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  • Macbook Pro Multiple Monitor Problem

    - by thinksocrates
    I have been using a Macbook pro (newest model) for about 4 weeks with dual monitors. It has been working great using the mac adaptor to dvi. Today however, my mac will not recognize it's built in monitor while the second monitor is plugged in. Plug in second monitor The screen on the laptop goes dark. The second monitor acts as the main screen. Click "Detect displays". Nothing happens Unplug the second monitor Screen on the laptop comes on. Any thoughts?

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  • How to queue up Windows 8 file coping to only have one copying at a time

    - by Valamas
    The new windows 8 file explorer copying is great. I can setup multiple copying tasks. They appear in a single window and I am able to pause them. Is there a way to have the copying only occur one at a time and when complete to progress the next one? Currently I have to setup the file copy and pause subsequent ones, then unpause the next one when I notice the current one finishes. I am only asking about a way to queue the file explorer coping and not use alternative tools like robocopy.

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  • Don't Use "Static" in C#?

    - by Joshiatto
    I submitted an application I wrote to some other architects for code review. One of them almost immediately wrote me back and said "Don't use "static". You can't write automated tests with static classes and methods. "Static" is to be avoided." I checked and fully 1/4 of my classes are marked "static". I use static when I am not going to create an instance of a class because the class is a single global class used throughout the code. He went on to mention something involving mocking, IOC/DI techniques that can't be used with static code. He says it is unfortunate when 3rd party libraries are static because of their un-testability. Is this other architect correct? update: here is an example: APIManager - this class keeps dictionaries of 3rd party APIs I am calling along with the next allowed time. It enforces API usage limits that a lot of 3rd parties have in their terms of service. I use it anywhere I am calling a 3rd party service by calling Thread.Sleep(APIManager.GetWait("ProviderXYZ")); before making the call. Everything in here is thread safe and it works great with the TPL in C#.

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  • How to provide multiple input to ffmpeg?

    - by tomm89
    I'm using ffmpeg to create time-lapses and it's working great. As input I have images named 001.jpg, 002.jpg, etc. and then with the command ffmpeg -i %3d.jpg -sameq -s 1440x1080 video.mp4 I create the video. But my problem comes when I want to create a video using multiple sets as input. For example, I'm in a dir where I have two folders set1 and set2, each with photos in it in the format explained previously. I tried doing ffmpeg -i ./set1/%3d.jpg -i ./set2/%3d.jpg -sameq -s 1440x1080 video.mp4 but it ends up doing a video using only the first set. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks!

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  • Lubuntu Stability Problems

    - by marinara
    I installed Lubuntu 11.10 from scratch a few days ago, now I can't even run aptitude without crashing from the mess it's made of the package system. (yes I added a non-offical repository, because I needed firefox 8) I'm a new user. So I don't know. Did I make a mistake by loading Lubuntu? I really like the LXDE stuff. but so many things seem very buggy. ***edit I think besides the sound problems, all of my other problems are with either LXDE or with openbox. And I think the sound problem is Lubuntu specific also. Problems like windows not popping up, windows not getting painted. Windows flashing in the panel for no reason, Windows losing their title bar occasionally, mousewheel changing desktops when i'm clearly in a window, LXDE panel not responding to clicks, applications not launching from the menu, applications not launching from firefox downloads window, applications crashing when I don't do anything but click on them. Pretty sure all this stuff is openbox or LXDE. This is just too much work to keep Lubuntu running. It's a lemon. (sorry I realize I should be constructive but I'm tired) It's pretty clear that openbox needs some damn bugfixes for compatibility with Oneric. And LXDE isn't that great either. I expect things to launch when I click on them. I think installing the acpid package is what made it clear to me. If 20 seconds after installing the package (from the offical repo), linux has already crashed, then I'm in the wrong damn neighborhood.

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  • Personal | First Stop on our trip, St. Louis

    - by Jeff Julian
    St. Louis is definitely a cool city. I have always looked at it as Kansas City’s big brother. I love to Arch, wonder what is would be like to have pro hockey, really like the downtown area, and have some great friends who live there. The reason we left for St. Louis on Thursday evening was to get us a head start on our journey. Since we were doing a Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives tour, it made since to have the journey start there. We picked the Hyatt Downtown as our hotel because they had an Arch Package which was suppose to get you tickets to the arch so you didn’t need to arrive early and wait in line. That ended up not working cause the arch had been selling out every day and they were no longer accepting the hotels tickets. No biggie and the hotel did try very hard to get us tickets, but we just took our chances in the line and waited. We walked over to the park and had to wait for about 20 minutes for the doors to open and had tickets after another 20 minutes of waiting in line and at that point walked right up and were able to get to the elevators.I want to stop here to have a little aside. I don’t know who started the rumor that the arch ride is scary but it is not. You do sit in a small pod, but it like the accent on a roller coaster to the top of the first drop and an elevator with no windows outside. Nothing to be afraid of here if you aren’t claustrophobic. If you are afraid of small spaces, stay clear of this ride. Once you get to the top, you walk up 10 to 30 stairs depending on which car you were in (lower the number the less stairs you climb) and you are then at the top in a decent sized room where you look out the windows. Beautiful view of the city. I don’t typically like heights, but this felt like being inside a building and not hang out on a roof. Here is the view from the arch: Related Tags: Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, St. Louis, Vacation

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  • How to drop packets in a custom Intrusion Detection System

    - by tzoukos
    Hi there, I'm trying to build a custom Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDS/IPS). I found a great utility named ROPE which can scan the packet payload and drop the packet that doesn't follow the rules, set by a script. This serves my purpose completely, since what I want to do is check the payload for some specific text and then drop it or allow it ( the string feature in iptables wouldn't do me any good, because I want to check more than one string in tha payload, like usernames, id's, etc ). However, ROPE is really old and despite my many attempts I haven't managed to install it properly. Do you know any similar program that will help me drop packets in iptables depending on the payload? Any suggestion is greatly appreciated :)

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  • Dutch ACEs SOA Partner Community Award Celebration

    - by JuergenKress
    When you win you need to celebrate. This was the line of thinking when I found out that I was part of a group that won the Oracle SOA Community Country Award. Well – thinking about a party is one thing, preparing it and finally having the small party is something completely different. It starts with finding a date that would be suitable for the majority of invited people. As you can imagine the SOA ACEs and ACE Directors have a busy life, that takes them places. Alongside that they are engaged with customers who want to squeeze every bit of knowledge out of them. So everybody is pretty busy (that’s what makes you an ACE). After some deliberation (and checks of international Oracle events, Trip-it, blogs and tweets) a date was chosen. Meeting on a Friday evening for some drinks is probably not a Dutch-only activity. But as some of the ACEs are self-employed they miss the companies around them to organize such events. Come the day a turn-out of almost 50% was great – although I expected some more folks . This was mainly due to some illness and work overload. Luckily the mini-party got going, (alcoholic) beverages were consumed, food was appreciated, a decent picture was made (see below) and all had a good chat and hopefully a good time. (Above from left to right: Eric Elzinga, Andreas Chatziantoniou, Mike van Aalst, Edwin Biemond) All in all a nice evening and certainly a "meeting" which can be repeated.  For the full article please visit Andreas's blog Want to organize a local SOA & BPM community? Let us know we are more than happy to support you! To receive more information become a member of the SOA & BPM Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Eric Elzinga,Andreas Chatziantoniou,Mike van Aalst,Edwin Biemond,Dutsch SOA Community,SOA Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress,ACE

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  • Bash color prompt and long commands

    - by Eric J.
    I'm colorizing parts of my bash prompt using ANSI escape sequences. This works great, until the command I'm currently typing in is long enough that it has to wrap. Instead of the rest of the command displaying on the next line, it wraps back to column 1 of the current line, overwriting the beginning of the prompt. I get that behavior with this prompt: export PS1="[\u][\033[0;32;40mdemo \033[0;33;40m1.5.40.b\033[0;37;40m] \w> \033[0m" but it works correctly with the same prompt, ANSI sequences remove: export PS1="[\u][demo 1.5.40.b] \w> " I'm connecting using the current version of Putty, with default Putty settings. The OS is Ubuntu 8.10.

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  • ffmpeg, vlc - Unable to find input stream

    - by zozo
    Good day to all... I have some "little" problems with ffserver and ffmpeg... What I need to do is to broadcast a live video. So I got the cam... used vlc and used send stream option. I sent it to 192.168.1.9:64555, which is a virtual machine on the same computer, running centos. On the virtual machine I run the command ffmpeg -i 192.168.1.9:64555 output.mpg. The response is "unable to find file whatever". Can any1 tell me what I did wrong? Thank you and have a great day. Print-screen with error:

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  • Command-line access to remote MySQL server

    - by Jerry Krinock
    I administer a website on a remote, shared host. My web host offers MySQL, and I am able to access this from my Mac OS X computer using a GUI program, Sequel Pro. That works great. But I want to script some queries, and Sequel Pro is not scriptable. What should I do? I've read about tunneling to mysql via SSH. I have shell access to the server, with an SSH key on my Mac, so ssh [email protected] -p 7978 gets me in. Should tunneling the MySQL port 3306 work? Like this? ssh [email protected] -L 3306:127.0.0.1:3306 (It "times out" after a minute.) Do I need to install mysql on my Mac?

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  • gVIM "put" driving me mad, how do I "put" at the beginning of a line

    - by crgnz
    I'm learning gVIM on Windows, and as I slowly learn more of the keystrokes I find myself using the mouse less and less, which is great. I have a couple of questions I've yet to figure out: I do a lot of copy and paste. So I use 'v' to enter VISUAL mode, use k/j to move up/down and select the lines, then hit 'y' to yank. I then go to the line where I want to insert, and hit 'p' to put, BUT the darn thing pastes after the 1st character. I can't move any further left, so I am definitely at the start of the line, so I find the 'p'ut behaviour of pasting 1 char after my cursor position to be supremely annoying. I switch between edit and command mode an awful lot, and my poor little finger on my left hand is getting sore from being stretched out to hit the 'Esc' key (to enter command mode) every few seconds. Is there a more finger-friendly way to enter command mode?

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  • July, the 31 Days of SQL Server DMO’s – Day 27 (sys.dm_db_file_space_usage)

    - by Tamarick Hill
    The sys.dm_db_file_space usage DMV returns information about database file space usage.  This DMV was enhanced for the 2012 version to include 3 additional columns. Let’s query this DMV against our AdventureWorks2012 database and view the results. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_file_space_usage The column returned from this DMV are really self-explanatory, but I will give you a description, paraphrased from books online, below. The first three columns returned from this DMV represent the Database, File, and Filegroup for the current database context that executed the DMV query. The next column is the total_page_count which represents the total number of pages in the file. The allocated_extent_page_count represents the total number of pages in all extents that have been allocated. The unallocated_extent_page_count represents the number of pages in the unallocated extents within the file. The version_store_reserved_page_count column represents the number of pages that are allocated to the version store. The user_object_reserved_page_count represents the number of pages allocated for user objects. The internal_object_reserved_page_count represents the number of pages allocated for internal objects.  Lastly is the mixed_extent_page_count which represents the total number of pages that are part of mixed extents. This is a great DMV for retrieving usage space information from your database files. For more information about this DMV, please see the below Books Online link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174412.aspx Follow me on Twitter @PrimeTimeDBA

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  • SQLAuthority News – Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 Released (SP1)

    - by pinaldave
    Last week, I was attending SQLPASS 2012 and I had great fun attending the event. During the event long awaited SQL Serer 2012 Service Pack 1 was released. I am pretty excited with SP1 as new service packs are cumulative updates and upgrade all editions and service levels of SQL Server 2012 to SP1. This service pack contains SQL Server 2012 Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) and Cumulative Update 2 (CU2). The latest SP1 has many new and enhanced features. Here are a few for example: Cross-Cluster Migration of AlwaysOn Availability Groups for OS Upgrade Selective XML Index DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS works with SELECT permission New function returns statistics properties – sys.dm_db_stats_properties SSMS Complete in Express SlipStream Full Installation Business Intelligence highlights with Office and SharePoint Server 2013 Management Object Support Added for Resource Governor DDL Please note that the size of the service pack is near 1 GB. Here is the link to SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1. SQL Server Express is the free and feature rich edition of the SQL Server. It is used with lightweight website and desktop applications. Here is the link to SQL Server 2012 EXPRESS Service Pack 1. Here is the question for you – how long have you been using SQL Server 2012? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Service Pack

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  • CentOS - PHP - Yum Install with Custom ./configure params

    - by Mike Purcell
    I have successfully configured and compiled php on my dev server, and works great, but after talking to a sysadmin buddy, he informed that custom compiles of the latest builds are not recommended for production (or even development) systems. He noted a situation where they custom configured and compiled PHP 5.3.6, only to find that there was some issue with a low-level Postgres driver, so they had to revert back to 5.3.3. So I am considering going back to yum to install PHP, however I have several custom configuration settings and was wondering if it's possible to pass or configure how PHP will be compiled through YUM? My current configure line: Configure Command => './configure' '--with-libdir=lib64' '--prefix=/usr/local/_custom/app/php' '--with-config-file-path=/usr/local/_custom/app/php/etc' '--with-config-file-scan-dir=/usr/local/_custom/app/php/etc/modules' '--disable-all' '--with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs' '--with-curl=/usr/sbin/curl' '--with-gd' '--with-iconv' '--with-jpeg-dir=/usr/lib' '--with-mcrypt=/usr/bin' '--with-pcre-regex' '--with-pdo-mysql=mysqlnd' '--with-png-dir=/usr/lib' '--with-zlib' '--enable-ctype' '--enable-dom' '--enable-hash' '--enable-json' '--enable-libxml' '--enable-mbstring' '--enable-mbregex' '--enable-pdo' '--enable-session' '--enable-simplexml' '--enable-xml' '--enable-xmlreader' '--enable-xmlwriter'

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  • SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #049

    - by Pinal Dave
    Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Two Connections Related Global Variables Explained – @@CONNECTIONS and @@MAX_CONNECTIONS @@CONNECTIONS Returns the number of attempted connections, either successful or unsuccessful since SQL Server was last started. @@MAX_CONNECTIONS Returns the maximum number of simultaneous user connections allowed on an instance of SQL Server. The number returned is not necessarily the number currently configured. Query Editor – Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio This post may be very simple for most of the users of SQL Server 2005. Earlier this year, I have received one question many times – Where is Query Analyzer in SQL Server 2005? I wrote small post about it and pointed many users to that post – SQL SERVER – 2005 Query Analyzer – Microsoft SQL SERVER Management Studio. Recently I have been receiving similar question. OUTPUT Clause Example and Explanation with INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE SQL Server 2005 has a new OUTPUT clause, which is quite useful. OUTPUT clause has access to insert and deleted tables (virtual tables) just like triggers. OUTPUT clause can be used to return values to client clause. OUTPUT clause can be used with INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to identify the actual rows affected by these statements. OUTPUT clause can generate a table variable, a permanent table, or temporary table. Even though, @@Identity will still work with SQL Server 2005, however I find the OUTPUT clause very easy and powerful to use. Let us understand the OUTPUT clause using an example. Find Name of The SQL Server Instance Based on database server stored procedures has to run different logic. We came up with two different solutions. 1) When database schema is very much changed, we wrote completely new stored procedure and deprecated older version once it was not needed. 2) When logic depended on Server Name we used global variable @@SERVERNAME. It was very convenient while writing migrating script which depended on the server name for the same database. Explanation of TRY…CATCH and ERROR Handling With RAISEERROR Function One of the developers at my company thought that we can not use the RAISEERROR function in new feature of SQL Server 2005 TRY… CATCH. When asked for an explanation he suggested SQL SERVER – 2005 Explanation of TRY… CATCH and ERROR Handling article as excuse suggesting that I did not give example of RAISEERROR with TRY…CATCH. We all thought it was funny. Just to keep records straight, TRY… CATCH can sure use RAISEERROR function. Different Types of Cache Objects Serveral kinds of objects can be stored in the procedure cache: Compiled Plans: When the query optimizer finishes compiling a query plan, the principal output is compiled plan. Execution contexts: While executing a compiled plan, SQL Server has to keep track of information about the state of execution. Cursors: Cursors track the execution state of server-side cursors, including the cursor’s current location within a resultset. Algebrizer trees: The Algebrizer’s job is to produce an algebrizer tree, which represents the logic structure of a query. Open SSMS From Command Prompt – sqlwb.exe Example This article is written by request and suggestion of Sr. Web Developer at my organization. Due to the nature of this article most of the content is referred from Book On-Line. sqlwbcommand prompt utility which opens SQL Server Management Studio. Squib command does not run queries from the command prompt. sqlcmd utility runs queries from command prompt, read for more information. 2008 Puzzle – Solution – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation Just a day before I wrote article SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation which was inspired by SQL Server MVP Jacob Sebastian. I suggest that before continuing this article read the original puzzle question SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation.The question was if the computed column was of datatype TINYINT how to create a Computed Column of datatype INT? 2008 – Find If Index is Being Used in Database It is very often I get a query that how to find if any index is being used in the database or not. If any database has many indexes and not all indexes are used it can adversely affect performance. If the number of indices are higher it reduces the INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE operation but increase the SELECT operation. It is recommended to drop any unused indexes from table to improve the performance. 2009 Interesting Observation – Execution Plan and Results of Aggregate Concatenation Queries If you want to see what’s going on here, I think you need to shift your point of view from an implementation-centric view to an ANSI point of view. ANSI does not guarantee processing the order. Figure 2 is interesting, but it will be potentially misleading if you don’t understand the ANSI rule-set SQL Server operates under in most cases. Implementation thinking can certainly be useful at times when you really need that multi-million row query to finish before the backup fire off, but in this case, it’s counterproductive to understanding what is going on. SQL Server Management Studio and Client Statistics Client Statistics are very important. Many a times, people relate queries execution plan to query cost. This is not a good comparison. Both parameters are different, and they are not always related. It is possible that the query cost of any statement is less, but the amount of the data returned is considerably larger, which is causing any query to run slow. How do we know if any query is retrieving a large amount data or very little data? 2010 I encourage all of you to go through complete series and write your own on the subject. If you write an article and send it to me, I will publish it on this blog with due credit to you. If you write on your own blog, I will update this blog post pointing to your blog post. SQL SERVER – ORDER BY Does Not Work – Limitation of the View 1 SQL SERVER – Adding Column is Expensive by Joining Table Outside View – Limitation of the View 2 SQL SERVER – Index Created on View not Used Often – Limitation of the View 3 SQL SERVER – SELECT * and Adding Column Issue in View – Limitation of the View 4 SQL SERVER – COUNT(*) Not Allowed but COUNT_BIG(*) Allowed – Limitation of the View 5 SQL SERVER – UNION Not Allowed but OR Allowed in Index View – Limitation of the View 6 SQL SERVER – Cross Database Queries Not Allowed in Indexed View – Limitation of the View 7 SQL SERVER – Outer Join Not Allowed in Indexed Views – Limitation of the View 8 SQL SERVER – SELF JOIN Not Allowed in Indexed View – Limitation of the View 9 SQL SERVER – Keywords View Definition Must Not Contain for Indexed View – Limitation of the View 10 SQL SERVER – View Over the View Not Possible with Index View – Limitations of the View 11 SQL SERVER – Get Query Running in Session I was recently looking for syntax where I needed a query running in any particular session. I always remembered the syntax and ha d actually written it down before, but somehow it was not coming to mind quickly this time. I searched online and I ended up on my own article written last year SQL SERVER – Get Last Running Query Based on SPID. I felt that I am getting old because I forgot this really simple syntax. Find Total Number of Transaction on Interval In one of my recent Performance Tuning assignments I was asked how do someone know how many transactions are happening on a server during certain interval. I had a handy script for the same. Following script displays transactions happened on the server at the interval of one minute. You can change the WAITFOR DELAY to any other interval and it should work. 2011 Here are two DMV’s which are newly introduced in SQL Server 2012 and provides vital information about SQL Server. DMV – sys.dm_os_volume_stats – Information about operating system volume DMV – sys.dm_os_windows_info – Information about Operating System SQL Backup and FTP – A Quick and Handy Tool I have used this tool extensively since 2009 at numerous occasion and found it to be very impressive. What separates it from the crowd the most – it is it’s apparent simplicity and speed. When I install SQLBackupAndFTP and configure backups – all in 1 or 2 minutes, my clients are always impressed. Quick Note about JOIN – Common Questions and Simple Answers In this blog post we are going to talk about join and lots of things related to the JOIN. I recently started office hours to answer questions and issues of the community. I receive so many questions that are related to JOIN. I will share a few of the same over here. Most of them are basic, but note that the basics are of great importance. 2012 Importance of User Without Login Question: “In recent version of SQL Server we can create user without login. What is the use of it?” Great question indeed. Let me first attempt to answer this question but after reading my answer I need your help. I want you to help him as well with adding more value to it. Preserve Leading Zero While Coping to Excel from SSMS Earlier I wrote two articles about how to efficiently copy data from SSMS to Excel. Since I wrote that post there are plenty of interest generated on this subject. There are a few questions I keep on getting over this subject. One of the question is how to get the leading zero preserved while copying the data from SSMS to Excel. Well it is almost the same way as my earlier post SQL SERVER – Excel Losing Decimal Values When Value Pasted from SSMS ResultSet. The key here is in EXCEL and not in SQL Server. Solution – 2 T-SQL Puzzles – Display Star and Shortest Code to Display 1 Earlier on this blog we had asked two puzzles. The response from all of you is nothing but Amazing. I have received 350+ responses. Many are valid and many were indeed something I had not thought about it. I strongly suggest you read all the puzzles and their answers here - trust me if you start reading the comments you will not stop till you read every single comment. Seriously trust me on it. Personally I have learned a lot from it. Identify Most Resource Intensive Queries – SQL in Sixty Seconds #028 – Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlYy-TGaaA Importance of User Without Login – T-SQL Demo Script Earlier I wrote a blog post about SQL SERVER – Importance of User Without Login and my friend and SQL Expert Vinod Kumar has written excellent follow up blog post about Contained Databases inside SQL Server 2012. Now lots of people asked me if I can also explain the same concept again so here is the small demonstration for it. Let me show you how login without user can help. Before we continue on this subject I strongly recommend that you read my earlier blog post here. In following demo I am going to demonstrate following situation. Login using the System Admin account Create a user without login Checking Access Impersonate the user without login Checking Access Revert Impersonation Give Permission to user without login Impersonate the user without login Checking Access Revert Impersonation Clean up Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Making a Case For The Command Line

    - by Jesse Taber
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2013/06/30/making-a-case-for-the-command-line.aspxI have had an idea percolating in the back of my mind for over a year now that I’ve just recently started to implement. This idea relates to building out “internal tools” to ease the maintenance and on-going support of a software system. The system that I currently work on is (mostly) web-based, so we traditionally we have built these internal tools in the form of pages within the app that are only accessible by our developers and support personnel. These pages allow us to perform tasks within the system that, for one reason or another, we don’t want to let our end users perform (e.g. mass create/update/delete operations on data, flipping switches that turn paid modules of the system on or off, etc). When we try to build new tools like this we often struggle with the level of effort required to build them. Effort Required Creating a whole new page in an existing web application can be a fairly large undertaking. You need to create the page and ensure it will have a layout that is consistent with the other pages in the app. You need to decide what types of input controls need to go onto the page. You need to ensure that everything uses the same style as the rest of the site. You need to figure out what the text on the page should say. Then, when you figure out that you forgot about an input that should really be present you might have to go back and re-work the entire thing. Oh, and in addition to all of that, you still have to, you know, write the code that actually performs the task. Everything other than the code that performs the task at hand is just overhead. We don’t need a fancy date picker control in a nicely styled page for the vast majority of our internal tools. We don’t even really need a page, for that matter. We just need a way to issue a command to the application and have it, in turn, execute the code that we’ve written to accomplish a given task. All we really need is a simple console application! Plumbing Problems A former co-worker of mine, John Sonmez, always advocated the Unix philosophy for building internal tools: start with something that runs at the command line, and then build a UI on top of that if you need to. John’s idea has a lot of merit, and we tried building out some internal tools as simple Console applications. Unfortunately, this was often easier said that done. Doing a “File –> New Project” to build out a tool for a mature system can be pretty daunting because that new project is totally empty.  In our case, the web application code had a lot of of “plumbing” built in: it managed authentication and authorization, it handled database connection management for our multi-tenanted architecture, it managed all of the context that needs to follow a user around the application such as their timezone and regional/language settings. In addition, the configuration file for the web application  (a web.config in our case because this is an ASP .NET application) is large and would need to be reproduced into a similar configuration file for a Console application. While most of these problems are could be solved pretty easily with some refactoring of the codebase, building Console applications for internal tools still potentially suffers from one pretty big drawback: you’d have to execute them on a machine with network access to all of the needed resources. Obviously, our web servers can easily communicate the the database servers and can publish messages to our service bus, but the same is not true for all of our developer and support personnel workstations. We could have everyone run these tools remotely via RDP or SSH, but that’s a bit cumbersome and certainly a lot less convenient than having the tools built into the web application that is so easily accessible. Mix and Match So we need a way to build tools that are easily accessible via the web application but also don’t require the overhead of creating a user interface. This is where my idea comes into play: why not just build a command line interface into the web application? If it’s part of the web application we get all of the plumbing that comes along with that code, and we’re executing everything on the web servers which means we’ll have access to any external resources that we might need. Rather than having to incur the overhead of creating a brand new page for each tool that we want to build, we can create one new page that simply accepts a command in text form and executes it as a request on the web server. In this way, we can focus on writing the code to accomplish the task. If the tool ends up being heavily used, then (and only then) should we consider spending the time to build a better user experience around it. To be clear, I’m not trying to downplay the importance of building great user experiences into your system; we should all strive to provide the best UX possible to our end users. I’m only advocating this sort of bare-bones interface for internal consumption by the technical staff that builds and supports the software. This command line interface should be the “back end” to a highly polished and eye-pleasing public face. Implementation As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this is an idea that I’ve had for awhile but have only recently started building out. I’ve outlined some general guidelines and design goals for this effort as follows: Text in, text out: In the interest of keeping things as simple as possible, I want this interface to be purely text-based. Users will submit commands as plain text, and the application will provide responses in plain text. Obviously this text will be “wrapped” within the context of HTTP requests and responses, but I don’t want to have to think about HTML or CSS when taking input from the user or displaying responses back to the user. Task-oriented code only: After building the initial “harness” for this interface, the only code that should need to be written to create a new internal tool should be code that is expressly needed to accomplish the task that the tool is intended to support. If we want to encourage and enable ourselves to build good tooling, we need to lower the barriers to entry as much as possible. Built-in documentation: One of the great things about most command line utilities is the ‘help’ switch that provides usage guidelines and details about the arguments that the utility accepts. Our web-based command line utility should allow us to build the documentation for these tools directly into the code of the tools themselves. I finally started trying to implement this idea when I heard about a fantastic open-source library called CLAP (Command Line Auto Parser) that lets me meet the guidelines outlined above. CLAP lets you define classes with public methods that can be easily invoked from the command line. Here’s a quick example of the code that would be needed to create a new tool to do something within your system: 1: public class CustomerTools 2: { 3: [Verb] 4: public void UpdateName(int customerId, string firstName, string lastName) 5: { 6: //invoke internal services/domain objects/hwatever to perform update 7: } 8: } This is just a regular class with a single public method (though you could have as many methods as you want). The method is decorated with the ‘Verb’ attribute that tells the CLAP library that it is a method that can be invoked from the command line. Here is how you would invoke that code: Parser.Run(args, new CustomerTools()); Note that ‘args’ is just a string[] that would normally be passed passed in from the static Main method of a Console application. Also, CLAP allows you to pass in multiple classes that define [Verb] methods so you can opt to organize the code that CLAP will invoke in any way that you like. You can invoke this code from a command line application like this: SomeExe UpdateName -customerId:123 -firstName:Jesse -lastName:Taber ‘SomeExe’ in this example just represents the name of .exe that is would be created from our Console application. CLAP then interprets the arguments passed in order to find the method that should be invoked and automatically parses out the parameters that need to be passed in. After a quick spike, I’ve found that invoking the ‘Parser’ class can be done from within the context of a web application just as easily as it can from within the ‘Main’ method entry point of a Console application. There are, however, a few sticking points that I’m working around: Splitting arguments into the ‘args’ array like the command line: When you invoke a standard .NET console application you get the arguments that were passed in by the user split into a handy array (this is the ‘args’ parameter referenced above). Generally speaking they get split by whitespace, but it’s also clever enough to handle things like ignoring whitespace in a phrase that is surrounded by quotes. We’ll need to re-create this logic within our web application so that we can give the ‘args’ value to CLAP just like a console application would. Providing a response to the user: If you were writing a console application, you might just use Console.WriteLine to provide responses to the user as to the progress and eventual outcome of the command. We can’t use Console.WriteLine within a web application, so I’ll need to find another way to provide feedback to the user. Preferably this approach would allow me to use the same handler classes from both a Console application and a web application, so some kind of strategy pattern will likely emerge from this effort. Submitting files: Often an internal tool needs to support doing some kind of operation in bulk, and the easiest way to submit the data needed to support the bulk operation is in a file. Getting the file uploaded and available to the CLAP handler classes will take a little bit of effort. Mimicking the console experience: This isn’t really a requirement so much as a “nice to have”. To start out, the command-line interface in the web application will probably be a single ‘textarea’ control with a button to submit the contents to a handler that will pass it along to CLAP to be parsed and run. I think it would be interesting to use some javascript and CSS trickery to change that page into something with more of a “shell” interface look and feel. I’ll be blogging more about this effort in the future and will include some code snippets (or maybe even a full blown example app) as I progress. I also think that I’ll probably end up either submitting some pull requests to the CLAP project or possibly forking/wrapping it into a more web-friendly package and open sourcing that.

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  • Last Night's Phoenix Silverlight UserGroup Meeting -- thanks!

    - by Dave Campbell
    14 of us gathered last night for a great presentation. As advertised, Les Brown of Sogeti came out to talk to us about the 4.0 enhancements, and brought along a new graduate and fellow-worker Chris Ross (Congratulations on your degree, again). Good discussion about MEF and Les' approach to using it, all of which is available on CodePlex along with other fun things Les has done, for example: FileUpload Control, FlipPanel, Animation Extensions, etc., and also his CodeCamp material. As it turned out I only had one give-away with me, but that was worth probably close to everything I've given away so far: a Telerik Ultimate License graciously provided by Telerik: I also have a Sitefinity license to use on our site from Telerik, but I've been jammed up and haven't had the time to devote to getting it cooking. I included Les and Chris in my spreadsheet for randomly selecting swag awardees, and Chris ended up the winner... Being a presenter, a new graduate, and new job, I thought it was appropriate. Let's not forget our host, Interface Technical Training for taking the burden of providing a facility for us off my agenda. I've been to User Group meetings in many places, but the ITT facilities are the best, so thanks! Also thanks to everyone that came out... we had some new people and some regulars. I have a speaker for August but not July, so if you have something to present, send me an email. Thanks!

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  • DHCP lease time in DrayTek Vigor 2600 Plus

    - by Nelson Reis
    I'm having some problems with my ADSL router DrayTek Vigor 2600 Plus. After a few days and some people connecting to it, it stops assigning IP addresses to new people that tries to connect. I was hoping that reducing the DHCP lease time could improve something. Anyone knows how can I change that in this model? I was also looking for the user guide on the internet, but couldn't find it anywhere. It would be great if someone points me to the pdf.

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  • Essential roles for web application team

    - by jromero
    Some friends of mine came up with an idea for a web application which we (so far) think could be great. I made the analysis and all the early stages of the development process and I'm about to start the coding. I'm talking about something that is barely a mid-level project, so I consider one developer (myself) should be enough. The thing is that we are trying to assign roles to each one of us so we can be focused on our duties and have clear our responsibilities within the team. We are a crew of four people, three of us (my friends) are business people who would do the marketing, customer relationship, management and accounting stuff and I'm basically the developer. I have in mind to get them involved into the development process by giving them documentation to write and use them as testers, all of that besides the management duties they have. Perhaps someone out there have been in the same situation, so I would appreciate if the experience is shared so we can effectively give ourselves positions in the project based on what I explained above. Which are the essential roles or the optimal team layout so the idea can be developed successfully? The question is not strictly about programming, but it's related to build a software entrepreneurship beyond the code, that is something that I'm sure plenty of us are looking. Any help is really appreciated! Regards.

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  • Message Passing Interface (MPI)

    So you have installed your cluster and you are done with introductory material on Windows HPC. Now you want to develop an application with the most common programming model: Message Passing Interface.The MPI programming model is a standard with implementations from many vendors. For newbies (like myself!), I have aggregated below links for getting started.Non-Microsoft MPI resources (useful even if you are not on the Windows platform)1. Message Passing Interface on wikipedia. 2. The MPI standard.3. MPICH2 - an MPI implementation.4. Tutorial on MPI by William Gropp.5. MPI patterns presented as a tutorial with sample code. 6. THE official MPI Forum (maintains the standard) including the wiki discussing the MPI future.7. Great MPI tutorial including at the end the MPI Exercise.8. C++ MPI Exercises by John Burkardt.9. Book online: MPI The Complete Reference.MS-MPI10. Windows HPC Server 2008 - Using MS-MPI whitepaper (15 page doc).11. Tracing MPI applications (27 page doc).12. Using Microsoft MPI (TechNet section).13. Windows HPC Server MPI forum (for posting questions). MPI.NET14. MPI.NET Home Page (not owned by Microsoft).15. MPI.NET Tutorial.16. HPC Development using F# using MPI.NET (38 page doc).Next time I'll post resources for the Microsoft Cluster SOA programming model - happy coding... Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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  • It&rsquo;s About You: Tell Microsoft How They&rsquo;re Doing!

    - by juanlarios
    Every fall and spring, a survey goes out to a few hundred thousand IT folk in Canada asking what they think of Microsoft as a company. The information they get from this survey helps them understand what problems and issues you’re facing and how they can do better. The team at Microsoft Canada takes the input they get from this survey very seriously. Now I don’t know who of you will get the survey and who won’t but if you do find an email in your inbox from "Microsoft Feedback” with an email address of “ [email protected] ” and a subject line “Help Microsoft Focus on Customers and Partners” from now until April 13th — it’s not a hoax or phishing email. Please open it and take a few minutes to tell them what you think. This is your chance to get your voice heard: If they’re doing well, feel free to pile on the kudos (they love positive feedback!) and if you see areas they can improve, please point them out so they can make adjustments (they also love constructive criticism!). The Microsoft team would like to thank you for all your feedback in the past — to those of you who have filled out the survey and sent them emails. Thank you to all who engage with them in so many different ways through events, the blogs, online and in person. You are why they do what they do and they feel lucky to work with such a great community! One last thing - even if you don’t get the survey you can always give the team feedback by emailing us directly through the Microsoft Canada IT Pro Feedback email address . They want to make sure they are serving you in the best possible way. Tell them what you want more of. What should they do less of or stop altogether? How can they help? Do you want more cowbell ? Let them know through the survey or the email alias. They love hearing from you!

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  • What kind of storage do people actually use for VMware ESX servers?

    - by Dirk Paessler
    VMware and many network evangelists try to tell you that sophisticated (=expensive) fiber SANs are the "only" storage option for VMware ESX and ESXi servers. Well, yes, of course. Using a SAN is fast, reliable and makes vMotion possible. Great. But: Can all ESX/ESXi users really afford SANs? My theory is that less than 20% of all VMware ESX installations on this planet actually use fiber or iSCS SANs. Most of these installation will be in larger companies who can afford this. I would predict that most VMware installations use "attached storage" (vmdks are stored on disks inside the server). Most of them run in SMEs and there are so many of them! We run two ESX 3.5 servers with attached storage and two ESX 4 servers with an iSCS san. And the "real live difference" between both is barely notable :-) Do you know of any official statistics for this question? What do you use as your storage medium?

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  • What are the options for simple Ajax calls for a Java webapp?

    - by Cedric Martin
    I've got a very simple need and I don't know what are the options available. If I simplify, users see webpage like this server by a Java webapp server: [-] red [x] green [-] blue [-] yellow The selected color is green And then I want the user to be able to select the yellow color and have the part of the page containing the relevant text change to: [-] red [-] green [-] blue [x] yellow The selected color is yellow Basically I want something a bit more user friendly than simply using HTTP GET all the time. There shall be a lot of options the user can select from and this shall affect an (HTML formatted) text displayed on the page. And I want the user to see his change as soon as possible, without having the page to fully reload and without being redirected to another page. There shall be a client/server round-trip (the information to display depending on the options selected ain't available on the client-side so I cannot do it all in JavaScript in the browser). I'd like to use Ajax requests but I don't know which way to go: jQuery GWT something else What are my options and what would be the pros and cons of the various approach? P.S: I'm very familiar with Java (SCP since the last century and basically being a Java programmer for the last 12 years or so) but not familiar at all with JavaScript (though I did hack a few Ajaxy-calls years ago, way before great libraries existed).

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  • Making of Amar Chitra Katha Comics – Behind The Scenes

    - by Gopinath
    Couple of days ago there was a book fair at our work place and found very interesting comic books for children in a crowded stall. The comic are mostly based on Indian mythologies, historians and the legends who inspired the generations. By flicking couple of book pages I fell in love with them and decided that my next gifts I’m going to buy for kids is going to be one of these comic books. After speaking to the sales men, I came to know that these comic books are very popular in among the kids and elders by the name, Amar Chitra Katha. I found myself ashamed of being ignorant about these popular books and started doing a bit of research. The Amar Chitra Katha comics is started in 1967 by Anant Pai, who was recently honoured by Google India with a doodle. The comic books are published in 20 Indian languages, 440+ titles are released so far and over a million copies are sold since the inception. Here is an interesting video i found on labnol blog that takes us through the journey of behind the scenes making Amar Chitra Katha comics You can browse through the collection of comics on their website amarchitrakatha.com and place orders for free shipping around the globe. For those who care to teach children about the history and great leaders of India, I strongly recommend them to gift of Amar Chitra Katha. This article titled,Making of Amar Chitra Katha Comics – Behind The Scenes, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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