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  • How to diagnose computer lockup/freezing problem

    - by Scott Mitchell
    I built a desktop computer a couple years back with the following specs: CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz 6MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor BX80580Q9300 Motherboard: EVGA 122-CK-NF68-T1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard Video Card: Two EVGA 256-P2-N758-TR GeForce 8600GT SCC 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported Video Card PSU: SeaSonic S12 Energy Plus SS-550HT 550W ATX12V V2.3 / EPS12V V2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply Memory: Two G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ Since its inception, the machine has periodically locked up, the regularlity having varied over the years from once a day to once a month. Typically, lockups happen once every few days. By "lockup" I mean my computer just freezes. The screen locks up, I can't move the mouse. Hitting keys on my keyboard that normally turn LEDs on or off on the keyboard (such as Caps Lock) no longer turn the LEDs on or off. If there was music playing at the time of the lockup, noise keeps coming out of the speakers, but it's just the current frequency/note that plays indefinitely. There is no BSOD. When such a lockup occurs I have to do a hard reboot by either turning off the computer or hitting the reset button. I have the most recent version of the NVIDIA hardware drivers, and update them semi-regularly, but that hasn't seemed to help. I am currently using Windows 7 x64, but was previously using Windows Server 2003 x64 and having the same lockup issues. My guess is that it's somehow video driver or motherboard related, but I don't know how to go about diagnosing this problem to narrow down which of the two is the culprit. Additional information re: cooling Regarding cooling... I've not installed any after-market cooling systems aside from two regular fans I scavenged from an older computer. The fan atop the CPU is the one that shipped with it. One of the two scavenged fans I added it located at the bottom tower of the corner, in an attempt to create some airflow from front to back. The second fan is pointed directly at the two video cards. SpeedFan installation and readings Per studiohack's suggestion, I installed SpeedFan, which provided the following temperature readings: GPU: 63C GPU: 65C System: 76C CPU: 64C AUX: 36C Core 0: 78C Core 1: 76C Core 2: 79C Core 3: 79C Update #3: Another Lockup :-( Well, I had another lockup last night. :-( SpeedFan reported the CPU temp at 38 C when it happened, and there was no spike in temperature leading up to the freeze. One thing I notice is that the freeze seems more likely to happen if I am watching a video. In fact, of the last 5 freezes over the past month, 4 of them have been while watching a video on Flickr. Not necessarily the same video, but a video nevertheless. I don't know if this is just coincidence or if it means anything. (As an aside, each night before bedtime my 2 year old daughter sits on my lap and watches some home videos on Flickr and, in the last month, has learned the phrase, "Uh oh, computer broke.") Update #4: MemTest86 and 3DMark06 Test Results: Per suggestions in the comments, I ran the MemTest86 overnight and it cycled through the 8 GB of memory 5 times without error. I also ran the 3DMark06 test without a problem (see my scores at http://3dmark.com/3dm06/15163549). So... what now? :-) Any further suggestions on what to check? Is there some way to get a stack trace or something when the computer locks like that? Thanks

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  • Performing mechanical movements using computer

    - by Vi
    How to make a computer (in particular, my laptop) to perform some mechanical movements without buying anything $5, soldering things inside computer or creating big sophisticated circuits? Traditionally CD-ROM tray is used to make computer do some movement IRL by, for example, SSH command, but in laptop tray is one-shot (unless manually reloaded) and also not very comfortable [mis]usage. Some assistance circuits can be in use too, but not complex. For example, there is a little motor that can work on USB power. Devices in my computer: DVD-ROM tray: one-time push. USB power: continuous power to the motor or LEDS or relay that turns on something powerful. Audio card. 3 outputs (modprobe alsa model=test can set Mic and Line-in as additional output). One controllable DC output (microphone) that can power up LED and some electronic (may be even mechanic?) relay. Also with sophisticated additional circuiting can control a lot of devices with a good precision. Both input and output support. Probably the most useful object in computer for radio ham. Modem. Don't know about this much, it doesn't work because of hsfmodem crashes kernel if memory is = 1GB. May be it's "pick up" and "hang up" can turn on and off power taken from USB port? Video card. VGA port? S-Video port? Will them be useful? Backlight. Tunable, but probably unuseful. CardBus (or some) slot. Nothing interesting for the task probably (is it?). AC adapter and battery. Probably nothing programmable here. /* My AC adapter already have additional jacks to connect extra devics */ Keyboard. No use. Touchpad. Good sensor (synclient -m 1), but no output. Various LEDs inside laptop. Probably too weak and requires soldering. Fans inside laptop. Poor control over them, requires soldering and dangerous to tinker. HDD (internal and external) that can be spin down and up (hdparm -Y, cat /dev/ubb). But connecting anything serially with it's power line makes HDD underpowered... And too complex. Is something are missed? Any ideas how to use described components? Any other ideas? May be there are easily available /* in developing countries */ cheap devices like "enhanced multimeters" that are controllable from computer and can provide configurable output and measure current and other things? Things to aid pushing many physical buttons with computer. Isn't this a simple idea and implementation and a lot of use in good hands?

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  • PXE Boot not working

    - by Nishant
    Please explain the error in this screenshot DHCP Setting: This screenshot was taken after powering off the old comp hence he server interface is shown as the wireless card - it becomes 192.168.0.1 when I connect wires and power up the old laptop to boot via PXE. My scenario is simple. An old laptop and a new laptop . A cross over cable ( that I myself made from CAT 6 cable by cutting it and connecting 4 wires as mentioned in some doc). The new laptop ( tftp server ) has a Wirelss Card ( with which I am browsing and writing this ) . And the cable is connected between laptops . TFTP server ( new laptop details ) Windows IP Configuration Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::f511:3d4a:ca01:122e%16 IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.2 Wireless LAN adapter Wireless Network Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Achilles Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::99b1:8ae0:9e6c:f300%11 IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.3 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.1

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  • Intermittent lockups, unable to diagnose in over a year

    - by Magsol
    Here's a real doosie; I may just give my firstborn child to whomever helps me solve this problem. In July 2008, I assembled what would be my desktop computer for graduate school. Here are the specs of the machine I built: Thermaltake 750W PSU Corsair Dominator 2x2GB 240-pin SDRAM Thermaltake Tower Asus P5K Deluxe Motherboard Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 2.5GHz CPU 2 x GeForce 8600 GT WD Caviar Blue 640GB hard drive CD burner DVD burner Soon thereafter, I ordered a new motherboard (because I was an idiot; that first motherboard supported CrossFire, not SLI), an Asus P5N-D. I was originally running Windows XP SP3. Pretty much right into the start of the fall semester, my desktop would simply lock up after awhile. If my system was largely idling, it would be after 1-3 days. If was gaming, it often happened an hour or two into my gaming session, indicating a link to activity level. Here's where it started getting interesting. I started looking at the system temps. The CPU was warmer than it should have been (~60s C), so I purchased some more efficient cooling compound a way better cooler for it. Now it hardly goes over 40 C. Intel was even kind enough to swap it out for free, just to rule it out. Lockups continued. The graphics cards were also running pretty warm: about 60 C idling. Removing one of them seemed to improve stability a little bit...as in, it wouldn't lock up quite as frequently, but still always eventually locked up. But it didn't matter which card I used or removed, the lockups continued. I reverted back to the original motherboard, the P5K Deluxe. Lockups continued. I purchased an entirely new motherboard, eVGA's nForce 750i. Lockups continued. Ran memtest86+ over and over and over, with no errors. Even RMA'd the memory. Lockups continued. Replaced the PSU with a Corsair 750W PSU. Lockups continued. Tried disconnecting all IDE drives (HDDs are SATA). Lockups continued. Replaced both graphics cards with a single Radeon HD 4980. Average temps are now always around 50 C when idling, 60 C only when gaming. Lockups continued. Throughout the whole ordeal, the system has been upgraded from Windows XP SP3 to Vista 32-bit, to Vista 64-bit, and is now at Windows 7 64-bit. Lockups have occurred at every step along the way (each OS was in place for at least a few months before the next upgrade). Edit: By "upgrade" I mean clean install each time. In addition to those reformats, I have performed many, many other reformats of the system and a reinstall of whatever OS had been previously installed in an attempt to rectify this problem, to no avail./Edit When the system locks up, there's no blue screen, no reboot, no error message of any kind. It simply freezes in place until I hit the reset button. Very, very rarely, once Windows boots back up, the system informs me that Windows has recovered from an error, but it can never find the source aside from some piece of hardware. I've swapped out every component in this computer, and there are more fans in it than I care to count...though for the sake of completeness: top 80mm case fan (out) rear 80mm case fan (out) rear 120mm case fan (out) front 120mm case fan (in) side 250mm case fan (in) giant CPU fan on-board motherboard fan (the eVGA board) triple-fan memory setup (came with the memory) PSU internal fan another 120mm fan I stuck on the underside of the video card to keep hot air from collecting at the bottom of the case I'm truly out of ideas. ANY help at all would be oh-so-very GREATLY appreciated. Thank you!

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  • Hardware recommendations / parts list for a modern, quiet ZFS NAS box - 2011-Feb edition [closed]

    - by dandv
    I want to build some really reliable storage for my data, and it seems that ZFS is the only filesystem at the moment that does live checksumming. That rules out DroboPro, so I'm looking to building a quiet ZFS NAS that would start with 4 2TB or larger hard drives. I'd like this system to be very reliable and relatively future-proof for 2-3 years, so I'm willing to invest some $$$ and buy higher end components. I did see questions here and on other forums about low-cost servers, but I'm not looking for those. I'd be super happy to go for an off-the-shelf solution, but I haven't found one that's quiet. I started doing the research (summarized on my wiki), but I realized that it just gets too complicated for what I know as a software dude, and I'm entering the analysis paralysis area. At this point, I'm basically looking for a parts list for a configuration that will work (and is modern), and I know there are folks around here who are way more competent than me. I've built computers and am comfortable assembling one and messing with *nix; I can follow guides; I just want to end the decision process for the hardware and software configuration. What I've researched so far (not that these are very modern components): Case: I think I've settled on the Antec Twelve Hundred case because it cools well, is quiet, and simply has 12 bays that allow elastic mounting. The SilverStone Raven is its counter-candidate, but I find its construction quite odd. For the PSU, I'm torn between Antec CP-850 and Nexus RX-8500, but I did this research more than a year ago. The Nexus has a very uniform power profile, and I'd rather not have the Antec spin up and down based on load. On the other hand, I'm not sure how often my file server will draw more than 400W under use. For the hard drives, I've read that WD Black drives are actually WD RE3 with a software setting changed. I'd also like to buy different drive types, not just 4 WDs. Recommendations? Right now I have a 2TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K300. For the motherboard, CPU and RAM I have no idea, other than the RAM must be ECC. I already asked a question here about ECC RAM, but I was misguided and was looking for a motherboard that would support USB 3.0 as well. I've learned to go with eSATA, or worry about USB later. Then there's the (liquid) cooling, Wi-Fi card, and FreeBSD vs. OpenSolaris Express. Lastly, I'm wondering if I can make this PC into a media server by adding a Blu-ray drive and a good sound card. But support for Blu-Ray is spotty on Linux, and I don't know if Windows 7 on VirtualBox would get sufficient hardware access to output HDMI or SPDIFF signals. (Running OpenSolaris virtualized is not an option because of the reliability risk.) Then there are HDCP concerns. Suggestions on that would be appreciated as well, but I don't want us to get sidetracked. A specific shopping list on the core components would be great, so I can start ordering, and in the meantime educate myself with regards to the other issues. Finally, I think this could become a great FAQ for those technically inclined to build their own ZFS server, but confused by the dizzying array of options out there, and I promise to compile the results and share my experience building and benchmarking the server.

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  • Bridging a non-persistent PPP connection to wireless (or wired) in Windows XP

    - by phooze
    I have a 3G modem-like device (eMobile's D01NX, PC card style, for any Japan nerds out there) that I use to connect my PC to the Internet. I'd like to bridge this connection with another computer either via an ad-hoc wireless network, or a simple cross-over cable (either are options). However, when I open "Network Connections", I do not see the PPP connection (otherwise I could click both and bridge). I believe this is because there is software (provided by the vendor) that is handling the card directly and registering a PPP connection dynamically. When connected, an ipconfig at the command line yields: Ethernet adapter wireless: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Autoconfiguration IP Address. . . : 169.254.5.169 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.0.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : Ethernet adapter lan: Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected PPP adapter {B59EEDDE-A22B-48DF-93E5-04842B641257}: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 114.xx.xxx.xx Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.255 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 114.xx.xxx.xx (I've commented out my IP address for privacy reasons, but what does appear there is a functional Internet IP address.) When I disconnect the adapter with the vendor software, the PPP connection disappears completely from the ipconfig list. Any ideas on how to do this?

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  • Problems with XP, Office, and PC in general - any ideas?

    - by molecule
    Hi all This may not make a whole lot of sense so pls bear with me... I am about to perform a routine check on one of my user's PC. Some background - the PC has a Xeon processor and 4Gb of RAM and running XP SP3 He has 2xHDD and pagefile is hosted on the secondary HDD (D:) and min/max values are set to 4096. NO pagefile on C: This user has 6 monitors so he has an NVIDIA Quadro NVS440 hosting 4xmonitors and an NVIDIA Quadro NVS290 hosting 2xmonitors. There is a video card driver from NVIDIA which is compatible with both NVS440 and NVS290 and he is on the latest version of that driver. (Note: Make of video cards are different - one is from leadtek and the other from Nvidia) He is a heavy Bloomberg, Outlook, Word, and Excel user and runs two Citrix applications. Other apps are FoxIt PDF and IE. Problems - Outlook and Excel frequently crashes - I am going to perform an Outlook and Excel repair and also check/remove unnecessary addins - will he lose any customizations if I repaired and chose "Restore my shortcuts while repairing" and do not select "Discard my customized settings and restore default settings". Does repair really repair anything? FYI - It stopped crashing ever since i moved a large spreadsheet he has open to his local HDD instead of over the network. This spreadsheet "refreshes" constantly as it is pulling live data to update cells and I suspect it was auto-saving so frequently that it caused crashes if saving over the network. At times, his right click completely fails to respond. His left click works fine but he can't right click on anything in any Window and even on the desktop. Sometimes, he needs to start to close certain applications such as Adobe and the right click will start functioning again. I removed Adobe and installed FoxIt as I figured it was a resource issue but I do not think so as he does have sufficient resources when the problem is happening. Sometimes he can't bring task manager up until he kills certain apps. Definitely sounds like a resource issue but I am not confident that is the root cause. Also not sure if this is related to one of the apps installed but his Start bar flickers (does not completely disappear) intermittently from time to time. The taskbar icons which are hidden appear and then get hidden again as if it was having "fits". I have performed reg scans, malware scans etc but problems do not go away. I am planning to perform sfc /scannow and office repair but would like to know if anyone has any other suggestions. What about setting a "small" pagefile on C:. I have heard that this is recommended and may be the reason why a minidmp file was not generated when he encountered a blue screen. Also, any feedback on his video cards? Do you think different models would cause problems? The drivers seem to work but he only has 2.5Gb out of 4Gb available RAM as I believe the video card chomped up a portion of this. I have recommended creating a new profile for him but due to the amount of customisations he has and the amount of time and effort it will take to get him up and running again, he prefers to bear with the problem than to go down that path. However, at least once a week, his PC acts up and I can't think of any other tools or techniques to rectify his problems. I guess we are at a stage where we just want to "stabilize" things so he won't encounter issues that frequently. Any feedback is very much appreciated.

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  • How to diagnose computer lockups and freezes?

    - by Scott Mitchell
    I built a desktop computer a couple years back with the following specs: CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz 6 MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor BX80580Q9300 Motherboard: EVGA 122-CK-NF68-T1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard Video Card: Two EVGA 256-P2-N758-TR GeForce 8600GT SCC 256 MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported Video Card PSU: SeaSonic S12 Energy Plus SS-550HT 550W ATX12V V2.3 / EPS12V V2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply Memory: Two G.SKILL 4 GB (2 x 2 GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ Since its inception, the machine has periodically locked up, the regularity having varied over the years from once a day to once a month. Typically, lockups happen once every few days. By "lockup" I mean my computer just freezes. The screen locks up, I can't move the mouse. Hitting keys on my keyboard that normally turn LEDs on or off on the keyboard (such as Caps Lock) no longer turn the LEDs on or off. If there was music playing at the time of the lockup, noise keeps coming out of the speakers, but it's just the current frequency/note that plays indefinitely. There is no BSOD. When such a lockup occurs I have to do a hard reboot by either turning off the computer or hitting the reset button. I have the most recent version of the NVIDIA hardware drivers, and update them semi-regularly, but that hasn't seemed to help. I am currently using Windows 7 x64, but was previously using Windows Server 2003 x64 and having the same lockup issues. My guess is that it's somehow video driver or motherboard related, but I don't know how to go about diagnosing this problem to narrow down which of the two is the culprit. Additional information re: cooling Regarding cooling... I've not installed any after-market cooling systems aside from two regular fans I scavenged from an older computer. The fan atop the CPU is the one that shipped with it. One of the two scavenged fans I added it located at the bottom tower of the corner, in an attempt to create some airflow from front to back. The second fan is pointed directly at the two video cards. SpeedFan installation and readings Per studiohack's suggestion, I installed SpeedFan, which provided the following temperature readings: GPU: 63C GPU: 65C System: 76C CPU: 64C AUX: 36C Core 0: 78C Core 1: 76C Core 2: 79C Core 3: 79C Update #3: Another Lockup :-( Well, I had another lockup last night. :-( SpeedFan reported the CPU temp at 38 C when it happened, and there was no spike in temperature leading up to the freeze. One thing I notice is that the freeze seems more likely to happen if I am watching a video. In fact, of the last 5 freezes over the past month, 4 of them have been while watching a video on Flickr. Not necessarily the same video, but a video nevertheless. I don't know if this is just coincidence or if it means anything. (As an aside, each night before bedtime my 2 year old daughter sits on my lap and watches some home videos on Flickr and, in the last month, has learned the phrase, "Uh oh, computer broke.") Update #4: MemTest86 and 3DMark06 Test Results: Per suggestions in the comments, I ran the MemTest86 overnight and it cycled through the 8 GB of memory 5 times without error. I also ran the 3DMark06 test without a problem (see my scores at http://3dmark.com/3dm06/15163549). So... what now? :-) Any further suggestions on what to check? Is there some way to get a stack trace or something when the computer locks like that? Resolution I have never did figure out the particular problems, but based on the suggestions here and elsewhere, I'm presuming it was a motherboard issue. In any event, I recently upgraded my system, buying a new motherbeard, PSU, CPU, and RAM, and that new rig has been working splendidly the past several weeks. I am using the same graphic cards as in the old setup, so I think it's safe to reason that they weren't the cause of the problem.

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  • Why does my computer run slowly and freeze sometimes?

    - by Brae
    EDIT I disabled sound in the BIOS, rebooted and it hung. I removed the (previously) faulty HDD, rebooted and it hung. I have managed to get my Realtek audio manager open again after its mysterious disappearance. Subsequently my microphone is now working again, to fix it I had to uninstall audio drivers, disable audio in BIOS, install audio drivers, enable audio in BIOS. Access via network (with faulty HDD in) seems to not be triggering hangs at the moment. I think with the sound problem fixed it might play a little nicer, but I think its still going to hang. If it does, then I'm fairly sure its been narrowed down to the mobo. EDIT Pretty convinced my motherboard is the culprit, because nothing else seems to have any obvious problems (bar the hard drive, which the PC still hangs without it being plugged in) So thank you all for helping, once I get more rep ill up a few of the answers. My PC is doing some weird things... Sometimes when I open up a program, lets say Adobe Photoshop, it will load everything normally, nice and quick no problems and I can use it fine. Other times its a little odd, and it loads the program as if it's only using half of the CPU. It's pretty obvious when it does it, normally the loading screen skims past, but when it does this weird load you see it slowly tick though each thing, and the program itself becomes incredibly slow. Even Google Chrome does it sometimes. Yet when I exit and reopen the program without doing anything else, it typically opens fine without lagging. I think this problem is probably a symptom of something bigger, because of other problems I'm having. Random hangs; no matter what I have open or what I'm doing. My PC will sort of freeze up for a few seconds. If music is playing it will either loop the last second or two, or it will buzz. This only lasts for a few seconds then it returns to normal without having to restart. During this time all programs lock up and freeze, and the mouse and keyboard are useless. I am also having a weird issue with my audio jacks, without touching my PC at all, sometimes I will see a popup saying that I have unplugged something or plugged something in, neither of which has actually happened. Pretty sure this is cause by the motherboard. I recently had a 'Pink Screen of Death' (yes pink) which pointed to my audio drivers. The lockups seem to happen with some consistency when someone is accessing my shared files via my home LAN. Which leads me to believe either one of my hard drives is acting up or more likely the controller. One of my drives had a bit of a crash before, I used Spinrite and managed to recover my stuff and now the drive appears to be working okay. This is possibly adding to the problems. My best guess is something has gone wrong with my motherboard, possibly a power issue or a chip has died, I really don't know. So what I would like to know is: Have I have missed some obvious diagnostic to help figure out what it is, or should I just bite the bullet and assume its my motherboard acting up and buy a new system? dxdiag[64-bit] - http://pastebin.com/G30kb2TL PSOD (minidump) - http://pastebin.com/aZsv0H56 HWiNFO64 (system info / specs) - http://pastebin.com/X6h3K8g6

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  • Computer not POSTing "randomly"?

    - by smoth190
    I have a custom built PC that is exhibiting some...odd... behavior, something I've never seen before. It was working fine one day, and the next day, it wouldn't start. Seeing as I wanted an upgrade anyway, I purchased a new motherboard that was compatible with all my parts. While replacing the motherboard, I accidentally damaged the CPU. Well, I wanted a new one anyway... so I got a new one. Seeing as I was replacing a ton of parts already, I bought a new PSU because the old one was super loud. When I slapped it all together, it starts up, lights, fans, drives, they all start. But I get no display from the monitor. No beeps, which I believe means it doesn't POST. I figured it was the RAM, because after removing the sound card and graphics card, there was nothing else that I hadn't replaced. When I remove both sticks of RAM, I get a continuous beeping, and according to the mobo handbook, means no RAM. So I think the mobo is functional, or atleast partly. I bought new RAM, but it still didn't work. I tried 3 monitors, with both VGA and DIV. So it's probably not the monitor, either. Now, let me get to the random part. Every 20 or so boots (I should also mention, for about 3 out of 5 boots I have to unplug the PC because it won't powerdown via the button), it will POST and I'll get display. Then, after about 2 or 3 resets, it won't work again. This confuses me so much, because even when I change nothing, it will/will not work. My thought is that maybe it has something to do with the RAM not clearing or something. I also reset the CMOS battery, incase that had anything to do with it, but no eval. I found some weird suggestion online about holding the power button for 30 seconds while it was unplugged. That did nothing, but I didn't expect it would... I've replaced just about the entire computer, and all the parts are compatible. Done about everything I can think of, but nothing has worked. Hopefully someone can help me here. And as I side note: When I do get my computer to boot, it says my hardware has changed and I have to re-activate windows. But it says I have to call Microsoft to do it. So I get this fancy automated voice that asks me to enter in a code into windows, then it asks me "How many computers have you activated with this copy of Windows?". Well, I had it on my computer before I replaced everything, so I said 1. Then he yelled at me for violating my 1-use license. I dunno what's going on there, do I have to re-purchase Windows 7? And they wonder why people pirate software... That's just a bonus question, though. Specs: 8GB of DDR2 RAM (Corsair) AMD CPU (I don't know what GHz or model because I can't find the box... (I think its 4 cores of 2.8Ghz) ASRock A785GM-LE Motherboard

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  • Windows 7 is stuck at "Starting Windows" when I attempt to boot computer

    - by Eli
    Basically, whenever I turn on my computer, it gets to the Starting Windows phase and just stays there. The startup animation still plays, yet it gets nowhere. I have tried booting into safe mode, however it gets stuck at loading CLASSPNP.SYS. It then freezes there and doesn't continue booting. I have tried booting into recovery mode from the hard drive, and it freezes after displaying the background image. I have tried booting from a recovery CD, which works, and I was able to use system restore. However, using system restore did not fix it, and it still is stuck at the Starting Windows screen. I have tried booting a Windows CD (Windows 8 Retail Installer) to see if I could upgrade it to fix this issue, however that froze at a blank screen after it got past the boot logo. I have tried changing around the BIOS settings (including resetting), to no avail. I have tried re-plugging the internal PSU cables (this is a custom-built desktop), yet this has changed nothing. I can boot into a loopback Ubuntu install on the same drive, which works fine, other than the fact that it has issues with some of the USB ports and the network card. This system has worked fine for the past few months, completely stable, and nothing in the configuration has changed before this error started happening. Startup Repair on the Windows recovery CD doesn't find any issues. Unplugging my secondary hard drive or swapping around memory doesn't change anything. The hard drive itself is fine, it hasn't shown any signs of failure and once again, boots my other OS fine. If anyone could help with this, that would be great. I can't seem to find any possible solution to this. If it makes any difference, my system specs are as follows: AMD FX-8320 Gigabyte GA-970A-D3 4GB of DDR3 Radeon HD 6870 550w PSU I'd like to not have to reinstall Windows, for I have more than a terabyte of data that I would have to back up if that becomes the only option. EDIT: I have since tried the following: Tried the solution involving restoring files from RegBackup, which changed nothing. Tried testing everything with Hiren's boot CD, everything comes back as fine. Tried disabling everything unnecessary in the BIOS and unplugging everything unneeded, it still hangs. Tried swapping out every possible combination of RAM, it still has the same result. The RAM is not at fault it seems Tried every GPU I own (which is many!) and it still hangs at the exact same place. Tried minimizing the power consumption as much as possible, even using an old PCI graphics card. It still hangs at the same place in the same way, signifying that it's not the PSU at fault. Tried resetting the BIOS again, still nothing. Tried every possible combination of BIOS options, even downclocking everything, it still hangs in the same spot. Tried upgrading the BIOS from version FB to FD, which changed nothing. Based on this, I would conclude the motherboard to be at fault. Are there any other possibilities? I don't want to spend $150 for a new motherboard. EDIT 2: This is what it gets stuck at when I try to boot into safe mode: Note the slight graphical corruption at the top of the screen. No matter how I set up the system, this seems to be there. In addition, either it has stopped booting into safe mode now, or it takes upwards of 2+ hours, and I haven't left it running for that long.

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  • New Validation Attributes in ASP.NET MVC 3 Future

    - by imran_ku07
         Introduction:             Validating user inputs is an very important step in collecting information from users because it helps you to prevent errors during processing data. Incomplete or improperly formatted user inputs will create lot of problems for your application. Fortunately, ASP.NET MVC 3 makes it very easy to validate most common input validations. ASP.NET MVC 3 includes Required, StringLength, Range, RegularExpression, Compare and Remote validation attributes for common input validation scenarios. These validation attributes validates most of your user inputs but still validation for Email, File Extension, Credit Card, URL, etc are missing. Fortunately, some of these validation attributes are available in ASP.NET MVC 3 Future. In this article, I will show you how to leverage Email, Url, CreditCard and FileExtensions validation attributes(which are available in ASP.NET MVC 3 Future) in ASP.NET MVC 3 application.       Description:             First of all you need to download ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM Source Code from here. Then extract all files in a folder. Then open MvcFutures project from mvc3-rtm-sources\mvc3\src\MvcFutures folder. Build the project. In case, if you get compile time error(s) then simply remove the reference of System.Web.WebPages and System.Web.Mvc assemblies and add the reference of System.Web.WebPages and System.Web.Mvc 3 assemblies again but from the .NET tab and then build the project again, it will create a Microsoft.Web.Mvc assembly inside mvc3-rtm-sources\mvc3\src\MvcFutures\obj\Debug folder. Now we can use Microsoft.Web.Mvc assembly inside our application.             Create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 application. For demonstration purpose, I will create a dummy model UserInformation. So create a new class file UserInformation.cs inside Model folder and add the following code,   public class UserInformation { [Required] public string Name { get; set; } [Required] [EmailAddress] public string Email { get; set; } [Required] [Url] public string Website { get; set; } [Required] [CreditCard] public string CreditCard { get; set; } [Required] [FileExtensions(Extensions = "jpg,jpeg")] public string Image { get; set; } }             Inside UserInformation class, I am using Email, Url, CreditCard and FileExtensions validation attributes which are defined in Microsoft.Web.Mvc assembly. By default FileExtensionsAttribute allows png, jpg, jpeg and gif extensions. You can override this by using Extensions property of FileExtensionsAttribute class.             Then just open(or create) HomeController.cs file and add the following code,   public class HomeController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Index(UserInformation u) { return View(); } }             Next just open(or create) Index view for Home controller and add the following code,  @model NewValidationAttributesinASPNETMVC3Future.Model.UserInformation @{ ViewBag.Title = "Index"; Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml"; } <h2>Index</h2> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> @using (Html.BeginForm()) { @Html.ValidationSummary(true) <fieldset> <legend>UserInformation</legend> <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Name) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Name) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Name) </div> <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Email) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Email) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Email) </div> <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Website) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Website) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Website) </div> <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.CreditCard) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.CreditCard) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.CreditCard) </div> <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Image) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Image) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Image) </div> <p> <input type="submit" value="Save" /> </p> </fieldset> } <div> @Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") </div>             Now just run your application. You will find that both client side and server side validation for the above validation attributes works smoothly.                      Summary:             Email, URL, Credit Card and File Extension input validations are very common. In this article, I showed you how you can validate these input validations into your application. I explained this with an example. I am also attaching a sample application which also includes Microsoft.Web.Mvc.dll. So you can add a reference of Microsoft.Web.Mvc assembly directly instead of doing any manual work. Hope you will enjoy this article too.   SyntaxHighlighter.all()

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  • The APEX of Business Value...or...the Business Value of APEX? Oracle Cloud Takes Oracle APEX to New Heights!

    - by Gene Eun
    The attraction of Oracle Application Express (APEX) has increased tremendously with the recent launch of the Oracle Cloud. APEX already supported departmental development and deployment of business applications with minimal involvement from the IT department. Positioned as the ideal replacement for MS Access, APEX probably has managed better to capture the eye of developers and was used for enterprise application development at least as much as for the kind of tactical applications that Oracle strategically positioned it for. With APEX as PaaS from the Oracle Cloud, a leap is made to a much higher level of business value. Now the IT department is not even needed to make infrastructure available with a database running  on it. All the business needs is a credit card. And the business application that is developed, managed and used from the cloud through a standard browser can now just as easily be accessed by users from around the world as by users from the business department itself. As a bonus – the development of the APEX application is also done in the cloud – with no special demands on the location or the enterprise access privileges of the developers. To sum it up: APEX from Oracle Cloud Database Service get the development environment up and running in minutes no involvement from the internal IT department required (not for infrastructure, platform, or development) superior availability and scalability is offered by Oracle users from anywhere in the world can be invited to access the application developers from anywhere in the world can participate in creating and maintaining the application In addition: because the Oracle Cloud platform is the same as the on-premise platform, you can still decide to move the APEX application between the cloud and the local environment – and back again. The REST-ful services that are available through APEX allow programmatic interaction with the database under the APEX application. That means that this database can be synchronized with on premise databases or data stores in (other) clouds. Through the Oracle Cloud Messaging Service, the APEX application can easily enter into asynchronous conversations with other APEX applications, Fusion Middleware applications (ADF, SOA, BPM) and any other type of REST-enabled application. In my opinion, now, for the first time perhaps, APEX offers the attraction to the business that has been suggested before: because of the cloud, all the business needs is  a credit card (a budget of $175 per month), an internet-connection and a browser. Not like before, with a PC hidden under a desk or a database running somewhere in the data center. No matter how unattended: equipment is needed, power is consumed, the database needs to be kept running and if Oracle Database XE does not suffice, software licenses are required as well. And this set up always has a security challenge associated with it. The cloud fee for the Oracle Cloud Database Service includes infrastructure, power, licenses, availability, platform upgrades, a collection of reusable application components and the development and runtime environments containing the APEX platform. Of course this not only means that business departments can move quickly without having to convince their IT colleagues to move along – it also means that small organizations that do not even have IT colleagues can do the same. Getting tailored applications or applications up and running to get in touch with users and customers all over the world is now within easy reach for small outfits – without any investment. My misunderstanding For a long time, I was under the impression that the essence of APEX was that the business could create applications themselves – meaning that business ‘people’ would actually go into APEX to create the application. To me APEX was too much of a developers’ tool to see that happen – apart from the odd business analyst who missed his or her calling as an IT developer. Having looked at various other cloud based development offerings – including Force.com, Mendix, WaveMaker, WorkXpress, OrangeScape, Caspio and Cordys- I have come to realize my mistake. All these platforms are positioned for 'the business' but require a fair amount of coding and technical expertise. However, they make the business happy nevertheless, because they allow the  business to completely circumvent the IT department. That is the essence. Not having to go through the red tape, not having to wait for IT staff who (justifiably) need weeks or months to provide an environment, not having to deal with administrators (again, justifiably) refusing to take on that 'strange environment'. Being able to think of an initiative and turn into action right away. The business does not have to build the application - it can easily hire some external developers or even that nerdy boy next door. They can get started, get an application up and running and invite users in – especially external users such as customers. They will worry later about upgrades and life cycle management and integration. To get applications up and running quickly and start turning ideas into action and results rightaway. That is the key selling point for all these cloud offerings, including APEX from the Cloud. And it is a compelling story. For APEX probably even more so than for the others. While I consider APEX a somewhat proprietary framework compared with ‘regular’ Java/JEE web development (or even .NET and PHP  development), it is still far more open than most cloud environments. APEX is SQL and PL/SQL based – nothing special about those languages – and can run just as easily on site as in the cloud. It has been around since 2004 (that is not including several predecessors that fed straight into APEX) so it can be considered pretty mature. Oracle as a company seems pretty stable – so investments in its technology are bound to last for some time to come. By the way: neither APEX nor the other Cloud DevaaS offerings are targeted at creating applications with enormous life times. They fit into a trend of agile development and rapid life cycle management, with fairly light weight user interfaces that quickly adapt to taste, technology trends and functional requirements and that are easily replaced. APEX and ADF – a match made in heaven?! (or at least in the sky) Note that using APEX only for cloud based database with REST-ful Services is also a perfectly viable scenario: any UI – mobile or browser based – capable of consuming REST-ful services can be created against such a business tier. Creating an ADF Mobile application for example that runs aginst REST-ful services is a best practice for mobile development. Such REST-ful services can be consumed from any service provider – including the Cloud based APEX powered REST-ful services running against the Oracle Cloud Database Service! The ADF Mobile architecture overview can easily be morphed to fit the APEX services in – allowing for a cloud based mobile app: Want to learn more about Oracle Database Cloud Service or Oracle Cloud, just visit cloud.oracle.com  or oracle.com/cloud. Repost of a blog entry by Rick Greenwald, Director of Product Management, Oracle Database Cloud Service.

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  • Java Cloud Service Integration using Web Service Data Control

    - by Jani Rautiainen
    Java Cloud Service (JCS) provides a platform to develop and deploy business applications in the cloud. In Fusion Applications Cloud deployments customers do not have the option to deploy custom applications developed with JDeveloper to ensure the integrity and supportability of the hosted application service. Instead the custom applications can be deployed to the JCS and integrated to the Fusion Application Cloud instance.This series of articles will go through the features of JCS, provide end-to-end examples on how to develop and deploy applications on JCS and how to integrate them with the Fusion Applications instance.In this article a custom application integrating with Fusion Application using Web Service Data Control will be implemented. v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Pre-requisites Access to Cloud instance In order to deploy the application access to a JCS instance is needed, a free trial JCS instance can be obtained from Oracle Cloud site. To register you will need a credit card even if the credit card will not be charged. To register simply click "Try it" and choose the "Java" option. The confirmation email will contain the connection details. See this video for example of the registration. Once the request is processed you will be assigned 2 service instances; Java and Database. Applications deployed to the JCS must use Oracle Database Cloud Service as their underlying database. So when JCS instance is created a database instance is associated with it using a JDBC data source. The cloud services can be monitored and managed through the web UI. For details refer to Getting Started with Oracle Cloud. JDeveloper JDeveloper contains Cloud specific features related to e.g. connection and deployment. To use these features download the JDeveloper from JDeveloper download site by clicking the “Download JDeveloper 11.1.1.7.1 for ADF deployment on Oracle Cloud” link, this version of JDeveloper will have the JCS integration features that will be used in this article. For versions that do not include the Cloud integration features the Oracle Java Cloud Service SDK or the JCS Java Console can be used for deployment. For details on installing and configuring the JDeveloper refer to the installation guide. For details on SDK refer to Using the Command-Line Interface to Monitor Oracle Java Cloud Service and Using the Command-Line Interface to Manage Oracle Java Cloud Service. Create Application In this example the “JcsWsDemo” application created in the “Java Cloud Service Integration using Web Service Proxy” article is used as the base. Create Web Service Data Control In this example we will use a Web Service Data Control to integrate with Credit Rule Service in Fusion Applications. The data control will be used to query data from Fusion Applications using a web service call and present the data in a table. To generate the data control choose the “Model” project and navigate to "New -> All Technologies -> Business Tier -> Data Controls -> Web Service Data Control" and enter following: Name: CreditRuleServiceDC URL: https://ic-[POD].oracleoutsourcing.com/icCnSetupCreditRulesPublicService/CreditRuleService?WSDL Service: {{http://xmlns.oracle.com/apps/incentiveCompensation/cn/creditSetup/creditRule/creditRuleService/}CreditRuleService On step 2 select the “findRule” operation: Skip step 3 and on step 4 define the credentials to access the service. Do note that in this example these credentials are only used if testing locally, for JCS deployment credentials need to be manually updated on the EAR file: Click “Finish” and the proxy generation is done. Creating UI In order to use the data control we will need to populate complex objects FindCriteria and FindControl. For simplicity in this example we will create logic in a managed bean that populates the objects. Open “JcsWsDemoBean.java” and add the following logic: Map findCriteria; Map findControl; public void setFindCriteria(Map findCriteria) { this.findCriteria = findCriteria; } public Map getFindCriteria() { findCriteria = new HashMap(); findCriteria.put("fetchSize",10); findCriteria.put("fetchStart",0); return findCriteria; } public void setFindControl(Map findControl) { this.findControl = findControl; } public Map getFindControl() { findControl = new HashMap(); return findControl; } Open “JcsWsDemo.jspx”, navigate to “Data Controls -> CreditRuleServiceDC -> findRule(Object, Object) -> result” and drag and drop the “result” node into the “af:form” element in the page: On the “Edit Table Columns” remove all columns except “RuleId” and “Name”: On the “Edit Action Binding” window displayed enter reference to the java class created above by selecting “#{JcsWsDemoBean.findCriteria}”: Also define the value for the “findControl” by selecting “#{JcsWsDemoBean.findControl}”. Deploy to JCS For WS DC the authentication details need to be updated on the connection details before deploying. Open “connections.xml” by navigating “Application Resources -> Descriptors -> ADF META-INF -> connections.xml”: Change the user name and password entry from: <soap username="transportUserName" password="transportPassword" To match the access details for the target environment. Follow the same steps as documented in previous article ”Java Cloud Service ADF Web Application”. Once deployed the application can be accessed with URL: https://java-[identity domain].java.[data center].oraclecloudapps.com/JcsWsDemo-ViewController-context-root/faces/JcsWsDemo.jspx When accessed the first 10 rules in the system are displayed: Summary In this article we learned how to integrate with Fusion Applications using a Web Service Data Control in JCS. In future articles various other integration techniques will be covered. 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  • A Good Developer is So Hard to Find

    - by James Michael Hare
    Let me start out by saying I want to damn the writers of the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever – 2. It is eating every last shred of my free time! But as I've been churning through each puzzle and marvelling at the brain teasers and trivia within, I began to think about interviewing developers and why it seems to be so hard to find good ones.  The problem is, it seems like no matter how hard we try to find the perfect way to separate the chaff from the wheat, inevitably someone will get hired who falls far short of expectations or someone will get passed over for missing a piece of trivia or a tricky brain teaser that could have been an excellent team member.   In shops that are primarily software-producing businesses or other heavily IT-oriented businesses (Microsoft, Amazon, etc) there often exists a much tighter bond between HR and the hiring development staff because development is their life-blood. Unfortunately, many of us work in places where IT is viewed as a cost or just a means to an end. In these shops, too often, HR and development staff may work against each other due to differences in opinion as to what a good developer is or what one is worth.  It seems that if you ask two different people what makes a good developer, often you will get three different opinions.   With the exception of those shops that are purely development-centric (you guys have it much easier!), most other shops have management who have very little knowledge about the development process.  Their view can often be that development is simply a skill that one learns and then once aquired, that developer can produce widgets as good as the next like workers on an assembly-line floor.  On the other side, you have many developers that feel that software development is an art unto itself and that the ability to create the most pure design or know the most obscure of keywords or write the shortest-possible obfuscated piece of code is a good coder.  So is it a skill?  An Art?  Or something entirely in between?   Saying that software is merely a skill and one just needs to learn the syntax and tools would be akin to saying anyone who knows English and can use Word can write a 300 page book that is accurate, meaningful, and stays true to the point.  This just isn't so.  It takes more than mere skill to take words and form a sentence, join those sentences into paragraphs, and those paragraphs into a document.  I've interviewed candidates who could answer obscure syntax and keyword questions and once they were hired could not code effectively at all.  So development must be more than a skill.   But on the other end, we have art.  Is development an art?  Is our end result to produce art?  I can marvel at a piece of code -- see it as concise and beautiful -- and yet that code most perform some stated function with accuracy and efficiency and maintainability.  None of these three things have anything to do with art, per se.  Art is beauty for its own sake and is a wonderful thing.  But if you apply that same though to development it just doesn't hold.  I've had developers tell me that all that matters is the end result and how you code it is entirely part of the art and I couldn't disagree more.  Yes, the end result, the accuracy, is the prime criteria to be met.  But if code is not maintainable and efficient, it would be just as useless as a beautiful car that breaks down once a week or that gets 2 miles to the gallon.  Yes, it may work in that it moves you from point A to point B and is pretty as hell, but if it can't be maintained or is not efficient, it's not a good solution.  So development must be something less than art.   In the end, I think I feel like development is a matter of craftsmanship.  We use our tools and we use our skills and set about to construct something that satisfies a purpose and yet is also elegant and efficient.  There is skill involved, and there is an art, but really it boils down to being able to craft code.  Crafting code is far more than writing code.  Anyone can write code if they know the syntax, but so few people can actually craft code that solves a purpose and craft it well.  So this is what I want to find, I want to find code craftsman!  But how?   I used to ask coding-trivia questions a long time ago and many people still fall back on this.  The thought is that if you ask the candidate some piece of coding trivia and they know the answer it must follow that they can craft good code.  For example:   What C++ keyword can be applied to a class/struct field to allow it to be changed even from a const-instance of that class/struct?  (answer: mutable)   So what do we prove if a candidate can answer this?  Only that they know what mutable means.  One would hope that this would infer that they'd know how to use it, and more importantly when and if it should ever be used!  But it rarely does!  The problem with triva questions is that you will either: Approve a really good developer who knows what some obscure keyword is (good) Reject a really good developer who never needed to use that keyword or is too inexperienced to know how to use it (bad) Approve a really bad developer who googled "C++ Interview Questions" and studied like hell but can't craft (very bad) Many HR departments love these kind of tests because they are short and easy to defend if a legal issue arrises on hiring decisions.  After all it's easy to say a person wasn't hired because they scored 30 out of 100 on some trivia test.  But unfortunately, you've eliminated a large part of your potential developer pool and possibly hired a few duds.  There are times I've hired candidates who knew every trivia question I could throw out them and couldn't craft.  And then there are times I've interviewed candidates who failed all my trivia but who I took a chance on who were my best finds ever.    So if not trivia, then what?  Brain teasers?  The thought is, these type of questions measure the thinking power of a candidate.  The problem is, once again, you will either: Approve a good candidate who has never heard the problem and can solve it (good) Reject a good candidate who just happens not to see the "catch" because they're nervous or it may be really obscure (bad) Approve a candidate who has studied enough interview brain teasers (once again, you can google em) to recognize the "catch" or knows the answer already (bad). Once again, you're eliminating good candidates and possibly accepting bad candidates.  In these cases, I think testing someone with brain teasers only tests their ability to answer brain teasers, not the ability to craft code. So how do we measure someone's ability to craft code?  Here's a novel idea: have them code!  Give them a computer and a compiler, or a whiteboard and a pen, or paper and pencil and have them construct a piece of code.  It just makes sense that if we're going to hire someone to code we should actually watch them code.  When they're done, we can judge them on several criteria: Correctness - does the candidate's solution accurately solve the problem proposed? Accuracy - is the candidate's solution reasonably syntactically correct? Efficiency - did the candidate write or use the more efficient data structures or algorithms for the job? Maintainability - was the candidate's code free of obfuscation and clever tricks that diminish readability? Persona - are they eager and willing or aloof and egotistical?  Will they work well within your team? It may sound simple, or it may sound crazy, but when I'm looking to hire a developer, I want to see them actually develop well-crafted code.

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  • Day 3 - XNA: Hacking around with images

    - by dapostolov
    Yay! Today I'm going to get into some code! My mind has been on this all day! I find it amusing how I practice, daily, to be "in the moment" or "present" and the excitement and anticipation of this project seems to snatch it away from me frequently. WELL!!! (Shakes Excitedly) Let's do this =)! Let's code! For these next few days it is my intention to better understand image rendering using XNA; after said prototypes are complete I should (fingers crossed) be able to dive into my game code using the design document I hammered out the other night. On a personal note, I think the toughest thing right now is finding the time to do this project. Each night, after my little ones go to bed I can only really afford a couple hours of work on this project. However, I hope to utilise this time as best as I can because this is the first time in a while I've found a project that I've been passionate about. A friend recently asked me if I intend to go 3D or extend the game design. Yes. For now I'm keeping it simple. Lastly, just as a note, as I was doing some further research into image rendering this morning I came across some other XNA content and lessons learned. I believe this content could have probably been posted in the first couple of posts, however, I will share the new content as I learn it at the end of each day. Maybe I'll take some time later to fix the posts but for now Installation and Deployment - Lessons Learned I had installed the XNA studio  (Day 1) and the site instructions were pretty easy to follow. However, I had a small difficulty with my development environment. You see, I run a virtual desktop development environment. Even though I was able to code and compile all the tutorials the game failed to run...because I lacked a 3D capable card; it was not detected on the virtual box... First Lesson: The XNA runtime needs to "see" the 3D card! No sweat, Il copied the files over to my parent box and executed the program. ERROR. Hmm... Second Lesson (which I should have probably known but I let the excitement get the better of me): you need the XNA runtime on the client PC to run the game, oh, and don't forget the .Net Runtime! Sprite, it ain't just a Soft Drink... With these prototypes I intend to understand and perform the following tasks. learn game development terminology how to place and position (rotate) a static image on the screen how to layer static images on the screen understand image scaling can we reuse images? understand how framerate is handled in XNA how to display text , basic shapes, and colors on the screen how to interact with an image (collision of user input?) how to animate an image and understand basic animation techniques how to detect colliding images or screen edges how to manipulate the image, lets say colors, stretching how to focus on a segment of an image...like only displaying a frame on a film reel what's the best way to manage images (compression, storage, location, prevent artwork theft, etc.) Well, let's start with this "prototype" task list for now...Today, let's get an image on the screen and maybe I can mark a few of the tasks as completed... C# Prototype1 New Visual Studio Project Select the XNA Game Studio 3.1 Project Type Select the Windows Game 3.1 Template Type Prototype1 in the Name textbox provided Press OK. At this point code has auto-magically been created. Feel free to press the F5 key to run your first XNA program. You should have a blue screen infront of you. Without getting into the nitty gritty right, the code that was generated basically creates some basic code to clear the window content with the lovely CornFlowerBlue color. Something to notice, when you move your mouse into the window...nothing. ooooo spoooky. Let's put an image on that screen! Step A - Get an Image into the solution Under "Content" in your Solution Explorer, right click and add a new folder and name it "Sprites". Copy a small image in there; I copied a "Royalty Free" wizard hat from a quick google search and named it wizards_hat.jpg (rightfully so!) Step B - Add the sprite and position fields Now, open/edit  Game1.cs Locate the following line:  SpriteBatch spriteBatch; Under this line type the following:         SpriteBatch spriteBatch; // the line you are looking for...         Texture2D sprite;         Vector2 position; Step C - Load the image asset Locate the "Load Content" Method and duplicate the following:             protected override void LoadContent()         {             spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice);             // your image name goes here...             sprite = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Sprites\\wizards_hat");             position = new Vector2(200, 100);             base.LoadContent();         } Step D - Draw the image Locate the "Draw" Method and duplicate the following:        protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)         {             GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue);             spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);             spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White);             spriteBatch.End();             base.Draw(gameTime);         }  Step E - Compile and Run Engage! (F5) - Debug! Your image should now display on a cornflowerblue window about 200 pixels from the left and 100 pixels from the top. Awesome! =) Pretty cool how we only coded a few lines to display an image, but believe me, there is plenty going on behind the scenes. However, for now, I'm going to call it a night here. Blogging all this progress certainly takes time... However, tomorrow night I'm going to detail what we just did, plus start checking off points on that list! I'm wondering right now if I should add pictures / code to this post...let me know if you want them =) Best Regards, D.

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

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

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  • GLSL compiler messages from different vendors [on hold]

    - by revers
    I'm writing a GLSL shader editor and I want to parse GLSL compiler messages to make hyperlinks to invalid lines in a shader code. I know that these messages are vendor specific but currently I have access only to AMD's video cards. I want to handle at least NVidia's and Intel's hardware, apart from AMD's. If you have video card from different vendor than AMD, could you please give me the output of following C++ program: #include <GL/glew.h> #include <GL/freeglut.h> #include <iostream> using namespace std; #define STRINGIFY(X) #X static const char* fs = STRINGIFY( out vec4 out_Color; mat4 m; void main() { vec3 v3 = vec3(1.0); vec2 v2 = v3; out_Color = vec4(5.0 * v2.x, 1.0); vec3 k = 3.0; float = 5; } ); static const char* vs = STRINGIFY( in vec3 in_Position; void main() { vec3 v(5); gl_Position = vec4(in_Position, 1.0); } ); void printShaderInfoLog(GLint shader) { int infoLogLen = 0; int charsWritten = 0; GLchar *infoLog; glGetShaderiv(shader, GL_INFO_LOG_LENGTH, &infoLogLen); if (infoLogLen > 0) { infoLog = new GLchar[infoLogLen]; glGetShaderInfoLog(shader, infoLogLen, &charsWritten, infoLog); cout << "Log:\n" << infoLog << endl; delete [] infoLog; } } void printProgramInfoLog(GLint program) { int infoLogLen = 0; int charsWritten = 0; GLchar *infoLog; glGetProgramiv(program, GL_INFO_LOG_LENGTH, &infoLogLen); if (infoLogLen > 0) { infoLog = new GLchar[infoLogLen]; glGetProgramInfoLog(program, infoLogLen, &charsWritten, infoLog); cout << "Program log:\n" << infoLog << endl; delete [] infoLog; } } void initShaders() { GLuint v = glCreateShader(GL_VERTEX_SHADER); GLuint f = glCreateShader(GL_FRAGMENT_SHADER); GLint vlen = strlen(vs); GLint flen = strlen(fs); glShaderSource(v, 1, &vs, &vlen); glShaderSource(f, 1, &fs, &flen); GLint compiled; glCompileShader(v); bool succ = true; glGetShaderiv(v, GL_COMPILE_STATUS, &compiled); if (!compiled) { cout << "Vertex shader not compiled." << endl; succ = false; } printShaderInfoLog(v); glCompileShader(f); glGetShaderiv(f, GL_COMPILE_STATUS, &compiled); if (!compiled) { cout << "Fragment shader not compiled." << endl; succ = false; } printShaderInfoLog(f); GLuint p = glCreateProgram(); glAttachShader(p, v); glAttachShader(p, f); glLinkProgram(p); glUseProgram(p); printProgramInfoLog(p); if (!succ) { exit(-1); } delete [] vs; delete [] fs; } int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { glutInit(&argc, argv); glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_DOUBLE | GLUT_RGBA); glutInitWindowSize(600, 600); glutCreateWindow("Triangle Test"); glewInit(); GLenum err = glewInit(); if (GLEW_OK != err) { cout << "glewInit failed, aborting." << endl; exit(1); } cout << "Using GLEW " << glewGetString(GLEW_VERSION) << endl; const GLubyte* renderer = glGetString(GL_RENDERER); const GLubyte* vendor = glGetString(GL_VENDOR); const GLubyte* version = glGetString(GL_VERSION); const GLubyte* glslVersion = glGetString(GL_SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION); GLint major, minor; glGetIntegerv(GL_MAJOR_VERSION, &major); glGetIntegerv(GL_MINOR_VERSION, &minor); cout << "GL Vendor : " << vendor << endl; cout << "GL Renderer : " << renderer << endl; cout << "GL Version : " << version << endl; cout << "GL Version : " << major << "." << minor << endl; cout << "GLSL Version : " << glslVersion << endl; initShaders(); return 0; } On my video card it gives: Status: Using GLEW 1.7.0 GL Vendor : ATI Technologies Inc. GL Renderer : ATI Radeon HD 4250 GL Version : 3.3.11631 Compatibility Profile Context GL Version : 3.3 GLSL Version : 3.30 Vertex shader not compiled. Log: Vertex shader failed to compile with the following errors: ERROR: 0:1: error(#132) Syntax error: '5' parse error ERROR: error(#273) 1 compilation errors. No code generated Fragment shader not compiled. Log: Fragment shader failed to compile with the following errors: WARNING: 0:1: warning(#402) Implicit truncation of vector from size 3 to size 2. ERROR: 0:1: error(#174) Not enough data provided for construction constructor WARNING: 0:1: warning(#402) Implicit truncation of vector from size 1 to size 3. ERROR: 0:1: error(#132) Syntax error: '=' parse error ERROR: error(#273) 2 compilation errors. No code generated Program log: Vertex and Fragment shader(s) were not successfully compiled before glLinkProgram() was called. Link failed. Or if you like, you could give me other compiler messages than proposed by me. To summarize, the question is: What are GLSL compiler messages formats (INFOs, WARNINGs, ERRORs) for different vendors? Please give me examples or pattern explanation. EDIT: Ok, it seems that this question is too broad, then shortly: How does NVidia's and Intel's GLSL compilers present ERROR and WARNING messages? AMD/ATI uses patterns like this: ERROR: <position>:<line_number>: <message> WARNING: <position>:<line_number>: <message> (examples are above).

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  • Feedback on meeting of the Linux User Group of Mauritius

    Once upon a time in a country far far away... Okay, actually it's not that bad but it has been a while since the last meeting of the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM). There have been plans in the past but it never really happened. Finally, Selven took the opportunity and organised a new meetup with low administrative overhead, proper scheduling on alternative dates and a small attendee's survey on the preferred option. All the pre-work was nicely executed. First, I wasn't sure whether it would be possible to attend. Luckily I got some additional information, like children should come, too, and I was sold to this community gathering. According to other long-term members of the LUGM it was the first time 'ever' that a gathering was organised outside of Quatre Bornes, and I have to admit it was great! LUGM - user group meeting on the 15.06.2013 in L'Escalier Quick overview of Linux & the LUGM With a little bit of delay the LUGM meeting officially started with a quick overview and introduction to Linux presented by Avinash. During the session he told the audience that there had been quite some activity over the island some years ago but unfortunately it had been quiet during recent times. Of course, we also spoke about the acknowledged world dominance of Linux - thanks to Android - and the interesting possibilities for countries like Mauritius. It is known that a couple of public institutions have there back-end infrastructure running on Red Hat Linux systems but the presence on the desktop is still very low. Users are simply hanging on to Windows XP and older versions of Microsoft Office. Following the introduction of the LUGM Ajay joined into the session and it quickly changed into a panel discussion with lots of interesting questions and answers, sharing of first-hand experience either on the job or in private use of Linux, and a couple of ideas about how the LUGM could promote Linux a bit more in Mauritius. It was great to get an insight into other attendee's opinion and activities. Especially taking into consideration that I'm already using Linux since around 1996/97. Frankly speaking, I bought a SuSE 4.x distribution back in those days because I couldn't achieve certain tasks on Windows NT 4.0 without spending a fortune. OpenELEC Mediacenter Next, Selven gave us decent introduction on OpenELEC: Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center (OpenELEC) is a small Linux distribution built from scratch as a platform to turn your computer into an XBMC media center. OpenELEC is designed to make your system boot fast, and the install is so easy that anyone can turn a blank PC into a media machine in less than 15 minutes. I didn't know about it until this presentation. In the past, I was mainly attached to Video Disk Recorder (VDR) as it allows the use of satellite receiver cards very easily. Hm, somehow I'm still missing my precious HTPC that I had to leave back in Germany years ago. It was great piece of hardware and software; self-built PC in a standard HiFi-sized (43cm) black desktop casing with 2 full-featured Hauppauge DVB-s cards, an old-fashioned Voodoo graphics card, WiFi card, Pioneer slot-in DVD drive, and fully remote controlled via infra-red thanks to Debian, VDR and LIRC. With EP Guide, scheduled recordings and general multimedia centre it offered all the necessary comfort in the living room, besides a Nintendo game console; actually a GameCube at that time... But I have to admit that putting OpenELEC on a Raspberry Pi would be a cool DIY project in the near future. LUGM - our next generation of linux users (15.06.2013) Project Evil Genius (PEG) Don't be scared of the paragraph header. Ish gave us a cool explanation why he named it PEG - Project Evil Genius; it's because of the time of the day when he was scripting down his ideas to be able to build, package and provide software applications to various Linux distributions. The main influence came from openSuSE but the platform didn't cater for his needs and ideas, so he started to work out something on his own. During his passionate session he also talked about the amazing experience he had due to other Linux users from all over the world. During the next couple of days Ish promised to put his script to GitHub... Looking forward to that. Check out Ish's personal blog over at hacklog.in. Highly recommended to read. Why India? Simply because the registration fees per year for an Indian domain are approximately 20 times less than for a Mauritian domain (.mu). Exploring the beach of L'Escalier af the meeting 'After-party' at the beach of L'Escalier Puh, after such interesting sessions, ideas around Linux and good conversation during the breaks and over lunch it was time for a little break-out. Selven suggested that we all should head down to the beach of L'Escalier and get some impressions of nature down here in the south of the island. Talking about 'beach' ;-) - absolutely not comparable to the white-sanded ones here in Flic en Flac... There are no lagoons down at the south coast of Mauriitus, and watching the breaking waves is a different experience and joy after all. Unfortunately, I was a little bit worried about the thoughtless littering at such a remote location. You have to drive on natural paths through the sugar cane fields and I was really shocked by the amount of rubbish lying around almost everywhere. Sad, really sad and it concurs with Yasir's recent article on the same topic. Resumé & outlook It was a great event. I met with new people, had some good conversations, and even my children enjoyed themselves the whole day. The location was well-chosen, enough space for each and everyone, parking spaces and even a playground for the children. Also, a big "Thank You" to Selven and his helpers for the organisation and preparation of lunch. I'm kind of sure that this was an exceptional meeting of LUGM and I'm really looking forward to the next gathering of Linux geeks. Hopefully, soon. All images are courtesy of Avinash Meetoo. More pictures are available on Flickr.

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  • Making Those PanelBoxes Behave

    - by Duncan Mills
    I have a little problem to solve earlier this week - misbehaving <af:panelBox> components... What do I mean by that? Well here's the scenario, I have a page fragment containing a set of panelBoxes arranged vertically. As it happens, they are stamped out in a loop but that does not really matter. What I want to be able to do is to provide the user with a simple UI to close and open all of the panelBoxes in concert. This could also apply to showDetailHeader and similar items with a disclosed attrubute, but in this case it's good old panelBoxes.  Ok, so the basic solution to this should be self evident. I can set up a suitable scoped managed bean that the panelBoxes all refer to for their disclosed attribute state. Then the open all / close commandButtons in the UI can simply set the state of that bean for all the panelBoxes to pick up via EL on their disclosed attribute. Sound OK? Well that works basically without a hitch, but turns out that there is a slight problem and this is where the framework is attempting to be a little too helpful. The issue is that is the user manually discloses or hides a panelBox then that will override the value that the EL is setting. So for example. I start the page with all panelBoxes collapsed, all set by the EL state I'm storing on the session I manually disclose panelBox no 1. I press the Expand All button - all works as you would hope and all the panelBoxes are now disclosed, including of course panelBox 1 which I just expanded manually. Finally I press the Collapse All button and everything collapses except that first panelBox that I manually disclosed.  The problem is that the component remembers this manual disclosure and that overrides the value provided by the expression. If I change the viewId (navigate away and back) then the panelBox will start to behave again, until of course I touch it again! Now, the more astute amoungst you would think (as I did) Ah, sound like the MDS personalizaton stuff is getting in the way and the solution should simply be to set the dontPersist attribute to disclosed | ALL. Alas this does not fix the issue.  After a little noodling on the best way to approach this I came up with a solution that works well, although if you think of an alternative way do let me know. The principle is simple. In the disclosureListener for the panelBox I take a note of the clientID of the panelBox component that has been touched by the user along with the state. This all gets stored in a Map of Booleans in ViewScope which is keyed by clientID and stores the current disclosed state in the Boolean value.  The listener looks like this (it's held in a request scope backing bean for the page): public void handlePBDisclosureEvent(DisclosureEvent disclosureEvent) { String clientId = disclosureEvent.getComponent().getClientId(FacesContext.getCurrentInstance()); boolean state = disclosureEvent.isExpanded(); pbState.addTouchedPanelBox(clientId, state); } The pbState variable referenced here is a reference to the bean which will hold the state of the panelBoxes that lives in viewScope (recall that everything is re-set when the viewid is changed so keeping this in viewScope is just fine and cleans things up automatically). The addTouchedPanelBox() method looks like this: public void addTouchedPanelBox(String clientId, boolean state) { //create the cache if needed this is just a Map<String,Boolean> if (_touchedPanelBoxState == null) { _touchedPanelBoxState = new HashMap<String, Boolean>(); } // Simply put / replace _touchedPanelBoxState.put(clientId, state); } So that's the first part, we now have a record of every panelBox that the user has touched. So what do we do when the Collapse All or Expand All buttons are pressed? Here we do some JavaScript magic. Basically for each clientID that we have stored away, we issue a client side disclosure event from JavaScript - just as if the user had gone back and changed it manually. So here's the Collapse All button action: public String CloseAllAction() { submitDiscloseOverride(pbState.getTouchedClientIds(true), false); _uiManager.closeAllBoxes(); return null; }  The _uiManager.closeAllBoxes() method is just manipulating the master-state that all of the panelBoxes are bound to using EL. The interesting bit though is the line:  submitDiscloseOverride(pbState.getTouchedClientIds(true), false); To break that down, the first part is a call to that viewScoped state holder to ask for a list of clientIDs that need to be "tweaked": public String getTouchedClientIds(boolean targetState) { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); if (_touchedPanelBoxState != null && _touchedPanelBoxState.size() > 0) { for (Map.Entry<String, Boolean> entry : _touchedPanelBoxState.entrySet()) { if (entry.getValue() == targetState) { if (sb.length() > 0) { sb.append(','); } sb.append(entry.getKey()); } } } return sb.toString(); } You'll notice that this method only processes those panelBoxes that will be in the wrong state and returns those as a comma separated list. This is then processed by the submitDiscloseOverride() method: private void submitDiscloseOverride(String clientIdList, boolean targetDisclosureState) { if (clientIdList != null && clientIdList.length() > 0) { FacesContext fctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); StringBuilder script = new StringBuilder(); script.append("overrideDiscloseHandler('"); script.append(clientIdList); script.append("',"); script.append(targetDisclosureState); script.append(");"); Service.getRenderKitService(fctx, ExtendedRenderKitService.class).addScript(fctx, script.toString()); } } This method constructs a JavaScript command to call a routine called overrideDiscloseHandler() in a script attached to the page (using the standard <af:resource> tag). That method parses out the list of clientIDs and sends the correct message to each one: function overrideDiscloseHandler(clientIdList, newState) { AdfLogger.LOGGER.logMessage(AdfLogger.INFO, "Disclosure Hander newState " + newState + " Called with: " + clientIdList); //Parse out the list of clientIds var clientIdArray = clientIdList.split(','); for (var i = 0; i < clientIdArray.length; i++){ var panelBox = flipPanel = AdfPage.PAGE.findComponentByAbsoluteId(clientIdArray[i]); if (panelBox.getComponentType() == "oracle.adf.RichPanelBox"){ panelBox.broadcast(new AdfDisclosureEvent(panelBox, newState)); } }  }  So there you go. You can see how, with a few tweaks the same code could be used for other components with disclosure that might suffer from the same problem, although I'd point out that the behavior I'm working around here us usually desirable. You can download the running example (11.1.2.2) from here. 

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  • Restructuring a large Chrome Extension/WebApp

    - by A.M.K
    I have a very complex Chrome Extension that has gotten too large to maintain in its current format. I'd like to restructure it, but I'm 15 and this is the first webapp or extension of it's type I've built so I have no idea how to do it. TL;DR: I have a large/complex webapp I'd like to restructure and I don't know how to do it. Should I follow my current restructure plan (below)? Does that sound like a good starting point, or is there a different approach that I'm missing? Should I not do any of the things I listed? While it isn't relevant to the question, the actual code is on Github and the extension is on the webstore. The basic structure is as follows: index.html <html> <head> <link href="css/style.css" rel="stylesheet" /> <!-- This holds the main app styles --> <link href="css/widgets.css" rel="stylesheet" /> <!-- And this one holds widget styles --> </head> <body class="unloaded"> <!-- Low-level base elements are "hardcoded" here, the unloaded class is used for transitions and is removed on load. i.e: --> <div class="tab-container" tabindex="-1"> <!-- Tab nav --> </div> <!-- Templates for all parts of the application and widgets are stored as elements here. I plan on changing these to <script> elements during the restructure since <template>'s need valid HTML. --> <template id="template.toolbar"> <!-- Template content --> </template> <!-- Templates end --> <!-- Plugins --> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/plugins.js"></script> <!-- This contains the code for all widgets, I plan on moving this online and downloading as necessary soon. --> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/widgets.js"></script> <!-- This contains the main application JS. --> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/script.js"></script> </body> </html> widgets.js (initLog || (window.initLog = [])).push([new Date().getTime(), "A log is kept during page load so performance can be analyzed and errors pinpointed"]); // Widgets are stored in an object and extended (with jQuery, but I'll probably switch to underscore if using Backbone) as necessary var Widgets = { 1: { // Widget ID, this is set here so widgets can be retreived by ID id: 1, // Widget ID again, this is used after the widget object is duplicated and detached size: 3, // Default size, medium in this case order: 1, // Order shown in "store" name: "Weather", // Widget name interval: 300000, // Refresh interval nicename: "weather", // HTML and JS safe widget name sizes: ["tiny", "small", "medium"], // Available widget sizes desc: "Short widget description", settings: [ { // Widget setting specifications stored as an array of objects. These are used to dynamically generate widget setting popups. type: "list", nicename: "location", label: "Location(s)", placeholder: "Enter a location and press Enter" } ], config: { // Widget settings as stored in the tabs object (see script.js for storage information) size: "medium", location: ["San Francisco, CA"] }, data: {}, // Cached widget data stored locally, this lets it work offline customFunc: function(cb) {}, // Widgets can optionally define custom functions in any part of their object refresh: function() {}, // This fetches data from the web and caches it locally in data, then calls render. It gets called after the page is loaded for faster loads render: function() {} // This renders the widget only using information from data, it's called on page load. } }; script.js (initLog || (window.initLog = [])).push([new Date().getTime(), "These are also at the end of every file"]); // Plugins, extends and globals go here. i.e. Number.prototype.pad = .... var iChrome = function(refresh) { // The main iChrome init, called with refresh when refreshing to not re-run libs iChrome.Status.log("Starting page generation"); // From now on iChrome.Status.log is defined, it's used in place of the initLog iChrome.CSS(); // Dynamically generate CSS based on settings iChrome.Tabs(); // This takes the tabs stored in the storage (see fetching below) and renders all columns and widgets as necessary iChrome.Status.log("Tabs rendered"); // These will be omitted further along in this excerpt, but they're used everywhere // Checks for justInstalled => show getting started are run here /* The main init runs the bare minimum required to display the page, this sets all non-visible or instantly need things (such as widget dragging) on a timeout */ iChrome.deferredTimeout = setTimeout(function() { iChrome.deferred(refresh); // Pass refresh along, see above }, 200); }; iChrome.deferred = function(refresh) {}; // This calls modules one after the next in the appropriate order to finish rendering the page iChrome.Search = function() {}; // Modules have a base init function and are camel-cased and capitalized iChrome.Search.submit = function(val) {}; // Methods within modules are camel-cased and not capitalized /* Extension storage is async and fetched at the beginning of plugins.js, it's then stored in a variable that iChrome.Storage processes. The fetcher checks to see if processStorage is defined, if it is it gets called, otherwise settings are left in iChromeConfig */ var processStorage = function() { iChrome.Storage(function() { iChrome.Templates(); // Templates are read from their elements and held in a cache iChrome(); // Init is called }); }; if (typeof iChromeConfig == "object") { processStorage(); } Objectives of the restructure Memory usage: Chrome apparently has a memory leak in extensions, they're trying to fix it but memory still keeps on getting increased every time the page is loaded. The app also uses a lot on its own. Code readability: At this point I can't follow what's being called in the code. While rewriting the code I plan on properly commenting everything. Module interdependence: Right now modules call each other a lot, AFAIK that's not good at all since any change you make to one module could affect countless others. Fault tolerance: There's very little fault tolerance or error handling right now. If a widget is causing the rest of the page to stop rendering the user should at least be able to remove it. Speed is currently not an issue and I'd like to keep it that way. How I think I should do it The restructure should be done using Backbone.js and events that call modules (i.e. on storage.loaded = init). Modules should each go in their own file, I'm thinking there should be a set of core files that all modules can rely on and call directly and everything else should be event based. Widget structure should be kept largely the same, but maybe they should also be split into their own files. AFAIK you can't load all templates in a folder, therefore they need to stay inline. Grunt should be used to merge all modules, plugins and widgets into one file. Templates should also all be precompiled. Question: Should I follow my current restructure plan? Does that sound like a good starting point, or is there a different approach that I'm missing? Should I not do any of the things I listed? Do applications written with Backbone tend to be more intensive (memory and speed) than ones written in Vanilla JS? Also, can I expect to improve this with a proper restructure or is my current code about as good as can be expected?

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  • Meraki wireless access point disconnects clients

    - by resolver101
    We have a Meraki MR16 Cloud Managed AP and it disconnects certain clients. The clients with Intel wireless cards work without any disconnects. The Meraki reports the follow in its event log: Sep 4 09:55:47 WPA authentication Sep 4 09:55:47 802.11 association channel: 11, rssi: 64 Sep 4 09:55:38 802.11 disassociation client has left AP Sep 4 09:55:38 WPA deauthentication vap: 0, radio: 0, aid: 1633956416 An example wireless network card which the Meraki disconnects is Realtek RTL8191SE 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter. The realtek laptop is sat 2 meters away from the AP and has a lot of signal and the Meraki reports minimal interference. Any ideas why it disconnects non-intel wireless network cards?

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  • Using a Dell DRAC virtual console through a NAT firewall

    - by jetboy
    I have two Dell Poweredge R210 servers, both running Ubuntu 10 Server x64. Server A has a Dell DRAC ILO card (on 172.16.96.91), and both the server and the DRAC use Server B as a gateway (with server B's WAN IP being xxx.xxx.xxx.xx). Server B uses the following NAT rules in IPTables to route traffic through to Server A's DRAC: *NAT --append PREROUTING --in-interface eth1 --protocol tcp --destination xxx.xxx.xxx.xx --destination-port 8019 --jump DNAT --to-destination 172.16.96.91:443 --append POSTROUTING --out-interface eth1 --jump SNAT --to-source xxx.xxx.xxx.xx This works fine for accessing Server A's DRAC via Server B, apart from the Java virtual console. This fails with the following error: com.sun.deploy.net.FailedDownloadException: Unable to load resource: https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xx:443/software/avctKVM.jar at com.sun.deploy.net.DownloadEngine.actionDownload(Unknown Source) etc. I know that the Java console uses port 5900, and possibly ports 83 and 5891. Can anyone help me in getting this working?

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  • Running Firewall (IPCop) on Hyper-V

    - by Loren Charnley
    I currently use IPCop for our corporate firewall & VPN. I am looking to consolidate a number of servers, and am considering including the firewall server in the consolidation. I currently plan on using Server 2008 with Hyper-V for the virtualization. Has anyone out there tried virtualizing IPCop? Is there anything that I should be aware of? In particular, IPCop has somewhat limited hardware support for NICs - what hardware will the VM see for the network card?

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  • Dell Optiplex 980 vs. Dell Studio XPS 9000?

    - by Dave
    My company is allowing me to upgrade to either the XPS 9000 or the Optiplex 980. I haven't bought an Optiplex in over a decade, and the only thing I can remember is that the Optiplex is really meant for corporate IT environments, and we're not even close being large enough to have IT issues. I think the components might be of higher quality as well, like the motherboard and power supply. The XPS 9000 is about $150 cheaper than the Optiplex, but the Optiplex has 4GB more RAM, a 2nd video card, and an extra year of service. Seems like the Optiplex is a better deal overall, but since I haven't ever used one, I wanted to see what everyone else here thought.

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