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  • Jquery Autocomplete after space press

    - by Limpep
    I am having an issue with my auto-complete feature such as when a user presses the space button the auto-complete doesn't show up again. Here is my code script type="text/javascript"> function lookup(inputString) { if(inputString.length == 0) { // Hide the suggestion box. $('#suggestions').hide(); } else { $.post("autocomplete.php", { queryString: ""+inputString+"" }, function(data){ if(data.length >0) { $('#suggestions').show(); $('#autoSuggestionsList').html(data); } }); } } // lookup function fill(thisValue) { $('#tag').val(thisValue); setTimeout("$('#suggestions').hide();", 200); } here my php code <?php require_once('config.php'); $db = new mysqli(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD,DB_DATABASE); if(!$db) { // Show error if we cannot connect. echo 'ERROR: Could not connect to the database.'; } else { // Is there a posted query string? if(isset($_POST['queryString'])) { $queryString = $db->real_escape_string($_POST['queryString']); // Is the string length greater than 0? if(strlen($queryString) >0) { // Run the query: We use LIKE '$queryString%' // The percentage sign is a wild-card, in my example of countries it works like this... // $queryString = 'Uni'; // Returned data = 'United States, United Kindom'; $query = $db->query("SELECT name FROM tag WHERE name LIKE '$queryString%' ORDER BY name LIMIT 10"); if($query) { // While there are results loop through them - fetching an Object (i like PHP5 btw!). while ($result = $query ->fetch_object()) { // Format the results, im using <li> for the list, you can change it. // The onClick function fills the textbox with the result. echo '<li onClick="fill(\''.$result->name.'\');">'.$result->name.'</li>'; } } else { echo 'ERROR: There was a problem with the query.'; } } else { // Dont do anything. } // There is a queryString. } else { echo 'There should be no direct access to this script!'; } } ? Any help would be great, thanks.

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  • What is GC holes?

    - by tianyi
    I wrote a long TCP connection socket server in C#. Spike in memory in my server happens. I used dotNet Memory Profiler(a tool) to detect where the memory leaks. Memory Profiler indicates the private heap is huge, and the memory is something like below(the number is not real,what I want to show is the GC0 and GC2's Holes are very very huge, the data size is normal): Managed heaps - 1,500,000KB Normal heap - 1400,000KB Generation #0 - 600,000KB Data - 100,000KB "Holes" - 500,000KB Generation #1 - xxKB Data - 0KB "Holes" - xKB Generation #2 - xxxxxxxxxxxxxKB Data - 100,000KB "Holes" - 700,000KB Large heap - 131072KB Large heap - 83KB Overhead/unused - 130989KB Overhead - 0KB Howerver, what is GC hole? I read an article about the hole: http://kaushalp.blogspot.com/2007/04/what-is-gc-hole-and-how-to-create-gc.html The author said : The code snippet below is the simplest way to introduce a GC hole into the system. //OBJECTREF is a typedef for Object*. { PointerTable *pTBL = o_pObjectClass->GetPointerTable(); OBJECTREF aObj = AllocateObjectMemory(pTBL); OBJECTREF bObj = AllocateObjectMemory(pTBL); //WRONG!!! “aObj” may point to garbage if the second //“AllocateObjectMemory” triggered a GC. DoSomething (aOb, bObj); } All it does is allocate two managed objects, and then does something with them both. This code compiles fine, and if you run simple pre-checkin tests, it will probably “work.” But this code will crash eventually. Why? If the second call to “AllocateObjectMemory” triggers a GC, that GC discards the object instance you just assigned to “aObj”. This code, like all C++ code inside the CLR, is compiled by a non-managed compiler and the GC cannot know that “aObj” holds a root reference to an object you want kept live. ======================================================================== I can't understand what he explained. Does the sample mean aObj becomes a wild pointer after GC? Is it mean { aObj = (*aObj)malloc(sizeof(object)); free(aObj); function(aObj);? } ? I hope somebody can explain it.

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  • Week in Geek: US Govt E-card Scam Siphons Confidential Data Edition

    - by Asian Angel
    This week we learned how to “back up photos to Flickr, automate repetitive tasks, & normalize MP3 volume”, enable “stereo mix” in Windows 7 to record audio, create custom papercraft toys, read up on three alternatives to Apple’s flaky iOS alarm clock, decorated our desktops & app docks with Google icon packs, and more. Photo by alexschlegel. Random Geek Links It has been a busy week on the security & malware fronts and we have a roundup of the latest news to help keep you updated. Photo by TopTechWriter.US. US govt e-card scam hits confidential data A fake U.S. government Christmas e-card has managed to siphon off gigabytes of sensitive data from a number of law enforcement and military staff who work on cybersecurity matters, many of whom are involved in computer crime investigations. Security tool uncovers multiple bugs in every browser Michal Zalewski reports that he discovered the vulnerability in Internet Explorer a while ago using his cross_fuzz fuzzing tool and reported it to Microsoft in July 2010. Zalewski also used cross_fuzz to discover bugs in other browsers, which he also reported to the relevant organisations. Microsoft to fix Windows holes, but not ones in IE Microsoft said that it will release two security bulletins next week fixing three holes in Windows, but it is still investigating or working on fixing holes in Internet Explorer that have been reportedly exploited in attacks. Microsoft warns of Windows flaw affecting image rendering Microsoft has warned of a Windows vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of a computer if the user is logged on with administrative rights. Windows 7 Not Affected by Critical 0-Day in the Windows Graphics Rendering Engine While confirming that details on a Critical zero-day vulnerability have made their way into the wild, Microsoft noted that customers running the latest iteration of Windows client and server platforms are not exposed to any risks. Microsoft warns of Office-related malware Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center issued a warning this week that it has spotted malicious code on the Internet that can take advantage of a flaw in Word and infect computers after a user does nothing more than read an e-mail. *Refers to a flaw that was addressed in the November security patch releases. Make sure you have all of the latest security updates installed. Unpatched hole in ImgBurn disk burning application According to security specialist Secunia, a highly critical vulnerability in ImgBurn, a lightweight disk burning application, can be used to remotely compromise a user’s system. Hole in VLC Media Player Virtual Security Research (VSR) has identified a vulnerability in VLC Media Player. In versions up to and including 1.1.5 of the VLC Media Player. Flash Player sandbox can be bypassed Flash applications run locally can read local files and send them to an online server – something which the sandbox is supposed to prevent. Chinese auction site touts hacked iTunes accounts Tens of thousands of reportedly hacked iTunes accounts have been found on Chinese auction site Taobao, but the company claims it is unable to take action unless there are direct complaints. What happened in the recent Hotmail outage Mike Schackwitz explains the cause of the recent Hotmail outage. DOJ sends order to Twitter for Wikileaks-related account info The U.S. Justice Department has obtained a court order directing Twitter to turn over information about the accounts of activists with ties to Wikileaks, including an Icelandic politician, a legendary Dutch hacker, and a U.S. computer programmer. Google gets court to block Microsoft Interior Department e-mail win The U.S. Federal Claims Court has temporarily blocked Microsoft from proceeding with the $49.3 million, five-year DOI contract that it won this past November. Google Apps customers get email lockdown Companies and organisations using Google Apps are now able to restrict the email access of selected users. LibreOffice Is the Default Office Suite for Ubuntu 11.04 Matthias Klose has announced some details regarding the replacement of the old OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages with the new LibreOffice 3.3 ones, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Alpha 2 release. Sysadmin Geek Tips Photo by Filomena Scalise. How to Setup Software RAID for a Simple File Server on Ubuntu Do you need a file server that is cheap and easy to setup, “rock solid” reliable, and has Email Alerting? This tutorial shows you how to use Ubuntu, software RAID, and SaMBa to accomplish just that. How to Control the Order of Startup Programs in Windows While you can specify the applications you want to launch when Windows starts, the ability to control the order in which they start is not available. However, there are a couple of ways you can easily overcome this limitation and control the startup order of applications. Random TinyHacker Links Using Opera Unite to Send Large Files A tutorial on using Opera Unite to easily send huge files from your computer. WorkFlowy is a Useful To-do List Tool A cool to-do list tool that lets you integrate multiple tasks in one single list easily. Playing Flash Videos on iOS Devices Yes, you can play flash videos on jailbroken iPhones. Here’s a tutorial. Clear Safari History and Cookies On iPhone A tutorial on clearing your browser history on iPhone and other iOS devices. Monitor Your Internet Usage Here’s a cool, cross-platform tool to monitor your internet bandwidth. Super User Questions See what the community had to say on these popular questions from Super User this week. Why is my upload speed much less than my download speed? Where should I find drivers for my laptop if it didn’t come with a driver disk? OEM Office 2010 without media – how to reinstall? Is there a point to using theft tracking software like Prey on my laptop, if you have login security? Moving an “all-in-one” PC when turned on/off How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Get caught up on your HTG reading with our hottest articles from this past week. How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? Did You Know Facebook Has Built-In Shortcut Keys? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy looking through our latest gathering of retro article goodness. Learning Windows 7: Create a Homegroup & Join a New Computer To It How To Disconnect a Machine from a Homegroup Use Remote Desktop To Access Other Computers On a Small Office or Home Network How To Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and Vista Allow Users To Run Only Specified Programs in Windows 7 The Geek Note That is all we have for you this week and we hope your first week back at work or school has gone very well now that the holidays are over. Know a great tip? Send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by Pamela Machado. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 Arctic Theme for Windows 7 Gives Your Desktop an Icy Touch Install LibreOffice via PPA and Receive Auto-Updates in Ubuntu Creative Portraits Peek Inside the Guts of Modern Electronics Scenic Winter Lane Wallpaper to Create a Relaxing Mood Access Your Web Apps Directly Using the Context Menu in Chrome The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video]

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  • Finding a person in the forest

    - by PointsToShare
    © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved finding a person in the forest or Limiting the AD result in SharePoint People Picker There are times when we need to limit the SharePoint audience of certain farms or servers or site collections to a particular audience. One of my experiences involved limiting access to US citizens, another to a particular location. Now, most of us – your humble servant included – are not Active Directory experts – but we must be able to handle the “audience restrictions” as required. So here is how it’s done in a nutshell. Important note. Not all could be done in PowerShell (at least not yet)! There are no Windows PowerShell commands to configure People Picker. The stsadm command is: stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomquery -pv ADQuery –url http://somethingOrOther Note the long-hyphenated property name. Now to filling the ADQuery.   LDAP Query in a nutshell Syntax LDAP is no older than SQL and an LDAP query is actually a query against the LDAP Database. LDAP attributes are the equivalent of Database columns, so why do we have to learn a new query language? Beats me! But we must, so here it is. The syntax of an LDAP query string is made of individual statements with relational operators including: = Equal <= Lower than or equal >= Greater than or equal… and memberOf – a group membership. ! Not * Wildcard Equal and memberOf are the most commonly used. Checking for absence uses the ! – not and the * - wildcard Example: (SN=Grant) All whose last name – SurName – is Grant Example: (!(SN=Grant)) All except Grant Example: (!(SN=*)) all where there is no SurName i.e SurName is absent (probably Rappers). Example: (CN=MyGroup) Common Name is MyGroup.  Example: (GN=J*) all the Given Names that start with J (JJ, Jane, Jon, John, etc.) The cryptic SN, CN, GN, etc. are attributes and more about them later All the queries are enclosed in parentheses (Query). Complex queries are comprised of sets that are in AND or OR conditions. AND is denoted by the ampersand (&) and the OR is denoted by the vertical pipe (|). The general syntax is that of the Prefix polish notation where the operand precedes the variables. E.g +ab is the sum of a and b. In an LDAP query (&(A)(B)) will garner the objects for which both A and B are true. In an LDAP query (&(A)(B)(C)) will garner the objects for which A, B and C are true. There’s no limit to the number of conditions. In an LDAP query (|(A)(B)) will garner the objects for which either A or B are true. In an LDAP query (|(A)(B)(C)) will garner the objects for which at least one of A, B and C is true. There’s no limit to the number of conditions. More complex queries have both types of conditions and the parentheses determine the order of operations. Attributes Now let’s get into the SN, CN, GN, and other attributes of the query SN – is the SurName (last name) GN – is the Given Name (first name) CN – is the Common Name, usually GN followed by SN OU – is an Organization Unit such as division, department etc. DC – is a Domain Content in the AD forest l – lower case ‘L’ stands for location. Jerusalem anybody? Or Katmandu. UPN – User Principal Name, is usually the first part of an email address. By nature it is unique in the forest. Most systems set the UPN to be the first initial followed by the SN of the person involved. Some limit the total to 8 characters. If we have many ‘jsmith’ we have to somehow distinguish them from each other. DN – is the distinguished name – a name unique to AD forest in which it lives. Usually it’s a CN with some domain or group distinguishers. DN is important in conjunction with the memberOf relation. Groups have stricter requirement. Each group has to have a unique name - its CN and it has to be unique regardless of its place. See more below. All of the attributes are case insensitive. CN, cn, Cn, and cN are identical. objectCategory is an element that requires special consideration. AD contains many different object like computers, printers, and of course people and groups. In the queries below, we’re limiting our search to people (person). Putting it altogether Let’s get a list of all the Johns in the SPAdmin group of the Jerusalem that local domain. (&(objectCategory=person)(memberOf=cn=SPAdmin,ou=Jerusalem,dc=local)) The memberOf=cn=SPAdmin uses the cn (Common Name) of the SPAdmin group. This is how the memberOf relation is used. ‘SPAdmin’ is actually the DN of the group. Also the memberOf relation does not allow wild cards (*) in the group name. Also, you are limited to at most one ‘OU’ entry. Let’s add Marvin Minsky to the search above. |(&(objectCategory=person)(memberOf=cn=SPAdmin,ou=Jerusalem,dc=local))(CN=Marvin Minsky) Here I added the or pipeline at the beginning of the query and put the CN requirement for Minsky at the end. Note that if Marvin was already in the prior result, he’s not going to be listed twice. One last note: You may see a dryer but more complete list of attributes rules and examples in: http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=5667 And finally (thus negating the claim that my previous note was last), to the best of my knowledge there are 3 more ways to limit the audience. One is to use the peoplepicker-searchadcustomfilter property using the same ADQuery. This works only in SP1 and above. The second is to limit the search to users within this particular site collection – the property name is peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection and the value is yes (-pv yes) And the third is –pn peoplepicker-serviceaccountdirectorypaths –pv “OU=ou1,DC=dc1…..” Again you are limited to at most one ‘OU’ phrase – no OU=ou1,OU=ou2… And now the real end. The main property discussed in this sprawling and seemingly endless monogram – peoplepicker-searchadcustomquery - is the most general way of getting the job done. Here are a few examples of command lines that worked and some that didn’t. Can you see why? C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (Title=David) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (!Title=David) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (OU=OURealName,OU=OUMid,OU=OUTop,DC=TopDC,DC=MidDC,DC=BottomDC) Command line error. Too many OUs C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (OU=OURealName) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (DC=TopDC,DC=MidDC,DC=BottomDC) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (OU=OURealName,DC=TopDC,DC=MidDC,DC=BottomDC) Operation completed successfully.   That’s all folks!

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  • Rockmelt, the technology adoption model, and Facebook's spare internet

    - by Roger Hart
    Regardless of how good it is, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to make snide remarks about Rockmelt. After all, on the surface it looks a lot like some people spent two years building a browser instead of just bashing out a Chrome extension over a wet weekend. It probably does some more stuff. I don't know for sure because artificial scarcity is cool, apparently, so the "invitation" is still in the post*. I may in fact never know for sure, because I'm not wild about Facebook sign-in as a prerequisite for anything. From the video, and some initial reviews, my early reaction was: I have a browser, I have a Twitter client; what on earth is this for? The answer, of course, is "not me". Rockmelt is, in a way, quite audacious. Oh, sure, on launch day it's Bay Area bar-chat for the kids with no lenses in their retro specs and trousers that give you deep-vein thrombosis, but it's not really about them. Likewise,  Facebook just launched Google Wave, or something. And all the tech snobbery and scorn packed into describing it that way is irrelevant next to what they're doing with their platform. Here's something I drew in MS Paint** because I don't want to get sued: (see: The technology adoption lifecycle) A while ago in the Guardian, John Lanchester dusted off the idiom that "technology is stuff that doesn't work yet". The rest of the article would be quite interesting if it wasn't largely about MySpace, and he's sort of got a point. If you bolt on the sentiment that risk-averse businessmen like things that work, you've got the essence of Crossing the Chasm. Products for the mainstream market don't look much like technology. Think for  a second about early (1980s ish) hi-fi systems, with all the knobs and fiddly bits, their ostentatious technophile aesthetic. Then consider their sleeker and less (or at least less conspicuously) functional successors in the 1990s. The theory goes that innovators and early adopters like technology, it's a hobby in itself. The rest of the humans seem to like magic boxes with very few buttons that make stuff happen and never trouble them about why. Personally, I consider Apple's maddening insistence that iTunes is an acceptable way to move files around to be more or less morally unacceptable. Most people couldn't care less. Hence Rockmelt, and hence Facebook's continued growth. Rockmelt looks pointless to me, because I aggregate my social gubbins with Digsby, or use TweetDeck. But my use case is different and so are my enthusiasms. If I want to share photos, I'll use Flickr - but Facebook has photo sharing. If I want a short broadcast message, I'll use Twitter - Facebook has status updates. If I want to sell something with relatively little hassle, there's eBay - or Facebook marketplace. YouTube - check, FB Video. Email - messaging. Calendaring apps, yeah there are loads, or FB Events. What if I want to host a simple web page? Sure, they've got pages. Also Notes for blogging, and more games than I can count. This stuff is right there, where millions and millions of users are already, and for what they need it just works. It's not about me, because I'm not in the big juicy area under the curve. It's what 1990s portal sites could never have dreamed of achieving. Facebook is AOL on speed, crack, and some designer drugs it had specially imported from the future. It's a n00b-friendly gateway to the internet that just happens to serve up all the things you want to do online, right where you are. Oh, and everybody else is there too. The price of having all this and the social graph too is that you have all of this, and the social graph too. But plenty of folks have more incisive things to say than me about the whole privacy shebang, and it's not really what I'm talking about. Facebook is maintaining a vast, and fairly fully-featured training-wheels internet. And it makes up a large proportion of the online experience for a lot of people***. It's the entire web (2.0?) experience for the early and late majority. And sure, no individual bit of it is quite as slick or as fully-realised as something like Flickr (which wows me a bit every time I use it. Those guys are good at the web), but it doesn't have to be. It has to be unobtrusively good enough for the regular humans. It has to not feel like technology. This is what Rockmelt sort of is. You're online, you want something nebulously social, and you don't want to faff about with, say, Twitter clients. Wow! There it is on a really distracting sidebar, right in your browser. No effort! Yeah - fish nor fowl, much? It might work, I guess. There may be a demographic who want their social web experience more simply than tech tinkering, and who aren't just getting it from Facebook (or, for that matter, mobile devices). But I'd be surprised. Rockmelt feels like an attempt to grab a slice of Facebook-style "Look! It's right here, where you already are!", but it's still asking the mature market to install a new browser. Presumably this is where that Facebook sign-in predicate comes in handy, though it'll take some potent awareness marketing to make it fly. Meanwhile, Facebook quietly has the entire rest of the internet as a product management resource, and can continue to give most of the people most of what they want. Something that has not gone un-noticed in its potential to look a little sinister. But heck, they might even make Google Wave popular.     *This was true last week when I drafted this post. I got an invite subsequently, hence the screenshot. **MS Paint is no fun any more. It's actually good in Windows 7. Farewell ironically-shonky diagrams. *** It's also behind a single sign-in, lending a veneer of confidence, and partially solving the problem of usernames being crummy unique identifiers. I'll be blogging about that at some point.

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  • Source-control 'wet-work'?

    - by Phil Factor
    When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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  • Source-control 'wet-work'?

    - by Phil Factor
    When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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  • Book Review: Brownfield Application Development in .NET

    - by DotNetBlues
    I recently finished reading the book Brownfield Application Development in .NET by Kyle Baley and Donald Belcham.  The book is available from Manning.  First off, let me say that I'm a huge fan of Manning as a publisher.  I've found their books to be top-quality, over all.  As a Kindle owner, I also appreciate getting an ebook copy along with the dead tree copy.  I find ebooks to be much more convenient to read, but hard-copies are easier to reference. The book covers, surprisingly enough, working with brownfield applications.  Which is well and good, if that term has meaning to you.  It didn't for me.  Without retreading a chunk of the first chapter, the authors break code bases into three broad categories: greenfield, brownfield, and legacy.  Greenfield is, essentially, new development that hasn't had time to rust and is (hopefully) being approached with some discipline.  Legacy applications are those that are more or less stable and functional, that do not expect to see a lot of work done to them, and are more likely to be replaced than reworked. Brownfield code is the gray (brown?) area between the two and the authors argue, quite effectively, that it is the most likely state for an application to be in.  Brownfield code has, in some way, been allowed to tarnish around the edges and can be difficult to work with.  Although I hadn't realized it, most of the code I've worked on has been brownfield.  Sometimes, there's talk of scrapping and starting over.  Sometimes, the team dismisses increased discipline as ivory tower nonsense.  And, sometimes, I've been the ignorant culprit vexing my future self. The book is broken into two major sections, plus an introduction chapter and an appendix.  The first section covers what the authors refer to as "The Ecosystem" which consists of version control, build and integration, testing, metrics, and defect management.  The second section is on actually writing code for brownfield applications and discusses object-oriented principles, architecture, external dependencies, and, of course, how to deal with these when coming into an existing code base. The ecosystem section is just shy of 140 pages long and brings some real meat to the matter.  The focus on "pain points" immediately sets the tone as problem-solution, rather than academic.  The authors also approach some of the topics from a different angle than some essays I've read on similar topics.  For example, the chapter on automated testing is on just that -- automated testing.  It's all well and good to criticize a project as conflating integration tests with unit tests, but it really doesn't make anyone's life better.  The discussion on testing is more focused on the "right" level of testing for existing projects.  Sometimes, an integration test is the best you can do without gutting a section of functional code.  Even if you can sell other developers and/or management on doing so, it doesn't actually provide benefit to your customers to rewrite code that works.  This isn't to say the authors encourage sloppy coding.  Far from it.  Just that they point out the wisdom of ignoring the sleeping bear until after you deal with the snarling wolf. The other sections take a similarly real-world, workable approach to the pain points they address.  As the section moves from technical solutions like version control and continuous integration (CI) to the softer, process issues of metrics and defect tracking, the authors begin to gently suggest moving toward a zero defect count.  While that really sounds like an unreasonable goal for a lot of ongoing projects, it's quite apparent that the authors have first-hand experience with taming some gruesome projects.  The suggestions are grounded and workable, and the difficulty of some situations is explicitly acknowledged. I have to admit that I started getting bored by the end of the ecosystem section.  No matter how valuable I think a good project manager or business analyst is to a successful ALM, at the end of the day, I'm a gear-head.  Also, while I agreed with a lot of the ecosystem ideas, in theory, I didn't necessarily feel that a lot of the single-developer projects that I'm often involved in really needed that level of rigor.  It's only after reading the sidebars and commentary in the coding section that I had the context for the arguments made in favor of a strong ecosystem supporting the development process.  That isn't to say that I didn't support good product management -- indeed, I've probably pushed too hard, on occasion, for a strong ALM outside of just development.  This book gave me deeper insight into why some corners shouldn't be cut and how damaging certain sins of omission can be. The code section, though, kept me engaged for its entirety.  Many technical books can be used as reference material from day one.  The authors were clear, however, that this book is not one of these.  The first chapter of the section (chapter seven, over all) addresses object oriented (OO) practices.  I've read any number of definitions, discussions, and treatises on OO.  None of the chapter was new to me, but it was a good review, and I'm of the opinion that it's good to review the foundations of what you do, from time to time, so I didn't mind. The remainder of the book is really just about how to apply OOP to existing code -- and, just because all your code exists in classes does not mean that it's object oriented.  That topic has the potential to be extremely condescending, but the authors miraculously managed to never once make me feel like a dolt or that they were wagging their finger at me for my prior sins.  Instead, they continue the "pain points" and problem-solution presentation to give concrete examples of how to apply some pretty academic-sounding ideas.  That's a point worth emphasizing, as my experience with most OO discussions is that they stay in the academic realm.  This book gives some very, very good explanations of why things like the Liskov Substitution Principle exist and why a corporate programmer should even care.  Even if you know, with absolute certainty, that you'll never have to work on an existing code-base, I would recommend this book just for the clarity it provides on OOP. This book goes beyond just theory, or even real-world application.  It presents some methods for fixing problems that any developer can, and probably will, encounter in the wild.  First, the authors address refactoring application layers and internal dependencies.  Then, they take you through those layers from the UI to the data access layer and external dependencies.  Finally, they come full circle to tie it all back to the overall process.  By the time the book is done, you're left with a lot of ideas, but also a reasonable plan to begin to improve an existing project structure. Throughout the book, it's apparent that the authors have their own preferred methodology (TDD and domain-driven design), as well as some preferred tools.  The "Our .NET Toolbox" is something of a neon sign pointing to that latter point.  They do not beat the reader over the head with anything resembling a "One True Way" mentality.  Even for the most emphatic points, the tone is quite congenial and helpful.  With some of the near-theological divides that exist within the tech community, I found this to be one of the more remarkable characteristics of the book.  Although the authors favor tools that might be considered Alt.NET, there is no reason the advice and techniques given couldn't be quite successful in a pure Microsoft shop with Team Foundation Server.  For that matter, even though the book specifically addresses .NET, it could be applied to a Java and Oracle shop, as well.

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  • 5 Lessons learnt in localization / multi language support in WPF

    - by MarkPearl
    For the last few months I have been secretly working away at the second version of an application that we initially released a few years ago. It’s called MaxCut and it is a free panel/cut optimizer for the woodwork, glass and metal industry. One of the motivations for writing MaxCut was to get an end to end experience in developing an application for general consumption. From the early days of v1 of MaxCut I would get the odd email thanking me for the software and then listing a few suggestions on how to improve it. Two of the most dominant suggestions that we received were… Support for imperial measurements (the original program only supported the metric system) Multi language support (we had someone who volunteered to translate the program into Japanese for us). I am not going to dive into the Imperial to Metric support in todays blog post, but I would like to cover a few brief lessons we learned in adding support for multi-language functionality in the software. I have sectioned them below under different lessons. Lesson 1 – Build multi-language support in from the start So the first lesson I learnt was if you know you are going to do multi language support – build it in from the very beginning! One of the power points of WPF/Silverlight is data binding in XAML and so while it wasn’t to painful to retro fit multi language support into the programing, it was still time consuming and a bit tedious to go through mounds and mounds of views and would have been a minor job to have implemented this while the form was being designed. Lesson 2 – Accommodate for varying word lengths using Grids The next lesson was a little harder to learn and was learnt a bit further down the road in the development cycle. We developed everything in English, assuming that other languages would have similar character length words for equivalent meanings… don’t!. A word that is short in your language may be of varying character lengths in other languages. Some language like Dutch and German allow for concatenation of nouns which has the potential to create really long words. We picked up a few places where our views had been structured incorrectly so that if a word was to long it would get clipped off or cut out. To get around this we began using the WPF grid extensively with column widths that would automatically expand if they needed to. Generally speaking the grid replacement got round this hurdle, and if in future you have a choice between a stack panel or a grid – think twice before going for the easier option… often the grid will be a bit more work to setup, but will be more flexible. Lesson 3 – Separate the separators Our initial run through moving the words to a resource dictionary led us to make what I thought was one potential mistake. If we had a label like the following… “length : “ In the resource dictionary we put it as a single entry. This is fine until you start using a word more than once. For instance in our scenario we used the word “length’ frequently. with different variations of the word with grammar and separators included in the resource we ended up having what I would consider a bloated dictionary. When we removed the separators from the words and put them as their own resources we saw a dramatic reduction in dictionary size… so something that looked like this… “length : “ “length. “ “length?” Was reduced to… “length” “:” “?” “.” While this may not seem like a reduction at first glance, consider that the separators “:?.” are used everywhere and suddenly you see a real reduction in bloat. Lesson 4 – Centralize the Language Dictionary This lesson was learnt at the very end of the project after we had already had a release candidate out in the wild. Because our translations would be done on a volunteer basis and remotely, we wanted it to be really simple for someone to translate our program into another language. As a common design practice we had tiered the application so that we had a business logic layer, a ui layer, etc. The problem was in several of these layers we had resource files specific for that layer. What this resulted in was us having multiple resource files that we would need to send to our translators. To add to our problems, some of the wordings were duplicated in different resource files, which would result in additional frustration from our translators as they felt they were duplicating work. Eventually the workaround was to make a separate project in VS2010 with just the language translations. We then exposed the dictionary as public within this project and made it as a reference to the other projects within the solution. This solved out problem as now we had a central dictionary and could remove any duplication's. Lesson 5 – Make a dummy translation file to test that you haven’t missed anything The final lesson learnt about multi language support in WPF was when checking if you had forgotten to translate anything in the inline code, make a test resource file with dummy data. Ideally you want the data for each word to be identical. In our instance we made one which had all the resource key values pointing to a value of test. This allowed us point the language file to our test resource file and very quickly browse through the program and see if we had missed any linking. The alternative to this approach is to have two language files and swap between the two while running the program to make sure that you haven’t missed anything, but the downside of dual language file approach is that it is much a lot harder spotting a mistake if everything is different – almost like playing Where’s Wally / Waldo. It is much easier spotting variance in uniformity – meaning when you put the “test’ keyword for everything, anything that didn’t say “test” stuck out like a sore thumb. So these are my top five lessons learnt on implementing multi language support in WPF. Feel free to make any suggestions in the comments section if you feel maybe something is more important than one of these or if I got it wrong!

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  • Different Not Automatically Implies Better

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

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  • Write-error on swap-device, Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK

    - by Jan
    My root server at 1&1 was unresponsive on HTTP and SSH, so I logged into the serial console . It flooded my connection with endless error messages like quoted below. I initiated a reboot and now everything seems to work properly. After googling, I installed smartctl and ran a short self test, which told me the device was healthy. Is this likely a disk failure soon to happen or could it be just some program going wild? I assume, the swap device could also grow full when huge amounts of memory get consumed by a buggy program? How can I find out for sure? The sever was already unresponsive a week ago when I just restarted it without proper investigation. The server is running on CentOS. Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351055) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351063) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351071) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351079) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351087) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351095) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351103) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351111) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351119) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351127) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351135) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351143) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351151) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351159) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351167) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351175) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351183) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351191) sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Write(10): 2a 00 00 9c 00 ef 00 00 08 00 end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 10223855 Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10223863) sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Write(10): 2a 00 00 9c 0e 97 00 00 10 00 end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 10227351 Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10227359) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10227367) sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Write(10): 2a 00 00 9c b0 1f 00 00 10 00 end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 10268703 Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10268711) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10268719) sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Write(10): 2a 00 00 a0 84 7f 00 00 08 00 end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 10519679 Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10519687) sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Write(10): 2a 00 00 a7 26 af 00 04 00 00 end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 10954415 Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954423) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954431) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954439) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954447) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954455) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954463) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954471) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954479) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954487) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954495) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954503) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954511) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954519) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954527) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954535) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954543) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954551) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954559) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954567) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954575) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954583) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954591) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954599) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954607) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954615) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954623) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954631) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954639) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954647) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954655) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954663) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954671) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954679) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954687) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954695) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954703) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954711) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954719) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954727) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954735) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954743) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954751) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954759) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954767) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954775) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954783) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954791) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954799) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954807) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954815) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954823) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954831) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954839) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954847) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954855) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954863) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954871) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954879) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954887) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954895) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954903) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954911) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954919) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954927) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954935) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954943) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954951) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954959) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954967) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954975) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954983) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954991) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954999) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955007) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955015) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955023) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955031) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955039) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955047) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955055) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955063) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955071) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955079) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955087) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955095) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955103) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955111) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955119) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955127) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955135) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955143) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955151) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955159) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955167) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955175) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955183)

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  • Launching Intent.ACTION_VIEW intent not working on saved image file

    - by Savvas Dalkitsis
    First of all let me say that this questions is slightly connected to another question by me. Actually it was created because of that. I have the following code to write a bitmap downloaded from the net to a file in the sd card: // Get image from url URL u = new URL(url); HttpGet httpRequest = new HttpGet(u.toURI()); HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpResponse response = (HttpResponse) httpclient.execute(httpRequest); HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity(); BufferedHttpEntity bufHttpEntity = new BufferedHttpEntity(entity); InputStream instream = bufHttpEntity.getContent(); Bitmap bmImg = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(instream); instream.close(); // Write image to a file in sd card File posterFile = new File(Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory().getAbsolutePath()+"/Android/data/com.myapp/files/image.jpg"); posterFile.createNewFile(); BufferedOutputStream out = new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(posterFile)); Bitmap mutable = Bitmap.createScaledBitmap(bmImg,bmImg.getWidth(),bmImg.getHeight(),true); mutable.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG, 100, out); out.flush(); out.close(); // Launch default viewer for the file Intent intent = new Intent(); intent.setAction(android.content.Intent.ACTION_VIEW); intent.setDataAndType(Uri.parse(posterFile.getAbsolutePath()),"image/*"); ((Activity) getContext()).startActivity(intent); A few notes. I am creating the "mutable" bitmap after seeing someone using it and it seems to work better than without it. And i am using the parse method on the Uri class and not the fromFile because in my code i am calling these in different places and when i am creating the intent i have a string path instead of a file. Now for my problem. The file gets created. The intent launches a dialog asking me to select a viewer. I have 3 viewers installed. The Astro image viewer, the default media gallery (i have a milstone on 2.1 but on the milestone the 2.1 update did not include the 3d gallery so it's the old one) and the 3d gallery from the nexus one (i found the apk in the wild). Now when i launch the 3 viewers the following happen: Astro image viewer: The activity launches but i see nothing but a black screen. Media Gallery: i get an exception dialog shown "The application Media Gallery (process com.motorola.gallery) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again" with a force close option. 3D gallery: Everything works as it should. When i try to simply open the file using the Astro file manager (browse to it and simply click) i get the same option dialog but this time things are different: Astro image viewer: Everything works as it should. Media Gallery: Everything works as it should. 3D gallery: The activity launches but i see nothing but a black screen. As you can see everything is a complete mess. I have no idea why this happens but it happens like this every single time. It's not a random bug. Am i missing something when i am creating the intent? Or when i am creating the image file? Any ideas?

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  • Understanding the memory consumption on iPhone

    - by zoul
    Hello! I am working on a 2D iPhone game using OpenGL ES and I keep hitting the 24 MB memory limit – my application keeps crashing with the error code 101. I tried real hard to find where the memory goes, but the numbers in Instruments are still much bigger than what I would expect. I ran the application with the Memory Monitor, Object Alloc, Leaks and OpenGL ES instruments. When the application gets loaded, free physical memory drops from 37 MB to 23 MB, the Object Alloc settles around 7 MB, Leaks show two or three leaks a few bytes in size, the Gart Object Size is about 5 MB and Memory Monitor says the application takes up about 14 MB of real memory. I am perplexed as where did the memory go – when I dig into the Object Allocations, most of the memory is in the textures, exactly as I would expect. But both my own texture allocation counter and the Gart Object Size agree that the textures should take up somewhere around 5 MB. I am not aware of allocating anything else that would be worth mentioning, and the Object Alloc agrees. Where does the memory go? (I would be glad to supply more details if this is not enough.) Update: I really tried to find where I could allocate so much memory, but with no results. What drives me wild is the difference between the Object Allocations (~7 MB) and real memory usage as shown by Memory Monitor (~14 MB). Even if there were huge leaks or huge chunks of memory I forget about, the should still show up in the Object Allocations, shouldn’t they? I’ve already tried the usual suspects, ie. the UIImage with its caching, but that did not help. Is there a way to track memory usage “debugger-style”, line by line, watching each statement’s impact on memory usage? What I have found so far: I really am using that much memory. It is not easy to measure the real memory consumption, but after a lot of counting I think the memory consumption is really that high. My fault. I found no easy way to measure the memory used. The Memory Monitor numbers are accurate (these are the numbers that really matter), but the Memory Monitor can’t tell you where exactly the memory goes. The Object Alloc tool is almost useless for tracking the real memory usage. When I create a texture, the allocated memory counter goes up for a while (reading the texture into the memory), then drops (passing the texture data to OpenGL, freeing). This is OK, but does not always happen – sometimes the memory usage stays high even after the texture has been passed on to OpenGL and freed from “my” memory. This means that the total amount of memory allocated as shown by the Object Alloc tool is smaller than the real total memory consumption, but bigger than the real consumption minus textures (real – textures < object alloc < real). Go figure. I misread the Programming Guide. The memory limit of 24 MB applies to textures and surfaces, not the whole application. The actual red line lies a bit further, but I could not find any hard numbers. The consensus is that 25–30 MB is the ceiling. When the system gets short on memory, it starts sending the memory warning. I have almost nothing to free, but other applications do release some memory back to the system, especially Safari (which seems to be caching the websites). When the free memory as shown in the Memory Monitor goes zero, the system starts killing. I had to bite the bullet and rewrite some parts of the code to be more efficient on memory, but I am probably still pushing it. I

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  • Core Data Model Design Question - Changing "Live" Objects also Changes Saved Objects

    - by mwt
    I'm working on my first Core Data project (on iPhone) and am really liking it. Core Data is cool stuff. I am, however, running into a design difficulty that I'm not sure how to solve, although I imagine it's a fairly common situation. It concerns the data model. For the sake of clarity, I'll use an imaginary football game app as an example to illustrate my question. Say that there are NSMO's called Downs and Plays. Plays function like templates to be used by Downs. The user creates Plays (for example, Bootleg, Button Hook, Slant Route, Sweep, etc.) and fills in the various properties. Plays have a to-many relationship with Downs. For each Down, the user decides which Play to use. When the Down is executed, it uses the Play as its template. After each down is run, it is stored in history. The program remembers all the Downs ever played. So far, so good. This is all working fine. The question I have concerns what happens when the user wants to change the details of a Play. Let's say it originally involved a pass to the left, but the user now wants it to be a pass to the right. Making that change, however, not only affects all the future executions of that Play, but also changes the details of the Plays stored in history. The record of Downs gets "polluted," in effect, because the Play template has been changed. I have been rolling around several possible fixes to this situation, but I imagine the geniuses of SO know much more about how to handle this than I do. Still, the potential fixes I've come up with are: 1) "Versioning" of Plays. Each change to a Play template actually creates a new, separate Play object with the same name (as far as the user can tell). Underneath the hood, however, it is actually a different Play. This would work, AFAICT, but seems like it could potentially lead to a wild proliferation of Play objects, esp. if the user keeps switching back and forth between several versions of the same Play (creating object after object each time the user switches). Yes, the app could check for pre-existing, identical Plays, but... it just seems like a mess. 2) Have Downs, upon saving, record the details of the Play they used, but not as a Play object. This just seems ridiculous, given that the Play object is there to hold those just those details. 3) Recognize that Play objects are actually fulfilling 2 functions: one to be a template for a Down, and the other to record what template was used. These 2 functions have a different relationship with a Down. The first (template) has a to-many relationship. But the second (record) has a one-to-one relationship. This would mean creating a second object, something like "Play-Template" which would retain the to-many relationship with Downs. Play objects would get reconfigured to have a one-to-one relationship with Downs. A Down would use a Play-Template object for execution, but use the new kind of Play object to store what template was used. It is this change from a to-many relationship to a one-to-one relationship that represents the crux of the problem. Even writing this question out has helped me get clearer. I think something like solution 3 is the answer. However if anyone has a better idea or even just a confirmation that I'm on the right track, that would be helpful. (Remember, I'm not really making a football game, it's just faster/easier to use a metaphor everyone understands.) Thanks.

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  • Mobile App Data Syncronization

    - by Matt Rogish
    Let's say I have a mobile app that uses HTML5 SQLite DB (and/or the HTML5 key-value store). Assets (media files, PDFs, etc.) are stored locally on the mobile device. Luckily enough, the mobile device is a read-only copy of the "centralized" storage, so the mobile device won't have to propagate changes upstream. However, as the server changes assets (creates new ones, modifies existing, deletes old ones) I need to propagate those changes back to the mobile app. Assume that server changes are grouped into changesets (version number n) that contain some information (added element XYZ, deleted id = 45, etc.) and that the mobile device has limited CPU/bandwidth, so most of the processing has to take place on the server. I can think of a couple of methods to do this. All have trade-offs and at this point, I'm unsure which is the right course of action... Method 1: For change set n, store the "diff" of the current n and previous n-1. When a client with version y asks if there have been any changes, send the change sets from version y up to the current version. e.g. added item 334, contents: xxx. Deleted picture 44. Deleted PDF 11. Changed 33. added picture 99. Characteristics: Diffs take up space, although in theory would be kept small. However, all diffs must be kept around indefinitely (should a v1 app have not been updated for a year, must apply v2..v100). High latency devices (mobile apps) will incur a penalty to send lots of small files (assume cannot be zipped or tarr'd up into one file) Very few server CPU resources required, as all it does is send the client a list of files "Dumb" - if I change an item in change set 3, and change it to something else in 4, the client is going to perform both actions, even though #3 is rendered moot by #4. Or, if an asset is added in #4 and removed in #5 - the client will download a file just to delete it later. Method 2: Very similar to method 1 except on the server, do some sort of a diff between the change sets represented by the app version and server version. Package that up and send that single change set to the client. Characteristics: Client-efficient: The client only has to process one file, duplicate or irrelevant changes are stripped out. Server CPU/space intensive. The change sets must be diff'd and then written out to a file that is then sent to the client. Makes diff server scalability an issue. Possibly ways to cache the results and re-use them, but in the wild there's likely to be a lot of different versions so the diff re-use has a limit Diff algorithm is complicated. The change sets must be structured in such a way that an efficient and effective diff can be performed. Method 3: Instead of keeping diffs, write out the entire versioned asset collection to a mobile-database import file. When client requests an update, send the entire database to client and have them update their assets appropriately. Characteristics: Conceptually simple -- easy to develop and deploy Very inefficient as the client database is restored every update. If only one new thing was added, the whole database is refreshed. Server space and CPU efficient. Only the latest version DB needs kept around and the server just throws the file to the client. Others?? Thoughts? Thanks!!

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  • swfobject weird behavior

    - by David
    Hi All, I'm using swfobject to embed my flash. It's doing weird things. I've created a simple textfield using FlexBuilder. It's an AS3 project, which extends Sprite. I've set its width to be 640 and height to 450. Then, in the swfobject parameters of the page, I've also set 640 x 450. I've made the background nice and red and ugly so you can see it. :) http://www.brighttext.com/flash/TextFieldSetFormat.html It seems to be the right dimensions. BUT I've got a textfield which is supposed to be almost the same size and height. This runs fine in FlexBuilder (is the right size) but is all messed up once I add swfobject Can anyone see what is happening? EDIT NOTE: I just looked at it and it looks ok. But then I refreshed the page and the textfield is postage-stamp size (again -- this is the original behavior I saw.) It's now looking OK in firefox but not in IE8. Flash is supposed to look the same in all browsers !!?? AS3 code: package { import flash.display.Sprite; import flash.text.TextField; import flash.text.TextFormat; import flash.text.Font; [SWF(width="640", height="450", backgroundColor="#FFFFFF", frameRate="30")] public class TextFieldSetFormat extends Sprite { [Embed(source='C:/WINDOWS/Fonts/ArialBD.TTF', fontWeight = 'bold', fontName='ArialBold')] [Embed(source='C:/WINDOWS/Fonts/Arial.TTF', fontWeight = 'regular', fontName='Arial')] public function TextFieldSetFormat() { var tf2:TextFormat = new TextFormat(); tf2.size = 16; tf2.font = "Arial"; Font.registerFont(_VerdanaFontBold); Font.registerFont(_VerdanaFont); var pad:Number = 10; var brightTextField:TextField = new TextField; brightTextField.backgroundColor = 0xDDF3B2; brightTextField.background = true; brightTextField.embedFonts = true; brightTextField.border = true; brightTextField.defaultTextFormat = tf2; brightTextField.wordWrap = true; brightTextField.multiline = true; brightTextField.width = stage.stageWidth - (4 * pad); brightTextField.height = stage.stageHeight - (3 * pad); brightTextField.x = 2*pad; brightTextField.y = 2*pad; brightTextField.text = "Dear Senators, I have become concerned over the idea that some in the Senate will oppose the public option because of a group of wild-eyed, overbearing but misinformed ideologues. These people mistakenly equate insurance reform with Socialism and call our first African-American President unprintable epithets. This is unacceptable. The public option is the choice of more than 70% of Americans, a majority of the House and a great many opinion leaders. Passing insurance reform without a public option persists the current broken system. I am aware that many Senators would prefer to pass a reform bill with bipartisan support. But we cannot allow this critical debate to be hijacked by extremists or corporate profiteers. Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you."; addChild(brightTextField); } } }

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  • Action bar with Search View. Reverse compatibility issues

    - by suresh
    I am building a sample app to demonstrate SearchView with filter and other Action Bar items. I am able to successfully run this app on 4.2(Nexus 7). But it is not running on 2.3. I googled about the issue. Came to know that i should use SherLock Action bar. I just went to http://actionbarsherlock.com/download.html, downloaded the zip file and added the library as informed in the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GJ6yY1lNNY&feature=player_embedde by WiseManDesigns. But still I am unable to figure out the issue. Here is my code: SearchViewActionBar.java public class SearchViewActionBar extends Activity implements SearchView.OnQueryTextListener { private SearchView mSearchView; private TextView mStatusView; int mSortMode = -1; private ListView mListView; private ArrayAdapter<String> mAdapter; protected CharSequence[] _options = { "Wild Life", "River", "Hill Station", "Temple", "Bird Sanctuary", "Hill", "Amusement Park"}; protected boolean[] _selections = new boolean[ _options.length ]; private final String[] mStrings = Cheeses.sCheeseStrings; @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); getWindow().requestFeature(Window.FEATURE_ACTION_BAR); setContentView(R.layout.activity_main); // mStatusView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.status_text); // mSearchView = (SearchView) findViewById(R.id.search_view); mListView = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.list_view); mListView.setAdapter(mAdapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this, android.R.layout.simple_list_item_1, mStrings)); mListView.setTextFilterEnabled(true); //setupSearchView(); } private void setupSearchView() { mSearchView.setIconifiedByDefault(true); mSearchView.setOnQueryTextListener(this); mSearchView.setSubmitButtonEnabled(false); //mSearchView.setQueryHint(getString(R.string.cheese_hunt_hint)); } @Override public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) { super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu); MenuInflater inflater = getMenuInflater(); inflater.inflate(R.menu.searchview_in_menu, menu); MenuItem searchItem = menu.findItem(R.id.action_search); mSearchView = (SearchView) searchItem.getActionView(); //setupSearchView(searchItem); setupSearchView(); return true; } @Override public boolean onPrepareOptionsMenu(Menu menu) { if (mSortMode != -1) { Drawable icon = menu.findItem(mSortMode).getIcon(); menu.findItem(R.id.action_sort).setIcon(icon); } return super.onPrepareOptionsMenu(menu); } @Override public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) { String c="Category"; String s=(String) item.getTitle(); if(s.equals(c)) { System.out.println("same"); showDialog( 0 ); } //System.out.println(s); Toast.makeText(this, "Selected Item: " + item.getTitle(), Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show(); return true; } protected Dialog onCreateDialog( int id ) { return new AlertDialog.Builder( this ) .setTitle( "Category" ) .setMultiChoiceItems( _options, _selections, new DialogSelectionClickHandler() ) .setPositiveButton( "SAVE", new DialogButtonClickHandler() ) .create(); } public class DialogSelectionClickHandler implements DialogInterface.OnMultiChoiceClickListener { public void onClick( DialogInterface dialog, int clicked, boolean selected ) { Log.i( "ME", _options[ clicked ] + " selected: " + selected ); } } public class DialogButtonClickHandler implements DialogInterface.OnClickListener { public void onClick( DialogInterface dialog, int clicked ) { switch( clicked ) { case DialogInterface.BUTTON_POSITIVE: printSelectedPlanets(); break; } } } protected void printSelectedPlanets() { for( int i = 0; i < _options.length; i++ ){ Log.i( "ME", _options[ i ] + " selected: " + _selections[i] ); } } public void onSort(MenuItem item) { mSortMode = item.getItemId(); invalidateOptionsMenu(); } public boolean onQueryTextChange(String newText) { if (TextUtils.isEmpty(newText)) { mListView.clearTextFilter(); } else { mListView.setFilterText(newText.toString()); } return true; } public boolean onQueryTextSubmit(String query) { mStatusView.setText("Query = " + query + " : submitted"); return false; } public boolean onClose() { mStatusView.setText("Closed!"); return false; } protected boolean isAlwaysExpanded() { return false; } }

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  • Problem with jQuery plugin TinySort

    - by Volmar
    I'm trying to sort a list with the help of jQuery and the TinySort-plugin, and it works good but one thing is not working as i want. My Code is: <!doctype html> <html> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8" /> <title>TinySort problem</title> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://so.volmar.se/www/js/jquery.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://so.volmar.se/www/js/jquery.tinysort.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> function pktsort(way){ if($("div#paket>ul>li.sortdiv>a#s_abc").text() == "A-S"){ $("div#paket>ul>li.sortdiv>a#s_abc").text("S-A"); $("div#paket ul li.sortable").tsort("",{place:"org",returns:true,order:"desc"}); }else{ $("div#paket>ul>li.sortdiv>a#s_abc").text("A-S"); $("div#paket ul li.sortable").tsort("",{place:"org",returns:true,order:"asc"}); } } </script> </head> <body> <div id="paket" title="Paket"> <ul class="rounded"> <li class="sortdiv">Sort: <a href="#" onclick="pktsort();" class="active_sort" id="s_abc">A-S</a></li> <li class="sortable">Almost Famous</li> <li class="sortable">Children of Men</li> <li class="sortable">Coeurs</li> <li class="sortable">Colossal Youth</li> <li class="sortable">Demonlover</li> <li class="sortable">Femme Fatale</li> <li class="sortable">I'm Not There</li> <li class="sortable">In the City of Sylvia</li> <li class="sortable">Into the Wild</li> <li class="sortable">Je rentre à la maison</li> <li class="sortable">King Kong</li> <li class="sortable">Little Miss Sunshine</li> <li class="sortable">Man on Wire</li> <li class="sortable">Milk</li> <li class="sortable">Monsters Inc.</li> <li class="sortable">My Winnipeg</li> <li class="sortable">Ne touchez pas la hache</li> <li class="sortable">Nói albinói</li> <li class="sortable">Regular Lovers</li> <li class="sortable">Shaun of the Dead</li> <li class="sortable">Silent Light</li> <li class="addmore"><b>This text is not supposed to move</b></li> </ul> </div> </body> </html> you can try it out at: http://www.volmar.se/list-prob.html MY PROBLEM IS: I don't want the <li class="addmore"> to move above all the <li class="sortable">-elements when i press the sort-link. i wan't it to always be in the bottom. you can find documentation of the TinySort plugin here. i've tried loads of combinations with place and returns propertys but i just can't get it right.

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  • MVC design in Cocoa - are all 3 always necessary? Also: naming conventions, where to put Controller

    - by Nektarios
    I'm new to MVC although I've read a lot of papers and information on the web. I know it's somewhat ambiguous and there are many different interpretations of MVC patterns.. but the differences seem somewhat minimal My main question is - are M, V, and C always going to be necessary to be doing this right? I haven't seen anyone address this in anything I've read. Examples (I'm working in Cocoa/Obj-c although that shouldn't much matter).. 1) If I have a simple image on my GUI, or a text entry field that is just for a user's convenience and isn't saved or modified, these both would be V (view) but there's no M (no data and no domain processing going on), and no C to bridge them. So I just have some aspects that are "V" - seems fine 2) I have 2 different and visible windows that each have a button on them labeled as "ACTIVATE FOO" - when a user clicks the button on either, both buttons press in and change to say "DEACTIVATE FOO" and a third window appears with label "FOO". Clicking the button again will change the button on both windows to "ACTIVATE FOO" and will remove the third "FOO" window. In this case, my V consists of the buttons on both windows, and I guess also the third window (maybe all 3 windows). I definitely have a C, my Controller object will know about these buttons and windows and will get their clicks and hold generic states regarding windows and buttons. However, whether I have 1 button or 10 button, my window is called "FOO" or my window is called "BAR", this doesn't matter. There's no domain knowledge or data here - just control of views. So in this example, I really have "V" and "C" but no "M" - is that ok? 3) Final example, which I am running in to the most. I have a text entry field as my View. When I enter text in this, say a number representing gravity, I keep it in a Model that may do things like compute physics of a ball while taking in to account my gravity parameter. Here I have a V and an M, but I don't understand why I would need to add a C - a controller would just accept the signals from the View and pass it along to the Model, and vice versa. Being as the C is just a pure passthrough, it's really "junk" code and isn't making things any more reusable in my opinion. In most situations, when something changes I will need to change the C and M both in nearly identical ways. I realize it's probably an MVC beginner's mistake to think most situations call for only V and M.. leads me in to next subject 4) In Cocoa / Xcode / IB, I guess my Controllers should always be an instantiated object in IB? That is, I lay all of my "V" components in IB, and for each collection of View objects (things that are related) I should have an instantiated Controller? And then perhaps my Models should NOT be found in IB, and instead only found as classes in Xcode that tie in with Controller code found there. Is this accurate? This could explain why you'd have a Controller that is not really adding value - because you are keeping consistent.. 5) What about naming these things - for my above example about FOO / BAR maybe something that ends in Controller would be the C, like FancyWindowOpeningController, etc? And for models - should I suffix them with like GravityBallPhysicsModel etc, or should I just name those whatever I like? I haven't seen enough code to know what's out there in the wild and I want to get on the right track early on Thank you in advance for setting me straight or letting me know I'm on the right track. I feel like I'm starting to get it and most of what I say here makes sense, but validation of my guessing would help me feel confident..

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  • trie reg exp parse step over char and continue

    - by forest.peterson
    Setup: 1) a string trie database formed from linked nodes and a vector array linking to the next node terminating in a leaf, 2) a recursive regular expression function that if A) char '*' continues down all paths until string length limit is reached, then continues down remaining string paths if valid, and B) char '?' continues down all paths for 1 char and then continues down remaining string paths if valid. 3) after reg expression the candidate strings are measured for edit distance against the 'try' string. Problem: the reg expression works fine for adding chars or swapping ? for a char but if the remaining string has an error then there is not a valid path to a terminating leaf; making the matching function redundant. I tried adding a 'step-over' ? char if the end of the node vector was reached and then followed every path of that node - allowing this step-over only once; resulted in a memory exception; I cannot find logically why it is accessing the vector out of range - bactracking? Questions: 1) how can the regular expression step over an invalid char and continue with the path? 2) why is swapping the 'sticking' char for '?' resulting in an overflow? Function: void Ontology::matchRegExpHelper(nodeT *w, string inWild, Set<string> &matchSet, string out, int level, int pos, int stepover) { if (inWild=="") { matchSet.add(out); } else { if (w->alpha.size() == pos) { int testLength = out.length() + inWild.length(); if (stepover == 0 && matchSet.size() == 0 && out.length() > 8 && testLength == tokenLength) {//candidate generator inWild[0] = '?'; matchRegExpHelper(w, inWild, matchSet, out, level, 0, stepover+1); } else return; //giveup on this path } if (inWild[0] == '?' || (inWild[0] == '*' && (out.length() + inWild.length() ) == level ) ) { //wild matchRegExpHelper(w->alpha[pos].next, inWild.substr(1), matchSet, out+w->alpha[pos].letter, level, 0, stepover);//follow path -> if ontology is full, treat '*' like a '?' } else if (inWild[0] == '*') matchRegExpHelper(w->alpha[pos].next, '*'+inWild.substr(1), matchSet, out+w->alpha[pos].letter, level, 0, stepover); //keep adding chars if (inWild[0] == w->alpha[pos].letter) //follow self matchRegExpHelper(w->alpha[pos].next, inWild.substr(1), matchSet, out+w->alpha[pos].letter, level, 0, stepover); //follow char matchRegExpHelper(w, inWild, matchSet, out, level, pos+1, stepover);//check next path } } Error Message: +str "Attempt to access index 1 in a vector of size 1." std::basic_string<char,std::char_traits<char>,std::allocator<char> > +err {msg="Attempt to access index 1 in a vector of size 1." } ErrorException Note: this function works fine for hundreds of test strings with '*' wilds if the extra stepover gate is not used Semi-Solved: I place a pos < w->alpha.size() condition on each path that calls w->alpha[pos]... - this prevented the backtrack calls from attempting to access the vector with an out of bounds index value. Still have other issues to work out - it loops infinitely adding the ? and backtracking to remove it, then repeat. But, moving forward now. Revised question: why during backtracking is the position index accumulating and/or not deincrementing - so at somepoint it calls w->alpha[pos]... with an invalid position that is either remaining from the next node or somehow incremented pos+1 when passing upward?

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  • C# performance varying due to memory

    - by user1107474
    Hope this is a valid post here, its a combination of C# issues and hardware. I am benchmarking our server because we have found problems with the performance of our quant library (written in C#). I have simulated the same performance issues with some simple C# code- performing very heavy memory-usage. The code below is in a function which is spawned from a threadpool, up to a maximum of 32 threads (because our server has 4x CPUs x 8 cores each). This is all on .Net 3.5 The problem is that we are getting wildly differing performance. I run the below function 1000 times. The average time taken for the code to run could be, say, 3.5s, but the fastest will only be 1.2s and the slowest will be 7s- for the exact same function! I have graphed the memory usage against the timings and there doesnt appear to be any correlation with the GC kicking in. One thing I did notice is that when running in a single thread the timings are identical and there is no wild deviation. I have also tested CPU-bound algorithms and the timings are identical too. This has made us wonder if the memory bus just cannot cope. I was wondering could this be another .net or C# problem, or is it something related to our hardware? Would this be the same experience if I had used C++, or Java?? We are using 4x Intel x7550 with 32GB ram. Is there any way around this problem in general? Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); watch.Start(); List<byte> list1 = new List<byte>(); List<byte> list2 = new List<byte>(); List<byte> list3 = new List<byte>(); int Size1 = 10000000; int Size2 = 2 * Size1; int Size3 = Size1; for (int i = 0; i < Size1; i++) { list1.Add(57); } for (int i = 0; i < Size2; i = i + 2) { list2.Add(56); } for (int i = 0; i < Size3; i++) { byte temp = list1.ElementAt(i); byte temp2 = list2.ElementAt(i); list3.Add(temp); list2[i] = temp; list1[i] = temp2; } watch.Stop(); (the code is just meant to stress out the memory) I would include the threadpool code, but we used a non-standard threadpool library. EDIT: I have reduced "size1" to 100000, which basically doesn't use much memory and I still get a lot of jitter. This suggests it's not the amount of memory being transferred, but the frequency of memory grabs?

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  • Two functions working but not when I put them together

    - by Error_404
    I'm really new to C(I have been learning Cuda and wanted to learn C so I can run everything together instead of generating data in Java/Python and copy/pasting it manually to my Cuda program to play with). I am trying to open a large file(20+gb) and parse some data but because I was having problems I decided to try to break down my problem first to verify I can open and read line by line a file and then in another file take a sample of the output of a line and try to parse it, then if all goes well I can simply bring them together. I managed(after a bit of a struggle) to get each part working but when I combine them together it doesn't work(I tried in both eclipse & QT creator. QT creator says it exited unexpectedly and eclipse just stops..). Here's the parsing part(it works exactly as I want): #include <string.h> #include <stdio.h> int main() { char line[1024] = "[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 2, 2, 4],"; size_t len = strlen(line); memmove(line, line+1, len-3); line[len-3] = 0; printf("%s \n",line); char str[100], *s = str, *t = NULL; strcpy(str, line); while ((t = strtok(s, " ,")) != NULL) { s = NULL; printf(":%s:\n", t); } return 0; } The data in variable line is exactly as I get if I print each line of a file. But when I copy/paste it into my main program then it doesn't work(QT shows nothing and eclipse just shows the first line). This code is just a few file IO commands that are wrapped around the commands above(everything within the while loop is the exact same as above) #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main() { char line[1024]; FILE *fp = fopen("/Users/me/Desktop/output.txt","r"); printf("Starting.. \n"); int count = 0; int list[30]; //items will be stored here while(fgets(line, 1024, fp) != NULL){ count++; //char line[1024] = "[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 2, 2, 4],"; size_t len = strlen(line); memmove(line, line+1, len-3); line[len-3] = 0; printf("%s \n",line); char str[100], *s = str, *t = NULL; strcpy(str, line); while ((t = strtok(s, " ,")) != NULL) { s = NULL; printf(":%s:\n", t); } } printf(" num of lines is %i \n", count); return 0; } eclipse output: Starting.. 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 2, 2, 4 I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. I'm using a mac with gcc 4.2, if that helps. The only thing I can think of is maybe I'm doing something wrong the way I parse the list variable so its not accessible later on(I'm not sure its a wild guess). Is there anything I'm missing?

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 15, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 15, 2010New ProjectsBackup on Build: Backup critical files on each Visual Studio build.CDN Support for EPiServer CMS: This module adds CDN support for EPiServer CMS by modifying outgoing links.Custom WCF Bindings: This project contains some custom WCF LOB SDK bindings I have created including a SalesForce one. I will blog on updates as they occur. Please se...DocIcon for SharePoint 2010: DocIcon for SharePoint re-enables links from document icons in SharePoint 2010. This feature was in previous versions of SharePoint, but was remove...EEG Peak Detection: EEG Peak Detectionemployeemanagement1: employeemanagement1Enables map services on top of existing map providers like Google Maps: Services include Map visualization services, Map decoration services, Spot registration services and Spot naming services.fbprivacy: Tool to assess your Facebook Privacy SettingsfMRI SVM Toolbox: fMRI SVM ToolboxGCMS – using .Net for human CMS: GCMS makes only what you need to do with a CMS and nothing more and it makes it with .NETqjblog: My First Blog.Send2Sharepoint: Office(Word,Excel,Outlook) and windows explorer addin to upload documents to sharepoint document library. SharePoint Find and Replace: SharePoint Find & Replace allows you to replace a specific string within a site collection with a different value. For example, when you change a l...SharePoint Management Studio: This project developed on Visula Studio 2008 and c# language. The main aim is manage your SharePoint 2007 FARM.SharePoint PageController: A SharePoint solution which provides an extensible framework to perform actions on a per-page basis in SharePoint. OOTB functionality allows for f...SilverNotePad: Simple notepad built using MVVM patern.SolidWorks Addin Development: The SolidWorks Addin Development project is dedicated to helping developers and non-developers with creating fully functional addins.Sunlit World Scheme: Sunlit World Scheme is a nearly R4RS-compliant Scheme implementation that supports threading, TCP, UDP, cryptography, and simple graphics and windo...TimeBend: Time tracking gone wild.TinyCMS: Jednostavan CMS s mogućnosti unosa vijesti, linkova i natječaja. CSS je napravljen tek toliko... Aplikacija izrađena za dev4Fun natjecanje.Ujimanet Android: text categorization tool for androidVisual Storm Engine: Visual Storm es un motor para probar nuevas tecnologias orientadas a la creacion de video juegos. Por ahora solo soporta Windows Vista/7 y usa Dire...New ReleasesAjax ASP.Net Forum: developer.insecla.com-forum_v0.1.4: *VERSION: 0.1.4* FEATURES ADDED Rating Threads (Through AjaxCTK (included Ms .DLL in the BIN folder)) Empowered Within AJAX Custom star ima...AlphaGet: Alpha 3: Important: from this release WinGet changes its name to AlphaGet in order to identify it better and make it search-engine friendly. New Features N...Backup on Build: Backup on Build v1.0.0 Initial Release: Initial Release version 1.0.0Boleto.Net: BoletoNet: Última versão estável da BoletoNet.dll. O código fonte dessa versão pode ser encontrado em http://boletonet.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/change...CDN Support for EPiServer CMS: CDN Support v1: See links on start page for information on how to use and install this module.Chargify.NET: Chargify.NET v0.750: Adding support for creating freemium subscription plans Adding preliminary JSON support Adding ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 data embedded in the library ...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V38: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...ContainerOne - C# application server: V0.1.3.0: New minor release containing: Infrastructure - core service An installer of a windows service which provides the following: Service registry Even...DocIcon for SharePoint 2010: wwEsp.DocIcon Deployment Package Release 1.0.0: This package installs the DocIcon feature on a SharePoint 2010 server farm. The solution is deployed as a Farm-level feature that can be enabled or...Ethical Hacking ASP.NET: Version 1.2.0.0: For the complete list of changes, new features and fixes in the new version, please view the Version History page. Read more about the available te...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.6.3: The latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.6.3), with new features and Mini-Menu UI Changes (1.4). Once you have extracted the file, do not delete ...Hades: Projet Hadès - Official Demo - Version 0.1.1 Beta: Second release correcting some bugs... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Projet Hadès - Official Demo...KooBoo Image Gallery: RC 1: This new Version has this features 1) Refactoring to change the mispelled word galery to gallery 2) Change to use the plugin in the same page of ...LibWowArmory: LibWowArmory 0.3 beta: LibWowArmory 0.3 betaThis release of the LibWowArmory source code matches the WoW Armory as of version 3.3.3. Changes since version 0.2.3:Solution...MailChimp4Umbraco: 0.90 stable: Can be used in productionMapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 June 14: This version adds the WebMercator projection and fixes a bug that was causing some perfect spheres to be created as oblate WGS1984 spheroids.MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.18.59782: Supported FileServe. Supported SharingMatrix. Fixed minor bugs.MGM - MyGroupManager: MyGroupManager v0.1.5 - Alpha: At this point the application appears feature complete and works pretty well. The code still needs some tweaks (error handling), and a general look...MvcPager: MvcPager 1.4: MvcPager 1.4 source codes and demo projects MvcPager 1.4版源代码及示例文件Nito.LINQ: Beta (v0.6): Rx version The "with Rx" versions of Nito.LINQ are built against Rx 1.0.2563.0, released 2010-06-09. Supported Platforms .NET 4.0 Client Profile, ...open gaze and mouse analyzer: Ogama 3.3: This release was published on 14.06.2010 and is a bugfix release. For the list of changes please visit http://www.ogama.net. Only use this installe...patterns & practices: Prism: Prism 4.0 Drop 2: Prism 4.0 Drop 2 Welcome to the second drop of Prism 4.0 (formally known as the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight). This drop ...Prism Software Factory Light: 0.5 Beta: 4ward Prism Software Factory Light - 0.5 Beta releaseThis is the first public beta release of the 4ward Prism Software Factory Light that allows to...PROGRAMMABLE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT: PROGRAMMABLE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT--3.3: Over the last several months, my primary research effort has been directed at producing strictly portable development methods between C and C# . T...qjblog: v1.source: v1.sourceqjblog: v1blog: V1 BlogQuick Performance Monitor: Version 1.4.2: Added 'Move to new window' functionality.Refix - .NET dependency management: Refix v0.1.0.90 ALPHA: Added console tree-style visualisation of solution dependencies, as well as some bug fixes. This version should work out of the box with the demons...SEMICO Framework: Version Stable 1.0.0.3: Version Stable 1.0.0.3SharePoint Find and Replace: 1.0.16: Version: 1.0.16 This release is the first stable release of this project, including the Microsoft public license agreement. Fixes: Added about dia...SharePoint Management Studio: v1: v1SharePoint PageController: SharePoint PageController: For SharePoint 2010 and 2007 running on IIS 7Software Is Hardwork: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+06: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+06SolidWorks Addin Development: GenericAddinFramework-06.14.2010: R1.SourceGrid: SourceGrid 4.30: Sources are here Note that SourceGrid sources are not hosted on CodePlex. The sources are hosted on bitbucket.org Main Changes Improved hidden ...SSIS Expression Editor & Tester: Expression Editor and Tester v1.0.2.0: Corrected release of expression editor tool, no changes to control. Download and extract the files to get started, no install required. Changes Co...Sunlit World Scheme: Sunlit World Scheme - 20100614 - source and binary: This is the result of building the current source code in Debug mode. The source code is included.TinyCMS: TinyCMS: Source kodVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30614.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVianaNET - Videoanalysis for physical motion: VianaNET 1.2 - beta: This is the VianaNET beta release with some bug fixes. Would like to have some comments on it. Regards, AdrianWorkLogger: Worklogger Beta 1: Simple work logger for Windows in WPFMost Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRhyduino - Arduino and Managed CodeCassandraemonCommunity Forums NNTP bridgedotSpatialjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETLightweight Fluent WorkflowNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleUmbraco CMS

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  • Dotfuscator Deep Dive with WP7

    - by Bil Simser
    I thought I would share some experience with code obfuscation (specifically the Dotfuscator product) and Windows Phone 7 apps. These days twitter is a buzz with black hat and white operations coming out about how the marketplace is insecure and Microsoft failed, blah, blah, blah. So it’s that much more important to protect your intellectual property. You should protect it no matter what when releasing apps into the wild but more so when someone is paying for them. You want to protect the time and effort that went into your code and have some comfort that the casual hacker isn’t going to usurp your next best thing. Enter code obfuscation. Code obfuscation is one tool that can help protect your IP. Basically it goes into your compiled assemblies, rewrites things at an IL level (like renaming methods and classes and hiding logic flow) and rewrites it back so that the assembly or executable is still fully functional but prying eyes using a tool like ILDASM or Reflector can’t see what’s going on.  You can read more about code obfuscation here on Wikipedia. A word to the wise. Code obfuscation isn’t 100% secure. More so on the WP7 platform where the OS expects certain things to be as they were meant to be. So don’t expect 100% obfuscation of every class and every method and every property. It’s just not going to happen. What this does do is give you some level of protection but don’t put all your eggs in one basket and call it done. Like I said, this is just one step in the process. There are a few tools out there that provide code obfuscation and support the Windows Phone 7 platform (see links to other tools at the end of this post). One such tool is Dotfuscator from PreEmptive solutions. The thing about Dotfuscator is that they’ve struck a deal with Microsoft to provide a *free* copy of their commercial product for Windows Phone 7. The only drawback is that it only runs until March 31, 2010. However it’s a good place to start and the focus of this article. Getting Started When you fire up Dotfuscator you’re presented with a dialog to start a new project or load a previous one. We’ll start with a new project. You’re then looking at a somewhat blank screen that shows an Input tab (among others) and you’re probably wondering what to do? Click on the folder icon (first one) and browse to where your xap file is. At this point you can save the project and click on the arrow to start the process. Bam! You’re done. Right? Think again. The program did indeed run and create a new version of your xap (doing it’s thing and rewriting back your *obfuscated* assemblies) but let’s take a look at the assembly in Reflector to see the end result. Remember a xap file is really just a glorified zip file (or cab file if you prefer). When you ran Dotfuscator for the first time with the default settings you’ll see it created a new version of your xap in a folder under “My Documents” called “Dotfuscated” (you can configure the output directory in settings). Here’s the new xap file. Since a xap is just a zip, rename it to .cab or .zip or something and open it with your favorite unarchive program (I use WinRar but it doesn’t matter as long as it can unzip files). If you already have the xap file associated with your unarchive tool the rename isn’t needed. Once renamed extract the contents of the xap to your hard drive: Now you’ll have a folder with the contents of the xap file extracted: Double click or load up your assembly (WindowsPhoneDataBoundApplication1.dll in the example) in Reflector and let’s see the results: Hmm. That doesn’t look right. I can see all the methods and the code is all there for my LoadData method I wanted to protect. Product failure. Let’s return it for a refund. Hold your horses. We need to check out the settings in the program first. Remember when we loaded up our xap file. It started us on the Input tab but there was a settings tab before that. Wonder what it does? Here’s the default settings: Renaming Taking a closer look, all of the settings in Feature are disabled. WTF? Yeah, it leaves me scratching my head why an obfuscator by default doesn’t obfuscate. However it’s a simple fix to change these settings. Let’s enable Renaming as it sounds like a good start. Renaming obscures code by renaming methods and fields to names that are not understandable. Great. Run the tool again and go through the process of unzipping the updated xap and let’s take a look in Reflector again at our project. This looks a lot better. Lots of methods named a, b, c, d, etc. That’ll help slow hackers down a bit. What about our logic that we spent days weeks on? Let’s take a look at the LoadData method: What gives? We have renaming enabled but all of our code is still there. If you look through all your methods you’ll find it’s still sitting there out in the open. Control Flow Back to the settings page again. Let’s enable Control Flow now. Control Flow obfuscation synthesizes branching, conditional, and iterative constructs (such as if, for, and while) that produce valid executable logic, but yield non-deterministic semantic results when decompilation is attempted. In other words, the code runs as before, but decompilers cannot reproduce the original code. Do the dance again and let’s see the results in Reflector. Ahh, that’s better. Methods renamed *and* nobody can look at our LoadData method now. Life is good. More than Minimum This is the bare minimum to obfuscate your xap to at least a somewhat comfortable level. However I did find that while this worked in my Hello World demo, it didn’t work on one of my real world apps. I had to do some extra tweaking with that. Below are the screens that I used on one app that worked. I’m not sure what it was about the app that the approach above didn’t work with (maybe the extra assembly?) but it works and I’m happy with it. YMMV. Remember to test your obfuscated app on your device first before submitting to ensure you haven’t obfuscated the obfuscator. settings tab: rename tab: string encryption tab: premark tab: A few final notes Play with the settings and keep bumping up the bar to try to get as much obfuscation as you can. The more the better but remember you can overdo it. Always (always, always, always) deploy your obfuscated xap to your device and test it before submitting to the marketplace. I didn’t and got rejected because I had gone overboard with the obfuscation so the app wouldn’t launch at all. Not everything is going to be obfuscated. Specifically I don’t see a way to obfuscate auto properties and a few other language features. Again, if you crank the settings up you might hide these but I haven’t spent a lot of time optimizing the process. Some people might say to obfuscate your xaml using string encryption but again, test, test, test. Xaml is picky so too much obfuscation (or any) might disable your app or produce odd rendering effets. Remember, obfuscation is not 100% secure! Don’t rely on it as a sole way of protecting your assets. Other Tools Dotfuscator is one just product and isn’t the end-all be-all to obfuscation so check out others below. For example, Crypto can make it so Reflector doesn’t even recognize the app as a .NET one and won’t open it. Others can encrypt resources and Xaml markup files. Here are some other obfuscators that support the Windows Phone 7 platform. Feel free to give them a try and let people know your experience with them! Dotfuscator Windows Phone Edition Crypto Obfuscator for .NET DeepSea Obfuscation

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  • Taking web sites offline for demonstration

    While working in software development in general, and in web development for a couple of customers it is quite common that it is necessary to provide a test bed where the client is able to get an image, or better said, a feeling for the visions and ideas you are talking about. Usually here at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. we set up a demo web site on one of our staging servers, and provide credentials to the customer to access and review our progress and work ad hoc. This gives us the highest flexibility on both sides, as the test bed is simply online and available 24/7. We can update the structure, the UI and data at any time, and the client is able to view it as it suits best for her/him. Limited or lack of online connectivity But what is going to happen when your client is not capable to be online - no matter for what reasons; here are some more obvious ones: No internet connection (permanently or temporarily) Expensive connection, ie. mobile data package, stay at a hotel, etc. Presentation devices at an exhibition, ie. using tablets or iPads Being abroad for a certain time, and only occasionally online No network coverage, especially on mobile Bad infrastructure, like ie. in Third World countries Providing a catalogue on CD or USB pen drive Anyway, it doesn't matter really. We should be able to provide a solution for the circumstances of our customers. Presentation during an exhibition Recently, we had the following request from a customer: Is it possible to let us have a desktop version of ResortWork.co.uk that we can use for demo purposes at the forthcoming Ski Shows? It would allow us to let stand visitors browse the sites on an iPad to view jobs and training directory course listings. Yes, sure we can do that. Eventually, you might think why don't they simply use 3G enabled iPads for that purpose? As stated above, there might be several reasons for that - low coverage, expensive data packages, etc. Anyway, it is not a question on how to circumvent the request but to deliver a solution to that. Possible solutions... or not? We already did offline websites earlier, and even established complete mirrors of one or two web sites on our systems. There are actually several possibilities to handle this kind of request, and it mainly depends on the system or device where the offline site should be available on. Here, it is clearly expressed that we have to address this on an Apple iPad, well actually, I think that they'd like to use multiple devices during their exhibitions. Following is an overview of possible solutions depending on the technology or device in use, and how it can be done: Replication of source files and database The above mentioned web site is running on ASP.NET, IIS and SQL Server. In case that a laptop or slate runs a Windows OS, the easiest way would be to take a snapshot of the source files and database, and transfer them as local installation to those Windows machines. This approach would be fully operational on the local machine. Saving pages for offline usage This is actually a quite tedious job but still practicable for small web sites Tool based approach to 'harvest' the web site There quite some tools in the wild that could handle this job, namely wget, httrack, web copier, etc. Screenshots bundled as PDF document Not really... ;-) Creating screencast or video Simply navigate through your website and record your desktop session. Actually, we are using this kind of approach to track down difficult problems in order to see and understand exactly what the user was doing to cause an error. Of course, this list isn't complete and I'd love to get more of your ideas in the comments section below the article. Preparations for offline browsing The original website is dynamically and data-driven by ASP.NET, and looks like this: As we have to put the result onto iPads we are going to choose the tool-based approach to 'download' the whole web site for offline usage. Again, depending on the complexity of your web site you might have to check which of the applications produces the best results for you. My usual choice is to use wget but in this case, we run into problems related to the rewriting of hyperlinks. As a consequence of that we opted for using HTTrack. HTTrack comes in different flavours, like console application but also as either GUI (WinHTTrack on Windows) or Web client (WebHTTrack on Linux/Unix/BSD). Here's a brief description taken from the original website about HTTrack: HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. And there is an extensive documentation for all options and switches online. General recommendation is to go through the HTTrack Users Guide By Fred Cohen. It covers all the initial steps you need to get up and running. Be aware that it will take quite some time to get all the necessary resources down to your machine. Actually, for our customer we run the tool directly on their web server to avoid unnecessary traffic and bandwidth. After a couple of runs and some additional fine-tuning - explicit inclusion or exclusion of various external linked web sites - we finally had a more or less complete offline version available. A very handsome feature of HTTrack is the error/warning log after completing the download. It contains some detailed information about errors that appeared on the pages and the links within the pages that have been processed. Error: "Bad Request" (400) at link www.resortwork.co.uk/job-details_Ski_hire:tech_or_mgr_or_driver_37854.aspx (from www.resortwork.co.uk/Jobs_A_to_Z.aspx)Error: "Not Found" (404) at link www.247recruit.net/images/applynow.png (from www.247recruit.net/css/global.css)Error: "Not Found" (404) at link www.247recruit.net/activate.html (from www.247recruit.net/247recruit_tefl_jobs_network.html) In our situation, we took the records of HTTP 400/404 errors and passed them to the web development department. Improvements are to be expected soon. ;-) Quality assurance on the full-featured desktop Unfortunately, the generated output of HTTrack was still incomplete but luckily there were only images missing. Being directly on the web server we simply copied the missing images from the original source folder into our offline version. After that, we created an archive and transferred the file securely to our local workspace for further review and checks. From that point on, it wasn't necessary to get any more files from the original web server, and we could focus ourselves completely on the process of browsing and navigating through the offline version to isolate visual differences and functional problems. As said, the original web site runs on ASP.NET Web Forms and uses Postback calls for interaction like search, pagination and partly for navigation. This is the main field of improving the offline experience. Of course, same as for standard web development it is advised to test with various browsers, and strangely we discovered that the offline version looked pretty good on Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but not in Internet Explorer. A quick look at the HTML source shed some light on this, and there are conditional CSS inclusions based on the user agent. HTTrack is not acting as Internet Explorer and so we didn't have the necessary overrides for this browser. Not problematic after all in our case, but you might have to pay attention to this and get the IE-specific files explicitly. And while having a view at the source code, we also found out that HTTrack actually modifies the generated HTML output. In several occasions we discovered that <div> elements were converted into <table> constructs for no obvious reason; even nested structures. Search 'e'nd destroy - sed (or Notepad++) to the rescue During our intensive root cause analysis for a couple of HTML/CSS problems that needed some extra attention it is very helpful to be familiar with any editor that allows search and replace over multiple files like, ie. sed - stream editor for filtering and transforming text on Linux or my personal favourite Notepad++ on Windows. This allowed us to quickly fix a lot of anchors with onclick attributes and Javascript code that was addressed to ASP.NET files instead of their generated HTML counterparts, like so: grep -lr -e '.aspx' * | xargs sed -e 's/.aspx/.html?/g' The additional question mark after the HTML extension helps to separate the query string from the actual target and solved all our missing hyperlinks very fast. The same can be done in Notepad++ on Windows, too. Just use the 'Replace in files' feature and you are settled. Especially, in combination with Regular Expressions (regex). Landscape of browsers Okay, after several runs of HTML/CSS code analysis, searching and replacing some strings in a pool of more than 4.000 files, we finally had a very good match of an offline browsing experience in Firefox and Chrome on Linux. Next, we transferred that modified set of files to a Windows 8 machine for review on Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer 7 to 10, and a Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.7 to check the output on Safari and again on Chrome. Besides IE, for reasons already mentioned above, the results were identical. And last but not least it was about to check web site on tablets. Please continue to read on the following articles: Taking web sites offline for demonstration on Galaxy Tablet Taking web sites offline for demonstration on iPad

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