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  • Refresh file access time under Linux / Discard disk read cache

    - by calandoa
    I am making use of the access time to analyse some build process, but it is not working the way I want: the access time is updated the first time I read the file, then it stays the same for a long while, or until the next reboot. For instance: $ ll -u some_file -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.3M 2010-04-07 10:03 some_file $ grep abcdef some_file $ ll -u some_file -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.3M 2010-04-07 11:24 some_file # The access time is updated # waiting a few minutes... $ grep abcdef some_file $ ll -u some_file -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.3M 2010-04-07 11:24 some_file # The access time has not been updated :( I suppose that the file is buffered by Linux in the free memory, the only this copy is accessed the subsequent times for speed reasons. A solution would be to discard the buffers in memory. After searching some forums, I found: sync echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches But it is not working, it seems that it only sync up the write buffers, not the read ones. May be it is due to some custom kernel configuration on my distro (fedora 9)? Or I am missing something here? Is there a way to achieve this access time refresh? Note also that I do not want to simulate some writes on my entire file tree. Because I am using some makefile based build system, this will cause the entire project to be build again.

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  • Performance Test and TCP tuning

    - by Mithir
    We are in the process of performance testing an application which receives tcp requests converts them to soap requests (WCF-httpBinding) which other services work on. The server is Windows Server 2008 R2. The TCP requests are received by TcpListener instance (.NET C#). There are 3 http-binded WCF services running on the same server. We have built a performance test client which goal is to simulate multiple concurrent requests(each request has to be different and recognizable by the application). We built a test running 150 requests that run on the same time (by 150 different threads), and we noticed straight away that some requests get the TCP connection slowly, but once they get it, they act fast. A single request writes twice on the same connection- request and an application ack. Although a single request+ack can take about 150ms, the 150 test takes about 7 seconds. The Problem When we try to run this test from 2 different computers we lose requests. some clients requests are getting no connection was made because the target machine actively refused it So I got here and got convinced it was because of the backlog. I changed the TcpListener parameters and did the registry AFD backlog changes written here but it still didn't work, so I inserted all of the TCP tuning suggested plus some netsh commands which were recommended, but still no change, we still get that error. Is there anything else I need to know? Are there any other solutions?

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  • Exchange 2007 relay from sendmail, message "Undelivered". Possible reasons?

    - by garlicman
    Note: This is my re-post from Stackoverflow. I've been messing with a test environment for security purposes where a DMZ RHEL5 sendmail server is used as a relay for an Exchange 2007 server. Exchange is working in the environment, I have Vista and XP VMs using Outlook on the Domain to send e-mail to each other. I've been trying to simulate an external internet VM sending an e-mail to the DMZ sendmail relay, which forwards to the Exchange server. Before everyone thinks this is too big a problem/question, I've followed the sendmail/Exchange guides and all I want to know is how I can determine why a relayed message/e-mail in Exchange is "Undelivered". Basically I send a SMTP message to the sendmail server, which relayed to my Exchange. The /var/log/maillog shows the e-mail being relayed to Exchange. Nov 17 13:41:22 externalmailserver sendmail[9017]: pAHIfMuW009017: from=<[email protected]>, size=1233, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<[email protected]>, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=[10.50.50.1] Nov 17 13:42:17 externalmailserver sendmail[9050]: pAHIfMuW009017: to=<[email protected]>, delay=00:00:55, xdelay=00:00:36, mailer=relay, pri=121233, relay=mailserver.xyz.local. [192.168.1.20], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (<[email protected]> Queued mail for delivery) This is good, but the To never receives the e-mail from Exchange. So I started poking around Exchange. In the "Message Tracking" Troubleshooting Assistant I queried the processed messages and found this: (I had to copy and paste the cells... sorry for the format) 2011/11/17 RECEIVE SMTP <[email protected]> "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" [email protected] [email protected] 192.168.100.10 MAILSERVER\DMZ Relay [email protected] I just want to know if anyone has any suggestions on why the DMZ Relay Connector I setup isn't relaying and is instead returning the forwarded e-mail to sender as Undelivered? My Exchange Relay Receive Connector is pretty simple. The Exchange server's FQDN is set as the HELO response, all available IP addresses can receive relayed e-mail, and the IP address of my sendmail server is specifically set as a remote server.

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  • Simulated NAT Traversal on Virtual Box

    - by Sumit Arora
    I have installed virtual box ( with Two virtual Adapters(NAT-type)) - Host (Ubuntu -10.10) - Guest-Opensuse-11.4 . Objective : Trying to simulate all four types of NAT as defined here : https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/TOP/NAT+Traversal+Testing Simulating the various kinds of NATs can be done using Linux iptables. In these examples, eth0 is the private network and eth1 is the public network. Full-cone iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j SNAT --to-source iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -j DNAT --to-destination Restricted cone iptables -t nat POSTROUTING -o eth1 -p tcp -j SNAT --to-source iptables -t nat POSTROUTING -o eth1 -p udp -j SNAT --to-source iptables -t nat PREROUTING -i eth1 -p tcp -j DNAT --to-destination iptables -t nat PREROUTING -i eth1 -p udp -j DNAT --to-destination iptables -A INPUT -i eth1 -p tcp -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -i eth1 -p udp -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -i eth1 -p tcp -m state --state NEW -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth1 -p udp -m state --state NEW -j DROP Port-restricted cone iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j SNAT --to-source Symmentric echo "1" /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward iptables --flush iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE --random iptables -A FORWARD -i eth1 -o eth0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth1 -j ACCEPT What I did : OpenSuse guest with Two Virtual adapters - eth0 and eth1 -- eth1 with address 10.0.3.15 /eth1:1 as 10.0.3.16 -- eth0 with address 10.0.2.15 now running stund(http://sourceforge.net/projects/stun/) client/server : Server eKimchi@linux-6j9k:~/sw/stun/stund ./server -v -h 10.0.3.15 -a 10.0.3.16 Client eKimchi@linux-6j9k:~/sw/stun/stund ./client -v 10.0.3.15 -i 10.0.2.15 On all Four Cases It is giving same results : test I = 1 test II = 1 test III = 1 test I(2) = 1 is nat = 0 mapped IP same = 1 hairpin = 1 preserver port = 1 Primary: Open Return value is 0x000001 Q-1 :Please let me know If any has ever done, It should behave like NAT as per description but nowhere it working as a NAT. Q-2: How NAT Implemented in Home routers (Usually Port Restricted), but those also pre-configured iptables rules and tuned Linux

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  • Resolve another domain from current AD domain

    - by faulty
    We have 2 AD domain setup in our office. First is the primary domain for our office and exchange. The 2nd one is for development use to simulate production environment of our clients. Both domain are hosted on Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise. We, the development team has no access to the office domain other than login and email purpose. DNS is running on PDC of both domain. Both domain does not use public domain name. Now, our machines are joined to the development domain and we use outlook to access our office's exchange. We've added DNS entries for both the domain. From time to time we are having problem resolving our office domain (i.e. during outlook login), which we need to edit our NIC's DNS to have only DNS server from our office and then flush DNS. After that switch back once it's able to resolve. Is there a permanent solution for this scenario like specifying that the office domain be resolve with another DNS server when requested from the development domain? Thanks

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  • Can't open cocoa emacs from terminal using open -a

    - by Shane
    I installed emacs on my MacBook Air running Mac OS X 10.6.5 from this site http://emacsformacosx.com/. I believe this is what used to be called cocoa emacs. I dragged it into my Application folder and it works fine when I run it from there. I want to be able to run it from the Terminal. After some googling, I tried open -a /Application/Emacs.app foo.txt (foo.txt was and existing file). I got two emacs windows - one with welcome screen and one with foo.txt loaded. I tried a few applications in the /Applications directory and they did not seem to behave like this. I had installed it using my own account (an admin account) so after doing ls -l on /Application I noticed that the owner and group were different from the other entries in this folder. I recursively changed the owner and group to root and wheel, like the others, but this did not help. The only thing that looks funny now is that there that ls -l show a @ character which has something to do with extended attributes but I don't know how to check these. Any suggestions on what to check next? Is using the open command the only to run the program? Can I simulate what it does using a shell script?

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  • Setting up a Network Bridge on Linux VM (Windows 7 Host)

    - by GrandAdmiral
    I would like to use NetEm to simulate a low bandwidth environment while testing an Internet-connected device. My plan is to setup a bridge in a Linux VM (Linux Mint 13) on a Windows 7 host. Unfortunately I'm having trouble setting up the bridge. Then I can use NetEm in the Linux VM to limit the bandwidth to an external device. I went with the following script: ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 promisc up ifconfig eth1 0.0.0.0 promisc up Then create the bridge and bring it up: brctl addbr br0 brctl setfd br0 0 brctl addif br0 eth0 brctl addif br0 eth1 dhclient br0 ifconfig br0 up When I run that script, I see the following warning: Rather than invoking init scripts through /etc/init.d, use the service(8) utility, e.g. service smbd reload Since the script you are attempting to invoke has been converted to an Upstart job, you may also use the reload(8) utility, e.g. reload smbd The device connecting to the bridge is able to obtain an IP Address, but it can only ping the IP Address of the bridge (both are 10.2.32.xx). Then after a few minutes, other parts of our network go down. I'm not sure why, but once I kill the bridge the network is fine. Is it possible to setup a network bridge in a Linux VM? Do I need to do something else with the dhclient br0 part of the script? By the way, I'm using VirtualBox. The wired connection is eth0 and the wireless connection is eth1. The wired connection is connecting to the device and the wireless connection is going to the network. Both adapters are set up as bridged adapters with promiscuous mode set to "allow all".

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  • Cluster Core Resource state of Exchange 2010 DAG

    - by Christoph
    I have two Exchange 2010 servers in a DAG and a witness server to implement mailbox resiliency. The two Exchange servers are in two subnets and the Windows failover cluster therefore has two IP address resources. I now that Exchange uses "core functionality" of Windows Server failover clustering, but it does not use all features. My setup also seems to work, but if I run the validation in the Windows Failover Cluster Manager, it complains about one of the IP address resources being offline. However, I cannot bring this resource online, because the server complains that "the specified cluster node is not the owner of the resource, or the node is not a possible owner of the resource". If I "Simulate failure of this resource", it becomes offline and the other IP becomes online. I have the vague idea that Exchange might use the state of the IP resource to identify the Primary Active Manager, but I am not sure. As it is obviously important that failover really works, I would like to be sure. Therefore, my question is: Is it normal that only one IP address resource in a Exchange 2010 DAG failover cluster is active at a time? If not, how do I bring both resources online at the same time given the error described above?

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  • Howto change Axis server-config.wsdd so that we don't expect a SOAPAction

    - by GKForcare
    The problem I'm facing is that the client of my service will never send me a SOAPAction header. How can I tell Axis to still map to the incomming call to my service implementation anyway. I did bump into tricks like adding a Handler like this: <handler name="ReportMapper" type="java:com.mycompany.project.ReportMapper"/> <transport name="http"> <requestFlow> <handler type="ReportMapper"/> <handler type="URLMapper"/> <handler type="java:org.apache.axis.handlers.http.HTTPAuthHandler"/> </requestFlow> <parameter name="qs:list" value="org.apache.axis.transport.http.QSListHandler"/> <parameter name="qs:wsdl" value="org.apache.axis.transport.http.QSWSDLHandler"/> <parameter name="qs.list" value="org.apache.axis.transport.http.QSListHandler"/> <parameter name="qs.method" value="org.apache.axis.transport.http.QSMethodHandler"/> <parameter name="qs:method" value="org.apache.axis.transport.http.QSMethodHandler"/> <parameter name="qs.wsdl" value="org.apache.axis.transport.http.QSWSDLHandler"/> </transport> but that did not help. The mapper is found during the creation of the WSDL but when calling the service, the invoke of the handler is not used. I do need to note that when I simulate the SOAP-call using @curl@ and I do add the SOAPAction header, the invoke is called. Any help would be most appreciated.

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  • limiting connections from tomcat to IIS - proxy? iptables?

    - by Chris Phillips
    Howdy, I've webapp on tomcat6 which is connecting to an M$ PlayReady DRM instance on IIS6.0 The performance is seen to be best when we bench mark (using ab) the DRM service with 25 concurrent connections, which gives about 250 requests per second, which is ace. higher concurrent connections results in TCP/IP timeouts and other lower level mess. But there is no way to control how the tomcat app connects to the service - it's not internally managing a pool of connections etc, they are all isolated http connections to the server. Ideally I'd like a situation where we can have 25 http 1.1 connections being kept alive permanently from tomcat and requesting the licenses through this static pool of connections, which I think would the best performance. But this is not in the code, so was looking for a way to possibly simulate this at the Linux level. I was possibly thinking that iptables connlimit might be able to gracefully handle these connections, but whilst it could limit, it'd probably still annoy the app. What about a proxy? nginx (or possibly squid) seems potentially appealing to run on the tomcat server and hit on localhost as we might want to add additional DRM servers to use under load balance anyway. Could this take 100 incoming connections from tomcat, accept them all and proxy over the the IIS server in a more respectful manner? Any other angles? EDIT - looking over mod_proxy for apache, which we are already using for conventional use on an apache instance in front of this tomcat instance, might be ideal. I can set a max value on the proxy_pass to only allow 25 connections, and keep them alive permanently. Is that my answer? Many thanks, Chris

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  • URL Redirect Configuration in Virtualhost for a Single Page Web Application

    - by fenderplayer
    I have a web application under development that I am running locally. The home page of the application is fetched with the following url: http://local.dev/myapp/index.shtml When the app runs, javascript on the webpage maintains the url and the app state internally. Some of the other urls read as: http://local.dev/myapp/results?param1=val1&param2=val2 http://local.dev/myapp/someResource Note that there are no pages named results.html or someResource.html on my web server. They are just made up URLs to simulate RESTfulness in the single page app. All the app code - javascript, css etc - is present in the index.shtml file So, essentially, the question is how can I redirect all requests to the first URL above? Here's how the vhost configuration looks like: <VirtualHost 0.0.0.0:80> ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot "/Users/Me/mySites" ServerName local.dev RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule ^(myapp|myapp2)\/results\?.+$ $1/index.shtml [R=301,L] <Directory "/Users/Me/mySites/"> Options +Includes Indexes MultiViews FollowSymlinks AllowOverride All Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> ErrorLog "/private/var/log/apache2/error.log" CustomLog "/private/var/log/apache2/access.log" common </VirtualHost> But this doesn't seem to work. Requesting the other URLs directly results in 404 error.

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  • Can't open cocoa emacs from terminal using open -a

    - by Shane
    I installed emacs on my macbook air running os x 10.6.5 from this site http://emacsformacosx.com/. I believe this is what used to be called cocoa emacs. I dragged it into my Application folder and it works fine when i run it from there. I want to be able to run it from terminal. After some googling, i tried open -a /Application/Emacs.app foo.txt (foo.txt was and existing file). I got two emacs windows - one with welcome screen and one with foo.txt loaded. I tried a few applications in the /Applications directory and they did not seem to behave like this. I had installed it using my own account (an admin account) so after doing ls -l on /Application I noticed that the owner and group were different from the other entries in this folder. I recursively changed the owner and group to root and wheel, like the others, but this did not help. The only thing that looks funny now is that there that ls -l show a @ character which has something to do with extended attributes but i don't know how to check these. Any suggestions on what to check next? Is using the open command the only to run the program? Can I simulate what it does using a shell script?

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  • Website hosted on my virtualbox web server not displaying images or applying css when viewed through phone

    - by WebweaverD
    I would really appreciate it if someone could help me. Please let me know if you need more info in the comments. My Set Up I have a windows 7 pc. On it I run a virtual box VM with a ubuntu 12 guest os and LAMP setup. I share files between the two machines using samba from linux to windows and using windows file sharing (Workgroup) the other way round. The vm is set up with a bridged network adapter and can happily serve web pages to my host machine. I use DHCP reservations on my home wireless router/modem to reserve an ip for the vm and give it a sitename.dev in my windows host file so I can access it at sitename.dev through the browser. The Problem So far so good but I have a dev project which needs a lot of mobile template development, now obviously I can use a browser plugin to simulate a mobile device but I would like to be able to see the real thing easily on my phone during development. So ideally I would like a similar setup on my iphone to my windows setup Now I'm not great on networking and dont have much experience with web server set up. So when I typed the ip of my virtual box into my iphone i wasnt expecting to see anything. I was pleasantly surprised when my site loaded up. The javascript even seems to be running but the images and css are not happening. My Question 1) What is happening here, is it something to do with the bridged set up on the vm network? 2)How do I make the sites load properly through my phone Notes I've also tried another phone. The same sites viewed on live servers work fine.

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  • 403 Forbiden on Apache (CentOS) Server

    - by pouya
    These are my VM setup: HOST: windows 7 ultimate 32bit GUEST: CentOs 6.3 i386 Virtualization soft: Oracle virtualBox 4.1.22 Networking: NAT -> (PORT FORWARD: HOST:8080 => GUEST:80) Shared Folder: centos all the project files goes into shared folder and for each project file a virtualhost conf file is created in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ like /etc/httpd/conf.d/$domain I wasn't able to see anything in my browser before disabling both windows firewall and iptables in centos after that if i type for example: http://www.$domain:8080/ all i see is: Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server. Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) Server at www.$domain.com Port 8080 A sample Virtual Host conf file: <VirtualHost *:80> #General DocumentRoot /media/sf_centos/path/to/public_html ServerAdmin webmaster@$domain ServerName www.$domain ServerAlias $domain *.$domain #Logging ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/$domain-error.log CustomLog /var/log/httpd/$domain-access.log combined #mod rewrite RewriteEngine On RewriteLog /var/log/httpd/$domain-rewrite.log RewriteLogLevel 0 </VirtualHost> centos shared folder is availabe to guest at /media/sf_centos These are file permissons for sf_centos: drwxrwx--- root vboxsf vboxsf group includes: apache and root So these are my questions: 1- How to solve Forbidden Problem? 2- How to setup both host and guest firewalls? 3- How can i improve this developement environment to simulate production environment as much as possible specially security improvements?

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  • Is it possible to get ESC to behave as an actual escape key?

    - by leftaroundabout
    So I have finally switched, not so much because I'm yet convinced Emacs in itself is the better editor but because it certainly does have more powerful extensions. I am still using vim-mode though, perhaps that's part of my problem... but I really don't intend to abandon the modes-approach, so I'll probably stay with it. I'm getting along quite well, but one thing I find really unnerving is the behaviour of the esc key (which I have in the shift-lock position). I'm used to relying on this a lot as more or less a "panic key", which may not be nice but I find allows me to work generally quite a bit less caring about the keystrokes themselves, and thus faster. What I'd like this key to do is just get me out of any minibuffer or special editing mode into a well-defined normal state. Perhaps most importantly, I would like it to not do anything unrelated, Simulate meta. What do I have an alt key for? Close windows I'm not even in at the time. Getting interpreted as the final key in some key sequence. ... Is it possible to turn all that off and make esc an actual escape key? Vim-mode does make it behave kind of as I like in some situations, but when other plugins are involves this often breaks. Alternatively, are there different options that might suit my kind of workflow?

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  • Software for RAID Failure Alerts?

    - by QF_Developer
    I have two 256 GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD disks in a RAID 1 array. I would like to receive a notification if one of the disks in the array fails. Can anybody recommend an application I can install on the server to fire an email if such an event occurs? Here are some additional specs: Supermicro X9SCM-IIF motherboard utilising the hardware RAID controller. OS = Windows 2012 Standard Also is it possible to simulate a disk failure by pulling it out of the bay? SSDs appear to fail close together when in a mirrored config so I'd like to know ASAP if one goes down so I can swap them out with minimum delay. UPDATE 26th June 2013 ------------------------ None of the software that ships with the Supermicro X9SCM-* motherboards offer support for RAID monitoring. As has been pointed out here, these boards are built on an Intel chipset for RAID and so I installed Intel Rapid Storage Technology that supports automated email notifications on RAID failure http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/cs-020784.htm One small issue, the software only allows you to send email notifications without SMTP authentication. There's a bunch of different workarounds here: http://communities.intel.com/thread/30771

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  • Identifying test machines in analytics logs

    - by RTigger
    We're just beginning to add analytics to our SaaS application, to begin (among other things) billing clients based on usage. The problem we're running into is there's a few circumstances where our support team will simulate a log in into production to try to reproduce reported issues with a client's configuration. When they log in, an entry will be made into our analytics logs that their specific account has logged in, which we use to calculate billing. A few ideas we had to solve this: 1) We log IP addresses as well as machine keys for each PC that logs in - we could filter out known IP addresses and/or machine keys belonging to support. The drawback is we have to maintain a list of keys / addresses manually. 2) If support (or anyone else internal) runs our application in debug mode (as opposed to release), it will not report analytics. This is fine, as long as support / anyone else remembers to switch to debug mode. 3) Include some sort of reg key / similar setting required to be set when configuring a production system in order to send analytics. Again, fine, as long as our infrastructure team remembers to set the reg key or setting. All of these approaches require some sort of human involvement, which we all know can be iffy at best. Has anyone run into a similar situation? Is there an automated approach to this problem? (PS Of course, we shouldn't be testing in production, but there are a few one-off instances with customer set up that we can't reproduce without logging in as them in production. This is the only time we do so, and this is the case I'm talking about in this question.)

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  • 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

    - by Alan Smith
    For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour.  This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue   static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005>     define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2  diffuse 0.7  specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1  lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7  } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } }   viewpoint {     from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60     resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 }       light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20>   object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden }   object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome }   After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue }   In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000   As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72   Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: ·         On-Premise o   Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o   Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o   Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o   Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. ·         Windows Azure o   Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment.   The architecture of each worker role is shown below.   The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" >   <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small">     <Imports>     </Imports>     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString" />     </ConfigurationSettings>     <LocalResources>       <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" />     </LocalResources>   </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition>     The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1.       The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2.       PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3.       DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4.       The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5.       A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6.       The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7.       The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() {     // Set environment variables     string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation);     string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation);       LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder");     string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath;       JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs");     JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs");     CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes");     CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images");     RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource();       Frames = 0;       while (true)     {         // Get the render job from the queue         CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get();           if (jobMsg != null)         {             // Get the file details             string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString;             string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga");             string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg");               string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile);             string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile);             string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile);               // Copy the scene file to local storage             sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath);               // Run the ray tracer.             string polyrayArguments =                 string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath);             Process polyRayProcess = new Process();             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath);             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments;             polyRayProcess.Start();             polyRayProcess.WaitForExit();               // Convert the image             string dtaArguments =                 string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath));             Process dtaProcess = new Process();             dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath);             dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments;             dtaProcess.Start();             dtaProcess.WaitForExit();               // Upload the image to blob storage             imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath);               // Add a download job.             downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile);               // Delete the render job message             jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg);               Frames++;         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }           // Log the worker role activity.         roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive             ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames);     } }     Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage.   public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity {     public string ServerName { get; set; }     public string Status { get; set; }     public DateTime StartTime { get; set; }     public DateTime EndTime { get; set; }     public long SecondsRunning { get; set; }     public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; }     public int Frames { get; set; }     public string Comment { get; set; }       public RoleLifecycle()     {     }       public RoleLifecycle(string roleName)     {         PartitionKey = roleName;         RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey();         Status = "Started";         StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow;         LastActiveTime = StartTime;         EndTime = StartTime;         SecondsRunning = 0;         Frames = 0;     } }     A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="16" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames.   Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation.   With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes.     At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances.   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="256" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames.   Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds.   We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes.   The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each.   Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles   The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. ·         Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. ·         The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. ·         Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. ·         No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. ·         Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. ·         Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. ·         Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. ·         Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. ·         If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. ·         Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. ·         Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

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  • Improved appointment rendering in RadScheduler for ASP.NET AJAX, Q1 2010

    Now that Q1 2010 release is out in the wild, we can sit down and discuss some of the changes we decided to make in the new release. One of them is the new appointment rendering of RadScheduler - a potentially breaking change, but a much needed one. If you have problems with your old custom skins, include the old base stylesheet along with your RadScheduler and set EnableEmbeddedBaseStylesheet=false in your RadScheduler. You can find the said base stylesheet attached to this post.   While trying to improve the performance of RadScheduler, I noticed that the number of resources slows down the rendering and overall performance considerably. This had to be expected - the images to support the appointment rounded corners (and the predefined resources) were quite large. However, I didnt take into account that all browsers keep for performance reasons their images uncompressed in memory and with the color depth of the current desktop. A simple calculation later I discovered that the appointment sprite itself is taking 25MB memory when loaded. Add 5 resources to the fray and you have 150MB memory down with a single blow. As it turns out - a sprite image is not a panacea, if it gets too big - dont be afraid to break it in two. The loading time may suffer, but your browser suffers more while rendering a 25MB monster. First I thought of undertaking the aforementioned solution - breaking the appointment sprite in two and thus reducing the two appointment sprites to mere 2MB uncompressed. Then I thought - the rounded corners are small - I can use borders and backgrounds to simulate rounded appointment borders while still keeping the same HTML structure. The gradients can be done with a single 10x50px image plus we have a gain - border colors and backgrounds can be changed on the fly.  I started with five rendering elements at first, then tried with four and finally I settled on only three elements.  Behold the new appointment rendering (quite simple really):       On the left you can see that the first container has only top and bottom borders and a background. In fact, the background isnt even needed since it will be obscured by the elements on top of it. The whole first container is only needed for the four dots that reside in the four corners of the appointment. On top of this container is another one that holds the left and right borders and slightly lighter background to create the illusion of a second lighter border beside the other two. At last on top of all others is placed the text container that also holds the top and bottom borders and the gradient background. On the right you can see the final result - Im quite happy with it and I hope you will be too. After creating the new rendering we took another step further - we decided to use alpha gradients for the resource rendering, thus supporting any color appointments with rounded corners and gradients. You can see some examples below:We plan on adding BorderColor and BackColor properties  to the ResourceStyles definitions for Q1 SP1. However with the new rendering in Q1 2010 we do support BackColor and BorderColor appointment properties - you only need to set AppointmentStyleMode=Default to keep RadScheduler from switching to Simple appointment rendering. Here is one screenshot of RadScheduler with appointments set to different colors: I hope that you will enjoy working with the new appointments in RadScheduler. RadScheduler base stylesheet Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Improved appointment rendering in RadScheduler for ASP.NET AJAX, Q1 2010

    Now that Q1 2010 release is out in the wild, we can sit down and discuss some of the changes we decided to make in the new release. One of them is the new appointment rendering of RadScheduler - a potentially breaking change, but a much needed one. If you have problems with your old custom skins, include the old base stylesheet along with your RadScheduler and set EnableEmbeddedBaseStylesheet=false in your RadScheduler. You can find the said base stylesheet attached to this post.   While trying to improve the performance of RadScheduler, I noticed that the number of resources slows down the rendering and overall performance considerably. This had to be expected - the images to support the appointment rounded corners (and the predefined resources) were quite large. However, I didnt take into account that all browsers keep for performance reasons their images uncompressed in memory and with the color depth of the current desktop. A simple calculation later I discovered that the appointment sprite itself is taking 25MB memory when loaded. Add 5 resources to the fray and you have 150MB memory down with a single blow. As it turns out - a sprite image is not a panacea, if it gets too big - dont be afraid to break it in two. The loading time may suffer, but your browser suffers more while rendering a 25MB monster. First I thought of undertaking the aforementioned solution - breaking the appointment sprite in two and thus reducing the two appointment sprites to mere 2MB uncompressed. Then I thought - the rounded corners are small - I can use borders and backgrounds to simulate rounded appointment borders while still keeping the same HTML structure. The gradients can be done with a single 10x50px image plus we have a gain - border colors and backgrounds can be changed on the fly.  I started with five rendering elements at first, then tried with four and finally I settled on only three elements.  Behold the new appointment rendering (quite simple really):       On the left you can see that the first container has only top and bottom borders and a background. In fact, the background isnt even needed since it will be obscured by the elements on top of it. The whole first container is only needed for the four dots that reside in the four corners of the appointment. On top of this container is another one that holds the left and right borders and slightly lighter background to create the illusion of a second lighter border beside the other two. At last on top of all others is placed the text container that also holds the top and bottom borders and the gradient background. On the right you can see the final result - Im quite happy with it and I hope you will be too. After creating the new rendering we took another step further - we decided to use alpha gradients for the resource rendering, thus supporting any color appointments with rounded corners and gradients. You can see some examples below:We plan on adding BorderColor and BackColor properties  to the ResourceStyles definitions for Q1 SP1. However with the new rendering in Q1 2010 we do support BackColor and BorderColor appointment properties - you only need to set AppointmentStyleMode=Default to keep RadScheduler from switching to Simple appointment rendering. Here is one screenshot of RadScheduler with appointments set to different colors: I hope that you will enjoy working with the new appointments in RadScheduler. RadScheduler base stylesheet Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Silverlight Cream for March 24, 2010 -- #819

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Nokola, Tim Heuer, Christian Schormann, Brad Abrams, David Kelley, Phil Middlemiss, Michael Klucher, Brandon Watson, Kunal Chowdhury, Jacek Ciereszko, and Unni. Shoutouts: Michael Klucher has a short post up For Love of the Game (Development)…, where he's looking for some input from the developer community. Shawn Hargreaves has a link post up of all the Windows Phone MIX10 presentations Chris Cavanagh has a Soft-Body Physics for Windows Phone 7 post up that goes along with one he did 1-1/2 years ago! Jeff Weber posted An Open Letter To Microsoft Regarding The Silverlight Game Development Community Pete Brown posted his MIX10 Recap ... lots of information, and discussion of what he was up to ... I liked the Trivia app Pete... glad to hear that was yours :) I've changed my mind and added a WP7 tag to SilverlightCream. I'll straighten out all the Mobile plus Silverlight links to point at the WP7 tab hopefully tonight. From SilverlightCream.com: EasyPainter Source Pack 3: Adorners, Mouse Cursors and Frames Nokola has been busy with EasyPainter adding in Custom, Extensible Mouse Cursors and Customizable Adorners with extensible adorner frames, and best of all... all with source code! Simulate Geo Location in Silverlight Windows Phone 7 emulator Among the things we don't have in our WP7 emulators is Geo Location... Tim Heuer comes to the rescue with a simulator for it... too cool, Tim! Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part II Christian Schormann is back with Part 2 of his tutorial sequence on the new Path Layout. Really good info and definitely cool presentations of the control. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing OData Services Brad Abrams continues his series with a post on exposing OData services. This looks like a great tutorial on the topic... will probably resolve some questions I've been having :) No Silverlight and Preloader Experience(ish) - in 10 seconds... David Kelley exposes the code he uses on his site, designed to be friendly to Silverlight and non-Silverlight users alike. Merged Dictionaries of Style Resources and Blend Phil Middlemiss has a nice article up on Merged Dictionaries and using multiple resource dictionaries that the app chooses, but also be compatible with Prism and Blend while not eating your system resources out of house and home. XNA Game Studio and Windows Phone Emulator Compatibility Michael Klucher has a definitive post up about getting your XNA and system up-to-speed for WP7... a must-read if you've been running any of the other XNA drops. Windows Phone 7 301 Redirect Bug Brandon Watson reports a 301 Redirect bug on WP7 ... see the code and how he got it, then follow along as he explains all the debug paths he took and what the resolution (?) really is :) Silverlight 4: How to use the new Printing API? Kunal Chowdhury has a tutorial up on printing with Silverlight 4 RC... from the project layout to printing and then printing a smaller section... all good Printing problem in Silverlight 4.0 RC - loading images in code behind Jacek Ciereszko also is writing about printing, and in his case he had problems with loading an image dynamically and printing it... plus he provides a solution to the 'blank page' problem. ToolboxExampleAttribute - a new extension point in Blend 4 (and a few other extensibility related changes) Unni has an article up about Expression Blend 4's new ToolboxExampleAttribute which allow you to have multiple examples of the same type resulting in different XAML produced. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone    MIX10

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  • Unable to apt-get upgrade in ubuntu 11.10

    - by blackhole
    These are the errors shows by different client Update Manager: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/aptdaemon/worker.py", line 968, in simulate trans.unauthenticated = self._simulate_helper(trans) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/aptdaemon/worker.py", line 1092, in _simulate_helper return depends, self._cache.required_download, \ File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 235, in required_download pm.get_archives(fetcher, self._list, self._records) SystemError: E:Method has died unexpectedly!, E:Sub-process returned an error code (100), E:Method /usr/lib/apt/methods/ did not start correctly Synaptic package Manager E: Method has died unexpectedly! E: Sub-process returned an error code (100) E: Method /usr/lib/apt/methods/ did not start correctly E: Unable to lock the download directory Command: sudo apt-get upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be upgraded: libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev 2 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Failed to exec method /usr/lib/apt/methods/ E: Method has died unexpectedly! E: Sub-process returned an error code (100) E: Method /usr/lib/apt/methods/ did not start correctly Can anyone one tell me how to resolve these issues ? I have no volatile packages or anything so i am even posting the preview of my sources.list file. # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 10.10 _Maverick Meerkat_ - Release i386 (20101007)]/ maverick main restricted # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric universe deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric multiverse deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-updates multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'backports' ## repository. ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. # deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick-backports main restricted universe multiverse # deb-src http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick-backports main restricted universe multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu oneiric partner deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu oneiric partner ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu oneiric main deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu oneiric main deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-security main restricted deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-security universe deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-security multiverse # deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner Here is the preview of my sources.list file

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  • 2D Rendering with OpenGL ES 2.0 on Android (matrices not working)

    - by TranquilMarmot
    So I'm trying to render two moving quads, each at different locations. My shaders are as simple as possible (vertices are only transformed by the modelview-projection matrix, there's only one color). Whenever I try and render something, I only end up with slivers of color! I've only done work with 3D rendering in OpenGL before so I'm having issues with 2D stuff. Here's my basic rendering loop, simplified a bit (I'm using the Matrix manipulation methods provided by android.opengl.Matrix and program is a custom class I created that just calls GLES20.glUniformMatrix4fv()): Matrix.orthoM(projection, 0, 0, windowWidth, 0, windowHeight, -1, 1); program.setUniformMatrix4f("Projection", projection); At this point, I render the quads (this is repeated for each quad): Matrix.setIdentityM(modelview, 0); Matrix.translateM(modelview, 0, quadX, quadY, 0); program.setUniformMatrix4f("ModelView", modelview); quad.render(); // calls glDrawArrays and all I see is a sliver of the color each quad is! I'm at my wits end here, I've tried everything I can think of and I'm at the point where I'm screaming at my computer and tossing phones across the room. Anybody got any pointers? Am I using ortho wrong? I'm 100% sure I'm rendering everything at a Z value of 0. I tried using frustumM instead of orthoM, which made it so that I could see the quads but they would get totally skewed whenever they got moved, which makes sense if I correctly understand the way frustum works (it's more for 3D rendering, anyway). If it makes any difference, I defined my viewport with GLES20.glViewport(0, 0, windowWidth, windowHeight); Where windowWidth and windowHeight are the same values that are pased to orthoM It might be worth noting that the android.opengl.Matrix methods take in an offset as the second parameter so that multiple matrices can be shoved into one array, so that'w what the first 0 is for For reference, here's my vertex shader code: uniform mat4 ModelView; uniform mat4 Projection; attribute vec4 vPosition; void main() { mat4 mvp = Projection * ModelView; gl_Position = vPosition * mvp; } I tried swapping Projection * ModelView with ModelView * Projection but now I just get some really funky looking shapes... EDIT Okay, I finally figured it out! (Note: Since I'm new here (longtime lurker!) I can't answer my own question for a few hours, so as soon as I can I'll move this into an actual answer to the question) I changed Matrix.orthoM(projection, 0, 0, windowWidth, 0, windowHeight, -1, 1); to float ratio = windowWwidth / windowHeight; Matrix.orthoM(projection, 0, 0, ratio, 0, 1, -1, 1); I then had to scale my projection matrix to make it a lot smaller with Matrix.scaleM(projection, 0, 0.05f, 0.05f, 1.0f);. I then added an offset to the modelview translations to simulate a camera so that I could center on my action (so Matrix.translateM(modelview, 0, quadX, quadY, 0); was changed to Matrix.translateM(modelview, 0, quadX + camX, quadY + camY, 0);) Thanks for the help, all!

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  • How to future-proof my touch-enabled web application?

    - by Rice Flour Cookies
    I recently went out and purchased a touch-screen monitor with the intention of learning how to program touch-enabled web applications. I had reviewed the MDN documentation about touch events, as well as the W3C specification. To get started, I wrote a very short test page with two event handlers: one for the mousedown event and one for the touchstart event. I fired up the web page in IE and touched the document and found that only the mousedown event fired. I saw the same behavior with Firefox, only to find out later that Firefox can be set to enable the touchstart event using about:config. When touch events are enabled, the touchstart event fires, but not mousedown. Chrome was even stranger: it fired both events when I touched the document: touchstart and mousedown, in that order. Only on my Android phone does it appear to be the case that only the touchstart event fires when I touch the document. I did a a Google search and ended up on two interesting pages. First, I found the page on CanIUse for touch events: http://caniuse.com/#feat=touch Can I Use clearly indicates that IE does not support touch events as of this writing, and Firefox only supports touch events if they are manually enabled. Furthermore, all four browsers I mentioned treat the touch in a completely different way. It boils down to this: IE: simulated mouse click Firefox with touch disabled: simulated mouse click Firefox with touch enabled: touch event Chrome: touch event and simulated mouse click Android: touch event What is more frustrating is that Google also found a Microsoft page called RethinkIE. RethinkIE brags about touch support in IE; as a matter of fact, one of their slogans is "Touch the Web". It links to a number of touch-based application. I followed some of these links, and as best I can tell, it's just like CanIUse described; no proper touch support; just simulated mouse clicks. The MDN (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Touch) and W3C (http://www.w3.org/TR/touch-events/) documentation describe a far richer interface; an interface that doesn't just simulate mouse clicks, but keeps track of multiple touches at once, the contact area, rotation, and force of each touch, and unique identifiers for each touch so that they can be tracked individually. I don't see how simulated mouse clicks can ever touch the above described functionality, which, once again, is part of the W3C specification, although it is listed as "non-normative", meaning that a browser can claim to be standards-compliant without implementing it. (Why bother making it part of the standard, then?) What motivated my research is that I've written an HTML5 application that doesn't work on Android because Android doesn't fire mouse events. I'm now afraid to try to implement touch for my application because the browsers all behave so differently. I imagine that at some time in the future, the browsers might start handling touch similarly, but how can I tell how they might be handled in the future short of writing code to handle the behavior of each individual browser? Is it possible to write code today that will work with touch-enabled browsers for years to come? If so, how?

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  • MySQL Cluster 7.3: On-Demand Webinar and Q&A Available

    - by Mat Keep
    The on-demand webinar for the MySQL Cluster 7.3 Development Release is now available. You can learn more about the design, implementation and getting started with all of the new MySQL Cluster 7.3 features from the comfort and convenience of your own device, including: - Foreign Key constraints in MySQL Cluster - Node.js NoSQL API  - Auto-installation of higher performance distributed, clusters We received some great questions over the course of the webinar, and I wanted to share those for the benefit of a broader audience. Q. What Foreign Key actions are supported: A. The core referential actions defined in the SQL:2003 standard are implemented: CASCADE RESTRICT NO ACTION SET NULL Q. Where are Foreign Keys implemented, ie data nodes or SQL nodes? A. They are implemented in the data nodes, therefore can be enforced for both the SQL and NoSQL APIs Q. Are they compatible with the InnoDB Foreign Key implementation? A. Yes, with the following exceptions: - InnoDB doesn’t support “No Action” constraints, MySQL Cluster does - You can choose to suspend FK constraint enforcement with InnoDB using the FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS parameter; at the moment, MySQL Cluster ignores that parameter. - You cannot set up FKs between 2 tables where one is stored using MySQL Cluster and the other InnoDB. - You cannot change primary keys through the NDB API which means that the MySQL Server actually has to simulate such operations by deleting and re-adding the row. If the PK in the parent table has a FK constraint on it then this causes non-ideal behaviour. With Restrict or No Action constraints, the change will result in an error. With Cascaded constraints, you’d want the rows in the child table to be updated with the new FK value but, the implicit delete of the row from the parent table would remove the associated rows from the child table and the subsequent implicit insert into the parent wouldn’t reinstate the child rows. For this reason, an attempt to add an ON UPDATE CASCADE where the parent column is a primary key will be rejected. Q. Does adding or dropping Foreign Keys cause downtime due to a schema change? A. Nope, this is an online operation. MySQL Cluster supports a number of on-line schema changes, ie adding and dropping indexes, adding columns, etc. Q. Where can I see an example of node.js with MySQL Cluster? A. Check out the tutorial and download the code from GitHub Q. Can I use the auto-installer to support remote deployments? How about setting up MySQL Cluster 7.2? A. Yes to both! Q. Can I get a demo Check out the tutorial. You can download the code from http://labs.mysql.com/ Go to Select Build drop-down box Q. What is be minimum internet speen required for Geo distributed cluster with synchronous replication? A. if you're splitting you cluster between sites then we recommend a network latency of 20ms or less. Alternatively, use MySQL asynchronous replication where the latency of your WAN doesn't impact the latency of your reads/writes. Q. Where you can one learn more about the PayPal project with MySQL Cluster? A. Take a look at the following - you'll find press coverage, a video and slides from their keynote presentation  So, if you want to learn more, listen to the new MySQL Cluster 7.3 on-demand webinar  MySQL Cluster 7.3 is still in the development phase, so it would be great to get your feedback on these new features, and things you want to see!

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