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• [GEEK SCHOOL] Network Security 3: Windows Defender and a Malware-Free System

  - by Ciprian Rusen

  In this second lesson we are going to talk about one of the most confusing security products that are bundled with Windows: Windows Defender. In the past, this product has had a bad reputation and for good reason – it was very limited in its capacity to protect your computer from real-world malware. However, the latest version included in Windows 8.x operating systems is much different than in the past and it provides real protection to its users. The nice thing about Windows Defender in its current incarnation, is that it protects your system from the start, so there are never gaps in coverage. We will start this lesson by explaining what Windows Defender is in Windows 7 and Vista versus what it is in Windows 8, and what product to use if you are using an earlier version. We next will explore how to use Windows Defender, how to improve its default settings, and how to deal with the alerts that it displays. As you will see, Windows Defender will have you using its list of quarantined items a lot more often than other security products. This is why we will explain in detail how to work with it and remove malware for good or restore those items that are only false alarms. Lastly, you will learn how to turn off Windows Defender if you no longer want to use it and you prefer a third-party security product in its place and then how to enable it back, if you have changed your mind about using it. Upon completion, you should have a thorough understanding of your system’s default anti-malware options, or how to protect your system expeditiously. What is Windows Defender? Unfortunately there is no one clear answer to this question because of the confusing way Microsoft has chosen to name its security products. Windows Defender is a different product, depending on the Windows operating system you are using. If you use Windows Vista or Windows 7, then Windows Defender is a security tool that protects your computer from spyware. This but one form of malware made out of tools and applications that monitor your movements on the Internet or the activities you make on your computer. Spyware tends to send the information that is collected to a remote server and it is later used in all kinds of malicious purposes, from displaying advertising you don’t want, to using your personal data, etc. However, there are many other types of malware on the Internet and this version of Windows Defender is not able to protect users from any of them. That’s why, if you are using Windows 7 or earlier, we strongly recommend that you disable Windows Defender and install a more complete security product like Microsoft Security Essentials, or third-party security products from specialized security vendors. If you use Windows 8.x operating systems, then Windows Defender is the same thing as Microsoft Security Essentials: a decent security product that protects your computer in-real time from viruses and spyware. The fact that this product protects your computer also from viruses, not just from spyware, makes a huge difference. If you don’t want to pay for security products, Windows Defender in Windows 8.x and Microsoft Security Essentials (in Windows 7 or earlier) are good alternatives. Windows Defender in Windows 8.x and Microsoft Security Essentials are the same product, only their name is different. In this lesson, we will use the Windows Defender version from Windows 8.x but our instructions apply also to Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) in Windows 7 and Windows Vista. If you want to download Microsoft Security Essentials and try it out, we recommend you to use this page: Download Microsoft Security Essentials. There you will find both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of this product as well versions in multiple languages. How to Use and Configure Windows Defender Using Windows Defender (MSE) is very easy to use. To start, search for “defender” on the Windows 8.x Start screen and click or tap the “Windows Defender” search result. In Windows 7, search for “security” in the Start Menu search box and click “Microsoft Security Essentials”. Windows Defender has four tabs which give you access to the following tools and options: Home – here you can view the security status of your system. If everything is alright, then it will be colored in green. If there are some warnings to consider, then it will be colored in yellow, and if there are threats that must be dealt with, everything will be colored in red. On the right side of the “Home” tab you will find options for scanning your computer for viruses and spyware. On the bottom of the tab you will find information about when the last scan was performed and what type of scan it was. Update – here you will find information on whether this product is up-to-date. You will learn when it was last updated and the versions of the definitions it is using. You can also trigger a manual update. History – here you can access quarantined items, see which items you’ve allowed to run on your PC even if they were identified as malware by Windows Defender, and view a complete list with all the malicious items Windows Defender has detected on your PC. In order to access all these lists and work with them, you need to be signed in as an administrator. Settings – this is the tab where you can turn on the real-time protection service, exclude files, file types, processes, and locations from its scans as well as access a couple of more advanced settings. The only difference between Windows Defender in Windows 8.x and Microsoft Security Essentials (in Windows 7 or earlier) is that, in the “Settings” tab, Microsoft Security Essentials allows you to set when to run scheduled scans while Windows Defender lacks this option.

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• RTS Voxel Engine using LWJGL - Textures glitching

  - by Dieter Hubau

  I'm currently working on an RTS game engine using voxels. I have implemented a basic chunk manager using an Octree of Octrees which contains my voxels (simple square blocks, as in Minecraft). I'm using a Voronoi-based terrain generation to get a simplistic yet relatively realistic heightmap. I have no problem showing a 256*256*256 grid of voxels with a decent framerate (250), because of frustum culling, face culling and only rendering visible blocks. For example, in a random voxel grid of 256*256*256 I generally only render 100k-120k faces, not counting frustum culling. Frustum culling is only called every 100ms, since calling it every frame seemed a bit overkill. Now I have reached the stage of texturing and I'm experiencing some problems: Some experienced people might already see the problem, but if we zoom in, you can see the glitches more clearly: All the seams between my blocks are glitching and kind of 'overlapping' or something. It's much more visible when you're moving around. I'm using a single, simple texture map to draw on my cubes, where each texture is 16*16 pixels big: I have added black edges around the textures to get a kind of cellshaded look, I think it's cool. The texture map has 256 textures of each 16*16 pixels, meaning the total size of my texture map is 256*256 pixels. The code to update the ChunkManager: public void update(ChunkManager chunkManager) { for (Octree<Cube> chunk : chunks) { if (chunk.getId() < 0) { // generate an id for the chunk to be able to call it later chunk.setId(glGenLists(1)); } glNewList(chunk.getId(), GL_COMPILE); glBegin(GL_QUADS); faces += renderChunk(chunk); glEnd(); glEndList(); } } Where my renderChunk method is: private int renderChunk(Octree<Cube> node) { // keep track of the number of visible faces in this chunk int faces = 0; if (!node.isEmpty()) { if (node.isLeaf()) { faces += renderItem(node); } List<Octree<Cube>> children = node.getChildren(); if (children != null && !children.isEmpty()) { for (Octree<Cube> child : children) { faces += renderChunk(child); } } return faces; } Where my renderItem method is the following: private int renderItem(Octree<Cube> node) { Cube cube = node.getItem(-1, -1, -1); int faces = 0; float x = node.getPosition().x; float y = node.getPosition().y; float z = node.getPosition().z; float size = cube.getSize(); Vector3f point1 = new Vector3f(-size + x, -size + y, size + z); Vector3f point2 = new Vector3f(-size + x, size + y, size + z); Vector3f point3 = new Vector3f(size + x, size + y, size + z); Vector3f point4 = new Vector3f(size + x, -size + y, size + z); Vector3f point5 = new Vector3f(-size + x, -size + y, -size + z); Vector3f point6 = new Vector3f(-size + x, size + y, -size + z); Vector3f point7 = new Vector3f(size + x, size + y, -size + z); Vector3f point8 = new Vector3f(size + x, -size + y, -size + z); TextureCoordinates tc = textureManager.getTextureCoordinates(cube.getCubeType()); // front face if (cube.isVisible(CubeSide.FRONT)) { faces++; glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point1.x, point1.y, point1.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point4.x, point4.y, point4.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point3.x, point3.y, point3.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point2.x, point2.y, point2.z); } // back face if (cube.isVisible(CubeSide.BACK)) { faces++; glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point5.x, point5.y, point5.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point6.x, point6.y, point6.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point7.x, point7.y, point7.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point8.x, point8.y, point8.z); } // left face if (cube.isVisible(CubeSide.SIDE_LEFT)) { faces++; glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point5.x, point5.y, point5.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point1.x, point1.y, point1.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point2.x, point2.y, point2.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point6.x, point6.y, point6.z); } // ETC ETC return faces; } When all this is done, I simply render my lists every frame, like this: public void render(ChunkManager chunkManager) { glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, textureManager.getCubeTextureId()); // load all chunks from the tree List<Octree<Cube>> chunks = chunkManager.getTree().getAllItems(); for (Octree<Cube> chunk : chunks) { if (frustum.cubeInFrustum(chunk.getPosition(), chunk.getSize() / 2)) { glCallList(chunk.getId()); } } } I don't know if anyone is willing to go through all of this code or maybe you can spot the problem right away, but that is basically the problem, and I can't find a solution :-) Thanks for reading and any help is appreciated!

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• How do you use blog content?

  - by fatherjack

  Do you write a blog, have you ever thought about it? I think people fall into one of a few categories when it comes to blogs, especially blogs with technical content. Writing articles furiously - daily, twice daily and reading dozens of others. Writing the odd piece of content and read plenty of others' output. Started a blog once and its fizzled out but reading lots. Thought about starting a blog someday but never got around to it, hopping into the occasional blog when a link or a Tweet takes them there. Never thought about writing one but often catching content from them when Google (or other preferred search engine) finds content related to their search. Now I am not saying that either of these is right or wrong, nor am I saying that anyone should feel any compulsion to be in any particular category. What I would say is that you as a blog reader have the power to move blog writers from one category to another. How, you might ask? How do I have any power over a blog writer? It is very simple - feedback. If you give feedback then the blog writer knows that they are reaching an audience, if there is no response then they we are simply writing down our thoughts for what could amount to nothing more than a feeble amount of exercise and a few more key stokes towards the onset of RSI. Most blogs have a mechanism to alert the writer when there are comments, and personally speaking, if an email is received saying there has been a response to a blog article then there is a rush of enthusiasm, a moment of excitement that someone is actually reading and considering the text that was submitted and made available for the whole world to read. I am relatively new to this blog game and could be in some extended honeymoon period as I have also recently been incorporated into the Simple Talk 'stable'. I can understand that once you get to the "Dizzy Heights of Ozar" (www.brentozar.com) then getting comments and feedback might not be such a pleasure and may even be rather more of a chore but that, I guess, is the price of fame. For us mere mortals starting out blogging, getting feedback (or even at the moment for me, simply the hope of getting feedback) is what keeps it going. The hope that you will pick a topic that hasn't been done recently by Brad McGehee, Grant Fritchey,  Paul Randall, Thomas LaRock or any one of the dozen of rock star bloggers listed here or others from SQLServerPedia and so on, and then do it well enough to be found, reviewed, or <shudder> (re)tweeted to bring more visitors is what we are striving for, along with the fact that the content we might produce is something that will be of benefit to others. There is only so much point to typing content that no-one is reading and putting it on a blog. You may as well just write it in a diary. A technical blog is not like, say, a blog covering photography techniques where the way to frame and take a picture stands true whether it was written last week, last year or last century - technical content goes sour, quite quickly. There isn't much call for articles about yesterdays technology unless its something that still applies to current versions too, so some content written no more than 2 years ago isn't worth having now. The combination of a piece of content that you know is going to not last long and the fact that no-one reads it is a strong force against writing anything else. Getting feedback counters that despair and gives a value to writing something new. I would say that any feedback is good but there are obviously comments that are just so negative or otherwise badly phrased that they would hasten the demise of a blog but, in general most feedback will encourage a writer. It may not be a comment that supports or agrees with the main theme of a post but if it generates discussion or opens up a previously unexplored viewpoint it is contributing to the blog and is therefore encouraging to the writer. Even if you only say "thank you" before you leave a blog, having taken a section of script to use for yourself or having been given a few links to some content that has widened your knowledge it will be so welcome to the blog owner. Isn't it also the decent thing to do, acknowledging that you have benefited from another's efforts?

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• Justifiable Perks.

  - by Phil Factor

      I was once the director of a start-up IT Company, and had the task of recruiting a proportion of the management team. As my background was in IT management, I was rather more familiar with recruiting Geeks for technology jobs, but here, one of my early tasks was interviewing a Marketing Director.  The small group of financiers had suggested a rather strange Irishman called  Halleran.  From my background in City of London dealing-rooms, I was slightly unprepared for the experience of interviewing anyone wearing a pink suit. Many of my older City colleagues would have required resuscitation after seeing his white leather shoes. However, nobody will accuse me of prejudging an interviewee. After all, many Linux experts who I’ve come to rely on have appeared for interview dressed as hobbits. In fact, the interview went well, and we had even settled his salary.  I was somewhat unprepared for the coda.    ‘And I will need to be provided with a Ferrari  by the company.’    ‘Hmm. That seems reasonable.’    Initially, he looked startled, and then a slow smile of victory spread across his face.    ‘What colour would you like?’ I asked genially.    ‘It has to be red.’ He looked very earnest on this point.    ‘Fine. I have to go past Hamleys on the way home this evening, so I’ll pick one up then for you.’    ‘Er.. Hamley’s is a toyshop, not a Ferrari Dealership.’    I stared at him in bafflement for a few seconds. ‘You’re not seriously asking for a real Ferrari are you?’     ‘Well, yes. Not for my own sake, you understand. I’d much prefer a simple run-about, but my position demands it. How could I maintain the necessary status in the office without one? How could I do my job in marketing when my grey Datsun was all too visible in the car Park? It is a tool of the job.’    ‘Excuse me a moment, but I must confer with the MD’    I popped out to see Chris, the MD. ‘Chris, I’m interviewing a lunatic in a pink suit who is trying to demand that a Ferrari is a precondition of his employment. I tried the ‘misunderstanding trick’ but it didn’t faze him.’     ‘Sorry, Phil, but we’ve got to hire him. The VCs insist on it. You’ve got to think of something that doesn’t involve committing to the purchase of a Ferrari. Current funding barely covers the rent for the building.’    ‘OK boss. Leave it to me.’    On return, I slapped O’Halleran’s file on the table with a genial, paternalistic smile. ‘Of course you should have a Ferrari. The only trouble is that it will require a justification document that can be presented to the board. I’m sure you’ll have no problem in preparing this document in the required format.’ The initial look of despair was quickly followed by a bland look of acquiescence. He had, earlier in the interview, argued with great eloquence his skill in preparing the tiresome documents that underpin the essential corporate and government deals that were vital to the success of this new enterprise. The justification of a Ferrari should be a doddle.     After the interview, Chris nervously asked how I’d fared.     ‘I think it is all solved.’    ‘… without promising a Ferrari, I hope.’    ‘Well, I did actually; on condition he justified it in writing.’    Chris issued a stream of invective. The strain of juggling the resources in an underfunded startup was beginning to show.    ‘Don’t worry. In the unlikely event of him coming back with the required document, I’ll give him mine.’    ‘Yours?’ He strode over to the window to stare down at the car park.    He needn’t have worried: I knew that his breed of marketing man could more easily lay an ostrich egg than to prepare a decent justification document. My Ferrari is still there at the back of my garage. Few know of the Ferrari cultivator, a simple inexpensive motorized device designed for the subsistence farmers of southern Italy. It is the very devil to start, but it creates a perfect tilth for the seedbed.

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• IE9 not rendering box-shadow Elements inside of Table Cells

  - by Rick Strahl

  Ran into an annoying problem today with IE 9. Slowly updating some older sites with CSS 3 tags and for the most part IE9 does a reasonably decent job of working with the new CSS 3 features. Not all by a long shot but at least some of the more useful ones like border-radius and box-shadow are supported. Until today I was happy to see that IE supported box-shadow just fine, but I ran into a problem with some old markup that uses tables for its main layout sections. I found that inside of a table cell IE fails to render a box-shadow. Below are images from Chrome (left) and IE 9 (right) of the same content: The download and purchase images are rendered with: <a href="download.asp" style="display:block;margin: 10px;"><img src="../images/download.gif" class="boxshadow roundbox" /></a> where the .boxshadow and .roundbox styles look like this:.boxshadow { -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; } .roundbox { -moz-border-radius: 6px 6px 6px 6px; -webkit-border-radius: 6px; border-radius: 6px 6px 6px 6px; } And the Problem is… collapsed Table Borders Now normally these two styles work just fine in IE 9 when applied to elements. But the box-shadow doesn't work inside of this markup - because the parent container is a table cell.<td class="sidebar" style="border-collapse: collapse"> … <a href="download.asp" style="display:block;margin: 10px;"><img src="../images/download.gif" class="boxshadow roundbox" /></a> …</td> This HTML causes the image to not show a shadow. In actuality I'm not styling inline, but as part of my browser Reset I have the following in my master .css file:table { border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0; } which has the same effect as the inline style. border-collapse by default inherits from the parent and so the TD inherits from table and tr - so TD tags are effectively collapsed. You can check out a test document that demonstrates this behavior here in this CodePaste.net snippet or run it here. How to work around this Issue To get IE9 to render the shadows inside of the TD tag correctly, I can just change the style explicitly NOT to use border-collapse:<td class="sidebar" style="border-collapse: separate; border-width: 0;"> Or better yet (thanks to David's comment below), you can add the border-collapse: separate to the .boxshadow style like this:.boxshadow { -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; border-collapse: separate; } With either of these approaches IE renders the shadows correctly. Do you really need border-collapse? Should you bother with border-collapse? I think so! Collapsed borders render flat as a single fat line if a border-width and border-color are assigned, while separated borders render a thin line with a bunch of weird white space around it or worse render a old skool 3D raised border which is terribly ugly as well. So as a matter of course in any app my browser Reset includes the above code to make sure all tables with borders render the same flat borders. As you probably know, IE has all sorts of rendering issues in tables and on backgrounds (opacity backgrounds or image backgrounds) most of which is caused by the way that IE internally uses ActiveX filters to apply these effects. Apparently collapsed borders are yet one more item that causes problems with rendering. There you have it. Another crappy failure in IE we have to check for now, just one more reason to hate Internet Explorer. Luckily this one has a reasonably easy workaround. I hope this helps out somebody and saves them the hour I spent trying to figure out what caused this problem in the first place. Resources Sample HTML document that demonstrates the behavior Run the Sample© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in HTML  Internet Explorer   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• My Codemash 2011 Retrospective

  - by Greg Malcolm

  I just got back from Codemash yesterday, and still on an adrenaline buzz. Here's my take on this years encounter: The Awesome Nearly everybody in one place Codemash is the ultimate place to catch up with community friends. This is my 3rd year visiting and I've got to know a great number of very cool people through various conferences, Give Camps and other community events. I'm finding more and more that Codemash is the best place to catch up with everybody regardless of technology interest or location. Of course I always make a whole bunch more friends while I'm there! Yay! Open Spaced I found the open spaces didn't work so well last year. This year things went a lot smoother and the topics were engaging and fresh. While I miss Alan Steven's approach of running it like an agile project, it was very cool to see that it evolving. Laptops were often cracked open, not just once but frequently! For example: Jasmine - Paired on a javascript kata using the Jasmine javascript test runner J - Sat in on a J demo from local J enthusiast, Tracy Harms Watir - More pairing, this time using Ruby with the watir-webdriver through cucumber. I'd mostly forgotten that Cucumber runs just fine without Rails. It made a change to do without. The other spaces were engaging too, but I think that's enough for that topic. Javascript Shenanigans I've already mentioned that I attended a Jasmine kata session. Jasmine is close to my heart right now every since I discovered it while on the hunt for a decent Javascript testing framework for a javascript koans project earlier this year. Well, it also got covered in the Java Precompiler and Pillar's vendor session, which was great to see. Node.js was also a reoccurring theme. Node.js in a nutshell? It's an extremely scalable Event based I/O server which runs on Javascript. I'd already encountered through a Startup Weekend project and have been noticing increasing interest of late. After encountering more node.js driven excitement from my peers at codemash I absolutely had to attend the open space on it. At least 20 people turned up and by the end we had some answers, a whole ton of new questions and an impromptu user group in the form of a twitter channel (#nodemash). I have no idea where this is going to go or how big it is going to become, but if it can cross the chasm into the enterprise it could become huge... Scala Koans I'm a bit of a Koans addict, and I really need more exposure to functional languages so I gave the Scala Koans precompiler a try. Great fun! I'm really glad I attended because I found I had a whole ton of questions. Currently the koans are available here, and the answers are here. Opportunities While we're on the subject can we change the subject now? Hai Gregory, You really need to keep the drinking for later in the day. I mean seriously, you're 34 and you still do this every single time! Sure, you made it to Chad Fowler keynote ok, but you looking a rather pale weren't you? Also might have been nice to attend 'Netflicks in the Cloud' instead of 'Sleeping It Off For People Who Should Know Better'. Kthxbye PS: Stop talking to yourself Not that I entirely regret it, I've had some of my greatest insights through late night drunken conversations at the CodeMash bar. Just might be nice to reign it in a little and get something out of the next morning too. Diversity This is something that is in the back of my mind because of conversations at Codemash as well as throughout the year; I'm realizing more and more how discouraging the IT profession is for women. I notice in the community there has been a lot of attention paid to stamping out harrasment, which is good, but there also seems to be a massive PR issue. I really don't have any solutions, but I figure it can't hurt to pay more attention to whats going on... And in Other News I now have a picture of Chad Fowler giving me more cowbell! Sadly I managed to lose the cowbell later on. Hopefully it's gone to a Better Place. The Womack Family Band joined in with the musicians jam this year. There's my cowbell again! Why must you hide from me? I also finally went in the water for the first time in all the I've been coming to codemash. Why did I wait so long?!?

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• Best way to store a large amount of game objects and update the ones onscreen

  - by user3002473

  Good afternoon guys! I'm a young beginner game developer working on my first large scale game project and I've run into a situation where I'm not quite sure what the best solution may be (if there is a lone solution). The question may be vague (if anyone can think of a better title after having read the question, please edit it) or broad but I'm not quite sure what to do and I thought it would help just to discuss the problem with people more educated in the field. Before we get started, here are some of the questions I've looked at for help in the past: Best way to keep track of game objects Elegant way to simulate large amounts of entities within a game world What is the most efficient container to store dynamic game objects in? I've also read articles about different data structures commonly used in games to store game objects such as this one about slot maps, but none of them are really what I'm looking for. Also, if it helps at all I'm using Python 3 to design the game. It has to be Python 3, if I could I would use C++ or Unityscript or something else, but I'm restricted to having to use Python 3. My game will be a form of side scroller shooter game. In said game the player will traverse large rooms with large amounts of enemies and other game objects to update (think some of the larger areas in Cave Story or Iji). The player obviously can't see the entire room all at once, so there is a viewport that follows the player around and renders only a selection of the room and the game objects that it contains. This is not a foreign concept. The part that's getting me confused has to do with how certain game objects are updated. Some of them are to be updated constantly, regardless of whether or not they can be seen. Other objects however are only to be updated when they are onscreen (for example, an enemy would only be updated to react to the player when it is onscreen or when it is in a certain range of the screen). Another problem is that game objects have to be easily referable by other game objects; something that happens in the player's update() method may affect another object in the world. Collision detection in games is always a serious problem. I need a way of containing the game objects such that it minimizes the number of cases when testing for collisions against one another. The final problem is that of creating and destroying game objects. I think this problem is pretty self explanatory. To store the game objects then I've considered a number of different methods. The original method I had was to simply store all the objects in a hash table by an id. This method was simple, and decently fast as it allows all the objects to be looked up in O(1) complexity, and also allows them to be deleted fairly easily. Hash collisions would not be a major problem; I wasn't originally planning on using computer generated ids to store the game objects I was going to rely on them all using ids given to them by the game designer (such names would be strings like 'Player' or 'EnemyWeapon4'), and even if I did use computer generated ids, if I used a decent hashing algorithm then the chances of collisions would be around 1 in 4 billion. The problem with using a hash table however is that it is inefficient in checking to see what objects are in range of the viewport. Considering the fact that certain game objects move (as well as the viewport itself), the only solution I could think of in order to only update objects that are in the viewport would be to iterate through every object in the hash table and check if it is in the viewport or not, updating only the ones that are in the valid area. This would be incredibly slow in scenarios where the amount of game objects exceeds 500, or even 200. The second solution was to store everything in a 2-d list. The world is partitioned up into cells (a tilemap essentially), where each cell or tile is the same size and is square. Each cell would contain a list of the game objects that are currently occupying it (each game object would be inserted into a cell depending on the center of the object's collision mask). A 2-d list would allow me to take the top-left and bottom-right corners of the viewport and easily grab a rectangular area of the grid containing only the cells containing entities that are in valid range to be updated. This method also solves the problem of collision detection; when I take an entity I can find the cell that it is currently in, then check only against entities in it's cell and the 8 cells around it. One problem with this system however is that it prohibits easy lookup of game objects. One solution I had would be to simultaneously keep a hash table that would contain all the positions of the objects in the 2-d list indexed by the id of said object. The major problem with a 2-d list is that it would need to be rebuilt every single game frame (along with the hash table of object positions), which may be a serious detriment to game speed. Both systems have ups and downs and seem to solve some of each other's problems, however using them both together doesn't seem like the best solution either. If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, comments, opinions or solutions on new data structures or better implementations of the existing data structures I have in mind, please post, any and all criticism and help is welcome. Thanks in advance! EDIT: Please don't close the question because it has a bad title, I'm just bad with names!

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• Annoying flickering of vertices and edges (possible z-fighting)

  - by Belgin

  I'm trying to make a software z-buffer implementation, however, after I generate the z-buffer and proceed with the vertex culling, I get pretty severe discrepancies between the vertex depth and the depth of the buffer at their projected coordinates on the screen (i.e. zbuffer[v.xp][v.yp] != v.z, where xp and yp are the projected x and y coordinates of the vertex v), sometimes by a small fraction of a unit and sometimes by 2 or 3 units. Here's what I think is happening: Each triangle's data structure holds the plane's (that is defined by the triangle) coefficients (a, b, c, d) computed from its three vertices from their normal: void computeNormal(Vertex *v1, Vertex *v2, Vertex *v3, double *a, double *b, double *c) { double a1 = v1 -> x - v2 -> x; double a2 = v1 -> y - v2 -> y; double a3 = v1 -> z - v2 -> z; double b1 = v3 -> x - v2 -> x; double b2 = v3 -> y - v2 -> y; double b3 = v3 -> z - v2 -> z; *a = a2*b3 - a3*b2; *b = -(a1*b3 - a3*b1); *c = a1*b2 - a2*b1; } void computePlane(Poly *p) { double x = p -> verts[0] -> x; double y = p -> verts[0] -> y; double z = p -> verts[0] -> z; computeNormal(p -> verts[0], p -> verts[1], p -> verts[2], &p -> a, &p -> b, &p -> c); p -> d = p -> a * x + p -> b * y + p -> c * z; } The z-buffer just holds the smallest depth at the respective xy coordinate by somewhat casting rays to the polygon (I haven't quite got interpolation right yet so I'm using this slower method until I do) and determining the z coordinate from the reversed perspective projection formulas (which I got from here: double z = -(b*Ez*y + a*Ez*x - d*Ez)/(b*y + a*x + c*Ez - b*Ey - a*Ex); Where x and y are the pixel's coordinates on the screen; a, b, c, and d are the planes coefficients; Ex, Ey, and Ez are the eye's (camera's) coordinates. This last formula does not accurately give the exact vertices' z coordinate at their projected x and y coordinates on the screen, probably because of some floating point inaccuracy (i.e. I've seen it return something like 3.001 when the vertex's z-coordinate was actually 2.998). Here is the portion of code that hides the vertices that shouldn't be visible: for(i = 0; i < shape.nverts; ++i) { double dist = shape.verts[i].z; if(z_buffer[shape.verts[i].yp][shape.verts[i].xp].z < dist) shape.verts[i].visible = 0; else shape.verts[i].visible = 1; } How do I solve this issue? EDIT I've implemented the near and far planes of the frustum, with 24 bit accuracy, and now I have some questions: Is this what I have to do this in order to resolve the flickering? When I compare the z value of the vertex with the z value in the buffer, do I have to convert the z value of the vertex to z' using the formula, or do I convert the value in the buffer back to the original z, and how do I do that? What are some decent values for near and far? Thanks in advance.

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• NDepend Evaluation: Part 3

  - by Anthony Trudeau

  NDepend is a Visual Studio add-in designed for intense code analysis with the goal of high code quality. NDepend uses a number of metrics and aggregates the data in pleasing static and active visual reports. My evaluation of NDepend will be broken up into several different parts. In the first part of the evaluation I looked at installing the add-in.  And in the last part I went over my first impressions including an overview of the features.  In this installment I provide a little more detail on a few of the features that I really like. Dependency Matrix The dependency matrix is one of the rich visual components provided with NDepend.  At a glance it lets you know where you have coupling problems including cycles.  It does this with number indicating the weight of the dependency and a color-coding that indicates the nature of the dependency. Green and blue cells are direct dependencies (with the difference being whether the relationship is from row-to-column or column-to-row).  Black cells are the ones that you really want to know about.  These indicate that you have a cycle.  That is, type A refers to type B and type B also refers to Type A. But, that’s not the end of the story.  A handy pop-up appears when you hover over the cell in question.  It explains the color, the dependency, and provides several interesting links that will teach you more than you want to know about the dependency. You can double-click the problem cells to explode the dependency.  That will show the dependencies on a method-by-method basis allowing you to more easily target and fix the problem.  When you’re done you can click the back button on the toolbar. Dependency Graph The dependency graph is another component provided.  It’s complementary to the dependency matrix, but it isn’t as easy to identify dependency issues using the window. On a positive note, it does provide more information than the matrix. My biggest issue with the dependency graph is determining what is shown.  This was not readily obvious.  I ended up using the navigation buttons to get an acceptable view.  I would have liked to choose what I see. Once you see the types you want you can get a decent idea of coupling strength based on the width of the dependency lines.  Double-arrowed lines are problematic and are shown in red.  The size of the boxes will be related to the metric being displayed.  This is controlled using the Box Size drop-down in the toolbar.  Personally, I don’t find the size of the box to be helpful, so I change it to Constant Font. One nice thing about the display is that you can see the entire path of dependencies when you hover over a type.  This is done by color-coding the dependencies and dependants.  It would be nice if selecting the box for the type would lock the highlighting in place. I did find a perhaps unintended work-around to the color-coding.  You can lock the color-coding in by hovering over the type, right-clicking, and then clicking on the canvas area to clear the pop-up menu.  You can then do whatever with it including saving it to an image file with the color-coding. CQL NDepend uses a code query language (CQL) to work with your code just like it was a database.  CQL cannot be confused with the robustness of T-SQL or even LINQ, but it represents an impressive attempt at providing an expressive way to enumerate and interrogate your code. There are two main windows you’ll use when working with CQL.  The CQL Query Explorer allows you to define what queries (rules) are run as part of a report – I immediately unselected rules that I don’t want in my results.  The CQL Query Edit window is where you can view or author your own rules.  The explorer window is pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t mention it further other than to say that any queries you author will appear in the custom group. Authoring your own queries is really hard to screw-up.  The Intellisense-like pop-ups tell you what you can do while making composition easy.  I was able to create a query within two minutes of playing with the editor.  My query warns if any types that are interfaces don’t start with an “I”. WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT TYPES WHERE IsInterface AND !NameLike “I” The results from the CQL Query Edit window are immediate. That fact makes it useful for ad hoc querying.  It’s worth mentioning two things that could make the experience smoother.  First, out of habit from using Visual Studio I expect to be able to scroll and press Tab to select an item in the list (like Intellisense).  You have to press Enter when you scroll to the item you want.  Second, the commands are case-sensitive.  I don’t see a really good reason to enforce that. CQL has a lot of potential not just in enforcing code quality, but also enforcing architectural constraints that your enterprise has defined. Up Next My next update will be the final part of the evaluation.  I will summarize my experience and provide my conclusions on the NDepend add-in. ** View Part 1 of the Evaluation ** ** View Part 2 of the Evaluation ** Disclaimer: Patrick Smacchia contacted me about reviewing NDepend. I received a free license in return for sharing my experiences and talking about the capabilities of the add-in on this site. There is no expectation of a positive review elicited from the author of NDepend.

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• BizTalk 2009 - Custom Functoid Wizard

  - by StuartBrierley

  When creating BizTalk maps you may find that there are times when you need perform tasks that the standard functoids do not cover.  At other times you may find yourself reapeating a pattern of standard functoids over and over again, adding visual complexity to an otherwise simple process.  In these cases you may find it preferable to create your own custom functoids.  In the past I have created a number of custom functoids from scratch, but recently I decided to try out the Custom Functoid Wizard for BizTalk 2009. After downloading and installing the wizard you should start Visual Studio and select to create a new BizTalk Server Functoid Project. Following the splash screen you will be presented with the General Properties screen, where you can set the classname, namespace, assembly name and strong name key file. The next screen is the first set of properties for the functoid.  First of all is the fuctoid ID; this must be a value above 6000. You should also then set the name, tooltip and description of the functoid.  The name will appear in the visual studio toolbox and the tooltip on hover over in the toolbox.  The descrition will be shown when you configure the functoid inputs when using it in a map; as such it should provide a decent level of information to allow the functoid to be used. Next you must set the category, exception mesage, icon and implementation language.  The category will affect the positioning of the functoid within the toolbox and also some of the behaviours of the functoid. We must then define the parameters and connections for our new functoid.  Here you can define the names and types of your input parameters along with the minimum and maximum number of input connections.  You will also need to define the types of connections accepted and the output type of the functoid. Finally you can click finish and your custom functoid project will be created. The results of this process can be seen in the solution explorer, where you will see that a project, functoid class file and a resource file have been created for you. If you open the class file you will see that the following code has been created for you: The "base" function sets all the properties that you previsouly detailed in the custom functoid wizard.  public TestFunctoids():base()  {    int functoidID;    // This has to be a number greater than 6000    functoidID = System.Convert.ToInt32(resmgr.GetString("FunctoidId"));    this.ID = functoidID;    // Set Resource strings, bitmaps    SetupResourceAssembly(ResourceName, Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());    SetName("FunctoidName");                     SetTooltip("FunctoidToolTip");    SetDescription("FunctoidDescription");    SetBitmap("FunctoidBitmap");    // Minimum and maximum parameters that the functoid accepts    this.SetMinParams(2);    this.SetMaxParams(2);    /// Function name that needs to be called when this Functoid is invoked.    /// Put this in GAC.    SetExternalFunctionName(GetType().Assembly.FullName,     "MyCompany.BizTalk.Functoids.TestFuntoids.TestFunctoids", "Execute");    // Category for this functoid.    this.Category = FunctoidCategory.String;    // Input and output Connection type    this.OutputConnectionType = ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord;    AddInputConnectionType(ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord);   } The "Execute" function provides a skeleton function that contains the code to be executed by your new functoid.  The inputs and outputs should match those you defined in the Custom Functoid Wizard.   public System.Int32 Execute(System.Int32 Cool)   {    ResourceManager resmgr = new ResourceManager(ResourceName, Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());    try    {     // TODO: Implement Functoid Logic    }    catch (Exception e)    {     throw new Exception(resmgr.GetString("FunctoidException"), e);    }   } Opening the resource file you will see some of the various string values that you defined in the Custom Functoid Wizard - Name, Tooltip, Description and Exception. You can also select to look at the image resources.  This will display the embedded icon image for the functoid.  To change this right click the icon and select "Import from File". Once you have completed the skeleton code you can then look at trying out your functoid. To do this you will need to build the project, copy the compiled DLL to C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009\Developer Tools\Mapper Extensions and then refresh the toolbox in visual studio.

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• 4 Ways Your Brand Can Jump From the Edge of Space

  - by Mike Stiles

  Can your brand’s social media content captivate the world and make it hold its collective breath? Can you put something on the screen that’s so compelling that your audience can’t look away? Will they want to make sure their friends see it so they can talk about it? If not, you’re probably not with Red Bull. I was impressed with Red Bull’s approach to social content even before Felix Baumgartner’s stunning skydive from the edge of space. And then they did this. According to Visible Measures, videos of the jump scored 50 million views in 4 days. 1,700 clips were generated from both official and organic sources. The live stream was the most watched YouTube Stream of all time (8 million concurrent viewers). The 2nd most watched live stream was…Felix’ first attempt Oct. 9. Are you ready to compete with that? I ask that question because some brands are still out there tying themselves up in knots about whether or not they should tweet. The public’s time and attention are scarce commodities, commodities they value greatly. The competition amongst brands for that time and attention is intense and going up like Felix’s capsule. If you still view your press releases as “content,” you won’t even be counted as being among the competition. Here are 5 lessons learned from Red Bull’s big leap: 1. They have a total understanding of their target market and audience. Not only do they have an understanding of it, they do something about it. They act on it. They fill the majority of their thoughts with what the audience wants. They hunger for wild applause from that audience. They want to do things that embrace the audience’s lifestyle and immerse in it so the target will identify the brand as “one of them.” Takeaway: BE your target market. 2. They deliver content that strikes the audience right where they emotionally live. If you want your content to have impact, you have to make your audience’s heart race, or make them tear up, or make them laugh. Label them “data points” all you want, but humans are emotional creatures. No message connects that’s not carried in on an emotion. Takeaway: You’re on the inside. If your content doesn’t make you say “wow,” it’s unlikely it will register with fans. 3. They put aside old school marketing and don’t let their content be degraded into a commercial. Their execs seem to understand the value in keeping a lid on the hard sell. So many brands just can’t bring themselves to disconnect advertising and social content. The result is, otherwise decent content gets contaminated with a desperation the viewer can smell a mile away. Think the Baumgartner skydive didn’t do Red Bull any good since he wasn’t drinking one on the way down while singing a jingle? Analysis company Taykey discovered that at the peak of the skydive buzz, about 1% of all online conversation was about the jump. Mentions of Red Bull constituted 1/3 of 1% of all Internet activity. Views of other Red Bull videos also shot up. Takeaway: Chill out with the ads. Your brand will get full credit for entertaining/informing fans in a relevant way, provided you do it. 4. They don’t hesitate to ask, “What can we do next”? Most corporate cultures are a virtual training facility for “we can’t do that.” Few are encouraged to innovate or think big, if think at all. Thinking big involves faith, and work. It means freedom and letting employees run a little wild with their ideas. There will always be the opportunity to let fear of everything that moves creep in and kill grand visions dead in their tracks. Experimenting must be allowed. Failure must be allowed. Red Bull didn’t think big. They thought mega. They tried to outdo themselves. Felix could have gone ahead and jumped halfway up, thinking, “This is still relatively high up. Good enough.” But that wouldn’t have left us breathless. Takeaway: Go for it. Jump. In putting up social properties and gathering fans of your brand, you’ve basically invited people to a party. A good host doesn’t just set out warm beer and stale chips because that’s inexpensive and easy. Be on the lookout for ways to make your guests walk away saying, “That was epic.”

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• Synergy - easy share of keyboard and mouse between multiple computers

  Did you ever have the urge to share one set of keyboard and mouse between multiple machines? If so, please read on... Using multiple machines Honestly, as a software craftsman it is my daily business to run multiple machines - either physical or virtual - to be able to solve my customers' requirements. Recent hardware equipment allows this very easily. For laptops it's a no-brainer to attach a second or even a third screen in order to extend your native display. This works quite handy and in my case I used to attached two additional screens - one via HD15 connector, the other via HDMI. But... as it's a laptop and therefore a mobile unit there are slight restrictions. Detaching and re-attaching all cables when changing locations is one of them but hardware limitations, too. After all, it's a laptop and not a workstation. I guess, that anyone working in IT (or ICT) has more than one machine at their workplace or their home office and at least I find it quite annoying to have multiple sets of keyboard and mouse conquering my remaining space on my desk. Despite the ugly looks of all those cables and whatsoever 'chaos of distraction' I prefer a more clean solution and working environment. This allows me to actually focus on my work and tasks to do rather than to worry about choosing the right combination of keyboard/mouse. My current workplace is a patch work of various pieces of hardware (approx. 2-3 years): DIY desktop on Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit, Core2 Duo (E7400, 2.8GHz), 4GB RAM, 2x 250GB HDD, nVidia GPU 512MB Dell Inspiron 1525 on Windows 8 64-bit, 4GB RAM, 200GB HDD HP Compaq 6720s on Windows Vista 32-bit, Core2 Duo (T5670, 1.8GHz), 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD Mac mini on Mac OS X 10.7, Core i5 (2.3 GHz), 2GB RAM, 500GB HDD I know... Not the latest and greatest but a decent combination to work with. New system(s) is/are already on the shopping list but I live in the 'wrong' country to buy computer hardware. So, the next trip abroad will provide me with some new stuff. Using multiple operating systems The list of hardware above already names different operating systems, and actually I have only one preference: Linux. But still my job as a software craftsman for Visual FoxPro and .NET development requires other OSes, too. Not a big deal, it's just like this. Additionally to those physical machines, there are a bunch of virtual machines around. Most of them running either Windows XP or Windows 7. Since years I have the practice that each development for one customer is isolated into its own virtual machine and environment. This keeps it clean and version-safe. But as you can easily imagine with that setup there are a couple of constraints referring to keyboard and mouse. Usually, those systems require their own pieces of hardware attached. As stated, I don't like clutter on my desk's surface, so a cross-platform solution has to come in here. In the past, I tried it with various applications, hardware or network protocols like X11, RDP, NX, TeamViewer, RAdmin, KVM switch, etc. but the problem in this case is that they either allow you to remotely connect to the other system or exclusively 'bind' your peripherals to the active system. Not optimal after all. Synergy to the rescue Quote from their website: "Synergy lets you easily share your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers on your desk, and it's Free and Open Source. Just move your mouse off the edge of one computer's screen on to another. You can even share all of your clipboards. All you need is a network connection. Synergy is cross-platform (works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)." Yep, that's it! All I need for my setup here... Actually, I couldn't believe it myself that I didn't stumble over synergy earlier but 'Get over it' and there we go. And despite the fact that it is Open Source, no, it's also for free. Donations for the developers are very welcome and recently they introduced Synergy Premium. A possibility to buy so-called premium votes that can be used to put more weight / importance on specific issues or bugs that you would like the developers to look into. Installation and configuration Simply download the installation packages for your systems of choice, run the installer and enter some minor information about your network setup. I chose my desktop machine for the role of the Synergy server and configured my screen setup as follows: The screen setup allows you currently to build or connect up to 15 machines. The number of screens can be higher as those machine might have multiple screens physically attached. Synergy takes this into the overall calculations and simply works as expected. I tried it for fun with a second monitor each connected to both laptops to have a total number of 6 active screens. No flaws after all - stunning! All the other machines are configured as clients like so: Side note: The screenshot was taken on Windows 8 and pasted via clipboard into Gimp running on Ubuntu. Resume Synergy is now definitely in my box of tools for my daily work, and amongst the first pieces of software I install after the operating system. It just simplifies my life and cleans my desk. Never again without Synergy!Now, only waiting for an Android version to integrate my Galaxy Tab 10.1, too. ;-) Please, check out that superb product and enjoy sharing one keyboard, one mouse and one clipboard between your various machines and operating systems.

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• What Counts for A DBA: Observant

  - by drsql

  When walking up to the building where I work, I can see CCTV cameras placed here and there for monitoring access to the building. We are required to wear authorization badges which could be checked at any time. Do we have enemies?  Of course! No one is 100% safe; even if your life is a fairy tale, there is always a witch with an apple waiting to snack you into a thousand years of slumber (or at least so I recollect from elementary school.) Even Little Bo Peep had to keep a wary lookout.    We nerdy types (or maybe it was just me?) generally learned on the school playground to keep an eye open for unprovoked attack from simpler, but more muscular souls, and take steps to avoid messy confrontations well in advance. After we’d apprehensively negotiated adulthood with varying degrees of success, these skills of watching for danger, and avoiding it,  translated quite well to the technical careers so many of us were destined for. And nowhere else is this talent for watching out for irrational malevolence so appropriate as in a career as a production DBA.   It isn’t always active malevolence that the DBA needs to watch out for, but the even scarier quirks of common humanity.  A large number of the issues that occur in the enterprise happen just randomly or even just one time ever in a spurious manner, like in the case where a person decided to download the entire MSDN library of software, cross join every non-indexed billion row table together, and simultaneously stream the HD feed of 5 different sporting events, making the network access slow while the corporate online sales just started. The decent DBA team, like the going, gets tough under such circumstances. They spring into action, checking all of the sources of active information, observes the issue is no longer happening now, figures that either it wasn’t the database’s fault and that the reboot of the whatever device on the network fixed the problem.  This sort of reactive support is good, and will be the initial reaction of even excellent DBAs, but it is not the end of the story if you really want to know what happened and avoid getting called again when it isn’t even your fault.   When fires start raging within the corporate software forest, the DBA’s instinct is to actively find a way to douse the flames and get back to having no one in the company have any idea who they are.  Even better for them is to find a way of killing a potential problem while the fires are small, long before they can be classified as raging. The observant DBA will have already been monitoring the server environment for months in advance.  Most troubles, such as disk space and security intrusions, can be predicted and dealt with by alerting systems, whereas other trouble can come out of the blue and requires a skill of observing ongoing conditions and noticing inexplicable changes that could signal an emerging problem.  You can’t automate the DBA, because the bankable skill of a DBA is in detecting the early signs of unexpected problems, and working out how to deal with them before anyone else notices them.    To achieve this, the DBA will check the situation as it is currently happening,  and in many cases is likely to have been the person who submitted the problem to the level 1 support person in the first place, just to let the support team know of impending issues (always well received, I tell you what!). Database and host computer settings, configurations, and even critical data might be profiled and captured for later comparisons. He’ll use Monitoring tools, built-in, commercial (Not to be too crassly commercial or anything, but there is one such tool is SQL Monitor) and lots of homebrew monitoring tools to monitor for problems and changes in the server environment.   You will know that you have it right when a support call comes in and you can look at your monitoring tools and quickly respond that “response time is well within the normal range, the query that supports the failing interface works perfectly and has actually only been called 67% as often as normal, so I am more than willing to help diagnose the problem, but it isn’t the database server’s fault and is probably a client or networking slowdown causing the interface to be used less frequently than normal.” And that is the best thing for any DBA to observe…

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• What are some concise and comprehensive introductory guide to unit testing for a self-taught programmer [closed]

  - by Superbest

  I don't have much formal training in programming and I have learned most things by looking up solutions on the internet to practical problems I have. There are some areas which I think would be valuable to learn, but which ended up both being difficult to learn and easy to avoid learning for a self-taught programmer. Unit testing is one of them. Specifically, I am interested in tests in and for C#/.NET applications using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools in Visual Studio 2010 and/or 2012, but I really want a good introduction to the principles so language and IDE shouldn't matter much. At this time I'm interested in relatively trivial tests for small or medium sized programs (development time of weeks or months and mostly just myself developing). I don't necessarily intend to do test-driven development (I am aware that some say unit testing alone is supposed to be for developing features in TDD, and not an assurance that there are no bugs in the software, but unit testing is often the only kind of testing for which I have resources). I have found this tutorial which I feel gave me a decent idea of what unit tests and TDD looks like, but in trying to apply these ideas to my own projects, I often get confused by questions I can't answer and don't know how to answer, such as: What parts of my application and what sorts of things aren't necessarily worth testing? How fine grained should my tests be? Should they test every method and property separately, or work with a larger scope? What is a good naming convention for test methods? (since apparently the name of the method is the only way I will be able to tell from a glance at the test results table what works in my program and what doesn't) Is it bad to have many asserts in one test method? Since apparently VS2012 reports only that "an Assert.IsTrue failed within method MyTestMethod", and if MyTestMethod has 10 Assert.IsTrue statements, it will be irritating to figure out why a test is failing. If a lot of the functionality deals with writing and reading data to/from the disk in a not-exactly trivial fashion, how do I test that? If I provide a bunch of files as input by placing them in the program's directory, do I have to copy those files to the test project's bin/Debug folder now? If my program works with a large body of data and execution takes minutes or more, should my tests have it do the whole use all of the real data, a subset of it, or simulated data? If latter, how do I decide on the subset or how to simulate? Closely related to the previous point, if a class is such that its main operation happens in a state that is arrived to by the program after some involved operations (say, a class makes calculations on data derived from a few thousands of lines of code analyzing some raw data) how do I test just that class without inevitably ending up testing that class and all the other code that brings it to that state along with it? In general, what kind of approach should I use for test initialization? (hopefully that is the correct term, I mean preparing classes for testing by filling them in with appropriate data) How do I deal with private members? Do I just suck it up and assume that "not public = shouldn't be tested"? I have seen people suggest using private accessors and reflection, but these feel like clumsy and unsuited for regular use. Are these even good ideas? Is there anything like design patterns concerning testing specifically? I guess the main themes in what I'd like to learn more about are, (1) what are the overarching principles that should be followed (or at least considered) in every testing effort and (2) what are popular rules of thumb for writing tests. For example, at one point I recall hearing from someone that if a method is longer than 200 lines, it should be refactored - not a universally correct rule, but it has been quite helpful since I'd otherwise happily put hundreds of lines in single methods and then wonder why my code is so hard to read. Similarly I've found ReSharpers suggestions on member naming style and other things to be quite helpful in keeping my codebases sane. I see many resources both online and in print that talk about testing in the context of large applications (years of work, 10s of people or more). However, because I've never worked on such large projects, this context is very unfamiliar to me and makes the material difficult to follow and relate to my real world problems. Speaking of software development in general, advice given with the assumptions of large projects isn't always straightforward to apply to my own, smaller endeavors. Summary So my question is: What are some resources to learn about unit testing, for a hobbyist, self-taught programmer without much formal training? Ideally, I'm looking for a short and simple "bible of unit testing" which I can commit to memory, and then apply systematically by repeatedly asking myself "is this test following the bible of testing closely enough?" and then amending discrepancies if it doesn't.

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• Run CGI in IIS 7 to work with GET without Requiring POST Request

  - by Mohamed Meligy

  I'm trying to migrate an old CGI application from an existing Windows 2003 server (IIS 6.0) where it works just fine to a new Windows 2008 server with IIS 7.0 where we're getting the following problem: After setting up the module handler and everything, I find that I can only access the CGI application (rdbweb.exe) file if I'm calling it via POST request (form submit from another page). If I just try to type in the URL of the file (issuing a GET request) I get the following error: HTTP Error 502.2 - Bad Gateway The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers. The headers it did return are "Exception EInOutError in module rdbweb.exe at 00039B44. I/O error 6. ". This is a very old application for one of our clients. When we tried to call the vendor they said we need to pay ~ $3000 annual support fee in order to start the talk about it. Of course I'm trying to avoid that! Note that: If we create a normal HTML form that submits to "rdbweb.exe", we get the CGI working normally. We can't use this as workaround though because some pages in the application link to "rdbweb.exe" with normal link not form submit. If we run "rdbweb.exe". from a Console (Command Prompt) Window not IIS, we get the normal HTML we'd typically expect, no problem. We have tried the following: Ensuring the CGI module mapped to "rdbweb.exe".in IIS has all permissions (read, write, execute) enabled and also all verbs are allowed not just specific ones, also tried allowing GET, POST explicitely. Ensuring the application bool has "enable 32 bit applications" set to true. Ensuring the website runs with an account that has full permissions on the "rdbweb.exe".file and whole website (although we know it "read", "execute" should be enough). Ensuring the machine wide IIS setting for "ISAPI and CGI Restrictions" has the full path to "rdbweb.exe".allowed. Making sure we have the latest Windows Updates (for IIS6 we found knowledge base articles stating bugs that require hot fixes for IIS6, but nothing similar was found for IIS7). Changing the module from CGI to Fast CGI, not working also Now the only remaining possibility we have instigated is the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/145661 - Which is about: CGI Error: The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers. The headers it did return are: the article suggests the following solution: Modify the source code for the CGI application header output. The following is an example of a correct header: print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n"; print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n\n"; Unfortunately we do not have the source to try this out, and I'm not sure anyway whether this is the issue we're having. Can you help me with this problem? Is there a way to make the application work without requiring POST request? Note that on the old IIS6 server the application is working just fine, and I could not find any special IIS configuration that I may want to try its equivalent on IIS7.

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• How do I remove a root kit from Windows XP?

  - by Chloe

  I was looking for root kits following these instructions http://computersight.com/software/how-to-manually-remove-rootkit/ and saw this in my boot log: Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\awhk9fmc.SYS I tried to search for that filename in Google but there was absolutely nothing found. I tried to look at the file on the disk but could not find it. Nearly every other file is there. I even tried to boot in Windows 98 and mount the NTFS and see the file, but it still wasn't there. I ran a full scan with Microsoft Security Essentials but it found nothing. When I rebooted, I saw this line instead: Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\a6n163gl.SYS How can I remove this? How can I find out what it does? How can I find out when it was put in? How can I find out who wrote it? Here is my full boot log: Service Pack 3 10 31 2012 17:35:36.500 Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\ntoskrnl.exe Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\hal.dll Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\KDCOM.DLL Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\BOOTVID.dll Loaded driver sptd.sys Loaded driver ACPI.sys Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\WMILIB.SYS Loaded driver pci.sys Loaded driver isapnp.sys Loaded driver pciide.sys Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\PCIIDEX.SYS Loaded driver MountMgr.sys Loaded driver ftdisk.sys Loaded driver PartMgr.sys Loaded driver VolSnap.sys Loaded driver atapi.sys Loaded driver disk.sys Loaded driver \WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\CLASSPNP.SYS Loaded driver fltmgr.sys Loaded driver sr.sys Loaded driver MpFilter.sys Loaded driver KSecDD.sys Loaded driver WudfPf.sys Loaded driver Ntfs.sys Loaded driver NDIS.sys Loaded driver uagp35.sys Loaded driver Mup.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\amdk7.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\sisgrp.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\i8042prt.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\mouclass.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\kbdclass.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\imapi.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\cdrom.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\redbook.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\GEARAspiWDM.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\cmuda.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\usbohci.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\usbehci.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\sisnicxp.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\avzk9sf5.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\fdc.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\serial.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\serenum.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\parport.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\gameenum.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\serscan.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\DrmCAudio.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\audstub.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\rasl2tp.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\ndistapi.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\ndiswan.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\raspppoe.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\raspptp.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\msgpc.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\psched.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\ptilink.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\raspti.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\tap0901.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\termdd.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\swenum.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\update.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\mssmbios.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\dtsoftbus01.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\NDProxy.SYS Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\NDProxy.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\usbhub.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\flpydisk.sys Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\lbrtfdc.SYS Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Sfloppy.SYS Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\i2omgmt.SYS Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Changer.SYS Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Cdaudio.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Fs_Rec.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Null.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Beep.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\vga.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\mnmdd.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\DRIVERS\RDPCDD.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Msfs.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Npfs.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\rasacd.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\ipsec.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\tcpip.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\netbt.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\afd.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\netbios.sys Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\PCIDump.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\srvkp.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\rdbss.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\mrxsmb.sys Loaded driver Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\ipnat.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\wanarp.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Fips.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\ctxusbm.sys Loaded driver \??\C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\cbfs3.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Fastfat.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Cdfs.SYS Did not load driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\rdbss.sys Did not load driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\mrxsmb.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\wdmaud.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\sysaudio.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\splitter.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\aec.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\swmidi.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\DMusic.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\kmixer.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\drmkaud.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\mrxdav.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\ParVdm.SYS Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\StarOpen.SYS Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\srv.sys Did not load driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\ipnat.sys Loaded driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\HTTP.sys

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• How to setup linux permissions for the WWW folder?

  - by Xeoncross

  Updated Summery The /var/www directory is owned by root:root which means that no one can use it and it's entirely useless. Since we all want a web server that actually works (and no-one should be logging in as "root"), then we need to fix this. Only two entities need access. PHP/Perl/Ruby/Python all need access to the folders and files since they create many of them (i.e. /uploads/). These scripting languages should be running under nginx or apache (or even some other thing like FastCGI for PHP). The developers How do they get access? I know that someone, somewhere has done this before. With however-many billions of websites out there you would think that there would be more information on this topic. I know that 777 is full read/write/execute permission for owner/group/other. So this doesn't seem to be needed as it leaves random users full permissions. What permissions are need to be used on /var/www so that... Source control like git or svn Users in a group like "websites" (or even added to "www-data") Servers like apache or lighthttpd And PHP/Perl/Ruby can all read, create, and run files (and directories) there? If I'm correct, Ruby and PHP scripts are not "executed" directly - but passed to an interpreter. So there is no need for execute permission on files in /var/www...? Therefore, it seems like the correct permission would be chmod -R 1660 which would make all files shareable by these four entities all files non-executable by mistake block everyone else from the directory entirely set the permission mode to "sticky" for all future files Is this correct? Update: I just realized that files and directories might need different permissions - I was talking about files above so i'm not sure what the directory permissions would need to be. Update 2: The folder structure of /var/www changes drastically as one of the four entities above are always adding (and sometimes removing) folders and sub folders many levels deep. They also create and remove files that the other 3 entities might need read/write access to. Therefore, the permissions need to do the four things above for both files and directories. Since non of them should need execute permission (see question about ruby/php above) I would assume that rw-rw-r-- permission would be all that is needed and completely safe since these four entities are run by trusted personal (see #2) and all other users on the system only have read access. Update 3: This is for personal development machines and private company servers. No random "web customers" like a shared host. Update 4: This article by slicehost seems to be the best at explaining what is needed to setup permissions for your www folder. However, I'm not sure what user or group apache/nginx with PHP OR svn/git run as and how to change them. Update 5: I have (I think) finally found a way to get this all to work (answer below). However, I don't know if this is the correct and SECURE way to do this. Therefore I have started a bounty. The person that has the best method of securing and managing the www directory wins.

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• When searching in Outlook, encountered this error "Instant Search encountered a problem while trying

  - by Imagineer

  Sometime when searching for certain keyword, I get this error "Instant Search encountered a problem while trying to display search results. Modifying your query may resolve this problem." I have enabled Outlook logging to determine what is the error as suggested by someone in other forum. but I haven't had a clue how to decipher it. 2010.05.11 09:38:10 <<<< Logging Started (level is LTF_TRACE) >>>> 2010.05.11 09:38:10 HELPER::Initialize called 2010.05.11 09:38:10 Initializing: Finding a Transport 2010.05.11 09:38:10 MAPI XP Call: XPProviderInit in EMSMDB.DLL, hr = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 09:38:10 MAPI XP Call: TransportLogon, hr = 0x8004011d 2010.05.11 09:38:10 MAPI XP Call: Shutdown, hr = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 09:38:10 MAPI XP Call: XPProviderInit in EMSMDB.DLL, hr = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 09:38:10 MAPI Status: (-- -- ---/--- -- ---) 2010.05.11 09:38:10 MAPI XP Call: TransportLogon, hr = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 09:38:10 Initializing: Found a transport, Error code = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 09:38:10 MAPI XP Call: AddressTypes, hr = 0x00000000, cAddrs = 4, cUids = 1 2010.05.11 09:38:10 MAPI XP Call: RegisterOptions, hr = 0x00000000, cOptions = 2 2010.05.11 09:38:10 MAPI Status: (IN -- ---/OUT -- ---) 2010.05.11 09:38:10 MAPI XP Call: TransportNotify(BEGIN_IN|BEGIN_OUT), hr = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 09:38:10 HELPER::Initialize done, Error code = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 09:38:10 HELPER::GetCapabilities called, Error code = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 09:38:10 Microsoft Exchange: Synch operation started (flags = 00000031) 2010.05.11 09:38:10 Microsoft Exchange: StartImport(flags = 00000000, max msg = ffffffff): full items 2010.05.11 09:38:10 Microsoft Exchange: UploadItems: 0 messages to send 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Starting the Spooling Cycle 2010.05.11 09:38:11 MAPI Status: (IN fl ---/OUT -- ---) 2010.05.11 09:38:11 MAPI XP Call: FlushQueues, hr = 0x00000000, ulFlushFlags = 0x0000001c 2010.05.11 09:38:11 MAPI XP Call: Poll, hr = 0x00000000, cPollCount = 855 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Progress: Receiving message (message 1 out of 856, size unknown) 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Downloading one message 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Transport tightly coupled with store, download is NOOP 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Downloading done, Error code = 0x8004010f 2010.05.11 09:38:11 MAPI Status: (IN -- ---/OUT -- ---) 2010.05.11 09:38:11 FINISHED MAPI TASK 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Microsoft Exchange: ReportStatus: RSF_COMPLETED, hr = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Finishing the Spooling Cycle, Error code = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 09:38:11 EXECUTING EndSession MAPI TASK 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Starting the Simplified Transfer Cycle 2010.05.11 09:38:11 MAPI XP Call: Poll, hr = 0x00000000, iMsgsReceived = 0, cPollCount = 855 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Progress: Receiving message (message 1 out of 856, size unknown) 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Downloading one message 2010.05.11 09:38:11 MAPI Status: (IN -- act/OUT -- ---) 2010.05.11 09:38:11 MAPI Status: (IN -- ---/OUT -- ---) 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Downloading done, Error code = 0x8004010f 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Finishing the Spooling Cycle, Error code = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 09:38:11 FINISHED MAPI TASK 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Microsoft Exchange: ReportStatus: RSF_COMPLETED, hr = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 09:38:11 Microsoft Exchange: Synch operation completed 2010.05.11 10:08:15 Microsoft Exchange: Synch operation started (flags = 00000031) 2010.05.11 10:08:15 Microsoft Exchange: StartImport(flags = 00000000, max msg = ffffffff): full items 2010.05.11 10:08:15 Microsoft Exchange: UploadItems: 0 messages to send 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Starting the Spooling Cycle 2010.05.11 10:08:16 MAPI Status: (IN fl ---/OUT -- ---) 2010.05.11 10:08:16 MAPI XP Call: FlushQueues, hr = 0x00000000, ulFlushFlags = 0x0000001c 2010.05.11 10:08:16 MAPI XP Call: Poll, hr = 0x00000000, cPollCount = 858 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Progress: Receiving message (message 1 out of 859, size unknown) 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Downloading one message 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Transport tightly coupled with store, download is NOOP 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Downloading done, Error code = 0x8004010f 2010.05.11 10:08:16 MAPI Status: (IN -- ---/OUT -- ---) 2010.05.11 10:08:16 FINISHED MAPI TASK 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Microsoft Exchange: ReportStatus: RSF_COMPLETED, hr = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Finishing the Spooling Cycle, Error code = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 10:08:16 EXECUTING EndSession MAPI TASK 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Starting the Simplified Transfer Cycle 2010.05.11 10:08:16 MAPI XP Call: Poll, hr = 0x00000000, iMsgsReceived = 0, cPollCount = 858 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Progress: Receiving message (message 1 out of 859, size unknown) 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Downloading one message 2010.05.11 10:08:16 MAPI Status: (IN -- act/OUT -- ---) 2010.05.11 10:08:16 MAPI Status: (IN -- ---/OUT -- ---) 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Downloading done, Error code = 0x8004010f 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Finishing the Spooling Cycle, Error code = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 10:08:16 FINISHED MAPI TASK 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Microsoft Exchange: ReportStatus: RSF_COMPLETED, hr = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 10:08:16 Microsoft Exchange: Synch operation completed 2010.05.11 10:09:48 HELPER::Uninitialize called 2010.05.11 10:09:48 MAPI Status: (-- -- ---/--- -- ---) 2010.05.11 10:09:48 MAPI XP Call: TransportNotify(END_IN|END_OUT), hr = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 10:09:48 MAPI XP Call: TransportLogoff in EMSMDB.DLL, hr = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 10:09:48 MAPI XP Call: Shutdown, hr = 0x00000000 2010.05.11 10:09:48 Resource manager terminated I'm running Outlook 2007 SP1 in Citrix environment and should be running in Cache Mode. In my Outlook Tools-Options-Search Option, there is nothing under indexing. Any help is greatly appreciated! Thank you.

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• apache2 namevirtualhost resolving wrong site

  - by joe

  Running apache 2.2.6. I'm setting up a development environment. dev and production will be hosted on the same machine, same IP address. DNS entries like prod.domain.com and dev.domain.com point to the same IP. * Imprortant: it is required that dev and prod are otherwise completely separate. Each will run it's own apache instance. Each will use it's own apache configuration. Each, prod and dev, will host http and https. I have this set up and working, but not as restrictive as I'd like. For instance, the production config: NameVirtualHost *:80 NameVirtualHost *:443 <VirtualHost *:80 > ServerName prod.domain.com # ... etc </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:443 > ServerName prod.domain.com # ... etc </VirtualHost> The dev site is set up similarly, using ports 8080 and 4443. Each site works fine. But assuming both apaches are running, one can also hit "cross-site" by mistake. So, inadvertently hitting prod.domain.com:8080 successfully returns a page from the dev site. It would be much better if this failed completely. This is a bit more difficult to solve (for me) because of the need for two apache configs. If all in one, the single process would have full knowledge of everything. So, I tried to solve this with brute force, including virtual hosts for the "other" site, with something that would fail, like no access to documentroot. But apache then inexplicably finds the "wrong" virtual host. Here's the full config for production, with the dummy dev configs. NameVirtualHost *:80 NameVirtualHost *:443 # ---------------------------------------------- # DUMMY HOSTS <VirtualHost *:8080 > ServerName dev.domain.com:8080 DocumentRoot /tmp/ <Directory /tmp/ > Order deny,allow Deny from all </Directory> </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:4443 > ServerName dev.domain.com:4443 DocumentRoot /tmp/ <Directory /tmp/ > Order deny,allow Deny from all </Directory> </VirtualHost> # ---------------------------------------------- # REAL PRODUCTION HOSTS <VirtualHost *:80 > ServerName prod.domain.com:80 DocumentRoot /something/valid/ <Directory /something/valid/> Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:443 > ServerName prod.domain.com:443 DocumentRoot /something/valid/ <Directory /something/valid/> Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> # .... other valid ssl setup </VirtualHost> Here's the strange thing. With this configuration, a prod.domain.com:80 hit succeeds. But a prod.domain.com:443 hit fails, because it finds the dev.domain.com:4443 instead. I've also tried removing the port from the ServerName, but it still doesn't work. Sorry for the long question. Hopefully this is enough information. Thanks in advance for any help.

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• Vagrant (Virtualbox) host-only multiple node networking issue

  - by Lorin Hochstein

  I'm trying to use a multi-VM vagrant environment as a testbed for deploying OpenStack, and I've run into a networking problem with trying to communicate from one VM, to a VM-inside-of-a-VM. I have two Vagrant nodes, a cloud controller node and a compute node. I'm using host-only networking. My Vagrantfile looks like this: Vagrant::Config.run do |config| config.vm.box = "precise64" config.vm.define :controller do |controller_config| controller_config.vm.network :hostonly, "192.168.206.130" # eth1 controller_config.vm.network :hostonly, "192.168.100.130" # eth2 controller_config.vm.host_name = "controller" end config.vm.define :compute1 do |compute1_config| compute1_config.vm.network :hostonly, "192.168.206.131" # eth1 compute1_config.vm.network :hostonly, "192.168.100.131" # eth2 compute1_config.vm.host_name = "compute1" compute1_config.vm.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", 1024] end end When I try to start up a (QEMU-based) VM, it boots successfully on compute1, and its virtual nic (vnet0) is connected via a bridge, br100: root@compute1:~# brctl show 100 bridge name bridge id STP enabled interfaces br100 8000.08002798c6ef no eth2 vnet0 When the QEMU VM makes a request to the DHCP server (dnsmasq) running on controller, I can see the request reaches the controller because of the output on the syslog on the controller: Aug 6 02:34:56 precise64 dnsmasq-dhcp[12042]: DHCPDISCOVER(br100) fa:16:3e:07:98:11 Aug 6 02:34:56 precise64 dnsmasq-dhcp[12042]: DHCPOFFER(br100) 192.168.100.2 fa:16:3e:07:98:11 However, the DHCPOFFER never makes it back to the VM running on compute1. If I watch the requests using tcpdump on the vboxnet3 interface on my host machine that runs Vagrant (Mac OS X), I can see both the requests and the replies $ sudo tcpdump -i vboxnet3 -n port 67 or port 68 tcpdump: WARNING: vboxnet3: That device doesn't support promiscuous mode (BIOCPROMISC: Operation not supported on socket) tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode listening on vboxnet3, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes 22:51:20.694040 IP 0.0.0.0.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from fa:16:3e:07:98:11, length 280 22:51:20.694057 IP 0.0.0.0.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from fa:16:3e:07:98:11, length 280 22:51:20.696047 IP 192.168.100.1.67 > 192.168.100.2.68: BOOTP/DHCP, Reply, length 311 22:51:23.700845 IP 0.0.0.0.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from fa:16:3e:07:98:11, length 280 22:51:23.700876 IP 0.0.0.0.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from fa:16:3e:07:98:11, length 280 22:51:23.701591 IP 192.168.100.1.67 > 192.168.100.2.68: BOOTP/DHCP, Reply, length 311 22:51:26.705978 IP 0.0.0.0.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from fa:16:3e:07:98:11, length 280 22:51:26.705995 IP 0.0.0.0.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from fa:16:3e:07:98:11, length 280 22:51:26.706527 IP 192.168.100.1.67 > 192.168.100.2.68: BOOTP/DHCP, Reply, length 311 But, if I tcpdump on eth2 on compute, I only see the requests, not the replies: root@compute1:~# tcpdump -i eth2 -n port 67 or port 68 tcpdump: WARNING: eth2: no IPv4 address assigned tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode listening on eth2, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes 02:51:20.240672 IP 0.0.0.0.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from fa:16:3e:07:98:11, length 280 02:51:23.249758 IP 0.0.0.0.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from fa:16:3e:07:98:11, length 280 02:51:26.258281 IP 0.0.0.0.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from fa:16:3e:07:98:11, length 280 At this point, I'm stuck. I'm not sure why the DHCP replies aren't making it to the compute node. Perhaps it has something to do with the configuration of the VirtualBox virtual switch/router? Note that eth2 interfaces on both nodes have been set to promiscuous mode.

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• DNS lookups failing somewhere between firewall and router

  - by TessellatingHeckler

  we have a setup of ADSL line - Cisco 837 ADSL router - Zyxel ZyWall 35 firewall/NAT - Switch == Intel load balanced NICS in a server. It has been fine for years, suddenly DNS resolution stopped working on the server. No changes that I know of, so I can't work backwards from there. It was configured with the ISP's DNS servers, neither network device does DNS relaying. Wireshark shows the request go out but nothing comes back. The server networking stack seems OK though, because if we query an internal DNS server on a remote site, that works. I can logon to the Cisco, and DNS resolves OK from the command line. I can logon to the ZyWall, and DNS does not resolve from the command line. So the problem seems to be the firewall, patch cable or router, yes? On the router: interface Ethernet0 ip address aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd 255.255.255.ddd ip tcp adjust-mss 1450 hold-queue 100 out On the firewall: DNS server set to 8.8.8.8 (Google's), DNS traffic allowed LAN-WAN. What else should I look for? Update: Following This guide I've got traffic logging on the Cisco. I have also got access to a public DNS server which I can run tcpdump on to see things from the other side. And as per the below comments, I've tested with Dig and see that DNS over TCP works, and over UDP does not. Currently: DNS request from the server using TCP shows up in the firewall log, and in the Cisco log, and in tcpdump on the DNS server, the answer comes back, it works fine. DNS request from the server using UDP shows up in the firewall log, and in the Cisco log, does NOT show in tcpdump on the DNS server, times out. DNS request from the cisco (using UDP) does show up in tcpdump on the DNS server, answer received, works fine. Ping requests from the server and the cisco to the DNS server show up in tcpdump on the DNS server. DNS request from the server using UDP does show up on the firewall. Summary: TCP seems fine throughought. UDP works over the ADSL and to the Cisco, and it works from the server to the Cisco, but it doesn't cross the Cisco properly, it seems. I did see the Cisco showing as connected at 10Mb/full-duplex internally, and the firewall showing as 100Mb/full-duplex externally. I have forced the firewall to 10Mb and rebooted both devices. That seemed to help get UDP traffic (server-firewall-cisco) instead of (server-firewall), but did not fix it. Update: Sanitized Cisco config: version 12.2 no service pad service timestamps debug datetime msec service timestamps log datetime msec service password-encryption ! hostname cisco ! logging queue-limit 100 enable secret 5 {password} enable password 7 {password} ! ip subnet-zero ip domain name example.org ip name-server {nameserver_IP} ! ! ip audit notify log ip audit po max-events 100 no ftp-server write-enable ! interface Ethernet0 ip address {Inside_public_IP} 255.255.255.248 ip tcp adjust-mss 1460 hold-queue 100 out ! interface ATM0 no ip address no atm ilmi-keepalive pvc 0/38 encapsulation aal5mux ppp dialer dialer pool-member 1 ! dsl operating-mode auto ! interface Dialer1 ip unnumbered Ethernet0 encapsulation ppp dialer pool 1 dialer idle-timeout 0 dialer persistent no cdp enable ppp chap hostname {ADSL_Username} ppp chap password 7 {ADSL_Password} ! ip classless ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 Dialer1 no ip http server no ip http secure-server ! access-list 23 permit {IP} dialer-list 1 protocol ip permit no cdp run snmp-server enable traps tty ! {con, vty} end

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• How to setup linux permissions the WWW folder?

  - by Xeoncross

  Updated Summery The /var/www directory is owned by root:root which means that no one can use it and it's entirely useless. Since we all want a web server that actually works (and no-one should be logging in as "root"), then we need to fix this. Only two entities need access. PHP/Perl/Ruby/Python all need access to the folders and files since they create many of them (i.e. /uploads/). These scripting languages should be running under nginx or apache (or even some other thing like FastCGI for PHP). The developers How do they get access? I know that someone, somewhere has done this before. With however-many billions of websites out there you would think that there would be more information on this topic. I know that 777 is full read/write/execute permission for owner/group/other. So this doesn't seem to be needed as it leaves random users full permissions. What permissions are need to be used on /var/www so that... Source control like git or svn Users in a group like "websites" (or even added to "www-data") Servers like apache or lighthttpd And PHP/Perl/Ruby can all read, create, and run files (and directories) there? If I'm correct, Ruby and PHP scripts are not "executed" directly - but passed to an interpreter. So there is no need for execute permission on files in /var/www...? Therefore, it seems like the correct permission would be chmod -R 1660 which would make all files shareable by these four entities all files non-executable by mistake block everyone else from the directory entirely set the permission mode to "sticky" for all future files Is this correct? Update: I just realized that files and directories might need different permissions - I was talking about files above so i'm not sure what the directory permissions would need to be. Update 2: The folder structure of /var/www changes drastically as one of the four entities above are always adding (and sometimes removing) folders and sub folders many levels deep. They also create and remove files that the other 3 entities might need read/write access to. Therefore, the permissions need to do the four things above for both files and directories. Since non of them should need execute permission (see question about ruby/php above) I would assume that rw-rw-r-- permission would be all that is needed and completely safe since these four entities are run by trusted personal (see #2) and all other users on the system only have read access. Update 3: This is for personal development machines and private company servers. No random "web customers" like a shared host. Update 4: This article by slicehost seems to be the best at explaining what is needed to setup permissions for your www folder. However, I'm not sure what user or group apache/nginx with PHP OR svn/git run as and how to change them. Update 5: I have (I think) finally found a way to get this all to work (answer below). However, I don't know if this is the correct and SECURE way to do this. Therefore I have started a bounty. The person that has the best method of securing and managing the www directory wins.

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• Centos/OVH: public IP on KVM virtual machine

  - by Sébastien

  Since a few days, I'm trying to configure my KVM vm to have a public IP address, without any success. First, I'm on OVH, and you need to know they don't allow networking from different mac addresses. I have so registered a virtual mac address associated with my failover IP Here's my configuration: Guest wanted IP: 46.105.40.x Host IP: 176.31.240.x Host configuration dummy0 interface: ifcfg-dummy0 BOOTPROTO=static IPADDR=10.0.0.1 NETMASK=255.0.0.0 ONBOOT=yes NM_CONTROLLED=no ARP=yes BRIDGE=br0 br0 bridge: ifcfg-br0 DEVICE=br0 TYPE=Bridge DELAY=0 ONBOOT=yes BOOTPROTO=static IPADDR=192.168.1.1 NETMASK=255.255.255.0 PEERDNS=yes NM_CONTROLLED=no ARP=yes Failover ip is redirected to the br0 bridge with ip route add 46.105.40.xxx dev br0 > cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward 1 > cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/vnet0/proxy_arp 1 > route -n Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 0.0.0.0 176.31.240.254 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 46.105.40.x 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 br0 176.31.240.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 br0 Guest configuration: KVM: <interface type='bridge'> <mac address='02:00:00:30:22:05'/> <source bridge='br0'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x06' function='0x0'/> </interface> I've borrowed most of the OVH configuration here (in french, http://guides.ovh.com/BridgeClient) for the guest configuration eth0 interface: ifcfg-eth0 DEVICE="eth0" BOOTPROTO=none HWADDR="02:00:00:30:22:05" NM_CONTROLLED="yes" ONBOOT="yes" TYPE="Ethernet" UUID="e9138469-0d81-4ee6-b5ab-de0d7d17d1c8" USERCTL=no PEERDNS=yes IPADDR=46.105.40.xxx NETMASK=255.255.255.255 GATEWAY=176.31.240.254 ARP=yes For the routes, I have in route-eth0: 176.31.240.254 dev eth0 default via 176.31.240.254 dev eth0 With this configuration, I don't have any access to the internet. The only thing I can do is to ping the public ip of the host, nothing more. My final conclusion is that the route does not work, because, when, on the guest, I run ping 8.8.8.8, I have, on the host: > tcpdump -i vnet0 icmp tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode listening on br0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes 13:38:09.009324 IP 46-105-40-xxx.kimsufi.com > google-public-dns-a.google.com: ICMP echo request, id 50183, seq 1, length 64 13:38:09.815344 IP 46-105-40-xxx.kimsufi.com > google-public-dns-a.google.com: ICMP echo request, id 50183, seq 2, length 64 I never get the ping reply, only the request. It seems Guest - Host communication is fine. On eth0: > tcpdump -i eth0 icmp tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes 13:39:40.240561 IP 46-105-40-xxx.kimsufi.com > google-public-dns-a.google.com: ICMP echo request, id 50439, seq 1, length 64 13:39:40.250161 IP google-public-dns-a.google.com > 46-105-40-xxx.kimsufi.com: ICMP echo reply, id 50439, seq 1, length 64 I have the request and the reply on eth0, but reply is not forwarded to the bridge. I really don't understand why, I though it was the aim of the route to do that! IPtables is disabled on both host and guest. I really hope some of you will be able to help me! Many thanks in advance, Sébastien

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• Cannot Start MySQL Server on Fresh MAMP Install

  - by alexpelan

  I'm using Mac OS X 10.6.2 on my Macbook Pro. I can get the apache server to start, but not the mysql server, on both the default apache and default MAMP ports. When I try to go to my start page, I get the message "Error: Could not connect to MySQL server!" . Here's what's in my mysql error log: 00513 02:00:07 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.pid ended 100513 02:00:16 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /Applications/MAMP/db/mysql 100513 2:00:16 [Warning] The syntax '--log_slow_queries' is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Please use '--slow_query_log'/'--slow_query_log_file' instead. 100513 2:00:16 [Warning] You have forced lower_case_table_names to 0 through a command-line option, even though your file system '/Applications/MAMP/db/mysql/' is case insensitive. This means that you can corrupt a MyISAM table by accessing it with different cases. You should consider changing lower_case_table_names to 1 or 2 100513 2:00:16 [Warning] One can only use the --user switch if running as root 100513 2:00:16 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. 100513 2:00:16 [Note] Plugin 'ndbcluster' is disabled. InnoDB: Error: log file /usr/local/mysql/data/ib_logfile0 is of different size 0 5242880 bytes InnoDB: than specified in the .cnf file 0 16777216 bytes! 100513 2:00:16 [ERROR] Plugin 'InnoDB' init function returned error. 100513 2:00:16 [ERROR] Plugin 'InnoDB' registration as a STORAGE ENGINE failed. 100513 2:00:16 [ERROR] /Applications/MAMP/Library/libexec/mysqld: unknown option '--skip-bdb' 100513 2:00:16 [ERROR] Aborting 100513 2:00:16 [Note] /Applications/MAMP/Library/libexec/mysqld: Shutdown complete 100513 02:00:16 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.pid ended A couple of things: 1) There are a bunch of different .cnf files that come with MAMP (my-huge, my-medium, etc.)...how can I tell which one is actually being used? 2) I deleted the ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 as recommended by another post on serverfault, and then ended up with more errors: 100519 16:01:30 InnoDB: Log file /usr/local/mysql/data/ib_logfile0 did not exist: new to be created InnoDB: Setting log file /usr/local/mysql/data/ib_logfile0 size to 16 MB InnoDB: Database physically writes the file full: wait... 100519 16:01:30 InnoDB: Log file /usr/local/mysql/data/ib_logfile1 did not exist: new to be created InnoDB: Setting log file /usr/local/mysql/data/ib_logfile1 size to 16 MB InnoDB: Database physically writes the file full: wait... InnoDB: The log sequence number in ibdata files does not match InnoDB: the log sequence number in the ib_logfiles! 100519 16:01:31 InnoDB: Database was not shut down normally! InnoDB: Starting crash recovery. InnoDB: Reading tablespace information from the .ibd files... InnoDB: Restoring possible half-written data pages from the doublewrite InnoDB: buffer... 100519 16:01:31 InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 0 44556 100519 16:01:31 [ERROR] /Applications/MAMP/Library/libexec/mysqld: unknown option '--skip-bdb' 100519 16:01:31 [ERROR] Aborting And then I got this the next time I tried to run it: InnoDB: Unable to lock /usr/local/mysql/data/ibdata1, error: 35 InnoDB: Check that you do not already have another mysqld process InnoDB: using the same InnoDB data or log files. Sorry that this is a lot of information, but I don't want to leave anything out. Thanks.

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• Outlook 2007 Does Not Accept Login Credentials, OWA Webmail Does. Troubleshooting Advice?

  - by Chris

  I am trying to connect Outlook 2007 to Exchange (Hosted Exchange from Rackspace). Soon, I will need to roll this out for our entire office. With the Exchange account added to Outlook, Outlook starts up and asks for the user's username and password. Unfortunately, it doesn't like the password I use for it. I can confirm this username (email address) and password combo works by using Outlook WebMail, and another user (in another network/office) confirmed the Exchange account does work within his Outlook client. In my network/office, I can confirm that an Outlook 2007 client (under Windows 7) can connect to the Hosted Exchange server from Rackspace. However, I have not been able to get Outlook 2007 (under Windows XP SP3) to connect to the very same Exchange server Outlook 2007 (under Windows 7) can connect to. Outlook continuously prompts me for the username and password and does not accept the correct combination. Now, regarding the Outlook client that cannot connect/login to Exchange: The user has full admin rights on the workstation We do not run a domain controller/LDAP The firewall on the workstation has been disabled Real time file scanning in Microsoft Security Essentials has been disabled There are no virus scanning applications that would interface with Outlook or an email server. The Exchange account is setup to run on a newly created Outlook profile The network firewall does not log any blocked attempts A packet capture at the router reveals communication between the workstation and the Exchange server or proxy (though, this is SSL encrypted, so I don't know what the computers are saying) I have applied a fix (Added DWORD value of 0 for DefConnectOpts under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\RPC) that was recommended to make RPC function when the workstation does not have a default gateway set. Workstation is configured as DHCP. This fix did nothing, and it may be worth noting the RPC subkey was not present until I added it. RPC service is running on the workstation The program is not running under any compatibility mode. Side note: Outlook 2007 installs with compatibility mode for XP enabled by default in windows 7. Outlook 2007 will not even try to connect to exchange if this compatibility mode is checked. In windows xp, I tried checking compatibility mode for windows 2000, and was unable to connect to exchange as well. Here is the specific configuration I've used in a blank outlook profile: Microsoft Exchange Server: ##MASKED##-MBX-C18.mex07a.mlsrvr.com Username: (Full Email Address: [email protected]) Password: ##MASKED## Outlook Anywhere: Connect to Microsoft Exchange using HTTP Exchange Proxy Settings: Proxy Server: mex07a.emailsrvr.com Check "Connect using SSL only" Under "Only connect to proxy servers...", enter: msstd:mex07a.emailsrvr.com Check "On fast networks, connect using HTTP first, then connect using TCP/IP" Check "On slow networks, connect using HTTP first, then connect using TCP/IP" Proxy authentication settings: Basic Authentication Notes: mex07a.mlsrvr.com and mex07a.emailsrvr.com may look incorrect at first glance, but this is not a typo - these instructions were handed down from rackspace and are confirmed to be working, just not on this workstation. I have tried to use the RpcPing utility but must have been using it wrong. I got as far as "Bad Interface Descriptor". It would seem to me getting Outlook and Exchange to work together would be a breeze, especially since everything is done over port 80 with web services. Unfortunately, the user is stuck with WebMail access only, because Outlook won't accept the Exchange credentials. Do you have any ideas of other things I could try to debug this issue further? Any and all help is greatly appreciated. Thank you! -Chris

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