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• Real World Nuget

  - by JoshReuben

  Why Nuget A higher level of granularity for managing references When you have solutions of many projects that depend on solutions of many projects etc à escape from Solution Hell. Links · Using A GUI (Package Explorer) to build packages - http://docs.nuget.org/docs/creating-packages/using-a-gui-to-build-packages · Creating a Nuspec File - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2010trainingcourse_aspnetmvcnuget_topic2.aspx · consuming a Nuget Package - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2010trainingcourse_aspnetmvcnuget_topic3 · Nuspec reference - http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/nuspec-reference · updating packages - http://nuget.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Updating%20All%20Packages · versioning - http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/versioning POC Folder Structure POC Setup Steps · Install package explorer · Source o Create a source solution – configure output directory for projects (Project > Properties > Build > Output Path) · Package o Add assemblies to package from output directory (D&D)- add net folder o File > Export – save .nuspec files and lib contents <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <package > <metadata> <id>MyPackage</id> <version>1.0.0.3</version> <title /> <authors>josh-r</authors> <owners /> <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance> <description>My package description.</description> <summary /> </metadata> </package> o File > Save – saves .nupkg file · Create Target Solution o In Tools > Options: Configure package source & Add package Select projects: Output from package manager (powershell console) ------- Installing...MyPackage 1.0.0 ------- Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyA.dll' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyA.pdb' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyB.dll' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyB.pdb' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'MyPackage.1.0.0.nupkg' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0'. Successfully installed 'MyPackage 1.0.0'. Added reference 'NugetSource.AssemblyA' to project 'AssemblyX' Added reference 'NugetSource.AssemblyB' to project 'AssemblyX' Added file 'packages.config'. Added file 'packages.config' to project 'AssemblyX' Added file 'repositories.config'. Successfully added 'MyPackage 1.0.0' to AssemblyX. ============================== o Packages folder created at solution level o Packages.config file generated in each project: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <packages>   <package id="MyPackage" version="1.0.0" targetFramework="net40" /> </packages> A local Packages folder is created for package versions installed: Each folder contains the downloaded .nupkg file and its unpacked contents – eg of dlls that the project references Note: this folder is not checked in UpdatePackages o Configure Package Manager to automatically check for updates o Browse packages - It automatically picked up the updates Update Procedure · Modify source · Change source version in assembly info · Build source · Open last package in package explorer · Increment package version number and re-add assemblies · Save package with new version number and export its definition · In target solution – Tools > Manage Nuget Packages – click on All to trigger refresh , then click on recent packages to see updates · If problematic, delete packages folder Versioning uninstall-package mypackage install-package mypackage –version 1.0.0.3 uninstall-package mypackage install-package mypackage –version 1.0.0.4 Dependencies · <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <package xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/packaging/2012/06/nuspec.xsd"> <metadata> <id>MyDependentPackage</id> <version>1.0.0</version> <title /> <authors>josh-r</authors> <owners /> <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance> <description>My package description.</description> <dependencies> <group targetFramework=".NETFramework4.0"> <dependency id="MyPackage" version="1.0.0.4" /> </group> </dependencies> </metadata> </package> Using NuGet without committing packages to source control http://docs.nuget.org/docs/workflows/using-nuget-without-committing-packages Right click on the Solution node in Solution Explorer and select Enable NuGet Package Restore. — Recall that packages folder is not part of solution If you get downloading package ‘Nuget.build’ failed, config proxy to support certificate for https://nuget.org/api/v2/ & allow unrestricted access to packages.nuget.org To test connectivity: get-package –listavailable To test Nuget Package Restore – delete packages folder and open vs as admin. In nugget msbuild: <Import Project="$(SolutionDir)\.nuget\nuget.targets" /> TFSBuild Integration Modify Nuget.Targets file <RestorePackages Condition="  '$(RestorePackages)' == '' "> True </RestorePackages> … <PackageSource Include="\\IL-CV-004-W7D\Packages" /> Add System Environment variable EnableNuGetPackageRestore=true & restart the “visual studio team foundation build service host” service. Important: Ensure Network Service has access to Packages folder Nugetter TFS Build integration Add Nugetter build process templates to TFS source control For Build Controller - Specify location of custom assemblies Generate .nuspec file from Package Explorer: File > Export Edit the file elements – remove path info from src and target attributes <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <package xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/packaging/2012/06/nuspec.xsd">     <metadata>         <id>Common</id>         <version>1.0.0</version>         <title />         <authors>josh-r</authors>         <owners />         <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance>         <description>My package description.</description>         <dependencies>             <group targetFramework=".NETFramework3.5" />         </dependencies>     </metadata>     <files>         <file src="CommonTypes.dll" target="CommonTypes.dll" />         <file src="CommonTypes.pdb" target="CommonTypes.pdb" /> … Add .nuspec file to solution so that it is available for build: Dev\NovaNuget\Common\NuSpec\common.1.0.0.nuspec Add a Build Process Definition based on the Nugetter build process template: Configure the build process – specify: · .sln to build · Base path (output directory) · Nuget.exe file path · .nuspec file path Copy DLLs to a binary folder 1) Set copy local for an assembly reference to false 2)  MSBuild Copy Task – modify .csproj file: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3e54c37h.aspx <ItemGroup>     <MySourceFiles Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\..\SourceAssemblies\**\*.*" />   </ItemGroup>     <Target Name="BeforeBuild">     <Copy SourceFiles="@(MySourceFiles)" DestinationFolder="bin\debug\SourceAssemblies" />   </Target> 3) Set Probing assembly search path from app.config - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/823z9h8w(v=vs.80).aspx -                 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration>   <runtime>     <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">       <probing privatePath="SourceAssemblies"/>     </assemblyBinding>   </runtime> </configuration> Forcing 'copy local = false' The following generic powershell script was added to the packages install.ps1: param($installPath, $toolsPath, $package, $project) if( $project.Object.Project.Name -ne "CopyPackages") { $asms = $package.AssemblyReferences | %{$_.Name} foreach ($reference in $project.Object.References) { if ($asms -contains $reference.Name + ".dll") { $reference.CopyLocal = $false; } } } An empty project named "CopyPackages" was added to the solution - it references all the packages and is the only one set to CopyLocal="true". No MSBuild knowledge required.

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• H1 Visa interview tips–What you must know before attending the interview?

  - by Gopinath

  USA’s H1 visa allows highly qualified professionals from other countries to work in America. Many IT professionals in India aspire to go to USA on H1 and work for their clients. Recently I had a chance to study H1 visa process to help one of my friends and I would like to share what I learned. With the assumption that your H1 petition is approved and you got an interview scheduled at US Embassy for your visa stamping, here are tips you must know before attending the interview Dress Code – Formals Say no to casuals or any fancy dress when you attend the interview. It’s not a party or friends home you are visiting. Consider H1 Visa interview as your job interview and dress up in formals. There is no option B for your, you must be in formals. A plain formal shirt with a matching pant is suggested for men. Tie and Suit would not be required, but if you are a professional at management level you can consider wearing suit. Women can wear either formal Salwar or formal pant-shirt. Avoid heavy jewellery, wear what is must as per your tradition or culture. Body Language -  Smile on your face Your body language reflects what you are and what’s going on in your mind. Don’t be nervous or restless, be relaxed and wear a beautiful smile on your face. A smile is a curve that sets everything straight. When you are called for the interview, greet the interviewer with a beautiful smile. Say Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening depending on time you are visiting them. Whenever appropriate say Thank You. Generally American professionals are very friendly people and they reciprocate for your greetings. Make sure that you make them comfortable to start the interview. Carry original documents in a separate folder I don’t want to talk much about the documents that are required for your H1B interview as it’s big subject on it’s own and it requires a separate post. I assume that your consultant or employer helped you in gathering all the required documents like – petition, DS 160 forms, education & job related documents, resume, interview call letters, client letters, etc. For all the documents you are going to submit at the interview make sure that you have originals in a separate folder.  If required interviewer may ask you show the originals of any of the document you submitted for visa processing. Don’t mix the original documents with the documents you need to submit for interview. Have a separate folder for them. For those who are going to stamping along with their spouse and children, they need to carry few extra original documents like – marriage certificate, marriage photos(30 numbers)/album, birth certificates, passports, education and profession related certificates of the spouse and children. Know your role & responsibilities The interviewer will ask you questions on your roles and responsibilities at client location. Be clear what is your day to day tasks at client place and prepared to face detailed questions on the same. When asked explain clearly and also make sure what you say is inline with what is mentioned in your petition and client invitation letter. At times they may ask you questions specific to the project/technology you are going to work. So doing some homework in this area will help you easily answer the questions. Failing to answer basic questions on your role & responsibilities may result in rejection. You work for your Employer at Client location but NOT FOR CLIENT One of the important things to keep in mind that you work for your employer and you are being deputed to client location on a work visa.  Your employer is going to be solely responsible for your salary, work, promotion, pay hikes or what so ever during your stay at USA. Your client will not be responsible for anything. Lets say you are employed with Company X in India and they are applying for H1B to work at your client(ex: Microsoft) in USA, you must keep in my mind that Microsoft is not your employer. Microsoft will not pay your salaries or responsible for any employment related activities. Company X will be solely responsible for all your employer related activities. If you don’t get this correctly and say to Visa interviewer that your client is responsible, then you may get into troubles. Know your client It’s always good to know the clients with whom you are going to work in USA and their business. If your client is a well know organisation then you may not get many questions from interviewer else you need to be well prepared to provide details like – nature of business, location, size of the organisation, etc.  Get to know the basic details about your client and be confident while providing those details to the interviewer. Also make sure that you never talk about any confidential details of your client projects and business. Revealing confidential details of your client may land your job itself in soup. Make sure that your spouse is also in sync with you If you’ve applied a H4 visa for your spouse along with your H1, make sure that spouse is in sync with you. Your spouse also should know the basic details of your job, your employer, client and location where you will be travelling. Your spouse should also be prepared to answers questions related to marriage, their profession(if working), kids, education, etc. Interviewers will try to asses your spouse communication skills, whereabouts while staying in USA and would they prefer to work USA or not. On H4, which is a dependent visa, your spouse is not allowed to work in USA and at any point your spouse should not show the intentions to search for work in USA. Less luggage more comfort You would have definitely heard that there are lot of restrictions on what you can carry along with you to an US Embassy while attending the interview. To be frank it’s not good to say there are many restrictions, but there are a hell a lot of restrictions. There are unbelievable restrictions and it’s for the safety of everyone. You are not allowed to carry mobile phones, CD/DVDs, USBs, bank cards, cameras, cosmetics, food(except baby food), water, wallets, backpacks, sealed covers, etc. Trust me most of the things we carry with us regularly every day are not allowed inside. As there are 100s of restrictions, it would be easier if you understand what you can carry along with you and just carry them alone. Ask your employer/consultant to provide you a checklist of items that you can carry. Most what you would require are H1B related documents provided by the employer/consultant Photographs All original documents supporting your H1B Passports Some cash for your travel expenses (avoid coins) Any important phone number / details written in a paper(like your cab driver number, etc.) If you carry restricted stuff then you will be stopped at security checks, you have to find people who can safely keep all the restricted items. Due to heavy restrictions in and around the US Embassy you will not find any  place to keep your luggage. So just carry the bare minimum things required so that you feel more comfortable. Useful Links THE U.S. NON IMMIGRANT VISA APPLICATION PROCESS U.S VISA SECURITY REGULATIONS GENERAL FAQS Hope this information is helpful to you and best of luck for your interview. Creative commons Image credit: Flickr/ alexfrance, vinothchandar. hughelectronic, architratan, striatic

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• first install for windows eight.....da beta

  - by raysmithequip

  The W8 preview is now installed and I am enjoying it.  I remember the learning curve of my first unix machine back in the eighties, this ain't that.It is normal for me to do the first os install with a keyboard and low end monitor...you never know what you'll encounter out in the field.  The OS took like a fish to water.  I used a low end INTEL motherboard dp55w I gathered on the cheap, an 1157 i5 from the used bin a pair of 6 gig ddr3 sticks, a rosewell 550 watt power supply a cheap used twenty buck sub 200g wd sata drive, a half working dvd burner and an asus fanless nvidia vid card, not a great one but Sub 50.00 on newey eggey...I did have to hunt the ms forums for a key and of course to activate the thing, if dos would of needed this outmoded ritual, we would still be on cpm and osborne would be a household name, of course little do people know that this ritual was common as far back as the seventies on att unix installs....not, but it was possible, I used to joke about when I ran a bbs, what hell would of been wrought had dos 3.2 machines been required to dial into my bbs to send fido mail to ms and wait for an acknowledgement.  All in all the thing was pushing a seven on the ms richter scale, not including the vid card, sadly it came in at just a tad over three....I wanted to evaluate it for a possible replacement on critical machines that in the past went down due to a vid card fan failure....you have no idea what a customer thinks when you show them a failed vid card fan..."you mean that little plastic piece of junk caused all this!!??!!!"...yea man.  Some production machines don't need any sort of vid, I will at least keep it on the maybe list for those, MTBF is a very important factor, some big box stores should put percentage of failure rate within 24 month estimates on the outside of the carton for sure.  And a warning that the power supplies are already at their limit.  Let's face it, today even 550w can be iffy.A few neat eye candy improvements over the earlier windows is nice, the metro screen is nice, anyone who has used a newer phone recently will intuitively drag their fingers across the screen....lot of good that was with no mouse or touch screen though.  Lucky me, I have been using windows since day one, I still have a copy of win 2.0 (and every other version) for no good reason.  Still the old ix collection of disks is much larger, recompiling any kernal is another silly ritual, same machine, different day, same recompile...argh. Rh is my all time fav, mandrake was always missing something, like it rewrote the init file or something, novell is ok as long as you stay on the beaten path and of course ubuntu normally recompiles with the same errors consistantly....makes life easy that way....no errors on windows eight, just a screen that did not match the installed hardware, natuarally I alt tabbed right out of it, then hit the flag key to find the start menu....no start button. I miss the start button already. Keyboard cowboy funnin and I was browsing the harddrive, nothing stunning there, I like that, means I can find stuff. Only I can't find what I want, the start button....the start menu is that first screen for touch tablets. No biggie for useruser, that is where they will want to be, I can see that. Admins won't want to be there, it is easy enough to get the control panel a bazzilion other ways though, just not the start button. (see a pattern here?). Personally, from the keyboard I find it fun to hit the carets along the location bar at the top of the explorer screen with tabs and arrows and choose SHOW ALL CONTROL PANEL ITEMS, or thereabouts. Bottom line, I love seven and I'll love eight even more!...very happy I did not have to follow the normal rule of thumb (a customer watching me build a system and asking questions said "oh I get it, so every piece you put in there is basically a hundred bucks, right?)...ok, sure, pretty much, more or less, well, ya dude.  It will be WAY past october till I get a real touch screen but I did pick up a pair of cheap tatungs so I can try the NEW main start screen, I parse a lot of folders and have a vision of how a pair of touch screens will be easier than landing a rover on mars.  Ok.  fine, they are way smallish, and I don't expect multitouch to work but we are talking a few percent of a new 21 inch viewsonic touch screen.  Will this OS be a game changer?  I don't know.  Bottom line with all the pads and droids in the world, it is more of a catch up move at first glance.  Not something ms is used to.  An app store?  I can see ms's motivation, the others have it.  I gather there will not be gadgets there, go ahead and see what ms did  to the once populated gadget page...go ahead, google gadgets and take a gander, used to hundreds of gadgets, they are already gone.  They replaced gadgets?  sort of, I'll drop that, it's a bit of a sore point for me.  More of interest was what happened when I downloaded stuff off codeplex and some other normal programs that I like, like orbitron, top o' my list!!...cardware it is...anyways, click on the exe, get a screen, normal for windows, this one indicated that I was not running a normal windows program and had a button for  exit the install, naw, I hit details, a hidden run program anyways came into view....great, my path to the normal windows has detected a program tha.....yea ok, acl is on, fine, moving along I got orbitron installed in record time and was tracking the iss on the newest Microsoft OS, beta of course, felt like the first time I setup bsd all those year ago...FUN!!...I suppose I gotta start to think about budgeting for the real os when it comes out in october, by then I should have a rasberry pi and be done with fedora remixed.  Of course that sounds like fun too!!  I would use this OS on a tablet or phone.  I don't like the idea of being hearded to an app store, don't like that on anything, we are americans and want real choices not marketed hype, lest you are younger with opm (other peoples money).   This os would be neat on a zune, but I suspect the zune is a gonner, I am rooting for microsoft, after all their default password is not admin anymore, nor alpine,  it's blank. Others force a password, my first fawn password was so long I could not even log into it with the password in front of me, who the heck uses %$# anyways, and if I was writing a brute force attack what the heck kinda impasse is that anyways at .00001 microseconds of a code execution cycle (just a non qualified number, not a real clock speed)....AI is where it will be before too long, MS is on that path, perhaps soon someone will sit down and write an app for the kinect that watches your eyes while you scan the new main start screen, clicking on the big E icon when you blink.....boy is that going to be fun!!!! sure. Blink,dammit,blink,dammit...... OPM no doubt.I like windows eight, we are moving forwards, better keep a close eye on ubuntu.  The real clinch comes when open source becomes paid source......don't blink, I already see plenty of very expensive 'ix apps, some even in app stores already.  more to come.......

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• Why people don't patch and upgrade?!?

  - by Mike Dietrich

  Discussing the topic "Why Upgrade" or "Why not Upgrade" is not always fun. Actually the arguments repeat from customer to customer. Typically we hear things such as: A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugs A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new features which lead to risk and require application verification  Patching means risk Patching changes the execution plans Patching requires too much testing Patching is too much work for our DBAs Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay out And to be very honest sometimes it's hard for me to stay calm in such discussions. Let's discuss some of these points a bit more in detail. A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugsWell, yes, that is true as no software containing more than some lines of code is bug free. This applies to Oracle's code as well as too any application or operating system code. But first of all, does that mean you never patch your OS because the patch may introduce new flaws? And second, what is the point of saying "it introduces new bugs"? Does that mean you will never get rid of the mean issues we know about and we fixed already? Scroll down from MOS Note:161818.1 to the patch release you are on, no matter if it's 10.2.0.4 or 11.2.0.3 and check for the Known Issues And Alerts.Will you take responsibility to know about all these issues and refuse to upgrade to 11.2.0.4? I won't. A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new featuresOk, we can discuss that. Offering new functionality within a database patch set is a dubious thing. It has advantages such as in 11.2.0.4 where we backported Database Redaction to. But this is something you will only use once you have an Advanced Security license. I interpret that statement I've heard quite often from customers in a different way: People don't want to get surprises such as new behaviour. This certainly gives everybody a hard time. And we've had many examples in the past (SESSION_CACHED_CURSROS in 10.2.0.4,  _DATAFILE_WRITE_ERRORS_CRASH_INSTANCE in 11.2.0.2 and others) where those things weren't documented, not even in the README. Thanks to many friends out there I learned about those as well. So new behaviour is the topic people consider as risky - not really new features. And just to point this out: A PSU never brings in new features or new behaviour by definition! Patching means riskDoes it really mean risk? Yes, there were issues in the past (and sometimes in the present as well) where a patch didn't get installed correctly. But personally I consider it way more risky to not patch. Keep that in mind: The day Oracle publishes an PSU (or CPU) containing security fixes all the great security experts out there go public with their findings as well. So from that day on even my grandma can find out about those issues and try to attack somebody. Now a lot of people say: "My database does not face the internet." And I will answer: "The enemy is sitting already behind your firewalls. And knows potentially about these things." My statement: Not patching introduces way more risk to your environment than patching. Seriously! Patching changes the execution plansDo they really? I agree - there's a very small risk for this happening with Patch Sets. But not with PSUs or CPUs as they contain no optimizer fixes changing behaviour (but they may contain fixes curing wrong-query-result-bugs). But what's the point of a changing execution plan? In Oracle Database 11g it is so simple to be prepared. SQL Plan Management is a free EE feature - so once that occurs you'll put the plan into the Plan Baseline. Basta! Yes, you wouldn't like to get such surprises? Than please use the SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) from Real Application Testing and you'll detect that easily upfront in minutes. And not to forget this, a plan change can also be very positive!Yes, there's a little risk with a database patchset - and we have many possibilites to detect this before patching. Patching requires too much testingWell, does it really? I have seen in the past 12 years how people test. There are very different efforts and approaches on this. I have seen people spending a hell of money on licenses or on project team staffing. And I have seen people sailing blindly without any tests just going the John-Wayne-approach.Proper tools will allow you to test easily without too much efforts. See the paragraph above. We have used Real Application Testing in so many customer projects reducing the amount of work spend on testing by over 50%. But apart from that at some point you will have to stop testing. If you don't you'll get lost and you'll burn money. There's no 100% guaranty. You will have to deal with a little risk as reaching the final 5% of certainty will cost you the same as it did cost to reach 95%. And doing this will lead to abnormal long product cycles that you'll run behind forever. And this will cost even more money. Patching is too much work for our DBAsPatching is a lot of work. I agree. And it's no fun work. It's boring, annoying. You don't learn much from that. That's why you should try to automate this task. Use the Database's Lifecycle Management Pack. And don't cry about the fact that it costs money. Yes it does. But it will ease the process and you'll save a lot of costs as you don't waste your valuable time with patching. Or use Oracle Database 12c Oracle Multitenant and patch either by unplug/plug or patch an entire container database with all PDBs with one patch in one task. We have customer reference cases proofing it saved them 75% of time, effort and cost since they've used Lifecycle Management Pack. So why don't you use it? Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay outWell, see my statements in the paragraph above. And it pays out as flying with a database with 100 known critical flaws in it which are already fixed by Oracle (such as in the Oct 2013 PSU for Oracle Database 12c) will cost ways more in case of failure or even data loss. Bet with me? Let me finally ask you some questions. What cell phone are you using and which OS does it run? Do you have an iPhone 5 and did you upgrade already to iOS 7.0.3? I've just encountered on mine that the alarm (which I rely on when traveling) has gotten now a dependency on the physical switch "sound on/off". If it is switched to "off" physically the alarm rings "silently". What a wonderful example of a behaviour change coming in with a patch set. Will this push you to stay with iOS5 or iOS6? No, because those have security flaws which won't be fixed anymore. What browser are you surfing with? Do you use Mozilla 3.6? Well, congratulations to all the hackers. It will be easy for them to attack you and harm your system. I'd guess you have the auto updater on.  Same for Google Chrome, Safari, IE. Right? -Mike The T.htmtableborders, .htmtableborders td, .htmtableborders th {border : 1px dashed lightgrey ! important;} html, body { border: 0px; } body { background-color: #ffffff; } img, hr { cursor: default }

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• Need personal advice on how to get out of a company..

  - by SOfan

  Hi, I am an SO user since past 6 months and this is the first time I am turning to SO for personal help. I have asked technical questions before with my real ID. I am stuck inside a service based IT company for the past one year and haven't been able to decide if to leave it, when to leave it and how to leave it. I had taken 2 weeks LWP on medical reason roughly at end of 1 year and then soon after reporting, I applied for 2 months more LWP (on medical/personal ground) with the intention of working on my health,take up a hobby class to ward off depression,pessimism, to have some fun in life, and to look for a job which I really would be excited about - that interests me and which matches with my strength. My leave starts from this Monday. So in any case, I had hard set in mind that I will leave the company after I join them back hopefully with some job offer already in hand (after figuring out what I want do). Neither I can stand the past project,past colleagues,company, HR, pathetically low salary. But if I really listen to my heart, I don't want to have to go back to that office after my sabbatical and again have to see those people. I will have to resign it after my sabbatical ends. Then HR people perhaps wont like it, may even accuse me on face or behind back that primary purpose of my leave must have been to hunt for a better job and I lied about medical and person reasons. Also, if they get nasty and force me to serve 2 months notice period. There is no way I see myself after sabbatical resuming in old project or starting new work. It will be a pain. Since they have already approved 2 months leave and stuff, ideally if they want, they should be just able to relieve me right on the next day after I join back. But, I don't know if they want to get nasty, will they mention about my 2 months sabbatical leave in my experience letter or more scary, the term medical/personal reason. I have hard earned my experience here, have worked against my will, mostly it has been painful and slogged like anything, because I realize the importance of work experience in IT industry. I don't have greed to have those 2 months included extra in my experience letter, but I don't want to mess up with my experience letter in a way which makes my next employer ask question, get suspicious, or be wary if I have any medical reason going on. Being an emotional,moody person or somebody who can't be in an environment, once my mind and heart starts hating it. I think it perhaps is best, if I resign on Monday itself telling them (in polite manner) something that look I took sabbatical for some reason but I don't want to resume working in the company after my sabbatical ends. So please accept my resignation. Now tell me what you want to do about my leave request, my notice period and when you are willing to relieve me. What should I write and how? Some background: I am working in an IT company in India.I am overqualified in the company. It is grossly underpaying me. My education qualifications far exceed anyone's in the whole company being a CS undergrad as well as a CS grad. I joined this company after finishing the grad. I had self-doubts about my skills and interest as a programmer. I like doing research oriented work, though didn't have any particular success during grad. My life here has been very hectic. The project containing many many sub-projects has kept me on my toes and I have never really liked the work. I have been playing against my strength. Also the company strict internet usage policy (you can't read gmails, can't browse any non-work related sites not even news). When working for a client, from the machine we can't even check company related emails.For this one has to go to kiosk like 5 machines in a small room etc. Most of the times those machines are not available, so it was not unusual to keep making rounds to these kiosk machines to check company emails, browse company related emails etc.So it was not so easy to keep in touch with company related basic affairs for a not particular careful person. Things like this which are new to me, make me feel restricted. I am an undecisive person with a sense of failure, self-doubt, not meeting up unrealistic expectation. Somewhere at back of mind, I envy my classmates who make a smooth transition from company to company without causing any gap in their resume. I on other hand have gaps in resume. I get tired after working in a place for sometime. problem with colleagues in general. I am not particular great with people, have few friends, not known for a fun nature, rather serious, scholar. I am not a typical conventional female. I think females are usually more disciplined. But I am not so. I reach office late (though after informing manager). I don't want to blame them entirely, because from my past, it is not unusual for me to get undecisive on things. Also I had doubts about my ability as researched and to succeed there. of building a relationship in a group, to have something to talk about, newspaper. I get cut-off from people. peer pressure. I make blunders in coding, lose patience. Consciously or unconsciously I feel contempt for people here, work here, environment here. I have doubts that either I go to a place which does innovation, does research oriented work, product biggies, have great motivated people, have competent people passionate about products they are building. But then I also doubt my ability to survive there. I have identified that an idea job for me would be 4 days a week, a high salary job. When among people in company/team, I can't think much. I need some time at home to read good authentic books written in good style on what work I am doing.So that I am comfortable with my understanding of work. I get into pressure easily under deadline and need 5th day to cool myself off. I took for 2 weeks leave, because each day was hell for me. May be the depression phase of bipolar is on and also partially it could be that being a work centered person, who derives happiness,self-esteem from work, haven't been enjoying work and have been working for the sole person of proving stability, and ability to stick, against all odds, and facing what challenges I see, bonding with people, identifying opportunities to learn in given task etc.have been averaging one day LWP in 1 week or 10 days. or may be because of my nature,ADD,not being able to switch context,out of touch with news, don't have a circle of friends with who I enjoy. less knowledge in general to talk about, just some technical stuff.anyway, so due to emotional reason, some practical reason etc, I wanted to be very sure before leaving. So my leave starts from Monday and I should feel happy about it. I have taken the leave to for a few purposes - to take care of my health by regular yoga/exercise (with project on, I just can't do anything regular), reassess myself to see what I want to try next which work I might like, look for next job, take up a hobby which I like say singing. I am not clear on my career,job aspiration. I have tried my hands on research. During this year appraisal yesterday, I even had some conflict with my last manager. In meeting with me one on one, he would say all nice things about me, but in feedback to new manager, he hasn't given any excellent feedback. It is all only good. I am angry at this old Manager. Also new manager also scolded me as I didn't agree to his appraisal and waited to hear myself from old Manager. He kind of scolded me for wasting his time. Am I being unethical somewhere? I am always very conscious of if I am cheating anywhere. What advice I am seeking? How to resign and what to write in resignation letter

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• MVP Summit 2011 summary and thoughts: The &ldquo;I hope I don&rsquo;t cross a line and lose my MVP status&rdquo; post

  - by George Clingerman

  I've been wanting to write this post summarizing my thoughts about the MVP summit but have been dragging my feet since it's a very difficult one to write. However seeing Andy (http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/77625.aspx) and Catalin (http://www.catalinzima.com/2011/03/mvp-summit-2011/) and Chris (http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/03/07/144229.aspx) post about it has encouraged me to finally take the plunge. I'm going to have to write carefully though because I'm going to be dancing around a ton of NDA mine fields as well as having to walk the tight-rope of not sending the wrong message or having people read too much into what I'm saying. I want to note that most of what I'm about to say is just based on my observations, they're not thoughts that Microsoft has asked me to pass along and they're not things I heard Microsoft say. It's just me sharing what I think after going to the MVP summit. Let's start off with a short imaginary question and answer session.     Has the App Hub forums and XBLIG management been rather poor by Microsoft? Yes.     Do I think we're going to see changes to that overnight? No.     Will it continue to look bad from the outside? Somewhat. Confusing right? Well that's kind of how things are right now. Lots of confusion. XNA is doing AWESOME. Like, really, really awesome. As a result of that awesomeness, XNA is on three major platforms: Xbox 360, WP7 and PC. This means that internally Microsoft is really excited and invested in the technology. That's fantastic for XNA and really should show you the future the framework has. It's here to stay. So why are Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers feeling so much pain? The ironic thing is that pain is being caused by the success of XNA. When XNA was just a small thing, there was more freedom and more focus. It was just us and them. We were an only child. Now our family has grown and everyone has and wants some time with XNA. This gets XNA pulled in all directions and as it moves onto new platforms, it plays catch up trying to get those platforms up to speed to where Xbox LIVE Indie Games has grown. Forums, documentation, educational content. They all need to be there because Xbox LIVE Indie Games has all of that and more. Along with the catch up in features/documentation/awesomeness there's the catch up that the people on the team have to play. New platforms and new areas of development mean new players and those new guys don't have the history of being around from the beginning. This leads to a lack of understanding at times just how important some things are because they seem so small and insignificant (Rich Text defaulting for new forum profiles would be one things that jumps to mind). If you're not aware that the forums have become more than just a basic Q&A, if you're not aware that they're a central hub to a very active community, then you don't understand why that small change should be prioritized over something else. New people have to get caught up and figure out how to make a framework and central forum site work for everyone it's now serving. So yeah, a lot of our pain this last year has been simply that XNA is doing well and XBLIG is doing well so the focus was shifted to catch other things up. It hurts when a parent seems to not have any time for you and they're spending some much time with your new baby brother. Growing pains. All families and in our case our product family experience it to some degree. I think as WP7 matures we'll see the team figuring out how to give everyone the right amount of attention. While we're talking about some of our growing pains, it is also important to note (although not really an excuse) that the Xbox LIVE Arcade developers complain about many of the same things that we do. If you paid attention to talks and information coming out of GDC 2011, most of the the XBLA guys were saying things that sounded eerily similar to what the XBLIG developers are saying (Scott Nichols from GayGamer.net noticed http://twitter.com/#!/NaviFairyGG/status/43540379206811650). Does this mean we should just accept the status quo since we're being treated exactly the same? No way. However it DOES show that the way we're being treated is no indication of the stability and future of the platform, it's just Microsoft dropping the communication ball on two playing fields. We're not alone and we're not even being treated worse. Not great, but also in a weird way a very good sign. Now on to a few tidbits I think I CAN share from the summit (I'm really crossing my fingers I'm not stepping over some NDA line I shouldn't be). First, I discovered that the XBLIG user base is bigger than I personally had originally estimated. I won't give the exact numbers (although we did beg Microsoft to release some of these numbers so maybe someday?) but it was much larger than my original guestimates and I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe some of you guys had the right number when you were guessing, but I know that mine was much too low. And even MORE importantly the number of users/shoppers is growing at a steady pace as well. Our market is growing! That was fantastic news and really something that I had to share. On to the community manager discussion. It was mentioned. I was mentioned. I blushed. Nothing more to report there than the blush in my cheeks was a light crimson color. If I ever see a job description posted for that position I have a resume waiting in the wings. I can't deny that I think that would be my dream job... ...so after I finished blushing, the MVPs did make it very, very clear that the communication has to improve. Community manager or not the single biggest pain point with the Xbox LIVE Indie Game community has been a lack of communication. I have seen dramatic improvement in the team responding to MVPs and I'm even seeing more communication from them on the forums so I'm hoping that's a long term change. I really think they understood the issue, the problem remains how to open that communication channel in a way that was sustainable. I think they'll get it figured out and hopefully that's sooner rather than later. During the summit, you may have seen me tweeting about how I was "that guy" (http://twitter.com/#!/clingermangw/status/42740432471470081). You also may have noticed that Andy and Catalin both mentioned me in their summit write ups. I may have come on a bit strong while I was there...went a little out of character for myself. I've been agitated for a while with the way things have been and I've been listening to you guys and hearing you guys be agitated. I'm also watching some really awesome indie game developers looking elsewhere and leaving the platform. Some of them we might not have been able to keep even with changes, but others are only leaving because of perceptions and lack of communication from Microsoft. And that pisses me off. And I let Microsoft know that I was pissed off. You made your list and I took that list and verbalized it. I verbalized the hell out of it. [It was actually mentioned that I'm a lot nicer on the forums and in email than I am in person...I felt bad about that, but I couldn't stay silent]. Hopefully it did something guys, I really did try hard to get the message across. Along with my agitation, I also brought some pride. I mentioned several things in person to the team that I was particularly proud of. From people in the community that are doing an awesome job, to the re-launch of XboxIndies that was going on that week and even gamers like Steven Hurdle (http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/) who have purchased one XBLIG every day for over 100 days now. The community is freaking rocking it and I made sure to highlight that. So in conclusion, I'd just like to say hang in there (you know, like that picture of the cat). If you've been worried about investing in Xbox LIVE Indie Games because you think it's on shaky ground. It's not. Dream Build Play being about the Xbox 360 should have helped a little to point that out. The team is really scrambling around trying to figure things out and make improvements all around. There’s quite a few new gals and guys and it's going to take them time to catch up and there are a lot of constantly shifting priorities. We all have one toy, one team and we're fighting for time with it. It's also time for the community to continue spreading our wings and going out on our own more often. The Indie Game Winter Uprising was a fantastic example of that. We took things into our own hands and it got noticed and Microsoft got behind it. They do every time we stand up and do something (look at how many Microsoft employees tweeted, wrote about the re-launch of XboxIndies.com or the support I've gotten from them for my weekly XNA Notes). XNA is here to stay, it's time for us to stop being scared of that and figure out how to make our own games the successes they should be. There's definitely a list of things that need to be fixed, things that should be improved and I think we should definitely keep vocal about that with Microsoft. Keep it short, focused and prioritized. There's also a lot of things we can do ourselves while we're waiting on them to fix and change things. Lots of ways we can compensate for particular weaknesses in the channel. The kind of stuff that we can step up and do ourselves. Do it on our own, you know, the way Indies always do. And I'm really looking forward to watching us do just that.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 29, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 29, 2010New ProjectsDesign Technology Laboratory: DTL project is prominent.Em-Lib: Electronic Music Library เป็นโปรแกรมที่พัฒนาขึ้นเพื่อให้เป็นห้องสมุดอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ โดยตัวโปรแกรมจะสามารถจำลองเครื่องดนตรี พร้อมข้อมูลที่เกี่ย...Extensions For ASP.NET: Extensions For ASP.NETFIM 2010 PowerShell Cmdlets: These PowerShell cmdlets let you manage objects in the Forefront Identity Manager 2010 web service easily and concisely. The five cmdlets let you e...Grunty OS: Grunty OS is a Free open source OS made my GruntXproductionsIrishDevelopers.net Test: IrishDevelopers.net TestJobping Url Shortener: MVC 2 project that Shortens urls Fully functioning 'bare bones' url shortening website. Just 1 page to create and display the short url. 'API' ...Made In Hell: Small console game. Just a training in code writings.manx: manx is a system for managing catalogs of technical documents. The system was created to handle the needs of the vintage computing community with ...ntn: playing around with new featuresOpen Bitrac: Bitrac is ASP.NET Blog SystemOpenNETCF.WindowsMobile.Ink: The Mobile Ink Library is a .NET component that provides support for the new Windows Mobile 6 WISP Lite API in your .NET Compact Framework applicat...Proxy Switch: Proxy switch is a program which allows the user to easily switch between a configured proxy server and a home network. The program is developed in ...Samcrypt: .Seoftware Evoluion Repository Mining: Project for mining data about develpoment effort from svn repository.SharePoint 2010 Bulk Document Importer: Need to import/migrate files and folders from servers and network shares into SharePoint 2010 document libraries? This free commandline application...SL2 - A Scala interpreter for L2: A simple L2 Interpreter. Just a project for a class.sMAPedit: -SocialCare: SocialCare - Team EUSOCIALSqlDiffFramework-A Visual Differencing Engine for Dissimilar Data Sources: Unique in database comparison, SDF lets you compare live data--or saved snapshots--from any combination of SQL Server, Oracle, MySql, or ODBC data ...Yasminuroban: Yasminuroban is an open source "Sokoban" (aka "Warehouse Keeper" or "Boxes") alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that us...Хрень для ао: Test project to implement Bot.New ReleasesAntySpam Microsoft Outlook Plugin: AntySpam Microsoft Outlook 2010 Plugin v.2.0.1: this release only tested on MS Outlook 2010 version: 14.0.4536.1000 (32-bit and 64-bit) part of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010. Source pro...AppFabric Caching Admin Tool: AppFabric Caching Admin Tool 1.2: System Requirements:.NET 4.0 RC AppFabric Caching Beta2 Refresh Test On:Win 7 (64x) Note: Must run as Administrator !!!AutoSPInstaller: Powershell script to pre-download prerequisites: This script will download all files required by Prerequisiteinstaller.exe in advance, in order to support an 'offline' installation of SharePoint 2...BeanProxy: BeanProxy 2.5: BeanProxy is a C# (.NET 3.5) library housing classes that facilitates unit testing. Any non-static, public interface/class/or abstract class can be...Bluetooth Radar: Verison 2.2.1: Please follow this link for the latest release - http://bluetoothradar.codeplex.com/releases/view/44232CSS 360 Planetary Calendar: LCA: Upload your LCA ppt pieces here. Then someone can merge them together.DeskNotes: DeskNotes 2.1.2: Version in development which features following improvements over DeskNotes 2.1.1: Each DeskNote can be made switchable between other windows on Wi...DotNetNuke Russian Language packs: Core Russian Language Pack for DNN 05.04.01: Core Russian Resource Language Pack for DNN 05.04.01 Русский языковый пакет для DNN 05.04.01DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.04.01: Major Highlights Fixed issue with assembly version type. Fixed issue with multiple cancel buttons on Add User screen. Fixed issue with ve...Event Scavenger: Version 3.2: Tweaked the import foreign logs functionality. Set version to 3.2 for Admin tool, service and database. Viewer unaffected.Event Scavenger: Version 3.2 stable: Update viewer version to 3.2 for consistency. Minor changes for rest.Event Scavenger: Version 3.2.2: Added setting to enable/disable creation of historic data.FIM 2010 PowerShell Cmdlets: Initial Release of FIM 2010 PowerShell Cmdlets: Initial release of FIM 2010 PowerShell cmdlets based on open source FIM web service client. Install by running installutil on Quest.FIMPowerhellSna...Fix.ly: Fix.ly 0.2: Fixed a bug where non-verbose mode would not workJobping Url Shortener: Deployment Code v0.1: Contains only the files necessary to run the Url Shortener website. Just provide a valid connection string in the web.configMetabolite Enterprise Libraries for EPiServer CMS using Page Type Builder: Metabolite Enterprise Libraries 1.1: This is the release of the Metabolite Enterprise Libraries 1.1 for use with EPiServer 5 R2 SP2 and Page Type Builder 1.1. If you want to get the s...Metabolite Enterprise Libraries for EPiServer CMS using Page Type Builder: Metabolite Enterprise Libraries 1.1 (source): This is the source code release of the Metabolite Enterprise Libraries 1.1 for use with EPiServer 5 R2 SP2 and Page Type Builder 1.1.MVC Music Store: MVC Music Store v0.8: This is the initial release of the MVC Music Store Tutorial. Download contains source and a tutorial document in PDF format.MyWSAT - ASP.NET Membership Administration Tool: MyWSAT v3.5.2: MyWSAT 3.5.2 Update Notes - April 28th 2010 1.) Fixed theme engine for administration area. Now I can create theme packages to make them available ...N2 CMS: 2.0 rc2: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes (1.5 -> 2.0 release candid...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel 2007 Template, version 1.0.1.122: The NodeXL Excel 2007 template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 workbook. What's NewThis version signi...nRoute Framework: nRoute.Toolkit Release Version 0.4.5: Release Targets, Silverlight and WPF: - Targets Silverlight 4 for Web - Targets WPF in .NET 4 for Desktop nRoute Dependencies: - System.Windows...NSIS Autorun: NSIS Autorun 0.1.4: NSIS Autorun 0.1.4 This release includes source code, application binary, and example materials.OpenNETCF.WindowsMobile.Ink: Initial Release: This is the source as originally hosted in the OpenNETCF SVN server.Resharper Settings Manager: RSM v2.1: Warning! The 'Load Settings File...' menu item won't show up in VS 2008. Will release an update soon. ChangesReworked plug-in options UI: Split RSM...RoTwee: RoTwee (11.1.0.0): Rotation is improved from 11.0.0.3.SharePoint 2010 Bulk Document Importer: SharePoint 2010 Bulk Document Importer 1.0.0.0: Features in 1.0.0.0 Command line interface Import folders and files with all subfolders Can be run from outside the SharePoint Server. Every a...sMAPedit: sMAPedit v0.6 (Base): + base version containing the applicaion & html resourcesSocialCare: SocialCare_src: Codigo Fonte da Aplicação e Banco de DadosTFS Code Comment Checking Policy (CCCP): CCCP 4.0 for VS2010: This release installs side-by-side with CCCP 3.0 for VS2008 SP1.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30428.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30428.1: Automatic drop of latest buildVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30428.2: Automatic drop of latest buildХрень для ао: Первый релиз: Пробую что это такое.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibrarySilverlight ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETiTuner - The iTunes CompanionMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrHydroServer - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System ServerIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleParticle Plot PivotSqlDiffFramework-A Visual Differencing Engine for Dissimilar Data SourcesN2 CMSBlogEngine.NET

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• The Low Down Dirty Azure Blues

  - by SGWellens

  Remember the SETI screen savers that used to be on everyone's computer? As far I as know, it was the first bona-fide use of "Cloud" computing…albeit an ad hoc cloud. I still think it was a brilliant leveraging of computing power. My interest in clouds was re-piqued when I went to a technical seminar at the local .Net User Group. The speaker was Mike Benkovitch and he expounded magnificently on the virtues of the Azure platform. Mike always does a good job. One killer reason he gave for cloud computing is instant scalability. Not applicable for most applications, but it is there if needed. I have a bunch of files stored on Microsoft's SkyDrive platform which is cloud storage. It is painfully slow. Accessing a file means going through layers and layers of software, redirections and security. Am I complaining? Hell no! It's free! So my opinions of Cloud Computing are both skeptical and appreciative. What intrigued me at the seminar, in addition to its other features, is that Azure can serve as a web hosting platform. I have a client with an Asp.Net web site I developed who is not happy with the performance of their current hosting service. I checked the cost of Azure and since the site has low bandwidth/space requirements the cost would be competitive with the existing host provider: Azure Pricing Calculator. And, Azure has a three month free trial. Perfect! I could try moving the website and see how it works for free. I went through the signup process. Everything was proceeding fine until I went to the MS SQL database management screen. A popup window informed me that I needed to install Silverlight on my machine. Silverlight? No thanks. Buh-Bye. I half-heartedly found the Azure support button and logged a ticket telling them I didn't want Silverlight on my machine. Within 4 to 6 hours (and a myriad (5) of automated support emails) they sent me a link to a database management page that did not require Silverlight. Thanks! I was able to create a database immediately. One really nice feature was that after creating the database, I was given a list of connection strings. I went to the current host provider, made a backup of the database and saved it to my machine. I attached to the remote database using SQL Server Studio 2012 and looked for the Restore menu item. It was missing. So I tried using the SQL command: RESTORE DATABASE MyDatabase FROM DISK ='C:\temp\MyBackup.bak' Msg 40510, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Statement 'RESTORE DATABASE' is not supported in this version of SQL Server. Are you kidding me? Why on earth…? This can't be happening! I opened both the source database and destination database in SQL Management Studio. I right clicked the source database, selected "Tasks" and noticed a menu selection called "Deploy Database to SQL Azure" Are you kidding me? Could it be? Oh yes, it be! There was a small problem because the database already existed on the Azure machine, I deployed to a new name, deleted the existing database and renamed the deployed database to what I needed. It was ridiculously easy. Being able to attach SQL Management Studio to remote databases is an awesome but scary feature. You can limit the IP addresses that can access the database which enhances security but when you give people, any people, me included, that much power, one errant mouse click could bring a live system down. My Advice: Tread softly and carry a large backup thumb-drive. Then I created a web site, the URL it returned look something like this: http://MyWebSite.azurewebsites.net/ Azure supports FTP, but I couldn't figure out the settings until I downloaded the publishing profile. It was an XML file that contained the needed information. I still couldn't connect with my FTP client (FileZilla). After about an hour of messing around, I deleted the port number from the FileZilla setup page….and voila, I was in like Flynn.   There are other options of deploying directly from Visual Studio, TFS, etc. but I do not like integrated tools that do things without my asking: It's usually hard to figure out what they did and how to undo it. I uploaded the aspx , cs , webconfig, etc. files. Bu it didn't run. The site I ported was in .NET 3.5. The Azure website configuration page gave me a choice between .NET 2.0 and 4.0. So, I switched to Visual Studio 2010, chose .NET 4.0 and upgraded the site. Of course I have the original version completely backed up and stored in a granite cave beneath the Nevada desert. And I have a backup CD under my pillow. The site uses ReportViewer to generate PDF documents. Of course it was the wrong version. I removed the old references to version 9 and added new references to version 10 (*see note below). Since the DLLs were not on the Azure Server, I uploaded them to the bin directory, crossed my fingers, burned some incense and gave it a try. After some fiddling around it ran. I don't know if I did anything particular to make it work or it just needed time to sort things out. However, one critical feature didn't work: ReportViewer could not programmatically generate PDF documents. I was getting this exception: "An error occurred during local report processing. Parameter is not valid." Rats. I did some searching and found other people were having the same problem, so I added a post saying I was having the same problem: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazurewebsitespreview/thread/b4a6eb43-0013-435f-9d11-00ee26a8d017 Currently they are looking into this problem and I am waiting for the results. Hence I had the time to write this BLOG entry. How lucky you are. This was the last message I got from the Microsoft person: Hi Steve, Windows Azure Web Sites is a multi-tenant environment. For security issue, we limited some API calls. Unfortunately, some GDI APIS required by the PDF converting function are in this list. We have noticed this issue, and still investigation the best way to go. At this moment, there is no news to share. Sorry about this. Will keep you posted. If I had to guess, I would say they are concerned with people uploading images and doing intensive graphics programming which would hog CPU time.  But that is just a guess. Another problem. While trying to resolve the ReportViewer problem, I tried to write a file to the PDF directory to see if there was a permissions problem with some test code: String MyPath = MapPath(@"~\PDFs\Test.txt"); File.WriteAllText(MyPath, "Hello Azure");     I got this message: Access to the path <my path> is denied. After some research, I understood that since Azure is a cloud based platform, it can't allow web applications to save files to local directories. The application could be moved or replicated as scaling occurs and trying to manage local files would be problematic to say the least. There are other options: Use the Azure APIs to get a path. That way the location of the storage is separated from the application. However, the web site is then tied Azure and can't be moved to another hosting platform. Use the ApplicationData folder (not recommended). Write to BLOB storage. Or, I could try and stream the PDF output directly to the email and not save a file. I'm not going to work on a final solution until the ReportViewer is fixed. I am just sharing some of the things you need to be aware of if you decide to use Azure. I got this information from here. (Note the author of the BLOG added a comment saying he has updated his entry). Is my memory faulty? While getting this BLOG ready, I tried to write the test file again. And it worked. My memory is incorrect, or much more likely, something changed on the server…perhaps while they are trying to get ReportViewer to work. (Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it). *Note: Since Visual Studio 2010 Express doesn't include a Report Editor, I downloaded and installed SQL Server Report Builder 2.0. It is a standalone Report Editor to replace the one not in Visual Studio 2010 Express. I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens CodeProject

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• How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project

  - by constant

  While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack. After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades? On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea. Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company. Engineering Systems is Hard Work! The backbone of Exalogic is its InfiniBand network: 4 times better bandwidth than even 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and only about a tenth of its latency. What a potential for increased scalability and throughput across the middleware and database layers! But InfiniBand is a beast that needs to be tamed: It is true that Exalogic uses a standard, open-source Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) InfiniBand driver stack. Unfortunately, this software has been developed by the HPC community with fastest speed in mind (which is good) but, despite the name, not many other enterprise-class requirements are included (which is less good). Here are some of the improvements that Oracle's InfiniBand development team had to add to the OFED stack to make it enterprise-ready, simply because typical HPC users didn't have the need to implement them: More than 100 bug fixes in the pieces that were not related to the Message Passing Interface Protocol (MPI), which is the protocol that HPC users use most of the time, but which is less useful in the enterprise. Performance optimizations and tuning across the whole IB stack: From Switches, Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) and drivers to low-level protocols, middleware and applications. Yes, even the standard HPC IB stack could be improved in terms of performance. Ethernet over IB (EoIB): Exalogic uses InfiniBand internally to reach high performance, but it needs to play nicely with datacenters around it. That's why Oracle added Ethernet over InfiniBand technology to it that allows for creating many virtual 10GBE adapters inside Exalogic's nodes that are aggregated and connected to Exalogic's IB gateway switches. While this is an open standard, it's up to the vendor to implement it. In this case, Oracle integrated the EoIB stack with Oracle's own IB to 10GBE gateway switches, and made it fully virtualized from the beginning. This means that Exalogic customers can completely rewire their server infrastructure inside the rack without having to physically pull or plug a single cable - a must-have for every cloud deployment. Anybody who wants to match this level of integration would need to add an InfiniBand switch development team to their project. Or just buy Oracle's gateway switches, which are conveniently shipped with a whole server infrastructure attached! IPv6 support for InfiniBand's Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP), Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS), TCP/IP over IB (IPoIB) and EoIB protocols. Because no IPv6 = not very enterprise-class. HA capability for SDP. High Availability is not a big requirement for HPC, but for enterprise-class application servers it is. Every node in Exalogic's InfiniBand network is connected twice for redundancy. If any cable or port or HCA fails, there's always a replacement link ready to take over. This requires extra magic at the protocol level to work. So in addition to Weblogic's failover capabilities, Oracle implemented IB automatic path migration at the SDP level to avoid unnecessary failover operations at the middleware level. Security, for example spoof-protection. Another feature that is less important for traditional users of InfiniBand, but very important for enterprise customers. InfiniBand Partitioning and Quality-of-Service (QoS): One of the first questions we get from customers about Exalogic is: “How can we implement multi-tenancy?” The answer is to partition your IB network, which effectively creates many networks that work independently and that are protected at the lowest networking layer possible. In addition to that, QoS allows administrators to prioritize traffic flow in multi-tenancy environments so they can keep their service levels where it matters most. Resilient IB Fabric Management: InfiniBand is a self-managing network, so a lot of the magic lies in coming up with the right topology and in teaching the subnet manager how to properly discover and manage the network. Oracle's Infiniband switches come with pre-integrated, highly available fabric management with seamless integration into Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. In short: Oracle elevated the OFED InfiniBand stack into an enterprise-class networking infrastructure. Many years and multiple teams of manpower went into the above improvements - this is something you can only get from Oracle, because no other InfiniBand vendor can give you these features across the whole stack! Exabus: Because it's not About the Size of Your Network, it's How You Use it! So let's assume that you somehow were able to get your hands on an enterprise-class IB driver stack. Or maybe you don't care and are just happy with the standard OFED one? Anyway, the next step is to actually leverage that InfiniBand performance. Here are the choices: Use traditional TCP/IP on top of the InfiniBand stack, Develop your own integration between your middleware and the lower-level (but faster) InfiniBand protocols. While more bandwidth is always a good thing, it's actually the low latency that enables superior performance for your applications when running on any networking infrastructure: The lower the latency, the faster the response travels through the network and the more transactions you can close per second. The reason why InfiniBand is such a low latency technology is that it gets rid of most if not all of your traditional networking protocol stack: Data is literally beamed from one region of RAM in one server into another region of RAM in another server with no kernel/drivers/UDP/TCP or other networking stack overhead involved! Which makes option 1 a no-go: Adding TCP/IP on top of InfiniBand is like adding training wheels to your racing bike. It may be ok in the beginning and for development, but it's not quite the performance IB was meant to deliver. Which only leaves option 2: Integrating your middleware with fast, low-level InfiniBand protocols. And this is what Exalogic's "Exabus" technology is all about. Here are a few Exabus features that help applications leverage the performance of InfiniBand in Exalogic: RDMA and SDP integration at the JDBC driver level (SDP), for Oracle Weblogic (SDP), Oracle Coherence (RDMA), Oracle Tuxedo (RDMA) and the new Oracle Traffic Director (RDMA) on Exalogic. Using these protocols, middleware can communicate a lot faster with each other and the Oracle database than by using standard networking protocols, Seamless Integration of Ethernet over InfiniBand from Exalogic's Gateway switches into the OS, Oracle Weblogic optimizations for handling massive amounts of parallel transactions. Because if you have an 8-lane Autobahn, you also need to improve your ramps so you can feed it with many cars in parallel. Integration of Weblogic with Oracle Exadata for faster performance, optimized session management and failover. As you see, “Exabus” is Oracle's word for describing all the InfiniBand enhancements Oracle put into Exalogic: OFED stack enhancements, protocols for faster IB access, and InfiniBand support and optimizations at the virtualization and middleware level. All working together to deliver the full potential of InfiniBand performance. Who else has 100% control over their middleware so they can develop their own low-level protocol integration with InfiniBand? Even if you take an open source approach, you're looking at years of development work to create, test and support a whole new networking technology in your middleware! The Extras: Less Hassle, More Productivity, Faster Time to Market And then there are the other advantages of Engineered Systems that are true for Exalogic the same as they are for every other Engineered System: One simple purchasing process: No headaches due to endless RFPs and no “Will X work with Y?” uncertainties. Everything has been engineered together: All kinds of bugs and problems have been already fixed at the design level that would have only manifested themselves after you have built the system from scratch. Everything is built, tested and integrated at the factory level . Less integration pain for you, faster time to market. Every Exalogic machine world-wide is identical to Oracle's own machines in the lab: Instant replication of any problems you may encounter, faster time to resolution. Simplified patching, management and operations. One throat to choke: Imagine finger-pointing hell for systems that have been put together using several different vendors. Oracle's Engineered Systems have a single phone number that customers can call to get their problems solved. For more business-centric values, read The Business Value of Engineered Systems. Conclusion: Buy Exalogic, or get ready for a 6-12 Month Science Project And here's the reason why it's not easy to "build your own Exalogic": There's a lot of work required to make such a system fly. In fact, anybody who is starting to "just put together a bunch of servers and an InfiniBand network" is really looking at a 6-12 month science project. And the outcome is likely to not be very enterprise-class. And it won't have Exalogic's performance either. Because building an Engineered System is literally rocket science: It takes a lot of time, effort, resources and many iterations of design/test/analyze/fix to build such a system. That's why InfiniBand has been reserved for HPC scientists for such a long time. And only Oracle can bring the power of InfiniBand in an enterprise-class, ready-to use, pre-integrated version to customers, without the develop/integrate/support pain. For more details, check the new Exalogic overview white paper which was updated only recently. P.S.: Thanks to my colleagues Ola, Paul, Don and Andy for helping me put together this article! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project'; var flattr_dsc = 'While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack.After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades?On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea.Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company.'; var flattr_tag = 'Engineered Systems,Engineered Systems,Infiniband,Integration,latency,Oracle,performance'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/04/how-avoid-your-next-12-month-science-project'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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• C#/.NET &ndash; Finding an Item&rsquo;s Index in IEnumerable&lt;T&gt;

  - by James Michael Hare

  Sorry for the long blogging hiatus.  First it was, of course, the holidays hustle and bustle, then my brother and his wife gave birth to their son, so I’ve been away from my blogging for two weeks. Background: Finding an item’s index in List<T> is easy… Many times in our day to day programming activities, we want to find the index of an item in a collection.  Now, if we have a List<T> and we’re looking for the item itself this is trivial: 1: // assume have a list of ints: 2: var list = new List<int> { 1, 13, 42, 64, 121, 77, 5, 99, 132 }; 3:  4: // can find the exact item using IndexOf() 5: var pos = list.IndexOf(64); This will return the position of the item if it’s found, or –1 if not.  It’s easy to see how this works for primitive types where equality is well defined.  For complex types, however, it will attempt to compare them using EqualityComparer<T>.Default which, in a nutshell, relies on the object’s Equals() method. So what if we want to search for a condition instead of equality?  That’s also easy in a List<T> with the FindIndex() method: 1: // assume have a list of ints: 2: var list = new List<int> { 1, 13, 42, 64, 121, 77, 5, 99, 132 }; 3:  4: // finds index of first even number or -1 if not found. 5: var pos = list.FindIndex(i => i % 2 == 0);   Problem: Finding an item’s index in IEnumerable<T> is not so easy... This is all well and good for lists, but what if we want to do the same thing for IEnumerable<T>?  A collection of IEnumerable<T> has no indexing, so there’s no direct method to find an item’s index.  LINQ, as powerful as it is, gives us many tools to get us this information, but not in one step.  As with almost any problem involving collections, there are several ways to accomplish the same goal.  And once again as with almost any problem involving collections, the choice of the solution somewhat depends on the situation. So let’s look at a few possible alternatives.  I’m going to express each of these as extension methods for simplicity and consistency. Solution: The TakeWhile() and Count() combo One of the things you can do is to perform a TakeWhile() on the list as long as your find condition is not true, and then do a Count() of the items it took.  The only downside to this method is that if the item is not in the list, the index will be the full Count() of items, and not –1.  So if you don’t know the size of the list beforehand, this can be confusing. 1: // a collection of extra extension methods off IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // Finds an item in the collection, similar to List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: // note if item not found, result is length and not -1! 8: return list.TakeWhile(i => !finder(i)).Count(); 9: } 10: } Personally, I don’t like switching the paradigm of not found away from –1, so this is one of my least favorites.  Solution: Select with index Many people don’t realize that there is an alternative form of the LINQ Select() method that will provide you an index of the item being selected: 1: list.Select( (item,index) => do something here with the item and/or index... ) This can come in handy, but must be treated with care.  This is because the index provided is only as pertains to the result of previous operations (if any).  For example: 1: // assume have a list of ints: 2: var list = new List<int> { 1, 13, 42, 64, 121, 77, 5, 99, 132 }; 3:  4: // you'd hope this would give you the indexes of the even numbers 5: // which would be 2, 3, 8, but in reality it gives you 0, 1, 2 6: list.Where(item => item % 2 == 0).Select((item,index) => index); The reason the example gives you the collection { 0, 1, 2 } is because the where clause passes over any items that are odd, and therefore only the even items are given to the select and only they are given indexes. Conversely, we can’t select the index and then test the item in a Where() clause, because then the Where() clause would be operating on the index and not the item! So, what we have to do is to select the item and index and put them together in an anonymous type.  It looks ugly, but it works: 1: // extensions defined on IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // finds an item in a collection, similar to List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: // if you don't name the anonymous properties they are the variable names 8: return list.Select((item, index) => new { item, index }) 9: .Where(p => finder(p.item)) 10: .Select(p => p.index + 1) 11: .FirstOrDefault() - 1; 12: } 13: }     So let’s look at this, because i know it’s convoluted: First Select() joins the items and their indexes into an anonymous type. Where() filters that list to only the ones matching the predicate. Second Select() picks the index of the matches and adds 1 – this is to distinguish between not found and first item. FirstOrDefault() returns the first item found from the previous clauses or default (zero) if not found. Subtract one so that not found (zero) will be –1, and first item (one) will be zero. The bad thing is, this is ugly as hell and creates anonymous objects for each item tested until it finds the match.  This concerns me a bit but we’ll defer judgment until compare the relative performances below. Solution: Convert ToList() and use FindIndex() This solution is easy enough.  We know any IEnumerable<T> can be converted to List<T> using the LINQ extension method ToList(), so we can easily convert the collection to a list and then just use the FindIndex() method baked into List<T>. 1: // a collection of extension methods for IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // find the index of an item in the collection similar to List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: return list.ToList().FindIndex(finder); 8: } 9: } This solution is simplicity itself!  It is very concise and elegant and you need not worry about anyone misinterpreting what it’s trying to do (as opposed to the more convoluted LINQ methods above). But the main thing I’m concerned about here is the performance hit to allocate the List<T> in the ToList() call, but once again we’ll explore that in a second. Solution: Roll your own FindIndex() for IEnumerable<T> Of course, you can always roll your own FindIndex() method for IEnumerable<T>.  It would be a very simple for loop which scans for the item and counts as it goes.  There’s many ways to do this, but one such way might look like: 1: // extension methods for IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // Finds an item matching a predicate in the enumeration, much like List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: int index = 0; 8: foreach (var item in list) 9: { 10: if (finder(item)) 11: { 12: return index; 13: } 14:  15: index++; 16: } 17:  18: return -1; 19: } 20: } Well, it’s not quite simplicity, and those less familiar with LINQ may prefer it since it doesn’t include all of the lambdas and behind the scenes iterators that come with deferred execution.  But does having this long, blown out method really gain us much in performance? Comparison of Proposed Solutions So we’ve now seen four solutions, let’s analyze their collective performance.  I took each of the four methods described above and run them over 100,000 iterations of lists of size 10, 100, 1000, and 10000 and here’s the performance results.  Then I looked for targets at the begining of the list (best case), middle of the list (the average case) and not in the list (worst case as must scan all of the list). Each of the times below is the average time in milliseconds for one execution as computer over the 100,000 iterations: Searches Matching First Item (Best Case)   10 100 1000 10000 TakeWhile 0.0003 0.0003 0.0003 0.0003 Select 0.0005 0.0005 0.0005 0.0005 ToList 0.0002 0.0003 0.0013 0.0121 Manual 0.0001 0.0001 0.0001 0.0001   Searches Matching Middle Item (Average Case)   10 100 1000 10000 TakeWhile 0.0004 0.0020 0.0191 0.1889 Select 0.0008 0.0042 0.0387 0.3802 ToList 0.0002 0.0007 0.0057 0.0562 Manual 0.0002 0.0013 0.0129 0.1255   Searches Where Not Found (Worst Case)   10 100 1000 10000 TakeWhile 0.0006 0.0039 0.0381 0.3770 Select 0.0012 0.0081 0.0758 0.7583 ToList 0.0002 0.0012 0.0100 0.0996 Manual 0.0003 0.0026 0.0253 0.2514   Notice something interesting here, you’d think the “roll your own” loop would be the most efficient, but it only wins when the item is first (or very close to it) regardless of list size.  In almost all other cases though and in particular the average case and worst case, the ToList()/FindIndex() combo wins for performance, even though it is creating some temporary memory to hold the List<T>.  If you examine the algorithm, the reason why is most likely because once it’s in a ToList() form, internally FindIndex() scans the internal array which is much more efficient to iterate over.  Thus, it takes a one time performance hit (not including any GC impact) to create the List<T> but after that the performance is much better. Summary If you’re concerned about too many throw-away objects, you can always roll your own FindIndex() method, but for sheer simplicity and overall performance, using the ToList()/FindIndex() combo performs best on nearly all list sizes in the average and worst cases.    Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Litte Wonders,BlackRabbitCoder,Software,LINQ,List

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• Java 7 update 6 installation fails on Windows 7 when Chrome is default browser

  - by ali1234

  I am configuring a brand new Lenovo U410 system with Windows 7 Home Premium for a user. I received the system direct from the shop. As part of the configuration I installed Java using the online installer. This worked correctly. Later, due to a mistake I made, I needed to restore the system to factory default. The factory default FORMATS C:\ and puts back (supposedly) the exact factory configuration. However, after doing this, I was no longer able to install Java successfully using the same method I used before. Now, whenever I attempt to use the online Java installer, the following happens. First of all, a window always appears "Welcome to Java", "Downloading Java Installer...". After short time this window disappears and then one of three things happens: The very first time I do this after doing a factory reset, I get a Windows error report, which contains this information: Application Name: JavaSetup7u5.exe Application Version: 7.0.50.6 Application Timestamp: 4feacd84 Fault Module Name: JavaIC.dll Fault Module Version: 9.9.9.9 Fault Module Timestamp: 4f2343d6 Exception Offset: 000052cb Exception Code: c0000417 Exception Data: 00000000 OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.768.3 Locale ID: 1033 Additional Information 1: 773c Additional Information 2: 773cd78cf06816f8246f359fa270f3bb Additional Information 3: f51a Additional Information 4: f51aaea7d22f36fa9e3a626b5a5cd1c3 2. Subsequent runs produce either this error message: "Error: Java(TM) installer - Downloaded file C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Temp\fx-runtime.exe is corrupt." or Nothing happens at all. I Believe this is a red herring. Running the installer again causes a different error because the files were downloaded and the installer crashed before it could clean up. This isn't the actual problem, as when this happens the installer deletes the downloaded files, and then when you run it for the third time, it downloads everything again and does the javaic.dll crash. I suspect the downloader is appending to the existing files or something, causing the corruption. I have tried all of the above as Administrator and as a normal user. I have tried reseting the system to factory defaults several times. I have tried downloading with Chrome and Internet Explorer 9. I have tried uninstalling all anti-virus software and disabling the windows firewall entirely. The only thing which makes a difference is running the installer in Windows XP compatibility mode, which allows the installation to complete. I know I can workaround this error by using the offline installer so please don't post that as an answer. I am looking for an explanation of the root cause. Additionally, if I use the offline installer, the updater does not work. The updater also does not work if I install in XP mode. The updater fails because it works by just downloading the newest online setup and running it. Also remember that the installers are digitally signed. The signitures verify correctly so there is no way in hell that this is caused by corrupted downloads. Some theories I have: The Java setup files on java.com actually changed in between the first successful install and my later attempts. Seems unlikely as none of the version numbers have changed. However, I have seen a couple of reports of this error which showed up in the past 24 hours. This looks like the most likely explanation right now: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1735645 - Oracle released 7 update 6 two days ago. Careful inspection of the installers reveal that they are in fact attempting to download .6, not .5 as the download page claims. Not actually correct. Only the update tool tries to install 7u6. The online installer still tries 7u5. However, 7u6 being released two days ago is too much of a coincidence to ignore. Update: The 7u6 online installer is available from Oracle technetwork. It crashes in exactly the same way. The factory reset software uses GMT-8 and I am on GMT-1. As a result, after factory reset, any software which cares to check would think that the system was restored 7 hours in the future, due to Window's awful policy of storing local time in the system clock. This could be confusing a certificate check or similar. Update: I discovered that this does cause Windows Update to fail. The workaround, setting the clock back before starting factory reset, does not enable Java to install correctly. The factory reset image isn't really the same as what is installed in the main partition when you buy the system. Naughty Lenovo. The installer appears to crash while installing or displaying something to do with the Ask.com toolbar. That seems to be what javaic.dll does. Microsoft Tuesday was the 14th. Some update in that could be causing this. However, I'm factory reseting the machine every time, so unless the patches get slipstreamed into the recovery image, or there is some mechanism by which they get silently installed even if updates are disabled, then I don't see how this can be the cause. Major breakthrough: The default browser on Lenovo systems is Google Chrome. I noticed that the JavaIC.dll "sponsor check" actually does a check on your default browser in order to decide which sponsor ad to display. Normally that would get you the Ask toolbar on IE9. But that toolbar doesn't work on Chrome, and so the installer tries to display a different ad. The different ad is what causes the crash. Changing the default browser to IE9 allows the installer to run correctly. So this looks like a genuine bug in the sponsor ad code in the installer, caused by a combination of Google Chrome default browser and not being in the US. (Installer also checks your location using IP geolocation service and displays different ads based on that.)

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• A tale from a Stalker

  - by Peter Larsson

  Today I thought I should write something about a stalker I've got. Don't get me wrong, I have way more fans than stalkers, but this stalker is particular persistent towards me. It all started when I wrote about Relational Division with Sets late last year(http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/peterl/archive/2010/07/02/Proper-Relational-Division-With-Sets.aspx) and no matter what he tried, he didn't get a better performing query than me. But this I didn't click until later into this conversation. He must have saved himself for 9 months before posting to me again. Well... Some days ago I get an email from someone I thought i didn't know. Here is his first email Hi, I want a proper solution for achievement the result. The solution must be standard query, means no using as any native code like TOP clause, also the query should run in SQL Server 2000 (no CTE use). We have a table with consecutive keys (nbr) that is not exact sequence. We need bringing all values related with nearest key in the current key row. See the DDL: CREATE TABLE Nums(nbr INTEGER NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, val INTEGER NOT NULL); INSERT INTO Nums(nbr, val) VALUES (1, 0),(5, 7),(9, 4); See the Result: pre_nbr     pre_val     nbr         val         nxt_nbr     nxt_val ----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- NULL        NULL        1           0           5           7 1           0           5           7           9           4 5           7           9           4           NULL        NULL The goal is suggesting most elegant solution. I would like see your best solution first, after that I will send my best (if not same with yours)   Notice there is no name, no please or nothing polite asking for my help. So, on the top of my head I sent him two solutions, following the rule "Work on SQL Server 2000 and only standard non-native code".     -- Peso 1 SELECT               pre_nbr,                              (                                                           SELECT               x.val                                                           FROM                dbo.Nums AS x                                                           WHERE              x.nbr = d.pre_nbr                              ) AS pre_val,                              d.nbr,                              d.val,                              d.nxt_nbr,                              (                                                           SELECT               x.val                                                           FROM                dbo.Nums AS x                                                           WHERE              x.nbr = d.nxt_nbr                              ) AS nxt_val FROM                (                                                           SELECT               (                                                                                                                     SELECT               MAX(x.nbr) AS nbr                                                                                                                     FROM                dbo.Nums AS x                                                                                                                     WHERE              x.nbr < n.nbr                                                                                        ) AS pre_nbr,                                                                                        n.nbr,                                                                                        n.val,                                                                                        (                                                                                                                     SELECT               MIN(x.nbr) AS nbr                                                                                                                     FROM                dbo.Nums AS x                                                                                                                     WHERE              x.nbr > n.nbr                                                                                        ) AS nxt_nbr                                                           FROM                dbo.Nums AS n                              ) AS d -- Peso 2 CREATE TABLE #Temp                                                         (                                                                                        ID INT IDENTITY(1, 1) PRIMARY KEY,                                                                                        nbr INT,                                                                                        val INT                                                           )   INSERT                                            #Temp                                                           (                                                                                        nbr,                                                                                        val                                                           ) SELECT                                            nbr,                                                           val FROM                                             dbo.Nums ORDER BY         nbr   SELECT                                            pre.nbr AS pre_nbr,                                                           pre.val AS pre_val,                                                           t.nbr,                                                           t.val,                                                           nxt.nbr AS nxt_nbr,                                                           nxt.val AS nxt_val FROM                                             #Temp AS pre RIGHT JOIN      #Temp AS t ON t.ID = pre.ID + 1 LEFT JOIN         #Temp AS nxt ON nxt.ID = t.ID + 1   DROP TABLE    #Temp Notice there are no indexes on #Temp table yet. And here is where the conversation derailed. First I got this response back Now my solutions: --My 1st Slt SELECT T2.*, T1.*, T3.*   FROM Nums AS T1        LEFT JOIN Nums AS T2          ON T2.nbr = (SELECT MAX(nbr)                         FROM Nums                        WHERE nbr < T1.nbr)        LEFT JOIN Nums AS T3          ON T3.nbr = (SELECT MIN(nbr)                         FROM Nums                        WHERE nbr > T1.nbr); --My 2nd Slt SELECT MAX(CASE WHEN N1.nbr > N2.nbr THEN N2.nbr ELSE NULL END) AS pre_nbr,        (SELECT val FROM Nums WHERE nbr = MAX(CASE WHEN N1.nbr > N2.nbr THEN N2.nbr ELSE NULL END)) AS pre_val,        N1.nbr AS cur_nbr, N1.val AS cur_val,        MIN(CASE WHEN N1.nbr < N2.nbr THEN N2.nbr ELSE NULL END) AS nxt_nbr,        (SELECT val FROM Nums WHERE nbr = MIN(CASE WHEN N1.nbr < N2.nbr THEN N2.nbr ELSE NULL END)) AS nxt_val   FROM Nums AS N1,        Nums AS N2  GROUP BY N1.nbr, N1.val;   /* My 1st Slt Table 'Nums'. Scan count 7, logical reads 14 My 2nd Slt Table 'Nums'. Scan count 4, logical reads 23 Peso 1 Table 'Nums'. Scan count 9, logical reads 28 Peso 2 Table '#Temp'. Scan count 0, logical reads 7 Table 'Nums'. Scan count 1, logical reads 2 Table '#Temp'. Scan count 3, logical reads 16 */  To this, I emailed him back asking for a scalability test What if you try with a Nums table with 100,000 rows? His response to that started to get nasty.  I have to say Peso 2 is not acceptable. As I said before the solution must be standard, ORDER BY is not part of standard SELECT. Try this without ORDER BY:  Truncate Table Nums INSERT INTO Nums (nbr, val) VALUES (1, 0),(9,4), (5, 7)  So now we have new rules. No ORDER BY because it's not standard SQL! Of course I asked him  Why do you have that idea? ORDER BY is not standard? To this, his replies went stranger and stranger Standard Select = Set-based (no any cursor) It’s free to know, just refer to Advanced SQL Programming by Celko or mail to him if you accept comments from him. What the stalker probably doesn't know, is that I and Mr Celko occasionally are involved in some conversation and thus we exchange emails. I don't know if this reference to Mr Celko was made to intimidate me either. So I answered him, still polite, this What do you mean? The SELECT itself has a ”cursor under the hood”. Now the stalker gets rude  But however I mean the solution must no containing any order by, top... No problem, I do not like Peso 2, it’s very non-intelligent and elementary. Yes, Peso 2 is elementary but most performing queries are... And now is the time where I started to feel the stalker really wanted to achieve something else, so I wrote to him So what is your goal? Have a query that performs well, or a query that is super-portable? My Peso 2 outperforms any of your code with a factor of 100 when using more than 100,000 rows. While I awaited his answer, I posted him this query Ok, here is another one -- Peso 3 SELECT             MAX(CASE WHEN d = 1 THEN nbr ELSE NULL END) AS pre_nbr,                    MAX(CASE WHEN d = 1 THEN val ELSE NULL END) AS pre_val,                    MAX(CASE WHEN d = 0 THEN nbr ELSE NULL END) AS nbr,                    MAX(CASE WHEN d = 0 THEN val ELSE NULL END) AS val,                    MAX(CASE WHEN d = -1 THEN nbr ELSE NULL END) AS nxt_nbr,                    MAX(CASE WHEN d = -1 THEN val ELSE NULL END) AS nxt_val FROM               (                              SELECT    nbr,                                        val,                                        ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY nbr) AS SeqID                              FROM      dbo.Nums                    ) AS s CROSS JOIN         (                              VALUES    (-1),                                        (0),                                        (1)                    ) AS x(d) GROUP BY           SeqID + x.d HAVING             COUNT(*) > 1 And here is the stats Table 'Nums'. Scan count 1, logical reads 2, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0. It beats the hell out of your queries…. Now I finally got a response from my stalker and now I also clicked who he was. This is his reponse Why you post my original method with a bit change under you name? I do not like it. See: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic468501-362-14.aspx ;WITH C AS ( SELECT seq_nbr, k,        DENSE_RANK() OVER(ORDER BY seq_nbr ASC) + k AS grp_fct   FROM [Sample]         CROSS JOIN         (VALUES (-1), (0), (1)         ) AS D(k) ) SELECT MIN(seq_nbr) AS pre_value,        MAX(CASE WHEN k = 0 THEN seq_nbr END) AS current_value,        MAX(seq_nbr) AS next_value   FROM C GROUP BY grp_fct HAVING min(seq_nbr) < max(seq_nbr); These posts: Posted Tuesday, April 12, 2011 10:04 AM Posted Tuesday, April 12, 2011 1:22 PM Why post a solution where will not work in SQL Server 2000? Wait a minute! His own solution is using both a CTE and a ranking function so his query will not work on SQL Server 2000! Bummer... The reference to "Me not like" are my exact words in a previous topic on SQLTeam.com and when I remembered the phrasing, I also knew who he was. See this topic http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=159262 where he writes a query and posts it under my name, as if I wrote it. So I answered him this (less polite). Like I keep track of all topics in the whole world… J So you think you are the only one coming up with this idea? Besides, “M S solution” doesn’t work.   This is the result I get pre_value        current_value                             next_value 1                           1                           5 1                           5                           9 5                           9                           9   And I did nothing like you did here, where you posted a solution which you “thought” I should write http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=159262 So why are you yourself using ranking function when this was not allowed per your original email, and no cte? You use CTE in your link above, which do not work in SQL Server 2000. All this makes no sense to me, other than you are trying your best to once in a lifetime create a better performing query than me? After a few hours I get this email back. I don't fully understand it, but it's probably a language barrier. >>Like I keep track of all topics in the whole world… J So you think you are the only one coming up with this idea?<< You right, but do not think you are the first creator of this.   >>Besides, “M S Solution” doesn’t work. This is the result I get <<   Why you get so unimportant mistake? See this post to correct it: Posted 4/12/2011 8:22:23 PM >> So why are you yourself using ranking function when this was not allowed per your original email, and no cte? You use CTE in your link above, which do not work in SQL Server 2000. <<  Again, why you get some unimportant incompatibility? You offer that solution for current goals not me  >> All this makes no sense to me, other than you are trying your best to once in a lifetime create a better performing query than me? <<  No, I only wanted to know who you will solve it. Now I know you do not have a special solution. No problem. No problem for me either. So I just answered him I am not the first, and you are not the first to come up with this idea. So what is your problem? I am pretty sure other people have come up with the same idea before us. I used this technique all the way back to 2007, see http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=93911 Let's see if he returns...  He did! >> So what is your problem? << Nothing Thanks for all replies; maybe we have some competitions in future, maybe. Also I like you but you do not attend it. Your behavior with me is not friendly. Not any meeting… Regards //Peso

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• Why does an error appear every time I try to open the Ubuntu Software Center? [duplicate]

  - by askubuntu7639

  This question already has an answer here: How do I remove a broken software source? 3 answers There is a glitch on the Ubuntu Software Center and whenever I open it an error appears and it keeps loading and never opens. Why does this happen? I have installed Ubuntu 13.04 on a disk and partitioned it. Please help me and ask for excess information if you need it. If you know of any duplicates please show me them!! This is the output of a question someone asked me. SystemError: E:Type '<!DOCTYPE' is not known on line 1 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list This next output is the output of cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list </div> <div style="float:left;"> <div class="textwidget"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "ca-pub-2917661377128354"; /* 160X600 Sidebar UX */ google_ad_slot = "9908287444"; google_ad_width = 160; google_ad_height = 600; //-- Recent Comments <article> <div style="float:left; display:block; margin:0 10px 10px 0; border:1px solid #CCCCCC; padding:3px; width:35px; height:35px;"><img alt='' src='http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/ae5f4503d5f167f1cf62d3e36e8242b6?s=35&amp;d=&amp;r=G' class='avatar avatar-35 photo' height='35' width='35' /></div> <div style="float:left;"> <h4 class="author">Richard Syme</h4> <p class="meta"> <time datetime="2013-09-24" pubdate>September 24, 2013</time> | <a class="permalink" href="http://www.unixmen.com/how-to-customize-you-vlc-hot-keys/#comment-13732">#</a> </p> </div> <div class="content" style="float:left;"><p>I dont have a clear button under the hotkeys. All i want to do is get rid of all hotkeys.</p> </article> <article> <div style="float:left; display:block; margin:0 10px 10px 0; border:1px solid #CCCCCC; padding:3px; width:35px; height:35px;"><img alt='' src='http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/ffabde94437e996a506e31e981bcf8fc?s=35&amp;d=&amp;r=G' class='avatar avatar-35 photo' height='35' width='35' /></div> <div style="float:left;"> <h4 class="author">Abin Thomas Mathew</h4> <p class="meta"> <time datetime="2013-09-24" pubdate>September 24, 2013</time> | <a class="permalink" href="http://www.unixmen.com/install-lamp-server-in-centos-6-4-rhel-6-4/#comment-13727">#</a> </p> </div> <div class="content" style="float:left;"><p>Simple and easy to follow tutorial to install and start of phpMyAdmin. Thank you</p> </article> <article> <div style="float:left; display:block; margin:0 10px 10px 0; border:1px solid #CCCCCC; padding:3px; width:35px; height:35px;"><img alt='' src='http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/499ccc1154e9b8569b87413434220b91?s=35&amp;d=&amp;r=G' class='avatar avatar-35 photo' height='35' width='35' /></div> <div style="float:left;"> <h4 class="author">SK</h4> <p class="meta"> <time datetime="2013-09-24" pubdate>September 24, 2013</time> | <a class="permalink" href="http://www.unixmen.com/munich-giving-ubuntu-linux-cds-citizens/#comment-13725">#</a> </p> </div> <div class="content" style="float:left;"><p>I have Bosslinux and i used it for a while. Now i swiched to Ubuntu 13.04.</p> </article> <article> <div style="float:left; display:block; margin:0 10px 10px 0; border:1px solid #CCCCCC; padding:3px; width:35px; height:35px;"><img alt='' src='http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/3dc2f7140bdd857dcdfe815a6e29aa6b?s=35&amp;d=&amp;r=G' class='avatar avatar-35 photo' height='35' width='35' /></div> <div style="float:left;"> <h4 class="author">Anon</h4> <p class="meta"> <time datetime="2013-09-24" pubdate>September 24, 2013</time> | <a class="permalink" href="http://www.unixmen.com/linus-torvalds-talks-backdoor-linuxcon/#comment-13724">#</a> </p> </div> <div class="content" style="float:left;"><p>Do you know how much extra bloat is in Ubuntu these days? How the hell does anyone really know?</p> </article> <article> <div style="float:left; display:block; margin:0 10px 10px 0; border:1px solid #CCCCCC; padding:3px; width:35px; height:35px;"><img alt='' src='http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/9dd28d1cf5efe754fa58b53c1e6de401?s=35&amp;d=&amp;r=G' class='avatar avatar-35 photo' height='35' width='35' /></div> <div style="float:left;"> <h4 class="author"><a href="http://ambitiousgeeks.blogspot.com/" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-commentauthor','http://ambitiousgeeks.blogspot.com']);" rel='external nofollow' class='url'>Ambition</a></h4> <p class="meta"> <time datetime="2013-09-24" pubdate>September 24, 2013</time> | <a class="permalink" href="http://www.unixmen.com/linus-torvalds-talks-backdoor-linuxcon/#comment-13723">#</a> </p> </div> <div class="content" style="float:left;"><p>True :)</p> </article> </div> <div style="float:left;"> &nbsp;<script type="text/javascript"> window.___gcfg = {lang: 'en-US'}; (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); })(); <div class="execphpwidget"></div> </div> <div class="module2"> <div class="recentPost"> <h3 class="module-title2">Favorite Links</h3> <ul class='xoxo blogroll'> http://www.iticy.com']);"Cheap Hosting http://www.tuxmachines.org']);"TuxMachines.org http://www.ubuntugeek.com']);"UbuntuGeek.com http://www.stelinuxhost.com']);"Webdesign & SEO </ul> <img src="http://180016988.r.cdn77.net/wp-content/themes/unimax/images/bigLine.jpg" alt="" /> </div> </div> <div align="center" style="min-height:610px;"> <div class="execphpwidget"></div> <div class="textwidget"><a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.en_US" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-widget','http://creativecommons.org']);"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />This work by <a xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="unixmen.com" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL">unixmen.com</a> is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.en_US" >Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License</a>.</div> </div> </div> <!-- #primary .widget-area --> </div> Unixmen Archive Select Month September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 Tags Cloudandroid apache browser Centos chrome command line Debian eyecandy Fedora firefox games gaming gnome google karmic koala kde libreoffice Linux linux distribution LinuxMint lucid lynx maverick meerkat mysql news oneiric ocelot openoffice opensource opensuse oracle ppa Precise Pangolin release RHEL security server software themes tools ubuntu unix upgrade virtualbox vlc windows wine Unixmen Twitts Firefox 16, a treat for developers http://t.co/cnd27CzT Ubuntu 12.10 ‘Quantal Quetzal’: Beta 2 Sneak Peek http://t.co/hd4LwDOy Top 5 security Myths about Linux; and their realities http://t.co/zO1LgHST About Us Advertising Sitemap Privacy Contact Us Hire Us Copyright © 2008-2013 Unixmen.com . Maintained by Unixmen . /* */ jQuery(document).on('ready post-load', easy_fancybox_handler ); http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/ Page Caching using apc Database Caching 3/186 queries in 0.035 seconds using apc Content Delivery Network via 180016988.r.cdn77.net Served from: www.unixmen.com @ 2013-09-25 01:38:14 by W3 Total Cache

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• Contract Work - Lessons Learned

  - by samerpaul

  I thought I would write a post of a different nature today, but still relevant to the tech world. I do a lot of contract jobs myself and really enjoy it. It's nice to keep jumping from project to project, and not having to go to an office or keep regular hours, etc. I really enjoy it. I have learned a lot in the past few years of doing it (both from experience and from help given to me from others, and the internet) so I thought I'd share some of that knowledge/experience today.So here's my own personal "lesson's learned" that hopefully will help you if you find yourself doing contract work:Should I take the job?Ok, so this is the first step. Assuming you were given sufficient information about what they want, then you should really think about what you're capable of doing and whether or not you should take this job. Personally, my rule is, if I know it's possible, I'll say yes, even if I don't yet know how to do it. That's because the internet is such a great help, it would be rare to run into an issue that you can't figure out with some help. So if your clients are asking for something that you don't yet know how to program, but you know you can do it on the platform then go for it. How else are you going to learn?Use this rule with some limitation, however. If you're really lacking the expertise or foundation in something, then unless you have tons of time to complete the project, then I wouldn't say yes. For example, I haven't personally done any 3d/openGL programming yet so I wouldn't say yes to a project that extensively uses it. OK, so I want the job, but how much do I charge?This part can be tricky. There is no set formula really, but I have some tips for pricing that will hopefully give you a better idea on how to confidently ask your price and have them accept. Here are some personal guidelinesHow much time do you have to complete the project? If it's shorter than average, then charge more. You can even make a subtle note about this (or not so subtle if they still don't get it.) If it seems too short of a time (i.e. near impossible to complete), be sure to say that. It looks bad to promise a time that you can't keep--and it makes it less likely for them to return to you for work.Your Hourly rate: How long have you been working in that language? Do you have existing projects to back you up? Or previous contacts that can vouch for your work? Are there very few people with your particular skill set? All of these things will lend themselves to setting an hourly rate. I'd also try out a quick google search of what your line of work is, to see what the industry standard is at that point in time.I wouldn't price too low, because you want to make your time worth it. You also want them to feel like they're paying for quality work (assuming you can deliver it :) ). Finally, think about your client. If it's a small business, then don't price it too high if you want the job. If it's an enterprise (like a Fortune company), then don't be afraid to price higher. They have the budget for it.Fixed price: If they want a fixed price project, then you need to think about how many hours it will take you to complete it and multiply it by the hourly rate you set for yourself. Then, honestly, I would add 10-20% on top of that. Why? Because nothing ever works exactly how you want it to. There are lots of times that something "trivial" is way harder than it should be, or something that "should work" doesn't for hours and it eats away at your hourly rate. I can't count the number of times I encountered a logical bug that took away an entire's day work because debuggers don't help in those cases. By adding that padding in, it's still OK to have those days where you don't get as much done as you want. And another useful tip: Depending on your client, and the scope, you most likely want to set that you both sign off on a specification sheet before doing any work, and that any changes will result in a re-evaulation of the price. This is to help protect you from being handed a huge new addition to the project half-way in, without any extra payment.Scope of project: Finally, is it a huge project? Is it really small/fast? This affects how much your client will be willing to pay. If it sounds big, they will be willing to pay more for it. If it seems really small, then you won't be able to get away with a large asking price (as easily).Ok, I priced it, now what?So now that you have the price, you want to make sure it feels justified to your client. I never set a price before I can really think about everything. For example, if you're still in your introduction phase, and they want a price, don't give one! Just comment that you will send them a proposal sheet with all the features outlined, and a price for everything. You don't want to shout out a low number and then deliver something that is way higher. You also don't want to shock them with a big number before they feel like they are getting a great product.Make up a proposal document in a word editor. Personally, I leave the price till the very end. Why? Because by the time they reach the end, you've already discussed all the great features you plan to implement, and how it's the best product they'll ever use, etc etc...so your price comes off as a steal! If you hit them up front with a price, they will read through the document with a negative bias. Think about those commercials on TV. They always go on about their product, then at the end, ask "What would you pay for something like this? $100? $50? How about $20!!". This is not by accident.Scenario: I finished the job way earlier than expectedYou have two options then. You can either polish the hell out of the application, and even throw in a few bonus features (assuming they are in-line with the customer's needs) or you can sit and wait on it until you near your deadline. Why don't you want to turn it in too early? Because you should treat that extra time as a surplus. If you said it is going to take you 3 weeks, and it took you only 1, you have a surplus of 2 weeks. I personally don't want to let them know that I can do a 3 week project in 1 week. Why not? Because that may not always be the case! I may later have a 3 week project that takes all 3 weeks, but if I set a precedent of delivering super early, then the pressure is on for that longer project. It also makes it harder to quote longer times if you keep delivering too early.Feel free to deliver early, but again, don't do it too early. They may also wonder why they paid you for 3 weeks of work if you're done in 1. They may further wonder if the product sucks, or what is wrong with it, if it's done so early, etc.I would just polish the application. Everyone loves polish in their applications. The smallest details are what make an application go from "functional" to "fantastic". And since you are still delivering on time, then they are still going to be very happy with you.Scenario: It's taking way too long to finish this, and the deadline is nearing/here!So this is not a fun scenario to be in, but it'll happen. Sometimes the scope of the project gets out of hand. The best policy here is OPENNESS/HONESTY. Tell them that the project is taking longer than expected, and give a reasonable time for when you think you'll have it done. I typically explain it in a way that makes it sound like it isn't something that I did wrong, but it's just something about the nature of the project. This really goes for any scenario, to be honest. Just continue to stay open and communicative about your progress. This doesn't mean that you should email them every five minutes (unless they want you to), but it does mean that maybe every few days or once a week, give them an update on where you're at, and what's next. They'll be happy to know they are paying for progress, and it'll make it easier to ask for an extension when something goes wrong, because they know that you've been working on it all along.Final tips and thoughts:In general, contract work is really fun and rewarding. It's nice to learn new things all the time, as mandated by the project ,and to challenge yourself to do things you may not have done before. The key is to build a great relationship with your clients for future work, and for recommendations. I am always very honest with them and I never promise something I can't deliver. Again, under promise, over deliver!I hope this has proved helpful!Cheers,samerpaul

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• Software development is (mostly) a trade, and what to do about it

  - by Jeff

  (This is another cross-post from my personal blog. I don’t even remember when I first started to write it, but I feel like my opinion is well enough baked to share.) I've been sitting on this for a long time, particularly as my opinion has changed dramatically over the last few years. That I've encountered more crappy code than maintainable, quality code in my career as a software developer only reinforces what I'm about to say. Software development is just a trade for most, and not a huge academic endeavor. For those of you with computer science degrees readying your pitchforks and collecting your algorithm interview questions, let me explain. This is not an assault on your way of life, and if you've been around, you know I'm right about the quality problem. You also know the HR problem is very real, or we wouldn't be paying top dollar for mediocre developers and importing people from all over the world to fill the jobs we can't fill. I'm going to try and outline what I see as some of the problems, and hopefully offer my views on how to address them. The recruiting problem I think a lot of companies are doing it wrong. Over the years, I've had two kinds of interview experiences. The first, and right, kind of experience involves talking about real life achievements, followed by some variation on white boarding in pseudo-code, drafting some basic system architecture, or even sitting down at a comprooder and pecking out some basic code to tackle a real problem. I can honestly say that I've had a job offer for every interview like this, save for one, because the task was to debug something and they didn't like me asking where to look ("everyone else in the company died in a plane crash"). The other interview experience, the wrong one, involves the classic torture test designed to make the candidate feel stupid and do things they never have, and never will do in their job. First they will question you about obscure academic material you've never seen, or don't care to remember. Then they'll ask you to white board some ridiculous algorithm involving prime numbers or some kind of string manipulation no one would ever do. In fact, if you had to do something like this, you'd Google for a solution instead of waste time on a solved problem. Some will tell you that the academic gauntlet interview is useful to see how people respond to pressure, how they engage in complex logic, etc. That might be true, unless of course you have someone who brushed up on the solutions to the silly puzzles, and they're playing you. But here's the real reason why the second experience is wrong: You're evaluating for things that aren't the job. These might have been useful tactics when you had to hire people to write machine language or C++, but in a world dominated by managed code in C#, or Java, people aren't managing memory or trying to be smarter than the compilers. They're using well known design patterns and techniques to deliver software. More to the point, these puzzle gauntlets don't evaluate things that really matter. They don't get into code design, issues of loose coupling and testability, knowledge of the basics around HTTP, or anything else that relates to building supportable and maintainable software. The first situation, involving real life problems, gives you an immediate idea of how the candidate will work out. One of my favorite experiences as an interviewee was with a guy who literally brought his work from that day and asked me how to deal with his problem. I had to demonstrate how I would design a class, make sure the unit testing coverage was solid, etc. I worked at that company for two years. So stop looking for algorithm puzzle crunchers, because a guy who can crush a Fibonacci sequence might also be a guy who writes a class with 5,000 lines of untestable code. Fashion your interview process on ways to reveal a developer who can write supportable and maintainable code. I would even go so far as to let them use the Google. If they want to cut-and-paste code, pass on them, but if they're looking for context or straight class references, hire them, because they're going to be life-long learners. The contractor problem I doubt anyone has ever worked in a place where contractors weren't used. The use of contractors seems like an obvious way to control costs. You can hire someone for just as long as you need them and then let them go. You can even give them the work that no one else wants to do. In practice, most places I've worked have retained and budgeted for the contractor year-round, meaning that the $90+ per hour they're paying (of which half goes to the person) would have been better spent on a full-time person with a $100k salary and benefits. But it's not even the cost that is an issue. It's the quality of work delivered. The accountability of a contractor is totally transient. They only need to deliver for as long as you keep them around, and chances are they'll never again touch the code. There's no incentive for them to get things right, there's little incentive to understand your system or learn anything. At the risk of making an unfair generalization, craftsmanship doesn't matter to most contractors. The education problem I don't know what they teach in college CS courses. I've believed for most of my adult life that a college degree was an essential part of being successful. Of course I would hold that bias, since I did it, and have the paper to show for it in a box somewhere in the basement. My first clue that maybe this wasn't a fully qualified opinion comes from the fact that I double-majored in journalism and radio/TV, not computer science. Eventually I worked with people who skipped college entirely, many of them at Microsoft. Then I worked with people who had a masters degree who sucked at writing code, next to the high school diploma types that rock it every day. I still think there's a lot to be said for the social development of someone who has the on-campus experience, but for software developers, college might not matter. As I mentioned before, most of us are not writing compilers, and we never will. It's actually surprising to find how many people are self-taught in the art of software development, and that should reveal some interesting truths about how we learn. The first truth is that we learn largely out of necessity. There's something that we want to achieve, so we do what I call just-in-time learning to meet those goals. We acquire knowledge when we need it. So what about the gaps in our knowledge? That's where the most valuable education occurs, via our mentors. They're the people we work next to and the people who write blogs. They are critical to our professional development. They don't need to be an encyclopedia of jargon, but they understand the craft. Even at this stage of my career, I probably can't tell you what SOLID stands for, but you can bet that I practice the principles behind that acronym every day. That comes from experience, augmented by my peers. I'm hell bent on passing that experience to others. Process issues If you're a manager type and don't do much in the way of writing code these days (shame on you for not messing around at least), then your job is to isolate your tradespeople from nonsense, while bringing your business into the realm of modern software development. That doesn't mean you slap up a white board with sticky notes and start calling yourself agile, it means getting all of your stakeholders to understand that frequent delivery of quality software is the best way to deal with change and evolving expectations. It also means that you have to play technical overlord to make sure the education and quality issues are dealt with. That's why I make the crack about sticky notes, because without the right technique being practiced among your code monkeys, you're just a guy with sticky notes. You're asking your business to accept frequent and iterative delivery, now make sure that the folks writing the code can handle the same thing. This means unit testing, the right instrumentation, integration tests, automated builds and deployments... all of the stuff that makes it easy to see when change breaks stuff. The prognosis I strongly believe that education is the most important part of what we do. I'm encouraged by things like The Starter League, and it's the kind of thing I'd love to see more of. I would go as far as to say I'd love to start something like this internally at an existing company. Most of all though, I can't emphasize enough how important it is that we mentor each other and share our knowledge. If you have people on your staff who don't want to learn, fire them. Seriously, get rid of them. A few months working with someone really good, who understands the craftsmanship required to build supportable and maintainable code, will change that person forever and increase their value immeasurably.

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• WCF Data Service BeginSaveChanges not saving changes in Silverlight app

  - by Enigmativity

  I'm having a hell of a time getting WCF Data Services to work within Silverlight. I'm using the VS2010 RC. I've struggled with the cross domain issue requiring the use of clientaccesspolicy.xml & crossdomain.xml files in the web server root folder, but I just couldn't get this to work. I've resorted to putting both the Silverlight Web App & the WCF Data Service in the same project to get past this issue, but any advice here would be good. But now that I can actually see my data coming from the database and being displayed in a data grid within Silverlight I thought my troubles were over - but no. I can edit the data and the in-memory entity is changing, but when I call BeginSaveChanges (with the appropriate async EndSaveChangescall) I get no errors, but no data updates in the database. Here's my WCF Data Services code: public class MyDataService : DataService<MyEntities> { public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All); config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("*", ServiceOperationRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } protected override void OnStartProcessingRequest(ProcessRequestArgs args) { base.OnStartProcessingRequest(args); HttpContext context = HttpContext.Current; HttpCachePolicy c = HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache; c.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.ServerAndPrivate); c.SetExpires(HttpContext.Current.Timestamp.AddSeconds(60)); c.VaryByHeaders["Accept"] = true; c.VaryByHeaders["Accept-Charset"] = true; c.VaryByHeaders["Accept-Encoding"] = true; c.VaryByParams["*"] = true; } } I've pinched the OnStartProcessingRequest code from Scott Hanselman's article Creating an OData API for StackOverflow including XML and JSON in 30 minutes. Here's my code from my Silverlight app: private MyEntities _wcfDataServicesEntities; private CollectionViewSource _customersViewSource; private ObservableCollection<Customer> _customers; private void UserControl_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { if (!System.ComponentModel.DesignerProperties.GetIsInDesignMode(this)) { _wcfDataServicesEntities = new MyEntities(new Uri("http://localhost:7156/MyDataService.svc/")); _customersViewSource = this.Resources["customersViewSource"] as CollectionViewSource; DataServiceQuery<Customer> query = _wcfDataServicesEntities.Customer; query.BeginExecute(result => { _customers = new ObservableCollection<Customer>(); Array.ForEach(query.EndExecute(result).ToArray(), _customers.Add); Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => { _customersViewSource.Source = _customers; }); }, null); } } private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { _wcfDataServicesEntities.BeginSaveChanges(r => { var response = _wcfDataServicesEntities.EndSaveChanges(r); string[] results = new[] { response.BatchStatusCode.ToString(), response.IsBatchResponse.ToString() }; _customers[0].FinAssistCompanyName = String.Join("|", results); }, null); } The response string I get back data binds to my grid OK and shows "-1|False". My intent is to get a proof-of-concept working here and then do the appropriate separation of concerns to turn this into a simple line-of-business app. I've spent hours and hours on this. I'm being driven insane. Any ideas how to get this working?

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• Xcode/iPhone Development 6 months in - Annoyances

  - by clearbrian

  Hi I've been iPhone programming for 6 months and come from a PC/Java/Eclipse background and still have a few annoyances with Xcode/iPhone programming I wonder are there any shortcuts to. Is there any way to prevent multiple windows opening all the time in XCode? a) When you click on the Errors/Warnings in the bottom right of the status bar build errors are shown in separate window. Any way to get these to show in the main editor? b) Anyway to get debugger to appear in main editor. I have a big screen iMac and it's still window hell on Macs. When you come from Alt-Tab the Mac is a nightmare. 2) Anyway to get a toolbar item on the main editor to: a) Open Console (I know CMD-thingy-R) b) Open Break points (you have to open Debugger first then breakpoints) I know there's keyboard shortcuts but I have only left hand free others on the trackball so any keys on right hand side of keyboard are too far. I know you can add Finder toolbar scripts (just wondering if anyway to extend Xcode). Are there utilities to extend Xcode? Scripts/Automator/Any Services I can setup to help. Can you automate Xcode like you can with Windows/ActiveX/VBA 3) Limit lookups using CMD + double click. If I double click on a variable to find its definition using CMD + double click it shows every occurrence of all variables with that name. (annoying it you name all you maps mapView) Anyway to get it to limit to the current class or at least order so current class is first. 4) Find doesn't seem to loop backwards if result all above cursor position I'm in a class and I hit CMD + F for find. Find box appears. I enter some text hit return. It says I have x matches but only back arrow is highlight in Find But when I hit < it does nothing. I need to scroll to the top and redo the search. If the text is both forwards and backwards then both < are highlighted and it works. is this a bug or a 'feature' Missing Eclipse features I have been looking at the User Script menu but was wondering how powerful they are? 5) any scripts around to generate source from members such as description: @property @synthesize if I add a new member, run a script will generate @property/@syntesize and release in dealloc 7) any good sites for scripts? SCM Im having problems with SCM and Folders on HD under project Classes directory. You get a library e.g. JSON. It usually comes as a folder. You copy it to the /Classes for your project. /Classes/JSON I create a Group for the Library in Xcode under Classes group. Classes JSON I drag the files from the folder into xcode into the JSON Group. I add them to the SCM and icon changes from ? to A but if I try and commit them it say folder /JSON is not under SCM. Can you drag a folder into Xcode so that it AND its files get included in SCM? Anyway to stop Xcode Help from being on top all the time. I keep feeling like punching it and telling it to get out of the way! :) I dont mind it open just not in the way once I've finished. Yes I know I can Ctrl-W Sites: the main site I use to learn Obj-C are : stackoverflow.com Google code Search - tonnes of full apps on here http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-development/ Apple Developers Forums (anyway to get RSS feed to these or is that blasphemy :) ) Safari - 100s of IT book though prob too many to keep up :) any others? Any site that gives simple examples for Obj-C/ UIKit The docs just show the methods but actual examples (Google code search has helped a lot here)

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• Problem with URL encoded parameters in URL view helper

  - by Richard Knop

  So my problem is kinda weird, it only occurs when I test the application offline (on my PC with WampServer), the same code works 100% correctly online. Here is how I use the helper (just example): <a href="<?php echo $this->url(array('module' => 'admin', 'controller' => 'index', 'action' => 'approve-photo', 'id' => $this->escape($a->id), 'ret' => urlencode('admin/index/photos')), null, true); ?>" class="blue">approve</a> Online, this link works great, it goes to the action which looks similar to this: public function approvePhotoAction() { $request = $this->getRequest(); $photos = $this->_getTable('Photos'); $dbTrans = false; try { $db = $this->_getDb(); $dbTrans = $db->beginTransaction(); $photos->edit($request->getParam('id'), array('status' => 'approved')); $db->commit(); } catch (Exception $e) { if (true === $dbTrans) { $db->rollBack(); } } $this->_redirect(urldecode($request->getParam('ret'))); } So online, it approves the photo and redirects back to the URL that is encoded as "ret" param in the URL ("admin/index/photos"). But offline with WampServer I click on the link and get 404 error like this: Not Found The requested URL /public/admin/index/approve-photo/id/1/ret/admin/index/photos was not found on this server. What the hell? I'm using the latest version of WampServer (WampServer 2.0i [11/07/09]). Everything else works. Here is my .htaccess file, just in case: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L] RewriteRule ^.*$ /index.php [NC,L] # Turn off magic quotes #php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off I'm using virtual hosts to test ZF projects on my local PC. Here is how I add virtual hosts. httpd.conf: NameVirtualHost *:80 <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName myproject DocumentRoot "C:\wamp\www\myproject" </VirtualHost> the hosts file: 127.0.0.1 myproject Any help would be appreciated because this makes testing and debugging projects on my localhost a nightmare and almost impossible task. I have to upload everything online to check if it works :( UPDATE: Source code of the _redirect helper (built in ZF helper): /** * Set redirect in response object * * @return void */ protected function _redirect($url) { if ($this->getUseAbsoluteUri() && !preg_match('#^(https?|ftp)://#', $url)) { $host = (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'])?$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']:''); $proto = (isset($_SERVER['HTTPS'])&&$_SERVER['HTTPS']!=="off") ? 'https' : 'http'; $port = (isset($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'])?$_SERVER['SERVER_PORT']:80); $uri = $proto . '://' . $host; if ((('http' == $proto) && (80 != $port)) || (('https' == $proto) && (443 != $port))) { $uri .= ':' . $port; } $url = $uri . '/' . ltrim($url, '/'); } $this->_redirectUrl = $url; $this->getResponse()->setRedirect($url, $this->getCode()); } UPDATE 2: Output of the helper offline: /admin/index/approve-photo/id/1/ret/admin%252Findex%252Fphotos And online (the same): /admin/index/approve-photo/id/1/ret/admin%252Findex%252Fphotos UPDATE 3: OK. The problem was actually with the virtual host configuration. The document root was set to C:\wamp\www\myproject instead of C:\wamp\www\myproject\public. And I was using this htaccess to redirect to the public folder: RewriteEngine On php_value upload_max_filesize 15M php_value post_max_size 15M php_value max_execution_time 200 php_value max_input_time 200 # Exclude some directories from URI rewriting #RewriteRule ^(dir1|dir2|dir3) - [L] RewriteRule ^\.htaccess$ - [F] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ="" RewriteRule ^.*$ /public/index.php [NC,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/public/.*$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /public/$1 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L] RewriteRule ^public/.*$ /public/index.php [NC,L] Damn it I don't know why I forgot about this, I thought the virtual host was configured correctly to the public folder, I was 100% sure about that, I also double checked it and saw no problem (wtf? am I blind?).

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• Need help to debug application using .Net and MySQL

  - by Tim Murphy

  What advice can you give me on how to track down a bug I have while inserting data into MySQL database with .Net? The error message is: MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlException: Duplicate entry '26012' for key 'StockNumber_Number_UNIQUE' Reviewing of the log proves that StockNumber_Number of 26012 has not been inserted yet. Products in use. Visual Studio 2008. mysql.data.dll 6.0.4.0. Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit and Windows 2003 32 bit. Custom built ORM framework (have source code). Importing data from Access 2003 database. The code works fine for 3000 - 5000 imports. The record being imported that causes the problem in a full run works fine if just importing by itself. I've also seen the error on other records if I sort the data to be imported a different way. Have tried import with and without transactions. Have logged the hell out of the system. The SQL command to create the table: CREATE TABLE `RareItems_RareItems` ( `RareItemKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, `StockNumber_Text` VARCHAR(7) NOT NULL, `StockNumber_Number` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, UNIQUE INDEX `StockNumber_Number_UNIQUE` (`StockNumber_Number` ASC), `OurPercentage` NUMERIC , `SellPrice` NUMERIC(19, 2) , `Author` VARCHAR(250) , `CatchWord` VARCHAR(250) , `Title` TEXT , `Publisher` VARCHAR(250) , `InternalNote` VARCHAR(250) , `DateOfPublishing` VARCHAR(250) , `ExternalNote` LONGTEXT , `Description` LONGTEXT , `Scrap` LONGTEXT , `SuppressionKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `TypeKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `CatalogueStatusKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `CatalogueRevisedDate` DATETIME , `CatalogueRevisedByKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `CatalogueToBeRevisedByKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `DontInsure` BIT NOT NULL, `ExtraCosts` NUMERIC(19, 2) , `IsWebReady` BIT NOT NULL, `LocationKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `LanguageKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `CatalogueDescription` VARCHAR(250) , `PlacePublished` VARCHAR(250) , `ToDo` LONGTEXT , `Headline` VARCHAR(250) , `DepartmentKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `Temp1` INT , `Temp2` INT , `Temp3` VARCHAR(250) , `Temp4` VARCHAR(250) , `InternetStatusKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `InternetStatusInfo` LONGTEXT , `PurchaseKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `ConsignmentKey` CHAR(36) , `IsSold` BIT NOT NULL, `RowCreated` DATETIME NOT NULL, `RowModified` DATETIME NOT NULL ); The SQL command and parameters to insert the record: INSERT INTO `RareItems_RareItems` (`RareItemKey`, `StockNumber_Text`, `StockNumber_Number`, `OurPercentage`, `SellPrice`, `Author`, `CatchWord`, `Title`, `Publisher`, `InternalNote`, `DateOfPublishing`, `ExternalNote`, `Description`, `Scrap`, `SuppressionKey`, `TypeKey`, `CatalogueStatusKey`, `CatalogueRevisedDate`, `CatalogueRevisedByKey`, `CatalogueToBeRevisedByKey`, `DontInsure`, `ExtraCosts`, `IsWebReady`, `LocationKey`, `LanguageKey`, `CatalogueDescription`, `PlacePublished`, `ToDo`, `Headline`, `DepartmentKey`, `Temp1`, `Temp2`, `Temp3`, `Temp4`, `InternetStatusKey`, `InternetStatusInfo`, `PurchaseKey`, `ConsignmentKey`, `IsSold`, `RowCreated`, `RowModified`) VALUES (@RareItemKey, @StockNumber_Text, @StockNumber_Number, @OurPercentage, @SellPrice, @Author, @CatchWord, @Title, @Publisher, @InternalNote, @DateOfPublishing, @ExternalNote, @Description, @Scrap, @SuppressionKey, @TypeKey, @CatalogueStatusKey, @CatalogueRevisedDate, @CatalogueRevisedByKey, @CatalogueToBeRevisedByKey, @DontInsure, @ExtraCosts, @IsWebReady, @LocationKey, @LanguageKey, @CatalogueDescription, @PlacePublished, @ToDo, @Headline, @DepartmentKey, @Temp1, @Temp2, @Temp3, @Temp4, @InternetStatusKey, @InternetStatusInfo, @PurchaseKey, @ConsignmentKey, @IsSold, @RowCreated, @RowModified) @RareItemKey = 0b625bd6-776d-43d6-9405-e97159d172a6 @StockNumber_Text = 199305 @StockNumber_Number = 26012 @OurPercentage = 22.5 @SellPrice = 1250 @Author = SPARRMAN, Anders. @CatchWord = COOK: SECOND VOYAGE @Title = A Voyage Round the World with Captain James Cook in H.M.S. Resolution… Introduction and notes by Owen Rutter, wood engravings by Peter Barker-Mill. @Publisher = @InternalNote = @DateOfPublishing = 1944 @ExternalNote = The first English translation of Sparrman’s narrative, which had originally been published in Sweden in 1802-1818, and the only complete version of his account to appear in English. The eighteenth-century translation had appeared some time before the Swedish publication of the final sections of his account. Sparrman’s observant and well-written narrative of the second voyage contains much that appears nowhere else, emphasising naturally his interests in medicine, health, and natural history.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;One of 350 numbered copies: a handsomely produced and beautifully illustrated work. @Description = Small folio, wood-engravings in the text; original olive glazed cloth, top edges gilt, a very good copy. London, Golden Cockerel Press, 1944. @Scrap = @SuppressionKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 @TypeKey = 93f58155-7471-46ad-84c5-262ab9dd37e8 @CatalogueStatusKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000003 @CatalogueRevisedDate = @CatalogueRevisedByKey = c4f6fc06-956d-44c4-b393-0d5462cbffec @CatalogueToBeRevisedByKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 @DontInsure = False @ExtraCosts = @IsWebReady = False @LocationKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 @LanguageKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 @CatalogueDescription = @PlacePublished = Golden Cockerel Press @ToDo = @Headline = @DepartmentKey = 529578a3-9189-40de-b656-eef9039d00b8 @Temp1 = @Temp2 = @Temp3 = @Temp4 = v @InternetStatusKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 @InternetStatusInfo = @PurchaseKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 @ConsignmentKey = @IsSold = True @RowCreated = 8/04/2010 8:49:16 PM @RowModified = 8/04/2010 8:49:16 PM Suggestions on what is causing the error and/or how to track down what is causing the problem?

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• Wordpress Iphone App: nsxmlparsererrordomain error 64

  - by iMayne

  Spending hours fixing my function.php page and all seemed well, except Im getting errors on my rss feed at: blog.xternalit.co.uk. I leave that issue to rest and installed wordpress iphone app. The connection to my blog works perfect with wordpress' default theme. Ha! But it keeps making me resetting my password. So hell with that. Switched back to my theme and I cant connect from app to blog. The internet say there's n issue with my function.php. here's a look again at the script: '', 'after_widget' = '', 'before_title' = '', 'after_title' = '', )); function content($num) { $theContent = get_the_content(); $output = preg_replace('/]+./','', $theContent); $limit = $num+1; $content = explode(' ', $output, $limit); array_pop($content); $content = implode(" ",$content)."..."; echo $content; } function post_is_in_descendant_category( $cats, $_post = null ) { foreach ( (array) $cats as $cat ) { // get_term_children() accepts integer ID only $descendants = get_term_children( (int) $cat, 'category'); if ( $descendants && in_category( $descendants, $_post ) ) return true; } return false; } //custom comments function mytheme_comment($comment, $args, $depth) { $GLOBALS['comment'] = $comment; ? id="li-comment-" " %s says:'), get_comment_author_link()) ? comment_approved == '0') : ? $depth, 'max_depth' = $args['max_depth']))) ? </div> 0 && isset($_POST['rockwell_settings']) ) { $options = array ( 'style','logo_img','logo_alt','logo_txt', 'logo_tagline', 'tagline_width', 'contact_email','ads', 'advertise_page', 'twitter_link', 'facebook_link', 'flickr', 'about_tit', 'about_txt', 'analytics'); foreach ( $options as $opt ) { delete_option ( 'rockwell_'.$opt, $_POST[$opt] ); add_option ( 'rockwell_'.$opt, $_POST[$opt] ); } } add_theme_page(__('Rockwell Options'), __('Rockwell Options'), 'edit_themes', basename(__FILE__), 'rockwell_settings'); } function rockwell_settings () {? Rockwell Options Panel General Settings Theme Color Scheme selected="selected"pink.css selected="selected"blue.css selected="selected"orange.css Logo image (full path to image) " class="regular-text" / Logo image ALT text " class="regular-text" / Text logo " class="regular-text" / Leave this empty if you entered an image as logo Logo Tag Line " class="regular-text" / Tag Line Box Width (px)Default width: 300px " class="regular-text" / Email Address for Contact Form " class="regular-text" / Twitter link " class="regular-text" / Facebook link " class="regular-text" / Flickr Photostream selected="selected"Yes selected="selected"No Make sure you have FlickrRSS plugin activated if you choose to enable Flickr Photostream Sidebar About Box Title " class="regular-text" / Text Ads Box Settings Ads Section Enabled: selected="selected"Yes selected="selected"No Make sure you have AdMinister plugin activated and have the position "Sidebar" created within the plugin. Advertise Page Google Analytics code: \'"[\'"].*/i', $post-post_content, $matches); $first_img = $matches [1] [0]; if(empty($first_img)){ //Defines a default image $first_img = "/images/default.jpg"; } return $first_img; } ? Please note, if I add: to the bottome of the page, the blog crashes. Without: I get tons of errors. Any help?

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• Qt, MSVC, and /Zc:wchar_t- == I want to blow up the world

  - by Noah Roberts

  So Qt is compiled with /Zc:wchar_t- on windows. What this means is that instead of wchar_t being a typedef for some internal type (__wchar_t I think) it becomes a typedef for unsigned short. The really cool thing about this is that the default for MSVC is the opposite, which of course means that the libraries you're using are likely compiled with wchar_t being a different type than Qt's wchar_t. This doesn't become an issue of course until you try to use something like std::wstring in your code; especially when one or more libraries have functions that accept it as parameters. What effectively happens is that your code happily compiles but then fails to link because it's looking for definitions using std::wstring<unsigned short...> but they only contain definitions expecting std::wstring<__wchar_t...> (or whatever). So I did some web searching and ran into this link: http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-6345 Based on the statement by Thiago Macieira, "Sorry, we will not support building Qt like this," I've been worried that fixing Qt to work like everything else might cause some problem and have been trying to avoid it. We recompiled all of our support libraries with the /Zc:wchar_t- flag and have been fairly content with that until a couple days ago when we started trying to port over (we're in the process of switching from Wx to Qt) some serialization code. Because of how win32 works, and because Wx just wraps win32, we've been using std::wstring to represent string data with the intent of making our product as i18n ready as possible. We did some testing and Wx did not work with multibyte characters when trying to print special stuff (even not so special stuff like the degree symbol was an issue). I'm not so sure that Qt has this problem since QString isn't just a wrapper to the underlying _TCHAR type but is a Unicode monster of some sort. At any rate, the serialization library in boost has compiled parts. We've attempted to recompile boost with /Zc:wchar_t- but so far our attempts to tell bjam to do this have gone unheeded. We're at an impasse. From where I'm sitting I have three options: Recompile Qt and hope it works with /Zc:wchar_t. There's some evidence around the web that others have done this but I have no way of predicting what will happen. All attempts to ask Qt people on forums and such have gone unanswered. Hell, even in that very bug report someone asks why and it just sat there for a year. Keep fighting with bjam until it listens. Right now I've got someone under me doing that and I have more experience fighting with things to get what I want but I do have to admit to getting rather tired of it. I'm also concerned that I'll KEEP running into this issue just because Qt wants to be a c**t. Stop using wchar_t for anything. Unfortunately my i18n experience is pretty much 0 but it seems to me that I just need to find the right to/from function in QString (it has a BUNCH) to encode the Unicode into 8-bytes and visa-versa. UTF8 functions look promising but I really want to be sure that no data will be lost if someone from Zimbabfuckegypt starts writing in their own language and the documentation in QString frightens me a little into thinking that could happen. Of course, I could always run into some library that insists I use wchar_t and then I'm back to 1 or 2 but I rather doubt that would happen. So, what's my question... Which of these options is my best bet? Is Qt going to eventually cause me to gouge out my own eyes because I decided to compile it with /Zc:wchar_t anyway? What's the magic incantation to get boost to build with /Zc:wchar_t- and will THAT cause permanent mental damage? Can I get away with just using the standard 8-bit (well, 'common' anyway) character classes and be i18n compliant/ready? How do other Qt developers deal with this mess?

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• Random Complete System Unresponsiveness Running Mathematical Functions

  - by Computer Guru

  I have a program that loads a file (anywhere from 10MB to 5GB) a chunk at a time (ReadFile), and for each chunk performs a set of mathematical operations (basically calculates the hash). After calculating the hash, it stores info about the chunk in an STL map (basically <chunkID, hash>) and then writes the chunk itself to another file (WriteFile). That's all it does. This program will cause certain PCs to choke and die. The mouse begins to stutter, the task manager takes 2 min to show, ctrl+alt+del is unresponsive, running programs are slow.... the works. I've done literally everything I can think of to optimize the program, and have triple-checked all objects. What I've done: Tried different (less intensive) hashing algorithms. Switched all allocations to nedmalloc instead of the default new operator Switched from stl::map to unordered_set, found the performance to still be abysmal, so I switched again to Google's dense_hash_map. Converted all objects to store pointers to objects instead of the objects themselves. Caching all Read and Write operations. Instead of reading a 16k chunk of the file and performing the math on it, I read 4MB into a buffer and read 16k chunks from there instead. Same for all write operations - they are coalesced into 4MB blocks before being written to disk. Run extensive profiling with Visual Studio 2010, AMD Code Analyst, and perfmon. Set the thread priority to THREAD_MODE_BACKGROUND_BEGIN Set the thread priority to THREAD_PRIORITY_IDLE Added a Sleep(100) call after every loop. Even after all this, the application still results in a system-wide hang on certain machines under certain circumstances. Perfmon and Process Explorer show minimal CPU usage (with the sleep), no constant reads/writes from disk, few hard pagefaults (and only ~30k pagefaults in the lifetime of the application on a 5GB input file), little virtual memory (never more than 150MB), no leaked handles, no memory leaks. The machines I've tested it on run Windows XP - Windows 7, x86 and x64 versions included. None have less than 2GB RAM, though the problem is always exacerbated under lower memory conditions. I'm at a loss as to what to do next. I don't know what's causing it - I'm torn between CPU or Memory as the culprit. CPU because without the sleep and under different thread priorities the system performances changes noticeably. Memory because there's a huge difference in how often the issue occurs when using unordered_set vs Google's dense_hash_map. What's really weird? Obviously, the NT kernel design is supposed to prevent this sort of behavior from ever occurring (a user-mode application driving the system to this sort of extreme poor performance!?)..... but when I compile the code and run it on OS X or Linux (it's fairly standard C++ throughout) it performs excellently even on poor machines with little RAM and weaker CPUs. What am I supposed to do next? How do I know what the hell it is that Windows is doing behind the scenes that's killing system performance, when all the indicators are that the application itself isn't doing anything extreme? Any advice would be most welcome.

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• Android: HttpURLConnection not working properly

  - by giorgiline

  I'm trying to get the cookies from a website after sending user credentials through a POST Request an it seems that it doesn't work in android this way. ¿Am I doing something bad?. Please help. I've searched here in different posts but there's no useful answer. It's curious that this run in a desktop Java implementation it works perfect but it crashes in Android platform. And it is exactly the same code, specifically when calling HttpURLConnection.getHeaderFields(), it also happens with other member methods. It's a simple code and I don't know why the hell isn't working. DESKTOP CODE: This goes just in the main() HttpURLConnection connection = null; OutputStream out = null; try { URL url = new URL("http://www.XXXXXXXX.php"); String charset = "UTF-8"; String postback = "1"; String user = "XXXXXXXXX"; String password = "XXXXXXXX"; String rememberme = "on"; String query = String.format("postback=%s&user=%s&password=%s&rememberme=%s" , URLEncoder.encode(postback, charset) , URLEncoder.encode(user,charset) , URLEncoder.encode(password, charset) , URLEncoder.encode(rememberme, charset)); connection = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection(); connection.setRequestMethod("POST"); connection.setRequestProperty("Accept-Charset", charset); connection.setDoOutput(true); connection.setFixedLengthStreamingMode(query.length()); out = connection.getOutputStream (); out.write(query.getBytes(charset)); if (connection.getHeaderFields() == null){ System.out.println("Header null"); }else{ for (String cookie: connection.getHeaderFields().get("Set-Cookie")){ System.out.println(cookie.split(";", 2)[0]); } } } catch (IOException e){ e.printStackTrace(); } finally { try { out.close();} catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace();} connection.disconnect(); } So the output is: login_key=20ad8177db4eca3f057c14a64bafc2c9 FASID=cabf20cc471fcacacdc7dc7e83768880 track=30c8183e4ebbe8b3a57b583166326c77 client-data=%7B%22ism%22%3Afalse%2C%22showm%22%3Afalse%2C%22ts%22%3A1349189669%7D ANDROID CODE: This goes inside doInBackground AsyncTask body HttpURLConnection connection = null; OutputStream out = null; try { URL url = new URL("http://www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXX.php"); String charset = "UTF-8"; String postback = "1"; String user = "XXXXXXXXX"; String password = "XXXXXXXX"; String rememberme = "on"; String query = String.format("postback=%s&user=%s&password=%s&rememberme=%s" , URLEncoder.encode(postback, charset) , URLEncoder.encode(user,charset) , URLEncoder.encode(password, charset) , URLEncoder.encode(rememberme, charset)); connection = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection(); connection.setRequestMethod("POST"); connection.setRequestProperty("Accept-Charset", charset); connection.setDoOutput(true); connection.setFixedLengthStreamingMode(query.length()); out = connection.getOutputStream (); out.write(query.getBytes(charset)); if (connection.getHeaderFields() == null){ Log.v(TAG, "Header null"); }else{ for (String cookie: connection.getHeaderFields().get("Set-Cookie")){ Log.v(TAG, cookie.split(";", 2)[0]); } } } catch (IOException e){ e.printStackTrace(); } finally { try { out.close();} catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace();} connection.disconnect(); } And here there is no output, it seems that connection.getHeaderFields() doesn't return result. It takes al least 30 seconds to show the Log: 10-02 16:56:25.918: V/class com.giorgi.myproject.activities.HomeActivity(2596): Header null

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• Amazon Product API: "Your request is missing a required parameter combination" on Blended ItemSearch

  - by Daniel Schaffer

  I'm having some problems trying to do an ItemSearch on the Blended index using the Amazon Product API. According to the documentation, Blended requests cannot specify the MerchantId parameter - and indeed, if I try to include it I get an error telling me so. However, when I don't include it, I get an error telling me that my request is missing a required parameter combination and that a valid combination includes MerchantId... what the hell? Here's the XML response: <Items xmlns="http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2005-10-05"> <Request> <IsValid>False</IsValid> <ItemSearchRequest> <Availability>Available</Availability> <Condition>All</Condition> <Keywords> home theater pc and other geekery</Keywords> <ResponseGroup>Similarities</ResponseGroup> <ResponseGroup>SalesRank</ResponseGroup> <ResponseGroup>OfferSummary</ResponseGroup> <ResponseGroup>Small</ResponseGroup> <ResponseGroup>Images</ResponseGroup> <SearchIndex>Blended</SearchIndex> </ItemSearchRequest> <Errors> <Error> <Code>AWS.MissingParameterCombination</Code> <Message>Your request is missing a required parameter combination. Required parameter combinations include MerchantId, Availability.</Message> </Error> </Errors> </Request> </Items> The failing requests are being sent as part of batches with other requests that are succeeding. I'm using REST to send my requests, so here's an example of a request: http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?AWSAccessKeyId=-------------& ItemSearch.1.Keywords=Mates%20of%20State& ItemSearch.1.MerchantId=Amazon& ItemSearch.1.SearchIndex=DVD& ItemSearch.2.Keywords=teaching%20Lily%20various%20computer%20related%20skills& ItemSearch.2.SearchIndex=Blended& ItemSearch.Shared.Availability=Available& ItemSearch.Shared.Condition=All& ItemSearch.Shared.ResponseGroup=Small%2CSalesRank%2CImages%2COfferSummary%2CSimilarities& Operation=ItemSearch%2CSimilarityLookup& Service=AWSECommerceService& SimilarityLookup.1.ItemId=B000FNNHZ2& SimilarityLookup.2.ItemId=B000EQ5UPU& SimilarityLookup.Shared.Availability=Available& SimilarityLookup.Shared.Condition=All& SimilarityLookup.Shared.MerchantId=Amazon& SimilarityLookup.Shared.ResponseGroup=Small%2CSalesRank%2CImages%2COfferSummary& Timestamp=2010-04-02T17%3A18%3A05Z& Signature=---------------- Any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong?

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• Neo4j increasing latency as SKIP increases on Cypher query + REST API

  - by voldomazta

  My setup: Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_45-b18) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.45-b08, mixed mode) Neo4j 2.0.0-M06 Enterprise First I made sure I warmed up the cache by executing the following: START n=node(*) RETURN COUNT(n); START r=relationship(*) RETURN count(r); The size of the table is 63,677 nodes and 7,169,995 relationships Now I have the following query: START u1=node:node_auto_index('uid:39') MATCH (u1:user)-[w:WANTS]->(c:card)<-[h:HAS]-(u2:user) WHERE u2.uid <> 39 WITH u2.uid AS uid, (CASE WHEN w.qty < h.qty THEN w.qty ELSE h.qty END) AS have RETURN uid, SUM(have) AS total ORDER BY total DESC SKIP 0 LIMIT 25 This UID has about 40k+ results that I want to be able to put a pagination to. The initial skip was around 773ms. I tried page 2 (skip 25) and the latency was around the same even up to page 500 it only rose up to 900ms so I didn't really bother. Now I tried some fast forward paging and jumped by thousands so I did 1000, then 2000, then 3000. I was hoping the ORDER BY arrangement will already have been cached by Neo4j and using SKIP will just move to that index in the result and wont have to iterate through each one again. But for each thousand skip I made the latency increased by alot. It's not just cache warming because for one I already warmed up the cache and two, I tried the same skip a couple of times for each skip and it yielded the same results: SKIP 0: 773ms SKIP 1000: 1369ms SKIP 2000: 2491ms SKIP 3000: 3899ms SKIP 4000: 5686ms SKIP 5000: 7424ms Now who the hell would want to view 5000 pages of results? 40k even?! :) Good point! I will probably put a cap on the maximum results a user can view but I was just curious about this phenomenon. Will somebody please explain why Neo4j seems to be re-iterating through stuff which appears to be already known to it? Here is my profiling for the 0 skip: ==> ColumnFilter(symKeys=["uid", " INTERNAL_AGGREGATE65c4d6a2-1930-4f32-8fd9-5e4399ce6f14"], returnItemNames=["uid", "total"], _rows=25, _db_hits=0) ==> Slice(skip="Literal(0)", _rows=25, _db_hits=0) ==> Top(orderBy=["SortItem(Cached( INTERNAL_AGGREGATE65c4d6a2-1930-4f32-8fd9-5e4399ce6f14 of type Any),false)"], limit="Add(Literal(0),Literal(25))", _rows=25, _db_hits=0) ==> EagerAggregation(keys=["uid"], aggregates=["( INTERNAL_AGGREGATE65c4d6a2-1930-4f32-8fd9-5e4399ce6f14,Sum(have))"], _rows=41659, _db_hits=0) ==> ColumnFilter(symKeys=["have", "u1", "uid", "c", "h", "w", "u2"], returnItemNames=["uid", "have"], _rows=146826, _db_hits=0) ==> Extract(symKeys=["u1", "c", "h", "w", "u2"], exprKeys=["uid", "have"], _rows=146826, _db_hits=587304) ==> Filter(pred="((NOT(Product(u2,uid(0),true) == Literal(39)) AND hasLabel(u1:user(0))) AND hasLabel(u2:user(0)))", _rows=146826, _db_hits=146826) ==> TraversalMatcher(trail="(u1)-[w:WANTS WHERE (hasLabel(NodeIdentifier():card(1)) AND hasLabel(NodeIdentifier():card(1))) AND true]->(c)<-[h:HAS WHERE (NOT(Product(NodeIdentifier(),uid(0),true) == Literal(39)) AND hasLabel(NodeIdentifier():user(0))) AND true]-(u2)", _rows=146826, _db_hits=293696) And for the 5000 skip: ==> ColumnFilter(symKeys=["uid", " INTERNAL_AGGREGATE99329ea5-03cd-4d53-a6bc-3ad554b47872"], returnItemNames=["uid", "total"], _rows=25, _db_hits=0) ==> Slice(skip="Literal(5000)", _rows=25, _db_hits=0) ==> Top(orderBy=["SortItem(Cached( INTERNAL_AGGREGATE99329ea5-03cd-4d53-a6bc-3ad554b47872 of type Any),false)"], limit="Add(Literal(5000),Literal(25))", _rows=5025, _db_hits=0) ==> EagerAggregation(keys=["uid"], aggregates=["( INTERNAL_AGGREGATE99329ea5-03cd-4d53-a6bc-3ad554b47872,Sum(have))"], _rows=41659, _db_hits=0) ==> ColumnFilter(symKeys=["have", "u1", "uid", "c", "h", "w", "u2"], returnItemNames=["uid", "have"], _rows=146826, _db_hits=0) ==> Extract(symKeys=["u1", "c", "h", "w", "u2"], exprKeys=["uid", "have"], _rows=146826, _db_hits=587304) ==> Filter(pred="((NOT(Product(u2,uid(0),true) == Literal(39)) AND hasLabel(u1:user(0))) AND hasLabel(u2:user(0)))", _rows=146826, _db_hits=146826) ==> TraversalMatcher(trail="(u1)-[w:WANTS WHERE (hasLabel(NodeIdentifier():card(1)) AND hasLabel(NodeIdentifier():card(1))) AND true]->(c)<-[h:HAS WHERE (NOT(Product(NodeIdentifier(),uid(0),true) == Literal(39)) AND hasLabel(NodeIdentifier():user(0))) AND true]-(u2)", _rows=146826, _db_hits=293696) The only difference is the LIMIT clause on the Top function. I hope we can make this work as intended, I really don't want to delve into doing an embedded Neo4j + my own Jetty REST API for the web app.

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