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• Atheros 922 PCI WIFI is disabled in Unity but enabled in terminal - How to get it to work?

  - by zewone

  I am trying to get my PCI Wireless Atheros 922 card to work. It is disabled in Unity: both the network utility and the desktop (see screenshot http://www.amisdurailhalanzy.be/Screenshot%20from%202012-10-25%2013:19:54.png) I tried many different advises on many different forums. Installed 12.10 instead of 12.04, enabled all interfaces... etc. I have read about the aht9 driver... The terminal shows no hw or sw lock for the Atheros card, nevertheless, it is still disabled. Nothing worked so far, the card is still disabled. Any help is much appreciated. Here are more tech details: myuser@adri1:~$ sudo lshw -C network *-network:0 DISABLED description: Wireless interface product: AR922X Wireless Network Adapter vendor: Atheros Communications Inc. physical id: 2 bus info: pci@0000:03:02.0 logical name: wlan1 version: 01 serial: 00:18:e7:cd:68:b1 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k driverversion=3.5.0-17-generic firmware=N/A latency=168 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn resources: irq:18 memory:d8000000-d800ffff *-network:1 description: Ethernet interface product: VT6105/VT6106S [Rhine-III] vendor: VIA Technologies, Inc. physical id: 6 bus info: pci@0000:03:06.0 logical name: eth0 version: 8b serial: 00:11:09:a3:76:4a size: 10Mbit/s capacity: 100Mbit/s width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=via-rhine driverversion=1.5.0 duplex=half latency=32 link=no maxlatency=8 mingnt=3 multicast=yes port=MII speed=10Mbit/s resources: irq:18 ioport:d300(size=256) memory:d8013000-d80130ff *-network DISABLED description: Wireless interface physical id: 1 bus info: usb@1:8.1 logical name: wlan0 serial: 00:11:09:51:75:36 capabilities: ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=rt2500usb driverversion=3.5.0-17-generic firmware=N/A link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bg myuser@adri1:~$ sudo rfkill list all 0: hci0: Bluetooth Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 1: phy1: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: yes 2: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no myuser@adri1:~$ dmesg | grep wlan0 [ 15.114235] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready myuser@adri1:~$ dmesg | egrep 'ath|firm' [ 14.617562] ath: EEPROM regdomain: 0x30 [ 14.617568] ath: EEPROM indicates we should expect a direct regpair map [ 14.617572] ath: Country alpha2 being used: AM [ 14.617575] ath: Regpair used: 0x30 [ 14.637778] ieee80211 phy0: >Selected rate control algorithm 'ath9k_rate_control' [ 14.639410] Registered led device: ath9k-phy0 myuser@adri1:~$ dmesg | grep wlan1 [ 15.119922] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan1: link is not ready myuser@adri1:~$ lspci -nn | grep 'Atheros' 03:02.0 Network controller [0280]: Atheros Communications Inc. AR922X Wireless Network Adapter [168c:0029] (rev 01) myuser@adri1:~$ sudo ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:11:09:a3:76:4a inet addr:192.168.2.2 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::211:9ff:fea3:764a/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:5457 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:2548 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:3425684 (3.4 MB) TX bytes:282192 (282.1 KB) lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:590 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:590 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:53729 (53.7 KB) TX bytes:53729 (53.7 KB) myuser@adri1:~$ sudo iwconfig wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=off Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:on lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. wlan1 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=0 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off myuser@adri1:~$ lsmod | grep "ath9k" ath9k 116549 0 mac80211 461161 3 rt2x00usb,rt2x00lib,ath9k ath9k_common 13783 1 ath9k ath9k_hw 376155 2 ath9k,ath9k_common ath 19187 3 ath9k,ath9k_common,ath9k_hw cfg80211 175375 4 rt2x00lib,ath9k,mac80211,ath myuser@adri1:~$ iwlist scan wlan0 Failed to read scan data : Network is down lo Interface doesn't support scanning. eth0 Interface doesn't support scanning. wlan1 Failed to read scan data : Network is down myuser@adri1:~$ lsb_release -d Description: Ubuntu 12.10 myuser@adri1:~$ uname -mr 3.5.0-17-generic i686  Any help much appreciated... Thanks, Philippe 31-10-2012 ... I have some more updates. When I do the following command it does see my Wifi router... So even if it is still disabled... the card seems to work and see the router (ESSID:"5791BC26-CE9C-11D1-97BF-0000F81E") See below: sudo iwlist wlan1 scanning wlan1 Scan completed : Cell 01 - Address: 00:19:70:8F:B0:EA Channel:10 Frequency:2.457 GHz (Channel 10) Quality=51/70 Signal level=-59 dBm Encryption key:on ESSID:"5791BC26-CE9C-11D1-97BF-0000F81E" Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s Bit Rates:24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s Mode:Master Extra:tsf=000000025dbf2188 Extra: Last beacon: 108ms ago IE: Unknown: 002035373931424332362D434539432D313144312D393742462D3030303046383145 IE: Unknown: 010882848B960C121824 IE: Unknown: 03010A IE: Unknown: 0706424520010D14 IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1 Group Cipher : TKIP Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP Authentication Suites (1) : PSK IE: Unknown: 2A0100 IE: Unknown: 32043048606C IE: Unknown: DD180050F2020101030003A4000027A4000042435E0062322F00 IE: Unknown: DD0900037F01010000FF7F IE: Unknown: DD0A00037F04010000000000

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• Airline mess - what a journey

  - by Mike Dietrich

  What a day, what a journey ... Flew this noon from Munich to Zuerich for catch my ongoing flight to San Francisco with Swiss. And that day did start very well as Lufthansa messed up the connection flight by 42 minutes for a 35 minute flight. And as I was obviously the only passenger connection to San Francisco nobody picked me up at the airplane to bring me directly to my connection as Swiss did for the 8 passengers connection to Miami. So I missed my flight. What a start - and many thanks to Lufthansa. I was not the only one missing a connection as Lufthansa/Swiss had canceled the flight before due to "technical problems". In Zuerich Swiss did rebook me via Frankfurt with Lufthansa to board a United Airlines flight to San Francisco. "Ouch" I thought. I had my share of experience with United already as they've messed up my luggage on the way to San Francisco some years ago and it took them five (!!!) days to fly my bag over and deliver it. But actually it was the only option today. So I said "Yes". A big mistake as I've learned later on. The Frankfurt flight was delayed as well "due to a late incoming aircraft". But there was plenty of time. And I went to the Swiss counter at the gate and let them check if my baggage is on that flight to Frankfurt. They've said "Yes". Boarding the plane with a delay of 45 minutes (the typical Lufthansa delay these days) I spotted my Rimowa trolley right next to the plane on the airfield. So I was sure that it will be send to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt I went to the United counter once it did open - had to go through the passport check they do for US flights as well - and they've said "Yes, your luggage is with us". Well ... Arriving in San Francisco with just a bit of a some minutes delay and a very fast immigration procedure I saw the first bags with Priority tags getting pushed to the baggage claim - but mine was not there. I did wait ... and wait ... and wait. Well, thanks United, you did it again!!! I flew twice in the past years United Airlines - and in both cases they've messed up my luggage on the way to San Francisco. How lovely is that ... Now the real fun started again as the lady at the "Lost and Found" counter for luggage spotted my luggage in her system in Zuerich - and told me it's supposed to be sent with LH1191 to Frankfurt on Sept 27. But this was yesterday in Europe - it's already Sept 28 - and I saw my luggage in front of the airplane. So I'd suppose it's in Frankfurt already. But what could she do? Nothing but doing the awful paperwork. And "No Mr Dietrich, we don't call international numbers". Thank you, United. Next time I'll try to get a contract for a US land line in advance. They can't even tell you which plane will bring your luggage. It may be tomorrow with UA flight arriving around 4pm in SFO. I'm looking forward to some hours in the wonderful United Airlines call center waiting line. Last time I did spend 60-90 minutes every day until I got my luggage. If it takes again that long then OOW will be over by then. I love airline travel - and especially with United Airlines. And by the way ... they gave us these nice fancy packages during the flight:  That looks good - what's in that box??? Yes, really ... a bag of potato chips. Pure fat - very healthy.  I doubt that I'll ever fly United Airlines again!!!

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• Managing Your First SharePoint Project or Team

  - by Mark Rackley

  (*editor’s note* If you have proper SharePoint Training, know the difference between a site and a site collection, and have the utmost respect for the knowledge of your SharePoint team skip this blog and go directly to meetdux.com, do not pass go, do not collect $200… otherwise, please proceed) Dear Mr. or Mrs. I-know-nothing-about-SharePoint-but-hey,-I-have-manager-in-my-title-so-I’ll-tell-you-how-to-your-job, Thank you so much for joining the Acme corporation. We appreciate your eagerness and willingness to jump in and help us accomplish all of our goals here at acme (these roadrunner rockets don’t make themselves). You may have noticed that we have this thing called SharePoint lying around and we have invested some time in money to make it not a complete piece of garbage. So, I thought I’d give you some pointers to help make your stay here enjoyable and productive. Yeah… you don’t really know SharePoint Just because you had a mysite at your last organization or had a SharePoint 2003 team site does NOT mean you comprehend the vastness that is SharePoint. You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. You don’t know what should and should not be done. No, we CAN’T just query the SQL database directly. Yes, it really does take that long. No, we can’t do that out-of-the-box. Your experience doesn’t mean as much as you think it means… Yes, I’m aware that you co-created the internet with Al Gore and have been managing projects since I was blowing up GI Joe figures with firecrackers, however SharePoint is not like anything you have worked with before from a management perspective. Please don’t tell us the proper way to do our job or tell us how “you” would do it, and PLEASE don’t utter the words “I used to do some .NET development so let me know if you get stuck and need some guidance.” It MAY be possible for a incredible project manager to manage a SharePoint project and not understand the technology, but if you force your ideas on us or treat us like we don’t really know what we’re doing then you will prove yourself to NOT be one of those types. Oh no you didn’t… Please don’t tell us how you can bring in a group of guys of Kazakhstan to do the project for $20/hr. There are many companies out there who can do some really crappy SharePoint work and we don’t want to be stuck maintaining their junk. Do you know what it means to deploy a solution? Neither do some of those companies out there. However, there are are few AWESOME consulting firms out there but $150/hr is cheap for these guys. Believe me, it’s worth it though. You get what you pay for! Show us some respect We truly do appreciate and value your opinion and experience, but when we tell you something is different in SharePoint don’t be condescending and dismiss OUR experience and opinions. We have spent a lot of time and energy learning a very complicated technology that can open up a world of possibilities when used properly. We just want to make sure it is used properly. It’s not the same as .NET development. It’s not like a regular web application. There’s more going on behind the scenes than you can possibly fathom. Have a little faith in us please and listen when we talk. You may actually learn a thing or two. Take some time to learn the technology There is hope… you don’t have to be totally worthless. Take some time to learn SharePoint. Learn what it is and what it can do. Invest some time in learning our SharePoint environment. What’s our logical architecture and taxonomy? What governance do we have in place? If you just thought “huh?” then yes, I’m talking to you. Sincerely, Your SharePoint Team (This rant is not pointed at any particular organization or person. If you think it’s about you, you are wrong. This is just a general rant based upon things people have told me and things I’ve seen. If you don’t think it applies to you, please move on. If you think you might be guilty of handling your SharePoint team the wrong way, then just please listen, learn, and have a little faith in your team. You all have the same goal in mind. Also, take the time to learn something about SharePoint, you will all be less frustrated with each other.)

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• List of freely available programming books

  - by Karan Bhangui

  I'm trying to amass a list of programming books with opensource licenses, like Creative Commons, GPL, etc. The books can be about a particular programming language or about computers in general. Hoping you guys could help: Languages BASH Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide (An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting) C The C book C++ Thinking in C++ C++ Annotations How to Think Like a Computer Scientist C# .NET Book Zero: What the C or C++ Programmer Needs to Know About C# and the .NET Framework Illustrated C# 2008 (Dead Link) Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in C# Threading in C# Common Lisp Practical Common Lisp On Lisp Java Thinking in Java How to Think Like a Computer Scientist Java Thin-Client Programming JavaScript Eloquent JavaScript Haskell Real world Haskell Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! Objective-C The Objective-C Programming Language Perl Extreme Perl (license not specified - home page is saying "freely available") The Mason Book (Open Publication License) Practical mod_perl (CreativeCommons Attribution Share-Alike License) Higher-Order Perl Learning Perl the Hard Way PHP Practical PHP Programming Zend Framework: Survive the Deep End PowerShell Mastering PowerShell Prolog Building Expert Systems in Prolog Adventure in Prolog Prolog Programming A First Course Logic, Programming and Prolog (2ed) Introduction to Prolog for Mathematicians Learn Prolog Now! Natural Language Processing Techniques in Prolog Python Dive Into Python Dive Into Python 3 How to Think Like a Computer Scientist A Byte of Python Python for Fun Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python Ruby Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book SQL Practical PostgreSQL x86 assembly Paul Carter's tutorial Lua Programming In Lua (for v5 but still largely relevant) Algorithms and Data Structures Algorithms Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Java Planning Algorithms Frameworks/Projects The Django Book The Pylons Book Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt 4 (Open Publication License) Version control The SVN Book Mercurial: The Definitive Guide Pro Git UNIX / Linux The Art of Unix Programming Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition Others Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs The Little Book of Semaphores Mathematical Logic - an Introduction An Introduction to the Theory of Computation Developers Developers Developers Developers Linkers and loaders Beej's Guide to Network Programming Maven: The Definitive Guide I will expand on this list as I get comments or when I think of more :D Related: Programming texts and reference material for my Kindle What are some good free programming books? Can anyone recommend a free software engineering book? Edit: Oh I didn't notice the community wiki feature. Feel free to edit your suggestions right in!

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• Hive NR map progress inconsistent and regurlarly restart from 0%

  - by user92471

  I have a Yarn MR (with two ec2 instances to mapreduce) job on a dataset of approximately a thousand avro records, and the map phase is behaving erratically. See the progress below. Of course i checked the logs on resourcemanager and nodemanagers and saw nothing suspicious, but these logs are too verbose What is going on there ? hive> select * from nikon where qs_cs_s_aid='VIEW' limit 10; Total MapReduce jobs = 1 Launching Job 1 out of 1 Number of reduce tasks is set to 0 since there's no reduce operator Starting Job = job_1352281315350_0020, Tracking URL = http://blabla.ec2.internal:8088/proxy/application_1352281315350_0020/ Kill Command = /usr/lib/hadoop/bin/hadoop job -Dmapred.job.tracker=blabla.com:8032 -kill job_1352281315350_0020 Hadoop job information for Stage-1: number of mappers: 4; number of reducers: 0 2012-11-07 11:14:40,976 Stage-1 map = 0%, reduce = 0% 2012-11-07 11:15:06,136 Stage-1 map = 1%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 10.38 sec 2012-11-07 11:15:07,253 Stage-1 map = 1%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 12.18 sec 2012-11-07 11:15:08,371 Stage-1 map = 1%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 12.18 sec 2012-11-07 11:15:09,491 Stage-1 map = 1%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 12.18 sec 2012-11-07 11:15:10,643 Stage-1 map = 2%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 15.42 sec (...) 2012-11-07 11:15:35,441 Stage-1 map = 28%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 37.77 sec 2012-11-07 11:15:36,486 Stage-1 map = 28%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 37.77 sec here restart at 16% ? 2012-11-07 11:15:37,692 Stage-1 map = 16%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 21.15 sec 2012-11-07 11:15:38,815 Stage-1 map = 16%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 21.15 sec 2012-11-07 11:15:39,865 Stage-1 map = 16%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 21.15 sec 2012-11-07 11:15:41,064 Stage-1 map = 18%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 22.4 sec 2012-11-07 11:15:42,181 Stage-1 map = 18%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 22.4 sec 2012-11-07 11:15:43,299 Stage-1 map = 18%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 22.4 sec here restart at 0% ? 2012-11-07 11:15:44,418 Stage-1 map = 0%, reduce = 0% 2012-11-07 11:16:02,076 Stage-1 map = 1%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 6.86 sec 2012-11-07 11:16:03,193 Stage-1 map = 1%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 6.86 sec 2012-11-07 11:16:04,259 Stage-1 map = 2%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 8.45 sec (...) 2012-11-07 11:16:31,291 Stage-1 map = 22%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 35.34 sec 2012-11-07 11:16:32,414 Stage-1 map = 26%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 37.93 sec here restart at 11% ? 2012-11-07 11:16:33,459 Stage-1 map = 11%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 19.53 sec 2012-11-07 11:16:34,507 Stage-1 map = 11%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 19.53 sec 2012-11-07 11:16:35,731 Stage-1 map = 13%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 21.47 sec (...) 2012-11-07 11:16:46,839 Stage-1 map = 17%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 24.14 sec here restart at 0% ? 2012-11-07 11:16:47,939 Stage-1 map = 0%, reduce = 0% 2012-11-07 11:16:56,653 Stage-1 map = 1%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 7.54 sec 2012-11-07 11:16:57,814 Stage-1 map = 1%, reduce = 0%, Cumulative CPU 7.54 sec (...) Needless to say the job crashes after some time with an Error: java.io.IOException: java.io.IOException: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: -56

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• open,edit and save xml file with schema using php

  - by Neat

  Hy... I'm new in XML Schema, XSL,... (I have basic understanding) On web page: http://w3schools.com/xsl/xsl_editxml.asp is shown example for open,edit,save xml file, but with asp. Do anyone know how can i open/edit and save xml file using php for next example: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <tools> <tool id="1"> <field id="prodName"> <value>HAMMER HG2606</value> </field> <field id="prodNo"> <value>32456240</value> </field> <field id="price"> <value>$30.00</value> </field> </tool> <tool id="2"> <field id="prodName"> <value>Audi</value> </field> <field id="prodNo"> <value>88885</value> </field> <field id="price"> <value>$26.00</value> </field> </tool> </tools> and do i need <tool id="2"> or just <tool> is enough. Thanks very much on replay, and i don't need another xsl like shown on w3s, just fine is refresh submitted php file after submit (will do something with ajax after). I saw replay from Mr. Writman on questions/377632/add-update-and-edit-an-xml-file-with-php but that is for now 2 complex for me...:) is there any simpler answer (solution). Thanks in advance!!!

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• Call HttpWebRequest in another thread as UI with Task class - avoid to dispose object created in Task scope

  - by John

  I would like call HttpWebRequest on another thread as UI, because I must make 200 request or server and downloaded image. My scenation is that I make a request on server, create image and return image. This I make in another thread. I use Task class, but it call automaticaly Dispose method on all object created in task scope. So I return null object from this method. public BitmapImage CreateAvatar(Uri imageUri, int sex) { if (imageUri == null) return CreateDefaultAvatar(sex); BitmapImage image = null; new Task(() => { var request = WebRequest.Create(imageUri); var response = request.GetResponse(); using (var stream = response.GetResponseStream()) { Byte[] buffer = new Byte[response.ContentLength]; int offset = 0, actuallyRead = 0; do { actuallyRead = stream.Read(buffer, offset, buffer.Length - offset); offset += actuallyRead; } while (actuallyRead > 0); image = new BitmapImage { CreateOptions = BitmapCreateOptions.None, CacheOption = BitmapCacheOption.OnLoad }; image.BeginInit(); image.StreamSource = new MemoryStream(buffer); image.EndInit(); image.Freeze(); } }).Start(); return image; } How avoid it? Thank Mr. Jon Skeet try this: private Stream GetImageStream(Uri imageUri) { Byte[] buffer = null; //new Task(() => //{ var request = WebRequest.Create(imageUri); var response = request.GetResponse(); using (var stream = response.GetResponseStream()) { buffer= new Byte[response.ContentLength]; int offset = 0, actuallyRead = 0; do { actuallyRead = stream.Read(buffer, offset, buffer.Length - offset); offset += actuallyRead; } while (actuallyRead > 0); } //}).Start(); return new MemoryStream(buffer); } It return object which is null a than try this: private Stream GetImageStream(Uri imageUri) { Byte[] buffer = null; new Task(() => { var request = WebRequest.Create(imageUri); var response = request.GetResponse(); using (var stream = response.GetResponseStream()) { buffer= new Byte[response.ContentLength]; int offset = 0, actuallyRead = 0; do { actuallyRead = stream.Read(buffer, offset, buffer.Length - offset); offset += actuallyRead; } while (actuallyRead > 0); } }).Start(); return new MemoryStream(buffer); } Method above return null

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• .AVI Files randomly cease to open, other strange errors too

  - by Ben Franchuk

  I Recently (a couple weeks ago) downloaded the complete series of Seinfeld, all in varying file type. I Watched them in sequence according to season and to airing date, and all was well. All of the files played fine with my media player of choice ("BS Player"), and once I had finished, I went onto watch some other TV I had previously downloaded (The U.S. Series of "The Office"), and after then, some other film and then some music, over the following weeks (keep in mind all of these files are all on the same Hard Drive). Later then, More recently, I Went back to watching Seinfeld. The episodes played well as they did before- with the exclusion of a few in Season 7. I Have not tested all of the episodes in the season, but upon inspection, the majority of them are experiencing this problem; the problem being simply that they don't open! BS Player says that the files are either damaged or that the codecs to play the files are not on my computer-- however I am certain that the files DO have the codecs, and I am pretty sure that they are NOT DAMAGED either. I Have played the files with other players (such as VLC, Media Player Classic, and Windows Media Player), too, only to the same result; of them not opening. Seemingly the only way that I can differentiate between a damaged file and a non-damaged file are the way that the icon shows in Windows Explorer. For example, the below image is how explorer shows the information of a file that is non-damaged... ...and below is how a damaged file appears... The most disturbing and confusing part of this, though, is the last episode in the season- It opens, but not as a video- Instead, as a 1 Hour, 16 Minute, and 35 Second Audio file! The file plays a song for the first 4 or so minutes, and then is pretty much silent (except for some extremely quiet noise) until the last minute or so, when a random array of chopped up sounds and beeping noises play. I Do not recognise the song at the beginning of the file, but by the sounds of it, it is a song by the artist "Mr. Oizo," who's complete works I downloaded a couple weeks before now; and a bit before then I had finished downloading season 9 (not affected by these problems) of Seinfeld. I'd also like to note that the file I told of earlier (which played audio instead of video) reads as the same size as the other files in the season (around 175 MB) and also opens as a video clip. I Have NEVER experienced any of these problems in the past, and they seem to be only effecting the one season of my downloaded TV. The problems have not arisen with any of the other files on my Hard Drive, or any of the files downloaded around the time or after the time of which I downloaded season 7 of Seinfeld- or at least to my noticing. I Use the hard drive these files are located on almost every day, so could that be the cause of these problems? Is this a sign that my HDD is soon going to die? If it helps, the HDD is a Western Digital MyBook 1.5 TB 7500 RPM. It is connected to the computer via U.S.B. 2.0. EDIT! I noticed that this problem is now occurring with Season 9 of Seinfeld- and, presumably, other files on the drive I have yet to check. Please, If you have ANY IDEA AT ALL on what may be causing this or how to fix it, do tell me!

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• Create PDF document using iTextSharp in ASP.Net 4.0 and MemoryMappedFile

  - by sreejukg

  In this article I am going to demonstrate how ASP.Net developers can programmatically create PDF documents using iTextSharp. iTextSharp is a software component, that allows developers to programmatically create or manipulate PDF documents. Also this article discusses the process of creating in-memory file, read/write data from/to the in-memory file utilizing the new feature MemoryMappedFile. I have a database of users, where I need to send a notice to all my users as a PDF document. The sending mail part of it is not covered in this article. The PDF document will contain the company letter head, to make it more official. I have a list of users stored in a database table named “tblusers”. For each user I need to send customized message addressed to them personally. The database structure for the users is give below. id Title Full Name 1 Mr. Sreeju Nair K. G. 2 Dr. Alberto Mathews 3 Prof. Venketachalam Now I am going to generate the pdf document that contains some message to the user, in the following format. Dear <Title> <FullName>, The message for the user. Regards, Administrator Also I have an image, bg.jpg that contains the background for the document generated. I have created .Net 4.0 empty web application project named “iTextSharpSample”. First thing I need to do is to download the iTextSharp dll from the source forge. You can find the url for the download here. http://sourceforge.net/projects/itextsharp/files/ I have extracted the Zip file and added the itextsharp.dll as a reference to my project. Also I have added a web form named default.aspx to my project. After doing all this, the solution explorer have the following view. In the default.aspx page, I inserted one grid view and associated it with a SQL Data source control that bind data from tblusers. I have added a button column in the grid view with text “generate pdf”. The output of the page in the browser is as follows. Now I am going to create a pdf document when the user clicking on the Generate PDF button. As I mentioned before, I am going to work with the file in memory, I am not going to create a file in the disk. I added an event handler for button by specifying onrowcommand event handler. My gridview source looks like <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="False" DataSourceID="SqlDataSource1" Width="481px" CellPadding="4" ForeColor="#333333" GridLines="None" onrowcommand="Generate_PDF" > ………………………………………………………………………….. ………………………………………………………………………….. </asp:GridView> In the code behind, I wrote the corresponding event handler. protected void Generate_PDF(object sender, GridViewCommandEventArgs e) { // The button click event handler code. // I am going to explain the code for this section in the remaining part of the article } The Generate_PDF method is straight forward, It get the title, fullname and message to some variables, then create the pdf using these variables. The code for getting data from the grid view is as follows // get the row index stored in the CommandArgument property int index = Convert.ToInt32(e.CommandArgument); // get the GridViewRow where the command is raised GridViewRow selectedRow = ((GridView)e.CommandSource).Rows[index]; string title = selectedRow.Cells[1].Text; string fullname = selectedRow.Cells[2].Text; string msg = @"There are some changes in the company policy, due to this matter you need to submit your latest address to us. Please update your contact details / personnal details by visiting the member area of the website. ................................... "; since I don’t want to save the file in the disk, I am going the new feature introduced in .Net framework 4, called Memory-Mapped Files. Using Memory-Mapped mapped file, you can created non-persisted memory mapped files, that are not associated with a file in a disk. So I am going to create a temporary file in memory, add the pdf content to it, then write it to the output stream. To read more about MemoryMappedFile, read this msdn article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997372.aspx The below portion of the code using MemoryMappedFile object to create a test pdf document in memory and perform read/write operation on file. The CreateViewStream() object will give you a stream that can be used to read or write data to/from file. The code is very straight forward and I included comment so that you can understand the code. using (MemoryMappedFile mmf = MemoryMappedFile.CreateNew("test1.pdf", 1000000)) { // Create a new pdf document object using the constructor. The parameters passed are document size, left margin, right margin, top margin and bottom margin. iTextSharp.text.Document d = new iTextSharp.text.Document(PageSize.A4, 72,72,172,72); //get an instance of the memory mapped file to stream object so that user can write to this using (MemoryMappedViewStream stream = mmf.CreateViewStream()) { // associate the document to the stream. PdfWriter.GetInstance(d, stream); /* add an image as bg*/ iTextSharp.text.Image jpg = iTextSharp.text.Image.GetInstance(Server.MapPath("Image/bg.png")); jpg.Alignment = iTextSharp.text.Image.UNDERLYING; jpg.SetAbsolutePosition(0, 0); //this is the size of my background letter head image. the size is in points. this will fit to A4 size document. jpg.ScaleToFit(595, 842); d.Open(); d.Add(jpg); d.Add(new Paragraph(String.Format("Dear {0} {1},", title, fullname))); d.Add(new Paragraph("\n")); d.Add(new Paragraph(msg)); d.Add(new Paragraph("\n")); d.Add(new Paragraph(String.Format("Administrator"))); d.Close(); } //read the file data byte[] b; using (MemoryMappedViewStream stream = mmf.CreateViewStream()) { BinaryReader rdr = new BinaryReader(stream); b = new byte[mmf.CreateViewStream().Length]; rdr.Read(b, 0, (int)mmf.CreateViewStream().Length); } Response.Clear(); Response.ContentType = "Application/pdf"; Response.BinaryWrite(b); Response.End(); } Press ctrl + f5 to run the application. First I got the user list. Click on the generate pdf icon. The created looks as follows. Summary: Creating pdf document using iTextSharp is easy. You will get lot of information while surfing the www. Some useful resources and references are mentioned below http://itextsharp.com/ http://www.mikesdotnetting.com/Article/82/iTextSharp-Adding-Text-with-Chunks-Phrases-and-Paragraphs http://somewebguy.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/itextsharp-simplify-your-html-to-pdf-creation/ Hope you enjoyed the article.

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• Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore

  - by sathya

  Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore Sorry for my delayed post on day 3 because I had to travel from Blore to Chennai So I couldnt write for the past two days. On day 3 as usual we had lot of simultaneous tracks on various sessions. This day I choose the Your Data, Our Platform Track. It had sessions on the following 5 topics :   Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam This was one of the superb sessions i have attended. He explained all the concepts in detail with a demo. The important thing in this is there is something called Data-Tier application project which is newly introduced in this VS2010 with which we can manage all our data along with our application inside our VS itself. We can create DB,Tables,Procs,Views etc. here itself and once we deploy it creates a compressed file called .dacpac which stores all the changes in Table Schema,Created procs, etc. on to that single file which reduces our (developer's) effort in preparing the deployment scripts and giving it to the DBA. It also has some policy configurations which can be managed easily by checking some rules like in outlook. For Ex : IF the SQL Server Version > 10 then deploy else dont. This rule specifies that even if we try to deploy on SQL Server DB with version less than 10 It will not do it. And if we deploy some .dacpac to SQL server production db with the option upgrade DB with this dacpac once everything completes successfully it will say success else it rollsback to the prior version. Even if it gets deployed successfully and later @ a point of time you wish to revert it back to the prior version, you can go ahead and delete the existing dacpac version so that it reverts to the older version of the db changes. And for the good questions that were asked in the session T-Shirts were given. SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M This one too was the best session. The speaker Vinod explained everything very much clearly. This was really useful session and you dont believe, as per my knowledge, in the total 3 days in the TechEd except the Keynote, for this session seats were full (House FULL)  People were even standing out to attend this session. Such a great one it was. The speaker did a deep dive in to the Query Plan section and showed which actually causes the problem. Its all about the thing that we need to understand about the execution of SQL server Queries. We think in a way and SQL Server never executes in that way. We need to understand that first. He also told about there might be two plans generated for a single query at a point of time because of parallel processors in the system. The Key is here in every query. There is something called Estimated Row Count and Actual Row Count in the query plan. If the estimated row count by SQL server tallies with the actual row count your performance will be awesome. He said some tweaks to achieve the same. After this as usual we had lunch SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan This was more of a DBA's session. Am really sorry I was totally blank and I was not interested to attend this session and walked out to attend Migrating to the cloud by Harish Ranganathan (My favorite Speaker) but unfortunately that was some other persons session. There the speaker was telling about how to configure the connection strings in such a way that we can connect to the SQL Azure platform from our VS and also showed us how to deploy the same in to Windows Azure. In between there were lot of technical problems like laptop hang, user locked and he was switching between systems, also i came in the half so i wasnt able to listen that fully. In between, Since I got an MCTS certification they gave me T-Shirt with the lines 'Iam Certified. Are you?' and they asked me to wear that. If we wear that we might get spotted and they would give us some goodies  So on the 3rd day I was wearing that T-Shirt. I got spotted by the person Tarun who was coordinating things about the certification, and he was accompanied with a cameraman and they interviewed me about the certification and I was shown live in the Teched and was seen by 60000 live viewers of the TechEd. I was really happy on that. Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M This was one of the best sessions too in the TechEd. This guy is really amazing. In front of us he crashed a DB and showed how to recover the same in 6 different ways for different no of failures. Showed about Different types of error msgs like : 823,824,825 msdb..suspect_pages DBCC CheckDB (different parameters to it) I am really waiting for his session to get uploaded live in the Teched Website. Here is his contact info If you wish to connect to him : Twitter : @vinodk_sql Website : www.ExtremeExperts.com Blog : http://blogs.sqlxml.org/vinodkumar Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Pinal Dave is a King in SQL and he is a SQL MVP and he is the owner of SQLAuthority.com He took the session on Spatial Databases from the start. Showed about the different types of Spatial : Geometric and Geographic Geometric : x and y axis its a planar surface Geographic : Spherical surface with 3600  as the maximum which is used to represent the geographic points on the earth and easy to draw maps of different kinds. He had a lot of obstacles during his session like rain coming inside the hall, mic wires got bursted due to rain, Videos off on the display screens. In spite of that he asked the audience to come in the front rows and managed to take a good session without ppts and finally we got the displays on and he was showing demos on the same what he explained orally. That was really a fun filled informative session. He gave some books for the persons who asked good questions and answered well for his questions and I got one too  (It was a book on Data Mining - Wrox Publishers) And finally after all these things there was Keynote session for close of the TechEd. and we all assembled in a big hall where Mr.Ashok Soota, a man of age around 70  co-founder of Mindtree was called to give some lecture on his successes. He was explaining about his past and what all companies he switched and for what reasons and what are all his successes and what are all his failures and the learnings of him from his past failures. and his success and failures on his partnerships with the other concern. And there were some questions for him like What is your suggestion on young entrepreneur? How did you learn from past failures? What is reiterating your success? What is your suggestion on partnerships? How to choose partnerships? etc. And they said @ 7.30 Pm there would be a party night, but unfortunately i was not able to attend that because I had to catch my train and before that i had to pack things, so I started @ 7 itself. Thats it about the TechED!!! Stay tuned for further Technology updates.

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• Building extensions for Expression Blend 4 using MEF

  - by Timmy Kokke

  Introduction Although it was possible to write extensions for Expression Blend and Expression Design, it wasn’t very easy and out of the box only one addin could be used. With Expression Blend 4 it is possible to write extensions using MEF, the Managed Extensibility Framework. Until today there’s no documentation on how to build these extensions, so look thru the code with Reflector is something you’ll have to do very often. Because Blend and Design are build using WPF searching the visual tree with Snoop and Mole belong to the tools you’ll be using a lot exploring the possibilities.  Configuring the extension project Extensions are regular .NET class libraries. To create one, load up Visual Studio 2010 and start a new project. Because Blend is build using WPF, choose a WPF User Control Library from the Windows section and give it a name and location. I named mine DemoExtension1. Because Blend looks for addins named *.extension.dll  you’ll have to tell Visual Studio to use that in the Assembly Name. To change the Assembly Name right click your project and go to Properties. On the Application tab, add .Extension to name already in the Assembly name text field. To be able to debug this extension, I prefer to set the output path on the Build tab to the extensions folder of Expression Blend. This means that everything that used to go into the Debug folder is placed in the extensions folder. Including all referenced assemblies that have the copy local property set to false. One last setting. To be able to debug your extension you could start Blend and attach the debugger by hand. I like it to be able to just hit F5. Go to the Debug tab and add the the full path to Blend.exe in the Start external program text field. Extension Class Add a new class to the project.  This class needs to be inherited from the IPackage interface. The IPackage interface can be found in the Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility namespace. To get access to this namespace add Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility.dll to your references. This file can be found in the same folder as the (Expression Blend 4 Beta) Blend.exe file. Make sure the Copy Local property is set to false in this reference. After implementing the interface the class would look something like: using Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility; namespace DemoExtension1 { public class DemoExtension1:IPackage { public void Load(IServices services) { } public void Unload() { } } } These two methods are called when your addin is loaded and unloaded. The parameter passed to the Load method, IServices services, is your main entry point into Blend. The IServices interface exposes the GetService<T> method. You will be using this method a lot. Almost every part of Blend can be accessed thru a service. For example, you can use to get to the commanding services of Blend by calling GetService<ICommandService>() or to get to the Windowing services by calling GetService<IWindowService>(). To get Blend to load the extension we have to implement MEF. (You can get up to speed on MEF on the community site or read the blog of Mr. MEF, Glenn Block.)  In the case of Blend extensions, all that needs to be done is mark the class with an Export attribute and pass it the type of IPackage. The Export attribute can be found in the System.ComponentModel.Composition namespace which is part of the .NET 4 framework. You need to add this to your references. using System.ComponentModel.Composition; using Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility;   namespace DemoExtension1 { [Export(typeof(IPackage))] public class DemoExtension1:IPackage { Blend is able to find your addin now. Adding UI The addin doesn’t do very much at this point. The WPF User Control Library came with a UserControl so lets use that in this example. I just drop a Button and a TextBlock onto the surface of the control to have something to show in the demo. To get the UserControl to work in Blend it has to be registered with the WindowService.  Call GetService<IWindowService>() on the IServices interface to get access to the windowing services. The UserControl will be used in Blend on a Palette and has to be registered to enable it. This is done by calling the RegisterPalette on the IWindowService interface and passing it an identifier, an instance of the UserControl and a caption for the palette. public void Load(IServices services) { IWindowService windowService = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); UserControl1 uc = new UserControl1(); windowService.RegisterPalette("DemoExtension", uc, "Demo Extension"); } After hitting F5 to start debugging Expression Blend will start. You should be able to find the addin in the Window menu now. Activating this window will show the “Demo Extension” palette with the UserControl, style according to the settings of Blend. Now what? Because little is publicly known about how to access different parts of Blend adding breakpoints in Debug mode and browsing thru objects using the Quick Watch feature of Visual Studio is something you have to do very often. This demo extension can be used for that purpose very easily. Add the click event handler to the button on the UserControl. Change the contructor to take the IServices interface and store this in a field. Set a breakpoint in the Button_Click method. public partial class UserControl1 : UserControl { private readonly IServices _services;   public UserControl1(IServices services) { _services = services; InitializeComponent(); }   private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { } } Change the call to the constructor in the load method and pass it the services property. public void Load(IServices services) { IWindowService service = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); UserControl1 uc = new UserControl1(services); service.RegisterPalette("DemoExtension", uc, "Demo Extension"); } Hit F5 to compile and start Blend. Got to the window menu and start show the addin. Click on  the button to hit the breakpoint. Now place the carrot text _services text in the code window and hit Shift+F9 to show the Quick Watch window. Now start exploring and discovering where to find everything you need.  More Information The are no official resources available yet. Microsoft has released one extension for expression Blend that is very useful as a reference, the Microsoft Expression Blend® Add-in Preview for Windows® Phone. This will install a .extension.dll file in the extension folder of Blend. You can load this file with Reflector and have a peek at how Microsoft is building his addins. Conclusion I hope this gives you something to get started building extensions for Expression Blend. Until Microsoft releases the final version, which hopefully includes more information about building extensions, we’ll have to work on documenting it in the community.

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• Reg Gets a Job at Red Gate (and what happens behind the scenes)

  - by red(at)work

  Mr Reg Gater works at one of Cambridge’s many high-tech companies. He doesn’t love his job, but he puts up with it because... well, it could be worse. Every day he drives to work around the Red Gate roundabout, wondering what his boss is going to blame him for today, and wondering if there could be a better job out there for him. By late morning he already feels like handing his notice in. He got the hacky look from his boss for being 5 minutes late, and then they ran out of tea. Again. He goes to the local sandwich shop for lunch, and picks up a Red Gate job menu and a Book of Red Gate while he’s waiting for his order. That night, he goes along to Cambridge Geek Nights and sees some very enthusiastic Red Gaters talking about the work they do; it sounds interesting and, of all things, fun. He takes a quick look at the job vacancies on the Red Gate website, and an hour later realises he’s still there – looking at videos, photos and people profiles. He especially likes the Red Gate’s Got Talent page, and is very impressed with Simon Johnson’s marathon time. He thinks that he’d quite like to work with such awesome people. It just so happens that Red Gate recently decided that they wanted to hire another hot shot team member. Behind the scenes, the wheels were set in motion: the recruitment team met with the hiring manager to understand exactly what they’re looking for, and to decide what interview tests to do, who will do the interviews, and to kick-start any interview training those people might need. Next up, a job description and job advert were written, and the job was put on the market. Reg applies, and his CV lands in the Recruitment team’s inbox and they open it up with eager anticipation that Reg could be the next awesome new starter. He looks good, and in a jiffy they’ve arranged an interview. Reg arrives for his interview, and is greeted by a smiley receptionist. She offers him a selection of drinks and he feels instantly relaxed. A couple of interviews and an assessment later, he gets a job offer. We make his day and he makes ours by accepting, and becoming one of the 60 new starters so far this year. Behind the scenes, things start moving all over again. The HR team arranges for a “Welcome” goodie box to be whisked out to him, prepares his contract, sends an email to Information Services (Or IS for short - we’ll come back to them), keeps in touch with Reg to make sure he knows what to expect on his first day, and of course asks him to fill in the all-important wiki questionnaire so his new colleagues can start to get to know him before he even joins. Meanwhile, the IS team see an email in SupportWorks from HR. They see that Reg will be starting in the sales team in a few days’ time, and they know exactly what to do. They pull out a new machine, and within minutes have used their automated deployment software to install every piece of software that a new recruit could ever need. They also check with Reg’s new manager to see if he has any special requirements that they could help with. Reg starts and is amazed to find a fully configured machine sitting on his desk, complete with stationery and all the other tools he’ll need to do his job. He feels even more cared for after he gets a workstation assessment, and realises he’d be comfier with an ergonomic keyboard and a footstool. They arrive minutes later, just like that. His manager starts him off on his induction and sales training. Along with job-specific training, he’ll also have a buddy to help him find his feet, and loads of pre-arranged demos and introductions. Reg settles in nicely, and is great at his job. He enjoys the canteen, and regularly eats one of the 40,000 meals provided each year. He gets used to the selection of teas that are available, develops a taste for champagne launch parties, and has his fair share of the 25,000 cups of coffee downed at Red Gate towers each year. He goes along to some Feel Good Fund events, and donates a little something to charity in exchange for a turn on the chocolate fountain. He’s looking a little scruffy, so he decides to get his hair cut in between meetings, just in time for the Red Gate birthday company photo. Reg starts a new project: identifying existing customers to up-sell to new bundles. He talks with the web team to generate lists of qualifying customers who haven’t recently been sent marketing emails, and sends emails out, using a new in-house developed tool to schedule follow-up calls in CRM for the same group. The customer responds, saying they’d like to upgrade but are having a licensing problem – Reg sends the issue to Support, and it gets routed to the web team. The team identifies a workaround, and the bug gets scheduled into the next maintenance release in a fortnight’s time (hey; they got lucky). With all the new stuff Reg is working on, he realises that he’d be way more efficient if he had a third monitor. He speaks to IS and they get him one - no argument. He also needs a test machine and then some extra memory. Done. He then thinks he needs an iPad, and goes to ask for one. He gets told to stop pushing his luck. Some time later, Reg’s wife has a baby, so Reg gets 2 weeks of paid paternity leave and a bunch of flowers sent to his house. He signs up to the childcare scheme so that he doesn’t have to pay National Insurance on the first £243 of his childcare. The accounts team makes it all happen seamlessly, as they did with his Give As You Earn payments, which come out of his wages and go straight to his favorite charity. Reg’s sales career is going well. He’s grateful for the help that he gets from the product support team. How do they answer all those 900-ish support calls so effortlessly each month? He’s impressed with the patches that are sent out to customers who find “interesting behavior” in their tools, and to the customers who just must have that new feature. A little later in his career at Red Gate, Reg decides that he’d like to learn about management. He goes on some management training specially customised for Red Gate, joins the Management Book Club, and gets together with other new managers to brainstorm how to get the most out of one to one meetings with his team. Reg decides to go for a game of Foosball to celebrate his good fortune with his team, and has to wait for Finance to finish. While he’s waiting, he reflects on the wonderful time he’s had at Red Gate. He can’t put his finger on what it is exactly, but he knows he’s on to a good thing. All of the stuff that happened to Reg didn’t just happen magically. We’ve got teams of people working relentlessly behind the scenes to make sure that everyone here is comfortable, safe, well fed and caffeinated to the max.

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• The Internet of Things Is Really the Internet of People

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Mark Hurd - Originally Posted on LinkedIn As I speak with CEOs around the world, our conversations invariably come down to this central question: Can we change our corporate cultures and the ways we train and reward our people as rapidly as new technology is changing the work we do, the products we make and how we engage with customers? It’s a critical consideration given today’s pace of disruption, which already is straining traditional management models and HR strategies. Winning companies will bring innovation and vision to their employees and partners by attracting people who will thrive in this emerging world of relentless data, predictive analytics and unlimited what-if scenarios. So, where are we going to find employees who are as familiar with complex data as I am with orderly financial statements and business plans? I’m not just talking about high-end data scientists who most certainly will sit at or near the top of the new decision-making pyramid. Global organizations will need creative and motivated people who will devote their time to manipulating, reviewing, analyzing, sorting and reshaping data to drive business and delight customers. This might seem evident, but my conversations with business people across the globe indicate that only a small number of companies get it. In the past few years, executives have been busy keeping pace with seismic upheavals, including the rise of social customer engagement, the rapid acceleration of product-development cycles and the relentless move to mobile-first. But all of that, I think, is the start of an uphill climb to the top of a roller-coaster. Today, about 10 billion devices across the globe are connected to the Internet. In a couple of years, that number will probably double, and not because we will have bought 10 billion more computers, smart phones and tablets. This unprecedented explosion of Big Data is being triggered by the Internet of Things, which is another way of saying that the numerous intelligent devices touching our everyday lives are all becoming interconnected. Home appliances, food, industrial equipment, pets, pharmaceutical products, pallets, cars, luggage, packaged goods, athletic equipment, even clothing will be streaming data. Some data will provide important information about how to run our businesses and lead healthier lives. Much of it will be extraneous. How does a CEO cope with this unimaginable volume and velocity of data, much less harness it to excite and delight customers? Here are three things CEOs must do to tackle this challenge: 1) Take care of your employees, take care of your customers. Larry Ellison recently noted that the two most important priorities for any CEO today revolve around people: Taking care of your employees and taking care of your customers. Companies in today’s hypercompetitive business environment simply won’t be able to survive unless they’ve got world-class people at all levels of the organization. CEOs must demonstrate a commitment to employees by becoming champions for HR systems that empower every employee to fully understand his or her job, how it ties into the corporate framework, what’s expected of them, what training is available, and how they can use an embedded social network to communicate, collaborate and excel. Over the next several years, many of the world’s top industrialized economies will see a turnover in the workforce on an unprecedented scale. Across the United States, Europe, China and Japan, the “baby boomer” generation will be retiring and, by 2020, we’ll see turnovers in those regions ranging from 10 to 30 percent. How will companies replace all that brainpower, experience and know-how? How will CEOs perpetuate the best elements of their corporate cultures in the midst of this profound turnover? The challenge will be daunting, but it can be met with world-class HR technology. As companies begin replacing up to 30 percent of their workforce, they will need thousands of new types of data-native workers to exploit the Internet of Things in the service of the Internet of People. The shift in corporate mindset here can’t be overstated. The CEO has to be at the forefront of this new way of recruiting, training, motivating, aligning and developing truly 21-century talent. 2) Start thinking today about the Internet of People. Some forward-looking companies have begun pursuing the “democratization of data.” This allows more people within a company greater access to data that can help them make better decisions, move more quickly and keep pace with the changing interests and demands of their customers. As a result, we’ve seen organizations flatten out, growing numbers of well-informed people authorized to make decisions without corporate approval and a movement of engagement away from headquarters to the point of contact with the customer. These are profound changes, and I’m a huge proponent. As I think about what the next few years will bring as companies become deluged with unprecedented streams of data, I’m convinced that we’ll need dramatically different organizational structures, decision-making models, risk-management profiles and reward systems. For example, if a car company’s marketing department mines incoming data to determine that customers are shifting rapidly toward neon-green models, how many layers of approval, review, analysis and sign-off will be needed before the factory starts cranking out more neon-green cars? Will we continue to have organizations where too many people are empowered to say “No” and too few are allowed to say “Yes”? If so, how will those companies be able to compete in a world in which customers have more choices, instant access to more information and less loyalty than ever before? That’s why I think CEOs need to begin thinking about this problem right now, not in a year or two when competitors are already reshaping their organizations to match the marketplace’s new realities. 3) Partner with universities to help create a new type of highly skilled workers. Several years ago, universities introduced new undergraduate as well as graduate-level programs in analytics and informatics as the business need for deeper insights into the booming world of data began to explode. Today, as the growth rate of data continues to soar, we know that the Internet of Things will only intensify that growth. Moreover, as Big Data fuels insights that can be shaped into products and services that generate revenue, the demand for data scientists and data specialists will go on unabated. Beyond that top-level expertise, companies are going to need data-native thinkers at all levels of the organization. Where will this new type of worker come from? I think it’s incumbent on the business community to collaborate with universities to develop new curricula designed to turn out graduates who can capitalize on the data-driven world that the Internet of Things is surely going to create. These new workers will create opportunities to help their companies in fields as diverse as product design, customer service, marketing, manufacturing and distribution. They will become innovative leaders in fashioning an entirely new type of workforce and organizational structure optimized to fully exploit the Internet of Things so that it becomes a high-value enabler of the Internet of People. Mark Hurd is President of Oracle Corporation and a member of the company's Board of Directors. He joined Oracle in 2010, bringing more than 30 years of technology industry leadership, computer hardware expertise, and executive management experience to his role with the company. As President, Mr. Hurd oversees the corporate direction and strategy for Oracle's global field operations, including marketing, sales, consulting, alliances and channels, and support. He focuses on strategy, leadership, innovation, and customers.

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• DBCC CHECKDB on VVLDB and latches (Or: My Pain is Your Gain)

  - by Argenis

    Does your CHECKDB hurt, Argenis? There is a classic blog series by Paul Randal [blog|twitter] called “CHECKDB From Every Angle” which is pretty much mandatory reading for anybody who’s even remotely considering going for the MCM certification, or its replacement (the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master: Data Platform – makes my fingers hurt just from typing it). Of particular interest is the post “Consistency Options for a VLDB” – on it, Paul provides solid, timeless advice (I use the word “timeless” because it was written in 2007, and it all applies today!) on how to perform checks on very large databases. Well, here I was trying to figure out how to make CHECKDB run faster on a restored copy of one of our databases, which happens to exceed 7TB in size. The whole thing was taking several days on multiple systems, regardless of the storage used – SAS, SATA or even SSD…and I actually didn’t pay much attention to how long it was taking, or even bothered to look at the reasons why - as long as it was finishing okay and found no consistency errors. Yes – I know. That was a huge mistake, as corruption found in a database several days after taking place could only allow for further spread of the corruption – and potentially large data loss. In the last two weeks I increased my attention towards this problem, as we noticed that CHECKDB was taking EVEN LONGER on brand new all-flash storage in the SAN! I couldn’t really explain it, and were almost ready to blame the storage vendor. The vendor told us that they could initially see the server driving decent I/O – around 450Mb/sec, and then it would settle at a very slow rate of 10Mb/sec or so. “Hum”, I thought – “CHECKDB is just not pushing the I/O subsystem hard enough”. Perfmon confirmed the vendor’s observations. Dreaded @BlobEater What was CHECKDB doing all the time while doing so little I/O? Eating Blobs. It turns out that CHECKDB was taking an extremely long time on one of our frankentables, which happens to be have 35 billion rows (yup, with a b) and sucks up several terabytes of space in the database. We do have a project ongoing to purge/split/partition this table, so it’s just a matter of time before we deal with it. But the reality today is that CHECKDB is coming to a screeching halt in performance when dealing with this particular table. Checking sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks and sys.dm_os_latch_stats showed that LATCH_EX (DBCC_OBJECT_METADATA) was by far the top wait type. I remembered hearing recently about that wait from another post that Paul Randal made, but that was related to computed-column indexes, and in fact, Paul himself reminded me of his article via twitter. But alas, our pathologic table had no non-clustered indexes on computed columns. I knew that latches are used by the database engine to do internal synchronization – but how could I help speed this up? After all, this is stuff that doesn’t have a lot of knobs to tweak. (There’s a fantastic level 500 talk by Bob Ward from Microsoft CSS [blog|twitter] called “Inside SQL Server Latches” given at PASS 2010 – and you can check it out here. DISCLAIMER: I assume no responsibility for any brain melting that might ensue from watching Bob’s talk!) Failed Hypotheses Earlier on this week I flew down to Palo Alto, CA, to visit our Headquarters – and after having a great time with my Monkey peers, I was relaxing on the plane back to Seattle watching a great talk by SQL Server MVP and fellow MCM Maciej Pilecki [twitter] called “Masterclass: A Day in the Life of a Database Transaction” where he discusses many different topics related to transaction management inside SQL Server. Very good stuff, and when I got home it was a little late – that slow DBCC CHECKDB that I had been dealing with was way in the back of my head. As I was looking at the problem at hand earlier on this week, I thought “How about I set the database to read-only?” I remembered one of the things Maciej had (jokingly) said in his talk: “if you don’t want locking and blocking, set the database to read-only” (or something to that effect, pardon my loose memory). I immediately killed the CHECKDB which had been running painfully for days, and set the database to read-only mode. Then I ran DBCC CHECKDB against it. It started going really fast (even a bit faster than before), and then throttled down again to around 10Mb/sec. All sorts of expletives went through my head at the time. Sure enough, the same latching scenario was present. Oh well. I even spent some time trying to figure out if NUMA was hurting performance. Folks on Twitter made suggestions in this regard (thanks, Lonny! [twitter]) …Eureka? This past Friday I was still scratching my head about the whole thing; I was ready to start profiling with XPERF to see if I could figure out which part of the engine was to blame and then get Microsoft to look at the evidence. After getting a bunch of good news I’ll blog about separately, I sat down for a figurative smack down with CHECKDB before the weekend. And then the light bulb went on. A sparse column. I thought that I couldn’t possibly be experiencing the same scenario that Paul blogged about back in March showing extreme latching with non-clustered indexes on computed columns. Did I even have a non-clustered index on my sparse column? As it turns out, I did. I had one filtered non-clustered index – with the sparse column as the index key (and only column). To prove that this was the problem, I went and setup a test. Yup, that'll do it The repro is very simple for this issue: I tested it on the latest public builds of SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 (CU6) and SQL Server 2012 SP1 (CU4). First, create a test database and a test table, which only needs to contain a sparse column: CREATE DATABASE SparseColTest; GO USE SparseColTest; GO CREATE TABLE testTable (testCol smalldatetime SPARSE NULL); GO INSERT INTO testTable (testCol) VALUES (NULL); GO 1000000 That’s 1 million rows, and even though you’re inserting NULLs, that’s going to take a while. In my laptop, it took 3 minutes and 31 seconds. Next, we run DBCC CHECKDB against the database: DBCC CHECKDB('SparseColTest') WITH NO_INFOMSGS, ALL_ERRORMSGS; This runs extremely fast, as least on my test rig – 198 milliseconds. Now let’s create a filtered non-clustered index on the sparse column: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [badBadIndex] ON testTable (testCol) WHERE testCol IS NOT NULL; With the index in place now, let’s run DBCC CHECKDB one more time: DBCC CHECKDB('SparseColTest') WITH NO_INFOMSGS, ALL_ERRORMSGS; In my test system this statement completed in 11433 milliseconds. 11.43 full seconds. Quite the jump from 198 milliseconds. I went ahead and dropped the filtered non-clustered indexes on the restored copy of our production database, and ran CHECKDB against that. We went down from 7+ days to 19 hours and 20 minutes. Cue the “Argenis is not impressed” meme, please, Mr. LaRock. My pain is your gain, folks. Go check to see if you have any of such indexes – they’re likely causing your consistency checks to run very, very slow. Happy CHECKDBing, -Argenis ps: I plan to file a Connect item for this issue – I consider it a pretty serious bug in the engine. After all, filtered indexes were invented BECAUSE of the sparse column feature – and it makes a lot of sense to use them together. Watch this space and my twitter timeline for a link.

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• Vlc And other Multi Media Problems

  - by MrMagu

  ive tried numerous Free Multimedia Programs on ubuntu and i get the same result when i go to watch one of my movies off my other hardrive it allways ends up full screening with a stuck image in the middle and vlc ends up looking pitch black. ive look all over the web for this issue im wondering if anyone is experinceing the same problems I Dont know if it has to do with the duel monitors ive tried adding and re adding the repositorys but it seems to be doing the same repetive thing for over a month now do i need to reinstall the whole system or what idk anyhelp please would be much appreciated Ty MrMagu Xorg Conf File nvidia-settings: X configuration file generated by nvidia-settings nvidia-settings: version 304.37 (buildd@allspice) Sun Sep 9 05:59:26 UTC 2012 Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard" InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer" Option "Xinerama" "0" EndSection Section "Files" EndSection Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Keyboard0" Driver "kbd" EndSection Section "Monitor" # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "Ancor Communications Inc VE247" HorizSync 30.0 - 83.0 VertRefresh 50.0 - 76.0 Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor1" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "Ancor Communications Inc VE247" HorizSync 30.0 - 83.0 VertRefresh 50.0 - 76.0 EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" BoardName "Quadro FX 1500" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Device1" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" BoardName "Quadro FX 1500" BusID "PCI:1:0:0" Screen 1 EndSection Section "Screen" Removed Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DFP-1: nvidia-auto-select +1920+0; DFP-0: 1920x1080 +0+0, DFP-1: 1920x1080 +1920+0" Removed Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0; DFP-0: 1920x1080 +0+0; DFP-0: 1920x1080_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1680x1050 +0+0; DFP-0: 1680x1050_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1440x900 +0+0; DFP-0: 1440x900_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x1024 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x1024_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x1024_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x960 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x960_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1152x864 +0+0; DFP-0: 1152x864_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 1024x768 +0+0; DFP-0: 1024x768_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 1024x768_70 +0+0; DFP-0: 1024x768_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600_72 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600_56 +0+0; DFP-0: 640x480 +0+0; DFP-0: 640x480_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 640x480_72 +0+0; DFP-0: 640x480_60 +0+0; DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select @1920x720 +0+0" Removed Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0; DFP-0: 1920x1080 +0+0; DFP-0: 1920x1080_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1680x1050 +0+0; DFP-0: 1680x1050_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1440x900 +0+0; DFP-0: 1440x900_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x1024 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x1024_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x1024_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x960 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x960_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1152x864 +0+0; DFP-0: 1152x864_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 1024x768 +0+0; DFP-0: 1024x768_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 1024x768_70 +0+0; DFP-0: 1024x768_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600_72 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600_56 +0+0; DFP-0: 640x480 +0+0; DFP-0: 640x480_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 640x480_72 +0+0; DFP-0: 640x480_60 +0+0" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Device0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 24 Option "TwinView" "1" Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-0" Option "Stereo" "0" Option "nvidiaXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-0" Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DFP-1: 1920x1080 +1920+0; DFP-0: 1920x1080 +0+0, DFP-1: nvidia-auto-select +1920+0; DFP-0: 1920x1080_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1680x1050 +0+0; DFP-0: 1680x1050_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1440x900 +0+0; DFP-0: 1440x900_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x1024 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x1024_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x1024_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x960 +0+0; DFP-0: 1280x960_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 1152x864 +0+0; DFP-0: 1152x864_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 1024x768 +0+0; DFP-0: 1024x768_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 1024x768_70 +0+0; DFP-0: 1024x768_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600_72 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600_60 +0+0; DFP-0: 800x600_56 +0+0; DFP-0: 640x480 +0+0; DFP-0: 640x480_75 +0+0; DFP-0: 640x480_72 +0+0; DFP-0: 640x480_60 +0+0" SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen1" Device "Device1" Monitor "Monitor1" DefaultDepth 24 Option "Stereo" "0" Option "metamodes" "DFP-1: 1920x1080 +0+0" SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Section "InputClass" Identifier "Mouse Remap" MatchProduct "Saitek Cyborg R.A.T.7 Mouse" MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*" Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 0 0 0 0 0" EndSection Pictures http://tinypic.com/r/34o7j1h/6 http://tinypic.com/r/3rn20/6 Ty so Much Mr Magu

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• a friendly elaboratation on how iceweasel misses as recent request was discovered in post tut

  - by v3x3n

  I would like to specify what you asked about in how iceweasel misses on in hopes that you are interested in considering the answer to be valid considering the package should run efficient to a novice user especially when getting a first impression on a new software, browser, or package they are given by default. First let me say that I am very grateful for all debian has and continues to do for its user base and I am not complaining, only hoping that in mentioning such it will eventually aid in improving the disappointing experience iceweasel gave me in multiple ways right from the start of using it. I am sure tremendous amounts of hard work went into making it work as well as it does, and tremendous effort continues to go into IW like the rest of the package and distros such as this... Having said that, I do aim to keep my examples simple as possible but also explained in enough detail as to not leave out important info to get a full idea of my issue... (Thanks for understanding if I sound novice to debian, I am but continue to learn and advance by trial and error each day, and of course the wonderful help from all the great minds available here and there)... Well, my bone to pick (unfortunately as I disdain being a complainer when so much has been done for us, the end user) with IW is mainly 3 immediately noticed problems in offering me a smooth test drive (completely normal browsing conduct of your average user, I should indicate) as soon as I started out a task using IW (heading directly to google images and searched for a few web sized images, then saved a few (no more than 800 to 900 in dimensions, typically a normal procedure I would imagine) I experienced a horrendous reoccurring freeze and lag time that almost left me to kill the process more than once on each attempt and continued to compound so that by a few attempts later, even 1 single image save locked up the entire browser, ultimately giving up on my procedure in its simplicity with a bit of aggravation, if there was something I had done wrong on my end pre-attempt or during installation. Secondly, visiting video player sites in this case youtube will not allow for any video feed to play whatsoever and again, experienced a slight freezing that eventually dissipated as long as I didn't attempt to press play or reload another video trial... Very annoying and possibly related to my first issue (which could rely on my own lack of knowledge in setup config, but that troubles me if so).... Lastly as another user has stated already, in which brought you to ask them what exactly seemed to be the problem in the first place is also my final straw that broke the weasel's back, leading me here to find a solution to a updated version of firefox... being that iceweasel (an apparent build of firefox 17.x.x) leaving the user to find themselves out of luck when installing their favorite or much useful add-ons or plugins that aid their task or normal usage online.... As the other user clearly stated... there is almost zero options and barely any luck to find compatible plugins with such an outdated version still being used... I can only imagine if as a novoice or standard user to linux... and beginner to debian (which I am all for btw!) if I am discovering major conductivity issues which hinder normal user conduct right off the bat... that there is probably a bundle or more of security vulnerabilities that would unravel to me if I continued to give mr Hommey's package any further attention, or interest in continuing to use... This is a deal breaker on any account, unless all 3 of these issues stated are due to a very n00berish setting or lack thereof (which if that is the case, such was not properly stated for beginner in any place available by following installation tutorials such as LVM installers, which I felt lacked a clear understanding to someone who is trying to learn why and how, rather than, a fix to a potentially broken out of box installation... I really think that is irrelevant in any case however, as there is much step by step support regarding that kind of thing, just saying... its very challenging, along side a job to keep deadlines on, and the need to learn a better and more costomizible system, that was not as popularized when I became a dev via windows (OK OK I know thats a huge mistake and now I am way off original topic but anyway) Thanks very much for taking the time to read over this, and I hope it honestly gives you a few good and valid reasons for users wanting and seeking a way to get around iceweasel altogether... Finally, if I am missing something vital that renders all I've stated invalid or useless, please feel free to shove that elephant in the room my direction! Thanks for all you do, as I am sure it is very useful and dedicated, being you are a debian maintainer, and super user! Much love for intelligence, freedom and sharing the secrets of the web! May it remain unregulated and a good place to grow and learn for generations to come! Stay true! Take care now! -v3x (v3x @ gmx .com)

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• Asp.net mvc, view with multiple updatable parts - how?

  - by DerDres

  I have started doing asp.net mvc programming and like it more everyday. Most of the examples I have seen use separate views for viewing and editing details of a specific entity. E.g. - table of music albums linking to separate 'detail' and 'update' views [Action] | Title | Artist detail, update | Uuuh Baby | Barry White detail, update | Mr Mojo | Barry White With mvc how can I achieve a design where the R and the U (CRUD) are represented in a single view, and furthermore where the user can edit separate parts of the view, thus limiting the amount of data the user can edit before saving? Example mockup - editing album detials: I have achieved such a design with ajax calls, but Im curious how to do this without ajax. Parts of my own take on this can be seen below. I use a flag (enum EditCode) indicating which part of the view, if any, that has to render a form. Is such a design in accordance with the framework, could it be done more elegantly? AlbumController public class AlbumController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { var albumDetails = from ManageVM in state.AlbumState.ToList() select ManageVM.Value.Detail; return View(albumDetails); } public ActionResult Manage(int albumId, EditCode editCode) { (state.AlbumState[albumId] as ManageVM).EditCode = (EditCode)editCode; ViewData["albumId"] = albumId; return View(state.AlbumState[albumId]); } [HttpGet] public ActionResult Edit(int albumId, EditCode editCode) { return RedirectToAction("Manage", new { albumId = albumId, editCode = editCode }); } // edit album details [HttpPost] public ActionResult EditDetail(int albumId, Detail details) { (state.AlbumState[albumId] as ManageVM).Detail = details; return RedirectToAction("Manage", new { albumId = albumId, editCode = EditCode.NoEdit });// zero being standard } // edit album thought [HttpPost] public ActionResult EditThoughts(int albumId, List<Thought> thoughts) { (state.AlbumState[albumId] as ManageVM).Thoughts = thoughts; return RedirectToAction("Manage", new { albumId = albumId, editCode = EditCode.NoEdit });// zero being standard } Flag - EditCode public enum EditCode { NoEdit, Details, Genres, Thoughts } Mangae view <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<MvcApplication1.Controllers.ManageVM>" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> Manage </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2>Manage</h2> <% if(Model.EditCode == MvcApplication1.Controllers.EditCode.Details) {%> <% Html.RenderPartial("_EditDetails", Model.Detail); %> <% }else{%> <% Html.RenderPartial("_ShowDetails", Model.Detail); %> <% } %> <hr /> <% if(Model.EditCode == MvcApplication1.Controllers.EditCode.Thoughts) {%> <% Html.RenderPartial("_EditThoughts", Model.Thoughts); %> <% }else{%> <% Html.RenderPartial("_ShowThoughts", Model.Thoughts); %> <% } %>

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• HP-UX: libstd_v2 in stack trace of JNI code compiled with g++

  - by Miguel Rentes

  Hello, uname -mr: B.11.23 ia64 g++ --version: g++ (GCC) 4.4.0 java -version: Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0.06-jinteg_20_jan_2010_05_50-b00) Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (build 14.3-b01-jre1.6.0.06-rc1, mixed mode) I'm trying to run a Java application that uses JNI. It is crashing inside the JNI code with the following (abbreviated) stack trace: (0) 0xc0000000249353e0 VMError::report_and_die{_ZN7VMError14report_and_dieEv} + 0x440 at /CLO/Components/JAVA_HOTSPOT/Src/src/share/vm/utilities/vmError.cpp:738 [/opt/java6/jre/lib/IA64W/server/libjvm.so] (1) 0xc000000024559240 os::Hpux::JVM_handle_hpux_signal{_ZN2os4Hpux22JVM_handle_hpux_signalEiP9 __siginfoPvi} + 0x760 at /CLO/Components/JAVA_HOTSPOT/Src/src/os_cpu/hp-ux_ia64/vm/os_hp-ux_ia64.cpp:1051 [/opt/java6/jre/lib/IA64W/server/libjvm.so] (2) 0xc0000000245331c0 os::Hpux::signalHandler{_ZN2os4Hpux13signalHandlerEiP9__siginfoPv} + 0x80 at /CLO/Components/JAVA_HOTSPOT/Src/src/os/hp-ux/vm/os_hp-ux.cpp:4295 [/opt/java6/jre/lib/IA64W/server/libjvm.so] (3) 0xe00000010e002620 ---- Signal 11 (SIGSEGV) delivered ---- (4) 0xc0000000000d2d20 __pthread_mutex_lock + 0x400 at /ux/core/libs/threadslibs/src/common/pthreads/mutex.c:3895 [/usr/lib/hpux64/libpthread.so.1] (5) 0xc000000000342e90 __thread_mutex_lock + 0xb0 at ../../../../../core/libs/libc/shared_em_64/../core/threads/wrappers1.c:273 [/usr/lib/hpux64/libc.so.1] (6) 0xc00000000177dff0 _HPMutexWrapper::lock{_ZN15_HPMutexWrapper4lockEPv} + 0x90 [/usr/lib/hpux64/libstd_v2.so.1] (7) 0xc0000000017e9960 std::basic_string,std::allocator{_ZNSsC1ERKSs} + 0x80 [/usr/lib/hpux64/libstd_v2.so.1] (8) 0xc000000008fd9fe0 JniString::str{_ZNK9JniString3strEv} + 0x50 at eg_handler_jni.cxx:50 [/soft/bus-7_0/lib/libbus_registry_jni.so.7.0.0] (9) 0xc000000008fd7060 pt_efacec_se_aut_frk_cmp_registry_REGHandler::getKey{_ZN44pt_efacec_se_aut_frk_cmp_registry_REGHandler6getKeyEP8_jstringi} + 0xa0 [/soft/bus-7_0/lib/libbus_registry_jni.so.7.0.0] (10) 0xc000000008fd17f0 Java_pt_efacec_se_aut_frk_cmp_registry_REGHandler_getKey__Ljava_lang_String_2I + 0xa0 [/soft/bus-7_0/lib/libbus_registry_jni.so.7.0.0] (11) 0x9fffffffdf400ed0 Internal error (-3) while unwinding stack [/CLO/Components/JAVA_HOTSPOT/Src/src/os_cpu/hp-ux_ia64/vm/thread_hp-ux_ia64.cpp:142] This JNI code and dependencies are being compiled using g++, are multithreaded and 64 bit (-pthread -mlp64 -shared -fPIC). The LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable is set the dependencies location, and running ldd on the JNI shared libraries finds them all: ldd libbus_registry_jni.so: libefa-d.so.7 = /soft/bus-7_0/lib/libefa-d.so.7 libbus_registry-d.so.7 = /soft/bus-7_0/lib/libbus_registry-d.so.7 libboost_thread-gcc44-mt-d-1_41.so = /usr/local/lib/libboost_thread-gcc44-mt-d-1_41.so libboost_system-gcc44-mt-d-1_41.so = /usr/local/lib/libboost_system-gcc44-mt-d-1_41.so libboost_regex-gcc44-mt-d-1_41.so = /usr/local/lib/libboost_regex-gcc44-mt-d-1_41.so librt.so.1 = /usr/lib/hpux64/librt.so.1 libstdc++.so.6 = /opt/hp-gcc-4.4.0/lib/gcc/ia64-hp-hpux11.23/4.4.0/../../../hpux64/libstdc++.so.6 libm.so.1 = /usr/lib/hpux64/libm.so.1 libgcc_s.so.0 = /opt/hp-gcc-4.4.0/lib/gcc/ia64-hp-hpux11.23/4.4.0/../../../hpux64/libgcc_s.so.0 libunwind.so.1 = /usr/lib/hpux64/libunwind.so.1 librt.so.1 = /usr/lib/hpux64/librt.so.1 libm.so.1 = /usr/lib/hpux64/libm.so.1 libunwind.so.1 = /usr/lib/hpux64/libunwind.so.1 libdl.so.1 = /usr/lib/hpux64/libdl.so.1 libunwind.so.1 = /usr/lib/hpux64/libunwind.so.1 libc.so.1 = /usr/lib/hpux64/libc.so.1 libuca.so.1 = /usr/lib/hpux64/libuca.so.1 Looking at the stack trace, it seams odd that, although ldd list g++'s libstdc++ is being used, the std:string copy c'tor being reported as used is the one in libstd_v2, the implementation provided by aCC. The crash happens in the following code, when method str() returns: class JniString { std::string m_utf8; public: JniString(JNIEnv* env, jstring instance) { const char* utf8Chars = env-GetStringUTFChars(instance, 0); if (utf8Chars == 0) { env-ExceptionClear(); // RPF throw std::runtime_error("GetStringUTFChars returned 0"); } m_utf8.assign(utf8Chars); env-ReleaseStringUTFChars(instance, utf8Chars); } std::string str() const { return m_utf8; } }; Simultaneous usage of the two C++ implementations could likely be a reason for the crash, but that should not be happening. Any ideas?

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• JOptionPane opening another JFrame

  - by mike_hornbeck

  So I'm continuing my fight with this : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2923545/creating-java-dialogs/2926126 task. Now my JOptionPane opens new window with envelope overfiew, but I can't change size of this window. Also I wanted to have sender's data in upper left corner, and receiver's data in bottom right. How can I achieve that ? There is also issue with OptionPane itself. After I click 'OK' it opens small window in the upper left corner of the screen. What is this and why it's appearing ? My code: import java.awt.*; import java.awt.Font; import javax.swing.*; public class Main extends JFrame { private static JTextField nameField = new JTextField(20); private static JTextField surnameField = new JTextField(); private static JTextField addr1Field = new JTextField(); private static JTextField addr2Field = new JTextField(); private static JComboBox sizes = new JComboBox(new String[] { "small", "medium", "large", "extra-large" }); public Main(){ JPanel mainPanel = new JPanel(); mainPanel.setLayout(new BoxLayout(mainPanel, BoxLayout.Y_AXIS)); getContentPane().add(mainPanel); JPanel addrPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(0, 1)); addrPanel.setBorder(BorderFactory.createTitledBorder("Receiver")); addrPanel.add(new JLabel("Name")); addrPanel.add(nameField); addrPanel.add(new JLabel("Surname")); addrPanel.add(surnameField); addrPanel.add(new JLabel("Address 1")); addrPanel.add(addr1Field); addrPanel.add(new JLabel("Address 2")); addrPanel.add(addr2Field); mainPanel.add(addrPanel); mainPanel.add(new JLabel(" ")); mainPanel.add(sizes); String[] buttons = { "OK", "Cancel"}; int c = JOptionPane.showOptionDialog( null, mainPanel, "My Panel", JOptionPane.DEFAULT_OPTION, JOptionPane.PLAIN_MESSAGE, null, buttons, buttons[0] ); if(c ==0){ new Envelope(nameField.getText(), surnameField.getText(), addr1Field.getText() , addr2Field.getText(), sizes.getSelectedIndex()); } setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); pack(); setVisible(true); } public static void main(String[] args) { new Main(); } } class Envelope extends JFrame { private final int SMALL=0; private final int MEDIUM=1; private final int LARGE=2; private final int XLARGE=3; public Envelope(String n, String s, String a1, String a2, int i){ Container content = getContentPane(); JPanel mainPanel = new JPanel(); mainPanel.setLayout(new BoxLayout(mainPanel, BoxLayout.Y_AXIS)); mainPanel.add(new JLabel("John Doe")); mainPanel.add(new JLabel("FooBar str 14")); mainPanel.add(new JLabel("Newark, 45-99")); JPanel dataPanel = new JPanel(); dataPanel.setFont(new Font("sansserif", Font.PLAIN, 32)); //set size from i mainPanel.setLayout(new BoxLayout(mainPanel, BoxLayout.Y_AXIS)); mainPanel.setBackground(Color.ORANGE); mainPanel.add(new JLabel("Mr "+n+" "+s)); mainPanel.add(new JLabel(a1)); mainPanel.add(new JLabel(a2)); content.setSize(450, 600); content.setBackground(Color.ORANGE); content.add(mainPanel, BorderLayout.NORTH); content.add(dataPanel, BorderLayout.SOUTH); setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); pack(); setVisible(true); } }

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• XSLT Select all nodes containing a specific substing

  - by Mike

  I'm trying to write an XPath that will select certain nodes that contain a specific word. In this case the word is, "Lockwood". The correct answer is 3. Both of these paths give me 3. count(//*[contains(./*,'Lockwood')]) count(BusinessLetter/*[contains(../*,'Lockwood')]) But when I try to output the text of each specific node //*[contains(./*,'Lockwood')][1] //*[contains(./*,'Lockwood')][2] //*[contains(./*,'Lockwood')][3] Node 1 ends up containing all the text and nodes 2 and 3 are blank. Can some one please tell me what's happening or what I'm doing wrong. Thanks. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="XPathFunctions.xsl"?> <BusinessLetter> <Head> <SendDate>November 29, 2005</SendDate> <Recipient> <Name Title="Mr."> <FirstName>Joshua</FirstName> <LastName>Lockwood</LastName> </Name> <Company>Lockwood &amp; Lockwood</Company> <Address> <Street>291 Broadway Ave.</Street> <City>New York</City> <State>NY</State> <Zip>10007</Zip> <Country>United States</Country> </Address> </Recipient> </Head> <Body> <List> <Heading>Along with this letter, I have enclosed the following items:</Heading> <ListItem>two original, execution copies of the Webucator Master Services Agreement</ListItem> <ListItem>two original, execution copies of the Webucator Premier Support for Developers Services Description between Lockwood &amp; Lockwood and Webucator, Inc.</ListItem> </List> <Para>Please sign and return all four original, execution copies to me at your earliest convenience. Upon receipt of the executed copies, we will immediately return a fully executed, original copy of both agreements to you.</Para> <Para>Please send all four original, execution copies to my attention as follows: <Person> <Name> <FirstName>Bill</FirstName> <LastName>Smith</LastName> </Name> <Address> <Company>Webucator, Inc.</Company> <Street>4933 Jamesville Rd.</Street> <City>Jamesville</City> <State>NY</State> <Zip>13078</Zip> <Country>USA</Country> </Address> </Person> </Para> <Para>If you have any questions, feel free to call me at <Phone>800-555-1000 x123</Phone> or e-mail me at <Email>[email protected]</Email>.</Para> </Body> <Foot> <Closing> <Name> <FirstName>Bill</FirstName> <LastName>Smith</LastName> </Name> <JobTitle>VP of Operations</JobTitle> </Closing> </Foot> </BusinessLetter>

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• Wrapping a paragraph inside a div?

  - by LOD121

  How do I make my paragraph wrap inside my div? It is currently overflowing outside of the div and I have no idea how to stop the paragraph from overflowing over the edge. I do not want a scroll bar with: overflow: scroll; and the other overflow options don't seem to help here either... I have the following code: div { width: 1200px; margin: 0 auto; } .container { overflow: hidden; } .content { width: 1000px; float: left; margin-left: 0; text-align: left; } .rightpanel { width: 190px; float: right; margin-right: 0; } <div class="container"> <div class="content"> <p>Some content flowing over more than one line</p> </div> <div class="rightpanel"> <!-- content --> </div> </div> Edit: <div class="container"> <div class="content"> <div class="leftcontent"> </div> <div class="newsfeed"> <div class="newsitem"> <p>Full age sex set feel her told. Tastes giving in passed direct me valley as supply. End great stood boy noisy often way taken short. Rent the size our more door. Years no place abode in no child my. Man pianoforte too solicitude friendship devonshire ten ask. Course sooner its silent but formal she led. Extensive he assurance extremity at breakfast. Dear sure ye sold fine sell on. Projection at up connection literature insensible motionless projecting.<br><br>Be at miss or each good play home they. It leave taste mr in it fancy. She son lose does fond bred gave lady get. Sir her company conduct expense bed any. Sister depend change off piqued one. Contented continued any happiness instantly objection yet her allowance. Use correct day new brought tedious. By come this been in. Kept easy or sons my it done.</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="rightpanel"> </div>

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• DropDownList not working 100% in ASP.Net MVC

  - by Program.X

  I am quite confused with how to effectively use the Html.DropDownList helper for ASP.NET MVC. Background: I have a 5-page form, which saves data to the form each time "Next" is clicked. Users may navigate back and forth between sections, so previous sections will already be pre-populated with previously-entered data. This works for TextBoxes. But not DropDownLists. I have tried a load of different methods, including: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/867117/how-to-add-static-list-of-items-in-mvc-html-dropdownlist/867218#867218 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2080802/setting-selected-item-to-dropdownlist-in-mvc-application I have a ViewModel such taht I have got my lists and my Model (a LINQ-to-SQL generated class) as properties. eg: public class ConsultantRegistrationFormViewModel { public IConsultantRegistration ConsultantRegistration { get; private set; } public SelectList Titles { get; private set; } public SelectList Countries { get; private set; } public SelectList Currencies { get; private set; } public int CurrentSection { get; private set; } private ConsultantRegistrationFormViewModel(IConsultantRegistration consultantRegistration) { ConsultantRegistration = consultantRegistration; CurrentSection = 1; Titles = new SelectList(new string[] { "Mr", "Mrs", "Miss", "Ms", "Dr", "Sir" }); Countries = new SelectList(countries.Select(q => q.Name)); Currencies = new SelectList(currencies,"CurrencyCode","FriendlyForm"); } } My Controller's Edit Action on GET looks like: public class ConsultantRegistrationController : Controller { public IConsultantRegistrationRepository ConsultantRegistrationRepository { get; private set; } public ICountryRepository CountryRepository { get; private set; } public IEnumerable<ICountry> Countries { get; private set; } public ConsultantRegistrationController() { ConsultantRegistrationRepository = RepositoryFactory.CreateConsultantRegistrationRepository(); CountryRepository = RepositoryFactory.CreateCountryRepository(); Countries = CountryRepository.GetCountries().ToArray(); } public ActionResult Edit(Guid id, int sectionIndex) { IConsultantRegistration consultantRegistration = ConsultantRegistrationRepository.GetConsultantRegistration(id); SelectList bankBranchCountriesSelectList = new SelectList(Countries, "BankBranchCountry", "CountryName", consultantRegistration.BankBranchCountry); ViewData["bankBranchCountrySelectList"] = bankBranchCountriesSelectList; return View(new ConsultantRegistrationFormViewModel(consultantRegistration,sectionIndex, Countries,Currencies)); } } With my View doing: <%: Html.DropDownList("ConsultantRegistration.BankBranchCountry",ViewData["bankBranchCountrySelectList"] as SelectList) %> This gives me the error: DataBinding: 'IWW.ArrowPay.ConsultantRegistration.Data.Country' does not contain a property with the name 'BankBranchCountry'. Which it does, have a look at the schema of this property: public interface IConsultantRegistration { Guid ID { get; set; } [DisplayName("Branch Country")] string BankBranchCountry { get; set; } } (My LINQ-to-SQL type ConsultantRegistration implemented IConsultantRegistration) It seems that it is trying to bind to the wrong type, though? If I use this in my view (and use my Controller's Countries property): <%: Html.DropDownList("ConsultantRegistration.BankBranchCountry ",Model.Countries,"(select a Country)") %> I get the saved value fine, but my model doesn't update on POST. And if I use this in my view: <%: Html.DropDownListFor(model=>model.ConsultantRegistration.BankBranchCountry ",Model.Countries,"(select a Country)") %> I get the list, and it POSTs the selected value back, but does not pre-select the currently selected item in my model on the view. So I have a bit of the solution all over the place, but not all in one place. Hope you can help fill in my ignorance.

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• Part 2: Career development as a Software Developer without becoming a manager.

  - by albertpascual

  Seems like my previous post inspired by the work of Michael “Doc” Norton was a great success for the amount of emails I have received. Yet amazed how many people didn’t want to discuss their questions in the comments  sections. I would encourage people to be more public, still I would like to reply to all of you on this public media. I still welcome those emails. What I found out is that many people feels like me, they want to be developers and still be compensated for their experience without wanting to take a job as a manager. Their perfect day is a full day of coding and learning. Many believe their companies will never pay a manager’s salary to a developer no matter what. Most of you ask how to get the ball rolling. And is the later that I’m addressing here, the previous group, will never try. What companies understand developers value and where can I find them? This is a very difficult question to ask, I don’t have a list of those companies or departments, I have seen in my past signs in companies bending backwards to compensate, in more ways the monetary, a developer that is a good resource to them. Allowing the person to move out of the state and still let them work for the company from home is a sign that company goes by individual cases. Allowing them to go to conference that will not benefit the company is another big sign. Simple signs like flexible hours and letting some people work from home. To see those signs you need to be working in that company for awhile and look at the departments where the manager is taking care of their employees in individual cases. Look for the department where people get quiet extra perks, where some people in the department work from home or remotely. In my experience, but not always true, medium to big companies, are prompt to recognize good developers. Then again, some companies just don’t get it and is when you see many technical people managing developers. For all the people that email me stating that developers can also be very good managers, I do not disagree, I just think that a good developers loves writing code, when you remove that part the better salary isn’t enough to keep a developer happy. Burned out developers appreciate being promoted to managers. How do I know I work in a bad company? In my experience I have been a consultant and seen many companies, a few signs I have learned about companies that will not recognize good developers are: When the turn over is pretty high, when developers are moving out in a big rate, no rocket scientist needs to tap you in the shoulder. When the company is looking always to outsource their development resources. The product is not that interesting nor the company cares too much for their final result and support. Code sweat shops. You’ll know when you start working in one of those. Run for the hills! Where do I start? Disclaimer: I have only based this post on Michael “Doc” Norton, this is just my interpretation and ideas. First thing is to look at Michael “Doc” Norton presentation Take Control of Your Development Career http://docondev.blogspot.com/ That should be the first thing any developer should look and follow like it was a pattern. I would personally recommend to find some language or pattern you are interested with and learn it, learn something that will make you happy. Second, join a User Group and get involve in the community. There are hundreds of user groups, and I’m sure you’ll find one in your city or near you town. Code Camps are Developers Meet Ups are also good resources. Third, I would join a open source project you are interested or better yet, create a new open source project with the new technology that you have learn and get coding. Fourth, create a Twitter account and follow the people that talks about the technology you are interested on. If you follow this 4 steps above I think you’ll be on your way, after they are complete, when you release your Open Source project you can say that you accomplished the first steps. Now, do not expect anything to change in your career life, you are changing and should not expect anything in return, besides borrowing some time from sleeping and your family. Creating a good schedule may help you, I find wasted time in many places that I use. Flying for work is actually one of those that allows me to do my best work on a airplane, don’t need to borrow time from anywhere else. Making sure you always have a light, charged laptop is so important. Next steps following the Michael “Doc” Norton Pattern or my interpretation of. First, help run a user group or better yet, start a new user group. I’ll add, as well, go to one conference a year and free development events around your city; Code Camps, Geek Dinners, etc. There are many free events sponsored by different companies for developers to get to know their products, I highly recommend those as the way to get connected. Second, chose a mentor, this is a very hard thing to do I experienced, find an expert in the technology you are learning that has the time for you, it is difficult, I wish you best of luck. Third, learn another technology or pattern, open your horizons a little bit more. Why not, if you had fun previously, keep doing it. Fourth, get involved in forums to answer and ask questions, getting notice in public forums is rewarding for your ego after such a long journey. Final steps following the Michael “Doc” Norton Pattern Teach what you know, become humble on your knowledge, find as many opportunities to teach and to get involved with the community, bring all that to your day job. Mr. Norton talks about getting naked, expose yourself to others in your knowledge and what you do not know. You are never too important for small opportunities, yet don’t  be afraid to take anything big and learn from the experience. Anytime you have the opportunity to talk to somebody that has reach the point the community knows his or her name, means that you should learn from it. Take opportunities that won’t make you money, yet will make you happy. Sometimes you need to spend money and time. Register talks in Code Camps and Dev Meet Ups, those are free, also go to Conference, Development Summits and Geek Diners for example. One day, people will pay you to attend. When will all these pay off? I don’t know. I’m still in the path, there are a few things that during your journey you may get little acknowledgements that you are in the correct path. In my case I think those are the little signs that tells you about your journey. I got awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for ASP.NET in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. I got selected to speak at the DevConnections in Las Vegas in 2010 and Orlando 2011. I do believe that I do have a long way to go, yet what I do makes me happy and I hope I can keep doing for years to come. Every year I can see an improvement on my code, and more frameworks and languages are under my belt, I learn to embrace them all as well as in my daily job, I have been able to work in a few projects beyond my department. I’m a learner and believer of the Michael “Doc” Norton pattern. Looking forward to learn more about it to be able to apply it better. In my short journey I now see my mistakes, I did a few things right, I have been listening the intelligent people and not being afraid to move along the technology changes. In my professional life, I have tried to avoid being placed in only one technology and product. I have always share my code and never confused anybody that wanted to take over any of my projects, I didn’t think anything I created as my own nor care too much when politics didn’t see my vision. I stayed flexible, ready and visible, yet humble. I keep my head just below the clouds, and avoided managers meetings. I credit my manager for my success, and I faulted publicly only myself for the failures. Hope this helps. Cheers, Al Follow me in Twitter  Read my previous post tweetmeme_url = 'http://weblogs.asp.net/albertpascual/archive/2010/12/09/part-2-career-development-as-a-software-developer-without-becoming-a-manager.aspx'; tweetmeme_source = 'alpascual';

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• When Your Boss Doesn't Want you to Succeed

  - by Phil Factor

  You're working hard to get an application finished. You are programming long into the evenings sometimes, and eating sandwiches at your desk instead of taking a lunch break. Then one day you glance up at the IT manager, serene in his mysterious round of meetings, and think 'Does he actually care whether this project succeeds or not?'. The question may seem absurd. Of course the project must succeed. The truth, as always, is often far more complex. Your manager may even be doing his best to make sure you don't succeed. Why? There have always been rich pickings for the unscrupulous in IT.  In extreme cases, where administrators struggle with scarcely-comprehended technical issues, huge sums of money can be lost and gained without any perceptible results. In a very few cases can fraud be proven: most of the time, the intricacies of the 'game' are such that one can do little more than harbor suspicion.  Where does over-enthusiastic salesmanship end and fraud begin? The Business of Information Technology provides rich opportunities for White-collar crime. The poor developer has his, or her, hands full with the task of wrestling with the sheer complexity of building an application. He, or she, has no time for following the complexities of the chicanery of the management that is directing affairs.  Most likely, the developers wouldn't even suspect that their company management had ulterior motives. I'll illustrate what I mean with an entirely fictional, hypothetical, example. The Opportunist and the Aged Charities often do good, unexciting work that is funded by the income from a bequest that dates back maybe hundreds of years.  In our example, it isn't exciting work, for it involves the welfare of elderly people who have fallen on hard times.  Volunteers visit, giving a smile and a chat, and check that they are all right, but are able to spend a little money on their discretion to ameliorate any pressing needs for these old folk.  The money is made to work very hard and the charity averts a great deal of suffering and eases the burden on the state. Daisy hears the garden gate creak as Mrs Rainer comes up the path. She looks forward to her twice-weekly visit from the nice lady from the trust. She always asked ‘is everything all right, Love’. Cheeky but nice. She likes her cheery manner. She seems interested in hearing her memories, and talking about her far-away family. She helps her with those chores in the house that she couldn’t manage and once even paid to fill the back-shed with coke, the other year. Nice, Mrs. Rainer is, she thought as she goes to open the door. The trustees are getting on in years themselves, and worry about the long-term future of the charity: is it relevant to modern society? Is it likely to attract a new generation of workers to take it on. They are instantly attracted by the arrival to the board of a smartly dressed University lecturer with the ear of the present Government. Alain 'Stalin' Jones is earnest, persuasive and energetic. The trustees welcome him to the board and quickly forgive his humorless political-correctness. He talks of 'diversity', 'relevance', 'social change', 'equality' and 'communities', but his eye is on that huge bequest. Alain first came to notice as a Trotskyite union official, who insinuated himself into one of the duller Trades Unions and turned it, through his passionate leadership, into a radical, headline-grabbing organization.  Middle age, and the rise of European federal socialism, had brought him quiet prosperity and charcoal suits, an ear in the current government, and a wide influence as a member of various Quangos (government bodies staffed by well-paid unelected courtiers).  He was employed as a 'consultant' by several organizations that relied on government contracts. After gaining the confidence of the trustees, and showing a surprising knowledge of mundane processes and the regulatory framework of charities, Alain launches his plan.  The trust will expand their work by means of a bold IT initiative that will coordinate the interventions of several 'caring agencies', and provide  emergency cover, a special Website so anxious relatives can see how their elderly charges are doing, and a vastly more efficient way of coordinating the work of the volunteer carers. It will also provide a special-purpose site that gives 'social networking' facilities, rather like Facebook, to the few elderly folk on the lists with access to the internet. The trustees perk up. Their own experience of the internet is restricted to the occasional scanning of railway timetables, but they can see that it is 'relevant'. In his next report to the other trustees, Alain proudly announces that all this glamorous and exciting technology can be paid for by a grant from the government. He admits darkly that he has influence. True to his word, the government promises a grant of a size that is an order of magnitude greater than any budget that the trustees had ever handled. There was the understandable proviso that the company that would actually do the IT work would have to be one of the government's preferred suppliers and the work would need to be tendered under EU competition rules. The only company that tenders, a multinational IT company with a long track record of government work, quotes ten million pounds for the work. A trustee questions the figure as it seems enormous for the reasonably trivial internet facilities being built, but the IT Salesmen dazzle them with presentations and three-letter acronyms until they subside into quiescent acceptance. After all, they can’t stay locked in the Twentieth century practices can they? The work is put in hand with a large project team, in a splendid glass building near west London. The trustees see rooms of programmers working diligently at screens, and who talk with enthusiasm of the project. Paul, the project manager, looked through his resource schedule with growing unease. His initial excitement at being given his first major project hadn’t lasted. He’d been allocated a lackluster team of developers whose skills didn’t seem right, and he was allowed only a couple of contractors to make good the deficit. Strangely, the presentation he’d given to his management, where he’d saved time and resources with a OTS solution to a great deal of the development work, and a sound conservative architecture, hadn’t gone down nearly as big as he’d hoped. He almost got the feeling they wanted a more radical and ambitious solution. The project starts slipping its dates. The costs build rapidly. There are certain uncomfortable extra charges that appear, such as the £600-a-day charge by the 'Business Manager' appointed to act as a point of liaison between the charity and the IT Company.  When he appeared, his face permanently split by a 'Mr Sincerity' smile, they'd thought he was provided at the cost of the IT Company. Derek, the DBA, didn’t have to go to the server room quite some much as he did: but It got him away from the poisonous despair of the development group. Wave after wave of events had conspired to delay the project.  Why the management had imposed hideous extra bureaucracy to cover ISO 9000 and 9001:2008 accreditation just as the project was struggling to get back on-schedule was  beyond belief.  Then  the Business manager was coming back with endless changes in scope, sorrowing saying that the Trustees were very insistent, though hopelessly out in touch with the reality of technical challenges. Suddenly, the costs mount to the point of consuming the government grant in its entirety. The project remains tantalizingly just out of reach. Alain Jones gives an emotional rallying speech at the trustees review meeting, urging them not to lose their nerve. Sadly, the trustees dip into the accumulated capital of the trust, the seed-corn of all their revenues, in order to save the IT project. A few months later it is all over. The IT project is never delivered, even though it had seemed so incredibly close.  With the trust's capital all gone, the activities it funded have to be terminated and the trust becomes just a shell. There aren't even the funds to mount a legal challenge against the IT company, even had the trust's solicitor advised such a foolish thing. Alain leaves as suddenly as he had arrived, only to pop up a few months later, bronzed and rested, at another charity. The IT workers who were permanent employees are dispersed to other projects, and the contractors leave to other contracts. Within months the entire project is but a vague memory. One or two developers remain  puzzled that their managers had been so obstructive when they should have welcomed progress toward completion of the project, but they put it down to incompetence and testosterone. Few suspected that they were actively preventing the project from getting finished. The relationships between the IT consultancy, and the government of the day are intricate, and made more complex by the Private Finance initiatives and political patronage.  The losers in this case were the taxpayers, and the beneficiaries of the trust, and, perhaps the soul of the original benefactor of the trust, whose bid to give his name some immortality had been scuppered by smooth-talking white-collar political apparatniks.  Even now, nobody is certain whether a crime was ever committed. The perfect heist, I guess. Where’s the victim? "I hear that Daisy’s cottage is up for sale. She’s had to go into a care home.  She didn’t want to at all, but then there is nobody to keep an eye on her since she had that minor stroke a while back.  A charity used to help out. The ‘social’ don’t have the funding, evidently for community care. Yes, her old cat was put down. There was a good clearout, and now the house is all scrubbed and cleared ready for sale. The skip was full of old photos and letters, memories. No room in her new ‘home’."

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 16, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 16, 2010New Projects[C#] UML Touch: This project is my master thesis project for Msc Software Engineering at Oxford Brookes univesity. The goal of this project is to develop a UML Edi...3D Chart Reports, using ASP.NET 2.0: Project focuses on the visibility of internal supply chain management process. The objective is materialized, using MSChart and hence provides asse...Active Directory Health: ActiveDirectoryHealth (ADHealth) Aim: To create a suite of tools to allow an Active Directory administrator monitor and identify problems, particu...Art4Desktop: Aplicação desktop simplesAuto Increment field for any entity in MS CRM: Auto Increment field for any entity in MS CRM will add an attribute in any entity which will be auto increment type.Convection Game Engine (Basic Edition): A basic 2D game engine written in C# using XNA 3.1CSharp Intellisense: VS 2010 IntelliSense plug-in Provides custom IntelliSense for the CSharp Editor that is capable to filter out events, preoperties or methods. ...EP: Generic platform for enterprise applications developed on .NETFile Change Checker: A simple windows form application that checks and copies all modified files given a specified date. It aims to help developers that use Visual Stu...Folder: Folder is a puzzle platformer game, which provides you a whole new experience. You can fold objects in game play; a wall becomes a road, a high sti...Industrial Dashboard: WCF service that allows executing SQL Server stored procedures straight from javascript code, enabling sending and receiving structured data withou...kafrilion: Open Source Platform GameLogikBug.Injection: LogikBug.Injection is an IOC container and is very light weight. It is very simple to use and yet very roboust, there are many options and ways to ...MongoMvc: NoSql with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC. For more details check out the blog post http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/2010/04/16/nosql-wi...MOSSDAL: MOSS Data Access Layer for data from the Sharepoint Lists Service: MOSSDAL is a lightweight framework for working with Sharepoint MOSS List data using the List web Service. It can be used with silverlight or regul...Should: This is a set of test framework agnostic extensions assetion extensions. This project was born because test runners Should be independent of the...Software Localization Tool: summaryTIMETABLEASY: planning managerTR9: implementions of t9 technologies from mobile device to personal computer and laptopTrp net tools: net toolTwep: Twep is a JavaScript lib.Using PowerPivot to analyze MS Dynamics NAV: Project show how to prepare MS Dynamics NAV data for analyzing in PowerPivot for Excel. Project include Data Warehouse demo database, sql procedure...vmware virtual mashines management system for education: System for management many classes with PC and VMware virtual mashines (bad english,sorry)WebSite: Mr. John's projectsWebtrends DX and DC Services Libraries: This project is setup to provide assemblies to simplify access to the REST based DX and DC Web Services that Webtrends Provides. For access you ne...YetAnotherFileRenamer: Searches a directory and/or sub-directories for files matching a certain extension and copies and renames them to the same folder. The intent is a...New Releases3D Chart Reports, using ASP.NET 2.0: Beta iscm1.0.0.1: Its first release, might be a tolerant to bugs.A Guide to Parallel Programming: Drop 2 - Guide Chapters 2 and 5, accompanying code: This is Drop 2 with just the Guide Chapters 2 and 5 and the accompanying code samples. This drop requires Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 or later in ord...AnimeJ: AnimeJ 1.1: This new release features reversible animations. It is fully backward compatible, and by simply specifying an additional parameter to Run() you can...AutoPoco: AutoPoco 0.4: A load of additions to the convention system Inheritance precedence added And a pile of extra data sourcesCSharp Intellisense: V1.5: CSharpIntellisensePresenter(Free) Created by: Bnaya Eshet (Bnaya Eshet (credit to Karl Shifflett)) Last Updated: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 Version...DevTreks -social budgeting that improves lives and livelihoods: Social Budgeting Web Software, DevTreks alpha 4: Alpha 4 upgrades all story-telling with one very basic, simple, 'story' data pattern, schema, and stylesheet. Basic, simple, stories and eBook pa...ESPEHA: Espeha 4.3: Deletion of categories and tasks via F8 Saving on CtrlS, CtrlShiftS Navigating to search on CtrlF Hiding on CtrlQ, CtrlX, CtrlH, Q, X, H + Drag ...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.4.4: This is the latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.4.4), with general improvements. 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To run the demo application do the ollowing actions. 1. Create a directory call C:\data\...NetMassDownloader: Release 1.6.0.0: Mass Downloader For .Net Framework which allows you do download .Net Framework source code all at once.Offline debugging for VS2005 , VS2008 , Code...Nito.KitchenSink: Version 4: Features added in this release: PDBs are source-indexed to CodePlex, so it should be possible to step through the code (with on-demand downloads) w...Nito.KitchenSink: Version 5: The only feature for this release is support of the .NET 4.0 platform. Dependencies Nito.Linq 0.4 Beta (released 2010-04-15) Rx 1.0.2441.0 (rele...Nito.LINQ: Beta (v0.4): Rx version The "with Rx" versions of Nito.LINQ are built against Rx 1.0.2441.0, released 2010-04-15. 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Ask questions in our Silverlight Toolkit forum on Silverlight.net. The forum is the best resource for Silverlig...Software Localization Tool: SharpSLT 0.9: This is the first release of SharpSLT. Features Framework: .Net 3.5 UI language: English Works as standalone and External Tool for Visual C# Ex...Star Trooper for XNA 2D Tutorial: Lesson two content: Here is Lesson two original content for the StarTrooper 2D XNA tutorial. The blog tutorial has now started over on http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgen...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.0.14714.1: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.0.14714.1 o StyleCop 4.3.3.0 o ReSharper 5.0.1659.36 o Visual Studio 2008 / Visual Studio 2010 Installation Instructi...TaskUnZip for SSIS: TaskUnZip for SSIS 1.1.1.0 (beta 2): Ver. 1.1.1.0 (beta2) Bug: Correct installation bug. 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