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• Accessing ajax POST response in javascript

  - by mike44

  I'm making ajax POST request from javascript function: function UpdateMetrics() { $.ajax({ type: "POST", url: "MyHandler.ashx?Param1=value1", data: "{}", contentType: "text/json; charset=utf-8", dataType: "text", success: function (msg) { var jsonUpdatedData = msg; ... } }); } From my handler, I'm sending json string with: context.Response.write(json); I think I'll get it in msg. I also want to send other string (count). So I'm trying to use header info along with json data. So I added this line: context.Response.Headers.Add("MaxCount",Convert.ToString(tempList.Count)); If this is right way to do it, how can I access it in my success function?

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• problem with Expression not equal types

  - by user428547

  class first { private int? firstID; } class second { private int secondID; private int secondField; } public override Expression<Func<first, bool>> FirstFilter() { Contex db = new Contex(); List<second> list = (from p in db.second select p).ToList(); return b => list.Select(p => p.secondID).Contains(b.firstID); } and i have error: cannot convert from 'System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable' to 'System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable' i have tried many diferent ways, but i just don't know how can i fix it.

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• SQLite Queries for dates

  - by user2909616

  I have a SQLite data base which I am pulling data for a specific set of dates (lets say 01-01-2011 to 01-01-2011). What is the best way to implement this query into SQL. Ideally I would like the following line to run: SELECT * FROM database where start_date < date_stamp and end_date date_stamp This obviously does not work when I store the dates as strings. My solution (which I think is messy and I am hoping for another one) is to convert the dates into integers in the following format: YYYYMMDD Which makes the above line able to run (theoretically). IS there a better method? Using python sqlite3 Would the answer be any different if I were using SQL not SQLite

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• postfix: Temporary lookup failure

  - by mk_89

  I have followed the tutorials step by step for installing and configuring postfix https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostfixBasicSetupHowto I am trying to test the services to whether Temporary lookup failure error telnet localhost 25 250 2.1.0 Ok rcpt to: fmaster@localhost 451 4.3.0 <fmaster@localhost>: Temporary lookup failure rcpt to: info@localhost 451 4.3.0 <info@localhost>: Temporary lookup failure I have tried searching the web but I have found no solutions, why am I getting this problem? mail.log Sep 24 01:03:05 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[21055]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[::1]: 451 4.3.0 <info@localhost>: Temporary lookup failure; from=<root@localhost> to=<info@localhost> proto=ESMTP helo=<localhost> Sep 24 01:03:19 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[21055]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[::1]: 451 4.3.0 <root@localhost>: Temporary lookup failure; from=<root@localhost> to=<root@localhost> proto=ESMTP helo=<localhost> Sep 24 01:08:19 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[21055]: timeout after RCPT from unknown[::1] Sep 24 01:08:19 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[21055]: disconnect from unknown[::1] Sep 24 01:10:49 bookcdb postfix/anvil[21059]: statistics: max connection rate 1/60s for (smtp:::1) at Sep 24 01:00:49 Sep 24 01:10:49 bookcdb postfix/anvil[21059]: statistics: max connection count 1 for (smtp:::1) at Sep 24 01:00:49 Sep 24 01:10:49 bookcdb postfix/anvil[21059]: statistics: max cache size 1 at Sep 24 01:00:49 Sep 24 01:15:36 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22175]: error: open database /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:15:36 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22175]: warning: hostname localhost does not resolve to address ::1: No address associated with hostname Sep 24 01:15:36 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22175]: connect from unknown[::1] Sep 24 01:15:55 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22195]: error: open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:15:55 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22195]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:15:55 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22195]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "*" Sep 24 01:15:55 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22195]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:15:55 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22195]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "*" Sep 24 01:15:55 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22195]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:15:55 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22195]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "root@localhost" Sep 24 01:15:55 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22195]: warning: transport_maps lookup failure Sep 24 01:15:59 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22195]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:15:59 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22195]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "fmaster@localhost" Sep 24 01:15:59 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22195]: warning: transport_maps lookup failure Sep 24 01:15:59 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22175]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[::1]: 451 4.3.0 <fmaster@localhost>: Temporary lookup failure; from=<root@localhost> to=<fmaster@localhost> proto=ESMTP helo=<localhost> Sep 24 01:16:30 postfix/smtpd[22175]: last message repeated 5 times Sep 24 01:16:30 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22175]: disconnect from unknown[::1] Sep 24 01:19:50 bookcdb postfix/anvil[22177]: statistics: max connection rate 1/60s for (smtp:::1) at Sep 24 01:15:36 Sep 24 01:19:50 bookcdb postfix/anvil[22177]: statistics: max connection count 1 for (smtp:::1) at Sep 24 01:15:36 Sep 24 01:19:50 bookcdb postfix/anvil[22177]: statistics: max cache size 1 at Sep 24 01:15:36 Sep 24 01:20:32 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[21039]: D0C596E0B34: from=<[email protected]>, size=442, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 24 01:20:32 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[21039]: warning: connect to transport private/smtp-amavis: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:20:32 bookcdb postfix/error[22402]: D0C596E0B34: to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=5369, delays=5369/0.01/0/0.09, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (mail transport unavailable) Sep 24 01:24:16 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22573]: error: open database /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:24:16 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22573]: warning: hostname localhost does not resolve to address ::1: No address associated with hostname Sep 24 01:24:16 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22573]: connect from unknown[::1] Sep 24 01:24:43 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: error: open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:24:43 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:24:43 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "*" Sep 24 01:24:43 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:24:43 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "*" Sep 24 01:24:43 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:24:43 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "root@localhost" Sep 24 01:24:43 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: transport_maps lookup failure Sep 24 01:25:14 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:25:14 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "[email protected]" Sep 24 01:25:14 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: transport_maps lookup failure Sep 24 01:25:14 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22573]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[::1]: 451 4.3.0 <[email protected]>: Temporary lookup failure; from=<root@localhost> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<localhost> Sep 24 01:25:32 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[21039]: 2E5C36E0A07: from=<[email protected]>, size=438, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 24 01:25:32 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[21039]: warning: connect to transport private/smtp-amavis: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:25:32 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[21039]: 0EA3A6E0ACC: from=<[email protected]>, size=438, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 24 01:25:32 bookcdb postfix/error[22631]: 2E5C36E0A07: to=<[email protected]>, orig_to=<root>, relay=none, delay=30203, delays=30203/0.01/0/0.1, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (mail transport unavailable) Sep 24 01:25:32 bookcdb postfix/error[22632]: 0EA3A6E0ACC: to=<[email protected]>, orig_to=<root>, relay=none, delay=30115, delays=30115/0.01/0/0.11, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (mail transport unavailable) Sep 24 01:25:58 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22573]: warning: non-SMTP command from unknown[::1]: subject: fdf Sep 24 01:25:58 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22573]: disconnect from unknown[::1] Sep 24 01:26:01 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22573]: warning: hostname localhost does not resolve to address ::1: No address associated with hostname Sep 24 01:26:01 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22573]: connect from unknown[::1] Sep 24 01:26:10 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:26:10 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "root@locahost" Sep 24 01:26:10 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: transport_maps lookup failure Sep 24 01:26:37 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:26:37 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "fmaster@localhost" Sep 24 01:26:37 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[22594]: warning: transport_maps lookup failure Sep 24 01:26:37 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22573]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[::1]: 451 4.3.0 <fmaster@localhost>: Temporary lookup failure; from=<root@locahost> to=<fmaster@localhost> proto=SMTP Sep 24 01:26:45 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[22573]: disconnect from unknown[::1] Sep 24 01:30:05 bookcdb postfix/anvil[22575]: statistics: max connection rate 1/60s for (smtp:::1) at Sep 24 01:24:16 Sep 24 01:30:05 bookcdb postfix/anvil[22575]: statistics: max connection count 1 for (smtp:::1) at Sep 24 01:24:16 Sep 24 01:30:05 bookcdb postfix/anvil[22575]: statistics: max cache size 1 at Sep 24 01:24:16 Sep 24 01:34:57 bookcdb dovecot: master: Dovecot v2.0.19 starting up (core dumps disabled) Sep 24 01:35:02 bookcdb amavis[1009]: starting. /usr/sbin/amavisd-new at mail.bookcdb.com amavisd-new-2.6.5 (20110407), Unicode aware Sep 24 01:35:02 bookcdb amavis[1009]: Perl version 5.014002 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Net::Server: Group Not Defined. Defaulting to EGID '114 114' Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Net::Server: User Not Defined. Defaulting to EUID '108' Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Amavis::Conf 2.208 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Archive::Zip 1.30 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module BerkeleyDB 0.49 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Compress::Zlib 2.033 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Convert::TNEF 0.17 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Convert::UUlib 1.4 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA 0.27 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module DB_File 1.821 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Digest::MD5 2.51 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Digest::SHA 5.61 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module IO::Socket::INET6 2.69 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module MIME::Entity 5.502 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module MIME::Parser 5.502 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module MIME::Tools 5.502 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Mail::DKIM::Signer 0.39 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Mail::DKIM::Verifier 0.39 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Mail::Header 2.08 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Mail::Internet 2.08 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Mail::SPF v2.008 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Mail::SpamAssassin 3.003002 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Net::DNS 0.66 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Net::Server 0.99 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module NetAddr::IP 4.058 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Socket6 0.23 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Time::HiRes 1.972101 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module URI 1.59 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Module Unix::Syslog 1.1 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Amavis::DB code loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Amavis::Cache code loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: SQL base code NOT loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: SQL::Log code NOT loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: SQL::Quarantine NOT loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Lookup::SQL code NOT loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Lookup::LDAP code NOT loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: AM.PDP-in proto code loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: SMTP-in proto code loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Courier proto code NOT loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: SMTP-out proto code loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Pipe-out proto code NOT loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: BSMTP-out proto code NOT loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Local-out proto code loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: OS_Fingerprint code NOT loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: ANTI-VIRUS code loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: ANTI-SPAM code loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: ANTI-SPAM-EXT code NOT loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: ANTI-SPAM-C code NOT loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: ANTI-SPAM-SA code loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Unpackers code loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: DKIM code loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Tools code NOT loaded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Found $file at /usr/bin/file Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No $altermime, not using it Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Internal decoder for .mail Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No decoder for .F Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Found decoder for .Z at /bin/uncompress Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Internal decoder for .gz Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Found decoder for .bz2 at /bin/bzip2 -d Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No decoder for .lzo tried: lzop -d Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No decoder for .rpm tried: rpm2cpio.pl, rpm2cpio Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Found decoder for .cpio at /bin/pax Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Found decoder for .tar at /bin/pax Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Found decoder for .deb at /usr/bin/ar Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Internal decoder for .zip Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No decoder for .7z tried: 7zr, 7za, 7z Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No decoder for .rar tried: unrar-free Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No decoder for .arj tried: arj, unarj Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No decoder for .arc tried: nomarch, arc Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No decoder for .zoo tried: zoo Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No decoder for .lha Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No decoder for .doc tried: ripole Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No decoder for .cab tried: cabextract Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No decoder for .tnef Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Internal decoder for .tnef Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: No decoder for .exe tried: unrar-free; arj, unarj Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Using primary internal av scanner code for ClamAV-clamd Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Found secondary av scanner ClamAV-clamscan at /usr/bin/clamscan Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb amavis[1155]: Creating db in /var/lib/amavis/db/; BerkeleyDB 0.49, libdb 5.1 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb postgrey[1219]: Process Backgrounded Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb postgrey[1219]: 2012/09/24-01:35:05 postgrey (type Net::Server::Multiplex) starting! pid(1219) Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb postgrey[1219]: Using default listen value of 128 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb postgrey[1219]: Binding to TCP port 10023 on host localhost#012 Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb postgrey[1219]: Setting gid to "116 116" Sep 24 01:35:05 bookcdb postgrey[1219]: Setting uid to "110" Sep 24 01:35:06 bookcdb spamd[1231]: logger: removing stderr method Sep 24 01:35:08 bookcdb spamd[1233]: spamd: server started on port 783/tcp (running version 3.3.2) Sep 24 01:35:08 bookcdb spamd[1233]: spamd: server pid: 1233 Sep 24 01:35:08 bookcdb spamd[1233]: spamd: server successfully spawned child process, pid 1238 Sep 24 01:35:08 bookcdb spamd[1233]: spamd: server successfully spawned child process, pid 1240 Sep 24 01:35:08 bookcdb spamd[1233]: prefork: child states: SI Sep 24 01:35:08 bookcdb spamd[1233]: prefork: child states: II Sep 24 01:35:15 bookcdb postfix/master[1729]: daemon started -- version 2.9.3, configuration /etc/postfix Sep 24 01:36:08 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[1995]: error: open database /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:36:08 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[1995]: warning: hostname localhost does not resolve to address ::1: No address associated with hostname Sep 24 01:36:08 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[1995]: connect from unknown[::1] Sep 24 01:36:51 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: error: open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:36:51 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:36:51 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "*" Sep 24 01:36:51 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:36:51 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "*" Sep 24 01:36:51 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:36:51 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "root@localhost" Sep 24 01:36:51 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: warning: transport_maps lookup failure Sep 24 01:37:00 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:37:00 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "fmaster@localhost" Sep 24 01:37:00 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: warning: transport_maps lookup failure Sep 24 01:37:00 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[1995]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[::1]: 451 4.3.0 <fmaster@localhost>: Temporary lookup failure; from=<root@localhost> to=<fmaster@localhost> proto=SMTP Sep 24 01:37:28 bookcdb dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<mkadiri89>, method=PLAIN, rip=::1, lip=::1, mpid=2730, secured Sep 24 01:37:28 bookcdb dovecot: imap(mkadiri89): Disconnected: Logged out bytes=44/697 Sep 24 01:37:29 bookcdb dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<mkadiri89>, method=PLAIN, rip=::1, lip=::1, mpid=2732, secured Sep 24 01:37:29 bookcdb dovecot: imap(mkadiri89): Disconnected: Logged out bytes=464/1303 Sep 24 01:37:29 bookcdb dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<mkadiri89>, method=PLAIN, rip=::1, lip=::1, mpid=2734, secured Sep 24 01:37:29 bookcdb dovecot: imap(mkadiri89): Disconnected: Logged out bytes=117/1395 Sep 24 01:37:31 bookcdb dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<mkadiri89>, method=PLAIN, rip=::1, lip=::1, mpid=2737, secured Sep 24 01:37:31 bookcdb dovecot: imap(mkadiri89): Disconnected: Logged out bytes=117/1395 Sep 24 01:37:49 bookcdb dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<root>, method=PLAIN, rip=::1, lip=::1, mpid=2739, secured Sep 24 01:37:49 bookcdb dovecot: imap: Error: user root: Invalid settings in userdb: userdb returned 0 as uid Sep 24 01:37:49 bookcdb dovecot: imap: Error: Invalid user settings. Refer to server log for more information. Sep 24 01:37:54 bookcdb dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<root>, method=PLAIN, rip=::1, lip=::1, mpid=2741, secured Sep 24 01:37:54 bookcdb dovecot: imap: Error: user root: Invalid settings in userdb: userdb returned 0 as uid Sep 24 01:37:54 bookcdb dovecot: imap: Error: Invalid user settings. Refer to server log for more information. Sep 24 01:38:04 bookcdb dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<info>, method=PLAIN, rip=::1, lip=::1, mpid=2743, secured Sep 24 01:38:04 bookcdb dovecot: imap(info): Disconnected: Logged out bytes=44/697 Sep 24 01:38:04 bookcdb dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<info>, method=PLAIN, rip=::1, lip=::1, mpid=2745, secured Sep 24 01:38:04 bookcdb dovecot: imap(info): Disconnected: Logged out bytes=464/1303 Sep 24 01:38:04 bookcdb dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<info>, method=PLAIN, rip=::1, lip=::1, mpid=2747, secured Sep 24 01:38:04 bookcdb dovecot: imap(info): Disconnected: Logged out bytes=117/1395 Sep 24 01:38:55 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[1995]: disconnect from unknown[::1] Sep 24 01:38:58 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[1995]: warning: hostname localhost does not resolve to address ::1: No address associated with hostname Sep 24 01:38:58 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[1995]: connect from unknown[::1] Sep 24 01:39:11 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport is unavailable. open database /etc/postfix/transport.db: No such file or directory Sep 24 01:39:11 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: warning: hash:/etc/postfix/transport lookup error for "info@localhost" Sep 24 01:39:11 bookcdb postfix/trivial-rewrite[1999]: warning: transport_maps lookup failure Sep 24 01:39:37 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[1995]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[::1]: 451 4.3.0 <fmaster@localhost>: Temporary lookup failure; from=<info@localhost> to=<fmaster@localhost> proto=SMTP Sep 24 01:39:47 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[1995]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[::1]: 451 4.3.0 <fmaster@localhost>: Temporary lookup failure; from=<info@localhost> to=<fmaster@localhost> proto=SMTP Sep 24 01:40:13 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[1995]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[::1]: 451 4.3.0 <info@localhost>: Temporary lookup failure; from=<info@localhost> to=<info@localhost> proto=SMTP Sep 24 01:43:08 bookcdb postfix/smtpd[1995]: disconnect from unknown[::1] Sep 24 01:46:08 bookcdb postfix/anvil[1998]: statistics: max connection rate 1/60s for (smtp:::1) at Sep 24 01:36:08 Sep 24 01:46:08 bookcdb postfix/anvil[1998]: statistics: max connection count 1 for (smtp:::1) at Sep 24 01:36:08 Sep 24 01:46:08 bookcdb postfix/anvil[1998]: statistics: max cache size 1 at Sep 24 01:36:08 Sep 24 01:48:05 bookcdb dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<info>, method=PLAIN, rip=::1, lip=::1, mpid=2805, secured Sep 24 01:48:05 bookcdb dovecot: imap(info): Disconnected: Logged out bytes=85/681 Sep 24 01:51:30 bookcdb dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<info>, method=PLAIN, rip=::1, lip=::1, mpid=2815, secured Sep 24 01:51:30 bookcdb dovecot: imap(info): Disconnected: Logged out bytes=117/1395 Sep 24 02:05:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: 2EA006E0B32: from=<[email protected]>, size=439, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 24 02:05:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: warning: connect to transport private/smtp-amavis: No such file or directory Sep 24 02:05:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: E76996E09B2: from=<[email protected]>, size=439, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 24 02:05:15 bookcdb postfix/error[2842]: 2EA006E0B32: to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=8391, delays=8391/0.05/0/0.09, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (mail transport unavailable) Sep 24 02:05:16 bookcdb postfix/error[2843]: E76996E09B2: to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=8416, delays=8416/0.03/0/0.11, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (mail transport unavailable) Sep 24 02:30:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: D0C596E0B34: from=<[email protected]>, size=442, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 24 02:30:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: warning: connect to transport private/smtp-amavis: No such file or directory Sep 24 02:30:15 bookcdb postfix/error[2914]: D0C596E0B34: to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=9551, delays=9551/0.01/0/0.08, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (mail transport unavailable) Sep 24 02:35:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: 2E5C36E0A07: from=<[email protected]>, size=438, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 24 02:35:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: warning: connect to transport private/smtp-amavis: No such file or directory Sep 24 02:35:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: 0EA3A6E0ACC: from=<[email protected]>, size=438, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 24 02:35:15 bookcdb postfix/error[2926]: 2E5C36E0A07: to=<[email protected]>, orig_to=<root>, relay=none, delay=34386, delays=34386/0.03/0/0.1, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (mail transport unavailable) Sep 24 02:35:15 bookcdb postfix/error[2927]: 0EA3A6E0ACC: to=<[email protected]>, orig_to=<root>, relay=none, delay=34299, delays=34298/0.02/0/0.12, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (mail transport unavailable) Sep 24 03:15:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: 2EA006E0B32: from=<[email protected]>, size=439, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 24 03:15:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: warning: connect to transport private/smtp-amavis: No such file or directory Sep 24 03:15:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: E76996E09B2: from=<[email protected]>, size=439, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 24 03:15:15 bookcdb postfix/error[3025]: 2EA006E0B32: to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=12590, delays=12590/0.01/0/0.07, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (mail transport unavailable) Sep 24 03:15:15 bookcdb postfix/error[3026]: E76996E09B2: to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=12616, delays=12616/0.01/0/0.09, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (mail transport unavailable) Sep 24 03:40:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: D0C596E0B34: from=<[email protected]>, size=442, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 24 03:40:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: warning: connect to transport private/smtp-amavis: No such file or directory Sep 24 03:40:15 bookcdb postfix/error[3097]: D0C596E0B34: to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=13752, delays=13752/0.01/0/0.07, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (mail transport unavailable) Sep 24 03:45:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: 2E5C36E0A07: from=<[email protected]>, size=438, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 24 03:45:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: warning: connect to transport private/smtp-amavis: No such file or directory Sep 24 03:45:15 bookcdb postfix/qmgr[1745]: 0EA3A6E0ACC: from=<[email protected]>, size=438, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 24 03:45:15 bookcdb postfix/error[3129]: 2E5C36E0A07: to=<[email protected]>, orig_to=<root>, relay=none, delay=38586, delays=38586/0.01/0/0.09, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (mail transport unavailable) Sep 24 03:45:15 bookcdb postfix/error[3130]: 0EA3A6E0ACC: to=<[email protected]>, orig_to=<root>, relay=none, delay=38498, delays=38498/0.01/0/0.08, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (mail transport unavailable) postconf -n alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases, hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/aliases append_dot_mydomain = no biff = no broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes config_directory = /etc/postfix content_filter = smtp-amavis:[127.0.0.1]:10024 home_mailbox = Maildir/ inet_interfaces = all inet_protocols = all mailbox_command = mailbox_size_limit = 0 mailman_destination_recipient_limit = 1 mydestination = server1.bookcdb.com, bookcdb.com, localhost.bookcdb.com, localho st, bookcdb.com myhostname = server1.bookcdb.com mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8 myorigin = /etc/mailname readme_directory = no recipient_delimiter = + relay_domains = lists.bookcdb.com relayhost = smtp_tls_note_starttls_offer = yes smtp_tls_security_level = may smtp_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtp_scache smtpd_banner = $myhostname ESMTP $mail_name (Ubuntu) smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated,permit_mynetworks,rejec t_unauth_destination smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes smtpd_sasl_local_domain = smtpd_sasl_security_options = noanonymous smtpd_tls_CAfile = /etc/ssl/certs/cacert.pem smtpd_tls_auth_only = no smtpd_tls_cert_file = /etc/ssl/certs/smtpd.crt smtpd_tls_key_file = /etc/ssl/private/smtpd.key smtpd_tls_loglevel = 1 smtpd_tls_received_header = yes smtpd_tls_security_level = may smtpd_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtpd_scache smtpd_tls_session_cache_timeout = 3600s smtpd_use_tls = yes tls_random_source = dev:/dev/urandom transport_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/transport

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• Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

  - by mbcrump

  Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created.  Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases  including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands.  For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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• Xubuntu 13.10 64bit - Slow and buggy "log out" process?

  - by MrKatSwordfish

  I'm a Windows convert who has done only a little bit of dabbling in Ubuntu in the past (back in Dapper Drake a few years back). A lot has changes since then, and I've been yearning to jump back into linux again! So, having just bought a new SSD, I felt that this would be as good of a time as any to set up a dual-boot system again. I've messed around with Ubuntu 13.10 a bit, and while Unity has its issues, I think that it still needs some time to develop. I looked into XFCE and liked it a lot, so I went with Xubuntu. I've installed Xubuntu, and for the most part it's running smoothly and it a pleasure to work with. The customization is great and the minimalistic look and feel is really nice! But here's my problem, whenever I select the "Log Out" option from either the application menu, or the user profiles menu, my PC comes to a crawl, and the dialog box with all the options (shut down, restart, log out, etc.) takes maybe a minute or more to appear. I click the log out button, my PC is brought to a snail's pace, and I have to wait for what seems like an eternity for the logout options to appear! If i try to open something else (even a terminal window) while it's loading the logout options, that other program won't finish loading until the logout screen finally appears. Keep in mind, this is a pretty much vanilla install of Xubuntu 13.10 64bit, on a PC with an intel i7, an SSD, 6gb DDR3 RAM, and a new AMD 7770 gpu (drivers haven't been installed yet, though). Everything else runs fast, most applications open near-instantly! It must be an issue with how the logout options screen initializes or something, but I'm not sure exactly how I can fix it.. Edit - Extra Info: This problem is very consistent when using the "Log Out" buttons in Xubuntu. However, I've found that I'm able to reboot and shutdown much more quickly by going through the "Switch User" screen, and using the reboot or shutdown buttons on that screen. I'm nearly certain that it has something to do with the little Log Out options screen that appears when I select Log Out from the menu, and not the actual process of shutting down.. So what should I do? I really like XFCE so far, and I've never tried a non-ubuntu based distro before, but should I just switch to something else? Is there any known fix for this issue? Are there any work-arounds for logging out/shutting down/rebooting via the terminal so that I can avoid this irritating bug? Is there any that I can monitor the progress of the log out via terminal, allowing me to see which parts are causing the slow-down? What is the best way to report this bug to someone?

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• SQL SERVER – World Shapefile Download and Upload to Database – Spatial Database

  - by pinaldave

  During my recent, training I was asked by a student if I know a place where he can download spatial files for all the countries around the world, as well as if there is a way to upload shape files to a database. Here is a quick tutorial for it. VDS Technologies has all the spatial files for every location for free. You can download the spatial file from here. If you cannot find the spatial file you are looking for, please leave a comment here, and I will send you the necessary details. Unzip the file to a folder and it will have the following content. Then, download Shape2SQL tool from SharpGIS. This is one of the best tools available to convert shapefiles to SQL tables. Afterwards, run the .exe file. When the file is run for the first time, it will ask for the database properties. Provide your database details. Select the appropriate shape files and the tool will fill up the essential details automatically. If you do not want to create the index on the column, uncheck the box beside it. The screenshot below is simply explains the procedure. You also have to be careful regarding your data, whether that is GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY. In this example,  it is GEOMETRY data. Click “Upload to Database”. It will show you the uploading process. Once the shape file is uploaded, close the application and open SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Run the following code in SSMS Query Editor. USE Spatial GO SELECT * FROM dbo.world GO This will show the complete map of world after you click on Spatial Results in Spatial Tab. In Spatial Results Set, the Zoom feature is available. From the Select label column, choose the country name in order to show the country name overlaying the country borders. Let me know if this tutorial is helpful enough. I am planning to write a few more posts about this later. Note: Please note that the images displayed here do not reflect the original political boundaries. These data are pretty old and can probably draw incorrect maps as well. I have personally spotted several parts of the map where some countries are located a little bit inaccurately. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Add-On, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Spatial, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology

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• Can't remove GPT data from MBR

  - by user2373121

  I am having difficulty getting the Ubuntu installer (and gparted) to recognize the partitions on my MBR type disk. Other operating systems and disk tools read the disk structure and the files on it fine. I have used fixparts to write a new MBR but the issue persists. I assume the issue stems from the Protective MBR data still present on the disk but I am at a loss as to how to remove it while preserving my NTFS data partition. Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601] Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. c:\Users\mike\Desktop\fixpartsfixparts 3: FixParts 0.8.8 Loading MBR data from 3: Warning: 0xEE partition doesn't start on sector 1. This can cause problems in some OSes. MBR command (? for help): Running gdisk shows Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601] Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. c:\Users\mike\Desktop\fixparts>gdisk 3: GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.7 Partition table scan: MBR: MBR only BSD: not present APM: not present GPT: not present *************************************************************** Found invalid GPT and valid MBR; converting MBR to GPT format in memory. THIS OPERATION IS POTENTIALLY DESTRUCTIVE! Exit by typing 'q' if you don't want to convert your MBR partitions to GPT format! *************************************************************** ************************************************************************ Most versions of Windows cannot boot from a GPT disk, and most varieties prior to Vista cannot read GPT disks. Therefore, you should exit now unless you understand the implications of converting MBR to GPT or creating a new GPT disk layout! ************************************************************************ Are you SURE you want to continue? (Y/N): y Command (? for help): p Disk 3:: 2930277168 sectors, 1.4 TiB Logical sector size: 512 bytes Disk identifier (GUID): BFE92CE8-F93D-4141-82B8-816AD06FB36E Partition table holds up to 128 entries First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 2930277134 Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries Total free space is 163846893 sectors (78.1 GiB) Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name 1 163842048 2930272255 1.3 TiB 0700 Microsoft basic data Command (? for help): r Recovery/transformation command (? for help): o Disk size is 2930277168 sectors (1.4 TiB) MBR disk identifier: 0x00000000 MBR partitions: Number Boot Start Sector End Sector Status Code 1 1 2930277167 primary 0xEE Recovery/transformation command (? for help): q

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• Upgrade existing WinForms applications to use the latest RadControls

  Upgrading projects to new versions can be a pain, especially when you have to update several assemblies from a single version, as is the case with RadControls for WinForms. Q1 2010 simplifies this process a lot, by giving a couple of ways (one new and one updated) to upgrade existing applications to the latest and greatest version of RadControls for WinForms: By using the new Visual Studio Extensions (VSX), available in VS2005, VS2008 and VS2010 RC; By using the updated Project Upgrade Utility. Here are the steps: Upgrading a classic Windows Forms application to the latest RadControls for WinForms by using the Visual Studio Extensions Install RadControls for WinForms Q1 2010 Open the classic Windows Forms application (VB or C#) Open the Telerik Menu and select RadControls for WinForms --> Convert to Telerik WinForms Application     Select the Telerik controls you plan to use in the application, as well as a theme, and click OK. The VSX package will add the needed assemblies to your project automatically for you.     Replace the standard controls on your form with the respective Telerik controls.     Run the application to see the result. Upgrading an older RadControls application to the latest RadControls for WinForms by using the Visual Studio Extensions Install RadControls for WinForms Q1 2010. Open your current RadControls application (VB or C#), which uses pre-Q1 2010 assembly versions. Open the Telerik Menu and select RadControls for WinForms --> Upgrade Wizard   Choose to either use the online downloader of the latest version, or to use the currently installed version. The VSX package will check what assemblies you use in your project and will upgrade them automatically.     Run the application to see the result. Upgrading an older RadControls application to the latest RadControls for WinForms by using the Project Upgrade Utility The Q1 2010 Project Upgrade Utility now features upgrading not only a single project, but all projects in a directory/solution (recursively). The tool is quite intuitive - simply choose your solution folder (or a folder with several projects)m and click Update. Feel free to leave a comment. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• How to Add Proprietary Drivers to Ubuntu 10.04

  - by Matthew Guay

  Does the hardware on your Ubuntu system need proprietary drivers work at peak performance?  Today we take a look how easy version 10.04 makes it to install them. Ubuntu 10.04 finally automatically recognizes and installs drivers for most hardware today, it even recognized and configured Wi-Fi drivers correctly every time in our tests.  This is in contrast to the past, when it was often difficult to get hardware to work in Linux.  However, most video cards still need proprietary drivers from their manufacturer to get full hardware video acceleration. Even though Ubuntu doesn’t include any non-open source components, it still makes it easy to install proprietary drivers if you wish.  When you first install and boot into Ubuntu, you may see a popup informing you that “restricted” drivers are available. You may see a notification asking you if you’d like to install optional drivers from your graphics card manufacturer when you try to enable advanced desktop effects.  Click Enable to directly install the drivers right there. Or, you can select the tray icon from the first popup, and click Install drivers. Alternately, if the tray icon has disappeared, click System, then Administration, and select Hardware Drivers.   This will open a dialog showing all the proprietary drivers available for your system, which may include drivers for your video card and other hardware depending on your computer.  Select the driver you wish to install, and click Activate. Enter your password, and then Ubuntu will download and install the driver without any more input.  After installation you may be prompted to reboot your system. Now, you should be able to take full advantage of your hardware, including fancy desktop effects with hardware acceleration. If you ever wish to remove these drivers, simply re-open the drivers dialog as above, select the driver, and click Remove.  Once again, a reboot may be required to finish the process. Conclusion Ubuntu has definitely made it easier to use Linux on your desktop computer, no matter what hardware you have.  If your video card or other hardware require proprietary drivers, it makes them available and simple to install.  And, best of all, all of your drivers stay updated with your software updates, so you can be sure you’re always running the latest. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Adding extra Repositories on UbuntuBackup and Restore Hardware Drivers the Easy Way with Double DriverCopy Windows Drivers From One Machine to AnotherInstalling PHP4 and Apache on UbuntuInstalling PHP5 and Apache on Ubuntu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup Gmail Button Addon (Firefox) Hyperwords addon (Firefox) Backup Outlook 2010 Daily Motivator (Firefox) FetchMp3 Can Download Videos & Convert Them to Mp3 Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows

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• Enable Media Streaming in Windows Home Server to Windows Media Player

  - by Mysticgeek

  One of the cool features of Windows Home Server is the ability to stream photos, music, and video to other computers on your network. Today we take a look at how to enable streaming in WHS to Windows Media Player in Vista and Windows 7. Turn on Media Streaming on WHS To enable Media Streaming from Windows Home Server, open the Windows Home Server Console and click on Settings. Now in the Setting screen select Media Sharing, then in the right column under Media Library Sharing turn on Library Sharing for the folders you want to stream.   If you have a Windows 7 machine on your network make sure media streaming is enabled. You should then see the server under Other Libraries and can start streaming your media collection.   Stream Video to Media Player 11 Now let’s say you want to stream videos to another member of your household who’s using a Vista machine in another room through Windows Media Player 11. Open WMP and click on Library then Media Sharing. Now click the box next to Find media that others are sharing then click Ok. Now you should see the server listed under Library…where in this example it’s geekserver. Since we only enabled Video streaming for this example, we need to click on the category icon and select Video. Now you can scroll through the available videos… And start enjoying your favorite videos streamed from the server through WMP 11 on Vista. Of course you can use this method to stream photos and music as well, you just need to enable what you want to stream from the Home Server Console. You can also stream your media to Windows Media Center and Xbox which we will be covering soon. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Share Digital Media With Other Computers on a Home Network with Windows 7Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesGMedia Blog: Setting Up a Windows Home ServerShare and Stream Digital Media Between Windows 7 Machines On Your Home NetworkInstalling Windows Media Player Plugin for Firefox TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher Automate Tasks in Linux with Crontab

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• Manage Files Easier With Aero Snap in Windows 7

  - by Mysticgeek

  Before the days of Aero Snap you would need to arrange your Windows in some weird way to see all of your files. Today we show you how to quickly use the Aero Snap feature get it done in few key strokes in Windows 7. You can of course navigate the windows in Explorer to get them so you can see everything side by side, or use a free utility like Cubic Explorer.   Getting Explorer Windows Side by Side The process is actually simple but quite useful when looking for a large amount of data. Right-click the Windows Explorer icon on the taskbar and click Windows Explorer. Our first window opens up and you can certainly drag it over the the right or left side of the screen but the quickest method we’re using is the “Windows Key+Right Arrow” key combo (make sure to hold the Windows key down). Now the Windows is nicely placed on the right side. Next we want to open the other window, simply right-click the Explorer icon again and click Windows Explorer.   Now we have our second window open, and all we need to do this time is use the Windows Key+Left Arrow combination. There we go! Now you should be able to browse your files a lot more simply than relying on the expanding tree method (as much). You can actually use this method to snap a window to all four corners of your screen if you don’t feel like dragging it. Once you play with Aero Snap more you may enjoy it, but if you still despise it, you can disable it too! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Multitask Like a Pro with AquaSnapUse Windows Vista Aero through Remote Desktop ConnectionEasily Disable Win 7 or Vista’s Aero Before Running an Application (Such as a Video Game)Understanding Windows Vista Aero Glass RequirementsFree Storage With AOL’s Xdrive (Online Storage Series) TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Awesome Lyrics Finder for Winamp & Windows Media Player Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images Get Wildlife Photography Tips at BBC’s PhotoMasterClasses

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• A Taxonomy of Numerical Methods v1

  - by JoshReuben

  Numerical Analysis – When, What, (but not how) Once you understand the Math & know C++, Numerical Methods are basically blocks of iterative & conditional math code. I found the real trick was seeing the forest for the trees – knowing which method to use for which situation. Its pretty easy to get lost in the details – so I’ve tried to organize these methods in a way that I can quickly look this up. I’ve included links to detailed explanations and to C++ code examples. I’ve tried to classify Numerical methods in the following broad categories: Solving Systems of Linear Equations Solving Non-Linear Equations Iteratively Interpolation Curve Fitting Optimization Numerical Differentiation & Integration Solving ODEs Boundary Problems Solving EigenValue problems Enjoy – I did ! Solving Systems of Linear Equations Overview Solve sets of algebraic equations with x unknowns The set is commonly in matrix form Gauss-Jordan Elimination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Jordan_elimination C++: http://www.codekeep.net/snippets/623f1923-e03c-4636-8c92-c9dc7aa0d3c0.aspx Produces solution of the equations & the coefficient matrix Efficient, stable 2 steps: · Forward Elimination – matrix decomposition: reduce set to triangular form (0s below the diagonal) or row echelon form. If degenerate, then there is no solution · Backward Elimination –write the original matrix as the product of ints inverse matrix & its reduced row-echelon matrix à reduce set to row canonical form & use back-substitution to find the solution to the set Elementary ops for matrix decomposition: · Row multiplication · Row switching · Add multiples of rows to other rows Use pivoting to ensure rows are ordered for achieving triangular form LU Decomposition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LU_decomposition C++: http://ganeshtiwaridotcomdotnp.blogspot.co.il/2009/12/c-c-code-lu-decomposition-for-solving.html Represent the matrix as a product of lower & upper triangular matrices A modified version of GJ Elimination Advantage – can easily apply forward & backward elimination to solve triangular matrices Techniques: · Doolittle Method – sets the L matrix diagonal to unity · Crout Method - sets the U matrix diagonal to unity Note: both the L & U matrices share the same unity diagonal & can be stored compactly in the same matrix Gauss-Seidel Iteration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Seidel_method C++: http://www.nr.com/forum/showthread.php?t=722 Transform the linear set of equations into a single equation & then use numerical integration (as integration formulas have Sums, it is implemented iteratively). an optimization of Gauss-Jacobi: 1.5 times faster, requires 0.25 iterations to achieve the same tolerance Solving Non-Linear Equations Iteratively find roots of polynomials – there may be 0, 1 or n solutions for an n order polynomial use iterative techniques Iterative methods · used when there are no known analytical techniques · Requires set functions to be continuous & differentiable · Requires an initial seed value – choice is critical to convergence à conduct multiple runs with different starting points & then select best result · Systematic - iterate until diminishing returns, tolerance or max iteration conditions are met · bracketing techniques will always yield convergent solutions, non-bracketing methods may fail to converge Incremental method if a nonlinear function has opposite signs at 2 ends of a small interval x1 & x2, then there is likely to be a solution in their interval – solutions are detected by evaluating a function over interval steps, for a change in sign, adjusting the step size dynamically. Limitations – can miss closely spaced solutions in large intervals, cannot detect degenerate (coinciding) solutions, limited to functions that cross the x-axis, gives false positives for singularities Fixed point method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_iteration C++: http://books.google.co.il/books?id=weYj75E_t6MC&pg=PA79&lpg=PA79&dq=fixed+point+method++c%2B%2B&source=bl&ots=LQ-5P_taoC&sig=lENUUIYBK53tZtTwNfHLy5PEWDk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wezDUPW1J5DptQaMsIHQCw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=fixed%20point%20method%20%20c%2B%2B&f=false Algebraically rearrange a solution to isolate a variable then apply incremental method Bisection method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisection_method C++: http://numericalcomputing.wordpress.com/category/algorithms/ Bracketed - Select an initial interval, keep bisecting it ad midpoint into sub-intervals and then apply incremental method on smaller & smaller intervals – zoom in Adv: unaffected by function gradient à reliable Disadv: slow convergence False Position Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_position_method C++: http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/126100-bisection-and-false-position-methods/ Bracketed - Select an initial interval , & use the relative value of function at interval end points to select next sub-intervals (estimate how far between the end points the solution might be & subdivide based on this) Newton-Raphson method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_method C++: http://www-users.cselabs.umn.edu/classes/Summer-2012/csci1113/index.php?page=./newt3 Also known as Newton's method Convenient, efficient Not bracketed – only a single initial guess is required to start iteration – requires an analytical expression for the first derivative of the function as input. Evaluates the function & its derivative at each step. Can be extended to the Newton MutiRoot method for solving multiple roots Can be easily applied to an of n-coupled set of non-linear equations – conduct a Taylor Series expansion of a function, dropping terms of order n, rewrite as a Jacobian matrix of PDs & convert to simultaneous linear equations !!! Secant Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secant_method C++: http://forum.vcoderz.com/showthread.php?p=205230 Unlike N-R, can estimate first derivative from an initial interval (does not require root to be bracketed) instead of inputting it Since derivative is approximated, may converge slower. Is fast in practice as it does not have to evaluate the derivative at each step. Similar implementation to False Positive method Birge-Vieta Method http://mat.iitm.ac.in/home/sryedida/public_html/caimna/transcendental/polynomial%20methods/bv%20method.html C++: http://books.google.co.il/books?id=cL1boM2uyQwC&pg=SA3-PA51&lpg=SA3-PA51&dq=Birge-Vieta+Method+c%2B%2B&source=bl&ots=QZmnDTK3rC&sig=BPNcHHbpR_DKVoZXrLi4nVXD-gg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=R-_DUK2iNIjzsgbE5ID4Dg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Birge-Vieta%20Method%20c%2B%2B&f=false combines Horner's method of polynomial evaluation (transforming into lesser degree polynomials that are more computationally efficient to process) with Newton-Raphson to provide a computational speed-up Interpolation Overview Construct new data points for as close as possible fit within range of a discrete set of known points (that were obtained via sampling, experimentation) Use Taylor Series Expansion of a function f(x) around a specific value for x Linear Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_interpolation C++: http://www.hamaluik.com/?p=289 Straight line between 2 points à concatenate interpolants between each pair of data points Bilinear Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_interpolation C++: http://supercomputingblog.com/graphics/coding-bilinear-interpolation/2/ Extension of the linear function for interpolating functions of 2 variables – perform linear interpolation first in 1 direction, then in another. Used in image processing – e.g. texture mapping filter. Uses 4 vertices to interpolate a value within a unit cell. Lagrange Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_polynomial C++: http://www.codecogs.com/code/maths/approximation/interpolation/lagrange.php For polynomials Requires recomputation for all terms for each distinct x value – can only be applied for small number of nodes Numerically unstable Barycentric Interpolation http://epubs.siam.org/doi/pdf/10.1137/S0036144502417715 C++: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/621445-barycentric-coordinates-c-code-check/ Rearrange the terms in the equation of the Legrange interpolation by defining weight functions that are independent of the interpolated value of x Newton Divided Difference Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_polynomial C++: http://jee-appy.blogspot.co.il/2011/12/newton-divided-difference-interpolation.html Hermite Divided Differences: Interpolation polynomial approximation for a given set of data points in the NR form - divided differences are used to approximately calculate the various differences. For a given set of 3 data points , fit a quadratic interpolant through the data Bracketed functions allow Newton divided differences to be calculated recursively Difference table Cubic Spline Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spline_interpolation C++: https://www.marcusbannerman.co.uk/index.php/home/latestarticles/42-articles/96-cubic-spline-class.html Spline is a piecewise polynomial Provides smoothness – for interpolations with significantly varying data Use weighted coefficients to bend the function to be smooth & its 1st & 2nd derivatives are continuous through the edge points in the interval Curve Fitting A generalization of interpolating whereby given data points may contain noise à the curve does not necessarily pass through all the points Least Squares Fit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_squares C++: http://www.ccas.ru/mmes/educat/lab04k/02/least-squares.c Residual – difference between observed value & expected value Model function is often chosen as a linear combination of the specified functions Determines: A) The model instance in which the sum of squared residuals has the least value B) param values for which model best fits data Straight Line Fit Linear correlation between independent variable and dependent variable Linear Regression http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression C++: http://www.oocities.org/david_swaim/cpp/linregc.htm Special case of statistically exact extrapolation Leverage least squares Given a basis function, the sum of the residuals is determined and the corresponding gradient equation is expressed as a set of normal linear equations in matrix form that can be solved (e.g. using LU Decomposition) Can be weighted - Drop the assumption that all errors have the same significance –-> confidence of accuracy is different for each data point. Fit the function closer to points with higher weights Polynomial Fit - use a polynomial basis function Moving Average http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_average C++: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/17860/A-Simple-Moving-Average-Algorithm Used for smoothing (cancel fluctuations to highlight longer-term trends & cycles), time series data analysis, signal processing filters Replace each data point with average of neighbors. Can be simple (SMA), weighted (WMA), exponential (EMA). Lags behind latest data points – extra weight can be given to more recent data points. Weights can decrease arithmetically or exponentially according to distance from point. Parameters: smoothing factor, period, weight basis Optimization Overview Given function with multiple variables, find Min (or max by minimizing –f(x)) Iterative approach Efficient, but not necessarily reliable Conditions: noisy data, constraints, non-linear models Detection via sign of first derivative - Derivative of saddle points will be 0 Local minima Bisection method Similar method for finding a root for a non-linear equation Start with an interval that contains a minimum Golden Search method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_section_search C++: http://www.codecogs.com/code/maths/optimization/golden.php Bisect intervals according to golden ratio 0.618.. Achieves reduction by evaluating a single function instead of 2 Newton-Raphson Method Brent method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent's_method C++: http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/cpp_src/brent/brent.cpp Based on quadratic or parabolic interpolation – if the function is smooth & parabolic near to the minimum, then a parabola fitted through any 3 points should approximate the minima – fails when the 3 points are collinear , in which case the denominator is 0 Simplex Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_algorithm C++: http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/article.php/c17505/Simplex-Optimization-Algorithm-and-Implemetation-in-C-Programming.htm Find the global minima of any multi-variable function Direct search – no derivatives required At each step it maintains a non-degenerative simplex – a convex hull of n+1 vertices. Obtains the minimum for a function with n variables by evaluating the function at n-1 points, iteratively replacing the point of worst result with the point of best result, shrinking the multidimensional simplex around the best point. Point replacement involves expanding & contracting the simplex near the worst value point to determine a better replacement point Oscillation can be avoided by choosing the 2nd worst result Restart if it gets stuck Parameters: contraction & expansion factors Simulated Annealing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing C++: http://code.google.com/p/cppsimulatedannealing/ Analogy to heating & cooling metal to strengthen its structure Stochastic method – apply random permutation search for global minima - Avoid entrapment in local minima via hill climbing Heating schedule - Annealing schedule params: temperature, iterations at each temp, temperature delta Cooling schedule – can be linear, step-wise or exponential Differential Evolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_evolution C++: http://www.amichel.com/de/doc/html/ More advanced stochastic methods analogous to biological processes: Genetic algorithms, evolution strategies Parallel direct search method against multiple discrete or continuous variables Initial population of variable vectors chosen randomly – if weighted difference vector of 2 vectors yields a lower objective function value then it replaces the comparison vector Many params: #parents, #variables, step size, crossover constant etc Convergence is slow – many more function evaluations than simulated annealing Numerical Differentiation Overview 2 approaches to finite difference methods: · A) approximate function via polynomial interpolation then differentiate · B) Taylor series approximation – additionally provides error estimate Finite Difference methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_difference_method C++: http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/ETD/Available/etd-051807-164436/unrestricted/EAMPADU.pdf Find differences between high order derivative values - Approximate differential equations by finite differences at evenly spaced data points Based on forward & backward Taylor series expansion of f(x) about x plus or minus multiples of delta h. Forward / backward difference - the sums of the series contains even derivatives and the difference of the series contains odd derivatives – coupled equations that can be solved. Provide an approximation of the derivative within a O(h^2) accuracy There is also central difference & extended central difference which has a O(h^4) accuracy Richardson Extrapolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richardson_extrapolation C++: http://mathscoding.blogspot.co.il/2012/02/introduction-richardson-extrapolation.html A sequence acceleration method applied to finite differences Fast convergence, high accuracy O(h^4) Derivatives via Interpolation Cannot apply Finite Difference method to discrete data points at uneven intervals – so need to approximate the derivative of f(x) using the derivative of the interpolant via 3 point Lagrange Interpolation Note: the higher the order of the derivative, the lower the approximation precision Numerical Integration Estimate finite & infinite integrals of functions More accurate procedure than numerical differentiation Use when it is not possible to obtain an integral of a function analytically or when the function is not given, only the data points are Newton Cotes Methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%E2%80%93Cotes_formulas C++: http://www.siafoo.net/snippet/324 For equally spaced data points Computationally easy – based on local interpolation of n rectangular strip areas that is piecewise fitted to a polynomial to get the sum total area Evaluate the integrand at n+1 evenly spaced points – approximate definite integral by Sum Weights are derived from Lagrange Basis polynomials Leverage Trapezoidal Rule for default 2nd formulas, Simpson 1/3 Rule for substituting 3 point formulas, Simpson 3/8 Rule for 4 point formulas. For 4 point formulas use Bodes Rule. Higher orders obtain more accurate results Trapezoidal Rule uses simple area, Simpsons Rule replaces the integrand f(x) with a quadratic polynomial p(x) that uses the same values as f(x) for its end points, but adds a midpoint Romberg Integration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romberg's_method C++: http://code.google.com/p/romberg-integration/downloads/detail?name=romberg.cpp&can=2&q= Combines trapezoidal rule with Richardson Extrapolation Evaluates the integrand at equally spaced points The integrand must have continuous derivatives Each R(n,m) extrapolation uses a higher order integrand polynomial replacement rule (zeroth starts with trapezoidal) à a lower triangular matrix set of equation coefficients where the bottom right term has the most accurate approximation. The process continues until the difference between 2 successive diagonal terms becomes sufficiently small. Gaussian Quadrature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_quadrature C++: http://www.alglib.net/integration/gaussianquadratures.php Data points are chosen to yield best possible accuracy – requires fewer evaluations Ability to handle singularities, functions that are difficult to evaluate The integrand can include a weighting function determined by a set of orthogonal polynomials. Points & weights are selected so that the integrand yields the exact integral if f(x) is a polynomial of degree <= 2n+1 Techniques (basically different weighting functions): · Gauss-Legendre Integration w(x)=1 · Gauss-Laguerre Integration w(x)=e^-x · Gauss-Hermite Integration w(x)=e^-x^2 · Gauss-Chebyshev Integration w(x)= 1 / Sqrt(1-x^2) Solving ODEs Use when high order differential equations cannot be solved analytically Evaluated under boundary conditions RK for systems – a high order differential equation can always be transformed into a coupled first order system of equations Euler method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_method C++: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Euler_method First order Runge–Kutta method. Simple recursive method – given an initial value, calculate derivative deltas. Unstable & not very accurate (O(h) error) – not used in practice A first-order method - the local error (truncation error per step) is proportional to the square of the step size, and the global error (error at a given time) is proportional to the step size In evolving solution between data points xn & xn+1, only evaluates derivatives at beginning of interval xn à asymmetric at boundaries Higher order Runge Kutta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runge%E2%80%93Kutta_methods C++: http://www.dreamincode.net/code/snippet1441.htm 2nd & 4th order RK - Introduces parameterized midpoints for more symmetric solutions à accuracy at higher computational cost Adaptive RK – RK-Fehlberg – estimate the truncation at each integration step & automatically adjust the step size to keep error within prescribed limits. At each step 2 approximations are compared – if in disagreement to a specific accuracy, the step size is reduced Boundary Value Problems Where solution of differential equations are located at 2 different values of the independent variable x à more difficult, because cannot just start at point of initial value – there may not be enough starting conditions available at the end points to produce a unique solution An n-order equation will require n boundary conditions – need to determine the missing n-1 conditions which cause the given conditions at the other boundary to be satisfied Shooting Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_method C++: http://ganeshtiwaridotcomdotnp.blogspot.co.il/2009/12/c-c-code-shooting-method-for-solving.html Iteratively guess the missing values for one end & integrate, then inspect the discrepancy with the boundary values of the other end to adjust the estimate Given the starting boundary values u1 & u2 which contain the root u, solve u given the false position method (solving the differential equation as an initial value problem via 4th order RK), then use u to solve the differential equations. Finite Difference Method For linear & non-linear systems Higher order derivatives require more computational steps – some combinations for boundary conditions may not work though Improve the accuracy by increasing the number of mesh points Solving EigenValue Problems An eigenvalue can substitute a matrix when doing matrix multiplication à convert matrix multiplication into a polynomial EigenValue For a given set of equations in matrix form, determine what are the solution eigenvalue & eigenvectors Similar Matrices - have same eigenvalues. Use orthogonal similarity transforms to reduce a matrix to diagonal form from which eigenvalue(s) & eigenvectors can be computed iteratively Jacobi method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobi_method C++: http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/classes/acs2_2008/openmp/jacobi/jacobi.html Robust but Computationally intense – use for small matrices < 10x10 Power Iteration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_iteration For any given real symmetric matrix, generate the largest single eigenvalue & its eigenvectors Simplest method – does not compute matrix decomposition à suitable for large, sparse matrices Inverse Iteration Variation of power iteration method – generates the smallest eigenvalue from the inverse matrix Rayleigh Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh's_method_of_dimensional_analysis Variation of power iteration method Rayleigh Quotient Method Variation of inverse iteration method Matrix Tri-diagonalization Method Use householder algorithm to reduce an NxN symmetric matrix to a tridiagonal real symmetric matrix vua N-2 orthogonal transforms     Whats Next Outside of Numerical Methods there are lots of different types of algorithms that I’ve learned over the decades: Data Mining – (I covered this briefly in a previous post: http://geekswithblogs.net/JoshReuben/archive/2007/12/31/ssas-dm-algorithms.aspx ) Search & Sort Routing Problem Solving Logical Theorem Proving Planning Probabilistic Reasoning Machine Learning Solvers (eg MIP) Bioinformatics (Sequence Alignment, Protein Folding) Quant Finance (I read Wilmott’s books – interesting) Sooner or later, I’ll cover the above topics as well.

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• Using ClearType Tuner in Windows 7

  - by Mysticgeek

  Back in Windows XP there was an important Power toy created to enable ClearType for users of LCD screens. Now it’s standard in Windows 7, but you may not know about it. So let’s take a look. Access Clear Type in Windows 7 Click on the Start Menu and type cleartype into the search box and hit Enter. It should be enabled by default, but if not just check the box to enable it. Now, in the next step, you can enable it for two or more monitors if you have them. Or you could select an individual one if it works best for one but not another. Some people might want it turned off if they have a CRT and a LCD monitor for example. Now you can go through the wizard and pick out what resolution works best for the monitor(s) you choose.   Just select the text in each step that looks best for you. Then finish it out… This is a cool trick you may not have known about that already exists in Windows 7, and it can definitely help you get the best look of the text on each screen if you’re using different monitors! You may have to experiment with some different settings to get what works best for you. If you’re using Vista or XP check out our article on tuning clear type font settings in Vista/XP. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Tune Your ClearType Font Settings in Windows VistaGeek Tip: Be Sure to Enable ClearType in Your XP Virtual MachineListen to Local FM Radio in Windows 7 Media CenterWhy Do My Windows Vista Fonts Look Horrible?Roundup: 16 Tweaks to Windows Vista Look & Feel TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Need Help with Your Home Network? Awesome Lyrics Finder for Winamp & Windows Media Player Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images

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• Measuring Social Media Efforts

  - by David Dorf

  So you're on the bandwagon and you've created a Facebook page, you're tweeting everyday, and maybe you've even got a YouTube channel. Now what? After you put any program in place, you need to measure, set new goals, then execute and this is no different. But how does one measure social media efforts? First, I guess we need some goals. Typical ones might be to acquire customers, engage them, then convert them. So that translates to: Increase Facebook fans and Twitter followers Increase comments/posting and retweets Increase redemption of offers via Facebook and Twitter Counting fans and followers is easy, and tracking the redemption of coupons isn't that hard either, but measuring engagement is a tough one. How do you know whether your fans are reading your posts, and whether your posts have any meaning to them? For Facebook, the fan page administrator has access to analytics called Facebook Insights. There you can check weekly metrics such as total fans, new fans, lost fans, demographics of fans, number of postings, numbers clicks, etc. Not nearly as comprehensive as Google Analytics, but well on its way. For Twitter, getting information is a little tougher. Again, its easy to track followers and you can use tools like TweetMeme to encourage and track retweets. An interesting website called WeFollow tries to measure influence for certain topics. For example, the top three influencers for the topic "retail" are retailweek, retailwire, and retailerdaily. Other notables are #10 BestBuy, #11 GapOfficial, #12 JeffPR, and #17 OracleRetail. I assume influence is calculated based on number of followers, number of retweets, frequency of tweets, and perhaps depth of dialogs. If you want to get serious about monitoring and measuring social marketing efforts, you'd be wise to invest in a strong tool. Several are listed on this wiki, including big ones like Radian6, Nielsen, Omniture, and Buzzient. Buzzient might be particularly interesting because its integrated with Oracle CRM OnDemand -- see the demo. As always, I'm interested in hearing how others approach goal setting and monitoring of social media efforts, so feel free to post comments.

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• Basic Spatial Data with SQL Server and Entity Framework 5.0

  - by Rick Strahl

  In my most recent project we needed to do a bit of geo-spatial referencing. While spatial features have been in SQL Server for a while using those features inside of .NET applications hasn't been as straight forward as could be, because .NET natively doesn't support spatial types. There are workarounds for this with a few custom project like SharpMap or a hack using the Sql Server specific Geo types found in the Microsoft.SqlTypes assembly that ships with SQL server. While these approaches work for manipulating spatial data from .NET code, they didn't work with database access if you're using Entity Framework. Other ORM vendors have been rolling their own versions of spatial integration. In Entity Framework 5.0 running on .NET 4.5 the Microsoft ORM finally adds support for spatial types as well. In this post I'll describe basic geography features that deal with single location and distance calculations which is probably the most common usage scenario. SQL Server Transact-SQL Syntax for Spatial Data Before we look at how things work with Entity framework, lets take a look at how SQL Server allows you to use spatial data to get an understanding of the underlying semantics. The following SQL examples should work with SQL 2008 and forward. Let's start by creating a test table that includes a Geography field and also a pair of Long/Lat fields that demonstrate how you can work with the geography functions even if you don't have geography/geometry fields in the database. Here's the CREATE command:CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Geo]( [id] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [Location] [geography] NULL, [Long] [float] NOT NULL, [Lat] [float] NOT NULL ) Now using plain SQL you can insert data into the table using geography::STGeoFromText SQL CLR function:insert into Geo( Location , long, lat ) values ( geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(-121.527200 45.712113)', 4326), -121.527200, 45.712113 ) insert into Geo( Location , long, lat ) values ( geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(-121.517265 45.714240)', 4326), -121.517265, 45.714240 ) insert into Geo( Location , long, lat ) values ( geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(-121.511536 45.714825)', 4326), -121.511536, 45.714825) The STGeomFromText function accepts a string that points to a geometric item (a point here but can also be a line or path or polygon and many others). You also need to provide an SRID (Spatial Reference System Identifier) which is an integer value that determines the rules for how geography/geometry values are calculated and returned. For mapping/distance functionality you typically want to use 4326 as this is the format used by most mapping software and geo-location libraries like Google and Bing. The spatial data in the Location field is stored in binary format which looks something like this: Once the location data is in the database you can query the data and do simple distance computations very easily. For example to calculate the distance of each of the values in the database to another spatial point is very easy to calculate. Distance calculations compare two points in space using a direct line calculation. For our example I'll compare a new point to all the points in the database. Using the Location field the SQL looks like this:-- create a source point DECLARE @s geography SET @s = geography:: STGeomFromText('POINT(-121.527200 45.712113)' , 4326); --- return the ids select ID, Location as Geo , Location .ToString() as Point , @s.STDistance( Location) as distance from Geo order by distance The code defines a new point which is the base point to compare each of the values to. You can also compare values from the database directly, but typically you'll want to match a location to another location and determine the difference for which you can use the geography::STDistance function. This query produces the following output: The STDistance function returns the straight line distance between the passed in point and the point in the database field. The result for SRID 4326 is always in meters. Notice that the first value passed was the same point so the difference is 0. The other two points are two points here in town in Hood River a little ways away - 808 and 1256 meters respectively. Notice also that you can order the result by the resulting distance, which effectively gives you results that are ordered radially out from closer to further away. This is great for searches of points of interest near a central location (YOU typically!). These geolocation functions are also available to you if you don't use the Geography/Geometry types, but plain float values. It's a little more work, as each point has to be created in the query using the string syntax, but the following code doesn't use a geography field but produces the same result as the previous query.--- using float fields select ID, geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(' + STR (long, 15,7 ) + ' ' + Str(lat ,15, 7) + ')' , 4326), geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(' + STR (long, 15,7 ) + ' ' + Str(lat ,15, 7) + ')' , 4326). ToString(), @s.STDistance( geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(' + STR(long ,15, 7) + ' ' + Str(lat ,15, 7) + ')' , 4326)) as distance from geo order by distance Spatial Data in the Entity Framework Prior to Entity Framework 5.0 on .NET 4.5 consuming of the data above required using stored procedures or raw SQL commands to access the spatial data. In Entity Framework 5 however, Microsoft introduced the new DbGeometry and DbGeography types. These immutable location types provide a bunch of functionality for manipulating spatial points using geometry functions which in turn can be used to do common spatial queries like I described in the SQL syntax above. The DbGeography/DbGeometry types are immutable, meaning that you can't write to them once they've been created. They are a bit odd in that you need to use factory methods in order to instantiate them - they have no constructor() and you can't assign to properties like Latitude and Longitude. Creating a Model with Spatial Data Let's start by creating a simple Entity Framework model that includes a Location property of type DbGeography: public class GeoLocationContext : DbContext { public DbSet<GeoLocation> Locations { get; set; } } public class GeoLocation { public int Id { get; set; } public DbGeography Location { get; set; } public string Address { get; set; } } That's all there's to it. When you run this now against SQL Server, you get a Geography field for the Location property, which looks the same as the Location field in the SQL examples earlier. Adding Spatial Data to the Database Next let's add some data to the table that includes some latitude and longitude data. An easy way to find lat/long locations is to use Google Maps to pinpoint your location, then right click and click on What's Here. Click on the green marker to get the GPS coordinates. To add the actual geolocation data create an instance of the GeoLocation type and use the DbGeography.PointFromText() factory method to create a new point to assign to the Location property:[TestMethod] public void AddLocationsToDataBase() { var context = new GeoLocationContext(); // remove all context.Locations.ToList().ForEach( loc => context.Locations.Remove(loc)); context.SaveChanges(); var location = new GeoLocation() { // Create a point using native DbGeography Factory method Location = DbGeography.PointFromText( string.Format("POINT({0} {1})", -121.527200,45.712113) ,4326), Address = "301 15th Street, Hood River" }; context.Locations.Add(location); location = new GeoLocation() { Location = CreatePoint(45.714240, -121.517265), Address = "The Hatchery, Bingen" }; context.Locations.Add(location); location = new GeoLocation() { // Create a point using a helper function (lat/long) Location = CreatePoint(45.708457, -121.514432), Address = "Kaze Sushi, Hood River" }; context.Locations.Add(location); location = new GeoLocation() { Location = CreatePoint(45.722780, -120.209227), Address = "Arlington, OR" }; context.Locations.Add(location); context.SaveChanges(); } As promised, a DbGeography object has to be created with one of the static factory methods provided on the type as the Location.Longitude and Location.Latitude properties are read only. Here I'm using PointFromText() which uses a "Well Known Text" format to specify spatial data. In the first example I'm specifying to create a Point from a longitude and latitude value, using an SRID of 4326 (just like earlier in the SQL examples). You'll probably want to create a helper method to make the creation of Points easier to avoid that string format and instead just pass in a couple of double values. Here's my helper called CreatePoint that's used for all but the first point creation in the sample above:public static DbGeography CreatePoint(double latitude, double longitude) { var text = string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat, "POINT({0} {1})", longitude, latitude); // 4326 is most common coordinate system used by GPS/Maps return DbGeography.PointFromText(text, 4326); } Using the helper the syntax becomes a bit cleaner, requiring only a latitude and longitude respectively. Note that my method intentionally swaps the parameters around because Latitude and Longitude is the common format I've seen with mapping libraries (especially Google Mapping/Geolocation APIs with their LatLng type). When the context is changed the data is written into the database using the SQL Geography type which looks the same as in the earlier SQL examples shown. Querying Once you have some location data in the database it's now super easy to query the data and find out the distance between locations. A common query is to ask for a number of locations that are near a fixed point - typically your current location and order it by distance. Using LINQ to Entities a query like this is easy to construct:[TestMethod] public void QueryLocationsTest() { var sourcePoint = CreatePoint(45.712113, -121.527200); var context = new GeoLocationContext(); // find any locations within 5 kilometers ordered by distance var matches = context.Locations .Where(loc => loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) < 5000) .OrderBy( loc=> loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) ) .Select( loc=> new { Address = loc.Address, Distance = loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) }); Assert.IsTrue(matches.Count() > 0); foreach (var location in matches) { Console.WriteLine("{0} ({1:n0} meters)", location.Address, location.Distance); } } This example produces: 301 15th Street, Hood River (0 meters)The Hatchery, Bingen (809 meters)Kaze Sushi, Hood River (1,074 meters)   The first point in the database is the same as my source point I'm comparing against so the distance is 0. The other two are within the 5 mile radius, while the Arlington location which is 65 miles or so out is not returned. The result is ordered by distance from closest to furthest away. In the code, I first create a source point that is the basis for comparison. The LINQ query then selects all locations that are within 5km of the source point using the Location.Distance() function, which takes a source point as a parameter. You can either use a pre-defined value as I'm doing here, or compare against another database DbGeography property (say when you have to points in the same database for things like routes). What's nice about this query syntax is that it's very clean and easy to read and understand. You can calculate the distance and also easily order by the distance to provide a result that shows locations from closest to furthest away which is a common scenario for any application that places a user in the context of several locations. It's now super easy to accomplish this. Meters vs. Miles As with the SQL Server functions, the Distance() method returns data in meters, so if you need to work with miles or feet you need to do some conversion. Here are a couple of helpers that might be useful (can be found in GeoUtils.cs of the sample project):/// <summary> /// Convert meters to miles /// </summary> /// <param name="meters"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static double MetersToMiles(double? meters) { if (meters == null) return 0F; return meters.Value * 0.000621371192; } /// <summary> /// Convert miles to meters /// </summary> /// <param name="miles"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static double MilesToMeters(double? miles) { if (miles == null) return 0; return miles.Value * 1609.344; } Using these two helpers you can query on miles like this:[TestMethod] public void QueryLocationsMilesTest() { var sourcePoint = CreatePoint(45.712113, -121.527200); var context = new GeoLocationContext(); // find any locations within 5 miles ordered by distance var fiveMiles = GeoUtils.MilesToMeters(5); var matches = context.Locations .Where(loc => loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) <= fiveMiles) .OrderBy(loc => loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint)) .Select(loc => new { Address = loc.Address, Distance = loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) }); Assert.IsTrue(matches.Count() > 0); foreach (var location in matches) { Console.WriteLine("{0} ({1:n1} miles)", location.Address, GeoUtils.MetersToMiles(location.Distance)); } } which produces: 301 15th Street, Hood River (0.0 miles)The Hatchery, Bingen (0.5 miles)Kaze Sushi, Hood River (0.7 miles) Nice 'n simple. .NET 4.5 Only Note that DbGeography and DbGeometry are exclusive to Entity Framework 5.0 (not 4.4 which ships in the same NuGet package or installer) and requires .NET 4.5. That's because the new DbGeometry and DbGeography (and related) types are defined in the 4.5 version of System.Data.Entity which is a CLR assembly and is only updated by major versions of .NET. Why this decision was made to add these types to System.Data.Entity rather than to the frequently updated EntityFramework assembly that would have possibly made this work in .NET 4.0 is beyond me, especially given that there are no native .NET framework spatial types to begin with. I find it also odd that there is no native CLR spatial type. The DbGeography and DbGeometry types are specific to Entity Framework and live on those assemblies. They will also work for general purpose, non-database spatial data manipulation, but then you are forced into having a dependency on System.Data.Entity, which seems a bit silly. There's also a System.Spatial assembly that's apparently part of WCF Data Services which in turn don't work with Entity framework. Another example of multiple teams at Microsoft not communicating and implementing the same functionality (differently) in several different places. Perplexed as a I may be, for EF specific code the Entity framework specific types are easy to use and work well. Working with pre-.NET 4.5 Entity Framework and Spatial Data If you can't go to .NET 4.5 just yet you can also still use spatial features in Entity Framework, but it's a lot more work as you can't use the DbContext directly to manipulate the location data. You can still run raw SQL statements to write data into the database and retrieve results using the same TSQL syntax I showed earlier using Context.Database.ExecuteSqlCommand(). Here's code that you can use to add location data into the database:[TestMethod] public void RawSqlEfAddTest() { string sqlFormat = @"insert into GeoLocations( Location, Address) values ( geography::STGeomFromText('POINT({0} {1})', 4326),@p0 )"; var sql = string.Format(sqlFormat,-121.527200, 45.712113); Console.WriteLine(sql); var context = new GeoLocationContext(); Assert.IsTrue(context.Database.ExecuteSqlCommand(sql,"301 N. 15th Street") > 0); } Here I'm using the STGeomFromText() function to add the location data. Note that I'm using string.Format here, which usually would be a bad practice but is required here. I was unable to use ExecuteSqlCommand() and its named parameter syntax as the longitude and latitude parameters are embedded into a string. Rest assured it's required as the following does not work:string sqlFormat = @"insert into GeoLocations( Location, Address) values ( geography::STGeomFromText('POINT(@p0 @p1)', 4326),@p2 )";context.Database.ExecuteSqlCommand(sql, -121.527200, 45.712113, "301 N. 15th Street") Explicitly assigning the point value with string.format works however. There are a number of ways to query location data. You can't get the location data directly, but you can retrieve the point string (which can then be parsed to get Latitude and Longitude) and you can return calculated values like distance. Here's an example of how to retrieve some geo data into a resultset using EF's and SqlQuery method:[TestMethod] public void RawSqlEfQueryTest() { var sqlFormat = @" DECLARE @s geography SET @s = geography:: STGeomFromText('POINT({0} {1})' , 4326); SELECT Address, Location.ToString() as GeoString, @s.STDistance( Location) as Distance FROM GeoLocations ORDER BY Distance"; var sql = string.Format(sqlFormat, -121.527200, 45.712113); var context = new GeoLocationContext(); var locations = context.Database.SqlQuery<ResultData>(sql); Assert.IsTrue(locations.Count() > 0); foreach (var location in locations) { Console.WriteLine(location.Address + " " + location.GeoString + " " + location.Distance); } } public class ResultData { public string GeoString { get; set; } public double Distance { get; set; } public string Address { get; set; } } Hopefully you don't have to resort to this approach as it's fairly limited. Using the new DbGeography/DbGeometry types makes this sort of thing so much easier. When I had to use code like this before I typically ended up retrieving data pks only and then running another query with just the PKs to retrieve the actual underlying DbContext entities. This was very inefficient and tedious but it did work. Summary For the current project I'm working on we actually made the switch to .NET 4.5 purely for the spatial features in EF 5.0. This app heavily relies on spatial queries and it was worth taking a chance with pre-release code to get this ease of integration as opposed to manually falling back to stored procedures or raw SQL string queries to return spatial specific queries. Using native Entity Framework code makes life a lot easier than the alternatives. It might be a late addition to Entity Framework, but it sure makes location calculations and storage easy. Where do you want to go today? ;-) Resources Download Sample Project© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ADO.NET  Sql Server  .NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Best of "The Moth" 2010

  - by Daniel Moth

  It is the time again (like in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009) to look back at my blog for the past year and identify areas of interest that seem to be more prominent than others. After doing so, representative posts follow in my top 5 list (in random order). 1. This was the year where I had to move for the first time since 2004 my blog engine (blogger.com –> dasBlog), host provider (zen –> godaddy), web server technology and OS (apache on Linux –> IIS on Windows Server). My goal was not to break any permalinks or the look and feel of this website. A series of posts covered how I achieved that goal, culminating in a tool for others to use if they wanted to do the same: Tool to convert blogger.com content to dasBlog. Going forward I aim to be sharing more small code utilities like that one… 2. At work I am known for being fairly responsive on email, and more importantly never dropping email balls on the floor. This is due to my email processing system, which I shared here: Processing Email in Outlook. I will be sharing more tips with regards to making the best of the Office products. 3. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the year people will remember as the one where Microsoft finally fights back in the mobile space. Even though the new platform means my Windows Mobile book sales will dwindle :-), I am ecstatic about Windows Phone 7 both as a consumer and as a developer. On the release day, to get you started I shared the top 10 Windows Phone 7 developer resources. I will be sharing my tips from my experience in writing code for and consuming this new platform… 4. For my HPC developer friends using Visual Studio, I shared Slides and code for MPI Cluster Debugger and also gave you all the links you need for getting started with Dryad and DryadLINQ from MSR. Expect more from me on cluster development in the coming year… 5. Still in the HPC space, but actually also in the game and even mainstream development, the big disruption and opportunity comes in the form of GPGPU and, on the Microsoft platform, (currently) DirectCompute. Expect more from me on gpgpu development in the coming year… Subscribe via the link on the left to stay tuned for 2011… I wish you a very Happy New Year (with whatever definition of happiness works for you)! Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Advanced TSQL Tuning: Why Internals Knowledge Matters

  - by Paul White

  There is much more to query tuning than reducing logical reads and adding covering nonclustered indexes.  Query tuning is not complete as soon as the query returns results quickly in the development or test environments.  In production, your query will compete for memory, CPU, locks, I/O and other resources on the server.  Today’s entry looks at some tuning considerations that are often overlooked, and shows how deep internals knowledge can help you write better TSQL. As always, we’ll need some example data.  In fact, we are going to use three tables today, each of which is structured like this: Each table has 50,000 rows made up of an INTEGER id column and a padding column containing 3,999 characters in every row.  The only difference between the three tables is in the type of the padding column: the first table uses CHAR(3999), the second uses VARCHAR(MAX), and the third uses the deprecated TEXT type.  A script to create a database with the three tables and load the sample data follows: USE master; GO IF DB_ID('SortTest') IS NOT NULL DROP DATABASE SortTest; GO CREATE DATABASE SortTest COLLATE LATIN1_GENERAL_BIN; GO ALTER DATABASE SortTest MODIFY FILE ( NAME = 'SortTest', SIZE = 3GB, MAXSIZE = 3GB ); GO ALTER DATABASE SortTest MODIFY FILE ( NAME = 'SortTest_log', SIZE = 256MB, MAXSIZE = 1GB, FILEGROWTH = 128MB ); GO ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_CLOSE OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS ON ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_SHRINK OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS ON ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC ON ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET PARAMETERIZATION SIMPLE ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET MULTI_USER ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET RECOVERY SIMPLE ; USE SortTest; GO CREATE TABLE dbo.TestCHAR ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding CHAR(3999) NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestCHAR (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; CREATE TABLE dbo.TestMAX ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestMAX (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; CREATE TABLE dbo.TestTEXT ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding TEXT NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestTEXT (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; -- ============= -- Load TestCHAR (about 3s) -- ============= INSERT INTO dbo.TestCHAR WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT padding = REPLICATE(CHAR(65 + (Data.n % 26)), 3999) FROM ( SELECT TOP (50000) n = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT 0)) - 1 FROM master.sys.columns C1, master.sys.columns C2, master.sys.columns C3 ORDER BY n ASC ) AS Data ORDER BY Data.n ASC ; -- ============ -- Load TestMAX (about 3s) -- ============ INSERT INTO dbo.TestMAX WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(MAX), padding) FROM dbo.TestCHAR ORDER BY id ; -- ============= -- Load TestTEXT (about 5s) -- ============= INSERT INTO dbo.TestTEXT WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT CONVERT(TEXT, padding) FROM dbo.TestCHAR ORDER BY id ; -- ========== -- Space used -- ========== -- EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestCHAR'; EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestMAX'; EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestTEXT'; ; CHECKPOINT ; That takes around 15 seconds to run, and shows the space allocated to each table in its output: To illustrate the points I want to make today, the example task we are going to set ourselves is to return a random set of 150 rows from each table.  The basic shape of the test query is the same for each of the three test tables: SELECT TOP (150) T.id, T.padding FROM dbo.Test AS T ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; Test 1 – CHAR(3999) Running the template query shown above using the TestCHAR table as the target, we find that the query takes around 5 seconds to return its results.  This seems slow, considering that the table only has 50,000 rows.  Working on the assumption that generating a GUID for each row is a CPU-intensive operation, we might try enabling parallelism to see if that speeds up the response time.  Running the query again (but without the MAXDOP 1 hint) on a machine with eight logical processors, the query now takes 10 seconds to execute – twice as long as when run serially. Rather than attempting further guesses at the cause of the slowness, let’s go back to serial execution and add some monitoring.  The script below monitors STATISTICS IO output and the amount of tempdb used by the test query.  We will also run a Profiler trace to capture any warnings generated during query execution. DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) TC.id, TC.padding FROM dbo.TestCHAR AS TC ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; Let’s take a closer look at the statistics and query plan generated from this: Following the flow of the data from right to left, we see the expected 50,000 rows emerging from the Clustered Index Scan, with a total estimated size of around 191MB.  The Compute Scalar adds a column containing a random GUID (generated from the NEWID() function call) for each row.  With this extra column in place, the size of the data arriving at the Sort operator is estimated to be 192MB. Sort is a blocking operator – it has to examine all of the rows on its input before it can produce its first row of output (the last row received might sort first).  This characteristic means that Sort requires a memory grant – memory allocated for the query’s use by SQL Server just before execution starts.  In this case, the Sort is the only memory-consuming operator in the plan, so it has access to the full 243MB (248,696KB) of memory reserved by SQL Server for this query execution. Notice that the memory grant is significantly larger than the expected size of the data to be sorted.  SQL Server uses a number of techniques to speed up sorting, some of which sacrifice size for comparison speed.  Sorts typically require a very large number of comparisons, so this is usually a very effective optimization.  One of the drawbacks is that it is not possible to exactly predict the sort space needed, as it depends on the data itself.  SQL Server takes an educated guess based on data types, sizes, and the number of rows expected, but the algorithm is not perfect. In spite of the large memory grant, the Profiler trace shows a Sort Warning event (indicating that the sort ran out of memory), and the tempdb usage monitor shows that 195MB of tempdb space was used – all of that for system use.  The 195MB represents physical write activity on tempdb, because SQL Server strictly enforces memory grants – a query cannot ‘cheat’ and effectively gain extra memory by spilling to tempdb pages that reside in memory.  Anyway, the key point here is that it takes a while to write 195MB to disk, and this is the main reason that the query takes 5 seconds overall. If you are wondering why using parallelism made the problem worse, consider that eight threads of execution result in eight concurrent partial sorts, each receiving one eighth of the memory grant.  The eight sorts all spilled to tempdb, resulting in inefficiencies as the spilled sorts competed for disk resources.  More importantly, there are specific problems at the point where the eight partial results are combined, but I’ll cover that in a future post. CHAR(3999) Performance Summary: 5 seconds elapsed time 243MB memory grant 195MB tempdb usage 192MB estimated sort set 25,043 logical reads Sort Warning Test 2 – VARCHAR(MAX) We’ll now run exactly the same test (with the additional monitoring) on the table using a VARCHAR(MAX) padding column: DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) TM.id, TM.padding FROM dbo.TestMAX AS TM ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; This time the query takes around 8 seconds to complete (3 seconds longer than Test 1).  Notice that the estimated row and data sizes are very slightly larger, and the overall memory grant has also increased very slightly to 245MB.  The most marked difference is in the amount of tempdb space used – this query wrote almost 391MB of sort run data to the physical tempdb file.  Don’t draw any general conclusions about VARCHAR(MAX) versus CHAR from this – I chose the length of the data specifically to expose this edge case.  In most cases, VARCHAR(MAX) performs very similarly to CHAR – I just wanted to make test 2 a bit more exciting. MAX Performance Summary: 8 seconds elapsed time 245MB memory grant 391MB tempdb usage 193MB estimated sort set 25,043 logical reads Sort warning Test 3 – TEXT The same test again, but using the deprecated TEXT data type for the padding column: DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) TT.id, TT.padding FROM dbo.TestTEXT AS TT ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1, RECOMPILE) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; This time the query runs in 500ms.  If you look at the metrics we have been checking so far, it’s not hard to understand why: TEXT Performance Summary: 0.5 seconds elapsed time 9MB memory grant 5MB tempdb usage 5MB estimated sort set 207 logical reads 596 LOB logical reads Sort warning SQL Server’s memory grant algorithm still underestimates the memory needed to perform the sorting operation, but the size of the data to sort is so much smaller (5MB versus 193MB previously) that the spilled sort doesn’t matter very much.  Why is the data size so much smaller?  The query still produces the correct results – including the large amount of data held in the padding column – so what magic is being performed here? TEXT versus MAX Storage The answer lies in how columns of the TEXT data type are stored.  By default, TEXT data is stored off-row in separate LOB pages – which explains why this is the first query we have seen that records LOB logical reads in its STATISTICS IO output.  You may recall from my last post that LOB data leaves an in-row pointer to the separate storage structure holding the LOB data. SQL Server can see that the full LOB value is not required by the query plan until results are returned, so instead of passing the full LOB value down the plan from the Clustered Index Scan, it passes the small in-row structure instead.  SQL Server estimates that each row coming from the scan will be 79 bytes long – 11 bytes for row overhead, 4 bytes for the integer id column, and 64 bytes for the LOB pointer (in fact the pointer is rather smaller – usually 16 bytes – but the details of that don’t really matter right now). OK, so this query is much more efficient because it is sorting a very much smaller data set – SQL Server delays retrieving the LOB data itself until after the Sort starts producing its 150 rows.  The question that normally arises at this point is: Why doesn’t SQL Server use the same trick when the padding column is defined as VARCHAR(MAX)? The answer is connected with the fact that if the actual size of the VARCHAR(MAX) data is 8000 bytes or less, it is usually stored in-row in exactly the same way as for a VARCHAR(8000) column – MAX data only moves off-row into LOB storage when it exceeds 8000 bytes.  The default behaviour of the TEXT type is to be stored off-row by default, unless the ‘text in row’ table option is set suitably and there is room on the page.  There is an analogous (but opposite) setting to control the storage of MAX data – the ‘large value types out of row’ table option.  By enabling this option for a table, MAX data will be stored off-row (in a LOB structure) instead of in-row.  SQL Server Books Online has good coverage of both options in the topic In Row Data. The MAXOOR Table The essential difference, then, is that MAX defaults to in-row storage, and TEXT defaults to off-row (LOB) storage.  You might be thinking that we could get the same benefits seen for the TEXT data type by storing the VARCHAR(MAX) values off row – so let’s look at that option now.  This script creates a fourth table, with the VARCHAR(MAX) data stored off-row in LOB pages: CREATE TABLE dbo.TestMAXOOR ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestMAXOOR (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; EXECUTE sys.sp_tableoption @TableNamePattern = N'dbo.TestMAXOOR', @OptionName = 'large value types out of row', @OptionValue = 'true' ; SELECT large_value_types_out_of_row FROM sys.tables WHERE [schema_id] = SCHEMA_ID(N'dbo') AND name = N'TestMAXOOR' ; INSERT INTO dbo.TestMAXOOR WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT SPACE(0) FROM dbo.TestCHAR ORDER BY id ; UPDATE TM WITH (TABLOCK) SET padding.WRITE (TC.padding, NULL, NULL) FROM dbo.TestMAXOOR AS TM JOIN dbo.TestCHAR AS TC ON TC.id = TM.id ; EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestMAXOOR' ; CHECKPOINT ; Test 4 – MAXOOR We can now re-run our test on the MAXOOR (MAX out of row) table: DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) MO.id, MO.padding FROM dbo.TestMAXOOR AS MO ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1, RECOMPILE) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; TEXT Performance Summary: 0.3 seconds elapsed time 245MB memory grant 0MB tempdb usage 193MB estimated sort set 207 logical reads 446 LOB logical reads No sort warning The query runs very quickly – slightly faster than Test 3, and without spilling the sort to tempdb (there is no sort warning in the trace, and the monitoring query shows zero tempdb usage by this query).  SQL Server is passing the in-row pointer structure down the plan and only looking up the LOB value on the output side of the sort. The Hidden Problem There is still a huge problem with this query though – it requires a 245MB memory grant.  No wonder the sort doesn’t spill to tempdb now – 245MB is about 20 times more memory than this query actually requires to sort 50,000 records containing LOB data pointers.  Notice that the estimated row and data sizes in the plan are the same as in test 2 (where the MAX data was stored in-row). The optimizer assumes that MAX data is stored in-row, regardless of the sp_tableoption setting ‘large value types out of row’.  Why?  Because this option is dynamic – changing it does not immediately force all MAX data in the table in-row or off-row, only when data is added or actually changed.  SQL Server does not keep statistics to show how much MAX or TEXT data is currently in-row, and how much is stored in LOB pages.  This is an annoying limitation, and one which I hope will be addressed in a future version of the product. So why should we worry about this?  Excessive memory grants reduce concurrency and may result in queries waiting on the RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE wait type while they wait for memory they do not need.  245MB is an awful lot of memory, especially on 32-bit versions where memory grants cannot use AWE-mapped memory.  Even on a 64-bit server with plenty of memory, do you really want a single query to consume 0.25GB of memory unnecessarily?  That’s 32,000 8KB pages that might be put to much better use. The Solution The answer is not to use the TEXT data type for the padding column.  That solution happens to have better performance characteristics for this specific query, but it still results in a spilled sort, and it is hard to recommend the use of a data type which is scheduled for removal.  I hope it is clear to you that the fundamental problem here is that SQL Server sorts the whole set arriving at a Sort operator.  Clearly, it is not efficient to sort the whole table in memory just to return 150 rows in a random order. The TEXT example was more efficient because it dramatically reduced the size of the set that needed to be sorted.  We can do the same thing by selecting 150 unique keys from the table at random (sorting by NEWID() for example) and only then retrieving the large padding column values for just the 150 rows we need.  The following script implements that idea for all four tables: SET STATISTICS IO ON ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestCHAR ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id = ANY (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestMAX ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id IN (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestTEXT ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id IN (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestMAXOOR ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id IN (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; All four queries now return results in much less than a second, with memory grants between 6 and 12MB, and without spilling to tempdb.  The small remaining inefficiency is in reading the id column values from the clustered primary key index.  As a clustered index, it contains all the in-row data at its leaf.  The CHAR and VARCHAR(MAX) tables store the padding column in-row, so id values are separated by a 3999-character column, plus row overhead.  The TEXT and MAXOOR tables store the padding values off-row, so id values in the clustered index leaf are separated by the much-smaller off-row pointer structure.  This difference is reflected in the number of logical page reads performed by the four queries: Table 'TestCHAR' logical reads 25511 lob logical reads 000 Table 'TestMAX'. logical reads 25511 lob logical reads 000 Table 'TestTEXT' logical reads 00412 lob logical reads 597 Table 'TestMAXOOR' logical reads 00413 lob logical reads 446 We can increase the density of the id values by creating a separate nonclustered index on the id column only.  This is the same key as the clustered index, of course, but the nonclustered index will not include the rest of the in-row column data. CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestCHAR (id); CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestMAX (id); CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestTEXT (id); CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestMAXOOR (id); The four queries can now use the very dense nonclustered index to quickly scan the id values, sort them by NEWID(), select the 150 ids we want, and then look up the padding data.  The logical reads with the new indexes in place are: Table 'TestCHAR' logical reads 835 lob logical reads 0 Table 'TestMAX' logical reads 835 lob logical reads 0 Table 'TestTEXT' logical reads 686 lob logical reads 597 Table 'TestMAXOOR' logical reads 686 lob logical reads 448 With the new index, all four queries use the same query plan (click to enlarge): Performance Summary: 0.3 seconds elapsed time 6MB memory grant 0MB tempdb usage 1MB sort set 835 logical reads (CHAR, MAX) 686 logical reads (TEXT, MAXOOR) 597 LOB logical reads (TEXT) 448 LOB logical reads (MAXOOR) No sort warning I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out why trying to eliminate the Key Lookup by adding the padding column to the new nonclustered indexes would be a daft idea Conclusion This post is not about tuning queries that access columns containing big strings.  It isn’t about the internal differences between TEXT and MAX data types either.  It isn’t even about the cool use of UPDATE .WRITE used in the MAXOOR table load.  No, this post is about something else: Many developers might not have tuned our starting example query at all – 5 seconds isn’t that bad, and the original query plan looks reasonable at first glance.  Perhaps the NEWID() function would have been blamed for ‘just being slow’ – who knows.  5 seconds isn’t awful – unless your users expect sub-second responses – but using 250MB of memory and writing 200MB to tempdb certainly is!  If ten sessions ran that query at the same time in production that’s 2.5GB of memory usage and 2GB hitting tempdb.  Of course, not all queries can be rewritten to avoid large memory grants and sort spills using the key-lookup technique in this post, but that’s not the point either. The point of this post is that a basic understanding of execution plans is not enough.  Tuning for logical reads and adding covering indexes is not enough.  If you want to produce high-quality, scalable TSQL that won’t get you paged as soon as it hits production, you need a deep understanding of execution plans, and as much accurate, deep knowledge about SQL Server as you can lay your hands on.  The advanced database developer has a wide range of tools to use in writing queries that perform well in a range of circumstances. By the way, the examples in this post were written for SQL Server 2008.  They will run on 2005 and demonstrate the same principles, but you won’t get the same figures I did because 2005 had a rather nasty bug in the Top N Sort operator.  Fair warning: if you do decide to run the scripts on a 2005 instance (particularly the parallel query) do it before you head out for lunch… This post is dedicated to the people of Christchurch, New Zealand. © 2011 Paul White email: @[email protected] twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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• New regular expression features in PCRE 8.34 and 8.35

  - by Jan Goyvaerts

  PCRE 8.34 adds some new regex features and changes the behavior of a few to make it better compatible with the latest versions of Perl. There are no changes to the regex syntax in PCRE 8.35. \o{377} is now an octal escape just like \377. This syntax was first introduced in Perl 5.12. It avoids any confusion between octal escapes and backreferences. It also allows octal numbers beyond 377 to be used. E.g. \o{400} is the same as \x{100}. If you have any reason to use octal escapes instead of hexadecimal escapes then you should definitely use the new syntax. Because of this change, \o is now an error when it doesn’t form a valid octal escape. Previously \o was a literal o and \o{377} was a sequence of 337 o‘s. In free-spacing mode, whitespace between a quantifier and the ? that makes it lazy or the + that makes it possessive is now ignored. In Perl this has always been the case. In PCRE 8.33 and prior, whitespace ended a quantifier and any following ? or + was seen as a second quantifier and thus an error. The shorthand \s now matches the vertical tab character in addition to the other whitespace characters it previously matched. Perl 5.18 made the same change. Many other regex flavors have always included the vertical tab in \s, just like POSIX has always included it in [[:space:]]. Names of capturing groups are no longer allowed to start with a digit. This has always been the case in Perl since named groups were added to Perl 5.10. PCRE 8.33 and prior even allowed group names to consist entirely of digits. [[:<:]] and [[::]] are now treated as POSIX-style word boundaries. They match at the start and the end of a word. Though they use similar syntax, these have nothing to do with POSIX character classes and cannot be used inside character classes. Perl does not support POSIX word boundaries. The same changes affect PHP 5.5.10 (and later) and R 3.0.3 (and later) as they have been updated to use PCRE 8.34. RegexBuddy and RegexMagic have been updated to support the latest versions of PCRE, PHP, and R. Older versions that were previously supported are still supported, so you can compare or convert your regular expressions between the latest versions of PCRE, PHP, and R and whichever version you were using previously.

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• Keep Track of Your Tasks with toDoo

  - by Asian Angel

  A tasks list can be convenient but most times you can not include details for those tasks or have to have an online account to do so. If you want to keep your tasks list with you on your computer or laptop and be able to add plenty of details then you might want to look at toDoo. Note: Requires Adobe AIR (download link at bottom of article). toDoo in Action Once you have installed toDoo everything is rather straightforward for getting started. The first time that you start toDoo there will be a temporary “fill-in” for the “Subject & Details Areas”. Simply highlight over the temporary text and add your information. Notice that if desired you can easily set a custom date and time for your tasks right below the “Details Area”. Note: toDoo does not minimize to the “System Tray”. Once you have everything set all that you need to do is click on “add task”. Here was our first new task being viewed in the “toDoo Description Tab”. Time to add a second task…here you can see the drop-down calendar. You can scroll through and select a different month very easily…just click on the desired day and it will be automatically set. Adding our second task… If you need to edit any of the details for a particular task you can do so in the “Edit toDoo Tab”. This nice little app is convenient and easy to use. Conclusion ToDoo is a simple straightforward app that lets you keep track of your tasks list and relevant details without an online account (especially helpful if you are without a wireless connection at a given moment). If you are looking for more of a list approach that runs on your desktop, then check out our article on Doomi here. Links Download ToDoo at Softpedia Download ToDoo at Adobe Marketplace Download Adobe AIR Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Turn Chrome’s New Tab Page into a Google Tasks PageMake To-Do Bar in Outlook 2007 Show Only Today’s TasksAdd a non-Google Tasks List to ChromeKeep Track of Homework Assignments with SoshikuTrack the Amount of Time You Spend Online in Firefox TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images Get Wildlife Photography Tips at BBC’s PhotoMasterClasses Mashpedia is a Real-time Encyclopedia

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• SQL SERVER – A Puzzle – Fun with NULL – Fix Error 8117

  - by pinaldave

  During my 8 years of career, I have been involved in many interviews. Quite often, I act as the  interview. If I am the interviewer, I ask many questions – from easy questions to difficult ones. When I am the interviewee, I frequently get an opportunity to ask the interviewer some questions back. Regardless of the my capacity in attending the interview, I always make it a point to ask the interviewer at least one question. What is NULL? It’s always fun to ask this question during interviews, because in every interview, I get a different answer. NULL is often confused with false, absence of value or infinite value. Honestly, NULL is a very interesting subject as it bases its behavior in server settings. There are a few properties of NULL that are universal, but the knowledge about these properties is not known in a universal sense. Let us run this simple puzzle. Run the following T-SQL script: SELECT SUM(data) FROM (SELECT NULL AS data) t It will return the following error: Msg 8117, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Operand data type NULL is invalid for sum operator. Now the error makes it very clear that NULL is invalid for sum Operator. Frequently enough, I have showed this simple query to many folks whom I came across. I asked them if they could modify the subquery and return the result as NULL. Here is what I expected: Even though this is a very simple looking query, so far I’ve got the correct answer from only 10% of the people to whom I have asked this question. It was common for me to receive this kind of answer – convert the NULL to some data type. However, doing so usually returns the value as 0 or the integer they passed. SELECT SUM(data) FROM (SELECT ISNULL(NULL,0) AS data) t I usually see many people modifying the outer query to get desired NULL result, but that is not allowed in this simple puzzle. This small puzzle made me wonder how many people have a clear understanding about NULL. Well, here is the answer to my simple puzzle. Just CAST NULL AS INT and it will return the final result as NULL: SELECT SUM(data) FROM (SELECT CAST(NULL AS INT) AS data) t Now that you know the answer, don’t you think it was very simple indeed? This blog post is especially dedicated to my friend Madhivanan who has written an excellent blog post about NULL. I am confident that after reading the blog post from Madhivanan, you will have no confusion regarding NULL in the future. Read: NULL, NULL, NULL and nothing but NULL. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• What&rsquo;s new in VS.10 &amp; TFS.10?

  - by johndoucette

  Getting my geek on… I have decided to call the products VS.10 (Visual Studio 2010), TP.10 (Test Professional 2010),  and TFS.10 (Team Foundation Server 2010) Thanks Neno Loje. What's new in Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server 2010? Focusing on Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) ALM-related parts: Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 NEW: IntelliTrace® (aka the historical debugger) NEW: Architecture Tools New Project Type: Modeling Project UML Diagrams UML Use Case Diagram UML Class Diagram UML Sequence Diagram (supports reverse enginneering) UML Activity Diagram UML Component Diagram Layer Diagram (with Team Build integration for layer validation) Architecuture Explorer Dependency visualization DGML Web & Load Tests Visual Studio Premium 2010 NEW: Architecture Tools Read-only model viewer Development Tools Code Analysis New Rules like SQL Injection detection Rule Sets Code Profiler Multi-Tier Profiling JScript Profiling Profiling applications on virtual machines in sampling mode Code Metrics Test Tools Code Coverage NEW: Test Impact Analysis NEW: Coded UI Test Database Tools (DB schema versioning & deployment) Visual Studio Professional 2010 Debuger Mixed Mode Debugging for 64-bit Applications Export/Import of Breakpoints and data tips Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 Microsoft Test Manager (MTM, formerly known as "Camano")) Fast Forward Testing Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Work Item Tracking and Project Management New MSF templatesfor Agile and CMMI (V 5.0) Hierarchical Work Items Custom Work Item Link Types Ready to use Excel agile project management workbooks for managing your backlogs (including capacity planing) Convert Work Item query to an Excel report MS Excel integration Support for Work Item hierarchies Formatting is preserved after doing a 'Refresh' MS Project integration Hierarchy and successor/predecessor info is now synchronized NEW: Test Case Management Version Control Public Workspaces Branch & Merge Visualization Tracking of Changesets & Work Items Gated Check-In Team Build Build Controllers and Agents Workflow 4-based build process NEW: Lab Management (only a pre-release is avaiable at the moment!) Project Portal & Reporting Dashboards (on SharePoint Portal) Burndown Chart TFS Web Parts (to show data from TFS) Administration & Operations Topology enhancements Application tier network load balancing (NLB) SQL Server scale out Improved Sharepoint flexibility Report Server flexibility Zone support Kerberos support Separation of TFS and SQL administration Setup Separate install from configure Improved installation wizards Optional components Simplified account requirements Improved Reporting Services configuration Setup consolidation Upgrading from previous TFS versions Improved IIS flexibility Administration Consolidation of command line tools User rename support Project Collections Archive/restore individual project collections Move Team Project Collections Server consolidation Team Project Collection Split Team Project Collection Isolation Server request cancellation Licensing: TFS server license included in MSDN subscriptions Removed features (former features not part of Visual Studio 2010): Debug » Start With Application Verifier Object Test Bench IntelliSense for C++ / CLI Debugging support for SQL 2000

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• American Modern Insurance Group recognized at 2010 INN VIP Best Practices Awards

  - by [email protected]

  Below: Helen Pitts (right), Oracle Insurance, congratulates Bruce Weisgerber, Munich Re, as he accepts a VIP Best Practices Award on behalf of American Modern Insurance Group.     Oracle Insurance Senior Product Marketing Manager Helen Pitts is attending the 2010 ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, and will be providing updates from the show floor. This is one of my favorite seasons of the year--insurance trade show season. It is a time to reconnect with peers, visit with partners, make new industry connections, and celebrate our customers' achievements. It's especially meaningful when we can share the experience of having one of our Oracle Insurance customers recognized for being an innovator in its business and in the industry. Congratulations to American Modern Insurance Group, part of the Munich Re Group. American Modern earned an Insurance Networking News (INN) 2010 VIP Best Practice Award yesterday evening during the 2010 ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum. The award recognizes an insurer's best practice for use of a specific technology and the role, if feasible, that ACORD data standards played as a part of their business and technology. American Modern received an Honorable Mention for leveraging the Oracle Documaker enterprise document automation solution to: Improve the quality of communications with customers in high value, high-touch lines of business Convert thousands of page elements or "forms" from their previous system, with near pixel-perfect accuracy Increase efficiency and reusability by storing all document elements (fonts, logos, approved wording, etc.) in one place Issue on-demand documents, such as address changes or policy transactions to multiple recipients at once Consolidate all customer communications onto a single platform Gain the ability to send documents to multiple recipients at once, further improving efficiency Empower agents to produce documents in real time via the Web, such as quotes, applications and policy documents, improving carrier-agent relationships Munich Re's Bruce Weisgerber accepted the award on behalf of American Modern from Lloyd Chumbly, vice president of standards at ACORD. In a press release issued after the ceremony Chumbly noted, "This award embodies a philosophy of efficiency--working smarter with standards, these insurers represent the 'best of the best' as chosen by a body of seasoned insurance industry professionals." We couldn't agree with you more, Lloyd. Congratulations again to American Modern on your continued innovation and success. You're definitely a VIP in our book! To learn more about how American Modern is putting its enterprise document automation strategy into practice, click here to read a case study. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance.

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• Playing NSF music in FMOD.net

  - by Tesserex

  So, as the title says, I want to be able to play NSF files using FMOD, because my project already uses FMOD and I'd rather not replace it. This will involve figuring out how existing players and emulators work and porting it. I haven't yet found an existing player that uses FMOD. My starting point is the MyNes source from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mynes/. There are two big steps between here and what I'm looking for. MyNes plays from a ROM, not NSF. So, I have to rip out the APU and get it to play NSF files. The MyNes APU uses SlimDX, so I have to convert that to FMOD.NET. I am really stuck about how to go about either of these, because I'm not that familiar with audio formats and it's hard finding resources online. So here are a few questions: From what I can tell from the NSF spec at http://kevtris.org/nes/nsfspec.txt, it's just contains the relevant memory section of the ROM, plus the header. If anyone can verify or correct this that would be great. The emulator APU uses data from the rest of the emulator to play, including things like cycle counts. I'm not sure what replaces this in a standalone player. Can't I just load all the music data at once into a stream and play it? Joining #1 and #2, does the header data from the NSF substitute for some of the ROM data in the emulator code? Using FMOD, will I be following the usercreatedsound example for loading a stream? And does this format count as PCM? Specifically MyNes says PCM8. Any tips on loading / playing the stream in FMOD are appreciated. As an aside, I don't really understand the loading / playing sections of the spec I linked at all. It seems to apply to 6502 systems / emulators only and not to my situation. I know it's a long shot for anyone here to have enough experience in this area to help, but anything you can provide is definitely appreciated. A link to an existing .NET library that does this would be even better, but I don't believe one exists.

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• Defining Social Media Terms

  - by David Dorf

  As I talk about social in the context of retail, I sometimes get tripped up on different terms. I know what I mean, but the audience may have something else in mind. So I decided to see if I could find some well accepted definitions for common terms. While there are definitions on the Internet, I'm not sure they are well accepted. After reviewing several, here's what I came up with: Social Network: a structure of individuals and groups connected together by commonality. That seems pretty straightforward. A group of friends, co-workers, music fans, etc. The key here is that they have something in common that connects them. Social Media: Internet channels that support the collaborative publishing of information by and for social networks. The key here is to differentiate between traditional one-way media, and conversational social media. When its social its two-way, allowing both the publishing and consuming of information. Examples are blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Social Marketing: the use of social media for marketing, public relations, and customer service. Wikipedia actually includes "selling" here but I think that's separate from marketing, as you'll see further down below. Most people look at social media as entertainment, but the marketing angle adds business value. This is where retailers discover and engage customers to build a relationship. Social Merchandising: the integration of social media and product discovery. Whereas marketing is focused more on brand image, customer engagement, and promotions, merchandising is more directly trying to convert browsers into purchases. This includes deciding what customers want, often by asking the social network, and deciding how to position products to the social network. Social Selling: the incorporation of e-commerce into social media. While on a social media site, social selling enables the purchasing of goods/services in the user's context, without leaving the social media channel. If a user clicks on an advertisement and is taken to an e-commerce site, then that's really just web advertising and not social selling. Well, do these terms and definitions make sense? Let me know what you think.

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