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• Tuning performance of Ubuntu 10.04 on Compaq Evo W4000.

  - by Fantomas

  Hi, I got this computer free and installed Ubuntu 10.04 on it + updates, plus followed the following tutorial all the way: http://www.unixmen.com/linux-tutorials/937-things-to-do-after-installing-ubuntu-1004-lts-lucid-lynx I love the Docky which comes with it, but the computer has been running rather slowly. The System: kernel 2.6.32-22-generic Gnome 2.30.0 (I like Gnome!) Memory: 1GB Processor: Intel (R) Pentium (R) 4 CPU 1700 MHz (needless to say, it is 32 bit). I think I dedicated 128 Mb to video memory while installing, but cannot find this setting now. I did also install an NVidia driver for the 3D card, so I probably want to reclaim that memory back. I want to trim the fat but I also want to keep some of the sex appeal of Ubuntu 10.04. I will gift this computer to a friend, who will use it for Internet, music, videos, word processing, Skype and instant messaging - he is non-technical, so this hardware and Linux should work for him; I just need to speed it up while keeping the good software and having a nice UI. I sort of know my way around Linux, but not that well. Feel free to ask me to run particular commands if you want more info. For starters, here are the services below. Which ones can I kill and how? What else can go? There is no need to run ssh or ftp or http or ntp servers. As I said before, this computer is for non-technical person. There is also absolutely no bluetooth or wireless networking needed - it will feed off a regular ethernet cable. What I do not want to do is reinstall some other distro or recompile a kernel. I want to make it 80% perfect spending 20% of the energy :) Thanks! $ service --status-all [ ? ] acpi-support [ ? ] acpid [ ? ] alsa-mixer-save [ ? ] anacron [ - ] apparmor [ ? ] apport [ ? ] atd [ ? ] avahi-daemon [ ? ] binfmt-support [ - ] bluetooth [ - ] bootlogd [ - ] brltty [ ? ] console-setup [ ? ] cron [ + ] cups [ ? ] dbus [ ? ] dmesg [ ? ] dns-clean [ ? ] failsafe-x [ - ] fancontrol [ ? ] gdm [ - ] grub-common [ ? ] hostname [ ? ] hwclock [ ? ] hwclock-save [ ? ] irqbalance [ - ] kerneloops [ ? ] killprocs [ - ] lm-sensors [ ? ] module-init-tools [ ? ] network-interface [ ? ] network-interface-security [ ? ] network-manager [ ? ] networking [ ? ] ondemand [ ? ] pcmciautils [ ? ] plymouth [ ? ] plymouth-log [ ? ] plymouth-splash [ ? ] plymouth-stop [ ? ] pppd-dns [ ? ] procps [ + ] pulseaudio [ ? ] rc.local [ - ] rsync [ ? ] rsyslog [ - ] saned [ ? ] screen-cleanup [ ? ] sendsigs [ ? ] speech-dispatcher [ ? ] stop-bootlogd [ ? ] stop-bootlogd-single [ ? ] udev [ ? ] udev-finish [ ? ] udevmonitor [ ? ] udevtrigger [ ? ] ufw [ ? ] umountfs [ ? ] umountnfs.sh [ ? ] umountroot [ ? ] unattended-upgrades [ - ] urandom [ + ] winbind [ ? ] wpa-ifupdown [ - ] x11-common

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• Big Data – Operational Databases Supporting Big Data – Key-Value Pair Databases and Document Databases – Day 13 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the Relational Database and NoSQL database in the Big Data Story. In this article we will understand the role of Key-Value Pair Databases and Document Databases Supporting Big Data Story. Now we will see a few of the examples of the operational databases. Relational Databases (Yesterday’s post) NoSQL Databases (Yesterday’s post) Key-Value Pair Databases (This post) Document Databases (This post) Columnar Databases (Tomorrow’s post) Graph Databases (Tomorrow’s post) Spatial Databases (Tomorrow’s post) Key Value Pair Databases Key Value Pair Databases are also known as KVP databases. A key is a field name and attribute, an identifier. The content of that field is its value, the data that is being identified and stored. They have a very simple implementation of NoSQL database concepts. They do not have schema hence they are very flexible as well as scalable. The disadvantages of Key Value Pair (KVP) database are that they do not follow ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) properties. Additionally, it will require data architects to plan for data placement, replication as well as high availability. In KVP databases the data is stored as strings. Here is a simple example of how Key Value Database will look like: Key Value Name Pinal Dave Color Blue Twitter @pinaldave Name Nupur Dave Movie The Hero As the number of users grow in Key Value Pair databases it starts getting difficult to manage the entire database. As there is no specific schema or rules associated with the database, there are chances that database grows exponentially as well. It is very crucial to select the right Key Value Pair Database which offers an additional set of tools to manage the data and provides finer control over various business aspects of the same. Riak Rick is one of the most popular Key Value Database. It is known for its scalability and performance in high volume and velocity database. Additionally, it implements a mechanism for collection key and values which further helps to build manageable system. We will further discuss Riak in future blog posts. Key Value Databases are a good choice for social media, communities, caching layers for connecting other databases. In simpler words, whenever we required flexibility of the data storage keeping scalability in mind – KVP databases are good options to consider. Document Database There are two different kinds of document databases. 1) Full document Content (web pages, word docs etc) and 2) Storing Document Components for storage. The second types of the document database we are talking about over here. They use Javascript Object Notation (JSON) and Binary JSON for the structure of the documents. JSON is very easy to understand language and it is very easy to write for applications. There are two major structures of JSON used for Document Database – 1) Name Value Pairs and 2) Ordered List. MongoDB and CouchDB are two of the most popular Open Source NonRelational Document Database. MongoDB MongoDB databases are called collections. Each collection is build of documents and each document is composed of fields. MongoDB collections can be indexed for optimal performance. MongoDB ecosystem is highly available, supports query services as well as MapReduce. It is often used in high volume content management system. CouchDB CouchDB databases are composed of documents which consists fields and attachments (known as description). It supports ACID properties. The main attraction points of CouchDB are that it will continue to operate even though network connectivity is sketchy. Due to this nature CouchDB prefers local data storage. Document Database is a good choice of the database when users have to generate dynamic reports from elements which are changing very frequently. A good example of document usages is in real time analytics in social networking or content management system. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about various other Operational Databases supporting Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Exposed: Fake Social Marketing

  - by Mike Stiles

  Brands and marketers who want to build their social popularity on a foundation of lies are starting to face more of an uphill climb. Fake social is starting to get exposed, and there are a lot of emperors getting caught without any clothes. Facebook is getting ready to do a purge of “Likes” on Pages that were a result of bots, fake accounts, and even real users who were duped or accidentally Liked a Page. Most of those accidental Likes occur on mobile, where it’s easy for large fingers to hit the wrong space. Depending on the degree to which your Page has been the subject of such activity, you may see your number of Likes go down. But don’t sweat it, that’s a good thing. The social world has turned the corner and assessed the value of a Like. And the verdict is that a Like is valuable as an opportunity to build a real relationship with a real customer. Its value pales immensely compared to a user who’s actually engaged with the brand. Those fake Likes aren’t doing you any good. Huge numbers may once have impressed, but it’s not fooling anybody anymore. Facebook’s selling point to marketers is the ability to use a brand’s fans to reach friends of those fans. Consequently, there has to be validity and legitimacy to a fan count. Speaking of mobile, Trademob recently reported 40% of clicks are essentially worthless, because 22% of them are accidental (again with the fat fingers), while 18% are trickery. Publishers will but huge banner ads next to tiny app buttons to increase the odds of an accident. Others even hide a banner behind another to score 2 clicks instead of 1. Pontiflex and Harris Interactive last year found 47% of users were more likely to click a mobile ad accidentally than deliberately. Beyond that, hijacked devices are out there manipulating click data. But to what end for a marketer? What’s the value of a click on something a user never even saw? What’s the value of a seen but accidentally clicked ad if there’s no resulting transaction? Back to fake Likes, followers and views; they’re definitely for sale on numerous sites, none of which I’ll promote. $5 can get you 1,000 Twitter followers. You can even get followers targeted by interests. One site was set up by an unemployed accountant out of his house in England. He gets them from a wholesaler in Brooklyn, who gets them from a 19-year-old supplier in India. The unemployed accountant is making $10,000 a day. That means a lot of brands, celebrities and organizations are playing the fake social game, apparently not coming to grips with the slim value of the numbers they’re buying. But now, in addition to having paid good money for non-ROI numbers, there’s the embarrassment factor. At least a couple of sites have popped up allowing anyone to see just how many fake and inactive followers you have. Britain’s Fake Follower Check and StatusPeople are the two getting the most attention. Enter any Twitter handle and the results are there for all to see. Fake isn’t good, period. “Inactive” could be real followers, but if they’re real, they’re just watching, not engaging. If someone runs a check on your Twitter handle and turns up fake followers, does that mean you’re suspect or have purchased followers? No. Anyone can follow anyone, so most accounts will have some fakes. Even account results like Barack Obama’s (70% fake according to StatusPeople) and Lady Gaga’s (71% fake) don’t mean these people knew about all those fakes or initiated them. Regardless, brands should realize they’re now being watched, and users are judging the legitimacy of their social channels. Use one of any number of tools available to assess and clean out fake Likes and followers so that your numbers are as genuine as possible. And obviously, skip the “buying popularity” route of social marketing strategy. It doesn’t work and it gets you busted…a losing combination.

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• How can I thoroughly evaluate a prospective employer?

  - by glenviewjeff

  We hear much about code smells, test smells, and even project smells, but I have heard no discussion about employer "smells" outside of the Joel Test. After much frustration working for employers with a bouquet of unpleasant corporate-culture odors, I believe it's time for me to actively seek a more mature development environment. I've started assembling a list of questions to help vet employers by identifying issues during a job interview, and am looking for additional ideas. I suppose this list could easily be modified by an employer to vet an employee as well, but please answer from the interviewee's perspective. I think it would be important to ask many of these questions of multiple people to find out if consistent answers are given. For the most part, I tried to put the questions in each section in the order they could be asked. An undesired answer to an early question will often make follow-ups moot. Values What constitutes "well-written" software? What attributes does a good developer have? Same question for manager. Process Do you have a development process? How rigorously do you follow it? How do you decide how much process to apply to each project? Describe a typical project lifecycle. Ask the following if they don't come up otherwise: Waterfall/iterative: How much time is spent in upfront requirements gathering? upfront design? Testing Who develops tests (developers or separate test engineers?) When are they developed? When are the tests executed? How long do they take to execute? What makes a good test? How do you know you've tested enough? What percentage of code is tested? Review What is the review process like? What percentage of code is reviewed? Design? How frequently can I expect to participate as code/design reviewer/reviewee? What are the criteria applied to review and where do the criteria come from? Improvement What new tools and techniques have you evaluated or deployed in the past year? What training courses have your employees been given in the past year? What will I be doing for the first six months in your company (hinting at what kind of organized mentorship/training has been thought through, if any) What changes to your development process have been made in the past year? How do you improve and learn from your mistakes as an organization? What was your organizations biggest mistake in the past year, and how was it addressed? What feedback have you given to management lately? Was it implemented? If not, why? How does your company use "best practices?" How do you seek them out from the outside or within, and how do you share them with each other? Ethics Tell me about an ethical problem you or your employees experienced recently and how was it resolved? Do you use open-source software? What open-source contributions have you made? Follow-Ups I liked what @jim-leonardo said on this Stack Overflow question: Really a thing to ask yourself: "Does this person seem like they are trying to recruit me and make me interested?" I think this is one of the most important bits. If they seem to be taking the attitude that the only one being interviewed is you, then they probably will treat you poorly. Good interviewers understand they have to sell the position as much as the candidate needs to sell themselves. @SethP added: Glassdoor.com is a good web site for researching potential employers. It contains information about how specific companies conduct interviews...

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• Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices

  - by Etienne Tremblay

  I’d like to thank Packt for providing me with a review version of Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices eBook. In fairness I also know the author Peter having seen him speak at DevTeach on many occasions.  I started by looking at the table of content to see what this book was about, knowing that “best practices” is a real misnomer I wanted to see what they were.  I really like the fact that he starts the book by really saying they are not really best practices but actually recommend practices.  As a Team Foundation Server user I found that chapter 2 was more for the open source crowd and I really skimmed it.  The portion on Branching was well documented, although I’m not a fan of the testing branch myself, but the rest was right on. The section on merge remote changes (bring the outside to you) paradigm is really important and was touched on. Chapter 3 has good solid practices on low level constructs like generics and exceptions. Chapter 4 dives into architectural practices like decoupling, distributed architecture and data based architecture.  DTOs and ORMs are touched on briefly as is NoSQL. Chapter 5 is about deployment and is really a great primer on all the “packaging” technologies like Visual Studio Setup and Deployment (depreciated in 2012), Click Once and WIX the major player outside of commercial solutions.  This is a nice section on how to move from VSSD to WIX this is going to be important in the coming years due to the fact that VS 2012 doesn’t support VSSD. In chapter 6 we dive into automated testing practices, including test coverage, mocking, TDD, SpecDD and Continuous Testing.  Peter covers all those concepts really nicely albeit succinctly. Being a book on recommended practices I find this is really good. I really enjoyed chapter 7 that gave me a lot of great tips to enhance my Visual Studio “experience”.  Tips on organizing projects where good.  Also even though I knew about configurations I like that he put that in there so you can move all your settings to another machine, a lot of people don’t know about that. Quick find and Resharper are also briefly covered.  He touches on macros (depreciated in 2012).  Finally he touches on Continuous Integration a very important concept in today’s ALM landscape. Chapter 8 is all about Parallelization, threads, Async, division of labor, reactive extensions.  All those concepts are touched on and again generalized approaches to those modern problems are giving.       Chapter 9 goes into distributed apps, the most used and accepted practice in the industry for .NET projects the chapter tackles concepts like Scalability, Messaging and Cloud (the flavor of the month of distributed apps, although I think this will stick ;-)).  He also looks a protocols TCP/UDP and how to debug distributed apps.  He touches on logging and health monitoring. Chapter 10 tackles recommended practices for web services starting with implementing WCF services, which goes into all sort of goodness like how to host in IIS or self-host.  How to manual test WCF services, also a section on authentication and authorization.  ASP.NET Web services are also touched on in that chapter All in all a good read, nice tips and accepted practices.  I like the conciseness of the subjects and Peter touches on a lot of things in this book and uses a lot of the current technologies flavors to explain the concepts.   Cheers, ET

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• C#: A "Dumbed-Down" C++?

  - by James Michael Hare

  I was spending a lovely day this last weekend watching my sons play outside in one of the better weekends we've had here in Saint Louis for quite some time, and whilst watching them and making sure no limbs were broken or eyes poked out with sticks and other various potential injuries, I was perusing (in the correct sense of the word) this month's MSDN magazine to get a sense of the latest VS2010 features in both IDE and in languages. When I got to the back pages, I saw a wonderful article by David S. Platt entitled, "In Praise of Dumbing Down"  (msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee336129.aspx).  The title captivated me and I read it and found myself agreeing with it completely especially as it related to my first post on divorcing C++ as my favorite language. Unfortunately, as Mr. Platt mentions, the term dumbing-down has negative connotations, but is really and truly a good thing.  You are, in essence, taking something that is extremely complex and reducing it to something that is much easier to use and far less error prone.  Adding safeties to power tools and anti-kick mechanisms to chainsaws are in some sense "dumbing them down" to the common user -- but that also makes them safer and more accessible for the common user.  This was exactly my point with C++ and C#.  I did not mean to infer that C++ was not a useful or good language, but that in a very high percentage of cases, is too complex and error prone for the job at hand. Choosing the correct programming language for a job is a lot like choosing any other tool for a task.  For example: if I want to dig a French drain in my lawn, I can attempt to use a huge tractor-like backhoe and the job would be done far quicker than if I would dig it by hand.  I can't deny that the backhoe has the raw power and speed to perform.  But you also cannot deny that my chances of injury or chances of severing utility lines or other resources climb at an exponential rate inverse to the amount of training I may have on that machinery. Is C++ a powerful tool?  Oh yes, and it's great for those tasks where speed and performance are paramount.  But for most of us, it's the wrong tool.  And keep in mind, I say this even though I have 17 years of experience in using it and feel myself highly adept in utilizing its features both in the standard libraries, the STL, and in supplemental libraries such as BOOST.  Which, although greatly help with adding powerful features quickly, do very little to curb the relative dangers of the language. So, you may say, the fault is in the developer, that if the developer had some higher skills or if we only hired C++ experts this would not be an issue.  Now, I will concede there is some truth to this.  Obviously, the higher skilled C++ developers you hire the better the chance they will produce highly performant and error-free code.  However, what good is that to the average developer who cannot afford a full stable of C++ experts? That's my point with C#:  It's like a kinder, gentler C++.  It gives you nearly the same speed, and in many ways even more power than C++, and it gives you a much softer cushion for novices to fall against if they code less-than-optimally.  A bug is a bug, of course, in any language, but C# does a good job of hiding and taking on the task of handling almost all of the resource issues that make C++ so tricky.  For my money, C# is much more maintainable, more feature-rich, second only slightly in performance, faster to market, and -- last but not least -- safer and easier to use.  That's why, where I work, I much prefer to see the developers moving to C#.  The quantity of bugs is much lower, and we don't need to hire "experts" to achieve the same results since the language itself handles those resource pitfalls so prevalent in poorly written C++ code.  C++ will still have its place in the world, and I'm sure I'll still use it now and again where it is truly the correct tool for the job, but for nearly every other project C# is a wonderfully "dumbed-down" version of C++ -- in the very best sense -- and to me, that's the smart choice.

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• Is inconsistent formatting a sign of a sloppy programmer?

  - by dreza

  I understand that everyone has their own style of programming and that you should be able to read other people's styles and accept it for what it is. However, would one be considered a sloppy programmer if one's style of coding was inconsistent across whatever standard they were working against? Some example of inconsistencies might be: Sometimes naming private variables with _ and sometimes not Sometimes having varying indentations within code blocks Not aligning braces up i.e. same column if using start using new line style Spacing not always consistent around operators i.e. p=p+1, p+=1 vs other times p =p+1 or p = p + 1 etc Is this even something that as a programmer I should be concerned with addressing? Or is it such a minor nit picking thing that at the end of the day I should just not worry about it and worry about what the end user sees and whether the code works rather than how it looks while working? Is it sloppy programming or just over obsessive nit picking? EDIT: After some excellent comments I realized I may have left out some information in my question. This question came about after reviewing another colleagues code check-in and noticing some of these things and then realizing that I've seen these kind of in-consistencies in previous check-ins. It then got me thinking about my code and whether I do the same things and noticed that I typically don't etc I'm not suggesting his technique is either bad or good in this question or whether his way of doing things is right or wrong. EDIT: To answer some queries to some more good feed back. The specific instance this review occurred in was using Visual Studio 2010 and programming in c# so I don't think the editor would cause any issues. In fact it should only help I would hope. Sorry if I left that piece of info out and it effects any current answers. I was trying to be a bit more generic in understanding if this would be considered sloppy etc. And to add an even more specific example of a code piece I saw during reading of the check-in: foreach(var block in Blocks) { // .. some other code in here foreach(var movement in movements) { movement.Moved.Zero(); } // the un-formatted brace } Such a minor thing I know, but many small things add up(???), and I did have to double glance at the code at the time to see where everything lined up I guess. Please note this code was formatted appropriately before this check-in. EDIT: After reading some great answers and varying thoughts, the summary I've taken from this was. It's not necessarily a sign of a sloppy programmer however as programmers we have a duty (to ourselves and other programmers) to make the code as readable as possible to assist in further ongoing development. However it can hint at inadequacies which is something that is only possible to review on a case by case (person by person) basis. There are many reasons why this might occur. They should be taken in context and worked through with the person/people involved if reasonable. We have a duty to try and help all programmers become better programmers! In the good old days when development was done using good old notepad (or other simple text editing tool) this occurred much more frequently. However we have the assistance of modern IDE's now so although we shouldn't necessarily become OTT about this, it should still probably be addressed to some degree. We as programmers vary in our standards, styles and approaches to solutions. However it seems that in general we all take PRIDE in our work and as a trait it is something that can stand programmers apart. Making something to the best of our abilities both internal (code) and external (end user result) goes along way to giving us that big fat pat on the back that we may not go looking for but swells our heart with pride. And finally to quote CrazyEddie from his post below. Don't sweat the small stuff

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• Apprentice Boot Camp in South Africa (Part 2)

  - by Tim Koekkoek

  By Maximilian Michel (DE), Jorge Garnacho (ES), Daniel Maull (UK), Adam Griffiths (UK), Guillermo De Las Nieves (ES), Catriona McGill (UK), Ed Dunlop (UK) Today we have the second part of the adventures of seven apprentices from all over Europe in South-Africa!  Kruger National Park & other experiences Going to the Kruger National Park was definitely an experience we will all remember for the rest of our lives. This trip,organised by Patrick Fitzgerald, owner of the Travellers Nest (where we all stayed), took us from the hustle and bustle of Joburg to experience what Africa is all about, the wild! Although the first week’s training we had prior to this trip to the Kruger was going very well, we all knew this was to be a very nice break before we started the second week of training. And we were right, the animals, scenery and sights we saw were just simply incredible and like I said something we will remember for the rest of our lives. To see lions, elephants, cheetahs and rhinos and many more in a zoo is one thing, but to see them in the wild, in their natural habitat is very special and I personally only realised this from the early 5 am start on the first morning in the Kruger, which was definitely worth it. Not only was it all about the safari, we ate some wonderful food, in particular on the Saturday night, Patrick made us a traditional South African Braai which was one of my favourite meals of the whole two weeks. After the Kruger National Park we had a whole day of traveling back to Johannesburg but even this was made to be a good day by our hosts. Despite the early start on the road it was all worth it by the time we reached God's Window. The walk to the top was made a lot harder by all the steaks we had eaten in the first week but the hard walk was worth it at the top, with views that stretched for miles. The Food The food in South Africa is typically meat and in big amounts, while there we ate a lot of big beef steaks, ribs and kudu sausage. All of the meat we ate was usually cooked with a sauce such as a Barbeque glaze. The restaurants we visited were: Upperdeck Restaurant, with live music and a great terrace to eat, the atmosphere was good for enjoying the music and eating our food. Most of us ate  Spare ribs that weighed 600 kg, with barbecue sauce that was delicious. Die Bosvelder Pub & Restaurant is a restaurant with a very surprising decor, this is because the walls had many of south Africa’s famous animals on them. The food was maybe the best we ate in South Africa. Our orders were: Springbokvlakte Lambs' Neck Stew, beef in gravy and steaks topped with cheese and then more meat on top! All meals were accompanied by a selection of white sauce cauliflower, spinach and zanhorias. Pepper Chair Restaurant, where the specialty is T-Bone steaks of 1.4 kg, but most of us were happy to attempt the 1 kg. Cooked with barbecue sauce over the meat, it was very good!  The only problem was their size causing the  the meat to get cold if you did not eat it very fast! We’re all waiting for our 1.0 kg t-bone steak including our Senior Director EMEA Systems Support Germany & Switzerland: Werner Hoellrigl The Godfather Restaurant, the food here was more meat in abundance. We ate: great ribs, hamburgers, steaks and all accompanied with a small plates of carrot and sauteed spinach, very good. We had two great weeks in South-Africa! If you want to join Oracle, then check http://campus.oracle.com 

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• PC runs very slowly for no apparent reason

  - by GalacticCowboy

  I have a Dell Latitude D820 that I've owned for about 2.5 years. It is a Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0GHz, with 2 GB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive and an NVidia Quadro 120M video card. The computer was purchased in late November of 2006 with XP Pro, and included a free upgrade to Vista Business. (Vista was available on MSDN but not yet via retail, so the Vista Business upgrades weren't shipped until March of '07.) Since we had an MSDN subscription at the time, I installed Vista Ultimate on it pretty much as soon as I got it. It ran happily until sometime in the spring of 2007 when Media Center (which I had never used except to watch DVDs) started throwing some kind of bizarre SQL (CE?) error. This error would pop up at random times just while using the computer. Furthermore, Media Center would no longer start. I never identified the cause of this error. I had the Vista Business upgrade by this time, so I nuked the machine, installed XP and all the drivers, and then the Vista Business upgrade. Again, it ran happily for a few months and then started behaving badly once again. Vista Business doesn't have Media Center, so this exhibited completely unrelated symptoms. For no apparent reason and at fairly random times, the machine would suddenly appear to freeze up or run very slowly. For example, launching a new application window (any app) might take 30-45 seconds to paint fully. However, Task Manager showed very low CPU load, memory, etc. I tried all the normal stuff (chkdsk, defrag, etc.) and ran several diagnostic programs to try to identify any problems, but none found anything. It eventually reached the point that the computer was all but unusable, so I nuked it again and installed XP. This time I decided to stick with XP instead of going to Vista. However, within the past couple of months it has started to exhibit the same symptoms in XP that I used to see in Vista. The computer is still under Dell warranty until December, but so far they aren't any help unless I can identify a specific problem. A friend (partner in a now-dead business) has an identical machine that was purchased at the same time. His machine exhibits none of these symptoms, which leads me to believe it is a hardware issue, but I can't figure out how to identify it. Any ideas? Utilities? Seen something similar? At this point I can't even identify any pattern to the behavior, but would be willing to run a "stress test"-style app for as long as a couple days if I had any hope that it would find something. EDIT July 17 I'm testing jerryjvl's answer regarding the video card, though I'm not sure it fully explains the symptoms yet. This morning I ran a video stress test. The test itself ran fine, but immediately afterward the PC started acting up again. I left ProcExp open and various system processes were consuming 50-60% of the CPU but with no apparent reason. For example, "services.exe" was eating about 40%, but the sum of its child processes wasn't higher than about 5%. I left it alone for several minutes to settle down, and then it was fine again. I used the "video card stability test" from firestone-group.com. Its output isn't very detailed, but it at least exercises the hardware pretty hard. EDIT July 22 Thanks for your excellent suggestions. Here is an update on what I have tried so far. Ran memtest86, SeaTools (Seagate), Hitachi drive fitness test, video card stability test (mentioned above). The video card test was the only one that seemed to produce any results, though it didn't occur during the actual test. I defragged the drive (again...) with JkDefrag I dropped the video card

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• Windows Service SearchIndexer.exe Crashes on Indexing

  - by Josh Jay

  Relevant Specs: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1 Outlook 2010 Version 14.0.7116.5000 (32-bit) Original Symptom: In outlook, I attempted to search for an email but nothing ever returned and the indicator kept going like it was searching. Attempted Resolutions: I investigated the search options and with some research noticed the Windows Service "Windows Search" (SearchIndexer.exe) was not running. I attempted to start it but I receive this error message: "Windows could not start the Windows Search service on Local Computer. Error 1067: The process terminated unexpectedly." The Event Viewer gives this error entry: Log Name: Application Source: Application Error Date: 6/3/2014 11:02:05 AM Event ID: 1000 Task Category: (100) Level: Error Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: ***REMOVED FOR POST*** Description: Faulting application name: SearchIndexer.exe, version: 7.0.7601.17610, time stamp: 0x4dc0d019 Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 6.1.7601.18229, time stamp: 0x51fb1677 Exception code: 0xc0000005 Fault offset: 0x000000000000940d Faulting process id: 0x6a0 Faulting application start time: 0x01cf7f3cc83757c6 Faulting application path: C:\Windows\system32\SearchIndexer.exe Faulting module path: C:\Windows\system32\KERNELBASE.dll Report Id: 06424160-eb30-11e3-9555-843a4b07b336 Event Xml: <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event"> <System> <Provider Name="Application Error" /> <EventID Qualifiers="0">1000</EventID> <Level>2</Level> <Task>100</Task> <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords> <TimeCreated SystemTime="2014-06-03T15:02:05.000000000Z" /> <EventRecordID>602923</EventRecordID> <Channel>Application</Channel> <Computer>M6700-12011.ncaa.org</Computer> <Security /> </System> <EventData> <Data>SearchIndexer.exe</Data> <Data>7.0.7601.17610</Data> <Data>4dc0d019</Data> <Data>KERNELBASE.dll</Data> <Data>6.1.7601.18229</Data> <Data>51fb1677</Data> <Data>c0000005</Data> <Data>000000000000940d</Data> <Data>6a0</Data> <Data>01cf7f3cc83757c6</Data> <Data>C:\Windows\system32\SearchIndexer.exe</Data> <Data>C:\Windows\system32\KERNELBASE.dll</Data> <Data>06424160-eb30-11e3-9555-843a4b07b336</Data> </EventData> </Event> The regular windows search (from start menu) works fine, and if I reboot the machine the service starts up OK but as soon as it kicks off when I let the machine idle for long enough it crashes (same Event Viewer entry). We also tried the Microsoft Utility to no avail. Has anyone seen this issue before?

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• AI to move custom-shaped spaceships (shape affecting movement behaviour)

  - by kaoD

  I'm designing a networked turn based 3D-6DOF space fleet combat strategy game which relies heavily on ship customization. Let me explain the game a bit, since you need to know a bit about it to set the question. What I aim for is the ability to create your own fleet of ships with custom shapes and attached modules (propellers, tractor beams...) which would give advantages and disadvantages to each ship, so you have lots of different fleet distributions. E.g., long ship with two propellers at the side would let the ship spin around that plane easily, bigger ships would move slowly unless you place lots of propellers at the back (therefore spending more "construction" points and energy when moving, and it will only move fast towards that direction.) I plan to balance all the game around this feature. The game would revolve around two phases: orders and combat phase. During the orders phase, you command the different ships. When all players finish the order phase, the combat phase begins and the ship orders get resolved in real-time for some time, then the action pauses and there's a new orders phase. The problem comes when I think about player input. To move a ship, you need to turn on or off different propellers if you want to steer, travel forward, brake, rotate in place... These propellers don't have to work at their whole power, so you can achieve more movement combinations with less propellers. I think this approach is a bit boring. The player doesn't want to fiddle with motors or anything, you just want to MOVE and KILL. The way I intend the player to give orders to these ships is by a destination and a rotation, and then the AI would calculate the correct propeller power to achive that movement and rotation. Propulsion doesn't have to be the same throught the entire turn calculation (after the orders have been given) so it would be cool if the ships reacted as they move, adjusting the power of the propellers for their needs dynamically, but it may be too hard to implement and it's not really needed for the game to work. In both cases, how would that AI decide which propellers to activate for the best (or at least not worst) trajectory to be achieved? I though about some approaches: Learning AI: The ship types would learn about their movement by trial and error, adjusting their behaviour with more uses, and finally becoming "smart". I don't want to get involved THAT far in AI coding, and I think it can be frustrating for the player (even if you can let it learn without playing.) Pre-calculated timestep movement: Upon ship creation, ALL possible movements are calculated for each propeller configuration and power for a given delta-time. Memory intensive, ugly, bad. Pre-calculated trajectories: The same as above but not for each delta-time but the whole trajectory, which would then be fitted as much as possible. Requires a fixed propeller configuration for the whole combat phase and is still memory intensive, ugly and bad. Continuous brute forcing: The AI continously checks ALL possible propeller configurations throughout the entire combat phase, precalculates a few time steps and decides which is the best one based on that. Con: what's good now might not be that good later, and it's too CPU intensive, ugly, and bad too. Single brute forcing: Same as above, but only brute forcing at the beginning of the simulation, so it needs constant propeller configuration throughout the entire combat phase. Coninuous angle check: This is not a full movement method, but maybe a way to discard "stupid" propeller configurations. Given the current propeller's normal vector and the final one, you can approximate the power needed for the propeller based on the angle. You must do this continuously throughout the whole combat phase. I figured this one out recently so I didn't put in too much thought. A priori, it has the "what's good now might not be that good later" drawback too, and it doesn't care about the other propellers which may act together to make a better propelling configuration. I'm really stuck here. Any ideas?

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• Where to download replacement "Explorerframe.DLL" Files for x64 Windows 7 Pro?

  - by Ben Franchuk

  After posting this question, I did some research to reveal what the problem likely was, and found what I need to fix. Following this is the original post, then my updated question. A few months ago I ended up requiring to change my computer's SID to fix a problem it had been having- Instead of fixing the problem, though, it screwed up my at-the-time current install of windows, to the point of me needing to do a fresh install. As I am in possession of an OEM copy of Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit, I successfully reinstalled over the dead copy with that (all the files that were on the computer previous to this windows install were put in a Windows.old folder). Everything installed and worked absolutely fine, except for one thing. The problem I am experiencing is that, in some Windows Explorer windows, the explorer pane doesn't show. Instead, it simply shows a white area where the pane would show. This makes some software not usable, I recently realized; Software such as Cubase, which use just the explorer pane to select file save locations, cannot save at all as the pane itself is... not operational. Below is a screenshot of this problem as it occurs in cubase; ...and again as it shows in UTorrent in the save location selector window. The highlighted area is where the sidebar would NORMALLY be. Pardon my scribbling over some of the things in the window- I would personally rather the internet did not get a glimpse of my files. I have yet to find a common reason why the pane works in some applications when they pull explorer, and others not. I have yet to see it go away, and the software affected by it has been affected since I reinstalled my copy of windows. Initially, I was able to live with it as I can type out save locations in the file name bar to navigate, but with software like Cubase, I do not have this option. Reinstalling windows again is NOT an option. Here's the updated question. After posting this question originally, I did some research on the problem in question, and it turns out that this is extremely easily fixable via replacing the file "ExplorerFrame.DLL" which is located in the System32 and SystemWOW64 Folders, in the windows folder, on the C:\ drive. As I quite frequently customize my computer, this is a normal thing for me to do and I know exactly how to safely and properly replace this file. The only problem is that I cannot for the life of me find a download of this file that actually works with my computer. I tried a couple from some different sites but they all caused explorer to not restart (I was given an error when starting the application from Task Manager) and was forced to revert to the broken .DLL files. Since there are 2 separate "ExplorerFrame.DLL" files; one for 64 bit and the other for 32 bit, I am assuming that I will need to download 2 separate versions to replace the corrupted ones. Where can I acquire these files? I am currently running Windows 7 Professional x64 Bit.

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• Test your internet connection - Emtel Fixed Broadband

  Already at the begin of April, I had a phone conversation with my representative at Emtel Ltd. about some upcoming issues due to the ongoing construction work in my neighbourhood. Unfortunately, they finally raised the house two levels above ours, and of course this has to have a negative impact on the visibility between the WiMAX outdoor unit on the roof and the aimed access point at Medine. So, today I had a technical team here to do a site survey and to come up with potential solutions. Short version: It doesn't look good after all. The site survey Well, the two technicians did their work properly, even re-arranged the antenna to check the connection with another end point down at La Preneuse. But no improvements. Looks like we are out of luck since the construction next door hasn't finished yet and at the moment, it even looks like they are planning to put at least one more level on top. I really wonder about the sanity of the responsible bodies at the local district council. But that's another story. Anyway, the outdoor unit was once again pointed towards Medine and properly fixed with new cable guides (air from the sea and rust...). Both of them did a good job and fine-tuned the reception signal to a mere 3 over 9; compared to the original 7 over 9 I had before the daily terror started. The site survey has been done, and now it's up to Emtel to come up with (better) solutions. Well, I wouldn't mind to have an unlimited, symmetric 3G/UMTS or even LTE connection. Let's see what they can do... Testing the connection There are several online sites available which offer you to check certain aspects of your internet connection. Personally, I'm used to speedtest.net and it works very well. I think it is good and necessary to check your connection from time to time, and only a couple of days ago, I posted the following on Emtel's wall at Facebook (21.05.2013 - 14:06 hrs): Dear Emtel, could you eventually provide an answer on the miserable results of SpeedTest? I chose Rose Hill (Hosted by Emtel Ltd.) as testing endpoint... Sadly, no response to this. Seems that the marketing department is not willing to deal with customers on Facebook. Okay, over at speedtest.net you can use their Flash-based test suite to check your connection to quite a number of servers of different providers world-wide. It's actually very interesting to see the results for different end points and to compare them to each other. The results Following are the results of Rose Hill (hosted by Emtel) and respectively Frankfurt, Germany (hosted by Vodafone DE): Speedtest.net result of 30.05.2013 between Flic en Flac and Rose Hill, Mauritius (Emtel - Fixed Broadband) Speedtest.net result of 30.05.2013 between Flic en Flac and Frankfurt, Germany (Emtel - Fixed Broadband) Luckily, the results are quite similar in terms of connection speed; which is good. I'm currently on a WiMAX tariff called 'Classic Browsing 2', or Fixed Broadband as they call it now, which provides a symmetric line of 768 Kbps (or roughly 0.75 Mbps). In terms of downloads or uploads this means that I would be able to transfer files in either direction with approximately 96 KB/s. Frankly speaking, thanks to compression, my choice of browser and operating system I usually exceed this value and I have download rates up to 120 KB/s - not too bad after all. Only the ping times are a little bit of concern. Due to the difference in distance, or better said based on the number of hubs between the endpoints, they indicate the amount of time that it takes to send a package from your machine to the remote server and get a response back. A lower value is better, and usually the ping is less than 300 ms between Mauritius and Europe. The alternatives in Mauritius Not sure whether I should note this done because for my requirements there are no alternatives to Emtel WiMAX at the moment. It would be great to have your opinion on the situation of internet connectivity in Mauritius. Are there really alternatives? And if so, what are the conditions?

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• What *exactly* gets screwed when I kill -9 or pull the power?

  - by Mike

  Set-Up I've been a programmer for quite some time now but I'm still a bit fuzzy on deep, internal stuff. Now. I am well aware that it's not a good idea to either: kill -9 a process (bad) spontaneously pull the power plug on a running computer or server (worse) However, sometimes you just plain have to. Sometimes a process just won't respond no matter what you do, and sometimes a computer just won't respond, no matter what you do. Let's assume a system running Apache 2, MySQL 5, PHP 5, and Python 2.6.5 through mod_wsgi. Note: I'm most interested about Mac OS X here, but an answer that pertains to any UNIX system would help me out. My Concern Each time I have to do either one of these, especially the second, I'm very worried for a period of time that something has been broken. Some file somewhere could be corrupt -- who knows which file? There are over 1,000,000 files on the computer. I'm often using OS X, so I'll run a "Verify Disk" operation through the Disk Utility. It will report no problems, but I'm still concerned about this. What if some configuration file somewhere got screwed up. Or even worse, what if a binary file somewhere is corrupt. Or a script file somewhere is corrupt now. What if some hardware is damaged? What if I don't find out about it until next month, in a critical scenario, when the corruption or damage causes a catastrophe? Or, what if valuable data is already lost? My Hope My hope is that these concerns and worries are unfounded. After all, after doing this many times before, nothing truly bad has happened yet. The worst is I've had to repair some MySQL tables, but I don't seem to have lost any data. But, if my worries are not unfounded, and real damage could happen in either situation 1 or 2, then my hope is that there is a way to detect it and prevent against it. My Question(s) Could this be because modern operating systems are designed to ensure that nothing is lost in these scenarios? Could this be because modern software is designed to ensure that nothing lost? What about modern hardware design? What measures are in place when you pull the power plug? My question is, for both of these scenarios, what exactly can go wrong, and what steps should be taken to fix it? I'm under the impression that one thing that can go wrong is some programs might not have flushed their data to the disk, so any highly recent data that was supposed to be written to the disk (say, a few seconds before the power pull) might be lost. But what about beyond that? And can this very issue of 5-second data loss screw up a system? What about corruption of random files hiding somewhere in the huge forest of files on my hard drives? What about hardware damage? What Would Help Me Most Detailed descriptions about what goes on internally when you either kill -9 a process or pull the power on the whole system. (it seems instant, but can someone slow it down for me?) Explanations of all things that could go wrong in these scenarios, along with (rough of course) probabilities (i.e., this is very unlikely, but this is likely)... Descriptions of measures in place in modern hardware, operating systems, and software, to prevent damage or corruption when these scenarios occur. (to comfort me) Instructions for what to do after a kill -9 or a power pull, beyond "verifying the disk", in order to truly make sure nothing is corrupt or damaged somewhere on the drive. Measures that can be taken to fortify a computer setup so that if something has to be killed or the power has to be pulled, any potential damage is mitigated. Thanks so much!

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• MVC Communication Pattern

  - by Kedu

  This is kind of a follow up question to this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23743285/model-view-controller-and-callbacks, but I wanted to post it separately, because its kind of a different topic. I'm working on a multiplayer cardgame for the Android platform. I split the project into MVC which fits the needs pretty good, but I'm currently stuck because I can't figure out a good way to communicate between the different parts. I have everything setup and working with the controller being a big state machine, which is called over and over from the gameloop, and calls getter methods from the GUI and the android/network part to get the input. The input itself in the GUI and network is set by inputlisteners that set a local variable which I read in the getter method. So far so good, this is working. But my problem is, the controller has to check every input separately,so if I want to add an input I have to check in which states its valid and call the getter method from all these states. This is not good, and lets the code look pretty ugly, makes additions uncomfortable and adds redundance. So what I've got from the question I mentioned above is that some kind of command or event pattern will fit my needs. What I want to do is to create a shared and threadsafe queue in the controller and instead of calling all these getter methods, I just check the queue for new input and proceed it. On the other side, the GUI and network don't have all these getters, but instead create an event or command and send it to the controller through, for example, observer/observable. Now my problem: I can't figure out a way, for these commands/events to fit a common interface (which the queue can store) and still transport different kind of data (button clicks, cards that are played, the player id the command comes from, synchronization data etc.). If I design the communication as command pattern, I have to stick all the information that is needed to execute the command into it when its created, that's impossible because the GUI or network has no knowledge of all the things the controller needs to execute stuff that needs to be done when for example a card is played. I thought about getting this stuff into the command when executing it. But over all the different commands I have, I would need all the information the controller has, and thus give the command a reference to the controller which would make everything in it public, which is real bad design I guess. So, I could try some kind of event pattern. I have to transport data in the event. So, like the command, I would have an interface, which all events have in common, and can be stored in the shared queue. I could create a big enum with all the different events that a are possible, save one of these enums in the actual event, and build a big switch case for the events, to proceed different stuff for different events. The problem here: I have different data for all the events. But I need a common interface, to store the events in a queue. How do I get the specific data, if I can only access the event through the interface? Even if that wouldn't be a problem, I'm creating another big switch case, which looks ugly, and when i want to add a new event, I have to create the event itself, the case, the enum, and the method that's called with the data. I could of course check the event with the enum and cast it to its type, so I can call event type specific methods that give me the data I need, but that looks like bad design too.

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• Why I switch from Asana.com

  - by Anirudha

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/anirugu/archive/2013/10/24/why-i-switch-from-asana.com.aspxI used Asana.com from 1-2 years. have nice experience to use it. it’s not so easy. When I started using it it’s make many confusion. Now I switch from it.   When I first time see I really didn’t understand how to make a private list. There is a icon on top click on it and make it private. After doing that I still not sure if this is working. There is a lot of confusion made that time. I discuss too much to figure out small small things. The UI is interesting but so hard to understand.  What I am looking for is just a list that I can hold private. I would like to share it only if I put them shared and put email address of person to hold them same list. Few days ago I see that My Win8 phone have a app that call Microsoft OneNote. The good thing of this MS app is that I can record my voice in the app. If someone want to make a list for future then he just need to say and this can be recorded.  This is awesome when you feel that Mobile keypad is just not so fast as a normal regular keyboard.   Google docs are another good option to handle this thing. Just make a word file and use it. share it with friend with many option. One best thing is this app have very simply UI then any other apps.   One more alternative is https://trello.com which you hear from joel on their blog http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/09/13.html There are many html5 and browser based, mobile based app. Many of them support multi platform feature. this means you can have them from PC to your Pocket. One good thing we all wanted is offline. if you are not online thing will be saved and push back to server when you will be online.   The biggest problem with some apps are they are attractive easy but hard to learn. Their one feature are not clearly defined what he does. This make frustration and confusion to user. When app are not simple to use people start stop trying to learn it. That’s all the problem I have with asana.com If you don’t want to try anything then what about Sticky Notes that is part of Windows 7. This app are still usable since you can store the text on it. If you know any good app to make a task list that provide access from tablet/mobile then put comment here. In the whole world of app there is a lot of app for doing this same thing differently. I mention few of them here. I hope this is nice to describe it.   Thanks for read my post.

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• Windows 7, file properties - Is "date accessed" ALWAYS 100% accurate?

  - by Robert

  Hello, Here's the situation: I went on vacation for a couple of weeks, but before I left, I took the harddrive out of my computer and hid it in a different location. Upon coming back on Monday and putting the harddrive back in my computer, I right-clicked on different files to see their properties. Interestingly enough, several files had been accessed during the time I was gone! I right-clicked different files in various locations on the harddrive, and all of these suspect files had been accessed within a certain time range (Sunday, ?January ?09, ?2011, approximately ??between 6:52:16 PM - 7:16:25 PM). Some of them had been accessed at the exact same time--down to the very second. This makes me think that someone must have done a search on my harddrive for certain types of files and then copied all those files to some other medium. The Windows 7 installation on this harddrive is password protected, but NOT encrypted, so they could have easily put the harddrive into an enclosure/toaster to access it from a different computer. Of course I did not right-click every single file on my computer, but did so in different folders. For instance, one of the folders I went through has different types of files: .mp3, ,prproj, .3gp, .mpg, .wmv, .xmp, .txt with file-sizes ranging from 2 KB to 29.7 MB (there is also a sub-folder in this folder which contains only .jpg files); however, of all these different types of files in this folder and its subfolder, all of them had been accessed (including the .jpg files from the sub-folder) EXCEPT the .mp3 files (if it makes any difference, the .mp3 files in this folder range in size from 187 KB to 4881 KB). Additionally, this sub-folder which contained only .jpg files (48 .jpg files to be exact) was not accessed during this time--only the .jpg files within it were accessed-- (between 6:57:03 PM - 6:57:08 PM). I thought that perhaps this was some kind of Windows glitch that was displaying the wrong access date, but then I looked at the "date created" and "date modified" for all of these files in question, and their created/modified dates and times were spot on correct. My first thought was that someone put the harddrive into an enclosure/toaster and viewed the files; but then I realized that this was impossible because several of the files had been accessed at the same exact time down to the second. So this made me think that the only other way the "date accessed" could have changed would have been if someone copied the files. Is there any chance at all whatsoever that this is some kind of Windows glitch or something, or is it a fact that someone was indeed accessing my files (and if someone was accessing my files, am I right about the files in question having been copied)? Is there any other possibility for what could have happened? Do I need to use any kinds of forensics tools to further investigate this matter (and if so, which tools), or is there any other way in which I can be certain of what took place in that timeframe the day before I got back? Or is what I see with Windows 7 good enough (i.e. accurate and truthful)? Thanks in advance, and please let me know if any other details are required on my part.

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• Is hidden content (display: none;) -indexed- by search engines? [closed]

  - by user568458

  Possible Duplicate: How bad is it to use display: none in CSS? We've established on this site before (in this question) that, since there are so many legitimate uses for hiding content with display: none; when creating interactive features, that sites aren't automatically penalised for content that is hidden this way (so long as it doesn't look algorithmically spammy). Google's Webmaster guidelines also make clear that a good practice when using content that is initially legitimately hidden for interactivity purposes is to also include the same content in a <noscript> tag, and Google recommend that if you design and code for users including users with screen readers or javascript disabled, then 9 times out of 10 good relevant search rankings will follow (though their specific advice seems more written for cases where javascript writes new content to the page). JavaScript: Place the same content from the JavaScript in a tag. If you use this method, ensure the contents are exactly the same as what’s contained in the JavaScript, and that this content is shown to visitors who do not have JavaScript enabled in their browser. So, best practice seems pretty clear. What I can't find out is, however, the simple factual matter of whether hidden content is indexed by search engines (but with potential penalties if it looks 'spammy'), or, whether it is ignored, or, whether it is indexed but with a lower weighting (like <noscript> content is, apparently). (for bonus points it would be great to know if this varies or is consistent between display: none;, visibility: hidden;, etc, but that isn't crucial). This is different to the other questions on display:none; and SEO - those are about good and bad practice and the answers are discussions of good and bad practice, I'm interested simply in the factual 'Yes or no' question of whether search engines index, or ignore, content that is in display: none; - something those other questions' answers aren't totally clear on. One other question has an answer, "Yes", supported by a link to an article that doesn't really clear things up: it establishes that search engines can spot that text is hidden, it discusses (again) whether hidden text causes sites to be marked as spam, and ultimately concludes that in mid 2011, Google's policy on hidden text was evolving, and that they hadn't at that time started automatically penalising display:none; or marking it as spam. It's clear that display: none; isn't always spam and isn't always treated as spam (many Google sites use it...): but this doesn't clear up how, or if, it is indexed. What I will do will be to follow the guidelines and make sure that all the content that is initially hidden which regular users can explore using javascript-driven interactivity is also structured in way that noscript/screenreader users can use. So I'm not interested in best practice, opinions etc because best practice seems to be really clear: accessibility best practices boosts SEO. But I'd like to know what exactly will happen: whether any display: none; content I have alongside <noscript> or otherwise accessibility-optimised content will be be ignored, or indexed again, or picked up to compare against the <noscript> content but not indexed... etc.

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• JASON parsing using soap request and response

  - by hardik

  hello all in my project i want to use JASON parsing my sample soap request and response is here below please guide me how can i do that // soap request // <SOAP-ENV:Envelope SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" xmlns:ns9093="urn:outmarket"><SOAP-ENV:Body><ns9093:doStartup xmlns:ns9093="urn:outmarket"><username xsi:type="xsd:string">guest</username><password xsi:type="xsd:string">guest</password></ns9093:doStartup></SOAP-ENV:Body></SOAP-ENV:Envelope> // soap response // <SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"><SOAP-ENV:Body><ns1:doStartupResponse xmlns:ns1="urn:outmarket"><return xsi:type="xsd:xml"><isvaliduser>1</isvaliduser><userid>19</userid><cansubmitphoto>0</cansubmitphoto><cansubmitcomment>0</cansubmitcomment><cansubmitrating>0</cansubmitrating><cansubmitmarket>0</cansubmitmarket><cansubmitstallholder>0</cansubmitstallholder><databaseid>1</databaseid><markets><markettype>1</markettype><marketid>3</marketid><marketname><![CDATA[Bairnsdale Farmers Market]]></marketname><ratingname><![CDATA[Market in general]]></ratingname><good>0</good><neutral>0</neutral><bad>0</bad></markets><markets><markettype>0</markettype><marketid>3</marketid><marketname><![CDATA[Bairnsdale Farmers Market]]></marketname><ratingname><![CDATA[Market in general]]></ratingname><good>25</good><neutral>0</neutral><bad>18</bad></markets><markets><markettype>0</markettype><marketid>5</marketid><marketname><![CDATA[Bendigo Farmers' Market]]></marketname><ratingname>`

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• How to program a neural network for chess?

  - by marco92w

  Hello! I want to program a chess engine which learns to make good moves and win against other players. I've already coded a representation of the chess board and a function which outputs all possible moves. So I only need an evaluation function which says how good a given situation of the board is. Therefore, I would like to use an artificial neural network which should then evaluate a given position. The output should be a numerical value. The higher the value is, the better is the position for the white player. My approach is to build a network of 385 neurons: There are six unique chess pieces and 64 fields on the board. So for every field we take 6 neurons (1 for every piece). If there is a white piece, the input value is 1. If there is a black piece, the value is -1. And if there is no piece of that sort on that field, the value is 0. In addition to that there should be 1 neuron for the player to move. If it is White's turn, the input value is 1 and if it's Black's turn, the value is -1. I think that configuration of the neural network is quite good. But the main part is missing: How can I implement this neural network into a coding language (e.g. Delphi)? I think the weights for each neuron should be the same in the beginning. Depending on the result of a match, the weights should then be adjusted. But how? I think I should let 2 computer players (both using my engine) play against each other. If White wins, Black gets the feedback that its weights aren't good. So it would be great if you could help me implementing the neural network into a coding language (best would be Delphi, otherwise pseudo-code). Thanks in advance!

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• Entity Framework query not returning correctly enumerated results.

  - by SkippyFire

  I have this really strange problem where my entity framework query isn't enumerating correctly. The SQL Server table I'm using has a table with a Sku field, and the column is "distinct". It isn't a key, but it doesn't contain any duplicate values. Using actual SQL with where, distinct and group by cluases I have confirmed this. However, when I do this: // Not good foreach(var product in dc.Products) or // Not good foreach(var product in dc.Products.ToList()) or // Not good foreach(var product in dc.Products.OrderBy(p => p.Sku)) the first two objects that are returned ARE THE SAME!!! The third item was technically the second item in the table, but then the fourth item was the first row from the table again!!! The only solution I have found is to use the Distinct extension method, which shouldn't really do anything in this situation: // Good foreach(var product in dc.Products.ToList().Distinct()) Another weird thing about this is that the count of the resulting queries is the same!!! So whether or not the resulting enumerable has the correct results or duplicates, I always get the number of rows in the actual table! (No I don't have a limit clause anywhere). What could possibly cause this!?!?!?

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• Iterating through a JSON object.

  - by user327508

  [ { "title": "Baby (Feat. Ludacris) - Justin Bieber", "description": "Baby (Feat. Ludacris) by Justin Bieber on Grooveshark", "link": "http://listen.grooveshark.com/s/Baby+Feat+Ludacris+/2Bqvdq", "pubDate": "Wed, 28 Apr 2010 02:37:53 -0400", "pubTime": 1272436673, "TinyLink": "http://tinysong.com/d3wI", "SongID": "24447862", "SongName": "Baby (Feat. Ludacris)", "ArtistID": "1118876", "ArtistName": "Justin Bieber", "AlbumID": "4104002", "AlbumName": "My World (Part II);\nhttp://tinysong.com/gQsw", "LongLink": "11578982", "GroovesharkLink": "11578982", "Link": "http://tinysong.com/d3wI" }, { "title": "Feel Good Inc - Gorillaz", "description": "Feel Good Inc by Gorillaz on Grooveshark", "link": "http://listen.grooveshark.com/s/Feel+Good+Inc/1UksmI", "pubDate": "Wed, 28 Apr 2010 02:25:30 -0400", "pubTime": 1272435930 } ] That is the current JSON object I have. I am now trying to iterate through it to get the import stuff like title and link. This is where I am having trouble I cant seem to get to the content that is past the ":" i tried doing dictionary way couldn't get it. def getLastSong(user,limit): base_url = 'http://gsuser.com/lastSong/' user_url = base_url + str(user) + '/' + str(limit) + "/" raw = urllib.urlopen(user_url) json_raw= raw.readlines() json_object = json.loads(json_raw[0]) #filtering and making it look good. gsongs = [] print json_object for song in json_object[0]: print song This code prints all the information before ":" Please help. ignore the Justin Bieber track :)

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• WCF: WTF! Does WCF raise the bar or just the complexity level?

  - by rp

  I understand the value of the three-part service/host/client model offered by WCF. But is it just me or does it seem like WCF took something pretty direct and straightforward (the ASMX model) and made a mess out of it? Is there an alternative to using SvcUtil's command line step back in time to generate the proxy? With ASMX services a test harness was automatically provided; is there a good alternative today with WCF? I appreciate that the WS* stuff is more tightly integrated with WCF and hope to find some payoff for WCF there, but geeze, otherwise I'm perplexed. Also, the state of books available for WCF is abysmal at best. Juval Lowy, a superb author, has written a good O'Reilly reference book "Programming WCF Services" but it doesn't do that much (for me anyway) for learning now to use WCF. That book's precursor (and a little better organized, but not much, as a tutorial) is Michele Leroux Bustamante's Learning WCF. It has good spots but is outdated in place and its corresponding Web site is gone. Do you have good WCF learning references besides just continuing to Google the bejebus out of things? Thanks, rp

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• Why calling Process.killProcess(Process.myPid()) is a bad idea?

  - by Tal Kanel

  I've read some posts saying using this method is "not good", shouldn't been use, it's not the right way to "close" the application and it's not how android works... I understand and accept the fact that Android OS knows better then me when it's the right time to terminate the process, but I didn't heard yet a good explanation why it's wrong using the killProcess() method?. after all - it's part of the android API... what I do know is that calling this method while other threads doing in potential an important work (operations on files, writing to DB, HTTP requests, running services..) can be terminated in the middle, and it's clearly not good. also I know I can benefit from the fact that "re-open" the application will be faster, cause the system maybe still "holds" in memory state from last time been used, and killProcess() prevents that. beside this reason, in assumption I don't have such operations, and I don't care my application will load from scratch each run, there are other reasons why not using the killProcess() method? I know about finish() method to close an Activity, so don't write me about that please.. finish() is only for Activity. not to all application, and I think I know exactly why and when to use it... and another thing - I'm developing also games with the Unity3D framework, and exporting the project to android. when I decompiled the generated apk, I was very suprised to find out that the java source code created from unity - implementing Unity's - Application.quit() method, with Process.killProcess(Process.myPid()). Application.quit() is suppose to be the right way to close game according to Unity3d guides (is it really?? maybe I'm wrong, and missed something), so how it happens that the Unity's framework developers which doing a very good work as it seems implemented this in native android to killProcess()? anyway - I wish to have a "list of reasons" why not using the killProcess() method, so please write down your answer - if you have something interesting to say about that. TIA

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• Finding text orientation in image (angle for rotation)

  - by maximus

  There is an image captured by camera, and I need to find the angle of the text in order to rotate it to make the image better for OCR results. So I know that the fourier transform can be used for that purpose, My question is, does it really gives good results or may be it is better to use something different than that? Can you tell me if there is a good method for this purpose? I am afraid that not every image containing the text will give me a good result after using fourier transform method. Actually, if I make like it is written here: link text (see the part related with an example of text image) calculating the logarithm of the magnitude of the Fourier transform of image with text and then thresholding it, I get that points and I can calculate the line approximately passing through them, and after getting the line calculate the angle, and then make an affine transform, But, what if I do not get a good result every time using this method , and make a false transform? Any ideas please to judge wether the result is correct or not, or may be another method is better? The binary image can contain noise, even if there are not so much of them, the angle found as a result can be not accurate.

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