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• Web Platform Installer bundles for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 - and how you can build your own WebPI bundles

  - by Jon Galloway

  Visual Studio SP1 is  now available via the Web Platform Installer, which means you've got three options: Download the 1.5 GB ISO image Run the 750KB Web Installer (which figures out what you need to download) Install via Web PI Note: I covered some tips for installing VS2010 SP1 last week - including some that apply to all of these, such as removing options you don't use prior to installing the service pack to decrease the installation time and download size. Two Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Web PI packages There are actually two WebPI packages for VS2010 SP1. There's the standard Visual Studio 2010 SP1 package [Web PI link], which includes (quoting ScottGu's post): VS2010 2010 SP1 ASP.NET MVC 3 (runtime + tools support) IIS 7.5 Express SQL Server Compact Edition 4.0 (runtime + tools support) Web Deployment 2.0 The notes on that package sum it up pretty well: Looking for the latest everything? Look no further. This will get you Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 and the RTM releases of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS 7.5 Express, SQL Server Compact 4.0 with tooling, and Web Deploy 2.0. It's the value meal of Microsoft products. Tell your friends! Note: This bundle includes the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 web installer, which will dynamically determine the appropriate service pack components to download and install. This is typically in the range of 200-500 MB and will take 30-60 minutes to install, depending on your machine configuration. There is also a Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Core package [Web PI link], which only includes only the SP without any of the other goodies (MVC3, IIS Express, etc.). If you're doing any web development, I'd highly recommend the main pack since it the other installs are small, simple installs, but if you're working in another space, you might want the core package. Installing via the Web Platform Installer I generally like to go with the Web PI when possible since it simplifies most software installations due to things like: Smart dependency management - installing apps or tools which have software dependencies will automatically figure out which dependencies you don't have and add them to the list (which you can review before install) Simultaneous download and install - if your install includes more than one package, it will automatically pull the dependencies first and begin installing them while downloading the others Lists the latest downloads - no need to search around, as they're all listed based on a live feed Includes open source applications - a lot of popular open source applications are included as well as Microsoft software and tools No worries about reinstallation - WebPI installations detect what you've got installed, so for instance if you've got MVC 3 installed you don't need to worry about the VS2010 SP1 package install messing anything up In addition to the links I included above, you can install the WebPI from http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx, and if you have Web PI installed you can just tap the Windows key and type "Web Platform" to bring it up in the Start search list. You'll see Visual Studio SP1 listed in the spotlight list as shown below. That's the standard package, which includes MVC 3 / IIS 7.5 Express / SQL Compact / Web Deploy. If you just want the core install, you can use the search box in the upper right corner, typing in "Visual Studio SP1" as shown. Core Install: Use Web PI or the Visual Studio Web Installer? I think the big advantage of using Web PI to install VS 2010 SP1 is that it includes the other new bits. If you're going to install the SP1 core, I don't think there's as much advantage to using Web PI, as the Web PI Core install just downloads the Visual Studio Web Installer anyways. I think Web PI makes it a little easier to find the download, but not a lot. The Visual Studio Web Installer checks dependencies, so there's no big advantage there. If you do happen to hit any problems installing Visual Studio SP1 via Web PI, I'd recommend running the Visual Studio Web Installer, then running the Web PI VS 2010 SP1 package to get all the other goodies. I talked to one person who hit some random snag, recommended that, and it worked out. Custom Web Platform Installer bundles You can create links that will launch the Web Platform Installer with a custom list of tools. You can see an example of this by clicking through on the install button at http://asp.net/downloads (cancelling the installation dialog). You'll see this in the address bar: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appsxml=&appid=MVC3;ASPNET;NETFramework4;SQLExpress;VWD Notice that the appid querystring parameter includes a semicolon delimited list, and you can make your own custom Web PI links with your own desired app list. I can think of a lot of cases where that would be handy: linking to a recommended software configuration from a software project or product, setting up a recommended / documented / supported install list for a software development team or IT shop, etc. For instance, here's a link that installs just VS2010 SP1 Core and the SQL CE tools: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appsxml=&appid=VS2010SP1Core;SQLCETools Note: If you've already got all or some of the products installed, the display will reflect that. On my dev box which has the full SP1 package, here's what the above link gives me: Here's another example - on a fresh box I created a link to install MVC 3 and the Web Farm Framework (http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appsxml=&appid=MVC3;WebFarmFramework) and got the following items added to the cart: But where do I get the App ID's? Aha, that's the trick. You can link to a list of cool packages, but you need to know the App ID's to link to them. To figure that out, I turned on tracing in Web Platform Installer  (also handy if you're ever having trouble with a WebPI install) and from the trace logs saw that the list of packages is pulled from an XML file: DownloadManager Information: 0 : Loading product xml from: https://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9763242 DownloadManager Verbose: 0 : Connecting to https://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9763242 with (partial) headers: Referer: wpi://2.1.0.0/Microsoft Windows NT 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 If-Modified-Since: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:15:27 GMT User-Agent:Platform-Installer/3.0.3.0(Microsoft Windows NT 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1) DownloadManager Information: 0 : https://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9763242 responded with 302 DownloadManager Information: 0 : Response headers: HTTP/1.1 302 Found Cache-Control: private Content-Length: 175 Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Expires: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:52:28 GMT Location: https://www.microsoft.com/web/webpi/3.0/webproductlist.xml Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:53:27 GMT Browsing to https://www.microsoft.com/web/webpi/3.0/webproductlist.xml shows the full list. You can search through that in your browser / text editor if you'd like, open it in Excel as an XML table, etc. Here's a list of the App ID's as of today: SMO SMO32 PHP52ForIISExpress PHP53ForIISExpress StaticContent DefaultDocument DirectoryBrowse HTTPErrors HTTPRedirection ASPNET NETExtensibility ASP CGI ISAPIExtensions ISAPIFilters ServerSideIncludes HTTPLogging LoggingTools RequestMonitor Tracing CustomLogging ODBCLogging BasicAuthentication WindowsAuthentication DigestAuthentication ClientCertificateMappingAuthentication IISClientCertificateMappingAuthentication URLAuthorization RequestFiltering IPSecurity StaticContentCompression DynamicContentCompression IISManagementConsole IISManagementScriptsAndTools ManagementService MetabaseAndIIS6Compatibility WASProcessModel WASNetFxEnvironment WASConfigurationAPI IIS6WPICompatibility IIS6ScriptingTools IIS6ManagementConsole LegacyFTPServer FTPServer WebDAV LegacyFTPManagementConsole FTPExtensibility AdminPack AdvancedLogging WebFarmFrameworkNonLoc ExternalCacheNonLoc WebFarmFramework WebFarmFrameworkv2 WebFarmFrameworkv2_beta ExternalCache ECacheUpdate ARRv1 ARRv2Beta1 ARRv2Beta2 ARRv2RC ARRv2NonLoc ARRv2 ARRv2Update MVC MVCBeta MVCRC1 MVCRC2 DBManager DbManagerUpdate DynamicIPRestrictions DynamicIPRestrictionsUpdate DynamicIPRestrictionsLegacy DynamicIPRestrictionsBeta2 FTPOOB IISPowershellSnapin RemoteManager SEOToolkit VS2008RTM MySQL SQLDriverPHP52IIS SQLDriverPHP53IIS SQLDriverPHP52IISExpress SQLDriverPHP53IISExpress SQLExpress SQLManagementStudio SQLExpressAdv SQLExpressTools UrlRewrite UrlRewrite2 UrlRewrite2NonLoc UrlRewrite2RC UrlRewrite2Beta UrlRewrite10 UrlScan MVC3Installer MVC3 MVC3LocInstaller MVC3Loc MVC2 VWD VWD2010SP1Pack NETFramework4 WebMatrix WebMatrix_v1Refresh IISExpress IISExpress_v1 IIS7 AspWebPagesVS AspWebPagesVS_1_0 Plan9 Plan9Loc WebMatrix_WHP SQLCE SQLCETools SQLCEVSTools SQLCEVSTools_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstaller_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerNew_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_EN_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_JA_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_FR_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_DE_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_ES_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_IT_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_RU_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_KO_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_ZH_CN_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_ZH_TW_4_0 VWD2008 WebDAVOOB WDeploy WDeploy_v2 WDeployNoSMO WDeploy11 WinCache52 WinCache53 NETFramework35 WindowsImagingComponent VC9Redist NETFramework20SP2 WindowsInstaller31 PowerShell PowerShellMsu PowerShell2 WindowsInstaller45 FastCGIUpdate FastCGIBackport FastCGIIIS6 IIS51 IIS60 SQLNativeClient SQLNativeClient2008 SQLNativeClient2005 SQLCLRTypes SQLCLRTypes32 SMO_10_1 MySQLConnector PHP52 PHP53 PHPManager VSVWD2010Feature VWD2010WebFeature_0 VWD2010WebFeature_1 VWD2010WebFeature_2 VS2010SP1Prerequisite RIAServicesToolkitMay2010 Silverlight4Toolkit Silverlight4Tools VSLS SSMAMySQL WebsitePanel VS2010SP1Core VS2010SP1Installer VS2010SP1Pack MissingVWDOrVSVWD2010Feature VB2010Beta2Express VCS2010Beta2Express VC2010Beta2Express RIAServicesToolkitApr2010 VS2010Beta1 VS2010RC VS2010Beta2 VS2010Beta2Express VS2k8RTM VSCPP2k8RTM VSVB2k8RTM VSCS2k8RTM VSVWDFeature LegacyWinCache SQLExpress2005 SSMS2005

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• Creating and maintaining Orchard translations

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  Many volunteers have already stepped up to provide translations for Orchard. There are many challenges to overcome with translating such a project. Orchard is a very modular CMS, so the translation mechanism needs to account for the core as well as first and third party modules and themes. Another issue is that every new version of Orchard or of a module changes some localizable strings and adds new ones as others enter obsolescence. In order to address those problems, I've built a small Orchard module that automates some of the most complex tasks that maintaining a translation implies. In this post, I'll walk you through the operations I had to do to update the French translation for Orchard 1.0. In order to make sure you translate all the first party modules, I would recommend that you start from a full source code enlistment. The reason is that I'll show how you can extract the default en-US translation from any source code enlistment. That enables you to create a translation that is even more up-to-date than what is currently on the site. Alternatively, you could start by downloading the current en-US translation. If you decide to do so, just skip the relevant paragraphs. First, let's install the Orchard Translation Manager. I'm starting from a vanilla clone of the latest in the code repository. After you've setup the site, go into the dashboard and click on Gallery. Locate the Orchard Translation Manager in the list of modules and click "Install". Once the module is installed, you need to enable its one feature by going into Configuration/Features and clicking "Enable" next to Vandelay.TranslationManager. We're done with the setup that we need in order to start our translation work. We'll now switch to the command-line and to our favorite text editor. Open a command-line on the Orchard web site folder. I found the easiest way to do this is to do a SHIFT+right-click on the Orchard.Web folder in Windows Explorer and to click "Open command window here". Type bin\orchard to enter the Orchard command-line environment. If you do a "help commands" you should see four commands in the list that came from the module we just installed: extract default translation, install translation, package translation and sync translation. First, we're going to generate the default translation. Note that it is possible to generate that default translation for a specific list of modules and themes by using the /Extensions: switch, which should facilitate the translation of third party extensions, but in this tutorial we're going to generate it for the whole of the Orchard source code. extract default translation /Output:\temp .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This should have created an Orchard.en-us.po.zip file in the temp directory. Extract that archive into an orchard.po folder under \temp. The next step depends on whether you have an existing translation that you want to update or not. If you do have an existing translation, just extract it into the same \temp\orchard.po directory. That should result in a file structure where you have the default en-US translation alongside your own. If you don't have an existing translation, just continue, the commands will be the same. We are now going to synchronize those translations (or generate the stub for a new one if you didn't start from an existing translation). sync translation /Input:\temp\orchard.po /Culture:fr-FR After this command (where you should of course substitute fr-FR with the culture you're working on), we now have updated files that contain a few useful flags. Open each of the .po files under the culture you are working on (there should be around 36) with your favorite text editor. For all the strings that are still valid in the latest version, nothing changes and you don't need to do anything. For all the strings that disappeared from the default culture, the old translation will still be there but they will be prefixed with the following comment: # Obsolete translation Conveniently, all the obsolete strings will be grouped at the end of the file. You can select all those and delete them. For all the new strings, you will see the following comment: # Untranslated string This is where the hard work begins. You'll need to translate each of those new strings by entering the translation between the quotes in: msgstr "" Don't introduce hard carriage returns in the strings, just stay on one line (your text editor should do some reasonable wrapping so this shouldn't be a big deal). Once you're done with a file, save it. Make sure, and this is very important, that your text editor is saving using the UTF-8 encoding. In Notepad, that setting can be found in the file saving dialog by doing a "Save As" rather than a plain "Save": When all the po files have been edited, you are ready to package the translation for submission (a.k.a. sending e-mail to the localization mailing list). package translation /Culture:fr-FR /Input:\temp\orchard.po /Output:\temp You should now see a Orchard.fr-FR.po.zip file in temp that is ready to be submitted. That is, once you've tested it, which can be done by deploying it into the site: install translation \temp\orchard.fr-fr.po.zip Once this is done you can go into the dashboard under Configuration/Settings and click on "Add or remove supported cultures for the site". Choose your culture and click "Add". You can go back to settings and set the default culture. Save. You may now take a tour of the application and verify that everything works as expected: And that's it really. Creating a translation for Orchard is a matter of a few hours. If you don't see a translation for your culture, please consider creating it.

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• Code Camp 2011 – Summary

  - by hajan

  Waiting whole twelve months to come this year’s Code Camp 2011 event was something which all Microsoft technologies (and even non-Microsoft techs.) developers were doing in the past year. Last year’s success was enough big to be heard and to influence everything around our developer community and beyond. Code Camp 2011 was nothing else but a invincible success which will remain in our memory for a long time from now. Darko Milevski (president of MKDOT.NET UG and SharePoint MVP) said something interesting at the event keynote that up to now we were looking at the past by saying what we did… now we will focus on the future and how to develop our community more and more in the future days, weeks, months and I hope so for many years… Even though it was held only two days ago (26th of November 2011), I already feel the nostalgia for everything that happened there and for the excellent time we have spent all together. ORGANIZED BY ENTHUSIASTS AND EXPERTS Code Camp 2011 was organized by number of community enthusiasts and experts who have unselfishly contributed with all their free time to make the best of this event. The event was organized by a known community group called MKDOT.NET User Group, name of a user group which is known not only in Macedonia, but also in many countries abroad. Organization mainly consists of software developers, technical leaders, team leaders in several known companies in Macedonia, as well as Microsoft MVPs. SPEAKERS There were 24 speakers at five parallel tracks. At Code Camp 2011 we had two groups of speakers: Professional Experts in various technologies and Student Speakers. The new interesting thing here is the Student Speakers, which draw attention a lot, especially to other students who were interested to see what their colleagues are going to speak about and how do they use Microsoft technologies in different coding scenarios and practices, in different topics. From the rest of the professional speakers, there were 7 Microsoft MVPs: Two ASP.NET/IIS MVPs, Two C# MVPs, and One MVP in SharePoint, SQL Server and Exchange Server. I must say that besides the MVP Speakers, who definitely did a great job as always… there were other excellent speakers as well, which were speaking on various technologies, such as: Web Development, Windows Phone Development, XNA, Windows 8, Games Development, Entity Framework, Event-driven programming, SOLID, SQLCLR, T-SQL, e.t.c. SESSIONS There were 25 sessions mainly all related to Microsoft technologies, but ranging from Windows 8, WP7, ASP.NET till Games Development, XNA and Event-driven programming. Sessions were going in five parallel tracks named as Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and Student track. Five presentations in each track, each with level 300 or 400. More info MY SESSION (ASP.NET MVC Best Practices) I must say that from the big number of speaking engagements I have had, this was one of my best performances and definitely I have set new records of attendees at my sessions and probably overall. I spoke on topic ASP.NET MVC Best Practices, where I have shown tips, tricks, guidelines and best practices on what to use and what to avoid by developing with one of the best web development frameworks nowadays, ASP.NET MVC. I had approximately 350+ attendees, the hall was full so that there was no room for staying at feet. Besides .NET developers, there were a lot of other technology oriented developers, who has also received the presentation very well and I really hope I gave them reason to think about ASP.NET as one of the best options for web development nowadays (if you ask me, it’s the best one ;-)). I have included 10 tips in using ASP.NET MVC each of them followed by a demo. Besides these 10 tips, I have briefly introduced the concept of ASP.NET MVC for those that haven’t been working with the framework and at the end some bonus tips. I must say there was lot of laugh for some funny sentences I have stated, like “If you code ASP.NET MVC, girls will love you more” – same goes for girls, only replace girls with boys :). [LINK TO SESSION WILL GO HERE, ONCE SESSIONS ARE AVAILABLE ON MK CODECAMP WEBSITE] VOLUNTEERS Without strong organization, such events wouldn’t be able to gather hundreds of attendees at one place and still stay perfectly organized to the smallest details, without dedicated organization and volunteers. I would like to dedicate this space in my blog to them and to say one big THANK YOU for supporting us before the event and during the whole day in the event. With such young and dedicated volunteers, we couldn’t achieve anything but great results. THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION! NETWORKING One of the main reasons why we do such events is to gather all professionals in one place. Networking is what everyone wants because through this way of networking, we can meet incredible people in one place. It is amazing feeling to share your knowledge with others and exchange thoughts on various topics. Meet and talk to interesting people. I have had very special moments with many attendees especially after my presentation. Special Thank You to all of them who come to meet me in person, whether to ask a question, say congrats for my session or simply meet me and just smile :)… everything counts! Thank You! TWITTER During the event, twitter was one of the most useful event-wide communication tool where everyone could tweet with hash tag #mkcodecamp or #mkdotnet and say what he/she wants to say about the current state and happenings at that moment… In my next blog post I will list the top craziest tweets that were posted at this event… FUTURE OF MKDOT.NET Having such strong community around MKDOT.NET, the future seems very bright. The initial plans are to have sub-groups in several technologies, however all these sub-groups will belong to the MKDOT.NET UG which will be, somehow, the HEAD of these sub-groups. We are doing this to provide better divisions by technologies and organize ourselves better since our community is very big, around 500 members in MKDOT.NET.We will have five sub-groups:- Web User Group (Lead:Hajan Selmani - me)- Mobile User Group (Lead: Filip Kerazovski)- Visual C# User Group (Lead: Vekoslav Stefanovski)- SharePoint User Group (Lead: Darko Milevski)- Dynamics User Group (Lead: Vladimir Senih) SUMMARY Online registered attendees: ~1.200 Event attendees: ~800 Number of members in organization: 40+ Organized by: MKDOT.NET User Group Number of tracks: 5 Number of speakers: 24 Number of sessions: 25 Event official website: http://codecamp.mkdot.net Total number of sponsors: 20 Platinum Sponsors: Microsoft, INETA, Telerik Place held: FON University City and Country: Skopje, Macedonia THANK YOU FOR BEING PART OF THE BEST EVENT IN MACEDONIA, CODE CAMP 2011. Regards, Hajan

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• MSCC: Scripting - Administrator's­ toolbox of magic...

  Finally, we made it to have our April meetup - in May. The most obvious explanation is the increased amount of open source and IT activities that either the MSCC, the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM), or the University of Mauritius Student's Computer Club is organising. It's absolutely incredible to see the recent hype of events here on the island. And I'm loving it! Unfortunately, we also had to deal with arranging for a location this time. It was kind of an odyssey as my requests (and phone calls) haven't been answered, even though I tried it several times - well, kind of disappointing and I have to look into that for future gatherings. In my opinion, it is essential that two parameters of a community meeting are fixed as early as possible: Location, and Date and time You can't just change one or both on the very last minute. Well, this time we had to do it due to unforeseen reasons, and I apologise to any MSCC member which couldn't make it to our April meetup. Okay, lesson learned but now back to the actual meetup report ... Shortly after the meeting I placed the following statement as my first impression: "Spontaneous and improvised :) No, seriously, Ish and Dan had well prepared presentations on shell scripting, mainly focused towards Bourne Again Shell (bash), and the pros and cons of scripting versus actually writing something in a decent programming language. I thought that I could cut myself out of the equation but the demand for information about PowerShell was higher than expected..." Well, it turned out that the interest in Windows PowerShell was high, as I even got a couple of questions on it via social media networks during the evening. I also like to mention that the number of attendees went back to what I would call a "standard" number of participation. This time there were 12 craftsmen, but again a good number of First Timers. Reactions of other attendees Here are some impressions and feedback from our participants: "Enjoyed the bash and powershell (linux / windows) presentations ..." -- Nadim on event comments "He [Daniel] also showed us some syntax loopholes in Bash that could leave someone with bad code." -- Ish on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting   Glad to see a couple of first time attendees, especially students from the university itself. Some details on the presentations MSCC: First time visit at the University of Mauritius - Phase II Engineering Tower, room 2.9 Gimme some love ... bash and other shells Ish gave a great introduction into shell scripting as he spoke about existing shell environments and a little bit about their history. Furthermore, he talked about various built-in commands, the use of coreutils, the ability to daisy-chain multiple commands using pipes, the importance of the standard I/O streams and their file descriptors in advanced scripting techniques. Combined with a couple of sample statements in the Linux terminal on Ubuntu 14.04 machine it was a solid presentation. Have a closer look at his slides - published on his blog on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting. Oddities of scripting After the brief introduction into bash it was Daniel's turn to highlight a good number of oddities when working with shell scripts. First of all, it should be clear that scripting is not supposed for any kind of implementations in terms of software but simply to automate administrative procedures and to simplify routine jobs on a system. One of the cool oddities that he mentioned is that everything (!) in a shell is represented by strings; there are no other types like integer, float, date-time, etc. that you'd like to use in a full-fledged programming language. Let's have a look at his sample:  more to come... What's the output? As a conclusion, Daniel suggests that shell scripting should be limited but not restricted to automatic repetitive command stacks and batch jobs, startup wrapper for applications in order to set up the execution environment, and other not too sophisticated jobs. But as soon as it might involve a little bit more logic or you might rely on performance it's better to write an application in Ruby, Python, or Perl (among others of course). This is also enables the possibility to test your code properly. MSCC: Ish talking about Bourne Again Shell (bash) and shell scripting to automate regular tasks MSCC: Daniel gives an overview about the pros and cons of shell scripting versus programming MSCC: PowerShell as your scripting solution on Windows operating systems The path of the Enlightened is long ... and tough. Honestly, even though PowerShell was mentioned without any further details on the meetup's agenda, I didn't expect that there would be demand to give a presentation on Microsoft PowerShell after all. I already took this topic out of the announcement but the audience wanted to have some information. Okay, then let's see what I could do - improvised style. While my machine booted and got hooked up to the projector, I started to talk about the beginnings of PowerShell from back in 2006, and its predecessors MS DOS and Command Prompt. A throwback in history... always good for young people. As usual, Microsoft didn't get it at that time. Instead of listening to their client's needs and demands they ignored the feasibility to administrate Windows server farms without any UI tools. PowerShell is actually a result of this, and seeing that shell scripting is a common, reliable and fast way in an administrator's toolbox for decades, Microsoft had to adapt from their Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to a broader approach. It's not like shell scripting was something new; it is in daily use by alternative operating systems like AIX, HP UX, Solaris, and last but not least Linux. Most interestingly, Microsoft is very good at renovating existing architectures, and over the years PowerShell not only replaced their own combination of Command Prompt and Scripting Hosts (VBScript and CScript) but really turned into a challenging competitor on the market. The shell is easy to extend with cmdlets, and open to other Microsoft products like SQL Server, SharePoint, as well as Third-party software applications. Similar to MMC PowerShell also offers the ability to administer other machine remotely - only without a graphical user interface and therefore it's easier to automate and schedule regular tasks. Following is a sample of a PowerShell script file (extension .ps1): $strComputer = "." $colItems = get-wmiobject -class Win32_BIOS -namespace root\CIMV2 -comp $strComputer foreach ($objItem in $colItems) {write-host "BIOS Characteristics: " $objItem.BiosCharacteristicswrite-host "BIOS Version: " $objItem.BIOSVersionwrite-host "Build Number: " $objItem.BuildNumberwrite-host "Caption: " $objItem.Captionwrite-host "Code Set: " $objItem.CodeSetwrite-host "Current Language: " $objItem.CurrentLanguagewrite-host "Description: " $objItem.Descriptionwrite-host "Identification Code: " $objItem.IdentificationCodewrite-host "Installable Languages: " $objItem.InstallableLanguageswrite-host "Installation Date: " $objItem.InstallDatewrite-host "Language Edition: " $objItem.LanguageEditionwrite-host "List Of Languages: " $objItem.ListOfLanguageswrite-host "Manufacturer: " $objItem.Manufacturerwrite-host "Name: " $objItem.Namewrite-host "Other Target Operating System: " $objItem.OtherTargetOSwrite-host "Primary BIOS: " $objItem.PrimaryBIOSwrite-host "Release Date: " $objItem.ReleaseDatewrite-host "Serial Number: " $objItem.SerialNumberwrite-host "SMBIOS BIOS Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSBIOSVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Major Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMajorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Minor Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMinorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Present: " $objItem.SMBIOSPresentwrite-host "Software Element ID: " $objItem.SoftwareElementIDwrite-host "Software Element State: " $objItem.SoftwareElementStatewrite-host "Status: " $objItem.Statuswrite-host "Target Operating System: " $objItem.TargetOperatingSystemwrite-host "Version: " $objItem.Versionwrite-host} Which gives you information about your BIOS and Windows OS. Then change the computer name to another one on your network (NetBIOS based) and run the script again. There lots of samples and tutorials at the Microsoft Script Center, and I would advise you to pay a visit over there if you are more interested in PowerShell. The Script Center provides the download links, too. Upcoming Events What are the upcoming events here in Mauritius? So far, we have the following ones (incomplete list as usual) in chronological order: Hacking Defence (14. May 2014) WebCup Maurice (7. & 8. June 2014) Developers Conference (TBA ~ July 2014) Linuxfest 2014 (TBA ~ November 2014) Hopefully, there will be more announcements during the next couple of weeks and months. If you know about any other event, like a bootcamp, a code challenge or hackathon here in Mauritius, please drop me a note in the comment section below this article. Thanks! My resume of the day Spontaneous and improvised :) The new location at the University of Mauritius turned out very well, there is plenty of space, and it could be a good choice for future meetings. Especially, having the ability to get more and more students into our IT community sounds like a great opportunity. Later during the day, I got some promising mails from Nadim regarding future sessions at the local branch of the Middlesex University. Well, we will see in the future... But for now this will be on hold until approximately October when students resume their regular studies. Anyway, it was a good experience at the university, and thanks again to the UoM Student's Computer Club that made the necessary arrangements for the MSCC!

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• The Proper Use of the VM Role in Windows Azure

  - by BuckWoody

  At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) in 2010 we announced an addition to the Computational Roles in Windows Azure, called the VM Role. This new feature allows a great deal of control over the applications you write, but some have confused it with our full infrastructure offering in Windows Hyper-V. There is a proper architecture pattern for both of them. Virtualization Virtualization is the process of taking all of the hardware of a physical computer and replicating it in software alone. This means that a single computer can “host” or run several “virtual” computers. These virtual computers can run anywhere - including at a vendor’s location. Some companies refer to this as Cloud Computing since the hardware is operated and maintained elsewhere. IaaS The more detailed definition of this type of computing is called Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) since it removes the need for you to maintain hardware at your organization. The operating system, drivers, and all the other software required to run an application are still under your control and your responsibility to license, patch, and scale. Microsoft has an offering in this space called Hyper-V, that runs on the Windows operating system. Combined with a hardware hosting vendor and the System Center software to create and deploy Virtual Machines (a process referred to as provisioning), you can create a Cloud environment with full control over all aspects of the machine, including multiple operating systems if you like. Hosting machines and provisioning them at your own buildings is sometimes called a Private Cloud, and hosting them somewhere else is often called a Public Cloud. State-ful and Stateless Programming This paradigm does not create a new, scalable way of computing. It simply moves the hardware away. The reason is that when you limit the Cloud efforts to a Virtual Machine, you are in effect limiting the computing resources to what that single system can provide. This is because much of the software developed in this environment maintains “state” - and that requires a little explanation. “State-ful programming” means that all parts of the computing environment stay connected to each other throughout a compute cycle. The system expects the memory, CPU, storage and network to remain in the same state from the beginning of the process to the end. You can think of this as a telephone conversation - you expect that the other person picks up the phone, listens to you, and talks back all in a single unit of time. In “Stateless” computing the system is designed to allow the different parts of the code to run independently of each other. You can think of this like an e-mail exchange. You compose an e-mail from your system (it has the state when you’re doing that) and then you walk away for a bit to make some coffee. A few minutes later you click the “send” button (the network has the state) and you go to a meeting. The server receives the message and stores it on a mail program’s database (the mail server has the state now) and continues working on other mail. Finally, the other party logs on to their mail client and reads the mail (the other user has the state) and responds to it and so on. These events might be separated by milliseconds or even days, but the system continues to operate. The entire process doesn’t maintain the state, each component does. This is the exact concept behind coding for Windows Azure. The stateless programming model allows amazing rates of scale, since the message (think of the e-mail) can be broken apart by multiple programs and worked on in parallel (like when the e-mail goes to hundreds of users), and only the order of re-assembling the work is important to consider. For the exact same reason, if the system makes copies of those running programs as Windows Azure does, you have built-in redundancy and recovery. It’s just built into the design. The Difference Between Infrastructure Designs and Platform Designs When you simply take a physical server running software and virtualize it either privately or publicly, you haven’t done anything to allow the code to scale or have recovery. That all has to be handled by adding more code and more Virtual Machines that have a slight lag in maintaining the running state of the system. Add more machines and you get more lag, so the scale is limited. This is the primary limitation with IaaS. It’s also not as easy to deploy these VM’s, and more importantly, you’re often charged on a longer basis to remove them. your agility in IaaS is more limited. Windows Azure is a Platform - meaning that you get objects you can code against. The code you write runs on multiple nodes with multiple copies, and it all works because of the magic of Stateless programming. you don’t worry, or even care, about what is running underneath. It could be Windows (and it is in fact a type of Windows Server), Linux, or anything else - but that' isn’t what you want to manage, monitor, maintain or license. You don’t want to deploy an operating system - you want to deploy an application. You want your code to run, and you don’t care how it does that. Another benefit to PaaS is that you can ask for hundreds or thousands of new nodes of computing power - there’s no provisioning, it just happens. And you can stop using them quicker - and the base code for your application does not have to change to make this happen. Windows Azure Roles and Their Use If you need your code to have a user interface, in Visual Studio you add a Web Role to your project, and if the code needs to do work that doesn’t involve a user interface you can add a Worker Role. They are just containers that act a certain way. I’ll provide more detail on those later. Note: That’s a general description, so it’s not entirely accurate, but it’s accurate enough for this discussion. So now we’re back to that VM Role. Because of the name, some have mistakenly thought that you can take a Virtual Machine running, say Linux, and deploy it to Windows Azure using this Role. But you can’t. That’s not what it is designed for at all. If you do need that kind of deployment, you should look into Hyper-V and System Center to create the Private or Public Infrastructure as a Service. What the VM Role is actually designed to do is to allow you to have a great deal of control over the system where your code will run. Let’s take an example. You’ve heard about Windows Azure, and Platform programming. You’re convinced it’s the right way to code. But you have a lot of things you’ve written in another way at your company. Re-writing all of your code to take advantage of Windows Azure will take a long time. Or perhaps you have a certain version of Apache Web Server that you need for your code to work. In both cases, you think you can (or already have) code the the software to be “Stateless”, you just need more control over the place where the code runs. That’s the place where a VM Role makes sense. Recap Virtualizing servers alone has limitations of scale, availability and recovery. Microsoft’s offering in this area is Hyper-V and System Center, not the VM Role. The VM Role is still used for running Stateless code, just like the Web and Worker Roles, with the exception that it allows you more control over the environment of where that code runs.

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• Wine PPA dependency problems after upgrading to 12.04

  - by Pablo

  I recently upgraded my Ubuntu up to 12.04. Untill that, i can't use synaptic at all. After trying to repair the issue through synaptics, it returns me: installArchives() failed: dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine1.4-i386:i386: wine1.4-i386:i386 depends on wine1.4-common (= 1.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1~ppa3); however: Version of wine1.4-common on system is 1.4-0ubuntu4. dpkg: error processing wine1.4-i386:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine1.4: wine1.4 depends on wine1.4-amd64 (= 1.4-0ubuntu4); however: Version of wine1.4-amd64 on system is 1.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1~ppa3. wine1.4 depends on wine1.4-i386 (= 1.4-0ubuntu4); however:No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Package wine1.4-i386 is not installed. Version of wine1.4-i386:i386 on system is 1.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1~ppa3. dpkg: error processing wine1.4 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine1.4-common: wine1.4-common depends on wine1.4 (= 1.4-0ubuntu4); however: Package wine1.4 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing wine1.4-common (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine1.4-amd64: wine1.4-amd64 depends on wine1.4-common (= 1.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1~ppa3); however: Version of wine1.4-common on system is 1.4-0ubuntu4. dpkg: error processing wine1.4-amd64 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine: wine depends on wine1.4; however: Package wine1.4 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing wine (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: depeNo apport report written because MaxReports is reached already No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already ndency problems prevent configuration of playonlinux: playonlinux depends on wine | wine-unstable; however: Package wine is not configured yet. Package wine1.4 which provides wine is not configured yet. Package wine-unstable is not installed. dpkg: error processing playonlinux (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Errors were encountered while processing: wine1.4-i386:i386 wine1.4 wine1.4-common wine1.4-amd64 wine playonlinux Error in function: SystemError: E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine1.4: wine1.4 depends on wine1.4-amd64 (= 1.4-0ubuntu4); however: Version of wine1.4-amd64 on system is 1.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1~ppa3. wine1.4 depends on wine1.4-i386 (= 1.4-0ubuntu4); however: Package wine1.4-i386 is not installed. Version of wine1.4-i386:i386 on system is 1.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1~ppa3. dpkg: error processing wine1.4 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine: wine depends on wine1.4; however: Package wine1.4 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing wine (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine1.4-common: wine1.4-common depends on wine1.4 (= 1.4-0ubuntu4); however: Package wine1.4 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing wine1.4-common (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine1.4-amd64: wine1.4-amd64 depends on wine1.4-common (= 1.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1~ppa3); however: Version of wine1.4-common on system is 1.4-0ubuntu4. dpkg: error processing wine1.4-amd64 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine1.4-i386:i386: wine1.4-i386:i386 depends on wine1.4-common (= 1.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1~ppa3); however: Version of wine1.4-common on system is 1.4-0ubuntu4. dpkg: error processing wine1.4-i386:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of playonlinux: playonlinux depends on wine | wine-unstable; however: Package wine is not configured yet. Package wine1.4 which provides wine is not configured yet. Package wine-unstable is not installed. dpkg: error processing playonlinux (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured I tried the following: sudo apt-get clean sudo apt-get autoclean sudo apt-get install -f And returnsme: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following extra packages will be installed: wine1.4 wine1.4-common Suggested packages: dosbox The following packages will be upgraded: wine1.4 wine1.4-common 2 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 110 not upgraded. 6 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/1,126 kB of archives. After this operation, 9,216 B of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine1.4-i386:i386: wine1.4-i386:i386 depends on wine1.4-common (= 1.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1~ppa3); however: Version of wine1.4-common on system is 1.4-0ubuntu4. dpkg: error processing wine1.4-i386:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine1.4: wine1.4 depends on wine1.4-amd64 (= 1.4-0ubuntu4); however: Version of wine1.4-amd64 on system is 1.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1~ppa3. wine1.4 depends on wine1.4-i386 (= 1.4-0ubuntu4); however: Package wine1.4-i386 is not installed. Version of wine1.4-i386:i386 on system is 1.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1~ppa3. No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure. dpkg: error processing wine1.4 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine1.4-common: wine1.4-common depends on wine1.4 (= 1.4-0ubuntu4); however: Package wine1.4 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing wine1.4-common (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine1.4-amd64: wine1.4-amd64 depends on wine1.4-common (= 1.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1~ppa3); however: Version of wine1.4-common on system is 1.4-0ubuntu4. dpkg: error processing wine1.4-amd64 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wine: wine depends on wine1.4; however: Package wine1.4 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing wine (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of playonlinux: playonlinux depends on wine | wine-unstable; however: PackagNo apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure. No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure. No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already e wine is not configured yet. Package wine1.4 which provides wine is not configured yet. Package wine-unstable is not installed. dpkg: error processing playonlinux (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Errors were encountered while processing: wine1.4-i386:i386 wine1.4 wine1.4-common wine1.4-amd64 wine playonlinux E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) Cna anyone helpme? I've been searching for a sollution for days and still can't solve it. Thanks! Pablo

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• Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine

  - by danx

  Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine Cryptography is a major component of secure e-commerce. Since cryptography is compute intensive and adds a significant load to applications, such as SSL web servers (https), crypto performance is an important factor. Providing accelerated crypto hardware greatly helps these applications and will help lead to a wider adoption of cryptography, and lower cost, in e-commerce and other applications. The Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to acclerate AES encryption. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions". These are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine. Previous Work Previously, AESNI instructions were introduced into the Solaris x86 kernel and libraries. That is, the "aes" kernel module (used by IPsec and other kernel modules) and the Solaris pkcs11 library (for user applications). These are available in Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8) and above, and Solaris 11. The work here is to add the aesni engine to OpenSSL. X86 AESNI Instructions Intel's Xeon 5600 is one of the processors that support AESNI. This processor is used in the Sun Fire X4170 M2 As mentioned above, six new instructions acclerate AES encryption in processor silicon. The new instructions are: aesenc performs one round of AES encryption. One encryption round is composed of these steps: substitute bytes, shift rows, mix columns, and xor the round key. aesenclast performs the final encryption round, which is the same as above, except omitting the mix columns (which is only needed for the next encryption round). aesdec performs one round of AES decryption aesdeclast performs the final AES decryption round aeskeygenassist Helps expand the user-provided key into a "key schedule" of keys, one per round aesimc performs an "inverse mixed columns" operation to convert the encryption key schedule into a decryption key schedule pclmulqdq Not a AESNI instruction, but performs "carryless multiply" operations to acclerate AES GCM mode. Since the AESNI instructions are implemented in hardware, they take a constant number of cycles and are not vulnerable to side-channel timing attacks that attempt to discern some bits of data from the time taken to encrypt or decrypt the data. Solaris x86 and OpenSSL Software Optimizations Having X86 AESNI hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it? The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris x86 on a AESNI-capable processor. AESNI is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules and is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library. For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, AESNI crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "aesni engine." This is in lieu of the extra overhead of going through the Solaris OpenSSL pkcs11 engine, which accesses Solaris crypto and digest operations. Instead, AESNI assembly is included directly in the new aesni engine. Instead of including the aesni engine in a separate library in /lib/openssl/engines/, the aesni engine is "built-in", meaning it is included directly in OpenSSL's libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library. This reduces overhead and the need to manually specify the aesni engine. Since the engine is built-in (that is, in libcrypto.so.1.0.0), the openssl -engine command line flag or API call is not needed to access the engine—the aesni engine is used automatically on AESNI hardware. Ciphers and Digests supported by OpenSSL aesni engine The Openssl aesni engine auto-detects if it's running on AESNI hardware and uses AESNI encryption instructions for these ciphers: AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, AES-256-CBC, AES-128-CFB128, AES-192-CFB128, AES-256-CFB128, AES-128-CTR, AES-192-CTR, AES-256-CTR, AES-128-ECB, AES-192-ECB, AES-256-ECB, AES-128-OFB, AES-192-OFB, and AES-256-OFB. Implementation of the OpenSSL aesni engine The AESNI assembly language routines are not a part of the regular Openssl 1.0.0 release. AESNI is a part of the "HEAD" ("development" or "unstable") branch of OpenSSL, for future release. But AESNI is also available as a separate patch provided by Intel to the OpenSSL project for OpenSSL 1.0.0. A minimal amount of "glue" code in the aesni engine works between the OpenSSL libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library and the assembly functions. The aesni engine code is separate from the base OpenSSL code and requires patching only a few source files to use it. That means OpenSSL can be more easily updated to future versions without losing the performance from the built-in aesni engine. OpenSSL aesni engine Performance Here's some graphs of aesni engine performance I measured by running openssl speed -evp $algorithm where $algorithm is aes-128-cbc, aes-192-cbc, and aes-256-cbc. These are using the 64-bit version of openssl on the same AESNI hardware, a Sun Fire X4170 M2 with a Intel Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz, running Solaris 11 FCS. "Before" is openssl without the aesni engine and "after" is openssl with the aesni engine. The numbers are MBytes/second. OpenSSL aesni engine performance on Sun Fire X4170 M2 (Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz) (Higher is better; "before"=OpenSSL on AESNI without AESNI engine software, "after"=OpenSSL AESNI engine) As you can see the speedup is dramatic for all 3 key lengths and for data sizes from 16 bytes to 8 Kbytes—AESNI is about 7.5-8x faster over hand-coded amd64 assembly (without aesni instructions). Verifying the OpenSSL aesni engine is present The easiest way to determine if you are running the aesni engine is to type "openssl engine" on the command line. No configuration, API, or command line options are needed to use the OpenSSL aesni engine. If you are running on Intel AESNI hardware with Solaris 11 FCS, you'll see this output indicating you are using the aesni engine: intel-westmere $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support If you are running on Intel without AESNI hardware you'll see this output indicating the hardware can't support the aesni engine: intel-nehalem $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support For Solaris on SPARC or older Solaris OpenSSL software, you won't see any aesni engine line at all. Third-party OpenSSL software (built yourself or from outside Oracle) will not have the aesni engine either. Solaris 11 FCS comes with OpenSSL version 1.0.0e. The output of typing "openssl version" should be "OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011". 64- and 32-bit OpenSSL OpenSSL comes in both 32- and 64-bit binaries. 64-bit executable is now the default, at /usr/bin/openssl, and OpenSSL 64-bit libraries at /lib/amd64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0 The 32-bit executable is at /usr/bin/i86/openssl and the libraries are at /lib/libcrytpo.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0. Availability The OpenSSL AESNI engine is available in Solaris 11 x86 for both the 64- and 32-bit versions of OpenSSL. It is not available with Solaris 10. You must have a processor that supports AESNI instructions, otherwise OpenSSL will fallback to the older, slower AES implementation without AESNI. Processors that support AESNI include most Westmere and Sandy Bridge class processor architectures. Some low-end processors (such as for mobile/laptop platforms) do not support AESNI. The easiest way to determine if the processor supports AESNI is with the isainfo -v command—look for "amd64" and "aes" in the output: $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu Conclusion The Solaris 11 OpenSSL aesni engine provides easy access to powerful Intel AESNI hardware cryptography, in addition to Solaris userland PKCS#11 libraries and Solaris crypto kernel modules.

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• Windows Azure VMs - New "Stopped" VM Options Provide Cost-effective Flexibility for On-Demand Workloads

  - by KeithMayer

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/KeithMayer/archive/2013/06/22/windows-azure-vms---new-stopped-vm-options-provide-cost-effective.aspxDidn’t make it to TechEd this year? Don’t worry!  This month, we’ll be releasing a new article series that highlights the Best of TechEd announcements and technical information for IT Pros.  Today’s article focuses on a new, much-heralded enhancement to Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to make it more cost-effective for spinning VMs up and down on-demand on the Windows Azure cloud platform. NEW! VMs that are shutdown from the Windows Azure Management Portal will no longer continue to accumulate compute charges while stopped! Previous to this enhancement being available, the Azure platform maintained fabric resource reservations for VMs, even in a shutdown state, to ensure consistent resource availability when starting those VMs in the future.  And, this meant that VMs had to be exported and completely deprovisioned when not in use to avoid compute charges. In this article, I'll provide more details on the scenarios that this enhancement best fits, and I'll also review the new options and considerations that we now have for performing safe shutdowns of Windows Azure VMs. Which scenarios does the new enhancement best fit? Being able to easily shutdown VMs from the Windows Azure Management Portal without continued compute charges is a great enhancement for certain cloud use cases, such as: On-demand dev/test/lab environments - Freely start and stop lab VMs so that they are only accumulating compute charges when being actively used.  "Bursting" load-balanced web applications - Provision a number of load-balanced VMs, but keep the minimum number of VMs running to support "normal" loads. Easily start-up the remaining VMs only when needed to support peak loads. Disaster Recovery - Start-up "cold" VMs when needed to recover from disaster scenarios. BUT ... there is a consideration to keep in mind when using the Windows Azure Management Portal to shutdown VMs: although performing a VM shutdown via the Windows Azure Management Portal causes that VM to no longer accumulate compute charges, it also deallocates the VM from fabric resources to which it was previously assigned.  These fabric resources include compute resources such as virtual CPU cores and memory, as well as network resources, such as IP addresses.  This means that when the VM is later started after being shutdown from the portal, the VM could be assigned a different IP address or placed on a different compute node within the fabric. In some cases, you may want to shutdown VMs using the old approach, where fabric resource assignments are maintained while the VM is in a shutdown state.  Specifically, you may wish to do this when temporarily shutting down or restarting a "7x24" VM as part of a maintenance activity.  Good news - you can still revert back to the old VM shutdown behavior when necessary by using the alternate VM shutdown approaches listed below.  Let's walk through each approach for performing a VM Shutdown action on Windows Azure so that we can understand the benefits and considerations of each... How many ways can I shutdown a VM? In Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, there's three general ways that can be used to safely shutdown VMs: Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM Stop VM via Windows PowerShell using Windows Azure PowerShell Module Although each of these options performs a safe shutdown of the guest operation system and the VM itself, each option handles the VM shutdown end state differently. Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal When clicking the Shutdown button at the bottom of the Virtual Machines page in the Windows Azure Management Portal, the VM is safely shutdown and "deallocated" from fabric resources.  Shutdown button on Virtual Machines page in Windows Azure Management Portal  When the shutdown process completes, the VM will be shown on the Virtual Machines page with a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status as shown in the figure below. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped (Deallocated)" Status "Deallocated" means that the VM configuration is no longer being actively associated with fabric resources, such as virtual CPUs, memory and networks. In this state, the VM will not continue to allocate compute charges, but since fabric resources are deallocated, the VM could receive a different internal IP address ( called "Dynamic IPs" or "DIPs" in Windows Azure ) the next time it is started.  TIP: If you are leveraging this shutdown option and consistency of DIPs is important to applications running inside your VMs, you should consider using virtual networks with your VMs.  Virtual networks permit you to assign a specific IP Address Space for use with VMs that are assigned to that virtual network.  As long as you start VMs in the same order in which they were originally provisioned, each VM should be reassigned the same DIP that it was previously using. What about consistency of External IP Addresses? Great question! External IP addresses ( called "Virtual IPs" or "VIPs" in Windows Azure ) are associated with the cloud service in which one or more Windows Azure VMs are running.  As long as at least 1 VM inside a cloud service remains in a "Running" state, the VIP assigned to a cloud service will be preserved.  If all VMs inside a cloud service are in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status, then the cloud service may receive a different VIP when VMs are next restarted. TIP: If consistency of VIPs is important for the cloud services in which you are running VMs, consider keeping one VM inside each cloud service in the alternate VM shutdown state listed below to preserve the VIP associated with the cloud service. Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM When performing a Guest OS shutdown or restart ( ie., a shutdown or restart operation initiated from the Guest OS running inside the VM ), the VM configuration will not be deallocated from fabric resources. In the figure below, the VM has been shutdown from within the Guest OS and is shown with a "Stopped" VM status rather than the "Stopped ( Deallocated )" VM status that was shown in the previous figure. Note that it may require a few minutes for the Windows Azure Management Portal to reflect that the VM is in a "Stopped" state in this scenario, because we are performing an OS shutdown inside the VM rather than through an Azure management endpoint. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped" Status VMs shown in a "Stopped" status will continue to accumulate compute charges, because fabric resources are still being reserved for these VMs.  However, this also means that DIPs and VIPs are preserved for VMs in this state, so you don't have to worry about VMs and cloud services getting different IP addresses when they are started in the future. Stop VM via Windows PowerShell In the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module, a new -StayProvisioned parameter has been added to the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet. This new parameter provides the flexibility to choose the VM configuration end result when stopping VMs using PowerShell: When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet without the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped and deallocated; that is, the VM will be left in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status just like the end result when a VM Shutdown operation is performed via the Windows Azure Management Portal.  When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet with the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped but fabric resource reservations will be preserved; that is the VM will be left in a "Stopped" status just like the end result when performing a Guest OS shutdown operation. So, with PowerShell, you can choose how Windows Azure should handle VM configuration and fabric resource reservations when stopping VMs on a case-by-case basis. TIP: It's important to note that the -StayProvisioned parameter is only available in the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module.  So, if you've previously downloaded this module, be sure to download and install the latest version to get this new functionality. Want to Learn More about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services? To learn more about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, be sure to check-out these additional FREE resources: Become our next "Early Expert"! Complete the Early Experts "Cloud Quest" and build a multi-VM lab network in the cloud for FREE!  Build some cool scenarios! Check out our list of over 20+ Step-by-Step Lab Guides based on key scenarios that IT Pros are implementing on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services TODAY!  Looking forward to seeing you in the Cloud! - Keith Build Your Lab! Download Windows Server 2012 Don’t Have a Lab? Build Your Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Machines Want to Get Certified? Join our Windows Server 2012 "Early Experts" Study Group

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• Fragmented Log files could be slowing down your database

  - by Fatherjack

  Something that is sometimes forgotten by a lot of DBAs is the fact that database log files get fragmented in the same way that you get fragmentation in a data file. The cause is very different but the effect is the same – too much effort reading and writing data. Data files get fragmented as data is changed through normal system activity, INSERTs, UPDATEs and DELETEs cause fragmentation and most experienced DBAs are monitoring their indexes for fragmentation and dealing with it accordingly. However, you don’t hear about so many working on their log files. How can a log file get fragmented? I’m glad you asked. When you create a database there are at least two files created on the disk storage; an mdf for the data and an ldf for the log file (you can also have ndf files for extra data storage but that’s off topic for now). It is wholly possible to have more than one log file but in most cases there is little point in creating more than one as the log file is written to in a ‘wrap-around’ method (more on that later). When a log file is created at the time that a database is created the file is actually sub divided into a number of virtual log files (VLFs). The number and size of these VLFs depends on the size chosen for the log file. VLFs are also created in the space added to a log file when a log file growth event takes place. Do you have your log files set to auto grow? Then you have potentially been introducing many VLFs into your log file. Let’s get to see how many VLFs we have in a brand new database. USE master GO CREATE DATABASE VLF_Test ON ( NAME = VLF_Test, FILENAME = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.ROCK_2008\MSSQL\DATA\VLF_Test.mdf', SIZE = 100, MAXSIZE = 500, FILEGROWTH = 50 ) LOG ON ( NAME = VLF_Test_Log, FILENAME = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.ROCK_2008\MSSQL\DATA\VLF_Test_log.ldf', SIZE = 5MB, MAXSIZE = 250MB, FILEGROWTH = 5MB ); go USE VLF_Test go DBCC LOGINFO; The results of this are firstly a new database is created with specified files sizes and the the DBCC LOGINFO results are returned to the script editor. The DBCC LOGINFO results have plenty of interesting information in them but lets first note there are 4 rows of information, this relates to the fact that 4 VLFs have been created in the log file. The values in the FileSize column are the sizes of each VLF in bytes, you will see that the last one to be created is slightly larger than the others. So, a 5MB log file has 4 VLFs of roughly 1.25 MB. Lets alter the CREATE DATABASE script to create a log file that’s a bit bigger and see what happens. Alter the code above so that the log file details are replaced by LOG ON ( NAME = VLF_Test_Log, FILENAME = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.ROCK_2008\MSSQL\DATA\VLF_Test_log.ldf', SIZE = 1GB, MAXSIZE = 25GB, FILEGROWTH = 1GB ); With a bigger log file specified we get more VLFs What if we make it bigger again? LOG ON ( NAME = VLF_Test_Log, FILENAME = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.ROCK_2008\MSSQL\DATA\VLF_Test_log.ldf', SIZE = 5GB, MAXSIZE = 250GB, FILEGROWTH = 5GB ); This time we see more VLFs are created within our log file. We now have our 5GB log file comprised of 16 files of 320MB each. In fact these sizes fall into all the ranges that control the VLF creation criteria – what a coincidence! The rules that are followed when a log file is created or has it’s size increased are pretty basic. If the file growth is lower than 64MB then 4 VLFs are created If the growth is between 64MB and 1GB then 8 VLFs are created If the growth is greater than 1GB then 16 VLFs are created. Now the potential for chaos comes if the default values and settings for log file growth are used. By default a database log file gets a 1MB log file with unlimited growth in steps of 10%. The database we just created is 6 MB, let’s add some data and see what happens. USE vlf_test go -- we need somewhere to put the data so, a table is in order IF OBJECT_ID('A_Table') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE A_Table go CREATE TABLE A_Table ( Col_A int IDENTITY, Col_B CHAR(8000) ) GO -- Let's check the state of the log file -- 4 VLFs found EXECUTE ('DBCC LOGINFO'); go -- We can go ahead and insert some data and then check the state of the log file again INSERT A_Table (col_b) SELECT TOP 500 REPLICATE('a',2000) FROM sys.columns AS sc, sys.columns AS sc2 GO -- insert 500 rows and we get 22 VLFs EXECUTE ('DBCC LOGINFO'); go -- Let's insert more rows INSERT A_Table (col_b) SELECT TOP 2000 REPLICATE('a',2000) FROM sys.columns AS sc, sys.columns AS sc2 GO 10 -- insert 2000 rows, in 10 batches and we suddenly have 107 VLFs EXECUTE ('DBCC LOGINFO'); Well, that escalated quickly! Our log file is split, internally, into 107 fragments after a few thousand inserts. The same happens with any logged transactions, I just chose to illustrate this with INSERTs. Having too many VLFs can cause performance degradation at times of database start up, log backup and log restore operations so it’s well worth keeping a check on this property. How do we prevent excessive VLF creation? Creating the database with larger files and also with larger growth steps and actively choosing to grow your databases rather than leaving it to the Auto Grow event can make sure that the growths are made with a size that is optimal. How do we resolve a situation of a database with too many VLFs? This process needs to be done when the database is under little or no stress so that you don’t affect system users. The steps are: BACKUP LOG YourDBName TO YourBackupDestinationOfChoice Shrink the log file to its smallest possible size DBCC SHRINKFILE(FileNameOfTLogHere, TRUNCATEONLY) * Re-size the log file to the size you want it to, taking in to account your expected needs for the coming months or year. ALTER DATABASE YourDBName MODIFY FILE ( NAME = FileNameOfTLogHere, SIZE = TheSizeYouWantItToBeIn_MB) * – If you don’t know the file name of your log file then run sp_helpfile while you are connected to the database that you want to work on and you will get the details you need. The resize step can take quite a while This is already detailed far better than I can explain it by Kimberley Tripp in her blog 8-Steps-to-better-Transaction-Log-throughput.aspx. The result of this will be a log file with a VLF count according to the bullet list above. Knowing when VLFs are being created By complete coincidence while I have been writing this blog (it’s been quite some time from it’s inception to going live) Jonathan Kehayias from SQLSkills.com has written a great article on how to track database file growth using Event Notifications and Service Broker. I strongly recommend taking a look at it as this is going to catch any sneaky auto grows that take place and let you know about them right away. Hassle free monitoring of VLFs If you are lucky or wise enough to be using SQL Monitor or another monitoring tool that let’s you write your own custom metrics then you can keep an eye on this very easily. There is a custom metric for VLFs (written by Stuart Ainsworth) already on the site and there are some others there are very useful so take a moment or two to look around while you are there. Resources MSDN – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms179355(v=sql.105).aspx Kimberly Tripp from SQLSkills.com – http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/KIMBERLY/post/8-Steps-to-better-Transaction-Log-throughput.aspx Thomas LaRock at Simple-Talk.com – http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/monitoring-sql-server-virtual-log-file-fragmentation/ Disclosure I am a Friend of Red Gate. This means that I am more than likely to say good things about Red Gate DBA and Developer tools. No matter how awesome I make them sound, take the time to compare them with other products before you contact the Red Gate sales team to make your order.

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• Visiting the Emtel Data Centre

  Back in February at the first event of the Emtel Knowledge Series (EKS) I spoke to various people at Emtel about their data centre here on the island. I was trying to see whether it would be possible to arrange a meeting over there for a selected group of our community members. Well, let's say it like this... My first approach wasn't that promising and far from successful but during the following months there were more and more occasions to get in touch with the "right" contact persons at Emtel to make it happen... Setting up an appointment and pre-requisites The major improvement came during a Boot Camp for Windows Phone 8.1 App development organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands in cooperation with Emtel at the Emtel World, Ebene. Apart from learning bits and pieces regarding Universal Apps I took the opportunity to get in touch with Arvin Lockee, Sales Executive - Data, during our lunch break. And this really kicked off the whole procedure. Prior to get access to the Emtel data centre it is requested that you provide full name and National ID of anyone going to visit. Also, it should be noted that there was only a limited amount of seats available. Anyways, packed with this information I posted through the usual social media channels. Responses came in very quickly and based on First-come, first-serve (FCFS) principle I noted down the details and forwarded them to Emtel in order to fix a date and time for the visit. In preparation on our side, all attendees exchanged contact details and we organised transport options to go to the data centre in Arsenal. The day before and on the day of our meeting, Arvin send me a reminder to check whether everything is still confirmed and ready to go... Of course, it was! Arriving at the Emtel Data Centre As I'm coming from Flic En Flac towards the North, we agreed that I'm going to pick up a couple of young fellows near the old post office in Port Louis. All went well, except that Sean eventually might be living in another time zone compared to the rest of us. Anyway, after some extended stop we were complete and arrived just in time in Arsenal to meet and greet with Ish and Veer. Again, Emtel is taking access procedures to their data centre very serious and the gate stayed close until all our IDs had been noted and compared to the list of registered attendees. Despite having a good laugh at the mixture of old and new ID cards it was a straight-forward processing. The ward was very helpful and guided us to the waiting area at the entrance section of the building. Shortly after we were welcomed by Kamlesh Bokhoree, the Data Centre Officer. He gave us brief introduction into the rules and regulations during our visit, like no photography allowed, not touching the buttons, and following his instructions through the whole visit. Of course! Inside the data centre Next, he explained us the multi-factor authentication system using a combination of bio-metric data, like finger print reader, and "classic" pin panel. The Emtel data centre provides multiple services and next to co-location for your own hardware they also offer storage options for your backup and archive data in their massive, fire-resistant vault. Very impressive to get to know about the considerations that have been done in choosing the right location and how to set up the whole premises. It should also be noted that there is 24/7 CCTV surveillance inside and outside the buildings. Strengths of the Emtel TIER 3 Data Centre, Mauritius Finally, we were guided into the first server room. And wow, the whole setup is cleverly planned and outlined in the architecture. From the false floor and ceilings in order to provide optimum air flow, over to the separation of cold and hot aisles between the full-size server racks, and of course the monitored air conditions in order to analyse and watch changes in temperature, smoke detection and other parameters. And not surprisingly everything has been implemented in two independent circuits. There is a standardised classification for the construction and operation of data centres world-wide, and the Emtel's one has been designed to be a TIER 4 building but due to the lack of an alternative power supplier on the island it is officially registered as a TIER 3 compliant data centre. Maybe in the long run there might be a second supplier of energy next to CEB... time will tell. Luckily, the data centre is integrated into the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and Emtel already connects internationally through diverse undersea cable routes like SAFE & LION/LION2 out of Mauritius and through several other providers for onwards connectivity. The data centre is part of the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and has redundant internet connectivity onwards. Meanwhile, Arvin managed to join our little group of geeks and he supported Kamlesh in answering our technical questions regarding the capacities and general operation of the data centre. Visiting the NOC and its dedicated team of IT professionals was surely one of the visual highlights. Seeing their wall of screens to monitor any kind of activities on the data lines, the managed servers and the activity in and around the building was great. Even though I'm using a multi-head setup since years I cannot keep it up with that setup... ;-) But I got a couple of ideas on how to improve my work spaces here at the office. Clear advantages of hosting your e-commerce and mobile backends locally After the completely isolated NOC area we continued our Q&A session with Kamlesh and Arvin in the second server room which is dedictated to shared environments. On first thought it should be well-noted that there is lots of space for full-sized racks and therefore co-location of your own hardware. Actually, given the feedback that there will be upcoming changes in prices the facilities at the Emtel data centre are getting more and more competitive and interesting for local companies, especially small and medium enterprises. After seeing this world-class infrastructure available on the island, I'm already considering of moving one of my root servers abroad to be co-located here on the island. This would provide an improved user experience in terms of site performance and latency. This would be a good improvement, especially for upcoming e-commerce solutions for two of my local clients. Later on, we actually started the conversation of additional services that could be a catalyst for the local market in order to attract more small and medium companies to take the data centre into their evaluations regarding online activities. Until today Emtel does not provide virtualised server environments but there might be ongoing plans in the future to cover this field as well. Emtel is a mobile operator and internet connectivity provider in the first place, entering a market of managed and virtualised server infrastructures including capacities in terms of cloud storage and computing are rather new and there is a continuous learning curve at Emtel, too. You cannot just jump into a new market and see how it works out... And I appreciate Emtel's approach towards a solid fundament and then building new services on top of that. Emtel as a future one-stop-shop service provider for all your internet and telecommunications needs. Emtel's promotional video about their TIER 3 data centre in Arsenal, Mauritius More details are thoroughly described in Emtel's brochure of their data centre. Check out their PDF document here. Thanks for this opportunity Visiting and walking through the Emtel data centre for more than 2 hours was a great experience. As representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) I would like to thank anyone at Emtel involved in the process of making it happen, and especially to Arvin Lockee and Kamlesh Bokhoree for their time and patience in explaining the infrastructure and answering all the endless questions from our members. Thank You!

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• New Features in ASP.NET Web API 2 - Part I

  - by dwahlin

  I’m a big fan of ASP.NET Web API. It provides a quick yet powerful way to build RESTful HTTP services that can easily be consumed by a variety of clients. While it’s simple to get started using, it has a wealth of features such as filters, formatters, and message handlers that can be used to extend it when needed. In this post I’m going to provide a quick walk-through of some of the key new features in version 2. I’ll focus on some two of my favorite features that are related to routing and HTTP responses and cover additional features in a future post.   Attribute Routing Routing has been a core feature of Web API since it’s initial release and something that’s built into new Web API projects out-of-the-box. However, there are a few scenarios where defining routes can be challenging such as nested routes (more on that in a moment) and any situation where a lot of custom routes have to be defined. For this example, let’s assume that you’d like to define the following nested route:   /customers/1/orders   This type of route would select a customer with an Id of 1 and then return all of their orders. Defining this type of route in the standard WebApiConfig class is certainly possible, but it isn’t the easiest thing to do for people who don’t understand routing well. Here’s an example of how the route shown above could be defined:   public static class WebApiConfig { public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config) { config.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "CustomerOrdersApiGet", routeTemplate: "api/customers/{custID}/orders", defaults: new { custID = 0, controller = "Customers", action = "Orders" } ); config.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "DefaultApi", routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}", defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional } ); GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Insert(0, new JsonpFormatter()); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   With attribute based routing, defining these types of nested routes is greatly simplified. To get started you first need to make a call to the new MapHttpAttributeRoutes() method in the standard WebApiConfig class (or a custom class that you may have created that defines your routes) as shown next:   public static class WebApiConfig { public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config) { // Allow for attribute based routes config.MapHttpAttributeRoutes(); config.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "DefaultApi", routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}", defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional } ); } } Once attribute based routes are configured, you can apply the Route attribute to one or more controller actions. Here’s an example:   [HttpGet] [Route("customers/{custId:int}/orders")] public List<Order> Orders(int custId) { var orders = _Repository.GetOrders(custId); if (orders == null) { throw new HttpResponseException(new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.NotFound)); } return orders; }   This example maps the custId route parameter to the custId parameter in the Orders() method and also ensures that the route parameter is typed as an integer. The Orders() method can be called using the following route: /customers/2/orders   While this is extremely easy to use and gets the job done, it doesn’t include the default “api” string on the front of the route that you might be used to seeing. You could add “api” in front of the route and make it “api/customers/{custId:int}/orders” but then you’d have to repeat that across other attribute-based routes as well. To simply this type of task you can add the RoutePrefix attribute above the controller class as shown next so that “api” (or whatever the custom starting point of your route is) is applied to all attribute routes: [RoutePrefix("api")] public class CustomersController : ApiController { [HttpGet] [Route("customers/{custId:int}/orders")] public List<Order> Orders(int custId) { var orders = _Repository.GetOrders(custId); if (orders == null) { throw new HttpResponseException(new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.NotFound)); } return orders; } }   There’s much more that you can do with attribute-based routing in ASP.NET. Check out the following post by Mike Wasson for more details.   Returning Responses with IHttpActionResult The first version of Web API provided a way to return custom HttpResponseMessage objects which were pretty easy to use overall. However, Web API 2 now wraps some of the functionality available in version 1 to simplify the process even more. A new interface named IHttpActionResult (similar to ActionResult in ASP.NET MVC) has been introduced which can be used as the return type for Web API controller actions. To return a custom response you can use new helper methods exposed through ApiController such as: Ok NotFound Exception Unauthorized BadRequest Conflict Redirect InvalidModelState Here’s an example of how IHttpActionResult and the helper methods can be used to cleanup code. This is the typical way to return a custom HTTP response in version 1:   public HttpResponseMessage Delete(int id) { var status = _Repository.DeleteCustomer(id); if (status) { return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); } else { throw new HttpResponseException(HttpStatusCode.NotFound); } } With version 2 we can replace HttpResponseMessage with IHttpActionResult and simplify the code quite a bit:   public IHttpActionResult Delete(int id) { var status = _Repository.DeleteCustomer(id); if (status) { //return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); return Ok(); } else { //throw new HttpResponseException(HttpStatusCode.NotFound); return NotFound(); } } You can also cleanup post (insert) operations as well using the helper methods. Here’s a version 1 post action:   public HttpResponseMessage Post([FromBody]Customer cust) { var newCust = _Repository.InsertCustomer(cust); if (newCust != null) { var msg = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Created); msg.Headers.Location = new Uri(Request.RequestUri + newCust.ID.ToString()); return msg; } else { throw new HttpResponseException(HttpStatusCode.Conflict); } } This is what the code looks like in version 2:   public IHttpActionResult Post([FromBody]Customer cust) { var newCust = _Repository.InsertCustomer(cust); if (newCust != null) { return Created<Customer>(Request.RequestUri + newCust.ID.ToString(), newCust); } else { return Conflict(); } } More details on IHttpActionResult and the different helper methods provided by the ApiController base class can be found here. Conclusion Although there are several additional features available in Web API 2 that I could cover (CORS support for example), this post focused on two of my favorites features. If you have .NET 4.5.1 available then I definitely recommend checking the new features out. Additional articles that cover features in ASP.NET Web API 2 can be found here.

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• Why It Is So Important to Know Your Customer

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Over the years, I endured enough delayed flights, air turbulence and misadventures in airport security clearance to watch my expectations for the air travel experience fall to abysmally low levels. The extent of my loyalty to any one carrier had more to do with the proximity of the airport parking garage to their particular gate than to any effort on the airline’s part to actually earn and retain my business. That all changed one day when I found myself at the airport hoping to catch a return flight home a few hours earlier than expected, using an airline I had flown with for the first time just that week.  When you travel regularly for business, being able to catch a return flight home that’s even an hour or two earlier than originally scheduled is a big deal. It can mean the difference between having a normal evening with your family and having to sneak in like a cat burglar after everyone is fast asleep. And so I found myself on this particular day hoping to catch an earlier flight home. I approached the gate agent and was told that I could go on standby for their next flight out. Then I asked how much it was going to cost to change the flight, knowing full well that I wouldn’t get reimbursed by my company for any change fees. “Oh, there’s no charge to fly on standby,” the gate agent told me. I made a funny look. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This airline was going to let my fly on standby, at no additional charge, even though I was a new customer with no status or points. It had been years since I’d seen an airline pass up a short term revenue generating opportunity in favor of a long term loyalty generating one.  At that moment, this particular airline gained my loyal business. Since then, this airline has had the opportunity to learn a lot about me. They know where I live, where I fly from, where I usually fly to, and where I like to sit on the plane. In general, I’ve found their customer service to be quite good whether at the airport, via call center and even through social channels. They email me occasionally, and when they do, they demonstrate that they know me by promoting deals for flights from where I live to places that I’d be interested in visiting. And that’s part of why I’m always so puzzled when I visit their website.Does this company with the great service, customer friendly policies, and clean planes demonstrate that they know me at all when I visit their website? The answer is no. Even when I log in using my loyalty program credentials, it’s pretty obvious that they’re presenting the same old home page and same old offers to every single one of their site visitors. I mean, those promotional offers that they’re featuring so prominently  -- they’re for flights that originate thousands of miles from where I live! There’s no way I’d ever book one of those flights and I’m sure I’m not the only one of their customers to feel that way.My reason for recounting this story is not to pick on the one customer experience flaw I've noticed with this particular airline, in fact, they do so many things right that I’ll continue to fly with them. But I did want to illustrate just how glaringly obvious it is to customers today when a touch point they have with a brand is impersonal, unconnected and out of sync. As someone who’s spent a number of years in the web experience management and online marketing space, it particularly peeves me when that out of sync touch point is a brand’s website, perhaps because I know how important it is to make a customer’s online experience relevant and how many powerful tools are available for making a relevant experience a reality. The fact is, delivering a one-size-fits-all online customer experience is no longer acceptable or particularly effective in today’s world. Today’s savvy customers expect you to know who they are and to understand their preferences, behavior and relationship with your brand. Not only do they expect you to know about them, but they also expect you to demonstrate this knowledge across all of their touch points with your brand in a consistent and compelling fashion, whether it be on your traditional website, your mobile web presence or through various social channels.Delivering the kind of personalized online experiences that customers want can have tremendous business benefits. This is not just about generating feelings of goodwill and higher customer satisfaction ratings either. More relevant and personalized online experiences boost the effectiveness of online marketing initiatives and the statistics prove this out. Personalized web experiences can help increase online conversion rates by 70% -- that’s a huge number.1  And more than three quarters of consumers indicate that they’ve made additional online purchases based on personalized product recommendations.2Now if only this airline would get on board with delivering a more personalized online customer experience. I’d certainly be happier and more likely to spring for one of their promotional offers. And by targeting relevant offers on their home page to appropriate segments of their site visitors, I bet they’d be happier and generating additional revenue too. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}  ***** If you're interested in hearing more perspectives on the benefits of demonstrating that you know your customers by delivering a more personalized experience, check out this white paper on creating a successful and meaningful customer experience on the web.  Also catch the video below on the business value of CX in attracting new customers featuring Oracle's VP of Customer Experience Strategy, Brian Curran. 1 Search Engine Watch 2 Marketing Charts

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• How to implement a 2d collision detection for Android

  - by Michael Seun Araromi

  I am making a 2d space shooter using opengl ES. Can someone please show me how to implement a collision detection between the enemy ship and player ship. The code for the two classes are below: Player Ship Class: package com.proandroidgames; import java.nio.ByteBuffer; import java.nio.ByteOrder; import java.nio.FloatBuffer; import javax.microedition.khronos.opengles.GL10; public class SSGoodGuy { public boolean isDestroyed = false; private int damage = 0; private FloatBuffer vertexBuffer; private FloatBuffer textureBuffer; private ByteBuffer indexBuffer; private float vertices[] = { 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, }; private float texture[] = { 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.25f, 0.0f, 0.25f, 0.25f, 0.0f, 0.25f, }; private byte indices[] = { 0, 1, 2, 0, 2, 3, }; public void applyDamage(){ damage++; if (damage == SSEngine.PLAYER_SHIELDS){ isDestroyed = true; } } public SSGoodGuy() { ByteBuffer byteBuf = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(vertices.length * 4); byteBuf.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); vertexBuffer = byteBuf.asFloatBuffer(); vertexBuffer.put(vertices); vertexBuffer.position(0); byteBuf = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(texture.length * 4); byteBuf.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); textureBuffer = byteBuf.asFloatBuffer(); textureBuffer.put(texture); textureBuffer.position(0); indexBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(indices.length); indexBuffer.put(indices); indexBuffer.position(0); } public void draw(GL10 gl, int[] spriteSheet) { gl.glBindTexture(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, spriteSheet[0]); gl.glFrontFace(GL10.GL_CCW); gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_CULL_FACE); gl.glCullFace(GL10.GL_BACK); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); gl.glVertexPointer(3, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, vertexBuffer); gl.glTexCoordPointer(2, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, textureBuffer); gl.glDrawElements(GL10.GL_TRIANGLES, indices.length, GL10.GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, indexBuffer); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_CULL_FACE); } } Enemy Ship Class: package com.proandroidgames; import java.nio.ByteBuffer; import java.nio.ByteOrder; import java.nio.FloatBuffer; import java.util.Random; import javax.microedition.khronos.opengles.GL10; public class SSEnemy { public float posY = 0f; public float posX = 0f; public float posT = 0f; public float incrementXToTarget = 0f; public float incrementYToTarget = 0f; public int attackDirection = 0; public boolean isDestroyed = false; private int damage = 0; public int enemyType = 0; public boolean isLockedOn = false; public float lockOnPosX = 0f; public float lockOnPosY = 0f; private Random randomPos = new Random(); private FloatBuffer vertexBuffer; private FloatBuffer textureBuffer; private ByteBuffer indexBuffer; private float vertices[] = { 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, }; private float texture[] = { 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.25f, 0.0f, 0.25f, 0.25f, 0.0f, 0.25f, }; private byte indices[] = { 0, 1, 2, 0, 2, 3, }; public void applyDamage() { damage++; switch (enemyType) { case SSEngine.TYPE_INTERCEPTOR: if (damage == SSEngine.INTERCEPTOR_SHIELDS) { isDestroyed = true; } break; case SSEngine.TYPE_SCOUT: if (damage == SSEngine.SCOUT_SHIELDS) { isDestroyed = true; } break; case SSEngine.TYPE_WARSHIP: if (damage == SSEngine.WARSHIP_SHIELDS) { isDestroyed = true; } break; } } public SSEnemy(int type, int direction) { enemyType = type; attackDirection = direction; posY = (randomPos.nextFloat() * 4) + 4; switch (attackDirection) { case SSEngine.ATTACK_LEFT: posX = 0; break; case SSEngine.ATTACK_RANDOM: posX = randomPos.nextFloat() * 3; break; case SSEngine.ATTACK_RIGHT: posX = 3; break; } posT = SSEngine.SCOUT_SPEED; ByteBuffer byteBuf = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(vertices.length * 4); byteBuf.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); vertexBuffer = byteBuf.asFloatBuffer(); vertexBuffer.put(vertices); vertexBuffer.position(0); byteBuf = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(texture.length * 4); byteBuf.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); textureBuffer = byteBuf.asFloatBuffer(); textureBuffer.put(texture); textureBuffer.position(0); indexBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(indices.length); indexBuffer.put(indices); indexBuffer.position(0); } public float getNextScoutX() { if (attackDirection == SSEngine.ATTACK_LEFT) { return (float) ((SSEngine.BEZIER_X_4 * (posT * posT * posT)) + (SSEngine.BEZIER_X_3 * 3 * (posT * posT) * (1 - posT)) + (SSEngine.BEZIER_X_2 * 3 * posT * ((1 - posT) * (1 - posT))) + (SSEngine.BEZIER_X_1 * ((1 - posT) * (1 - posT) * (1 - posT)))); } else { return (float) ((SSEngine.BEZIER_X_1 * (posT * posT * posT)) + (SSEngine.BEZIER_X_2 * 3 * (posT * posT) * (1 - posT)) + (SSEngine.BEZIER_X_3 * 3 * posT * ((1 - posT) * (1 - posT))) + (SSEngine.BEZIER_X_4 * ((1 - posT) * (1 - posT) * (1 - posT)))); } } public float getNextScoutY() { return (float) ((SSEngine.BEZIER_Y_1 * (posT * posT * posT)) + (SSEngine.BEZIER_Y_2 * 3 * (posT * posT) * (1 - posT)) + (SSEngine.BEZIER_Y_3 * 3 * posT * ((1 - posT) * (1 - posT))) + (SSEngine.BEZIER_Y_4 * ((1 - posT) * (1 - posT) * (1 - posT)))); } public void draw(GL10 gl, int[] spriteSheet) { gl.glBindTexture(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, spriteSheet[0]); gl.glFrontFace(GL10.GL_CCW); gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_CULL_FACE); gl.glCullFace(GL10.GL_BACK); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); gl.glVertexPointer(3, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, vertexBuffer); gl.glTexCoordPointer(2, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, textureBuffer); gl.glDrawElements(GL10.GL_TRIANGLES, indices.length, GL10.GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, indexBuffer); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_CULL_FACE); } }

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• SPARC T4-4 Beats 8-CPU IBM POWER7 on TPC-H @3000GB Benchmark

  - by Brian

  Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server delivered a world record TPC-H @3000GB benchmark result for systems with four processors. This result beats eight processor results from IBM (POWER7) and HP (x86). The SPARC T4-4 server also delivered better performance per core than these eight processor systems from IBM and HP. Comparisons below are based upon system to system comparisons, highlighting Oracle's complete software and hardware solution. This database world record result used Oracle's Sun Storage 2540-M2 arrays (rotating disk) connected to a SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle Solaris 11 and Oracle Database 11g Release 2 demonstrating the power of Oracle's integrated hardware and software solution. The SPARC T4-4 server based configuration achieved a TPC-H scale factor 3000 world record for four processor systems of 205,792 QphH@3000GB with price/performance of $4.10/QphH@3000GB. The SPARC T4-4 server with four SPARC T4 processors (total of 32 cores) is 7% faster than the IBM Power 780 server with eight POWER7 processors (total of 32 cores) on the TPC-H @3000GB benchmark. The SPARC T4-4 server is 36% better in price performance compared to the IBM Power 780 server on the TPC-H @3000GB Benchmark. The SPARC T4-4 server is 29% faster than the IBM Power 780 for data loading. The SPARC T4-4 server is up to 3.4 times faster than the IBM Power 780 server for the Refresh Function. The SPARC T4-4 server with four SPARC T4 processors is 27% faster than the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server with eight x86 processors on the TPC-H @3000GB benchmark. The SPARC T4-4 server is 52% faster than the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server for data loading. The SPARC T4-4 server is up to 3.2 times faster than the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 for the Refresh Function. The SPARC T4-4 server achieved a peak IO rate from the Oracle database of 17 GB/sec. This rate was independent of the storage used, as demonstrated by the TPC-H @3000TB benchmark which used twelve Sun Storage 2540-M2 arrays (rotating disk) and the TPC-H @1000TB benchmark which used four Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array devices (flash storage). [*] The SPARC T4-4 server showed linear scaling from TPC-H @1000GB to TPC-H @3000GB. This demonstrates that the SPARC T4-4 server can handle the increasingly larger databases required of DSS systems. [*] The SPARC T4-4 server benchmark results demonstrate a complete solution of building Decision Support Systems including data loading, business questions and refreshing data. Each phase usually has a time constraint and the SPARC T4-4 server shows superior performance during each phase. [*] The TPC believes that comparisons of results published with different scale factors are misleading and discourages such comparisons. Performance Landscape The table lists the leading TPC-H @3000GB results for non-clustered systems. TPC-H @3000GB, Non-Clustered Systems System Processor P/C/T – Memory Composite(QphH) $/perf($/QphH) Power(QppH) Throughput(QthH) Database Available SPARC Enterprise M9000 3.0 GHz SPARC64 VII+ 64/256/256 – 1024 GB 386,478.3 $18.19 316,835.8 471,428.6 Oracle 11g R2 09/22/11 SPARC T4-4 3.0 GHz SPARC T4 4/32/256 – 1024 GB 205,792.0 $4.10 190,325.1 222,515.9 Oracle 11g R2 05/31/12 SPARC Enterprise M9000 2.88 GHz SPARC64 VII 32/128/256 – 512 GB 198,907.5 $15.27 182,350.7 216,967.7 Oracle 11g R2 12/09/10 IBM Power 780 4.1 GHz POWER7 8/32/128 – 1024 GB 192,001.1 $6.37 210,368.4 175,237.4 Sybase 15.4 11/30/11 HP ProLiant DL980 G7 2.27 GHz Intel Xeon X7560 8/64/128 – 512 GB 162,601.7 $2.68 185,297.7 142,685.6 SQL Server 2008 10/13/10 P/C/T = Processors, Cores, Threads QphH = the Composite Metric (bigger is better) $/QphH = the Price/Performance metric in USD (smaller is better) QppH = the Power Numerical Quantity QthH = the Throughput Numerical Quantity The following table lists data load times and refresh function times during the power run. TPC-H @3000GB, Non-Clustered Systems Database Load & Database Refresh System Processor Data Loading(h:m:s) T4Advan RF1(sec) T4Advan RF2(sec) T4Advan SPARC T4-4 3.0 GHz SPARC T4 04:08:29 1.0x 67.1 1.0x 39.5 1.0x IBM Power 780 4.1 GHz POWER7 05:51:50 1.5x 147.3 2.2x 133.2 3.4x HP ProLiant DL980 G7 2.27 GHz Intel Xeon X7560 08:35:17 2.1x 173.0 2.6x 126.3 3.2x Data Loading = database load time RF1 = power test first refresh transaction RF2 = power test second refresh transaction T4 Advan = the ratio of time to T4 time Complete benchmark results found at the TPC benchmark website http://www.tpc.org. Configuration Summary and Results Hardware Configuration: SPARC T4-4 server 4 x SPARC T4 3.0 GHz processors (total of 32 cores, 128 threads) 1024 GB memory 8 x internal SAS (8 x 300 GB) disk drives External Storage: 12 x Sun Storage 2540-M2 array storage, each with 12 x 15K RPM 300 GB drives, 2 controllers, 2 GB cache Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition Audited Results: Database Size: 3000 GB (Scale Factor 3000) TPC-H Composite: 205,792.0 QphH@3000GB Price/performance: $4.10/QphH@3000GB Available: 05/31/2012 Total 3 year Cost: $843,656 TPC-H Power: 190,325.1 TPC-H Throughput: 222,515.9 Database Load Time: 4:08:29 Benchmark Description The TPC-H benchmark is a performance benchmark established by the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) to demonstrate Data Warehousing/Decision Support Systems (DSS). TPC-H measurements are produced for customers to evaluate the performance of various DSS systems. These queries and updates are executed against a standard database under controlled conditions. Performance projections and comparisons between different TPC-H Database sizes (100GB, 300GB, 1000GB, 3000GB, 10000GB, 30000GB and 100000GB) are not allowed by the TPC. TPC-H is a data warehousing-oriented, non-industry-specific benchmark that consists of a large number of complex queries typical of decision support applications. It also includes some insert and delete activity that is intended to simulate loading and purging data from a warehouse. TPC-H measures the combined performance of a particular database manager on a specific computer system. The main performance metric reported by TPC-H is called the TPC-H Composite Query-per-Hour Performance Metric (QphH@SF, where SF is the number of GB of raw data, referred to as the scale factor). QphH@SF is intended to summarize the ability of the system to process queries in both single and multiple user modes. The benchmark requires reporting of price/performance, which is the ratio of the total HW/SW cost plus 3 years maintenance to the QphH. A secondary metric is the storage efficiency, which is the ratio of total configured disk space in GB to the scale factor. Key Points and Best Practices Twelve Sun Storage 2540-M2 arrays were used for the benchmark. Each Sun Storage 2540-M2 array contains 12 15K RPM drives and is connected to a single dual port 8Gb FC HBA using 2 ports. Each Sun Storage 2540-M2 array showed 1.5 GB/sec for sequential read operations and showed linear scaling, achieving 18 GB/sec with twelve Sun Storage 2540-M2 arrays. These were stand alone IO tests. The peak IO rate measured from the Oracle database was 17 GB/sec. Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 required very little system tuning. Some vendors try to make the point that storage ratios are of customer concern. However, storage ratio size has more to do with disk layout and the increasing capacities of disks – so this is not an important metric in which to compare systems. The SPARC T4-4 server and Oracle Solaris efficiently managed the system load of over one thousand Oracle Database parallel processes. Six Sun Storage 2540-M2 arrays were mirrored to another six Sun Storage 2540-M2 arrays on which all of the Oracle database files were placed. IO performance was high and balanced across all the arrays. The TPC-H Refresh Function (RF) simulates periodical refresh portion of Data Warehouse by adding new sales and deleting old sales data. Parallel DML (parallel insert and delete in this case) and database log performance are a key for this function and the SPARC T4-4 server outperformed both the IBM POWER7 server and HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server. (See the RF columns above.) See Also Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) Home Page Ideas International Benchmark Page SPARC T4-4 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN Sun Storage 2540-M2 Array oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement TPC-H, QphH, $/QphH are trademarks of Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). For more information, see www.tpc.org. SPARC T4-4 205,792.0 QphH@3000GB, $4.10/QphH@3000GB, available 5/31/12, 4 processors, 32 cores, 256 threads; IBM Power 780 QphH@3000GB, 192,001.1 QphH@3000GB, $6.37/QphH@3000GB, available 11/30/11, 8 processors, 32 cores, 128 threads; HP ProLiant DL980 G7 162,601.7 QphH@3000GB, $2.68/QphH@3000GB available 10/13/10, 8 processors, 64 cores, 128 threads.

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• Gnome Do not Launching

  - by PyRulez

  When I try running gnome do, I get this. chris@Chris-Ubuntu-Laptop:~$ gnome-do pgrep: invalid user name: -u and it is not writable Trying sudo: chris@Chris-Ubuntu-Laptop:~$ sudo gnome-do [NetworkService] Could not initialize Network Manager dbus: Unable to open the session message bus. [Error 17:54:30.122] [SystemService] Could not initialize dbus: Unable to open the session message bus. (Do:2401): Wnck-CRITICAL **: wnck_set_client_type got called multiple times. (Do:2401): libdo-WARNING **: Binding '<Super>space' failed! [Error 17:54:30.649] [AbstractKeyBindingService] Key "" is already mapped. Tomboy.NotesItemSource "Tomboy Notes" encountered an error in UpdateItems: System.TypeInitializationException: An exception was thrown by the type initializer for Tomboy.TomboyDBus ---> System.Exception: Unable to open the session message bus. ---> System.ArgumentNullException: Argument cannot be null. Parameter name: address at NDesk.DBus.Bus.Open (System.String address) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at NDesk.DBus.Bus.get_Session () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at NDesk.DBus.Bus.get_Session () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Tomboy.TomboyDBus..cctor () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at Tomboy.NotesItemSource.UpdateItems () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Do.Universe.Safe.SafeItemSource.UpdateItems () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 . Firefox.PlacesItemSource "Firefox Places" encountered an error in UpdateItems: System.InvalidCastException: Cannot cast from source type to destination type. at Mono.Data.Sqlite.SqliteDataReader.VerifyType (Int32 i, DbType typ) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Mono.Data.Sqlite.SqliteDataReader.GetString (Int32 i) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Firefox.PlacesItemSource+<LoadPlaceItems>c__Iterator3.MoveNext () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.Collections.Generic.List`1[Firefox.PlaceItem].AddEnumerable (IEnumerable`1 enumerable) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.Collections.Generic.List`1[Firefox.PlaceItem]..ctor (IEnumerable`1 collection) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.Linq.Enumerable.ToArray[PlaceItem] (IEnumerable`1 source) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Firefox.PlacesItemSource.UpdateItems () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Do.Universe.Safe.SafeItemSource.UpdateItems () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 . Do.Universe.Linux.GNOMESpecialLocationsItemSource "GNOME Special Locations" encountered an error in UpdateItems: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not find file "/root/.gtk-bookmarks". File name: '/root/.gtk-bookmarks' at System.IO.FileStream..ctor (System.String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize, Boolean anonymous, FileOptions options) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.IO.FileStream..ctor (System.String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, FileShare share) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) System.IO.FileStream:.ctor (string,System.IO.FileMode,System.IO.FileAccess,System.IO.FileShare) at System.IO.File.OpenRead (System.String path) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.IO.StreamReader..ctor (System.String path, System.Text.Encoding encoding, Boolean detectEncodingFromByteOrderMarks, Int32 bufferSize) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.IO.StreamReader..ctor (System.String path) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) System.IO.StreamReader:.ctor (string) at Do.Universe.Linux.GNOMESpecialLocationsItemSource+<ReadBookmarkItems>c__Iterator3.MoveNext () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Do.Universe.Linux.GNOMESpecialLocationsItemSource.UpdateItems () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Do.Universe.Safe.SafeItemSource.UpdateItems () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 . ^[^\Full thread dump: "<unnamed thread>" tid=0x0xb7570700 this=0x0x56f18 thread handle 0x403 state : not waiting owns () at (wrapper managed-to-native) Mono.Unix.Native.Syscall.read (int,intptr,ulong) <0xffffffff> at Mono.Unix.Native.Syscall.read (int,void*,ulong) <0x00023> at Mono.Unix.UnixStream.Read (byte[],int,int) <0x0008b> at NDesk.DBus.Connection.ReadMessage () <0x0003c> at NDesk.DBus.Connection.Iterate () <0x0001b> at NDesk.DBus.BusG/<Init>c__AnonStorey0.<>m__0 (intptr,NDesk.GLib.IOCondition,intptr) <0x00033> at (wrapper native-to-managed) NDesk.DBus.BusG/<Init>c__AnonStorey0.<>m__0 (intptr,NDesk.GLib.IOCondition,intptr) <0xffffffff> at (wrapper managed-to-native) Gtk.Clipboard.gtk_clipboard_wait_is_text_available (intptr) <0xffffffff> at Gtk.Clipboard.WaitIsTextAvailable () <0x00017> at Do.Universe.SelectedTextItem.UpdateSelection (object,System.EventArgs) <0x00027> at Do.Platform.AbstractApplicationService.OnSummoned () <0x00025> at Do.Platform.ApplicationService.<ApplicationService>m__31 (object,System.EventArgs) <0x00013> at Do.Core.Controller.OnSummoned () <0x00025> at Do.Core.Controller.Summon () <0x00027> at Do.Do.Main (string[]) <0x001eb> at (wrapper runtime-invoke) <Module>.runtime_invoke_void_object (object,intptr,intptr,intptr) <0xffffffff> "<unnamed thread>" tid=0x0xb2c81b40 this=0x0x194150 thread handle 0x412 state : interrupted state owns () at (wrapper managed-to-native) System.IO.InotifyWatcher.ReadFromFD (intptr,byte[],intptr) <0xffffffff> at System.IO.InotifyWatcher.Monitor () <0x0005f> at System.Threading.Thread.StartInternal () <0x00057> at (wrapper runtime-invoke) object.runtime_invoke_void__this__ (object,intptr,intptr,intptr) <0xffffffff> "Universe Update Dispatcher" tid=0x0xb29ffb40 this=0x0x569d8 thread handle 0x41b state : interrupted state owns () at (wrapper managed-to-native) System.Threading.WaitHandle.WaitOne_internal (System.Threading.WaitHandle,intptr,int,bool) <0xffffffff> at System.Threading.WaitHandle.WaitOne (System.TimeSpan,bool) <0x00133> at System.Threading.WaitHandle.WaitOne (System.TimeSpan) <0x00022> at Do.Core.UniverseManager.UniverseUpdateLoop () <0x0007a> at System.Threading.Thread.StartInternal () <0x00057> at (wrapper runtime-invoke) object.runtime_invoke_void__this__ (object,intptr,intptr,intptr) <0xffffffff> Tomboy.NotesItemSource "Tomboy Notes" encountered an error in UpdateItems: System.TypeInitializationException: An exception was thrown by the type initializer for Tomboy.TomboyDBus ---> System.Exception: Unable to open the session message bus. ---> System.ArgumentNullException: Argument cannot be null. Parameter name: address at NDesk.DBus.Bus.Open (System.String address) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at NDesk.DBus.Bus.get_Session () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at NDesk.DBus.Bus.get_Session () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Tomboy.TomboyDBus..cctor () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at Tomboy.NotesItemSource.UpdateItems () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Do.Universe.Safe.SafeItemSource.UpdateItems () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 . Firefox.PlacesItemSource "Firefox Places" encountered an error in UpdateItems: System.InvalidCastException: Cannot cast from source type to destination type. at Mono.Data.Sqlite.SqliteDataReader.VerifyType (Int32 i, DbType typ) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Mono.Data.Sqlite.SqliteDataReader.GetString (Int32 i) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Firefox.PlacesItemSource+<LoadPlaceItems>c__Iterator3.MoveNext () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.Collections.Generic.List`1[Firefox.PlaceItem].AddEnumerable (IEnumerable`1 enumerable) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.Collections.Generic.List`1[Firefox.PlaceItem]..ctor (IEnumerable`1 collection) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.Linq.Enumerable.ToArray[PlaceItem] (IEnumerable`1 source) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Firefox.PlacesItemSource.UpdateItems () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Do.Universe.Safe.SafeItemSource.UpdateItems () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 . Do.Universe.Linux.GNOMESpecialLocationsItemSource "GNOME Special Locations" encountered an error in UpdateItems: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not find file "/root/.gtk-bookmarks". File name: '/root/.gtk-bookmarks' at System.IO.FileStream..ctor (System.String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize, Boolean anonymous, FileOptions options) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.IO.FileStream..ctor (System.String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, FileShare share) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) System.IO.FileStream:.ctor (string,System.IO.FileMode,System.IO.FileAccess,System.IO.FileShare) at System.IO.File.OpenRead (System.String path) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.IO.StreamReader..ctor (System.String path, System.Text.Encoding encoding, Boolean detectEncodingFromByteOrderMarks, Int32 bufferSize) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.IO.StreamReader..ctor (System.String path) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) System.IO.StreamReader:.ctor (string) at Do.Universe.Linux.GNOMESpecialLocationsItemSource+<ReadBookmarkItems>c__Iterator3.MoveNext () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Do.Universe.Linux.GNOMESpecialLocationsItemSource.UpdateItems () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Do.Universe.Safe.SafeItemSource.UpdateItems () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 . It stops when I try my key combination, ctrl-alt-. It does not pop up though.

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• SQL Server Split() Function

  - by HighAltitudeCoder

  Title goes here   Ever wanted a dbo.Split() function, but not had the time to debug it completely?  Let me guess - you are probably working on a stored procedure with 50 or more parameters; two or three of them are parameters of differing types, while the other 47 or so all of the same type (id1, id2, id3, id4, id5...).  Worse, you've found several other similar stored procedures with the ONLY DIFFERENCE being the number of like parameters taped to the end of the parameter list. If this is the situation you find yourself in now, you may be wondering, "why am I working with three different copies of what is basically the same stored procedure, and why am I having to maintain changes in three different places?  Can't I have one stored procedure that accomplishes the job of all three? My answer to you: YES!  Here is the Split() function I've created.    /******************************************************************************                                       Split.sql   ******************************************************************************/ /******************************************************************************   Split a delimited string into sub-components and return them as a table.   Parameter 1: Input string which is to be split into parts. Parameter 2: Delimiter which determines the split points in input string. Works with space or spaces as delimiter. Split() is apostrophe-safe.   SYNTAX: SELECT * FROM Split('Dvorak,Debussy,Chopin,Holst', ',') SELECT * FROM Split('Denver|Seattle|San Diego|New York', '|') SELECT * FROM Split('Denver is the super-awesomest city of them all.', ' ')   ******************************************************************************/ USE AdventureWorks GO   IF EXISTS       (SELECT *       FROM sysobjects       WHERE xtype = 'TF'       AND name = 'Split'       ) BEGIN       DROP FUNCTION Split END GO   CREATE FUNCTION Split (       @InputString                  VARCHAR(8000),       @Delimiter                    VARCHAR(50) )   RETURNS @Items TABLE (       Item                          VARCHAR(8000) )   AS BEGIN       IF @Delimiter = ' '       BEGIN             SET @Delimiter = ','             SET @InputString = REPLACE(@InputString, ' ', @Delimiter)       END         IF (@Delimiter IS NULL OR @Delimiter = '')             SET @Delimiter = ','   --INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@Delimiter) -- Diagnostic --INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@InputString) -- Diagnostic         DECLARE @Item                 VARCHAR(8000)       DECLARE @ItemList       VARCHAR(8000)       DECLARE @DelimIndex     INT         SET @ItemList = @InputString       SET @DelimIndex = CHARINDEX(@Delimiter, @ItemList, 0)       WHILE (@DelimIndex != 0)       BEGIN             SET @Item = SUBSTRING(@ItemList, 0, @DelimIndex)             INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@Item)               -- Set @ItemList = @ItemList minus one less item             SET @ItemList = SUBSTRING(@ItemList, @DelimIndex+1, LEN(@ItemList)-@DelimIndex)             SET @DelimIndex = CHARINDEX(@Delimiter, @ItemList, 0)       END -- End WHILE         IF @Item IS NOT NULL -- At least one delimiter was encountered in @InputString       BEGIN             SET @Item = @ItemList             INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@Item)       END         -- No delimiters were encountered in @InputString, so just return @InputString       ELSE INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@InputString)         RETURN   END -- End Function GO   ---- Set Permissions --GRANT SELECT ON Split TO UserRole1 --GRANT SELECT ON Split TO UserRole2 --GO   The syntax is basically as follows: SELECT <fields> FROM Table 1 JOIN Table 2 ON ... JOIN Table 3 ON ... WHERE LOGICAL CONDITION A AND LOGICAL CONDITION B AND LOGICAL CONDITION C AND TABLE2.Id IN (SELECT * FROM Split(@IdList, ',')) @IdList is a parameter passed into the stored procedure, and the comma (',') is the delimiter you have chosen to split the parameter list on. You can also use it like this: SELECT <fields> FROM Table 1 JOIN Table 2 ON ... JOIN Table 3 ON ... WHERE LOGICAL CONDITION A AND LOGICAL CONDITION B AND LOGICAL CONDITION C HAVING COUNT(SELECT * FROM Split(@IdList, ',') Similarly, it can be used in other aggregate functions at run-time: SELECT MIN(SELECT * FROM Split(@IdList, ','), <fields> FROM Table 1 JOIN Table 2 ON ... JOIN Table 3 ON ... WHERE LOGICAL CONDITION A AND LOGICAL CONDITION B AND LOGICAL CONDITION C GROUP BY <fields> Now that I've (hopefully effectively) explained the benefits to using this function and implementing it in one or more of your database objects, let me warn you of a caveat that you are likely to encounter.  You may have a team member who waits until the right moment to ask you a pointed question: "Doesn't this function just do the same thing as using the IN function?  Why didn't you just use that instead?  In other words, why bother with this function?" What's happening is, one or more team members has failed to understand the reason for implementing this kind of function in the first place.  (Note: this is THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT OF THIS POST). Allow me to outline a few pros to implementing this function, so you may effectively parry this question.  Touche. 1) Code consolidation.  You don't have to maintain what is basically the same code and logic, but with varying numbers of the same parameter in several SQL objects.  I'm not going to go into the cons related to using this function, because the afore mentioned team member is probably more than adept at pointing these out.  Remember, the real positive contribution is ou are decreasing the liklihood that your team fails to update all (x) duplicate copies of what are basically the same stored procedure, and so on...  This is the classic downside to duplicate code.  It is a virus, and you should kill it. You might be better off rejecting your team member's question, and responding with your own: "Would you rather maintain the same logic in multiple different stored procedures, and hope that the team doesn't forget to always update all of them at the same time?".  In his head, he might be thinking "yes, I would like to maintain several different copies of the same stored procedure", although you probably will not get such a direct response.  2) Added flexibility - you can use the Split function elsewhere, and for splitting your data in different ways.  Plus, you can use any kind of delimiter you wish.  How can you know today the ways in which you might want to examine your data tomorrow?  Segue to my next point. 3) Because the function takes a delimiter parameter, you can split the data in any number of ways.  This greatly increases the utility of such a function and enables your team to work with the data in a variety of different ways in the future.  You can split on a single char, symbol, word, or group of words.  You can split on spaces.  (The list goes on... test it out). Finally, you can dynamically define the behavior of a stored procedure (or other SQL object) at run time, through the use of this function.  Rather than have several objects that accomplish almost the same thing, why not have only one instead?

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• Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine

  - by danx

  Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine Cryptography is a major component of secure e-commerce. Since cryptography is compute intensive and adds a significant load to applications, such as SSL web servers (https), crypto performance is an important factor. Providing accelerated crypto hardware greatly helps these applications and will help lead to a wider adoption of cryptography, and lower cost, in e-commerce and other applications. The Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to acclerate AES encryption. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions". These are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine. Previous Work Previously, AESNI instructions were introduced into the Solaris x86 kernel and libraries. That is, the "aes" kernel module (used by IPsec and other kernel modules) and the Solaris pkcs11 library (for user applications). These are available in Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8) and above, and Solaris 11. The work here is to add the aesni engine to OpenSSL. X86 AESNI Instructions Intel's Xeon 5600 is one of the processors that support AESNI. This processor is used in the Sun Fire X4170 M2 As mentioned above, six new instructions acclerate AES encryption in processor silicon. The new instructions are: aesenc performs one round of AES encryption. One encryption round is composed of these steps: substitute bytes, shift rows, mix columns, and xor the round key. aesenclast performs the final encryption round, which is the same as above, except omitting the mix columns (which is only needed for the next encryption round). aesdec performs one round of AES decryption aesdeclast performs the final AES decryption round aeskeygenassist Helps expand the user-provided key into a "key schedule" of keys, one per round aesimc performs an "inverse mixed columns" operation to convert the encryption key schedule into a decryption key schedule pclmulqdq Not a AESNI instruction, but performs "carryless multiply" operations to acclerate AES GCM mode. Since the AESNI instructions are implemented in hardware, they take a constant number of cycles and are not vulnerable to side-channel timing attacks that attempt to discern some bits of data from the time taken to encrypt or decrypt the data. Solaris x86 and OpenSSL Software Optimizations Having X86 AESNI hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it? The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris x86 on a AESNI-capable processor. AESNI is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules and is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library. For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, AESNI crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "aesni engine." This is in lieu of the extra overhead of going through the Solaris OpenSSL pkcs11 engine, which accesses Solaris crypto and digest operations. Instead, AESNI assembly is included directly in the new aesni engine. Instead of including the aesni engine in a separate library in /lib/openssl/engines/, the aesni engine is "built-in", meaning it is included directly in OpenSSL's libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library. This reduces overhead and the need to manually specify the aesni engine. Since the engine is built-in (that is, in libcrypto.so.1.0.0), the openssl -engine command line flag or API call is not needed to access the engine—the aesni engine is used automatically on AESNI hardware. Ciphers and Digests supported by OpenSSL aesni engine The Openssl aesni engine auto-detects if it's running on AESNI hardware and uses AESNI encryption instructions for these ciphers: AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, AES-256-CBC, AES-128-CFB128, AES-192-CFB128, AES-256-CFB128, AES-128-CTR, AES-192-CTR, AES-256-CTR, AES-128-ECB, AES-192-ECB, AES-256-ECB, AES-128-OFB, AES-192-OFB, and AES-256-OFB. Implementation of the OpenSSL aesni engine The AESNI assembly language routines are not a part of the regular Openssl 1.0.0 release. AESNI is a part of the "HEAD" ("development" or "unstable") branch of OpenSSL, for future release. But AESNI is also available as a separate patch provided by Intel to the OpenSSL project for OpenSSL 1.0.0. A minimal amount of "glue" code in the aesni engine works between the OpenSSL libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library and the assembly functions. The aesni engine code is separate from the base OpenSSL code and requires patching only a few source files to use it. That means OpenSSL can be more easily updated to future versions without losing the performance from the built-in aesni engine. OpenSSL aesni engine Performance Here's some graphs of aesni engine performance I measured by running openssl speed -evp $algorithm where $algorithm is aes-128-cbc, aes-192-cbc, and aes-256-cbc. These are using the 64-bit version of openssl on the same AESNI hardware, a Sun Fire X4170 M2 with a Intel Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz, running Solaris 11 FCS. "Before" is openssl without the aesni engine and "after" is openssl with the aesni engine. The numbers are MBytes/second. OpenSSL aesni engine performance on Sun Fire X4170 M2 (Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz) (Higher is better; "before"=OpenSSL on AESNI without AESNI engine software, "after"=OpenSSL AESNI engine) As you can see the speedup is dramatic for all 3 key lengths and for data sizes from 16 bytes to 8 Kbytes—AESNI is about 7.5-8x faster over hand-coded amd64 assembly (without aesni instructions). Verifying the OpenSSL aesni engine is present The easiest way to determine if you are running the aesni engine is to type "openssl engine" on the command line. No configuration, API, or command line options are needed to use the OpenSSL aesni engine. If you are running on Intel AESNI hardware with Solaris 11 FCS, you'll see this output indicating you are using the aesni engine: intel-westmere $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support If you are running on Intel without AESNI hardware you'll see this output indicating the hardware can't support the aesni engine: intel-nehalem $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support For Solaris on SPARC or older Solaris OpenSSL software, you won't see any aesni engine line at all. Third-party OpenSSL software (built yourself or from outside Oracle) will not have the aesni engine either. Solaris 11 FCS comes with OpenSSL version 1.0.0e. The output of typing "openssl version" should be "OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011". 64- and 32-bit OpenSSL OpenSSL comes in both 32- and 64-bit binaries. 64-bit executable is now the default, at /usr/bin/openssl, and OpenSSL 64-bit libraries at /lib/amd64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0 The 32-bit executable is at /usr/bin/i86/openssl and the libraries are at /lib/libcrytpo.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0. Availability The OpenSSL AESNI engine is available in Solaris 11 x86 for both the 64- and 32-bit versions of OpenSSL. It is not available with Solaris 10. You must have a processor that supports AESNI instructions, otherwise OpenSSL will fallback to the older, slower AES implementation without AESNI. Processors that support AESNI include most Westmere and Sandy Bridge class processor architectures. Some low-end processors (such as for mobile/laptop platforms) do not support AESNI. The easiest way to determine if the processor supports AESNI is with the isainfo -v command—look for "amd64" and "aes" in the output: $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu Conclusion The Solaris 11 OpenSSL aesni engine provides easy access to powerful Intel AESNI hardware cryptography, in addition to Solaris userland PKCS#11 libraries and Solaris crypto kernel modules.

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• Adding RSS to tags in Orchard

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  A year ago, I wrote a scary post about RSS in Orchard. RSS was one of the first features we implemented in our CMS, and it has stood the test of time rather well, but the post was explaining things at a level that was probably too abstract whereas my readers were expecting something a little more practical. Well, this post is going to correct this by showing how I built a module that adds RSS feeds for each tag on the site. Hopefully it will show that it's not very complicated in practice, and also that the infrastructure is pretty well thought out. In order to provide RSS, we need to do two things: generate the XML for the feed, and inject the address of that feed into the existing tag listing page, in order to make the feed discoverable. Let's start with the discoverability part. One might be tempted to replace the controller or the view that are responsible for the listing of the items under a tag. Fortunately, there is no need to do any of that, and we can be a lot less obtrusive. Instead, we can implement a filter: public class TagRssFilter : FilterProvider, IResultFilter .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } On this filter, we can implement the OnResultExecuting method and simply check whether the current request is targeting the list of items under a tag. If that is the case, we can just register our new feed: public void OnResultExecuting(ResultExecutingContext filterContext) { var routeValues = filterContext.RouteData.Values; if (routeValues["area"] as string == "Orchard.Tags" && routeValues["controller"] as string == "Home" && routeValues["action"] as string == "Search") { var tag = routeValues["tagName"] as string; if (! string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(tag)) { var workContext = _wca.GetContext(); _feedManager.Register( workContext.CurrentSite + " – " + tag, "rss", new RouteValueDictionary { { "tag", tag } } ); } } } The registration of the new feed is just specifying the title of the feed, its format (RSS) and the parameters that it will need (the tag). _wca and _feedManager are just instances of IWorkContextAccessor and IFeedManager that Orchard injected for us. That is all that's needed to get the following tag to be added to the head of our page, without touching an existing controller or view: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="VuLu - Science" href="/rss?tag=Science"/> Nifty. Of course, if we navigate to the URL of that feed, we'll get a 404. This is because no implementation of IFeedQueryProvider knows about the tag parameter yet. Let's build one that does: public class TagFeedQuery : IFeedQueryProvider, IFeedQuery IFeedQueryProvider has one method, Match, that we can implement to take over any feed request that has a tag parameter: public FeedQueryMatch Match(FeedContext context) { var tagName = context.ValueProvider.GetValue("tag"); if (tagName == null) return null; return new FeedQueryMatch { FeedQuery = this, Priority = -5 }; } This is just saying that if there is a tag parameter, we will handle it. All that remains to be done is the actual building of the feed now that we have accepted to handle it. This is done by implementing the Execute method of the IFeedQuery interface: public void Execute(FeedContext context) { var tagValue = context.ValueProvider.GetValue("tag"); if (tagValue == null) return; var tagName = (string)tagValue.ConvertTo(typeof (string)); var tag = _tagService.GetTagByName(tagName); if (tag == null) return; var site = _services.WorkContext.CurrentSite; var link = new XElement("link"); context.Response.Element.SetElementValue("title", site.SiteName + " - " + tagName); context.Response.Element.Add(link); context.Response.Element.SetElementValue("description", site.SiteName + " - " + tagName); context.Response.Contextualize(requestContext => link.Add(GetTagUrl(tagName, requestContext))); var items = _tagService.GetTaggedContentItems(tag.Id, 0, 20); foreach (var item in items) { context.Builder.AddItem(context, item.ContentItem); } } This code is resolving the tag content item from its name and then gets content items tagged with it, using the tag services provided by the Orchard.Tags module. Then we add those items to the feed. And that is it. To summarize, we handled the request unobtrusively in order to inject the feed's link, then handled requests for feeds with a tag parameter and generated the list of items for that tag. It remains fairly simple and still it is able to handle arbitrary content types. That makes me quite happy about our little piece of over-engineered code from last year. The full code for this can be found in the Vandelay.TagCloud module: http://orchardproject.net/gallery/List/Modules/ Orchard.Module.Vandelay.TagCloud/1.2

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• Creating a podcast feed for iTunes & BlackBerry users using WCF Syndication

  - by brian_ritchie

   In my previous post, I showed how to create a RSS feed using WCF Syndication.  Next, I'll show how to add the additional tags needed to turn a RSS feed into an iTunes podcast.   A podcast is merely a RSS feed with some special characteristics: iTunes RSS tags.  These are additional tags beyond the standard RSS spec.  Apple has a good page on the requirements. Audio file enclosure.  This is a link to the audio file (such as mp3) hosted by your site.  Apple doesn't host the audio, they just read the meta-data from the RSS feed into their system. The SyndicationFeed class supports both AttributeExtensions & ElementExtensions to add custom tags to the RSS feeds. A couple of points of interest in the code below: The imageUrl below provides the album cover for iTunes (170px × 170px) Each SyndicationItem corresponds to an audio episode in your podcast So, here's the code: .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: XNamespace itunesNS = "http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd"; 2: string prefix = "itunes"; 3:   4: var feed = new SyndicationFeed(title, description, new Uri(link)); 5: feed.Categories.Add(new SyndicationCategory(category)); 6: feed.AttributeExtensions.Add(new XmlQualifiedName(prefix, 7: "http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/"), itunesNS.NamespaceName); 8: feed.Copyright = new TextSyndicationContent(copyright); 9: feed.Language = "en-us"; 10: feed.Copyright = new TextSyndicationContent(DateTime.Now.Year + " " + ownerName); 11: feed.ImageUrl = new Uri(imageUrl); 12: feed.LastUpdatedTime = DateTime.Now; 13: feed.Authors.Add(new SyndicationPerson() {Name=ownerName, Email=ownerEmail }); 14: var extensions = feed.ElementExtensions; 15: extensions.Add(new XElement(itunesNS + "subtitle", subTitle).CreateReader()); 16: extensions.Add(new XElement(itunesNS + "image", 17: new XAttribute("href", imageUrl)).CreateReader()); 18: extensions.Add(new XElement(itunesNS + "author", ownerName).CreateReader()); 19: extensions.Add(new XElement(itunesNS + "summary", description).CreateReader()); 20: extensions.Add(new XElement(itunesNS + "category", 21: new XAttribute("text", category), 22: new XElement(itunesNS + "category", 23: new XAttribute("text", subCategory))).CreateReader()); 24: extensions.Add(new XElement(itunesNS + "explicit", "no").CreateReader()); 25: extensions.Add(new XDocument( 26: new XElement(itunesNS + "owner", 27: new XElement(itunesNS + "name", ownerName), 28: new XElement(itunesNS + "email", ownerEmail))).CreateReader()); 29:   30: var feedItems = new List<SyndicationItem>(); 31: foreach (var i in Items) 32: { 33: var item = new SyndicationItem(i.title, null, new Uri(link)); 34: item.Summary = new TextSyndicationContent(i.summary); 35: item.Id = i.id; 36: if (i.publishedDate != null) 37: item.PublishDate = (DateTimeOffset)i.publishedDate; 38: item.Links.Add(new SyndicationLink() { 39: Title = i.title, Uri = new Uri(link), 40: Length = i.size, MediaType = i.mediaType }); 41: var itemExt = item.ElementExtensions; 42: itemExt.Add(new XElement(itunesNS + "subtitle", i.subTitle).CreateReader()); 43: itemExt.Add(new XElement(itunesNS + "summary", i.summary).CreateReader()); 44: itemExt.Add(new XElement(itunesNS + "duration", 45: string.Format("{0}:{1:00}:{2:00}", 46: i.duration.Hours, i.duration.Minutes, i.duration.Seconds) 47: ).CreateReader()); 48: itemExt.Add(new XElement(itunesNS + "keywords", i.keywords).CreateReader()); 49: itemExt.Add(new XElement(itunesNS + "explicit", "no").CreateReader()); 50: itemExt.Add(new XElement("enclosure", new XAttribute("url", i.url), 51: new XAttribute("length", i.size), new XAttribute("type", i.mediaType))); 52: feedItems.Add(item); 53: } 54:   55: feed.Items = feedItems; If you're hosting your podcast feed within a MVC project, you can use the code from my previous post to stream it. Once you have created your feed, you can use the Feed Validator tool to make sure it is up to spec.  Or you can use iTunes: Launch iTunes. In the Advanced menu, select Subscribe to Podcast. Enter your feed URL in the text box and click OK. After you've verified your feed is solid & good to go, you can submit it to iTunes.  Launch iTunes. In the left navigation column, click on iTunes Store to open the store. Once the store loads, click on Podcasts along the top navigation bar to go to the Podcasts page. In the right column of the Podcasts page, click on the Submit a Podcast link. Follow the instructions on the Submit a Podcast page. Here are the full instructions.  Once they have approved your podcast, it will be available within iTunes. RIM has also gotten into the podcasting business...which is great for BlackBerry users.  They accept the same enhanced-RSS feed that iTunes uses, so just create an account with them & submit the feed's URL.  It goes through a similar approval process to iTunes.  BlackBerry users must be on BlackBerry 6 OS or download the Podcast App from App World. In my next post, I'll show how to build the podcast feed dynamically from the ID3 tags within the MP3 files.

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• MIX 2010 Covert Operations Day 2 Silverlight + Windows 7 Phone

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  Left the Circus Circus and headed to the geek circus at Mandalay Bay.  Got in, got some breakfast, met a few more people and headed to the keynote. Upon arriving the crew I was hanging with at the event; Erik Mork, Beth Murray, and Brian Henderson and I were entertained with several other thousand geeks by the wicked yo-yoing. The first video demo of something was of Bing Maps and various aspects of Microsoft Research integrated together.  Namely the pictures, put in place, on real 3d element maps of various environments. Silverlight Scott Guthrie, as one would guess, kicked off the keynote.  His first point was that user experience has become a priority at Microsoft.  This can be seen by any observant soul with the release and push of Expression, Silverlight, and the other tools.  This is even more apparent when one takes note of Microsoft bringing in people that can actually do good design and putting them at the forefront. The next thing Scott brought up was a few key points about Silverlight.  Currently Silverlight is a little over 2 years old and has achieved a pretty solid 60% penetration.  Silverlight has all sorts of capabilities that have been developed and are now provided as open source including;  ad injection, smoothing, playback editing, and more.  Another thing he showed, which really struck me as awesome being in the analytics space, was the Olympics and a quick glimpse of the ad statistics, viewer experience, video playback performance, audience trends, and overall viewer participation.  All of it rendered in Silverlight in beautiful detail. The key piece of Scott's various points were all punctuated with the fact that all of this code is available as open source.  Not only is Microsoft really delving into this design element of things, they're getting involved in the right ways. One of the last points I'll bring up about Silverlight 4 is the ability to have HD video on a monitor, and an entirely different activity being done on the other monitor, effectively making Silverlight the only RIA framework that supports multi-monitor support.  Overall, Silverlight is continuing to impress – providing superior capabilities tit-for-tat with the competition. Windows 7 Phone The Windows 7 Phone has 3 primary buttons (yes, more than the iPhone, don't let your mind explode!!).  Start, Search, and Back control all of the needed functionality of the phone.  At the same time, of course, there is the multi-touch, touch, and other interactive abilities of the interface.  The intent, once start is pressed is to have all the information that a phone owner wants displayed immediately.  Avoiding the scrolling through pages of apps or rolling a ball to get through multitudes of other non-interactive phone interfaces.  The Windows 7 Phone simply has the data right in front of you, basically a phone dashboard.  From there it is easy to dive into the interactive areas of the phone. Each area of the interface of the phone is broken into hubs.  These hubs include applications, data, and other things based on a relative basis.  This basis being determined by the user.  These applications interact on many other levels, and form a kind of relationship between each other adding more and more meta-data to the phone user, their interactions between the applications, and of course the social element of their interactions on the phone.  This makes this phone a practical must have for a marketer involved in social media.  The level of wired together interaction is massive, and of course, if you've seen Office Outlook 2010 you know that the power that is pulled into the phone by being tied to Outlook is massive. Joe Belfiore also showed several UI & specifically UX elements of the phone interface that allows paging to be instinctual by simple clipped items, flipping page to page, and other excellent user experience advances for phone devices.  Belfiore's also showed how his people hub had a massive list of people, with pictures, all from various different social networks and other associated relations.  The rendering, speed, and viewing of these people's, their pictures, their social network information, and other characteristics was smooth and in some situations unbelievably rendered.  This demo showed some of the great power of the beta phone, which isn't even as powerful as the planned end device. Joe finished up by jumping into the music, videos, and other media with the Zune Component of the Windows 7 Mobile Phone.  This was all good stuff, but I'll get to what really sold me on the media element in a moment. When Joe was done, Scott Guthrie stepped back up to walk through building a Windows 7 Mobile Phone.  This is were I have to give serious props.  He built this application, in Visual Studio 2010, in front of 2000+ people.  That was cool, but what really was amazing that he build the application in about 2 minutes.  The IDE, side by side design that is standard in Visual Studio is light years ahead of x-Code or any of the iPhone IDEs.  The Windows 7 Mobile System, if it can get market penetration, poses a technologically superior development and phone platform over anything on the market right now.  The biggest problem with the phone, is it just isn't available yet.  I personally can't wait for a chance to build some apps for the new Windows Phone. Netflix, I May Start Up an Account Again! When I get my Windows 7 Phone device, I am absolutely getting a Netflix account again.  The Vertigo crew, as I wrote on Twitter "#MIX10 Props @seesharp on @netflix demo", displayed an application on the phone for Netflix that actually ran HD Video of Rescue Me (with Dennis Leary).  The video played back smooth as it would on a dedicated computer, I was instantly sold.  So this didn't actually sell me on the phone, because I'm already sold, but it did sell me whole heartedly on the media capabilities of the pending phone. Anyway, I try not to do this but I may double post today.  Lunch is over and I'm off to another session very near and dear to the heart of my occupation, Analytics Tracking.  Stay tuned and I should have that post up by the end of the day. Original Post – Check out my other blog for even more technical ramblings and reads.

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• LibPCL issues on Ubuntu 13.10

  - by user254885

  i wanted to install the Point Cloud Library but it does not work i use an ODROID board(ARM processor) Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: libpcl-all : Depends: libpcl-1.7-all but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. by compiling v1.7 , i get these errors : /usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/4.8/../../../arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpthread.a(ptw-fcntl.o): In function `__fcntl_nocancel': /build/buildd/eglibc-2.17/nptl/../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/i386/fcntl.c:37: undefined reference to `__libc_do_syscall' /usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/4.8/../../../arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpthread.a(ptw-fcntl.o): In function `__libc_fcntl': /build/buildd/eglibc-2.17/nptl/../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/i386/fcntl.c:53: undefined reference to `__libc_do_syscall' /build/buildd/eglibc-2.17/nptl/../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/i386/fcntl.c:57: undefined reference to `__libc_do_syscall' /usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/4.8/../../../arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpthread.a(ptw-open64.o): In function `__libc_open64': /build/buildd/eglibc-2.17/nptl/../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/open64.c:41: undefined reference to `__libc_do_syscall' /build/buildd/eglibc-2.17/nptl/../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/open64.c:45: undefined reference to `__libc_do_syscall' /usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/4.8/../../../arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpthread.a(cancellation.o):/build/buildd/eglibc-2.17/nptl/cancellation.c:96: more undefined references to `__libc_do_syscall' follow collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status make[2]: *** [bin/pcl_convert_pcd_ascii_binary] Error 1 make[1]: *** [io/tools/CMakeFiles/pcl_convert_pcd_ascii_binary.dir/all] Error 2 make: *** [all] Error 2 i could not find anything in google to solve these errors i believe some packages were not ported for ARM processors any help would be appreciated $ dpkg --list | grep headers ii linux-headers-3.0.63-odroidx2 20130215 ii linux-headers-3.0.71-odroidx2 20130415 ii linux-headers-3.0.74-odroidx2 20130417 ii linux-headers-3.0.75-odroidx2 20130426 ii linux-headers-3.1.10-6 3.1.10-6.10 ii linux-headers-3.1.10-6-ac100 3.1.10-6.10 ii linux-headers-ac100 3.1.10.6.2 installing packages did'nt do well sudo apt-get install linux-generic [sudo] password for odroid: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: debugedit libasound2-dev libestools2.1-dev librpmbuild3 librpmsign1 thunderbird-locale-en thunderbird-locale-en-gb thunderbird-locale-en-us thunderbird-locale-ko Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following extra packages will be installed: linux-headers-3.11.0-17 linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic linux-image-generic Suggested packages: fdutils linux-doc-3.11.0 linux-source-3.11.0 linux-tools The following NEW packages will be installed: linux-generic linux-headers-3.11.0-17 linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic linux-image-generic 0 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 58.2 MB of archives. After this operation, 203 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y Get:1 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ saucy-updates/main linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic armhf 3.11.0-17.31 [44.5 MB] Get:2 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ saucy-updates/main linux-image-generic armhf 3.11.0.17.18 [2,356 B] Get:3 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ saucy-updates/main linux-headers-3.11.0-17 all 3.11.0-17.31 [12.6 MB] Get:4 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ saucy-updates/main linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic armhf 3.11.0-17.31 [1,128 kB] Get:5 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ saucy-updates/main linux-headers-generic armhf 3.11.0.17.18 [2,350 B] Get:6 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ saucy-updates/main linux-generic armhf 3.11.0.17.18 [1,726 B] Fetched 58.2 MB in 13s (4,379 kB/s) Selecting previously unselected package linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic. (Reading database ... 258618 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic (from .../linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic_3.11.0-17.31_armhf.deb) ... Examining /etc/kernel/preinst.d/ Done. Selecting previously unselected package linux-image-generic. Unpacking linux-image-generic (from .../linux-image-generic_3.11.0.17.18_armhf.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package linux-headers-3.11.0-17. Unpacking linux-headers-3.11.0-17 (from .../linux-headers-3.11.0-17_3.11.0-17.31_all.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic. Unpacking linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic (from .../linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic_3.11.0-17.31_armhf.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package linux-headers-generic. Unpacking linux-headers-generic (from .../linux-headers-generic_3.11.0.17.18_armhf.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package linux-generic. Unpacking linux-generic (from .../linux-generic_3.11.0.17.18_armhf.deb) ... Setting up linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic (3.11.0-17.31) ... Running depmod. update-initramfs: deferring update (hook will be called later) cp: cannot stat ‘/boot/initrd.img-3.11.0-17-generic’: No such file or directory Failed to copy /boot/initrd.img-3.11.0-17-generic to /boot/initrd.img at /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic.postinst line 730. dpkg: error processing linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-generic: linux-image-generic depends on linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic; however: Package linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing linux-image-generic (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Setting up linux-headers-3.11.0-17 (3.11.0-17.31) ... No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Setting up linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic (3.11.0-17.31) ... Examining /etc/kernel/header_postinst.d. Setting up linux-headers-generic (3.11.0.17.18) ... dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-generic: linux-generic depends on linux-image-generic (= 3.11.0.17.18); however: Package linux-image-generic is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing linux-generic (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Errors were encountered while processing: linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic linux-image-generic linux-generic E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) i had to uninstall these cos they were messing up other packages installation(buildessentials were already installed)

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• Combination of Operating Mode and Commit Strategy

  - by Kevin Yang

  If you want to populate a source into multiple targets, you may also want to ensure that every row from the source affects all targets uniformly (or separately). Let’s consider the Example Mapping below. If a row from SOURCE causes different changes in multiple targets (TARGET_1, TARGET_2 and TARGET_3), for example, it can be successfully inserted into TARGET_1 and TARGET_3, but failed to be inserted into TARGET_2, and the current Mapping Property TLO (target load order) is “TARGET_1 -> TARGET_2 -> TARGET_3”. What should Oracle Warehouse Builder do, in order to commit the appropriate data to all affected targets at the same time? If it doesn’t behave as you intended, the data could become inaccurate and possibly unusable.                                               Example Mapping In OWB, we can use Mapping Configuration Commit Strategies and Operating Modes together to achieve this kind of requirements. Below we will explore the combination of these two features and how they affect the results in the target tables Before going to the example, let’s review some of the terms we will be using (Details can be found in white paper Oracle® Warehouse Builder Data Modeling, ETL, and Data Quality Guide11g Release 2): Operating Modes: Set-Based Mode: Warehouse Builder generates a single SQL statement that processes all data and performs all operations. Row-Based Mode: Warehouse Builder generates statements that process data row by row. The select statement is in a SQL cursor. All subsequent statements are PL/SQL. Row-Based (Target Only) Mode: Warehouse Builder generates a cursor select statement and attempts to include as many operations as possible in the cursor. For each target, Warehouse Builder inserts each row into the target separately. Commit Strategies: Automatic: Warehouse Builder loads and then automatically commits data based on the mapping design. If the mapping has multiple targets, Warehouse Builder commits and rolls back each target separately and independently of other targets. Use the automatic commit when the consequences of multiple targets being loaded unequally are not great or are irrelevant. Automatic correlated: It is a specialized type of automatic commit that applies to PL/SQL mappings with multiple targets only. Warehouse Builder considers all targets collectively and commits or rolls back data uniformly across all targets. Use the correlated commit when it is important to ensure that every row in the source affects all affected targets uniformly. Manual: select manual commit control for PL/SQL mappings when you want to interject complex business logic, perform validations, or run other mappings before committing data. Combination of the commit strategy and operating mode To understand the effects of each combination of operating mode and commit strategy, I’ll illustrate using the following example Mapping. Firstly we insert 100 rows into the SOURCE table and make sure that the 99th row and 100th row have the same ID value. And then we create a unique key constraint on ID column for TARGET_2 table. So while running the example mapping, OWB tries to load all 100 rows to each of the targets. But the mapping should fail to load the 100th row to TARGET_2, because it will violate the unique key constraint of table TARGET_2. With different combinations of Commit Strategy and Operating Mode, here are the results ¦ Set-based/ Correlated Commit: Configuration of Example mapping:                                                     Result:                                                      What’s happening: A single error anywhere in the mapping triggers the rollback of all data. OWB encounters the error inserting into Target_2, it reports an error for the table and does not load the row. OWB rolls back all the rows inserted into Target_1 and does not attempt to load rows to Target_3. No rows are added to any of the target tables. ¦ Row-based/ Correlated Commit: Configuration of Example mapping:                                                   Result:                                                  What’s happening: OWB evaluates each row separately and loads it to all three targets. Loading continues in this way until OWB encounters an error loading row 100th to Target_2. OWB reports the error and does not load the row. It rolls back the row 100th previously inserted into Target_1 and does not attempt to load row 100 to Target_3. Then, if there are remaining rows, OWB will continue loading them, resuming with loading rows to Target_1. The mapping completes with 99 rows inserted into each target. ¦ Set-based/ Automatic Commit: Configuration of Example mapping: Result: What’s happening: When OWB encounters the error inserting into Target_2, it does not load any rows and reports an error for the table. It does, however, continue to insert rows into Target_3 and does not roll back the rows previously inserted into Target_1. The mapping completes with one error message for Target_2, no rows inserted into Target_2, and 100 rows inserted into Target_1 and Target_3 separately. ¦ Row-based/Automatic Commit: Configuration of Example mapping: Result: What’s happening: OWB evaluates each row separately for loading into the targets. Loading continues in this way until OWB encounters an error loading row 100 to Target_2 and reports the error. OWB does not roll back row 100th from Target_1, does insert it into Target_3. If there are remaining rows, it will continue to load them. The mapping completes with 99 rows inserted into Target_2 and 100 rows inserted into each of the other targets. Note: Automatic Correlated commit is not applicable for row-based (target only). If you design a mapping with the row-based (target only) and correlated commit combination, OWB runs the mapping but does not perform the correlated commit. In set-based mode, correlated commit may impact the size of your rollback segments. Space for rollback segments may be a concern when you merge data (insert/update or update/insert). Correlated commit operates transparently with PL/SQL bulk processing code. The correlated commit strategy is not available for mappings run in any mode that are configured for Partition Exchange Loading or that include a Queue, Match Merge, or Table Function operator. If you want to practice in your own environment, you can follow the steps: 1. Import the MDL file: commit_operating_mode.mdl 2. Fix the location for oracle module ORCL and deploy all tables under it. 3. Insert sample records into SOURCE table, using below plsql code: begin     for i in 1..99     loop         insert into source values(i, 'col_'||i);     end loop;     insert into source values(99, 'col_99'); end; 4. Configure MAPPING_1 to any combinations of operating mode and commit strategy you want to test. And make sure feature TLO of mapping is open. 5. Deploy Mapping “MAPPING_1”. 6. Run the mapping and check the result.

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• techniques for an AI for a highly cramped turn-based tactics game

  - by Adam M.

  I'm trying to write an AI for a tactics game in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics or Vandal Hearts. I can't change the game rules in any way, only upgrade the AI. I have experience programming AI for classic board games (basically minimax and its variants), but I think the branching factor is too great for the approach to be reasonable here. I'll describe the game and some current AI flaws that I'd like to fix. I'd like to hear ideas for applicable techniques. I'm a decent enough programmer, so I only need the ideas, not an implementation (though that's always appreciated). I'd rather not expend effort chasing (too many) dead ends, so although speculation and brainstorming are good and probably helpful, I'd prefer to hear from somebody with actual experience solving this kind of problem. For those who know it, the game is the land battle mini-game in Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004) and you can skim/skip the next two paragraphs. For those who don't, here's briefly how it works. The battle is turn-based and takes place on a 16x16 grid. There are three terrain types: clear (no hindrance), forest (hinders movement, ranged attacks, and sight), and rock (impassible, but does not hinder attacks or sight). The map is randomly generated with roughly equal amounts of each type of terrain. Because there are many rock and forest tiles, movement is typically very cramped. This is tactically important. The terrain is not flat; higher terrain gives minor bonuses. The terrain is known to both sides. The player is always the attacker and the AI is always the defender, so it's perfectly valid for the AI to set up a defensive position and just wait. The player wins by killing all defenders or by getting a unit to the city gates (a tile on the other side of the map). There are very few units on each side, usually 4-8. Because of this, it's crucial not to take damage without gaining some advantage from it. Units can take multiple actions per turn. All units on one side move before any units on the other side. Order of execution is important, and interleaving of actions between units is often useful. Units have melee and ranged attacks. Melee attacks vary widely in strength; ranged attacks have the same strength but vary in range. The main challenges I face are these: Lots of useful move combinations start with a "useless" move that gains no immediate advantage, or even loses advantage, in order to set up a powerful flank attack in the future. And, since the player units are stronger and have longer range, the AI pretty much always has to take some losses before they can start to gain kills. The AI must be able to look ahead to distinguish between sacrificial actions that provide a future benefit and those that don't. Because the terrain is so cramped, most of the tactics come down to achieving good positioning with multiple units that work together to defend an area. For instance, two defenders can often dominate a narrow pass by positioning themselves so an enemy unit attempting to pass must expose itself to a flank attack. But one defender in the same pass would be useless, and three units can defend a slightly larger pass. Etc. The AI should be able to figure out where the player must go to reach the city gates and how to best position its few units to cover the approaches, shifting, splitting, or combining them appropriately as the player moves. Because flank attacks are extremely deadly (and engineering flank attacks is key to the player strategy), the AI should be competent at moving its units so that they cover each other's flanks unless the sacrifice of a unit would give a substantial benefit. They should also be able to force flank attacks on players, for instance by threatening a unit from two different directions such that responding to one threat exposes the flank to the other. The AI should attack if possible, but sometimes there are no good ways to approach the player's position. In that case, the AI should be able to recognize this and set up a defensive position of its own. But the AI shouldn't be vulnerable to a trivial exploit where the player repeatedly opens and closes a hole in his defense and shoots at the AI as it approaches and retreats. That is, the AI should ideally be able to recognize that the player is capable of establishing a solid defense of an area, even if the defense is not currently in place. (I suppose if a good unit allocation algorithm existed, as needed for the second bullet point, the AI could run it on the player units to see where they could defend.) Because it's important to choose a good order of action and interleave actions between units, it's not as simple as just finding the best move for each unit in turn. All of these can be accomplished with a minimax search in theory, but the search space is too large, so specialized techniques are needed. I thought about techniques such as influence mapping, but I don't see how to use the technique to great effect. I thought about assigning goals to the units. This can help them work together in some limited way, and the problem of "how do I accomplish this goal?" is easier to solve than "how do I win this battle?", but assigning good goals is a hard problem in itself, because it requires knowing whether the goal is achievable and whether it's a good use of resources. So, does anyone have specific ideas for techniques that can help cleverize this AI? Update: I found a related question on Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133273/ai-for-a-final-fantasy-tactics-like-game The selected answer gives a decent approach to choosing between alternative actions, but it doesn't seem to have much ability to look into the future and discern beneficial sacrifices from wasteful ones. It also focuses on a single unit at a time and it's not clear how it could be extended to support cooperation between units in defending or attacking.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 01, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 01, 2013Popular ReleasesQuickMon: Version 2.10.3: Mainly just a service release - no major changes. Toolbar buttons on main and config window can now be re-arrange (using ALT key) Added property to disable corrective scriptsDotNetNuke® IFrame: IFrame 04.05.00: New DNN6/7 Manifest file and Azure Compatibility.VidCoder: 1.5.2 Beta: Fixed crash on presets with an invalid bitrate.Roadkill - .NET Wiki engine: Roadkill v1.7: New features in 1.7: New file manager: Multiple file uploads Drag and drop uploads Delete folders (admins only) Delete files (admins only) (Experimental) Syntaxhighlighting custom variable (using https://github.com/alexgorbatchev/SyntaxHighlighter) - use [[[code lang=c#|your code here]]] (Experimental) MathJax custom variable - use [[[Mathjax]]] and $$your tex$$ on the page. Improved black bar theme Site speed improvements for Javascript/CSS files - now just two files files ea...Download Sharepoint Solution package: Release 4: version updated for SP2013WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.5: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8.0 and 8.1 Preview SDKs. Do not download the source code from here if you are looking for latest updates! You can download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features Attachable Behaviors AwaitableUI extensions Composition library for visual tree rende...Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX version 1.2.1: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.2.1 has new facilities for defining and manipulating character classes. These changes make the construction of large Unicode character classes more convenient. The runtime code for performing automaton backup has been re-implemented, and is now faster for scanners that need backup. Source CodeThe distribution contains a complete VS2010 project for the appli...ZXMAK2: Version 2.7.5.7: - fix TZX emulation (Bruce Lee, Zynaps) - fix ATM 16 colors for border - add memory module PROFI 512K; add PROFI V03 rom image; fix PROFI 3.XX configTwitter image Downloader: Twitter Image Downloader 2 with Installer: Application file with Install shield and Dot Net 4.0 redistributableUltimate Music Tagger: Ultimate Music Tagger 1.0.0.0: First release of Ultimate Music TaggerBlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.2: 2013.06.28 Ver5.9.2 (1) ??????????(????SMTP?????)?????????? (2) HTTPS???????????Outlook 2013 Add-In: Configuration Form: This new version includes the following changes: - Refactored code a bit. - Removing configuration from main form to gain more space to display items. - Moved configuration to separate form. You can click the little "gear" icon to access the configuration form (still very simple). - Added option to show past day appointments from the selected day (previous in time, that is). - Added some tooltips. You will have to uninstall the previous version (add/remove programs) if you had installed it ...Terminals: Version 3.0 - Release: Changes since version 2.0:Choose 100% portable or installed version Removed connection warning when running RDP 8 (Windows 8) client Fixed Active directory search Extended Active directory search by LDAP filters Fixed single instance mode when running on Windows Terminal server Merged usage of Tags and Groups Added columns sorting option in tables No UAC prompts on Windows 7 Completely new file persistence data layer New MS SQL persistence layer (Store data in SQL database)...NuGet: NuGet 2.6: Released June 26, 2013. Release notes: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/release-notes/nuget-2.6Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.0 Beta: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 Beta. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, and cross platform debugging support. For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuewiStN...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 and WP8 (v1.3 beta): Preview: New MPEG DASH adaptive streaming plugin for Windows Azure Media Services Preview: New Ultraviolet CFF plugin. Preview: New WP7 version with WP8 compatibility. (source code only) Source code is now available via CodePlex Git Misc bug fixes and improvements: WP8 only: Added optional fullscreen and mute buttons to default xaml JS only: protecting currentTime from returning infinity. Some videos would cause currentTime to be infinity which could cause errors in plugins expectin...AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.8: SERVER OWNERS: note that the default maprot has changed once again. Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we continue to try to package for those OSes. Or better yet, try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compi...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.95: update parser to allow for CSS3 calc( function to nest. add recognition of -pponly (Preprocess-Only) switch in AjaxMinManifestTask build task. Fix crashing bug in EXE when processing a manifest file using the -xml switch and an error message needs to be displayed (like a missing input file). Create separate Clean and Bundle build tasks for working with manifest files (AjaxMinManifestCleanTask and AjaxMinBundleTask). Removed the IsCleanOperation from AjaxMinManifestTask -- use AjaxMinMan...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.44: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImgChili.net" links FIXED: Auto UpdaterDocument.Editor: 2013.25: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.25: Improved Spell Check support Improved User Interface Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsNew ProjectsAerCloud.net Client - Java, Linux & Windows: This project source code provides a step by step guide for using AerCloud.net Framework as a Service API. For more information please visit http://www.aercloudAmiClient – Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) client based on the Rx Framework: Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) client based on the Rx Frameworkbaidupan: cdcddddC#??????: C#??????ImageHelper: imagehelperIP switcher: IP switcher is a simple tool for switching settings, and store presets, on networkadapters.MastersProject: A MS project with a goal of creating a fully Code Contracts verified physics engine and a relatively simple game that uses it.Multiplatform card game: Example multipatform project.PhoneTools: A collection of tools designed to help developers create beautiful Windows Phone 8 apps.rodidexter: lllSharePoint 2013 List Item Encryption: This coding exercise project enables you to encrypt/decrypt list item text field in the browser using industry standard algorithms.tvaSoft: simulation, rotor dynamics, Finite Element Analisys, FEM, ODE, torsional vibration, flexural vibrationX3DML Project: X3DML is an xml-based markup language that defines rules for modeling 3D scenes from a tag-based document. It may be usefull in 3D web design and VR.zhuang-tfs: zhuang tfs

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 31, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 31, 2010New ProjectsAndrew's XNA Helpers: A collection of simple, yet useful methods and ways of accessing crucial variables such as the ContentManager or SpriteBatch from anywhere in your ...BASIC-DOS: BASIC-DOS OS Makes It Easier For People To Use DOS As It Comes With An Graphical User Interface That Loads Up During Boot Up. No Need To Type Any C...Chirpy - Visual Studio Add In For Handling Js, Css, and DotLess Files: Mashes, minifies, and validates your javascript, stylesheet, and dotless files.fprparser: Fortify XML Report parser in the form of an Excel Add-inHL7ToXmlConverter: Class library to transform HL7 Version 2.x to HL7Xml Version 2 depends on the used HL7 grammar.imdb movie downloader: basically download info from imdb and it s realy FAST ! need some development about thread pooling and webclient issues.. just try ;) for it run ...IMIfmoOptimisation: Задание по оптимизацииMarketView: MarketViewMediaStreamSources: 这是 CodePlex 上第一个可以呈现视频的 MediaStreamSource 项目。Migrate User Profile Values: A tool to move values between SharePoint 2007 User Profiles. The console application MigrateUserProfileValues.exe will export User Profile values ...Nexus6Studio Development Space: This is a working repository for development efforst of the Nexus6studio team.Project BlueLabel: BlueLabelSergioTools: SergioTools is a collection of tools and sample codes to help C# developers to improve your productivity and skills.SharePoint Property Bag Settings 2010: The Property Bag Settings can store any metadata as Key-Value pairs such as connection strings, server names, file paths, and other miscellaneous s...Silverlight Isolated Storage Cache: IsoCache is a small framework the make it easy to store dll's and xap files in the isolated storage so they can be use to speed up the startup of t...StackPivot: StackPivot is an app which can generate Microsoft Pivot "Collections" on-the-fly based on the data collected from the Stack Exchange APIs. Its d...Suspension Calculator: The Suspension Calculator aims to help people who are building race cars perform suspension related calculations. The calculations vary from motion...TFS Timesheets: A custom work item control for Team Foundation Server that allows timesheet data to be captured against a work item.Umbraco Membership infrastructure: Improvements to the Umbraco membership API implemented as a package. Includes user properties and improved membership API support.VolgaTransTelecomClient: VolgaTransTelecomClient makes it easier for clients of "Volga TransTelecom" company to get info about account. It's developed in C#.Wouter's SharePoint Demo Land: This site contains many of the SharePoint demos that I create while training or hobbying, both for the 2007 and the 2010 release. Please click the...New ReleasesAgUnit - Silverlight unit testing with ReSharper: AgUnit 0.1: Initial release of AgUnit. Copy the extracted files from AgUnit-0.1-ReSharper5.0.zip into the "Bin\Plugins\" folder of your ReSharper installatio...Andrew's XNA Helpers: Andrew's XNA Helpers v1: My first version of my Library of XNA Helpers. Includes: Variables class - A static class that can be accessed anywhere throughout your project -...Clean your Database: Database Cleaner Setup: Database Cleaner SetupClean your Database: Database Cleaner Source: Database Cleaner Source codeCommunity Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V16: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has add...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V17: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release is prim...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.5.8: The latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.5.8), with new GUI improvements and 'Help' feature - all the instructions needed to use the software (If ...HL7ToXmlConverter: HL7ToXmlConverter Version 0.0.0.9: First distribution on codepleximdb movie downloader: 0.9 Fist Tryout of MyImdb SourceCode: Fist Tryout of MyImdb SourceCodeLightweight Fluent Workflow: Objectflow 1.0.0.2: The features of this release take advantage of .Net 3.5 featrures; Lamda support is back for Constraints and Functions can now be used in workflows...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.16.59384: Fixed password detector in context of .rar files. Fixed FileFactory provider implementation. 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