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  • Can MFMailComposeViewController attach an XML doc to an HTML message?

    - by Luther Baker
    I am creating an email in MFMaiilComposeViewController and if I simply create some html snippets and assign them to the message body - all is well. The resulting email (in GMail and Yahoo) looks like the original HTML I sent. [mailMan_ setMessageBody:body isHTML:YES]; On the other hand, if I also include an XML attachment, my email reader renders everything as plain text … including, the XML inlined. IE: my mail client (GMail, Yahoo) shows the raw HTHML and XML tags - including html tags that I didn't supply - ie: the html, head, body tags the iPhone provides around the content: NSData *opmlData = [[NSData alloc] initWithData:[opml dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]]; NSString *fileName = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%f.opml", [NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate]]; [mailMan_ addAttachmentData:opmlData mimeType:@"text/xml" fileName:fileName]; I pop3'd the mails to see what was happening and found that WITHOUT an attachment, the resulting html section of the email contains this block: --0-1682099714-1273329398=:59784 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii <html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div><h2 style="b while on the other hand, WITH the XML attachment, the iPhone is sending this: --0-881105825-1273328091=:50337 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii <html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div><h2 style="bac Notice the difference? Look at the Content-Type … text/html vs text/plain. It looks like when I include an XML attachment, the iPhone is errantly tagging the HTML version of the body as plain text! Just to clarify, technically, both with and without the attachment, the iPhone also includes this: --0-881105825-1273328091=:50337 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Notebook Carpentry Bathroom floor tile Bathroom wall tile Scrape thinset But this obviously isn't where the problem lies. Am I doing something wrong? What must I do to actually "attach" XML without the iPhone labeling the entire HTML body as plain text. I tried reversing the assignments (attachment first and then body) but no luck. For what it's worth, the email looks perfect from the iPhone's sending interface. Indeed, the HTML renders correctly and the attachment looks like a little icon at the bottom of the message. This problem has more to do with what the iPhone is actually sending.

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  • How could I send live video stream to remote server from my phone !!!

    - by poc
    Hello , I have a problem about streaming my video to server in real-time from my phone. that is , let my phone be a IP Camera , and server can watch the live video from my phone I have googled many many solutions, but there is no one can solve my problem. I use MediaRecorder to record . it can save video file in the SD card correctly. then , I refered this page and used some method as followings skt = new Socket(InetAddress.getByName(hostname),port); pfd =ParcelFileDescriptor.fromSocket(skt); mediaRecorder.setOutputFile(pfd.getFileDescriptor()); now it seems I can send the video stream while recording however, I wrote a receiver-side program to receive the video stream from Android , but it doesn't work . is there any error? I can receive file , but I can not open the video file . I guess the problem may caused by file format ? there are outline of my code. in android side Socket skt = new Socket(hostIP,port); ParcelFileDescriptor pfd =ParcelFileDescriptor.fromSocket(skt); .... .... mediaRecorder.setAudioSource(MediaRecorder.AudioSource.MIC); mediaRecorder.setVideoSource(MediaRecorder.VideoSource.DEFAULT); mediaRecorder.setOutputFormat(MediaRecorder.OutputFormat.MPEG_4); mediaRecorder.setOutputFile(pfd.getFileDescriptor()); ..... mediaRecorder.setAudioEncoder(MediaRecorder.AudioEncoder.DEFAULT); mediaRecorder.setVideoEncoder(MediaRecorder.VideoEncoder.MPEG_4_SP); ..... mediaRecorder.start(); in receiver side (my ACER notebook) // anyway , I don't think the file extentions will do any effect File video = new File (strDate+".3gpp"); FileOutputStream fos; try { fos = new FileOutputStream(video); byte[] data = new byte[1024]; int count =-1; while( (count = fin.read(data,0,1024) ) !=-1) { fos.write(data,0,count); fos.flush(); } fos.close(); fin.close(); I confused a long time.... thanks in advance

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  • Use Those Extra Mouse Buttons to Increase Efficiency

    - by Mark Virtue
    Did you know that the most commonly used mouse actions are clicking a window’s “Close” button (the X in the top-right corner), and clicking the “Back” button (in a browser and various other programs)?  How much time do you spend every day locating the Close button or the Back button with your mouse so that you can click on them?  And what about that mouse you’re using – how many buttons does it have, besides the two main ones?  Most mouses these days have at least four (including the scroll-wheel, which a lot of people don’t realize is also a button as well).  Why not assign those extra buttons to your most common mouse actions, and save yourself a bundle of mousing-around time every day? If your mouse was manufactured by one of the “premium” mouse manufacturers (Microsoft, Logitech, etc), it almost certain came with driver software to allow you to customize your mouse’s controls and take advantage of your mouse’s special features.  Microsoft, for example, provides driver software called IntelliPoint (link below), while Logitech provides SetPoint.  It’s possible that your mouse has some extra buttons but doesn’t come with its own driver software (the author is using a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000, which amazingly is not supported by the Microsoft IntelliPoint software!).  If your mouse falls into this category, you can use a marvelous free product called X-Mouse Button Control, from Highresolution Enterprises (link below).  It provides a truly amazing array of mouse configuration options, including assigning actions to buttons on a per-application basis. Once X-Mouse Button Control is downloaded, its setup process is quite straightforward. Once downloaded, you can start the program via Start / Highresolution Enterprises / X-Mouse Button Control.  You will find the program’s icon in the system tray: Right-click on the icon and select Setup from the pop-up menu.  The program’s configuration window appears: It’s extremely unlikely that we will want to change the functionality of our mouse’s two main buttons (left and right), so instead we’ll look at the rest of the options on the right side of the window.  The Middle Button refers to either the third, middle button (found on some old mouses), or the pressing of the wheel itself, as a button (if you didn’t know you could press your wheel like a button, try it out now).  Mouse Button 4 and Mouse Button 5 usually refer to the extra buttons found on the side of the mouse, often near your thumb. So what can we use these extra mouse buttons for?  Well, clearly Close and Back are two obvious candidates.  Each of these can be found by selecting them from the drop-down menu next to each button field: Once the two options are chosen, the window will look something like this: If you’re not interested in choosing Back or Close, you may like to try some of the other options in the list, including: Cut, Copy and Paste Undo Show the Desktop Next/Previous track (for media playback) Open any program Simulate any keystroke or combination of keystrokes ….and many other options.  Explore the drop-down list to see them all. You may decide, for example, that closing the current document (as opposed to the current program) would be a good use for Mouse Button 5.  In other words, we need to simulate the keypress of Ctrl-F4.  Let’s see how we achieve this. First we select Simulated Keystrokes from the drop-down list: The Simulated Keystrokes window opens: The instructions on the page are pretty comprehensive.  If you want to simulate the Ctrl-F4 keystroke, you need to type {CTRL}{F4} into the box: …and then click OK. Assigning Actions to Buttons on a Per-Application Basis One of the most powerful features of X-Mouse Button Control is the ability to assign actions to buttons on a per-application basis.  This means that if we have a particular program open, then our mouse will behave differently – our buttons will do different things. For example, when we have Windows Media Player open, for example, we may wish to have buttons assigned to Play/Pause, Next track and Previous track, as well as changing the volume with the mouse!  This is easy with X-Mouse Button Control.  We start by opening Windows Media Player.  This makes the next step easier.  Then we return to X-Mouse Button Control and add a new “configuration”.  This is done by clicking the Add button: A window opens containing a list of all running programs, including our recently opened Windows Media Player: We select Windows Media Player and click OK.  A new, blank “configuration” is created: We repeat the earlier steps to assign buttons to Play/Pause, Next track and Previous track, and assign scrolling the wheel to alter the volume:   To save all our changes and close the window, we click Apply. Now spend a few minutes thinking of all the applications you use the most, and what are the most common simple tasks you perform in each of those applications.  Those tasks are then perfect candidates for per-application button assignments. There are many more configuration options and capabilities of X-Mouse Button Control – too many to list here.  We encourage you to spend a bit of time exploring the Setup window.  Then, most important of all, don’t forget to use your new mouse buttons!  Get into the habit of using them, and then after a while you’ll start to wonder how you ever tolerated the laborious, tedious, time-consuming process of actually locating each window’s Close button… Download X-Mouse Button Control Highresolution Enterprise Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Specialized Toolbar Buttons to Firefox the Easy WayBoost Your Mouse Pointing Accuracy in WindowsMake Mouse Navigation Faster in WindowsVista Style Popup Previews for Firefox TabsStupid Geek Tricks: Using the Quick Zoom Feature in Outlook TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images Get Wildlife Photography Tips at BBC’s PhotoMasterClasses Mashpedia is a Real-time Encyclopedia

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  • Speaker at the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004

    The following is an excerpt from the UniversalThread conference coverage of the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004 written by Hans-Otto Lochmann, Armin Neudert and myself. TRACK Active FoxPro Pages Back in 1996 Peter Herzog invented a FoxPro based solution to provide intranet capabilities for one of his customers. Nearly at the same time Rick Strahl had the same task and created WestWind Web Connection (WWWC). The aspect that developers have to have a full Visual FoxPro development environment to create WWWC solutions was the starting point of a "personal sportive competition" of Peter to write his own solution. But the main aspect has to be that it doesn't rely on a full VFP version in order to run. The VFP runtime should enough and the source code has to be compiled and interpreted on the fly. So, as Microsoft released Active Server Pages a name for Peter's solution was found: Active FoxPro Pages (AFP). During the years many drawbacks, design aspects as well as technological hassles forced ProLib Software to refactor the product. This way many limits like DCOM configuration, file-based information transfer between Web server and AFP, missing features (like upload forms or other Web servers than IIS) and extensibility were eliminated. As a consequence ProLib Software decided to rewrite Active FoxPro Pages in mid of 2002 completely. Christof Wollenhaupt, before his marriage known as Christof Lange, and Jochen Kirstätter had to solve this task. AFP 3.0 was officially released at German Devcon in November 2002. Today AFP has six distributors world-wide and there is a lot more information available online than before version 3.0. Directly after a short welcome speech by Rainer Becker, Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - opened today's AFP track and introduced the basic concepts how Active FoxPro Pages works in general, explained the AFP terminilogy and every single component, and presented a small Walk-Through about how to write an AFP-based Web solution. Actually his presentation slides themselves were an AFP Web application. This way it was easy to integrate accompanying AFP samples on the fly. Additionally it was shown that no Visual FoxPro development environment is needed to create a Web application. A simple text editor like NotePad or any WYSIWYG editor on the market is usable to fullfil customer's requirements.Welcome at least two new speakers - Nina Schwanzer and Bernhard Reiter. Both are working at ProLib Software and this year's conference is their first time as speakers. And they did their job very well. The whole session was kind of a "ping pong" game and those two complemented each other to keep the audience in tension. First, they described typical requirements a modern desktop application should fullfil - online registration and activation, auto-update capabilities, or even frontend to administer a Web application on a remote system via internet, and explained how possible solutions like Web Services (using the SOAP interface), DCOM, and even .NET might solve those requirements. But any of those ways has different drawbacks like complicated installation or configuration, or extraordinary download sizes. Next, they introduced a technology they developed and used in a customer's project: Active FoxPro Pages Remote Procedure Call (AFP RPC). [...]   In the next session JoKi described how to extend Active FoxPro Pages. On the one hand AFP provides a plugin interface, and on the other hand any addon for Visual FoxPro might be usable as well. During the first half he spoke about the plugin interface and wrote live a new AFP extension - the Devcon plugin. Later he questioned any former step and showed that a single AFP document may solve the problem as well. So, developing extensions is only interesting if they are re-usable and generic. At the end he talked about multiple interfaces for the same business logic. For instance plain VFP class, COM server and .NET integration. Currently there are several specialized AFP extensions for sending mail, for using cryptographic routines (ie. based on .NET classes), or enhanced methods to handle HTML/XML strings.Rainer Becker and Peter Herzog introduced a new development for Visual Extend (VFX) - an AFP form builder. With this builder creating an AFP Web form designed with Visual FoxPro's form designer was a matter of seconds. The builder itself is currently in pre-release status and will be part of the VFX framework in the future. It was very impressive to see that the whole design of a form as well as most parts of its functionality were exported to a combination of HTML, JavaScript and Active FoxPro Pages. At half-time Jürgen "wOOdy" Wondzinski and JoKi changed places with Rainer and Peter, and presented some Web solutions in AFP. [...] Visual FoxPro 9.0 und Linux Is Linux still a topic for Visual FoxPro developers based on the activities during this year? In his session Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - went not through the technical steps and requirements on how to setup and run FoxPro on a Linux client. Instead, he explained what Linux actually is, and talked about the high variety of distributions. In fact there are a lot of distributions around but since some several years there are some specialized ones available: Live Distributions (aka LiveCDs).The intension of LiveCDs is to run a full-featured Linux operating system on any personal computer directly from a bootable medium, like CD, DVD, or even USB memory stick, without installation on a hard disk. One of the first Linux LiveCDs was made by Klaus Knopper and is well-known as Knoppix. Today, many other LiveCDs are based on the concepts of Knoppix. During the session Jochen booted Morphix, a very light-weighted LiveCD, on his notebook, and actually showed the attendees that testing and playing around with Linux is absolutely easy. Running a text processing application swept away most of the contrary aspects the audience had. Okay, where is the part about FoxPro? Well, there are several scenarios a customer might require usage of Linux, and actually with all of them FoxPro could deal with. I guess that one of the more common ones is the situation that a customer has a heterogeneous intranet with Windows clients and Linux servers, i.e. Windows XP Professional and any Linux distribution on their servers. Even in this scenario there are two variants hidden! Why? Well, on the one hand there is a software package called Samba, that provides Windows server capabilities to a Linux system, and on the other hand there are several SQL servers for Linux, like PostgreSQL, DB2 and MySQL. Either way, FoxPro is able to deal with these scenarios, but you as developer have to know what you are talking about with your customers. And even if there's no Windows operating system, you are able to provide a FoxPro-based solution. Using the wine library - wine stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator - you are able to run your VFP applications on Linux clients, too; but not without reading VFP's EULA. Licenses were also part the session, and Jochen discussed the meaning of Open Source and its misunderstanding throughout most developers. Open Source does not mean that it's without a fee. Instead, it stands for access to the source code of an application or tool. And, VFP itself is one of the best samples to explain Open Source due to fact that since years, VFP is shipped with the xSource.zip archive. [...]

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  • Christmas in the Clouds

    - by andrewbrust
    I have been spending the last 2 weeks immersing myself in a number of Windows Azure and SQL Azure technologies.  And in setting up a new business (I’ll speak more about that in the future), I have also become a customer of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services).  In short, it has been a fortnight of Microsoft cloud computing. On the Azure side, I’ve looked, of course, at Web Roles and Worker Roles.  But I’ve also looked at Azure Storage’s REST API (including coding to it directly), I’ve looked at Azure Drive and the new VM Role; I’ve looked quite a bit at SQL Azure (including the project “Houston” Silverlight UI) and I’ve looked at SQL Azure labs’ OData service too. I’ve also looked at DataMarket and its integration with both PowerPivot and native Excel.  Then there’s AppFabric Caching, SQL Azure Reporting (what I could learn of it) and the Visual Studio tooling for Azure, including the storage of certificate-based credentials.  And to round it out with some user stuff, on the BPOS side, I’ve been working with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and LiveMeeting. I have to say I like a lot of what I’ve been seeing.  Azure’s not perfect, and BPOS certainly isn’t either.  But there’s good stuff in all these products, and there’s a lot of value. Azure Goes Deep Most people know that Web and Worker roles put the platform in charge of spinning virtual machines up and down, and keeping them up to date. But you can go way beyond that now.  The still-in-beta VM Role gives you the power to craft the machine (much as does Amazon’s EC2), though it takes away the platform’s self-managing attributes.  It still spins instances up and down, making drive storage non-durable, but Azure Drive gives you the ability to store VHD files as blobs and mount them as virtual hard drives that are readable and writeable.  Whether with Azure Storage or SQL Azure, Azure does data.  And OData is everywhere.  Azure Table Storage supports an OData Interface.  So does SQL Azure and so does DataMarket (the former project “Dallas”).  That means that Azure data repositories aren’t just straightforward to provision and configure…they’re also easy to program against, from just about any programming environment, in a RESTful manner.  And for more .NET-centric implementations, Azure AppFabric caching takes the technology formerly known as “Velocity” and throws it up into the cloud, speeding data access even more. Snapping in Place Once you get the hang of it, this stuff just starts to work in a way that becomes natural to understand.  I wasn’t expecting that, and I was really happy to discover it. In retrospect, I am not surprised, because I think the various Azure teams are the center of gravity for Redmond’s innovation right now.  The products belie this and so do my observations of the product teams’ motivation and high morale.  It is really good to see this; Microsoft needs to lead somewhere, and they need to be seen as the underdog while doing so.  With Azure, both requirements are in place.   BPOS: Bad Acronym, Easy Setup BPOS is about products you already know; Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting and Office Communications Server.  As such, it’s hard not to be underwhelmed by BPOS.  Until you realize how easy it makes it to get all that stuff set up.  I would say that from sign-up to productive use took me about 45 minutes…and that included the time necessary to wrestle with my DNS provider, set up Outlook and my SmartPhone up to talk to the Exchange account, create my SharePoint site collection, and configure the Outlook Conferencing add-in to talk to the provisioned Live Meeting account. Never before did I think setting up my own Exchange mail could come anywhere close to the simplicity of setting up an SMTP/POP account, and yet BPOS actually made it faster.   What I want from my Azure Christmas Next Year Not everything about Microsoft’s cloud is good.  I close this post with a list of things I’d like to see addressed: BPOS offerings are still based on the 2007 Wave of Microsoft server technologies.  We need to get to 2010, and fast.  Arguably, the 2010 products should have been released to the off-premises channel before the on-premise sone.  Office 365 can’t come fast enough. Azure’s Internet tooling and domain naming, is scattered and confusing.  Deployed ASP.NET applications go to cloudapp.net; SQL Azure and Azure storage work off windows.net.  The Azure portal and Project Houston are at azure.com.  Then there’s appfabriclabs.com and sqlazurelabs.com.  There is a new Silverlight portal that replaces most, but not all of the HTML ones.  And Project Houston is Silvelright-based too, though separate from the Silverlight portal tooling. Microsoft is the king off tooling.  They should not make me keep an entire OneNote notebook full of portal links, account names, access keys, assemblies and namespaces and do so much CTRL-C/CTRL-V work.  I’d like to see more project templates, have them automatically reference the appropriate assemblies, generate the right using/Imports statements and prime my config files with the right markup.  Then I want a UI that lets me log in with my Live ID and pick the appropriate project, database, namespace and key string to get set up fast. Beta programs, if they’re open, should onboard me quickly.  I know the process is difficult and everyone’s going as fast as they can.  But I don’t know why it’s so difficult or why it takes so long.  Getting developers up to speed on new features quickly helps popularize the platform.  Make this a priority. Make Azure accessible from the simplicity platforms, i.e. ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) and LightSwitch.  Support .NET 4 now.  Make WebMatrix, IIS Express and SQL Compact work with the Azure development fabric. Have HTML helpers make Azure programming easier.  Have LightSwitch work with SQL Azure and not require SQL Express.  LightSwitch has some promising Azure integration now.  But we need more.  WebMatrix has none and that’s just silly, now that the Extra Small Instance is being introduced. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is great.  But I want Microsoft to make it even better and I want them to evangelize it much more aggressively.  There’s a lot of good material on Azure development out there, but it’s scattered in the same way that the platform is.   The Training Kit ties a lot of disparate stuff together nicely.  Make it known. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot All in all, diving deep into Azure was a good way to end the year.  Diving deeper into Azure should a great way to spend next year, not just for me, but for Microsoft too.

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  • Accessing resources on localhost using domain credentials

    - by jas
    I'm trying to set up Team Foundation Server 2010, Sharepoint Server 2010 and Report Server 2008R2. I apologize for how long my question/problem is but I'm really lost on where to even look so am being as descriptive as possible in hopes that I'm making sense. The goal: Since developers can be inside or outside the firewall there needs to be a single http point of entry to TFS that works regardless of which side of the firewall you are and needs to work with external access to SharePoint and Report Server. Meaning we have it set up in DNS so buildserver.mydomain.com: points to the build service box which contains all of the services listed at the top of this post and specific services are defined/located by the port number. This is working great on every machine inside and out except for from the build server itself. All services must be able to work using external URLs. If I use http:// buildserver.mydomain.com:4800/tfs (the external URL) from my notebook which is behind the firewall I'm able to login with my domain credentials as expected. If the other developer points to the same URL from their home which isn't on the domain they are also able to login using their domain credentials. However if I am directly on buildserver and call SharePoint, TFS or Reporting Server from (i.e. http:// buildserver.mydomain.com:4800) itself using the external URL, I am prompted for a username and password. Entering my domain credentials results in another prompt to enter my credentials again. It will prompt three times regardless of which credentials are used (I have rights as a domain admin) and then after the third prompt directs me to a blank white page as though access was denied. There are no errors displayed on the page and nothing ends up in the event viewer. From buildserver if i use just the host name (the internal URL), then I'm prompted a single time for credentials and it works. i.e. http:// buildserver:4800/tfs works from the server itself. The behavior is identical for any service requiring authentication. Meaning from the box itself Sharepoint Central Admin, SharePoint WebApp, TFS, TFS Web Access, Report Server and Report Manager all fail using the external URL but will succeed if called using the interal URL. So the problem comes into play when configuring all of the services to work together. The only way to configure TFS is locally from the server which means I must point to the internal reporting server url (http:// buildserver:4800/reports and reportServer respectively instead of http:// buildserver.domainname.com:4800 like they need to be) since external URLs aren't working from itself. If I configure TFS to use the internal URL for Report Server then creating team projects or working in the SharePoint site for the team project fails for anyone not inside the domain since their machines have no idea who http:// buildserver:/reports even is or how to resolve them. I have configured Sharepoint with Alternate Access Mappings as well as set up Report Server to listen for external URLs. The external URLs simply aren't working when called from the server itself. I hope this makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to read this rather verbose plea for help.

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  • The best dvd ripper software in 2014 review

    - by user328170
    The top 3 DVD Ripping Tools in 2014 Nowadays everyone may have several smart mobile devices, such as iphone, ipad air, ipad mini ,Samsung Galaxy and Sony Xperia. If you want to take your movies with your mobile devices, or sometimes just want to backup those classic physical discs on your notebook or workstation with high quality resolutions, you need a fast and stable software to rip them and convert them to the format you like. Fortunately, there are plenty of great software products designed to make the process easy and transform DVD to the files that are playable on any mobile device you choose. We have done a full review on dozens of products. Here are five of the best, based on our review. We test the software from its ripping speed, friendly use guide , reliability and ripping capability. The top one is still Winx DVD Ripper platinum. We've test its 6.1 version 2 years ago for its ability to quickly and easily rip DVDs and Blu-ray discs to high quality MKV files with a single click. It gave us deep impression in the test. This time we test it’s lastest 7.3.5 version. Besides easy use and speed, we test its capability to decrypt all kinds of discs with different protect method, for example, Disney X-project DRM , Sony ArccOS, RCE and region code. The result shows that winx dvd ripper platinum still maintain its advantages in all the area. Winx dvd ripper platinum is a more focused on DVD ripping software with the basic duty to rip and convert DVD. The color of UI is a modern technical sense. All the main functions are shown obviously while others specials are hidden for advanced users, making it more clear and convenient to make option. There are two company weisoft limited and Digiarty who can provide the software. Weisoft limited focus on USA, UK and Australia market. Digiarty focus on others. ripping speed ????? friendly use guide ????? reliability ????? ripping capability ????? The second one DVDFab DVDFab is also very robust during ripping dics. It can also decrypt most of the dics in the market. The shortage it still friendly use and speed. We'd note that the app is frequently updated to cut through the copy protection on even the latest DVDs and Blu-ray discs . The app is shareware, meaning most features are free, including decrypting and ripping to your hard drive. Many of you note that you use another app for compression and authoring, but many of you say they hey, storage is cheap, and the rips from DVDFab are easy, one-click, and work. ripping speed ??? friendly use guide ???? reliability ????? ripping capability ????? The Third one is Handbrake Handbrake is our favorite video encoder for a reason: it's simple, easy to use, easy to install, and offers a lots of options to get the high quality file as a result. If you're scared by them, you don't even have to use them—the app will compensate for you and pick some settings it thinks you'll like based on your destination device. So many of you like Handbrake that many of you use it in conjunction with another app (like VLC, which makes ripping easy)—you'll let another app do the rip and crack the DRM on your discs, and then process the file through Handbrake for encoding. The app is fast, can make the most of multi-core processors to speed up the process, and is completely open source. ripping speed ??? friendly use guide ???? reliability ???? ripping capability ????

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  • This file does not have a program associated with it for performing

    - by Abu Hamzah
    update 2: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder ContentViewModeLayoutPatternForBrowse REG_SZ delta ContentViewModeForBrowse REG_SZ prop:~System.ItemNameDisplay;~System.LayoutPattern.PlaceHolder;~System.LayoutPattern.PlaceHolder;~System.LayoutPattern.PlaceHolder;System.DateModified ContentViewModeLayoutPatternForSearch REG_SZ alpha ContentViewModeForSearch REG_SZ prop:~System.ItemNameDisplay;System.DateModified;~System.ItemFolderPathDisplay (Default) REG_SZ Folder EditFlags REG_BINARY D2030000 FullDetails REG_SZ prop:System.PropGroup.Description;System.ItemNameDisplay;System.ItemTypeText;System.Size NoRecentDocs REG_SZ ThumbnailCutoff REG_DWORD 0x0 TileInfo REG_SZ prop:System.Title;System.ItemTypeText HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\DefaultIcon (Default) REG_EXPAND_SZ %SystemRoot%\System32\shell32.dll,3 HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\explore HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\explore\command HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\open MultiSelectModel REG_SZ Document HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\open\command DelegateExecute REG_SZ {11dbb47c-a525-400b-9e80-a54615a090c0} (Default) REG_EXPAND_SZ %SystemRoot%\Explorer.exe HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\opennewprocess MUIVerb REG_SZ @shell32.dll,-8518 MultiSelectModel REG_SZ Document Extended REG_SZ LaunchExplorerFlags REG_DWORD 0x3 ExplorerHost REG_SZ {ceff45ee-c862-41de-aee2-a022c81eda92} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\opennewprocess\command DelegateExecute REG_SZ {11dbb47c-a525-400b-9e80-a54615a090c0} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\opennewwindow MUIVerb REG_SZ @shell32.dll,-8517 MultiSelectModel REG_SZ Document OnlyInBrowserWindow REG_SZ LaunchExplorerFlags REG_DWORD 0x1 HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\opennewwindow\command DelegateExecute REG_SZ {11dbb47c-a525-400b-9e80-a54615a090c0} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx\ColumnHandlers HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx\ColumnHandlers\{0561EC90-CE54-4f0c-9C55-E226110A740C} (Default) REG_SZ Haali Column Provider 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Handler XXX (Default) REG_SZ {6C467336-8281-4E60-8204-430CED96822D} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\{596AB062-B4D2-4215-9F74-E9109B0A8153} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\CopyHookHandlers HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\CopyHookHandlers\FileSystem (Default) REG_SZ {217FC9C0-3AEA-1069-A2DB-08002B30309D} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\CopyHookHandlers\Sharing (Default) REG_SZ {40dd6e20-7c17-11ce-a804-00aa003ca9f6} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\DragDropHandlers HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\DragDropHandlers\WinRAR (Default) REG_SZ {B41DB860-8EE4-11D2-9906-E49FADC173CA} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\DragDropHandlers\WS_FTP (Default) REG_SZ {1D83C7B3-C931-4850-BED0-D3FE8B3F5808} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\Sharing (Default) REG_SZ {f81e9010-6ea4-11ce-a7ff-00aa003ca9f6} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{1f2e5c40-9550-11ce-99d2-00aa006e086c} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{4a7ded0a-ad25-11d0-98a8-0800361b1103} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{596AB062-B4D2-4215-9F74-E9109B0A8153} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{ECCDF543-45CC-11CE-B9BF-0080C87CDBA6} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{ef43ecfe-2ab9-4632-bf21-58909dd177f0} (Default) REG_SZ I updated my IE9 from IE8 and after I reboot my machine and try to access my computer drive and I get this error message whenever I try to double click c:\ drive or other drives but other than that everything seems to be working fince except that I can not access my drives.... its very strange any help? <<<This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Please install a program or, if one is already installed, create an association in the Default Programs control panel>>> using Windows 7 32 bit

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  • Book Review - Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan

    - by BuckWoody
    As part of my professional development, I’ve created a list of books to read throughout the year, starting in June of 2011. This a review of the first one, called Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan. You can find my entire list of books I’m reading for my career here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/06/07/head-in-the-clouds-eyes-on-the-books.aspx  Why I Chose This Book: As part of my learning style, I try to read multiple books about a single subject. I’ve found that at least 3 books are necessary to get the right amount of information to me. This is a “technical” work, meaning that it deals with technology and not business, writing or other facets of my career. I’ll have a mix of all of those as I read along. I chose this work in addition to others I’ve read since it covers everything from an introduction to more advanced topics in a single book. It also has some practical examples of actually working with the product, particularly on storage. Although it’s dated, many examples normally translate. I also saw that it had pretty good reviews. What I learned: I learned a great deal about storage, and many useful code snippets. I do think that there could have been more of a focus on the application fabric - but of course that wasn’t as mature a feature when this book was written. I learned some great architecture examples, and in one section I learned more about encryption. In that example, however, I would rather have seen the examples go the other way - the book focused on moving data from on-premise to Azure storage in an encrypted fashion. Using the Application Fabric I would rather see sensitive data left in a hybrid fashion on premise, and connect to for the Azure application. Even so, the examples were very useful. If you’re looking for a good “starter” Azure book, this is a good choice. I also recommend the last chapter as a quick read for a DBA, or Database Administrator. It’s not very long, but useful. Note that the limits described are incorrect - which is one of the dangers of reading a book about any cloud offering. The services offered are updated so quickly that the information is in constant danger of being “stale”. Even so, I found this a useful book, which I believe will help me work with Azure better. Raw Notes: I take notes as I read, calling that process “reading with a pencil”. I find that when I do that I pay attention better, and record some things that I need to know later. I’ll take these notes, categorize them into a OneNote notebook that I synchronize in my Live.com account, and that way I can search them from anywhere. I can even read them on the web, since the Live.com has a OneNote program built in. Note that these are the raw notes, so they might not make a lot of sense out of context - I include them here so you can watch my though process. Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan: Learning about how to select applications suitable for Distributed Technology. Application Fabric gets the least attention; probably because it was newer at the time. Very clear (Chapter One) Good foundation Background and history, but not too much I normally arrange my descriptions differently, starting with the use-cases and moving to physicality, but this difference helps me. Interesting that I am reading this using Safari Books Online, which uses many of these concepts. Taught me some new aspects of a Hypervisor – very low-level information about the Azure Fabric (not to be confused with the Application Fabric feature) (Chapter Two) Good detail of what is included in the SDK. Even more is available now. CS = Cloud Service (Chapter 3) Place Storage info in the configuration file, since it can be streamed in-line with a running app. Ditto for logging, and keep separated configs for staging and testing. Easy-switch in and switch out.  (Chapter 4) There are two Runtime API’s, one of external and one for internal. Realizing how powerful this paradigm really is. Some places seem light, and to drop off but perhaps that’s best. Managing API is not charged, which is nice. I don’t often think about the price, until it comes to an actual deployment (Chapter 5) Csmanage is something I want to dig into deeper. API requires package moves to Blob storage first, so it needs a URL. Csmanage equivalent can be written in Unix scripting using openssl. Upgrades are possible, and you use the upgradeDomainCount attribute in the Service-Definition.csdef file  Always use a low-privileged account to test on the dev fabric, since Windows Azure runs in partial trust. Full trust is available, but can be dangerous and must be well-thought out. (Chapter 6) Learned how to run full CMD commands in a web window – not that you would ever do that, but it was an interesting view into those links. This leads to a discussion on hosting other runtimes (such as Java or PHP) in Windows Azure. I got an expanded view on this process, although this is where the book shows its age a little. Books can be a problem for Cloud Computing for this reason – things just change too quickly. Windows Azure storage is not eventually consistent – it is instantly consistent with multi-phase commit. Plumbing for this is internal, not required to code that. (Chapter 7) REST API makes the service interoperable, hybrid, and consistent across code architectures. Nicely done. Use affinity groups to keep data and code together. Side note: e-book readers need a common “notes” feature. There’s a decent quick description of REST in this chapter. Learned about CloudDrive code – PowerShell sample that mounts Blob storage as a local provider. Works against Dev fabric by default, can be switched to Account. Good treatment in the storage chapters on the differences between using Dev storage and Azure storage. These can be mitigated. No, blobs are not of any size or number. Not a good statement (Chapter 8) Blob storage is probably Azure’s closest play to Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas). Blob change operations must be authenticated, even when public. Chapters on storage are pretty in-depth. Queue Messages are base-64 encoded (Chapter 9) The visibility timeout ensures processing of message in a disconnected system. Order is not guaranteed for a message, so if you need that set an increasing number in the queue mechanism. While Queues are accessible via REST, they are not public and are secured by default. Interesting – the header for a queue request includes an estimated count. This can be useful to create more worker roles in a dynamic system. Each Entity (row) in the Azure Table service is atomic – all or nothing. (Chapter 10) An entity can have up to 255 Properties  Use “ID” for the class to indicate the key value, or use the [DataServiceKey] Attribute.  LINQ makes working with the Azure Table Service much easier, although Interop is certainly possible. Good description on the process of selecting the Partition and Row Key.  When checking for continuation tokens for pagination, include logic that falls out of the check in case you are at the last page.  On deleting a storage object, it is instantly unavailable, however a background process is dispatched to perform the physical deletion. So if you want to re-create a storage object with the same name, add retry logic into the code. Interesting approach to deleting an index entity without having to read it first – create a local entity with the same keys and apply it to the Azure system regardless of change-state.  Although the “Indexes” description is a little vague, it’s interesting to see a Folding and Stemming discussion a-la the Porter Stemming Algorithm. (Chapter 11)  Presents a better discussion of indexes (at least inverted indexes) later in the chapter. Great treatment for DBA’s in Chapter 11. We need to work on getting secondary indexes in Table storage. There is a limited form of transactions called “Entity Group Transactions” that, although they have conditions, makes a transactional system more possible. Concurrency also becomes an issue, but is handled well if you’re using Data Services in .NET. It watches the Etag and allows you to take action appropriately. I do not recommend using Azure as a location for secure backups. In fact, I would rather have seen the examples in (Chapter 12) go the other way, showing how data could be brought back to a local store as a DR or HA strategy. Good information on cryptography and so on even so. Chapter seems out of place, and should be combined with the Blob chapter.  (Chapter 13) on SQL Azure is dated, although the base concepts are OK.  Nice example of simple ADO.NET access to a SQL Azure (or any SQL Server Really) database.  

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 04, 2013

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 04, 2013Popular ReleasesMoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): Version 1.11: Release Notes Release 1.11 =========== =Bug Fixes= =========== Now works with Terraria 1.2 wld files. =============== =Known Issues= =============== Not all tiles and items are accounted for. Missing tiles just show up as pink. This is actively being worked on but wanted to get a build out that works with 1.2VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.19: NEW: Added Option to login as Guest NEW: Added Support for "ImageTeam.org linksStyleMVVM: 3.1.4: This release has virtually no code change but adds multiple new Item templates for the Windows Phone 8 platformSystem Center Orchestrator Community Project: Orchestrator Visio and Word Generator 1.5: This tool lets you export Orchestrator runbooks as a Visio diagram, and you can also generate an optional Word file as well. Components exported as of v1.5 are : - Title of the runbook - Activities and their names/thumbnails/description (description is displayed as a callout in the Visio diagram, attached to the shape of the activity) - Links and their names/colors - Looping and their interval Thumbnails and activities are grouped in the Visio diagram, for easy manipulation of the diagra...State of Decay Save Manager: Version 1.0.4: Add version at bottom of formDNN® Form and List: DNN Form and List 06.00.07: DotNetNuke Form and List 06.00.06 Changes to 6.0.7•Fixed an error in datatypes.config that caused calculated fields to be missing in 6.0.6 Changes to 6.0.6•Add in Sql to remove 'text on row' setting for UserDefinedTable to make SQL Azure compatible. •Add new azureCompatible element to manifest. •Added a fix for importing templates. Changes to 6.0.2•Fix: MakeThumbnail was broken if the application pool was configured to .Net 4 •Change: Data is now stored in nvarchar(max) instead of ntext C...SimpleExcelReportMaker: Serm 0.03: SourceCode and Sample .Net Framework 3.5 AnyCPU compile.RDFSharp - Start playing with RDF!: RDFSharp-0.6.6: GENERAL (NEW) Introduction of INT64 hashing engine (codenamed "Greta"); QUERY (FIX) Incorrect query evaluation due to faulty detection of optional patterns (v0.6.5 regression); (FIX) Missing update of PatternGroupID information after adding patterns and filters to a pattern group; (FIX) Ensure Context information of a pattern is not null before trying to collect it as variable; (MISC) Changed semantics of Context information of a pattern: if not provided, it will be ignored; (MISC...Application Architecture Guidelines: App Architecture Guidelines 3.0.8: This document is an overview of software qualities, principles, patterns, practices, tools and libraries.C# Intellisense for Notepad++: Release v1.0.7.2: - smart indentation - document formatting To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.6: 2013.09.30 Ver5.9.6 (1)SMTP???????、???????????????? (2)WinAPI??????? (3)Web???????CGI???????????????????????Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 5.2: Mostly internal code tweaks. added -nosize switch to turn off the size- and gzip-calculations done after minification. removed the comments in the build targets script for the old AjaxMin build task (discussion #458831). Fixed an issue with extended Unicode characters encoded inside a string literal with adjacent \uHHHH\uHHHH sequences. Fixed an IndexOutOfRange exception when encountering a CSS identifier that's a single underscore character (_). In previous builds, the net35 and net20...AJAX Control Toolkit: September 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - September 2013 Release (Updated) Version 7.1002September 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Important UpdateThis release has been updated to fix two issues: Upda...WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.4.apifix-alpha: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.4.apifix-alpha is for testers to figure out if we got the NEW api plugged in ok. thanksVisual Log Parser: VisualLogParser: Portable Visual Log Parser for Dotnet 4.0AudioWordsDownloader: AudioWordsDownloader 1.1 build 88: New features list of words (mp3 files) is available upon typing when a download path is defined list of download paths is added paths history settings added Bug fixed case mismatch in word search field fixed path not exist bug fixed when history has been used path, when filled from dialog, not stored refresh autocomplete list after path change word sought is deleted when path is changed at the end sought word list is deleted word list not refreshed download ends. word lis...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.3.1309.28: Fix a bug, where WPP crash when running on a computer where Windows was installed in another language than Fr, En or De, and launching the Update Creation Wizard. Fix a bug, where WPP crash if some Multi-Thread job are launch with more than 64 items. Add a button to abort "Install This Update" wizard. Allow WPP to remember which columns are shown last time. Make URL clickable on the Update Information Tab. Add a new feature, when Double-Clicking on an update, the default action exec...Tweetinvi a friendly Twitter C# API: Alpha 0.8.3.0: Version 0.8.3.0 emphasis on the FIlteredStream and ease how to manage Exceptions that can occur due to the network or any other issue you might encounter. Will be available through nuget the 29/09/2013. FilteredStream Features provided by the Twitter Stream API - Ability to track specific keywords - Ability to track specific users - Ability to track specific locations Additional features - Detect the reasons the tweet has been retrieved from the Filtered API. You have access to both the ma...WPF Extended DataGrid: WPF Extended DataGrid 2.0.0.4 binaries: Improved performance of GroupByAcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.5: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????,????,?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????,??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??,????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ??v4.5 ???? AcPlay????????v3.5 ????????,???????????30% ?? ???????GoodManga.net???? ?? ?????????? ?? ??Acfun?????????? ??Bilibili??????????? ?????????flvcd???????? ??SfAcg????????????? ???????????? ???????????????? ????32...New ProjectsAnalysis Services Activity Viewer 2012: This project was created from a blog post I wrote back in February 2013 http://redphoenix.me/2013/08/22/upgrade-activity-viewer-2008-to-sql-server-2012/ARYSTA SYSTEM: Notebook System A/R Sales * Sales Order * Delivery * Sales Invoice * Sales Return * A/R Credit Memo * A/R Debit Memo A/P Purchasing * Purchase Order BEWELL SYSTEM: This system is design for Bewell-C Incorporated. Project Manager: Ben Penafiel System Engineer: Jhay Camba Report Designer: William Damasco Caching IOC: Caching IOC Container This will cache any Interface return results making it really easy to introduce caching to your solution.Grupo Anclita: Trabajo Final Laboratorio 4Halcyonic Skin by HTML5-UP - for DNN: This skin was converted for use in DNN by Michael Doxsey. Original HTML template designed and built by HTML5-UP: http://html5up.net/halcyonic/ ProPro: project about other projectsS3Unlock: Unlocks S3 agents that are stuck installing.sdfsdlfsdlkj01: dsfdffsdSerendipity - Responsive Skin for DNN: This is an HTML Template by Elemis, converted for use in DNN. Elemis URL: http://elemisfreebies.com/premium-themes/ Free for personal use and ed. purposes only.SmartSystemMenu: Smart system menu for you.SP 2013 Custom MultiTenant Adminstration: This Project creates a custom SP 2013 Tenant Admin site template covering limitations of existing tenant admin site.Telephasic Skin by HTML5-UP - for DNN: This skin was converted for use in DNN by Michael Doxsey. Original HTML template designed and built by HTML5-UP: http://html5up.net/telephasic/TelerikedIn: Social web app trying to look and feel like the famous LinkedInTerra 2: Generador de personajes para el juego de rol Terra2tsydev01: TextLineUpdateVds2465 Parser: This Project is about implementing a Parser for the Vds2465 protocol. It includes parsing and generating Vds2465 telegram bytes.Your Appliances: Empresa De ElectrodomesticosZeroFour by HTML5-UP - for DNN: This skin was converted for use in DNN by Michael Doxsey. Original HTML template designed and built by HTML5-UP: http://html5up.net/zerofour.

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  • Going Paperless

    - by Jesse
    One year ago I came to work for a company where the entire development team is 100% “remote”; we’re spread over 3 time zones and each of us works from home. This seems to be an increasingly popular way for people to work and there are many articles and blog posts out there enumerating the advantages and disadvantages of working this way. I had read a lot about telecommuting before accepting this job and felt as if I had a pretty decent idea of what I was getting into, but I’ve encountered a few things over the past year that I did not expect. Among the most surprising by-products of working from home for me has been a dramatic reduction in the amount of paper that I use on a weekly basis. Hoarding In The Workplace Prior to my current telecommute job I worked in what most would consider pretty traditional office environments. I sat in cubicles furnished with an enormous plastic(ish) modular desks, had a mediocre (at best) PC workstation, and had ready access to a seemingly endless supply of legal pads, pens, staplers and paper clips. The ready access to paper, countless conference room meetings, and abundance of available surface area on my desk and in drawers created a perfect storm for wasting paper. I brought a pad of paper with me to every meeting I ever attended, scrawled some brief notes, and then tore that sheet off to keep next to my keyboard to follow up on any needed action items. Once my immediate need for the notes was fulfilled, that sheet would get shuffled off into a corner of my desk or filed away in a drawer “just in case”. I would guess that for all of the notes that I ever filed away, I might have actually had to dig up and refer to 2% of them (and that’s probably being very generous). That said, on those rare occasions that I did have to dig something up from old notes, it was usually pretty important and I ended up being very glad that I saved them. It was only when I would leave a job or move desks that I would finally gather all those notes together and take them to shredding bin to be disposed of. When I left my last job the amount of paper I had accumulated over my three years there was absurd, and I knew coworkers who had substance-abuse caliber paper wasting addictions that made my bad habit look like nail-biting in comparison. A Product Of My Environment I always hated using all of this paper, but simply couldn’t bring myself to stop. It would look bad if I showed up to an important conference room meeting without a pad of paper. What if someone said something profound! Plus, everyone else always brought paper with them. If you saw someone walking down the hallway with a pad of paper in hand you knew they must be on their way to a conference room meeting. Some people even had fancy looking portfolio notebook sheaths that gave their legal pads all the prestige of a briefcase. No one ever worried about running out of fresh paper because there was an endless supply, and there certainly was no shortage of places to store and file used paper. In short, the traditional office was setup for using tons and tons of paper; it’s baked into the culture there. For that reason, it didn’t take long for me to kick the paper habit once I started working from home. In my home office, desk and drawer space are at a premium. I don’t have the budget (or the tolerance) for huge modular office furniture in my spare bedroom. I also no longer have access to a bottomless pit of office supplies stock piled in cabinets and closets. If I want to use some paper, I have to go out and buy it. Finally (and most importantly), all of the meetings that I have to attend these days are “virtual”. We use instant messaging, VOIP, video conferencing, and e-mail to communicate with each other. All I need to take notes during a meeting is my computer, which I happen to be sitting right in front of all day. I don’t have any hard numbers for this, but my gut feeling is that I actually take a lot more notes now than I ever did when I worked in an office. The big difference is I don’t have to use any paper to do so. This makes it far easier to keep important information safe and organized. The Right Tool For The Job When I first started working from home I tried to find a single application that would fill the gap left by the pen and paper that I always had at my desk when I worked in an office. Well, there are no silver bullets and I’ve evolved my approach over time to try and find the best tool for the job at hand. Here’s a quick summary of how I take notes and keep everything organized. Notepad++ – This is the first application I turn to when I feel like there’s some bit of information that I need to write down and save. I use Launchy, so opening Notepad++ and creating a new file only takes a few keystrokes. If I find that the information I’m trying to get down requires a more sophisticated application I escalate as needed. The Desktop – By default, I save every file or other bit of information to the desktop. Anyone who has ever had to fix their parents computer before knows that this is a dangerous game (any file my mother has ever worked on is saved directly to the desktop and rarely moves anywhere else). I agree that storing things on the desktop isn’t a great long term approach to keeping organized, which is why I treat my desktop a bit like my e-mail inbox. I strive to keep both empty (or as close to empty as I possibly can). If something is on my desktop, it means that it’s something relevant to a task or project that I’m currently working on. About once a week I take things that I’m not longer working on and put them into my ‘Notes’ folder. The ‘Notes’ Folder – As I work on a task, I tend to accumulate multiple files associated with that task. For example, I might have a bit of SQL that I’m working on to gather data for a new report, a quick C# method that I came up with but am not yet ready to commit to source control, a bulleted list of to-do items in a .txt file, etc. If the desktop starts to get too cluttered, I create a new sub-folder in my ‘Notes’ folder. Each sub-folder’s name is the current date followed by a brief description of the task or project. Then all files related to that task or project go into that sub folder. By using the date as the first part of the folder name, these folders are automatically sorted in reverse chronological order. This means that things I worked on recently will generally be near the top of the list. Using the built-in Windows search functionality I now have a pretty quick and easy way to try and find something that I worked on a week ago or six months ago. Dropbox – Dropbox is a free service that lets you store up to 2GB of files “in the cloud” and have those files synced to all of the different computers that you use. My ‘Notes’ folder lives in Dropbox, meaning that it’s contents are constantly backed up and are always available to me regardless of which computer I’m using. They also have a pretty decent iPhone application that lets you browse and view all of the files that you have stored there. The free 2GB edition is probably enough for just storing notes, but I also pay $99/year for the 50GB storage upgrade and keep all of my music, e-books, pictures, and documents in Dropbox. It’s a fantastic service and I highly recommend it. Evernote – I use Evernote mostly to organize information that I access on a fairly regular basis. For example, my Evernote account has a running grocery shopping list, recipes that my wife and I use a lot, and contact information for people I contact infrequently enough that I don’t want to keep them in my phone. I know some people that keep nearly everything in Evernote, but there’s something about it that I find a bit clunky, so I tend to use it sparingly. Google Tasks – One of my biggest paper wasting habits was keeping a running task-list next to my computer at work. Every morning I would sit down, look at my task list, cross off what was done and add new tasks that I thought of during my morning commute. This usually resulted in having to re-copy the task list onto a fresh sheet of paper when I was done. I still keep a running task list at my desk, but I’ve started using Google Tasks instead. This is a dead-simple web-based application for quickly adding, deleting, and organizing tasks in a simple checklist style. You can quickly move tasks up and down on the list (which I use for prioritizing), and even create sub-tasks for breaking down larger tasks into smaller pieces. Balsamiq Mockups – This is a simple and lightweight tool for creating drawings of user interfaces. It’s great for sketching out a new feature, brainstorm the layout of a interface, or even draw up a quick sequence diagram. I’m terrible at drawing, so Balsamiq Mockups not only lets me create sketches that other people can actually understand, but it’s also handy because you can upload a sketch to a common location for other team members to access. I can honestly say that using these tools (and having limited resources at home) have lead me to cut my paper usage down to virtually none. If I ever were to return to a traditional office workplace (hopefully never!) I’d try to employ as many of these applications and techniques as I could to keep paper usage low. I feel far less cluttered and far better organized now.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 31, 2014

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 31, 2014Popular ReleasesTooltip Web Preview: ToolTip Web Preview: Version 1.0Image View Slider: Image View Slider: This is a .NET component. We create this using VB.NET. Here you can use an Image Viewer with several properties to your application form. We wish somebody to improve freely. Try this out! Author : Steven Renaldo Antony Yustinus Arjuna Purnama Putra Andre Wijaya P Martin Lidau PBK GENAP 2014 - TI UKDWAspose for Apache POI: Missing Features of Apache POI WP - v 1.1: Release contain the Missing Features in Apache POI WP SDK in Comparison with Aspose.Words for dealing with Microsoft Word. What's New ?Following Examples: Insert Picture in Word Document Insert Comments Set Page Borders Mail Merge from XML Data Source Moving the Cursor Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are yet to come here. Keep visiting us. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.babelua: V1.5.6.0: V1.5.6.0 - 2014.5.30New feature: support quick-cocos2d-x project now; support text search in scripts folder now, you can use this function in Search Result Window;SEToolbox: 01.032.014 Release 1: Added fix when loading game Textures for icons causing 'Unable to read beyond the end of the stream'. Added new Resource Report, that displays all in game resources in a concise report. Added in temp directory cleaner, to keep excess files from building up. Fixed use of colors on the windows, to work better with desktop schemes. Adding base support for multilingual resources. This will allow loading of the Space Engineers resources to show localized names, and display localized date a...FileTable Services for Lightswitch: FileTable Services for Lightswitch version 1.0.4: 30 MAY 2014 version 1.0.4SqlFileTableDataSource changes: Updated Delete command to run in batch mode (Insert and Update commands already ran that way) Changed Update command to silently fail if an attempt is made to change something unchangeable (e.g., attempt to change IsFolder) FileNode changes: Made ID property editable, but not (by default) visible in Lightswitch (this is to allow the creator of a FileNode to specify its ID) Made IsFolder editable (this is to allow callers to more eas...HERB.IQ: HERB.IQ.0.7.6 UPGRADE (Windows) BETA 2: HERB.IQ.0.7.6 UPGRADE (Windows) BETA 2SQL Scripts to Improve DNN Performance: Turbo Scripts 0.8.7 for DNN 7.1.2 - 7.2.2: fixed a missing dbo/oq and a misspelled view nameIndonesian Red-Letter Day Calendar: Indonesian Red-Letter Day Calendar: This is a composite has been made by Microsoft Visual Studio 2013.Visual F# Tools: Daily Builds Preview 05-29-2014: This preview is released for use under a proprietary license.ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.71.2: More memory and performance improvements. Fixed an issue with pivot table field order.Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.9.101: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.9.1. Breaking changes: - Int/short Set methods of WritablePixelCollection are now unsigned. - The Q16 build no longer uses HDRI, switch to the new Q16-HDRI build if you need HDRI.QuickMon: Version 3.13: 1. Adding an Audio/sound notifier that can be used to simply draw attention to the application of a warning pr error state is returned by a collector. 2. Adding a property for Notifiers so it can be set to 'Attended', 'Unattended' or 'Both' modes. 3. Adding a WCF method to remote agent host so the version can be checked remotely. 4. Adding some 'Sample' monitor packs to installer. Note: this release and the next release (3.14 aka Pie release) will have some breaking changes and will be incom...fnr.exe - Find And Replace Tool: 1.7: Bug fixes Refactored logic for encoding text values to command line to handle common edge cases where find/replace operation works in GUI but not in command line Fix for bug where selection in Encoding drop down was different when generating command line in some cases. It was reported in: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/workitem/34 Fix for "Backslash inserted before dot in replacement text" reported here: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/discussions/541024 Fix for finding replacing...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.59: changes NEW: Added Support for 'GokoImage.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ViperII.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixxxView.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgRex.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixLiv.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'imgsee.me' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgS.it' linksXsemmel - XML Editor and Viewer: 29-MAY-2014: WINDOWS XP IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED If you need support for WinXP, download release 15-MAR-2014 instead. FIX: Some minor issues NEW: Better visualisation of validation issues NEW: Printing CHG: Disabled Jumplist CHG: updated to .net 4.5, WinXP NO LONGER SUPPORTEDPerformance Analyzer for Microsoft Dynamics: DynamicsPerf 1.20: Version 1.20 Improved performance in PERFHOURLYROWDATA_VW Fixed error handling encrypted triggers Added logic ACTIVITYMONITORVW to handle Context_Info for Dynamics AX 2012 and above with this flag set on AOS Added logic to optional blocking to handle Context_Info for Dynamics AX 2012 and above with this flag set on AOS Added additional queries for investigating blocking Added logic to collect Baseline capture data (NOTE: QUERY_STATS table has entire procedure cache for that db during...Toolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011/2013: XrmToolBox (v1.2014.5.28): XrmToolbox improvement XrmToolBox updates (v1.2014.5.28)Fix connecting to a connection with custom authentication without saved password Tools improvement New tool!Solution Components Mover (v1.2014.5.22) Transfer solution components from one solution to another one Import/Export NN relationships (v1.2014.3.7) Allows you to import and export many to many relationships Tools updatesAttribute Bulk Updater (v1.2014.5.28) Audit Center (v1.2014.5.28) View Layout Replicator (v1.2014.5.28) Scrip...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 5.10: Fix for Issue #20875 - echo switch doesn't work for CSS CSS should honor the SASS source-file comments JS should allow multi-line comment directivesKartris E-commerce: Kartris v2.6002: Minor release: Double check that Logins_GetList sproc is present, sometimes seems to get missed earlier if upgrading which can give error when viewing logins page Added CSV and TXT export option; this is not Google Products compatible, but can give a good base for creating a file for some other systems such as Amazon Fixed some minor combination and options issues to improve interface back and front Turn bitcoin and some other gateways off by default Minor CSS changes Fixed currenc...New Projectsbrute force ip blocker: Utility which will search registry for invalid login attempts and blocked IPs which are attempting BRUTE Force attacksChristofides heuristic: This class can solve salesman travel problem using the Christofides heuristic.CLR Toolbox (Reloaded): "CLR Toolbox (Reloaded)" is a refactored version of "CLR Toolbox" (https://clrtoolbox.codeplex.com) that is written in C# and that targets on .NET and Mono.CPU Frequency Tuner: Calculate approximate frequency of AMD CPU.DAS (Data Access Service) Constructor: A simple data access layer code generator. Actual implementation only connect to a SQL Server.Fancontroller: The Fancontroller is a little tray program for the Fujitsu-Siemens Xa 3530 notebook computer. It has Auto,Fast, Cruise, Low noise speed options.Fractal generator: This class can generate Mandelbrot and Julia set fractal images.igolder curve: We're students from Duta Wacana Chritstian University who built a component for VB.Net. This component draw the points using a formula that We made by ourselvesMDriven Getting started - WPF: This is the suggested starting point if you want to start a new WPF MDriven project. See more at capableobjects.comMegacpu: Megacpu it's a small system tray tool to start and switch between custom profiles created with Turion Power control.Mercator projection: This class can render geograpic coordinates with the mercator projection.modify the .dex: ??DEX?????My Common Portable Library: Notify Property ChangedNearest Neighbor and Voronoi cluster: Find nearest neighbor of a set of points and cluster the points using a voronoi diagram and a dendogram.Otaku Perfection: This is the source code for the game show called Otaku Perfection.Simplified Application Framework: Simplified Application FrameworkSQLSetupHelper: SQL Setup helper for .net application standup-timer-modified: ???????Android????standup-timer??????????,????????????????(???????????)。???????jni??.so?????????dex(odex)??????。Top Verses ( Ayat Emas ): Top Verses Component for VB.NET 2012 or aboveVi-AIO SearchBar: Vi – AIO Search Bar is a project from subject Component Oriented Programming in IT Faculty of Duta Wacana Christian University Yogyakarta.VK9 - .Net Vkontakte API Implementation: VK9 is library that allows you to easily work with official VK (Vkontakte) API in your Microsoft .NET application. ??????V1.0: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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  • How Mature is Your Database Change Management Process?

    - by Ben Rees
    .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database Delivery Patterns & Practices Further Reading Organization and team processes How do you get your database schema changes live, on to your production system? As your team of developers and DBAs are working on the changes to the database to support your business-critical applications, how do these updates wend their way through from dev environments, possibly to QA, hopefully through pre-production and eventually to production in a controlled, reliable and repeatable way? In this article, I describe a model we use to try and understand the different stages that customers go through as their database change management processes mature, from the very basic and manual, through to advanced continuous delivery practices. I also provide a simple chart that will help you determine “How mature is our database change management process?” This process of managing changes to the database – which all of us who have worked in application/database development have had to deal with in one form or another – is sometimes known as Database Change Management (even if we’ve never used the term ourselves). And it’s a difficult process, often painfully so. Some developers take the approach of “I’ve no idea how my changes get live – I just write the stored procedures and add columns to the tables. It’s someone else’s problem to get this stuff live. I think we’ve got a DBA somewhere who deals with it – I don’t know, I’ve never met him/her”. I know I used to work that way. I worked that way because I assumed that making the updates to production was a trivial task – how hard can it be? Pause the application for half an hour in the middle of the night, copy over the changes to the app and the database, and switch it back on again? Voila! But somehow it never seemed that easy. And it certainly was never that easy for database changes. Why? Because you can’t just overwrite the old database with the new version. Databases have a state – more specifically 4Tb of critical data built up over the last 12 years of running your business, and if your quick hotfix happened to accidentally delete that 4Tb of data, then you’re “Looking for a new role” pretty quickly after the failed release. There are a lot of other reasons why a managed database change management process is important for organisations, besides job security, not least: Frequency of releases. Many business managers are feeling the pressure to get functionality out to their users sooner, quicker and more reliably. The new book (which I highly recommend) Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Barry O’Reilly and Joanne Molesky provides a great discussion on how many enterprises are having to move towards a leaner, more frequent release cycle to maintain their competitive advantage. It’s no longer acceptable to release once per year, leaving your customers waiting all year for changes they desperately need (and expect) Auditing and compliance. SOX, HIPAA and other compliance frameworks have demanded that companies implement proper processes for managing changes to their databases, whether managing schema changes, making sure that the data itself is being looked after correctly or other mechanisms that provide an audit trail of changes. We’ve found, at Red Gate that we have a very wide range of customers using every possible form of database change management imaginable. Everything from “Nothing – I just fix the schema on production from my laptop when things go wrong, and write it down in my notebook” to “A full Continuous Delivery process – any change made by a dev gets checked in and recorded, fully tested (including performance tests) before a (tested) release is made available to our Release Management system, ready for live deployment!”. And everything in between of course. Because of the vast number of customers using so many different approaches we found ourselves struggling to keep on top of what everyone was doing – struggling to identify patterns in customers’ behavior. This is useful for us, because we want to try and fit the products we have to different needs – different products are relevant to different customers and we waste everyone’s time (most notably, our customers’) if we’re suggesting products that aren’t appropriate for them. If someone visited a sports store, looking to embark on a new fitness program, and the store assistant suggested the latest $10,000 multi-gym, complete with multiple weights mechanisms, dumb-bells, pull-up bars and so on, then he’s likely to lose that customer. All he needed was a pair of running shoes! To solve this issue – in an attempt to simplify how we understand our customers and our offerings – we built a model. This is a an attempt at trying to classify our customers in to some sort of model or “Customer Maturity Framework” as we rather grandly term it, which somehow simplifies our understanding of what our customers are doing. The great statistician, George Box (amongst other things, the “Box” in the Box-Jenkins time series model) gave us the famous quote: “Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful” We’ve taken this quote to heart – we know it’s a gross over-simplification of the real world of how users work with complex legacy and new database developments. Almost nobody precisely fits in to one of our categories. But we hope it’s useful and interesting. There are actually a number of similar models that exist for more general application delivery. We’ve found these from ThoughtWorks/Forrester, from InfoQ and others, and initially we tried just taking these models and replacing the word “application” for “database”. However, we hit a problem. From talking to our customers we know that users are far less further down the road of mature database change management than they are for application development. As a simple example, no application developer, who wants to keep his/her job would develop an application for an organisation without source controlling that code. Sure, he/she might not be using an advanced Gitflow branching methodology but they’ll certainly be making sure their code gets managed in a repo somewhere with all the benefits of history, auditing and so on. But this certainly isn’t the case (yet) for the database – a very large segment of the people we speak to have no source control set up for their databases whatsoever, even at the most basic level (for example, keeping change scripts in a source control system somewhere). By the way, if this is you, Red Gate has a great whitepaper here, on the barriers people face getting a source control process implemented at their organisations. This difference in maturity is the same as you move in to areas such as continuous integration (common amongst app developers, relatively rare for database developers) and automated release management (growing amongst app developers, very rare for the database). So, when we created the model we started from scratch and biased the levels of maturity towards what we actually see amongst our customers. But, what are these stages? And what level are you? The table below describes our definitions for four levels of maturity – Baseline, Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. As I say, this is a model – you won’t fit any of these categories perfectly, but hopefully one will ring true more than others. We’ve also created a PDF with a flow chart to help you find which of these groups most closely matches your team:  Download the Database Delivery Maturity Framework PDF here   Level D1 – Baseline Work directly on live databases Sometimes work directly in production Generate manual scripts for releases. Sometimes use a product like SQL Compare or similar to do this Any tests that we might have are run manually Level D2 – Beginner Have some ad-hoc DB version control such as manually adding upgrade scripts to a version control system Attempt is made to keep production in sync with development environments There is some documentation and planning of manual deployments Some basic automated DB testing in process Level D3 – Intermediate The database is fully version-controlled with a product like Red Gate SQL Source Control or SSDT Database environments are managed Production environment schema is reproducible from the source control system There are some automated tests Have looked at using migration scripts for difficult database refactoring cases Level D4 – Advanced Using continuous integration for database changes Build, testing and deployment of DB changes carried out through a proper database release process Fully automated tests Production system is monitored for fast feedback to developers   Does this model reflect your team at all? Where are you on this journey? We’d be very interested in knowing how you get on. We’re doing a lot of work at the moment, at Red Gate, trying to help people progress through these stages. For example, if you’re currently not source controlling your database, then this is a natural next step. If you are already source controlling your database, what about the next stage – continuous integration and automated release management? To help understand these issues, there’s a summary of the Red Gate Database Delivery learning program on our site, alongside a Patterns and Practices library here on Simple-Talk and a Training Academy section on our documentation site to help you get up and running with the tools you need to progress. All feedback is welcome and it would be great to hear where you find yourself on this journey! This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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  • GNOME PPP doesn't connect

    - by Motorhead
    I am a new ubuntu user and connect to the internet using wi-fi broadband on my notebook. But I need to setup a dial-up connection through my phone which can keep me online while I travel. I have tried connecting to dial-up using pppconfig, wvdial and gnome-ppp. I do not know whether they use the same files for connecting but I have only been able to connect using Gnome-ppp. But the connection is intermittent and disconnects every five seconds or so. The exit code is 16 which I checked in man and got to know that the modem hangs itself up. I am connecting my phone to ubuntu as a usb modem. And as I am new I might have skipped a step or two. Please suggest a solution or an alternative to this. I have put down the Gnome-ppp log. Thanks. --> WvDial: Internet dialer version 1.61 --> Cannot get information for serial port. --> Initializing modem. --> Sending: ATZ ATZ OK --> Modem initialized. --> Sending: ATM1L3DT*99***1# --> Waiting for carrier. ATM1L3DT*99***1# CONNECT --> Carrier detected. Waiting for prompt. ~[7f]}#@!}!}$} }=}!}$}%\}"}&} } } } }#}%B#}%}%}&}*urW}'}"}(}"mX~ --> PPP negotiation detected. --> Starting pppd at Sat Apr 28 21:55:55 2012 --> Warning: Could not modify /etc/ppp/chap-secrets: Permission denied --> --> CHAP (Challenge Handshake) may be flaky. --> Pid of pppd: 2459 --> Using interface ppp0 --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> Disconnecting at Sat Apr 28 21:56:01 2012 --> The PPP daemon has died: A modem hung up the phone (exit code = 16) --> man pppd explains pppd error codes in more detail. --> Try again and look into /var/log/messages and the wvdial and pppd man pages for more information. --> Auto Reconnect will be attempted in 5 seconds --> Cannot get information for serial port. --> Initializing modem. --> Sending: ATZ ATZ OK --> Modem initialized. --> Cannot get information for serial port. --> Initializing modem. --> Sending: ATZ ATZ OK --> Modem initialized. --> Sending: ATM1L3DT*99***1# --> Waiting for carrier. ATM1L3DT*99***1# CONNECT --> Carrier detected. Waiting for prompt. ~[7f]}#@!}!Q} }=}!}$}%\}"}&} } } } }#}%B#}%}%}&}*u69}'}"}(}"#W~ --> PPP negotiation detected. --> Starting pppd at Sat Apr 28 21:56:07 2012 --> Warning: Could not modify /etc/ppp/chap-secrets: Permission denied --> --> CHAP (Challenge Handshake) may be flaky. --> Pid of pppd: 2470 --> Using interface ppp0 --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> Disconnecting at Sat Apr 28 21:56:09 2012 --> The PPP daemon has died: A modem hung up the phone (exit code = 16) --> man pppd explains pppd error codes in more detail. --> Try again and look into /var/log/messages and the wvdial and pppd man pages for more information. --> Auto Reconnect will be attempted in 10 seconds --> Cannot get information for serial port. --> Initializing modem. --> Sending: ATZ ATZ OK --> Modem initialized. --> Cannot get information for serial port. --> Initializing modem. --> Sending: ATZ ATZ OK --> Modem initialized. --> Sending: ATM1L3DT*99***1# --> Waiting for carrier. ATM1L3DT*99***1# CONNECT --> Carrier detected. Waiting for prompt. ~[7f]}#@!}!@} }=}!}$}%\}"}&} } } } }#}%B#}%}%}&}*uvM}'}"}(}"p}$~ --> PPP negotiation detected. --> Starting pppd at Sat Apr 28 21:56:20 2012 --> Warning: Could not modify /etc/ppp/chap-secrets: Permission denied --> --> CHAP (Challenge Handshake) may be flaky. --> Pid of pppd: 2481 --> Using interface ppp0 --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> Disconnecting at Sat Apr 28 21:56:25 2012 --> The PPP daemon has died: A modem hung up the phone (exit code = 16) --> man pppd explains pppd error codes in more detail. --> Try again and look into /var/log/messages and the wvdial and pppd man pages for more information. --> Auto Reconnect will be attempted in 20 seconds --> Cannot get information for serial port. --> Initializing modem. --> Sending: ATZ ATZ OK --> Modem initialized.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 24, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 24, 2012Popular Releasesmenu4web: menu4web 0.0.3: menu4web 0.0.3Craig's Utility Library: Craig's Utility Library 3.1: This update adds about 60 new extension methods, a couple of new classes, and a number of fixes including: Additions Added DateSpan class Added GenericDelimited class Random additions Added static thread friendly version of Random.Next called ThreadSafeNext. AOP Manager additions Added Destroy function to AOPManager (clears out all data so system can be recreated. Really only useful for testing...) ORM additions Added PagedCommand and PageCount functions to ObjectBaseClass (same as M...SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQLMon 4.2 alpha 14: 1. improved accuracy of logic fault checking in analysisMapWindow 6 Desktop GIS: MapWindow 6.1.1: MapWindow 6 Desktop GIS is an open source desktop GIS for Microsoft Windows that is built upon the DotSpatial Library. This release requires .Net 4 (Client Profile). Are you a software developer?Instead of downloading MapWindow for development purposes, get started with with the DotSpatial templateDotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.1: This is a Minor Release. See the changes in the issue tracker. Minimal -- includes DotSpatial core and essential extensions Extended -- includes debugging symbols and additional extensions Just want to run the software? End user (non-programmer) version available branded as MapWindow Want to add your own feature? Develop a plugin, using the template and contribute to the extension feed (you can also write extensions that you distribute in other ways). Components are available as NuGet pa...Indiefreaks Game Framework: 0.9.2.0: Feature: Added SunBurn engine v2.0.18.7 support (doesn't support versions below). Feature: Added GammaCorrection Post processor to allow developers or even players to tweak the Gamma of the game depending on their screen (courtesy of bamyazi) Feature: Added Windows, Xbox 360 & WP7 enabled StorageManager (based on Nick Gravelyn's EasyStorage) to read/write files for player or game data. Feature: Added VirtualGamePad feature for WP7 allowing developers to define Touch areas on screen and mapped...Code for Rapid C# Windows Development eBook + LINQPad and Data Tools: LLBLGen LINQPad Data Context Driver Version 2.1: Sixth release of a LLBLGen Pro Typed Data Context Driver for LINQPad. For LLBLGen Pro versions 3.1 and 3.5(coming). New features:When you switch the query language to SQL, LINQPad updates the Schema Explorer to show SQL column names rather than CLR property names Connection dialog unloads assemblies when it has closed down so they are no longer locked - this allows them to be rebuilt while LINQPad is still open Connection dialog includes a button to quickly add assemblies needed for the...People's Note: People's Note 0.40: Version 0.40 adds an option to compact the database from the profile screen. Compacting a database can make it smaller and faster by removing empty spaces left over by editing, moving, and deleting notes. To install: copy the appropriate CAB file onto your WM device and run it.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: C++, .NET Coding Guideline: Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Coding Guideline This document describes the coding style guideline for native C++ and .NET (C# and VB.NET) programming used by the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework project team.WebDAV for WHS: Version 1.0.67: - Added: Check whether the Remote Web Access is turned on or not; - Added: Check for Add-In updates;Image 3D Viewer: Image 3D Viewer: WPF .Net 3.5 .Net 4 .Net 4.5Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0 (March 2012) for .NET 4.0: March release of Phalanger 3.0 significantly enhances performance, adds new features and fixes many issues. See following for the list of main improvements: New features: Phalanger Tools installable for Visual Studio 2011 Beta "filter" extension with several most used filters implemented DomDocument HTML parser, loadHTML() method mail() PHP compatible function PHP 5.4 T_CALLABLE token PHP 5.4 "callable" type hint PCRE: UTF32 characters in range support configuration supports <c...Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.0: Version 8.0 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing new features: Internationalization Custom authentication provider Access control list for forums and threads Webdeploy package checksum: abc62990189cf0d488ef915d4a55e4b14169bc01 Visit Roadmap for more details.BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6: This beta release is the first to support SQL Server 2012 (in addition to SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2). Since it is marked as a beta release, we are looking for bug reports in the next few months as you use BIDS Helper on real projects. In addition to getting all existing BIDS Helper functionality working appropriately in SQL Server 2012 (SSDT), the following features are new... Analysis Services Tabular Smart Diff Tabular Actions Editor Tabular HideMemberIf Tabular Pre-Build ...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 1: New feature - Windows 8 Metro build New feature - JsonTextReader automatically reads ISO strings as dates New feature - Added DateFormatHandling to control whether dates are written in the MS format or ISO format, with ISO as the default New feature - Added DateTimeZoneHandling to control reading and writing DateTime time zone details New feature - Added async serialize/deserialize methods to JsonConvert New feature - Added Path to JsonReader/JsonWriter/ErrorContext and exceptions w...SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Fixed a bug when ping and cmd.exe kept running in endless loop after action progress was finished. Fixed update checking from Codeplex RSS feed. The tool is downloadable as a ZIP file that contains four files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA...WebSocket4Net: WebSocket4Net 0.5: Changes in this release fixed the wss's default port bug improved JsonWebSocket supported set client access policy protocol for silverlight fixed a handshake issue in Silverlight fixed a bug that "Host" field in handshake hadn't contained port if the port is not default supported passing in Origin parameter for handshaking supported reacting pings from server side fixed a bug in data sending fixed the bug sending a closing handshake with no message which would cause an excepti...SuperWebSocket, a .NET WebSocket Server: SuperWebSocket 0.5: Changes included in this release: supported closing handshake queue checking improved JSON subprotocol supported sending ping from server to client fixed a bug about sending a closing handshake with no message refactored the code to improve protocol compatibility fixed a bug about sub protocol configuration loading in Mono improved BasicSubProtocol added JsonWebSocketSessionSurvey™ - web survey & form engine: Survey™ 2.0: The new stable Survey™ Project 2.0.0.1 version contains many new features like: Technical changes: - Use of Jquery, ASTreeview, Tabs, Tooltips and new menuprovider Features & Bugfixes: Survey list and search function Folder structure for surveys New Menustructure Library list New Library fields User list and search functions Layout options for a survey with CSS, page header and footer New IP filter security feature Enhanced Token Management New Question fields as ID, Alias...Speed up Printer migration using PrintBrm and it's configuration files: BRMC.EXE: Run the tool from the extracted directory of the printbrm backup. You can use the following command to extract a backup file to a directory - PRINTBRM.EXE -R -D C:\TEMP\EXPAND -F C:\TEMP\PRINTERBACKUP.PRINTEREXPORTNew ProjectsAsp.NET Url Router: 1.Url rewritting. 2.Provider regex matcher 3.Support custom url validate handler.BC-Web: ch projectCape: Dynamically generates Capistrano recipes for Rake tasks.cstgamebgs: Project for wp7GCalculator: GCalculator for performing basic arithmetic operations. Windows Sidebar Gadget invacc: Invacc- for inventory and Account Onlineirgsh-node: Worker nodes of BlankOn Package Factory - http://irgsh.blankonlinux.or.id/irgsh-repo: Repository manager node of BlankOn Package Factory - http://irgsh.blankonlinux.or.id/irgsh-web: Web interface and task manager of BlankOn Package Factory - http://irgsh.blankonlinux.or.id/Kinect Explorer For SharePoint 2010: Kinect Explorer for SharePoint is a tool which provide Natural User Interface to browse through SharePoint sites. Use body gestures to browse, read, move, copy documents. Use Speech services to read-out the files.MCU: mcu devMVC3ShellCode: MVC3ShellCode MVC3ShellCode MVC3ShellCode MVC3ShellCode MVC3ShellCode MVC3ShellCode NetWatch: NetWatch - network watchdog Small application primary designed for network connectivity monitoring. You can configure set of network tests (ping, http, ...) and time plan for this tests. Application is running in windows notification area and notife you each problem. NMortgage: The goal of this project will be to give a prospective home buyer or an existing home owner the insight they need to explore effects of different repayment strategies or different mortgage structures. Nucleo.NET MVP: The Nucleo MVP framework provides a Model-View-Presenter approach that isn't obtrusive, can be utilized in multiple environments, and is versatile. Providing a lot of features you see in other frameworks, the Nucleo MVP framework provides many extensibility points, pretty much allowing you to rewrite most of the framework. It features dynamic injection support, presenter and view initializers (like what you see in ASP.NET MVC), model property injection, attribute- and convention-based vie...P2PShare: This project is to build a new and moden System for p2p file shearing supporting downloads from HTTP, HTTPS, FTP support for P2Pshare client list servers so files can point to a server or a host only file so no servers are used and only p2p is usedPipeLayer: proyecto de sistemas inteligentespython-irgsh: Python library for BlankOn Package Factory - http://irgsh.blankonlinux.or.id/RamGec XNA Controls - Window Elements Library for XNA Solutions: Lightweight, ultra-high performance and flexible library for displaying and managing Window Controls for XNA system. Features its own Window Designer for creating custom windows and controls.RPG Character Generators and Tools: Various tools for pen and paper style role playing games.Screen scraper: A program that can be used to download public domain MP3 and other media such as pdf documents.SharePoint Bdc request library: The given set of classes simplifies an access to the external data, which can be reached through BDC. The library allows to make simple requests for values from external data source, using a BDC Entity Instance Identifier(s) or a value of a certain BDC Entity field. Developed to interact with Business Data Connectivity of SharePoint 2010.testtom03232012git01: testtom03232012git01testtom03232012git02: testtom03232012git02the north star uc: University projectTyphon: Typhon is a role playing simulation management application, much like Nova, but written in MVC/C#.VRE LabTrove-SharePoint connector: The VRE LabTrove-SharePoint Connector provides a means of integrating the ability to view, post to, and edit posts stored in a LabTrove electronic laboratory notebook from within the familiar environment of Microsoft SharePoint. Once installed and configured, these Web Parts give SharePoint users a straightforward way to interact with any LabTrove installation that they wish to use. They also facilitate users to attach data that is stored in a SharePoint Document Library to the LabTrove posts...

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  • The Windows Store... why did I sign up with this mess again?

    - by FransBouma
    Yesterday, Microsoft revealed that the Windows Store is now open to all developers in a wide range of countries and locations. For the people who think "wtf is the 'Windows Store'?", it's the central place where Windows 8 users will be able to find, download and purchase applications (or as we now have to say to not look like a computer illiterate: <accent style="Kentucky">aaaaappss</accent>) for Windows 8. As this is the store which is integrated into Windows 8, it's an interesting place for ISVs, as potential customers might very well look there first. This of course isn't true for all kinds of software, and developer tools in general aren't the kind of applications most users will download from the Windows store, but a presence there can't hurt. Now, this Windows Store hosts two kinds of applications: 'Metro-style' applications and 'Desktop' applications. The 'Metro-style' applications are applications created for the new 'Metro' UI which is present on Windows 8 desktop and Windows RT (the single color/big font fingerpaint-oriented UI). 'Desktop' applications are the applications we all run and use on Windows today. Our software are desktop applications. The Windows Store hosts all Metro-style applications locally in the store and handles the payment for these applications. This means you upload your application (sorry, 'app') to the store, jump through a lot of hoops, Microsoft verifies that your application is not violating a tremendous long list of rules and after everything is OK, it's published and hopefully you get customers and thus earn money. Money which Microsoft will pay you on a regular basis after customers buy your application. Desktop applications are not following this path however. Desktop applications aren't hosted by the Windows Store. Instead, the Windows Store more or less hosts a page with the application's information and where to get the goods. I.o.w.: it's nothing more than a product's Facebook page. Microsoft will simply redirect a visitor of the Windows Store to your website and the visitor will then use your site's system to purchase and download the application. This last bit of information is very important. So, this morning I started with fresh energy to register our company 'Solutions Design bv' at the Windows Store and our two applications, LLBLGen Pro and ORM Profiler. First I went to the Windows Store dashboard page. If you don't have an account, you have to log in or sign up if you don't have a live account. I signed in with my live account. After that, it greeted me with a page where I had to fill in a code which was mailed to me. My local mail server polls every several minutes for email so I had to kick it to get it immediately. I grabbed the code from the email and I was presented with a multi-step process to register myself as a company or as an individual. In red I was warned that this choice was permanent and not changeable. I chuckled: Microsoft apparently stores its data on paper, not in digital form. I chose 'company' and was presented with a lengthy form to fill out. On the form there were two strange remarks: Per company there can just be 1 (one, uno, not zero, not two or more) registered developer, and only that developer is able to upload stuff to the store. I have no idea how this works with large companies, oh the overhead nightmares... "Sorry, but John, our registered developer with the Windows Store is on holiday for 3 months, backpacking through Australia, no, he's not reachable at this point. M'yeah, sorry bud. Hey, did you fill in those TPS reports yesterday?" A separate Approver has to be specified, which has to be a different person than the registered developer. Apparently to Microsoft a company with just 1 person is not a company. Luckily we're with two people! *pfew*, dodged that one, otherwise I would be stuck forever: the choice I already made was not reversible! After I had filled out the form and it was all well and good and accepted by the Microsoft lackey who had to write it all down in some paper notebook ("Hey, be warned! It's a permanent choice! Written down in ink, can't be changed!"), I was presented with the question how I wanted to pay for all this. "Pay for what?" I wondered. Must be the paper they were scribbling the information on, I concluded. After all, there's a financial crisis going on! How could I forget! Silly me. "Ok fair enough". The price was 75 Euros, not the end of the world. I could only pay by credit card, so it was accepted quickly. Or so I thought. You see, Microsoft has a different idea about CC payments. In the normal world, you type in your CC number, some date, a name and a security code and that's it. But Microsoft wants to verify this even more. They want to make a verification purchase of a very small amount and are doing that with a special code in the description. You then have to type in that code in a special form in the Windows Store dashboard and after that you're verified. Of course they'll refund the small amount they pull from your card. Sounds simple, right? Well... no. The problem starts with the fact that I can't see the CC activity on some website: I have a bank issued CC card. I get the CC activity once a month on a piece of paper sent to me. The bank's online website doesn't show them. So it's possible I have to wait for this code till October 12th. One month. "So what, I'm not going to use it anyway, Desktop applications don't use the payment system", I thought. "Haha, you're so naive, dear developer!" Microsoft won't allow you to publish any applications till this verification is done. So no application publishing for a month. Wouldn't it be nice if things were, you know, digital, so things got done instantly? But of course, that lackey who scribbled everything in the Big Windows Store Registration Book isn't that quick. Can't blame him though. He's just doing his job. Now, after the payment was done, I was presented with a page which tells me Microsoft is going to use a third party company called 'Symantec', which will verify my identity again. The page explains to me that this could be done through email or phone and that they'll contact the Approver to verify my identity. "Phone?", I thought... that's a little drastic for a developer account to publish a single page of information about an external hosted software product, isn't it? On Facebook I just added a page, done. And paying you, Microsoft, took less information: you were happy to take my money before my identity was even 'verified' by this 3rd party's minions! "Double standards!", I roared. No-one cared. But it's the thought of getting it off your chest, you know. Luckily for me, everyone at Symantec was asleep when I was registering so they went for the fallback option in case phone calls were not possible: my Approver received an email. Imagine you have to explain the idiot web of security theater I was caught in to someone else who then has to reply a random person over the internet that I indeed was who I said I was. As she's a true sweetheart, she gave me the benefit of the doubt and assured that for now, I was who I said I was. Remember, this is for a desktop application, which is only a link to a website, some pictures and a piece of text. No file hosting, no payment processing, nothing, just a single page. Yeah, I also thought I was crazy. But we're not at the end of this quest yet. I clicked around in the confusing menus of the Windows Store dashboard and found the 'Desktop' section. I get a helpful screen with a warning in red that it can't find any certified 'apps'. True, I'm just getting started, buddy. I see a link: "Check the Windows apps you submitted for certification". Well, I haven't submitted anything, but let's see where it brings me. Oh the thrill of adventure! I click the link and I end up on this site: the hardware/desktop dashboard account registration. "Erm... but I just registered...", I mumbled to no-one in particular. Apparently for desktop registration / verification I have to register again, it tells me. But not only that, the desktop application has to be signed with a certificate. And not just some random el-cheapo certificate you can get at any mall's discount store. No, this certificate is special. It's precious. This certificate, the 'Microsoft Authenticode' Digital Certificate, is the only certificate that's acceptable, and jolly, it can be purchased from VeriSign for the price of only ... $99.-, but be quick, because this is a limited time offer! After that it's, I kid you not, $499.-. 500 dollars for a certificate to sign an executable. But, I do feel special, I got a special price. Only for me! I'm glowing. Not for long though. Here I started to wonder, what the benefit of it all was. I now again had to pay money for a shiny certificate which will add 'Solutions Design bv' to our installer as the publisher instead of 'unknown', while our customers download the file from our website. Not only that, but this was all about a Desktop application, which wasn't hosted by Microsoft. They only link to it. And make no mistake. These prices aren't single payments. Every year these have to be renewed. Like a membership of an exclusive club: you're special and privileged, but only if you cough up the dough. To give you an example how silly this all is: I added LLBLGen Pro and ORM Profiler to the Visual Studio Gallery some time ago. It's the same thing: it's a central place where one can find software which adds to / extends / works with Visual Studio. I could simply create the pages, add the information and they show up inside Visual Studio. No files are hosted at Microsoft, they're downloaded from our website. Exactly the same system. As I have to wait for the CC transcripts to arrive anyway, I can't proceed with publishing in this new shiny store. After the verification is complete I have to wait for verification of my software by Microsoft. Even Desktop applications need to be verified using a long list of rules which are mainly focused on Metro-style applications. Even while they're not hosted by Microsoft. I wonder what they'll find. "Your application wasn't approved. It violates rule 14 X sub D: it provides more value than our own competing framework". While I was writing this post, I tried to check something in the Windows Store Dashboard, to see whether I remembered it correctly. I was presented again with the question, after logging in with my live account, to enter the code that was just mailed to me. Not the previous code, a brand new one. Again I had to kick my mail server to pull the email to proceed. This was it. This 'experience' is so beyond miserable, I'm afraid I have to say goodbye for now to the 'Windows Store'. It's simply not worth my time. Now, about live accounts. You might know this: live accounts are tied to everything you do with Microsoft. So if you have an MSDN subscription, e.g. the one which costs over $5000.-, it's tied to this same live account. But the fun thing is, you can login with your live account to the MSDN subscriptions with just the account id and password. No additional code is mailed to you. While it gives you access to all Microsoft software available, including your licenses. Why the draconian security theater with this Windows Store, while all I want is to publish some desktop applications while on other Microsoft sites it's OK to simply sign in with your live account: no codes needed, no verification and no certificates? Microsoft, one thing you need with this store and that's: apps. Apps, apps, apps, apps, aaaaaaaaapps. Sorry, my bad, got carried away. I just can't stand the word 'app'. This store's shelves have to be filled to the brim with goods. But instead of being welcomed into the store with open arms, I have to fight an uphill battle with an endless list of rules and bullshit to earn the privilege to publish in this shiny store. As if I have to be thrilled to be one of the exclusive club called 'Windows Store Publishers'. As if Microsoft doesn't want it to succeed. Craig Stuntz sent me a link to an old blog post of his regarding code signing and uploading to Microsoft's old mobile store from back in the WinMo5 days: http://blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz/2006/10/11/28357/. Good read and good background info about how little things changed over the years. I hope this helps Microsoft make things more clearer and smoother and also helps ISVs with their decision whether to go with the Windows Store scheme or ignore it. For now, I don't see the advantage of publishing there, especially not with the nonsense rules Microsoft cooked up. Perhaps it changes in the future, who knows.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 09, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 09, 2011Popular ReleasesWatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.09.03: Whats NewAdded New Skin TagTastic http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/TagCloud-TagTastic-Skin.jpg Added New Skin RoundedButton http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/TagCloud-RoundedButton-Skin.jpg changes Tag Count fixed on Tag Source Referrals Fixed Tag Count when multiple Tag Sources are usedFolder Space Quota: com_folderspacequotaV1.1: Correct Language String settingWinXound: WinXound 3.4.x (Windows - OsX - Linux): Release Notes (3.4.x) for all platforms: New: Added an internal audio player (it is automatically called when rendering to an audio file or called by the user with Ctrl+P); New: Reimplemented the orc/sco file editor (and of course also the ability to convert them to the csd format) - The default open action can be changed in the settings; New: The new untitled or imported files are now automatically saved into a temporary directory (no more need to save them before to compile); New: Add...ExtremeML: ExtremeML v1.0 Beta 3: VS solution source code updated for compatibility with VS2010 (accommodates VS2010 breaking changes in T4 template support).People's Note: People's Note 0.23: Sorry for the long pause between updates — I had my hands full. Version 0.23 makes fairly significant improvements: A bug with local note deletion has been fixed. Synchronization has been improved. A single failed note no longer stops the whole process. Unsynchronized notes are now highlighted. Added an option to display notebook title; thanks to Vovansky for the idea. Text colour has been fixed for people whose default is not black; thanks to JZerr for pointing this out. Incorrect ...Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.1: This release adds a few more performance and graphical enhancements to 1.0. Switching desktops is now about as fast as you can blink. Desktop switching optimizations New welcome wizard for Vista/7 Fixed a few minor bugs Added a few more options to the options dialog (including ability to disable the taskbar switching)youtubeFisher: youtubeFisher 3.0 [beta]: What's new: Supports YouTube's new layout Complete internal refactoringNearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v5.0: Version 5.0 of the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing the following improvements: .NET 4.0 as target framework using ASP.NET MVC 3. All views migrated to Razor for cleaner markup. Alternate template (Layout file) for mobile devices 4 Bug Fixes since Version 4.1 Visit the project Roadmap for more details.fuv: 1.0 release, codename Chopper Joe: features: search/replace :o to open file :s to save file :q to quitASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager html generation optimized new features for the lookup (add additional search data ) live demo went aeroEnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.6 BETA: 2.3.6 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 Changes since 2.3.0 ...TestApi - a library of Test APIs: TestApi v0.6: TestApi v0.6 comes with the following changes: TestApi code development has been moved to Codeplex: Moved TestApi soluton to VS 2010; Moved all source code to Codeplex. All development work is done there now. Fault Injection API: Integrated the unmanaged FaultInjectionEngine.dll COM component in the build; Cleaned up FaultInjectionEngine.dll to build at warning level 4; Implemented “FaultScope” which allows for in-process fault injection; Added automation scripts & sample program; ...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.5: AutoChat now allows up to 6 items. Items with nr. 7-0 will be removed! News page url's are now opened in the default browser Added a context menu to the system tray icon (thanks to Alex Banagos) AutoChat now allows configuring the Chat Keys and the Modifier Key The recent files list now supports compact and full mode Fix: Swapped mouse buttons are now properly detected Fix: Sometimes the Play button was pressed while still greyed out Champion: Karma Note: You can also run the u...mojoPortal: 2.3.6.2: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2362-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Rawr: Rawr 4.0.19 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...IronRuby: 1.1.2: IronRuby 1.1.2 is a servicing release that keeps on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9.2 and includes IronRuby integration to Visual Studio 2010. We decided to drop 1.8.6 compatibility mode in all post-1.0 releases. We recommend using IronRuby 1.0 if you need 1.8.6 compatibility. In this release we fixed several major issues: - problems that blocked Gem installation in certain cases - regex syntax: the parser was replaced with a new one that is much more compatible with Ruby 1.9.2 - cras...MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (4): There was a small issue with the previous release that caused errors when installing the templates in VS10 Express. This release corrects the error. Only use this if you encountered issues when installing the previous release. No changes in the binaries.Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.2 (BETA): PLEASE TAKE A FEW MINUTES TO GIVE US SOME FEEDBACK: Facebook C# SDK Survey This is third BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. This release contains some breaking changes. Particularly with authentication. After spending time reviewing the trouble areas that people are having using th...ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider: MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 for MVC3: Using NuGet?MvcSiteMapProvider is also listed in the NuGet feed. Learn more... Like the project? Consider a donation!Donate via PayPal via PayPal. ChangelogTargeting ASP.NET MVC 3 and .NET 4.0 Additional UpdatePriority options for generating XML sitemaps Allow to specify target on SiteMapTitleAttribute One action with multiple routes and breadcrumbs Medium Trust optimizations Create SiteMapTitleAttribute for setting parent title IntelliSense for your sitemap with MvcSiteMapSchem...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab consists of six labs: one for logging, one for service location, and four for application setting manager. Each lab takes about 20 minutes to walk through. Each lab consists of a PDF document. You can go through the steps in the doc to create solution and then build/deploy the solution and run the lab. For those of you who wants to save the time, we included the final solution so you can just build/deploy the solution and run the lab.New Projects.NET Proxy (netProxy): ASP.NET and Javascript proxies for accessing external content. The ASPX file can be used for returning external content over the current channel (HTTP/SSL). Used with the ASPX, the JS file can provide remote server access (no "same origin policy") with XMLHttpRequest syntax.CalCheck: CalCheck is a Calendar Checking Tool for Outlook. It opens the default Calendar and checks the items in the calendar for known problems, and for certain logic problems, etc.CBM11: CBM11 makes use of the Cosmos C# operating system project, and 6502 CPU emulation code, to provide an bootable 6502 CPU environment, complete with simulated RAM, and a built-in ML monitor.Ela, functional language: Ela is a modern functional programming language that runs on CLR and Mono. It's developed in C#.Framework for Image Processing: This is small framework of image processing tools.fuv: fuv is a programmer's editor that is an excellent replacement for vim. *All* editing is done by searching and replacing over the existing text, using regular expressions.HD44780-compatible Character LCD class: LCD class for .NET Micro Framework provides everything needed to work with HD44780-compatible Character LCD.Home Budget Planner: Home Budget PlannerMath training program: The math training program. Great for kids who started to learn addition and multiplication tables. Easy interface, friendly design. Features timer. Number of equations and a math sign are set up by user. It's developed in C#.Mefisto.NET CMS: Mefisto.NET CMS is a project of CMS, developped in ASP.NET MVC3, coupled with MEF and ENTITY FRAMEWORK. This project is respectful of good practice: - accessible - based on jquery - using css - expandable with mef Now you're interested, contact me !MongoMapper: A .NET Object Mapper for MongoDB over MongoDB C# DriverMoshpit: A companion WP7 app for Microsoft Student Partners and students interested in everything Microsoft has to offer in the Academic space.myproject_0023: test firstNonHealthServicePageSample: NonHealthServicePageSample shows how to create a HealthVault Online application without deriving from HealthServicePage. This is developed in C#.Pokemon Battle System: A battle system for a roleplaying forums. Putting Data in Cold Storage with Windows Azure Table: Historical records and blobs are two examples of data that aren't necessarily kept in relational storage forever. Use Windows Azure Table to put "completed" records into cold storage. See a detailed explanation of this C# project at: http://tinyurl.com/4ocy2aj.Python library to read/write ooxml document files: Python library to read/write ooxml document filesRemoteLogMonitor: A tool which can monitor logs in remote computer realtimeRetete: Aplicatia gestioneaza stocul unui restaurant pe baza de retete. Materia prima este introdusa in sistem prin receptii si inventar, iar la vanzare este consumata in functie de retetele configurate. Vanzarile pot fi inregistrate pe o casa de marcat folosind driver-ul DocPrint. SilverDiagram Extensions: Tutorials, utilities and samples for Silver Diagram, a fast and extendable client framework for diagrams.SoPrism: SoPrism is a Solution Visual Studio Template using best practices to build a Silverlight composite application. This template generate a full Silverlight application based on a solid architecture including the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern and PRISM framework.TempProject: Temp project hostingWCF Data Services Toolkit: The WCF Data Services Toolkit is a set of extensions to WCF Data Services (the .NET implementation of OData) that attempt to make it easier to create OData services on top of arbitrary data stores without having deep knowledge of LINQ.Web Browser BOT.NET: To automate to manipulate form using .NET codeZombie Blogger: Zombie Blog Engine

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 23, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 23, 2012Popular ReleasesSSIS Multiple Hash: Multiple Hash V1.4.1: This is a feature release. It adds the ability to select multiple rows, and change the selection of these with a single click in the check box. All lists with check boxes have this ability. It is backwards compatible with previous versions. Please ensure that you select the appropriate download file based on the version of SQL Server that you will be using. If you have used the Denali installer from V1.4 for packages that you wish to now use the SQL 2012 release version, then you MUST ma...SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQLMon 4.2 alpha 14: 1. improved accuracy of logic fault checking in analysisMetodología General Ajustada - MGA: 02.02.02: Cambios John: Cambios en los cálculos del Flujo de Caja, Flujo Económico y Resumen EF y ES. Se visualiza el reporte de Resumen EF y ES en Grilla. Se ajustan formularios de llamado. Cambios Parmenio: Cambios en el formularios de Programaciòn.MapWindow 6 Desktop GIS: MapWindow 6.1.1: MapWindow 6 Desktop GIS is an open source desktop GIS for Microsoft Windows that is built upon the DotSpatial Library. This release requires .Net 4 (Client Profile). Are you a software developer?Instead of downloading MapWindow for development purposes, get started with with the DotSpatial templateDotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.1: This is a Minor Release. See the changes in the issue tracker. Minimal -- includes DotSpatial core and essential extensions Extended -- includes debugging symbols and additional extensions Just want to run the software? End user (non-programmer) version available branded as MapWindow Want to add your own feature? Develop a plugin, using the template and contribute to the extension feed (you can also write extensions that you distribute in other ways). Components are available as NuGet pa...Telerik CAB Enabling Kit for RadControls for WinForms: TCEK 2012.1.321.20: major update, new Workspaces and UIAdapters Workspaces: - RadDockWorkspace - RadPageViewWorkspace - RadFormWorkspace - RadFormMdiWorkspace - RadTabbedMdiWorkspace UI Adapters: - RadCommandBarUIAdapter - RadRibbonBarUIAdapter - RadTreeNodeUiAdapter - RadTreeViewUIAdapter - RadItemCollectionUIAdapter - (RadMenu, RadStatusStrip, all controls that support RadItem collections)Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: C++, .NET Coding Guideline: Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Coding Guideline This document describes the coding style guideline for native C++ and .NET (C# and VB.NET) programming used by the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework project team.WebDAV for WHS: Version 1.0.67: - Added: Check whether the Remote Web Access is turned on or not; - Added: Check for Add-In updates;Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0 (March 2012) for .NET 4.0: March release of Phalanger 3.0 significantly enhances performance, adds new features and fixes many issues. See following for the list of main improvements: New features: Phalanger Tools installable for Visual Studio 2011 Beta "filter" extension with several most used filters implemented DomDocument HTML parser, loadHTML() method mail() PHP compatible function PHP 5.4 T_CALLABLE token PHP 5.4 "callable" type hint PCRE: UTF32 characters in range support configuration supports <c...Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.0: Version 8.0 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing new features: Internationalization Custom authentication provider Access control list for forums and threads Webdeploy package checksum: abc62990189cf0d488ef915d4a55e4b14169bc01 Visit Roadmap for more details.BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6: This beta release is the first to support SQL Server 2012 (in addition to SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2). Since it is marked as a beta release, we are looking for bug reports in the next few months as you use BIDS Helper on real projects. In addition to getting all existing BIDS Helper functionality working appropriately in SQL Server 2012 (SSDT), the following features are new... Analysis Services Tabular Smart Diff Tabular Actions Editor Tabular HideMemberIf Tabular Pre-Build ...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 1: New feature - Windows 8 Metro build New feature - JsonTextReader automatically reads ISO strings as dates New feature - Added DateFormatHandling to control whether dates are written in the MS format or ISO format, with ISO as the default New feature - Added DateTimeZoneHandling to control reading and writing DateTime time zone details New feature - Added async serialize/deserialize methods to JsonConvert New feature - Added Path to JsonReader/JsonWriter/ErrorContext and exceptions w...SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Fixed a bug when ping and cmd.exe kept running in endless loop after action progress was finished. Fixed update checking from Codeplex RSS feed. The tool is downloadable as a ZIP file that contains four files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA...WebSocket4Net: WebSocket4Net 0.5: Changes in this release fixed the wss's default port bug improved JsonWebSocket supported set client access policy protocol for silverlight fixed a handshake issue in Silverlight fixed a bug that "Host" field in handshake hadn't contained port if the port is not default supported passing in Origin parameter for handshaking supported reacting pings from server side fixed a bug in data sending fixed the bug sending a closing handshake with no message which would cause an excepti...SuperWebSocket, a .NET WebSocket Server: SuperWebSocket 0.5: Changes included in this release: supported closing handshake queue checking improved JSON subprotocol supported sending ping from server to client fixed a bug about sending a closing handshake with no message refactored the code to improve protocol compatibility fixed a bug about sub protocol configuration loading in Mono improved BasicSubProtocol added JsonWebSocketSessionSurvey™ - web survey & form engine: Survey™ 2.0: The new stable Survey™ Project 2.0.0.1 version contains many new features like: Technical changes: - Use of Jquery, ASTreeview, Tabs, Tooltips and new menuprovider Features & Bugfixes: Survey list and search function Folder structure for surveys New Menustructure Library list New Library fields User list and search functions Layout options for a survey with CSS, page header and footer New IP filter security feature Enhanced Token Management New Question fields as ID, Alias...Speed up Printer migration using PrintBrm and it's configuration files: BRMC.EXE: Run the tool from the extracted directory of the printbrm backup. You can use the following command to extract a backup file to a directory - PRINTBRM.EXE -R -D C:\TEMP\EXPAND -F C:\TEMP\PRINTERBACKUP.PRINTEREXPORTAppBarUtils for Windows Phone SDK 7.1: AppBarUtils 1.2: This release contains IconUri dependency property for both AppBarItemCommand and AppBarItemTrigger as requested by shawnoster at http://appbarutils.codeplex.com/discussions/321745. When using this IconUri dependency property, please be sure to set the Type property to AppBarItemType.Button or just omit this property entirely, because it is only for app bar icon button. The demo has been updated to show how to use this new IconUri dependency property with a new lock button on the app bar. Wh...Offline Navigation for Windows Phone 7: 0.1 Alpha: This is the 0.1 alpha release of source code.SmartNet: V1.0.0.0: DY SmartNet ?????? V1.0New Projects2Sexy Content for DotNetNuke - great looking and animated content: 2Sexy Content is a DotNetNuke Extension to create attractive and designed content. It solves the common problem, allowing the web designer to create designed templates for different content elements, so that the user must only fill in fields and receive a perfectly designed and animated output. AgileMapper: AgileMapper????????????????????,?????????dto?do???????AksiMata: Berita terbaru dan peristiwa terkini di sekitar Anda... Langsung dari TKP!Caprice: Engineering adaptive privacy: Caprice is a tool aimed at supporting software engineers in the design of applications that appropriately adapt their behaviour to mitigate privacy threats. This tool helps provide software engineers design-time insight on the functional behaviour a system and associated runtime context changes that can threaten privacy.Change default Share-site group SharePoint Online (Office 365): As default when we share a site collection or site with external users, SharePoint Online show default SharePoint groups which are Visitors and Members. By using this feature, you will get a link which you can use to customize the default groups to your custom groups and other default groups. CodePlex Test Project: This is just to test how well CodePlex handles Git.Find Work Items For Source Items (Visual Studio Extension): work4source is a Visual Studio 2010 tool window which finds and lists all TFS work items associated with a specific source control file or folder, avoiding the need to view the details for every changeset. It also includes "versioned item" links which otherwise cannot be found from the source side of the link using Visual Studio. To install run the VSIX package, restart Visual Studio, then select View --> Other Windows --> "Find Work Items for Source Items" and either leave the window ...FSProject: FSProjectGit c9 Test: testing git to c9 integration possibilitiesImage 3D Viewer: A Image 3D Viewer with WPF.Jakarta Guide: Jakarta news featuring up-to-date information on attractions, hotels, restaurants, nightlife, travel tips and more.LinqLucene: Due to the fact to the original LinqToLucene project seems to have died, I have created this new project to carry on it's workLuskyCode: Just some codemaouidatest: testMarktplace: NLocalize MarketplaceMemoryLifter: MemoryLifter - the fastest way to memorize * is a virtual flashcard system, scientifically based on the Leitner card box algorithm * enables the user to lift any kind of information into long term memory * maximizes study efficiency with automation, controlled repetitionMemoryTributary - A replacement for MemoryStream: MemoryTributary is a replacement for MemoryStream that uses multiple memory chunks as its backing store, as opposed to the single byte array used by MemoryStream. The result is it can handle much larger streams and the initial allocations are more efficient. It's developed in C#.my career muse: Project configured for simultaneous use with other developersMyMusicBox: Mini-Projet MBDS Web 2.0 Michel BuffaNucleo.NET ORM: These components provide a unit of work interface that works with LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, and Entity Framework Code First, with more ORMs to come. The idea is to create one common wrapper and base framework to make it easier to work with the various ORM products.Orchard QnA: A lightweight discussions module for the Orchard CMS.Orchard Shoutbox: A lightweight shoutbox module for the Orchard CMS:PAIN: My projects from PAIN labs, semester 2012L, department of electronics of Warsaw University of Technology.Reactifier: This project is for the windows 8 Shoutcast MediaStreamSource: Shoutcast MediaStreamSource is a MediaStreamSource implementation of the Shoutcast protocol for Silverlight. This MediaStreamSource allows both Silverlight 4+ OOB and Windows Phone 7 applications to consume a Shoutcast stream using a MediaElement. Currently, Mp3 and AAC+ Shoutcast streams are supported on Windows Phone. However, ONLY Mp3 is supported on Desktop Silverlight. There is also limited (i.e. somewhat untested) M3u and PLS playlist support. Please report any issues playing...Simple Task Manager: Politechnika Wroclawska Team Project - 2012SkyGo Media Commander: SkyGo Media Commander permette di usare le frecce della tastiera per cambiare canale e il tasto invio per aprire il menu : "Telecomando". Utile se si usa un telecomando. Perfettamente funzionante con il telecomando CIR del notebook HP DV6 2137el.sunshine Design: sunshinetesting: testing projecttesttom032012git01: testtom032012git01testtom03222012hg01: testtom03222012hg01testtom03222012tfs01: testtom03222012tfs01testtom03222012tfs02: testtom03222012tfs02TileSet Map Editor: a small side project of a tileset map editorTraffic Light Simulation Application: Traffic Light Simulation application simulates traffic on a 2D plane under different traffic light control schemes. The interface will display a 10x10 grid where each street allows one-way traffic and there is one traffic light at each intersection.Type08ScreenCapture: Type08ScreenCapture brings Windows 8-like desktop capture function to Windows 7. If you type [Windows]+[PrintScreen], it capture a main display area and save the bitmap to your picture folder. It's developed in C#/WPF.WikiPlex – a Regex Wiki Engine: A regular expression based wiki engine allowing developers to integrate a wiki experience into an existing .NET applicationWindowsQR: Windows QR is a proof of concept about capturing a qr code using a webcam in a WPF application runinng in a desktop computer with Windows 7 or similars. It uses AForge.Vision to wrap the DirectShow complexity and zxing library to decode the qr code.Working with Social Data: 1)Customizing Tag Cloud By Accountname 2)RatingWPF 3D-Model Viewer: WPF 3D-Model Viewer

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  • How to diagnose failing 6Gbps SATA connection?

    - by whitequark
    I have a Samsung RC530 notebook and OCZ Vertex-3 6Gbps SATA SSD working in AHCI mode. # dmesg | grep DMI SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD. RC530/RC730/RC530/RC730, BIOS 03WD.M008.20110927.PSA 09/27/2011 # lspci -nn 00:1f.2 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port SATA AHCI Controller [8086:1c03] (rev 04) # sdparm -a /dev/sda /dev/sda: ATA OCZ-VERTEX3 2.15 At the boot, the following messages are present in dmesg (I am running Debian wheezy @ Linux 3.2.8): # dmesg | grep -iE '(ata|ahci)' [ 5.179783] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: version 3.0 [ 5.179802] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: PCI INT B -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 [ 5.179864] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: irq 42 for MSI/MSI-X [ 5.195424] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: AHCI 0001.0300 32 slots 6 ports 6 Gbps 0x5 impl SATA mode [ 5.195429] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: flags: 64bit ncq sntf pm led clo pio slum part ems apst [ 5.195436] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: setting latency timer to 64 [ 5.204035] scsi0 : ahci [ 5.204301] scsi1 : ahci [ 5.204447] scsi2 : ahci [ 5.204592] scsi3 : ahci [ 5.204682] scsi4 : ahci [ 5.204799] scsi5 : ahci [ 5.204917] ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xf7c06000 port 0xf7c06100 irq 42 [ 5.204920] ata2: DUMMY [ 5.204923] ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xf7c06000 port 0xf7c06200 irq 42 [ 5.204924] ata4: DUMMY [ 5.204926] ata5: DUMMY [ 5.204927] ata6: DUMMY [ 5.523039] ata3: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) [ 5.525911] ata3.00: ATAPI: TSSTcorp CDDVDW SN-208BB, SC00, max UDMA/100 [ 5.531006] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300) [ 5.533703] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/100 [ 5.542790] ata1.00: ATA-8: OCZ-VERTEX3, 2.15, max UDMA/133 [ 5.542800] ata1.00: 117231408 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32), AA [ 5.552751] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 [ 5.553050] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA OCZ-VERTEX3 2.15 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 [ 5.559621] scsi 2:0:0:0: CD-ROM TSSTcorp CDDVDW SN-208BB SC00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 [ 5.564059] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 117231408 512-byte logical blocks: (60.0 GB/55.8 GiB) [ 5.564127] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off [ 5.564131] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 [ 5.564158] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA [ 5.564582] sda: sda1 [ 5.564810] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk [ 5.572006] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 16x/24x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray [ 5.572010] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20 [ 5.572189] sr 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0 [ 6.717181] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x50 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x280900 action 0x6 frozen [ 6.717238] ata1.00: irq_stat 0x08000000, interface fatal error [ 6.717291] ata1: SError: { UnrecovData HostInt 10B8B BadCRC } [ 6.717342] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 6.717395] ata1.00: cmd 60/50:00:20:39:58/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 40960 in [ 6.717396] res 40/00:00:20:39:58/00:00:00:00:00/40 Emask 0x50 (ATA bus error) [ 6.717503] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 6.717553] ata1: hard resetting link [ 7.033417] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300) [ 7.055234] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 [ 7.055262] ata1: EH complete [ 7.147280] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0xf8 SErr 0x280100 action 0x6 frozen [ 7.147340] ata1.00: irq_stat 0x08000000, interface fatal error [ 7.147393] ata1: SError: { UnrecovData 10B8B BadCRC } [ 7.147460] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 7.147529] ata1.00: cmd 60/08:18:88:17:41/00:00:02:00:00/40 tag 3 ncq 4096 in [ 7.147531] res 40/00:38:50:99:64/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) [ 7.147691] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 7.147754] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 7.147821] ata1.00: cmd 60/00:20:f8:42:4c/01:00:02:00:00/40 tag 4 ncq 131072 in [ 7.147822] res 40/00:38:50:99:64/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) [ 7.147977] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 7.148036] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 7.148100] ata1.00: cmd 60/50:28:f8:43:4c/00:00:02:00:00/40 tag 5 ncq 40960 in [ 7.148101] res 40/00:38:50:99:64/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) [ 7.148255] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 7.148315] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 7.148379] ata1.00: cmd 60/00:30:50:98:64/01:00:02:00:00/40 tag 6 ncq 131072 in [ 7.148380] res 40/00:38:50:99:64/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) [ 7.148534] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 7.148593] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 7.148657] ata1.00: cmd 60/00:38:50:99:64/01:00:02:00:00/40 tag 7 ncq 131072 in [ 7.148658] res 40/00:38:50:99:64/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) [ 7.148813] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 7.148875] ata1: hard resetting link [ 7.464842] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300) [ 7.486794] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 [ 7.486822] ata1: EH complete [ 7.546395] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x2f SErr 0x280100 action 0x6 frozen [ 7.546470] ata1.00: irq_stat 0x08000000, interface fatal error [ 7.546531] ata1: SError: { UnrecovData 10B8B BadCRC } [ 7.546588] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 7.546648] ata1.00: cmd 60/00:00:e0:4b:61/01:00:02:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 131072 in [ 7.546649] res 40/00:28:e0:4c:61/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) [ 7.546794] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 7.546847] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 7.546906] ata1.00: cmd 60/00:08:90:2f:48/01:00:02:00:00/40 tag 1 ncq 131072 in [ 7.546907] res 40/00:28:e0:4c:61/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) [ 7.547053] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 7.547106] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 7.547165] ata1.00: cmd 60/00:10:90:30:48/01:00:02:00:00/40 tag 2 ncq 131072 in [ 7.547166] res 40/00:28:e0:4c:61/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) [ 7.547310] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 7.547363] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 7.547422] ata1.00: cmd 60/00:18:50:c7:64/01:00:02:00:00/40 tag 3 ncq 131072 in [ 7.547423] res 40/00:28:e0:4c:61/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) [ 7.547568] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 7.547621] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 7.547681] ata1.00: cmd 60/00:28:e0:4c:61/01:00:02:00:00/40 tag 5 ncq 131072 in [ 7.547682] res 40/00:28:e0:4c:61/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) [ 7.547825] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 7.547882] ata1: hard resetting link [ 7.864408] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300) [ 7.886351] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 [ 7.886375] ata1: EH complete [ 7.890012] ata1: limiting SATA link speed to 3.0 Gbps [ 7.890016] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x7 SErr 0x280100 action 0x6 frozen [ 7.890093] ata1.00: irq_stat 0x08000000, interface fatal error [ 7.890152] ata1: SError: { UnrecovData 10B8B BadCRC } [ 7.890210] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 7.890272] ata1.00: cmd 60/00:00:90:33:48/01:00:02:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 131072 in [ 7.890273] res 40/00:10:e0:4f:61/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) [ 7.890418] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 7.890472] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 7.890530] ata1.00: cmd 60/00:08:90:34:48/01:00:02:00:00/40 tag 1 ncq 131072 in [ 7.890531] res 40/00:10:e0:4f:61/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) [ 7.890672] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 7.890724] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 7.890781] ata1.00: cmd 60/78:10:e0:4f:61/00:00:02:00:00/40 tag 2 ncq 61440 in [ 7.890782] res 40/00:10:e0:4f:61/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) [ 7.890925] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } [ 7.890981] ata1: hard resetting link [ 8.208021] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 320) [ 8.230100] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 [ 8.230124] ata1: EH complete Looks like the SATA interface tries to use 6Gbps link, then fails miserably and Linux fallbacks to 3Gbps. This is somewhat fine for me, as the system boots successfully each time and works under high load (cd linux-3.2.8; make -j16). I've also ran memtest86+ and it did not find any errors. What concerns me more is that Grub sometimes takes a long time to load the images and/or fails to load itself completely. The error is consistent and is probablistic: that is, each time I boot I have a certain chance to fail. Actually, I have a slight suspiction on the cause of the failure. Look at the cabling: What kind of engineer does it this way? Nah. Even 1Gbps Ethernet hardly tolerates cables bent over a small angle, and there you have 6Gbps SATA. How cound I determine and fix the cause of errors and/or switch the link to 3Gbps mode permanently?

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  • Towards Database Continuous Delivery – What Next after Continuous Integration? A Checklist

    - by Ben Rees
    .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database delivery patterns & practices STAGE 4 AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT If you’ve been fortunate enough to get to the stage where you’ve implemented some sort of continuous integration process for your database updates, then hopefully you’re seeing the benefits of that investment – constant feedback on changes your devs are making, advanced warning of data loss (prior to the production release on Saturday night!), a nice suite of automated tests to check business logic, so you know it’s going to work when it goes live, and so on. But what next? What can you do to improve your delivery process further, moving towards a full continuous delivery process for your database? In this article I describe some of the issues you might need to tackle on the next stage of this journey, and how to plan to overcome those obstacles before they appear. Our Database Delivery Learning Program consists of four stages, really three – source controlling a database, running continuous integration processes, then how to set up automated deployment (the middle stage is split in two – basic and advanced continuous integration, making four stages in total). If you’ve managed to work through the first three of these stages – source control, basic, then advanced CI, then you should have a solid change management process set up where, every time one of your team checks in a change to your database (whether schema or static reference data), this change gets fully tested automatically by your CI server. But this is only part of the story. Great, we know that our updates work, that the upgrade process works, that the upgrade isn’t going to wipe our 4Tb of production data with a single DROP TABLE. But – how do you get this (fully tested) release live? Continuous delivery means being always ready to release your software at any point in time. There’s a significant gap between your latest version being tested, and it being easily releasable. Just a quick note on terminology – there’s a nice piece here from Atlassian on the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This piece also gives a nice description of the benefits of continuous delivery. These benefits have been summed up by Jez Humble at Thoughtworks as: “Continuous delivery is a set of principles and practices to reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering incremental changes to users” There’s another really useful piece here on Simple-Talk about the need for continuous delivery and how it applies to the database written by Phil Factor – specifically the extra needs and complexities of implementing a full CD solution for the database (compared to just implementing CD for, say, a web app). So, hopefully you’re convinced of moving on the the next stage! The next step after CI is to get some sort of automated deployment (or “release management”) process set up. But what should I do next? What do I need to plan and think about for getting my automated database deployment process set up? Can’t I just install one of the many release management tools available and hey presto, I’m ready! If only it were that simple. Below I list some of the areas that it’s worth spending a little time on, where a little planning and prep could go a long way. It’s also worth pointing out, that this should really be an evolving process. Depending on your starting point of course, it can be a long journey from your current setup to a full continuous delivery pipeline. If you’ve got a CI mechanism in place, you’re certainly a long way down that path. Nevertheless, we’d recommend evolving your process incrementally. Pages 157 and 129-141 of the book on Continuous Delivery (by Jez Humble and Dave Farley) have some great guidance on building up a pipeline incrementally: http://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912 For now, in this post, we’ll look at the following areas for your checklist: You and Your Team Environments The Deployment Process Rollback and Recovery Development Practices You and Your Team It’s a cliché in the DevOps community that “It’s not all about processes and tools, really it’s all about a culture”. As stated in this DevOps report from Puppet Labs: “DevOps processes and tooling contribute to high performance, but these practices alone aren’t enough to achieve organizational success. The most common barriers to DevOps adoption are cultural: lack of manager or team buy-in, or the value of DevOps isn’t understood outside of a specific group”. Like most clichés, there’s truth in there – if you want to set up a database continuous delivery process, you need to get your boss, your department, your company (if relevant) onside. Why? Because it’s an investment with the benefits coming way down the line. But the benefits are huge – for HP, in the book A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware, these are summarized as: -2008 to present: overall development costs reduced by 40% -Number of programs under development increased by 140% -Development costs per program down 78% -Firmware resources now driving innovation increased by a factor of 8 (from 5% working on new features to 40% But what does this mean? It means that, when moving to the next stage, to make that extra investment in automating your deployment process, it helps a lot if everyone is convinced that this is a good thing. That they understand the benefits of automated deployment and are willing to make the effort to transform to a new way of working. Incidentally, if you’re ever struggling to convince someone of the value I’d strongly recommend just buying them a copy of this book – a great read, and a very practical guide to how it can really work at a large org. I’ve spoken to many customers who have implemented database CI who describe their deployment process as “The point where automation breaks down. Up to that point, the CI process runs, untouched by human hand, but as soon as that’s finished we revert to manual.” This deployment process can involve, for example, a DBA manually comparing an environment (say, QA) to production, creating the upgrade scripts, reading through them, checking them against an Excel document emailed to him/her the night before, turning to page 29 in his/her notebook to double-check how replication is switched off and on for deployments, and so on and so on. Painful, error-prone and lengthy. But the point is, if this is something like your deployment process, telling your DBA “We’re changing everything you do and your toolset next week, to automate most of your role – that’s okay isn’t it?” isn’t likely to go down well. There’s some work here to bring him/her onside – to explain what you’re doing, why there will still be control of the deployment process and so on. Or of course, if you’re the DBA looking after this process, you have to do a similar job in reverse. You may have researched and worked out how you’d like to change your methodology to start automating your painful release process, but do the dev team know this? What if they have to start producing different artifacts for you? Will they be happy with this? Worth talking to them, to find out. As well as talking to your DBA/dev team, the other group to get involved before implementation is your manager. And possibly your manager’s manager too. As mentioned, unless there’s buy-in “from the top”, you’re going to hit problems when the implementation starts to get rocky (and what tool/process implementations don’t get rocky?!). You need to have support from someone senior in your organisation – someone you can turn to when you need help with a delayed implementation, lack of resources or lack of progress. Actions: Get your DBA involved (or whoever looks after live deployments) and discuss what you’re planning to do or, if you’re the DBA yourself, get the dev team up-to-speed with your plans, Get your boss involved too and make sure he/she is bought in to the investment. Environments Where are you going to deploy to? And really this question is – what environments do you want set up for your deployment pipeline? Assume everyone has “Production”, but do you have a QA environment? Dedicated development environments for each dev? Proper pre-production? I’ve seen every setup under the sun, and there is often a big difference between “What we want, to do continuous delivery properly” and “What we’re currently stuck with”. Some of these differences are: What we want What we’ve got Each developer with their own dedicated database environment A single shared “development” environment, used by everyone at once An Integration box used to test the integration of all check-ins via the CI process, along with a full suite of unit-tests running on that machine In fact if you have a CI process running, you’re likely to have some sort of integration server running (even if you don’t call it that!). Whether you have a full suite of unit tests running is a different question… Separate QA environment used explicitly for manual testing prior to release “We just test on the dev environments, or maybe pre-production” A proper pre-production (or “staging”) box that matches production as closely as possible Hopefully a pre-production box of some sort. But does it match production closely!? A production environment reproducible from source control A production box which has drifted significantly from anything in source control The big question is – how much time and effort are you going to invest in fixing these issues? In reality this just involves figuring out which new databases you’re going to create and where they’ll be hosted – VMs? Cloud-based? What about size/data issues – what data are you going to include on dev environments? Does it need to be masked to protect access to production data? And often the amount of work here really depends on whether you’re working on a new, greenfield project, or trying to update an existing, brownfield application. There’s a world if difference between starting from scratch with 4 or 5 clean environments (reproducible from source control of course!), and trying to re-purpose and tweak a set of existing databases, with all of their surrounding processes and quirks. But for a proper release management process, ideally you have: Dedicated development databases, An Integration server used for testing continuous integration and running unit tests. [NB: This is the point at which deployments are automatic, without human intervention. Each deployment after this point is a one-click (but human) action], QA – QA engineers use a one-click deployment process to automatically* deploy chosen releases to QA for testing, Pre-production. The environment you use to test the production release process, Production. * A note on the use of the word “automatic” – when carrying out automated deployments this does not mean that the deployment is happening without human intervention (i.e. that something is just deploying over and over again). It means that the process of carrying out the deployment is automatic in that it’s not a person manually running through a checklist or set of actions. The deployment still requires a single-click from a user. Actions: Get your environments set up and ready, Set access permissions appropriately, Make sure everyone understands what the environments will be used for (it’s not a “free-for-all” with all environments to be accessed, played with and changed by development). The Deployment Process As described earlier, most existing database deployment processes are pretty manual. The following is a description of a process we hear very often when we ask customers “How do your database changes get live? How does your manual process work?” Check pre-production matches production (use a schema compare tool, like SQL Compare). Sometimes done by taking a backup from production and restoring in to pre-prod, Again, use a schema compare tool to find the differences between the latest version of the database ready to go live (i.e. what the team have been developing). This generates a script, User (generally, the DBA), reviews the script. This often involves manually checking updates against a spreadsheet or similar, Run the script on pre-production, and check there are no errors (i.e. it upgrades pre-production to what you hoped), If all working, run the script on production.* * this assumes there’s no problem with production drifting away from pre-production in the interim time period (i.e. someone has hacked something in to the production box without going through the proper change management process). This difference could undermine the validity of your pre-production deployment test. Red Gate is currently working on a free tool to detect this problem – sign up here at www.sqllighthouse.com, if you’re interested in testing early versions. There are several variations on this process – some better, some much worse! How do you automate this? In particular, step 3 – surely you can’t automate a DBA checking through a script, that everything is in order!? The key point here is to plan what you want in your new deployment process. There are so many options. At one extreme, pure continuous deployment – whenever a dev checks something in to source control, the CI process runs (including extensive and thorough testing!), before the deployment process keys in and automatically deploys that change to the live box. Not for the faint hearted – and really not something we recommend. At the other extreme, you might be more comfortable with a semi-automated process – the pre-production/production matching process is automated (with an error thrown if these environments don’t match), followed by a manual intervention, allowing for script approval by the DBA. One he/she clicks “Okay, I’m happy for that to go live”, the latter stages automatically take the script through to live. And anything in between of course – and other variations. But we’d strongly recommended sitting down with a whiteboard and your team, and spending a couple of hours mapping out “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” NB: Most of what we’re discussing here is about production deployments. It’s important to note that you will also need to map out a deployment process for earlier environments (for example QA). However, these are likely to be less onerous, and many customers opt for a much more automated process for these boxes. Actions: Sit down with your team and a whiteboard, and draw out the answers to the questions above for your production deployments – “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” Repeat for earlier environments (QA and so on). Rollback and Recovery If only every deployment went according to plan! Unfortunately they don’t – and when things go wrong, you need a rollback or recovery plan for what you’re going to do in that situation. Once you move in to a more automated database deployment process, you’re far more likely to be deploying more frequently than before. No longer once every 6 months, maybe now once per week, or even daily. Hence the need for a quick rollback or recovery process becomes paramount, and should be planned for. NB: These are mainly scenarios for handling rollbacks after the transaction has been committed. If a failure is detected during the transaction, the whole transaction can just be rolled back, no problem. There are various options, which we’ll explore in subsequent articles, things like: Immediately restore from backup, Have a pre-tested rollback script (remembering that really this is a “roll-forward” script – there’s not really such a thing as a rollback script for a database!) Have fallback environments – for example, using a blue-green deployment pattern. Different options have pros and cons – some are easier to set up, some require more investment in infrastructure; and of course some work better than others (the key issue with using backups, is loss of the interim transaction data that has been added between the failed deployment and the restore). The best mechanism will be primarily dependent on how your application works and how much you need a cast-iron failsafe mechanism. Actions: Work out an appropriate rollback strategy based on how your application and business works, your appetite for investment and requirements for a completely failsafe process. Development Practices This is perhaps the more difficult area for people to tackle. The process by which you can deploy database updates is actually intrinsically linked with the patterns and practices used to develop that database and linked application. So you need to decide whether you want to implement some changes to the way your developers actually develop the database (particularly schema changes) to make the deployment process easier. A good example is the pattern “Branch by abstraction”. Explained nicely here, by Martin Fowler, this is a process that can be used to make significant database changes (e.g. splitting a table) in a step-wise manner so that you can always roll back, without data loss – by making incremental updates to the database backward compatible. Slides 103-108 of the following slidedeck, from Niek Bartholomeus explain the process: https://speakerdeck.com/niekbartho/orchestration-in-meatspace As these slides show, by making a significant schema change in multiple steps – where each step can be rolled back without any loss of new data – this affords the release team the opportunity to have zero-downtime deployments with considerably less stress (because if an increment goes wrong, they can roll back easily). There are plenty more great patterns that can be implemented – the book Refactoring Databases, by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage is a great read, if this is a direction you want to go in: http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Databases-Evolutionary-paperback-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321774515 But the question is – how much of this investment are you willing to make? How often are you making significant schema changes that would require these best practices? Again, there’s a difference here between migrating old projects and starting afresh – with the latter it’s much easier to instigate best practice from the start. Actions: For your business, work out how far down the path you want to go, amending your database development patterns to “best practice”. It’s a trade-off between implementing quality processes, and the necessity to do so (depending on how often you make complex changes). Socialise these changes with your development group. No-one likes having “best practice” changes imposed on them, so good to introduce these ideas and the rationale behind them early.   Summary The next stages of implementing a continuous delivery pipeline for your database changes (once you have CI up and running) require a little pre-planning, if you want to get the most out of the work, and for the implementation to go smoothly. We’ve covered some of the checklist of areas to consider – mainly in the areas of “Getting the team ready for the changes that are coming” and “Planning our your pipeline, environments, patterns and practices for development”, though there will be more detail, depending on where you’re coming from – and where you want to get to. This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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