caption competition - Page 40

! Extra }, or forgotten \endgroup. latex

- by gzou

hey, I met these latex format problem, anyone can offer some help? the .tex file: \begin{table}{} \renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.1} \caption{Cambridge Flow feature definition and description} \label{cambridge-feature}} \centering \begin{tabular}{|c|c|} \hline\bfseries Abbreviation &\bfseries Description\\ \hline serv-port & Server port\\ \hline clnt-port & Client port\\ \hline push-pkts-serv & count of all packets with\\ & push bit set in TCP header (server to client)\\ \hline init-win-bytes-clnt & the total number of bytes \\ & sent in initial window (client to server)\\ \hline init-win-bytes-serv & the total number of bytes sent\\ & in initial window (server to client)\\ \hline avg-seg-size-clnt & average segment size: \\ & data bytes devided by number of packets\\ \hline IP-bytes-med-clnt & median of total bytes in IP packet\\ \hline act-data-pkt-serv & count of packet with at least one byte \\ & of TCP data playload (server to client)\\ \hline data-bytes-var-clnt & variance of total \\ & bytes in packets (client to server)\\ \hline min-seg-size-serv & minimum segment size \\ & observed (server to client)\\ \hline RTT-samples-serv & total number of RTT samples\\ & found (server to client),\\ & {\bf see also \cite{Moore05discriminators}}\\ \hline push-pkts-clnt & count of all packets with push bit set \\ & in TCP header (server to client)\\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{table} and the error message: ! Extra }, or forgotten \endgroup. \@endfloatbox ...pagefalse \outer@nobreak \egroup \color@endbox l.892 \end{table} I've deleted a group-closing symbol because it seems to be spurious, as in $x}$'. But perhaps the } is legitimate and you forgot something else, as in\hbox{$x}'. In such cases the way to recover is to insert both the forgotten and the deleted material, e.g., by typing `I$}'. there is no $ in my table, also this { are matching with the }, and also after I comment the citation, the error remains. anyone can offer help? really appreciate all the comments! ! Extra }, or forgotten \endgroup.

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DUnit: How to run tests?

- by Ian Boyd

How do i run TestCase's from the IDE? i created a new project, with a single, simple, form: unit Unit1; interface uses Windows, Messages, SysUtils, Classes, Graphics, Controls, Forms, Dialogs, StdCtrls; type TForm1 = class(TForm) private public end; var Form1: TForm1; implementation {$R *.DFM} end. Now i'll add a test case to check that pushing Button1 does what it should: unit Unit1; interface uses Windows, Messages, SysUtils, Classes, Graphics, Controls, Forms, Dialogs, StdCtrls; type TForm1 = class(TForm) Button1: TButton; procedure Button1Click(Sender: TObject); private public end; var Form1: TForm1; implementation {$R *.DFM} uses TestFramework; type TForm1Tests = class(TTestCase) private f: TForm1; protected procedure SetUp; override; procedure TearDown; override; published procedure TestButton1Click; end; procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); begin //todo end; { TForm1Tests } procedure TForm1Tests.SetUp; begin inherited; f := TForm1.Create(nil); end; procedure TForm1Tests.TearDown; begin f.Free; inherited; end; procedure TForm1Tests.TestButton1Click; begin f.Button1Click(nil); Self.CheckEqualsString('Hello, world!', f.Caption); end; end. Given what i've done (test code in the GUI project), how do i now trigger a run of the tests? If i push F9 then the form simply appears: Ideally there would be a button, or menu option, in the IDE saying Run DUnit Tests: Am i living in a dream-world? A fantasy land, living in a gumdrop house on lollipop lane?

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imagick showing script url instead of image

- by Raz

Hi, currently i'm trying to use imagick to generate some images without saving them on the server and then outputting to the browser, my method of choice was image magic with the imagick extension for php. I read the documentation, and i'm sure the package is installed on my machine (windows xp, with xampp). the class is installed imagick module enabled imagick module version 2.0.0-alpha imagick classes Imagick, ImagickDraw, ImagickPixel, ImagickPixelIterator ImageMagick version ImageMagick 6.3.3 04/21/07 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org ImageMagick release date 04/21/07 ImageMagick Number of supported formats: 164 ImageMagick Supported formats A, ART, AVI, AVS, B, BIE, BMP, BMP2, BMP3, C, CACHE, CAPTION, CIN, CIP, CLIP, CLIPBOARD, CMYK, CMYKA, CUR, CUT, DCM, DCX, DFONT, DPS, DPX, EMF, EPDF, EPI, EPS, EPS2, EPS3, EPSF, EPSI, EPT, EPT2, EPT3, FAX, FITS, FRACTAL, FTS, G, G3, GIF, GIF87, GRADIENT, GRAY, HISTOGRAM, HTM, HTML, ICB, ICO, ICON, INFO, JBG, JBIG, JNG, JP2, JPC, JPEG, JPG, JPX, K, LABEL, M, M2V, MAP, MAT, MATTE, MIFF, MNG, MONO, MPC, MPEG, MPG, MSL, MSVG, MTV, MVG, NULL, O, OTB, OTF, PAL, PALM, PAM, PATTERN, PBM, PCD, PCDS, PCL, PCT, PCX, PDB, PDF, PFA, PFB, PGM, PGX, PICON, PICT, PIX, PJPEG, PLASMA, PNG, PNG24, PNG32, PNG8, PNM, PPM, PREVIEW, PS, PS2, PS3, PSD, PTIF, PWP, R, RAS, RGB, RGBA, RGBO, RLA, RLE, SCR, SCT, SFW, SGI, SHTML, STEGANO, SUN, SVG, SVGZ, TEXT, TGA, THUMBNAIL, TIFF, TILE, TIM, TTC, TTF, TXT, UIL, UYVY, VDA, VICAR, VID, VIFF, VST, WBMP, WMF, WMFWIN32, WMZ, WPG, X, XBM, XC, XCF, XPM, XV, XWD, Y, YCbCr, YCbCrA, YUV this is from the phpinfo so i know i have it installed, the thing is when i try to generate an image and save it, it works flawlessly, but when i try to output the image directly, i get the script url as an image $draw = new ImagickDraw(); $draw->setFont('AnkeCalligraph.TTF'); $draw->setFontSize(52); $draw->annotation(110, 110, "Hello World!"); $draw->annotation(50, 220, "Hello World!"); $canvas = new Imagick('./pictures/test_live.PNG'); $canvas->drawImage($draw); $canvas->setImageFormat('png'); header("Content-Type: image/png"); echo $canvas; this is the code used. if i use writeimage, then the file on the server is created with no problems. does anyone have any ideas what i'm doing wrong ?

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Uploading a picture to facebook

- by kielie

Hi guys, I am trying to upload a image to a gallery on a facebook fan page, here is my code thus far, $ch = curl_init(); $data = array('type' => 'client_cred', 'client_id' => 'app_id','client_secret'=>'secret_key',' redirect_uri'=>'http://apps.facebook.com/my-application/'); // your connect url here curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data); $rs = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); $ch = curl_init(); $data = explode("=",$rs); $token = $data[1]; $album_id = '1234'; $file= 'http://my.website.com/my-application/sketch.jpg'; $data = array(basename($file) => "@".realpath($file), //filename, where $row['file_location'] is a file hosted on my server "caption" => "test", "aid" => $album_id, //valid aid, as demonstrated above "access_token" => $token ); $ch2 = curl_init(); $url = "https://graph.facebook.com/".$album_id."/photos"; curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_HEADER, false); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, false); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_POST, true); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data); $op = curl_exec($ch2); When I echo $token, I seem to be getting the token, but when I run the script, I get this error, {"error":{"type":"OAuthAccessTokenException","message":"An access token is required to request this resource."} , I have NO idea why it is doing this! Basically what I am doing in that code is getting the access token with curl, and then, uploading the photo to my album also via curl, but I keep getting that error! Any help would be appreciated, thank you!

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Programming a windows service

- by xarzu

I have started prgramming a windows service. I have added a notify icon from the toolbox. It has the small notify icon that appears in the systray as a member of those icons. It works so far. So far I have a blank form. I have used the DoubleClick for the notifyIcon to bring up the form (I will use the form for something later). Now I have a list of things I want to accomplish to make this work like a true windows service. First of all, if possible, I owuld like to remove the maximize and cancel button on the form. Most windos service apps that I have seen offer the ability to close the app by right-mouse-button clicking on the notify icon which brings up a menu of options. I see in the properties of the form under Misc there is an CancelButton. But I do not see how do deactivate it. In the Properties of the forum I see under Window Style there is a ControlBox option that, if I turn to false, all three buttons, (minimize, maximize and cancel) go away. These are not what i am looking for. I would not like the option for them to resize, maximize or close the form here. I suspect people will close the box intending to make the box go away while still wanting the app to run. Under the "Focus" caption in Properties, there id "Deactivate". I have created my own event/method/function for this and in debug I noticed that when you click on the x-box in the upper right corner, this function is called. The problem is that after the function is over, the app closes anyway. How do I over-ride this function? Secondly, how do you catch the right button click event on the notify icon in the systray? I can see how to create events for "Click" and "MouseClick" etc. but how so I determine which button was click? Using the right buton click is how such programs know when to pull up a menu. So I would like to know how to do this as well.

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prgramming a windows service

- by xarzu

I have started prgramming a windows service. I have added a notify icon from the toolbox. It has the small notify icon that appears in the systray as a member of those icons. It works so far. So far I have a blank form. I have used the DoubleClick for the notifyIcon to bring up the form (I will use the form for something later). Now I have a list of things I want to accomplish to make this work like a true windows service. First of all, if possible, I owuld like to remove the maximize and cancel button on the form. Most windos service apps that I have seen offer the ability to close the app by right-mouse-button clicking on the notify icon which brings up a menu of options. I see in the properties of the form under Misc there is an CancelButton. But I do not see how do deactivate it. In the Properties of the forum I see under Window Style there is a ControlBox option that, if I turn to false, all three buttons, (minimize, maximize and cancel) go away. These are not what i am looking for. I would not like the option for them to resize, maximize or close the form here. I suspect people will close the box intending to make the box go away while still wanting the app to run. Under the "Focus" caption in Properties, there id "Deactivate". I have created my own event/method/function for this and in debug I noticed that when you click on the x-box in the upper right corner, this function is called. The problem is that after the function is over, the app closes anyway. How do I over-ride this function? Secondly, how do you catch the right button click event on the notify icon in the systray? I can see how to create events for "Click" and "MouseClick" etc. but how so I determine which button was click? Using the right buton click is how such programs know when to pull up a menu. So I would like to know how to do this as well.

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Algorithm for finding symmetries of a tree

- by Paxinum

I have n sectors, enumerated 0 to n-1 counterclockwise. The boundaries between these sectors are infinite branches (n of them). The sectors live in the complex plane, and for n even, sector 0 and n/2 are bisected by the real axis, and the sectors are evenly spaced. These branches meet at certain points, called junctions. Each junction is adjacent to a subset of the sectors (at least 3 of them). Specifying the junctions, (in pre-fix order, lets say, starting from junction adjacent to sector 0 and 1), and the distance between the junctions, uniquely describes the tree. Now, given such a representation, how can I see if it is symmetric wrt the real axis? For example, n=6, the tree (0,1,5)(1,2,4,5)(2,3,4) have three junctions on the real line, so it is symmetric wrt the real axis. If the distances between (015) and (1245) is equal to distance from (1245) to (234), this is also symmetric wrt the imaginary axis. The tree (0,1,5)(1,2,5)(2,4,5)(2,3,4) have 4 junctions, and this is never symmetric wrt either imaginary or real axis, but it has 180 degrees rotation symmetry if the distance between the first two and the last two junctions in the representation are equal. Edit: This is actually for my research. I have posted the question at mathoverflow as well, but my days in competition programming tells me that this is more like an IOI task. Code in mathematica would be excellent, but java, python, or any other language readable by a human suffices. Here are some examples (pretend the double edges are single and we have a tree) http://www2.math.su.se/~per/files.php?file=contr_ex_1.pdf http://www2.math.su.se/~per/files.php?file=contr_ex_2.pdf http://www2.math.su.se/~per/files.php?file=contr_ex_5.pdf Example 1 is described as (0,1,4)(1,2,4)(2,3,4)(0,4,5) with distances (2,1,3). Example 2 is described as (0,1,4)(1,2,4)(2,3,4)(0,4,5) with distances (2,1,1). Example 5 is described as (0,1,4,5)(1,2,3,4) with distances (2). So, given the description/representation, I want to find some algorithm to decide if it is symmetric wrt real, imaginary, and rotation 180 degrees. The last example have 180 degree symmetry. (These symmetries corresponds to special kinds of potential in the Schroedinger equation, which has nice properties in quantum mechanics.)

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Checking if an int is prime more efficiently

- by SipSop

I recently was part of a small java programming competition at my school. My partner and I have just finished our first pure oop class and most of the questions were out of our league so we settled on this one (and I am paraphrasing somewhat): "given an input integer n return the next int that is prime and its reverse is also prime for example if n = 18 your program should print 31" because 31 and 13 are both prime. Your .class file would then have a test case of all the possible numbers from 1-2,000,000,000 passed to it and it had to return the correct answer within 10 seconds to be considered valid. We found a solution but with larger test cases it would take longer than 10 seconds. I am fairly certain there is a way to move the range of looping from n,..2,000,000,000 down as the likely hood of needing to loop that far when n is a low number is small, but either way we broke the loop when a number is prime under both conditions is found. At first we were looping from 2,..n no matter how large it was then i remembered the rule about only looping to the square root of n. Any suggestions on how to make my program more efficient? I have had no classes dealing with complexity analysis of algorithms. Here is our attempt. public class P3 { public static void main(String[] args){ long loop = 2000000000; long n = Integer.parseInt(args[0]); for(long i = n; i<loop; i++) { String s = i +""; String r = ""; for(int j = s.length()-1; j>=0; j--) r = r + s.charAt(j); if(prime(i) && prime(Long.parseLong(r))) { System.out.println(i); break; } } System.out.println("#"); } public static boolean prime(long p){ for(int i = 2; i<(int)Math.sqrt(p); i++) { if(p%i==0) return false; } return true; } } ps sorry if i did the formatting for code wrong this is my first time posting here. Also the output had to have a '#' after each line thats what the line after the loop is about Thanks for any help you guys offer!!!

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Getting jQuery slideshow animation to stop on click

- by hollyb

I have a slide show built with jQuery that pauses on hover. It has a group of thumbnails sitting on top of the image that advances the image when clicked, otherwise the slideshow just auto-rotates through all the images. There is also a +/- to expand and contract a caption related to each image. I want to have the slideshow's automatic advancing to stop if one of the thumbnails is clicked, or the +/-. Basically, just stop whenever a user clicks anywhere within the gallery (div class=".homeImg"). I'm having a major brain fart in getting this working properly and could use some advice. Here's the jQuery: $(document).ready(function() { $(".main_image .desc").show(); //Show image info $(".main_image .block").animate({ opacity: 0.85 }, 1 ); //Set Opacity //Click and Hover events for thumbnail list $(".image_thumb ul li:first").addClass('active'); // * Adds a class 'last' to the last li to let the rotator know when to return to the first $(".image_thumb ul li:last").addClass('last'); $(".image_thumb ul li").click(function(){ //Set Variables var imgAlt = $(this).find('img').attr("alt"); //Get Alt Tag of Image var imgTitle = $(this).find('a').attr("href"); //Get Main Image URL var imgDesc = $(this).find('.block').html(); //Get HTML of block var imgDescHeight = $(".main_image").find('.block').height(); //Calculate height of block if ($(this).is(".active")) { //If it's already active, then… return false; // Don't click through } else { //Animate $(".main_image img").animate({ opacity: 0}, 800 ); $(".main_image .block").animate({ opacity: 0, marginBottom: -imgDescHeight }, 800, function() { $(".main_image .block").html(imgDesc).animate({ opacity: 0.85, marginBottom: "0" }, 250 ); $(".main_image img").attr({ src: imgTitle , alt: imgAlt}).animate({ opacity: 1}, 250 ); }); } $(".image_thumb ul li").removeClass('active'); //Remove class of 'active' on all lists $(this).addClass('active'); //add class of 'active' on this list only return false; }) .hover(function(){ $(this).addClass('hover'); }, function() { $(this).removeClass('hover'); }); //Toggle teaser $("a.collapse").click(function(){ $(".main_image .block").slideToggle(); $("a.collapse").toggleClass("show"); return false; // added to remove # browser jump }); // If we are hovering over the image area, pause the clickNext function pauseClickNext = false; $(".homeImg").hover( function () { pauseClickNext = true; }, function () { pauseClickNext = false; } ); // Define function to click the next li var clickNext = function(){ if(!pauseClickNext) { /// find the next li after .active var $next_li = $("li.active").next("li"); if($("li.active").hasClass("last") ){ $(".image_thumb ul li:first").trigger("click"); } else { $next_li.trigger("click"); } } }; // Time between image transition setInterval(clickNext, 6000); });

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Starting company and getting a good deal

- by Dan

Hi, I'm having the possibility to start a small company with someone else. I'm a software programmer and been working on a field where there isn't much competition, at least in the platform I'm developing, which is the one with highest market share. This other person comes from marketing so he would find / provide clients and be in charge of the business side. So initially it would be me, the tech guy with the knowledge to develop our product and products based on my development, and this person who would become CEO (basically a 50/50 share). The idea is getting a product on our own, but also perform projects for others in order to get some cash. The problem is that his idea is doing this without initial capital. He tells me that he could get some customers from past business (which is mostly true as he has been in the business for some time) and then with the money obtained from such development, we could hire some freelance developers and build our own platform. I've already discussed with him that I don't find this the best way, provided that we need to compete against other companies some of who are VC funded and have many developers working fulltime. But most of all, I'm thinking of whether this is a fair deal to do, provided that this person is not providing anything other than clients, and I'd be the one having to do the work and dedicate time, thus also taking most of the risks. In all fairness, I'd expect him to put some initial capital, given that initially I'm putting some of my code which in some way is money given the time I've dedicated to it. So the question here is, does this seem fair to you? Is this the way it is usually done? My only concern here is that I don't have previous experience with such deals, and I ignore whether this is the usual thing to do in other cases. Certainly having a marketing person helps a lot. As you probably know being a programmer doesn't make me the most indicated person for marketing ;-) but at the same time I'm not sure if this could be a good deal or I'd just be making a pretty inconvenient deal. Hope I made my point clear, but feel free to let me know if more details are needed. Thanks in advance

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PHP: Remove Simple Session with Get-Method

- by elmaso

Hello, I want to Remove the Sessions from this php code, actually if someone searches i get this url search.php?searchquery=test but if I reload the page, the results are cleaned. how can I remove the Sessions to get the Results still, if someone reloads the page? this are the codes: search.php <?php session_start(); ?> <form method="get" action="querygoogle.php"> <label for="searchquery"><span class="caption">Search this site</span> <input type="text" size="20" maxlength="255" title="Enter your keywords and click the search button" name="searchquery" /></label> <input type="submit" value="Search" /> </form> <?php if(!empty($_SESSION['googleresults'])) { echo $_SESSION['googleresults']; unset($_SESSION['googleresults']); } ?> querygoogle.php <?php session_start(); $url = 'http://www.example.com'; $handle = fopen($url, 'rb'); $body = ''; while (!feof($handle)) { $body .= fread($handle, 8192); } fclose($handle); $json = json_decode($body); foreach($json->responseData->results as $searchresult) { if($searchresult->GsearchResultClass == 'GwebSearch') { $formattedresults .= ' <div class="searchresult"> <h3><a href="' . $searchresult->unescapedUrl . '">' . $searchresult->titleNoFormatting . '</a></h3> <p class="resultdesc">' . $searchresult->content . '</p> <p class="resulturl">' . $searchresult->visibleUrl . '</p> </div>'; } } $_SESSION['googleresults'] = $formattedresults; header("Location: search.php?searchquery=" . $_GET['searchquery']); exit; ?> thank you for your help!!

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highlighting search results in php error

- by fusion

i'm trying to figure out what is wrong in this code. it either doesn't highlight the search result OR it outputs html tags surrounding the highlighted text. . $search_result = ""; $search_result = trim($search_result); $special_cases = array( '%', '_', '+' ); $search_result = str_replace( $special_cases, '', $_GET["q"] ); //Check if the string is empty if ($search_result == "") { echo "<p>Search Error</p><p>Please enter a search...</p>" ; exit(); } $result = mysql_query('SELECT cQuotes, vAuthor, cArabic, vReference FROM thquotes WHERE cQuotes LIKE "%' . mysql_real_escape_string($search_result) .'%" ORDER BY idQuotes DESC', $conn) or die ('Error: '.mysql_error()); //eliminating special characters function h($s) { echo htmlspecialchars($s, ENT_QUOTES); } function highlightWords($string, $word) { $string = str_replace($word, "<span style='background-color: #FFE066;font-weight:bold;'>".$word."</span>", $string); /*** return the highlighted string ***/ return $string; } ?> <div class="caption">Search Results</div> <div class="center_div"> <table> <?php while ($row= mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) { $cQuote = highlightWords($row['cQuotes'], $search_result); ?> <tr> <td style="text-align:right; font-size:15px;"><?php h($row['cArabic']); ?></td> <td style="font-size:16px;"><?php h($cQuote); ?></td> <td style="font-size:12px;"><?php h($row['vAuthor']); ?></td> <td style="font-size:12px; font-style:italic; text-align:right;"><?php h($row['vReference']); ?></td> </tr> <?php } ?> </table> </div> on the browser, it is outputted as: A good <span style='background-color: #FFE066;font-weight:bold;'>action</span> is an ever-remaining store and a pure yield or if a div is used with class: A good <div class='highlight'>action</div> is an ever-remaining store and a pure yield

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How can I create a Searchstring for a Google AJAX Search API?

- by elmaso

Hello, i have this code to get the search resutls from the api: querygoogle.php: <?php session_start(); // Here's the Google AJAX Search API url for curl. It uses Google Search's site:www.yourdomain.com syntax to search in a specific site. I used $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] to find my domain automatically. Change $_POST['searchquery'] to your posted search query $url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?rsz=large&v=1.0&start=20&q=' . urlencode('' . $_POST['searchquery']); // use fopen and fread to pull Google's search results $handle = fopen($url, 'rb'); $body = ''; while (!feof($handle)) { $body .= fread($handle, 8192); } fclose($handle); // now $body is the JSON encoded results. We need to decode them. $json = json_decode($body); // now $json is an object of Google's search results and we need to iterate through it. foreach($json->responseData->results as $searchresult) { if($searchresult->GsearchResultClass == 'GwebSearch') { $formattedresults .= ' <div class="searchresult"> <h3><a href="' . $searchresult->unescapedUrl . '">' . $searchresult->titleNoFormatting . '</a></h3> <p class="resultdesc">' . $searchresult->content . '</p> <p class="resulturl">' . $searchresult->visibleUrl . '</p> </div>'; } } $_SESSION['googleresults'] = $formattedresults; header('Location: ' . $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']); exit; ?> search.php <?php session_start(); ?> <form method="post" action="querygoogle.php"> <label for="searchquery"><span class="caption">Search this site</span> <input type="text" size="20" maxlength="255" title="Enter your keywords and click the search button" name="searchquery" /></label> <input type="submit" value="Search" /> </form> <?php if(!empty($_SESSION['googleresults'])) { echo $_SESSION['googleresults']; unset($_SESSION['googleresults']); } ?> but with this code, I cant add a searchstring.. how can i add a search string like search.php?search=keyword ? thanks

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Make text in a <div> wrap around a child element.

- by John

In Word you can place an image on a page and have the text flow nicely around it. I was wondering how far one can get towards this using CSS, noting that is has to work in IE6. I already have something sort of close using float, but the floated child-element still 'blocks' text above it. So it partially wraps. Is it possible to put a child div at some arbitrary position in the parent, and have text flow around it freely? The actual use-case here is to put illustrations inside the main content , where each illustration is implemented inside a child . I repeat, it has to work on IE6. And I don't want to get too involved in browser-specific hacks... floating the child at least works on IE6 with no tweaking. Currently I have like this: <div> <div class="illustration"> <img src="image1.png" /> <p>Illustration caption</p> </div> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. Atvero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. </p> </div> div.illustration { float:right; border-top: 1px solid #505050; border-left: 1px solid #505050; border-right: 1px solid #505050; border-bottom: 1px solid #505050; margin-right:30px; margin-top:100px; text-align:center; padding:2px; background: #96C3FF; } div.illustration p { margin:0; font-size:small; font-style:italic; padding:0; }

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Define Javascript slider hit/rollover area

- by Rob

Hey, Im having an issue defining the hit area for a javascript sliding element. See example: http://www.warface.co.uk/clients/warface.co.uk/ Please slide over the grey box on the right side to reveal the button, although this works I would only like for the slider to only be triggered by rolling over the red block. CSS .slidingtwitter { /* -- This is the hit area -- */ background: #ccc; width:255px; height:55px; overflow: hidden; top:50%; right: 0px; /* -- This is the sliding start point -- */ position: fixed; font-family: Gotham, Sans-Serif; z-index: 50; } .slidingtwitter.right { right:0px; } .slidingtwitter .caption { /* -- This is the sliding area -- */ background: #fff; position: absolute; width:260px; height:55px; right: -205px; /* -- This is the sliding start point -- */ } .slidingtwitter a { color: #484848; font-size: 20px; text-transform: uppercase; } .slidingtwitter a:hover { color: black; } .slidingtwitter .smaller { font-size: 12px; font-family: Gotham Medium; } .twitterblock { background: #f35555 url("styles/images/button_twitter.png") no-repeat 14px 15px ; width:35px; height:35px; padding:10px; float:left; display:block; } .slidingtwitter .followme { background: url("styles/images/button_arrowheadthin.jpg")no-repeat right 0; height:35px; display:block; float:left; line-height:14px; width:140px; margin:10px 0px 0px 14px; padding-top:6px; padding-right: 40px; } JS $('.slidingtwitter').hover(function(){ $(".slide", this).stop().animate({right:'0px'},{queue:false,duration:400}); //Position on rollover },function() { $(".slide", this).stop().animate({right:'-205px'},{queue:false,duration:400}); //Position on rollout }); Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

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How to use JSON response in the form of JSTL?

- by HariKrishna

I am getting JSON response,now i need to construct a table using this response.The table may be contain more than one record and i know one way of doing this is using Jstl tags but not JSON response.Here is my jsp code <div id="divHideAllergies" class="clone"> <div class="copy"> <div class="col-md-12"> <div class="portlet box carrot "> <div class="portlet-title"> <div class="caption"> <i class="fa fa-medkit"></i> Allergies </div> </div> <div class="portlet-body form"> <div class="form-body"> <div class="form-group"> <label class="control-label col-md-3">Allergy Type:</label> <div class="col-md-9"> <div class="input-group"> <span class="input-group-addon"><i class="fa fa-medkit"></i></span> <select class="form-control" id="allergy_type"> <option selected value="">--Select One--</option> <option value="Drug">Drug</option> <option value="Environmental">Environmental</option <option value="Food">Food</option> </select> </div> </div> </div> <div class="form-group"> <label class="control-label col-md-3">Allergic to:</label> <div class="col-md-9"> <div class="input-group"> <span class="input-group-addon"><i class="fa fa-medkit"></i></span> <input type="text" class="form-control" name="first name" id="allergy_to"/> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div>

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[Delphi] open text files in one application

- by Remus Rigo

hi all I want to write an text editor and to assign the txt files to it. My problem is that I want to have only one instance running and when a new file is opened to send the filename to the first app that is already running... (I want to do this using mutex). Here is a small test DPR looks like this uses Windows, Messages, SysUtils, Forms, wndMain in 'wndMain.pas' {frmMain}; {$R *.res} var PrevWindow : HWND; S : string; CData : TCopyDataStruct; begin PrevWindow := 0; if OpenMutex(MUTEX_ALL_ACCESS, False, 'MyMutex') <> 0 then begin repeat PrevWindow:=FindWindow('TfrmMain', nil); until PrevWindow<>Application.Handle; if IsWindow(PrevWindow) then begin SendMessage(PrevWindow, WM_SYSCOMMAND, SC_RESTORE, 0); BringWindowToTop(PrevWindow); SetForegroundWindow(PrevWindow); if FileExists(ParamStr(1)) then begin S:=ParamStr(1); CData.dwData:=0; CData.lpData:=PChar(S); CData.cbData:=1+Length(S); SendMessage(PrevWindow, WM_COPYDATA, 0, DWORD(@CData) ); end; end; end else CreateMutex(nil, False, 'MyMutex'); Application.Initialize; Application.CreateForm(TfrmMain, frmMain); Application.Run; end. PAS: type TfrmMain = class(TForm) memo: TMemo; private procedure WMCopyData ( var msg : TWMCopyData ) ; message WM_COPYDATA; public procedure OpenFile(f : String); end; var frmMain: TfrmMain; implementation {$R *.dfm} procedure TfrmMain.WMCopyData ( var msg : TWMCopyData ) ; var f : String; begin f:=PChar(msg.CopyDataStruct.lpData); //ShowMessage(f); OpenFile(f); end; procedure TfrmMain.OpenFile(f : String); begin memo.Clear; memo.Lines.LoadFromFile(f); Caption:=f; end; this code should be ok, but if i want to open a text file (from the second app), the first app receives a message like this: thanks

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% _ in search form displays all results

- by fusion

if the search form is blank, it should display an error that something should be entered by the user. it should only show those results which contain the keywords the user has entered in the search textbox. however, if the user enters % or _ or +, it displays all results. how do i display an error when the user enters these wildcard characters? my search php code: $search_result = ""; $search_result = $_GET["q"]; $search_result = trim($search_result); if ($search_result == "") { echo "<p>Search Error</p><p>Please enter a search...</p>" ; exit(); } $result = mysql_query('SELECT cQuotes, vAuthor, cArabic, vReference FROM thquotes WHERE cQuotes LIKE "%' . mysql_real_escape_string($search_result) .'%" ORDER BY idQuotes DESC', $conn) or die ('Error: '.mysql_error()); // there's either one or zero records. Again, no need for a while loop function h($s) { echo htmlspecialchars($s, ENT_QUOTES); } ?> <div class="caption">Search Results</div> <div class="center_div"> <table> <?php while ($row= mysql_fetch_array($result)) { ?> <tr> <td style="text-align:right; font-size:15px;"><?php h($row['cArabic']); ?></td> <td style="font-size:16px;"><?php h($cQuotes); ?></td> <td style="font-size:12px;"><?php h($row['vAuthor']); ?></td> <td style="font-size:12px; font-style:italic; text-align:right;"><?php h($row['vReference']); ?></td> </tr> <?php } ?> </table> <?php ?> </div>

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How To Start Your Own Professional Blog with WordPress

- by Matthew Guay

Would you like to start your own blog or website? With a free WordPress account, it’s free and easy to get started creating your own professional quality blog site. This is the first part in a series on how to create your own professional quality blog site. No, we’re not talking about some cheapo looking blog from Blogger or something on Facebook, but creating a quality blog you can be proud of and present to millions of readers online. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms, powering hundreds of high-profile websites and blogs around the world. It’s both powerful and easy to use, which makes it great whether you’re just starting out or are a blogging pro. To start out with your blogging project WordPress is completely free, and you can use the online interface or install the WordPress software on your own server and blog from there. Getting Started You can start a blog in just a few minutes. Head over to WordPress.com and click Sign up now on the right-hand side of the main page. Enter a username and password, check that you agree with the legal terms, select the “Gimme a blog” bullet, and click Next. WordPress may inform you that your username is already taken, simply choose a new one and try again. Next, choose a domain for your blog. This will be the address for your site, and cannot be changed, so be sure to choose exactly what you want. If you’d prefer your address to be yourname.com instead of yourname.wordpress.com, you can add your own domain for a fee after your blog is setup…but we’ll cover that later. Once you click signup, you will be sent a confirmation email. While you wait for the email to arrive you can go ahead and enter in your name and a short bio about yourself. When you receive your confirmation email, click the link. Congratulations; you now have your own blog! You can view your new blog immediately, though the default theme isn’t very interesting without your content and pictures. Back on the page you opened from the email, click Login to access your blog’s administration page and to start adding stuff to your blog. You can also access your blog’s admin page anytime by from yourname.wordpress.com/admin, substituting your own blog name for yourname. Enter your username and password, then click Log in to get started. Adding Content to your WordPress.com Blog When you sign in to your WordPress blog, you’ll first see the WordPress Admin page. Here you can see recent posts and comments, and you can see stats of how many people have visited your site. You can also access all of your blog tools and settings right from this page. To add a new post to your blog, click the Posts link on the left, then click “Add New” either on the left menu or on the top of the Edit Posts page. Or, if you want to edit the default first post, hover over it and select Edit. Or click the New Posts button on the top of the page. This menu bar is always visible whenever you’re logged in, so it’s an easy way to add a post. The editor lets you easily write anything you want in a Microsoft Word-style editor. You can format your text, add lists, links, quotes, and more. When you’re ready to share your content with the world, click Publish on the right side. To add pictures or other files, click the picture icon beside “Upload/Insert”. Your free blog account can store up to 3Gb of pictures and documents which will definitely give you a good start. Click Select Files, and then choose the pictures or documents you want to add to your post. When the pictures have uploaded, you can add a caption and choose how to position the picture. When you’re finished, select “Insert into Post”. Or, if you want to add a video, click the video button. You have to add a paid upgrade to upload videos directly, but you can add YouTube and other online videos for free. Click the “From URL” tab, and then paste the link to the YouTube video and click Insert into post. If you’re a code geek, click the HTML tab in the editor and edit the HTML of your blog post the geeky way. Once you’ve added all your content and edited it the way you want, click the Publish button on the right of the editor. Or, you can click Preview to make sure it looks right, and then click Publish. Here’s our blog with the new blog post containing a picture and video. While you’re getting to know you’re way around the controls in WordPress, the Preview feature will be your best friend while you try to organize the content to your liking. Conclusion It only takes a couple minutes to get started blogging at WordPress.com. Whether you want to write about your daily life, share pictures of your children, or review the latest books and gadgets, WordPress.com is a great place to get started for free. But we’ve only covered a small portion of the WordPress features…but this should get you started. Check back for more WordPress and blogging coverage coming up soon! Links Signup for a free WordPress.com account Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogHow-To Geek SoftwareProtecting Your WordPress Admin Panel From Hackers With .htaccessMake a Backup Copy of your Production Wordpress Blog on UbuntuLinux QuickTip: Downloading and Un-tarring in One Step 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 Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook Recycle !

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WatiN screenshot saver

- by Brian Schroer

In addition to my automated unit, system and integration tests for ASP.NET projects, I like to give my customers something pretty that they can look at and visually see that the web site is behaving properly. I use the Gallio test runner to produce a pretty HTML report, and WatiN (Web Application Testing In .NET) to test the UI and create screenshots. I have a couple of issues with WatiN’s “CaptureWebPageToFile” method, though: It blew up the first (and only) time I tried it, possibly because… It scrolls down to capture the entire web page (I tried it on a very long page), and I usually don’t need that Also, sometimes I don’t need a picture of the whole browser window - I just want a picture of the element that I'm testing (for example, proving that a button has the correct caption). I wrote a WatiN screenshot saver helper class with these methods: SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(Watin.Core.IE ie) / SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(Watin.Core.Element element) saves a screenshot of the browser window SaveBrowserWindowScreenshotWithHighlight(Watin.Core.Element element) saves a screenshot of the browser window, with the specified element scrolled into view and highlighted SaveElementScreenshot(Watin.Core.Element element) saves a picture of only the specified element The element highlighting improves on the built-in WatiN method (which just gives the element a yellow background, and makes the element pretty much unreadable when you have a light foreground color) by adding the ability to specify a HighlightCssClassName that points to a style in your site’s stylesheet. This code is specifically for testing with Internet Explorer (‘cause that’s what I have to test with at work), but you’re welcome to take it and do with it what you want… using System; using System.Drawing; using System.Drawing.Imaging; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Text; using System.Threading; using SHDocVw; using WatiN.Core; using mshtml; namespace BrianSchroer.TestHelpers { public static class WatinScreenshotSaver { public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshotWithHighlight (Element element, string screenshotName) { HighlightElement(element, true); SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(element, screenshotName); HighlightElement(element, false); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshotWithHighlight(Element element) { HighlightElement(element, true); SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(element); HighlightElement(element, false); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(Element element, string screenshotName) { SaveScreenshot(GetIe(element), screenshotName, SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(Element element) { SaveScreenshot(GetIe(element), null, SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(IE ie, string screenshotName) { SaveScreenshot(ie, screenshotName, SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(IE ie) { SaveScreenshot(ie, null, SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs); } public static void SaveElementScreenshot(Element element, string screenshotName) { // TODO: Figure out how to get browser window "chrome" size and not have to go to full screen: var iex = (InternetExplorerClass) GetIe(element).InternetExplorer; bool fullScreen = iex.FullScreen; if (!fullScreen) iex.FullScreen = true; ScrollIntoView(element); SaveScreenshot(GetIe(element), screenshotName, args => SaveElementBitmapForCallbackArgs(element, args)); iex.FullScreen = fullScreen; } public static void SaveElementScreenshot(Element element) { SaveElementScreenshot(element, null); } private static void SaveScreenshot(IE browser, string screenshotName, Action<ScreenshotCallbackArgs> screenshotCallback) { string fileName = string.Format("{0:000}{1}{2}.jpg", ++_screenshotCount, (string.IsNullOrEmpty(screenshotName)) ? "" : " ", screenshotName); string path = Path.Combine(ScreenshotDirectoryName, fileName); Console.WriteLine(); // Gallio HTML-encodes the following display, but I have a utility program to // remove the "HTML===" and "===HTML" and un-encode the rest to show images in the Gallio report: Console.WriteLine("HTML===<div><b>{0}:</br></b><img src=\"{1}\" /></div>===HTML", screenshotName, new Uri(path).AbsoluteUri); MakeBrowserWindowTopmost(browser); try { var args = new ScreenshotCallbackArgs { InternetExplorerClass = (InternetExplorerClass)browser.InternetExplorer, ScreenshotPath = path }; Thread.Sleep(100); screenshotCallback(args); } catch (Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine(ex.Message); } } public static void HighlightElement(Element element, bool doHighlight) { if (!element.Exists) return; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(HighlightCssClassName)) { element.Highlight(doHighlight); return; } string jsRef = element.GetJavascriptElementReference(); if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(jsRef)) return; var sb = new StringBuilder("try { "); sb.AppendFormat(" {0}.scrollIntoView(false);", jsRef); string format = (doHighlight) ? "{0}.className += ' {1}'" : "{0}.className = {0}.className.replace(' {1}', '')"; sb.AppendFormat(" " + format + ";", jsRef, HighlightCssClassName); sb.Append("} catch(e) {}"); string script = sb.ToString(); GetIe(element).RunScript(script); } public static void ScrollIntoView(Element element) { string jsRef = element.GetJavascriptElementReference(); if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(jsRef)) return; var sb = new StringBuilder("try { "); sb.AppendFormat(" {0}.scrollIntoView(false);", jsRef); sb.Append("} catch(e) {}"); string script = sb.ToString(); GetIe(element).RunScript(script); } public static void MakeBrowserWindowTopmost(IE ie) { ie.BringToFront(); SetWindowPos(ie.hWnd, HWND_TOPMOST, 0, 0, 0, 0, TOPMOST_FLAGS); } public static string HighlightCssClassName { get; set; } private static int _screenshotCount; private static string _screenshotDirectoryName; public static string ScreenshotDirectoryName { get { if (_screenshotDirectoryName == null) { var asm = Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(WatinScreenshotSaver)); var uri = new Uri(asm.CodeBase); var fileInfo = new FileInfo(uri.LocalPath); string directoryName = fileInfo.DirectoryName; _screenshotDirectoryName = Path.Combine( directoryName, string.Format("Screenshots_{0:yyyyMMddHHmm}", DateTime.Now)); Console.WriteLine("Screenshot folder: {0}", _screenshotDirectoryName); Directory.CreateDirectory(_screenshotDirectoryName); } return _screenshotDirectoryName; } set { _screenshotDirectoryName = value; _screenshotCount = 0; } } [DllImport("user32.dll")] [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)] private static extern bool SetWindowPos(IntPtr hWnd, IntPtr hWndInsertAfter, int X, int Y, int cx, int cy, uint uFlags); private static readonly IntPtr HWND_TOPMOST = new IntPtr(-1); private const UInt32 SWP_NOSIZE = 0x0001; private const UInt32 SWP_NOMOVE = 0x0002; private const UInt32 TOPMOST_FLAGS = SWP_NOMOVE | SWP_NOSIZE; private static IE GetIe(Element element) { if (element == null) return null; var container = element.DomContainer; while (container as IE == null) container = container.DomContainer; return (IE)container; } private static void SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs(ScreenshotCallbackArgs args) { InternetExplorerClass iex = args.InternetExplorerClass; SaveBitmap(args.ScreenshotPath, iex.Left, iex.Top, iex.Width, iex.Height); } private static void SaveElementBitmapForCallbackArgs(Element element, ScreenshotCallbackArgs args) { InternetExplorerClass iex = args.InternetExplorerClass; Rectangle bounds = GetElementBounds(element); SaveBitmap(args.ScreenshotPath, iex.Left + bounds.Left, iex.Top + bounds.Top, bounds.Width, bounds.Height); } /// <summary> /// This method is used instead of element.NativeElement.GetElementBounds because that /// method has a bug (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2994660&group_id=167632&atid=843727). /// </summary> private static Rectangle GetElementBounds(Element element) { var ieElem = element.NativeElement as WatiN.Core.Native.InternetExplorer.IEElement; IHTMLElement elem = ieElem.AsHtmlElement; int left = elem.offsetLeft; int top = elem.offsetTop; for (IHTMLElement parent = elem.offsetParent; parent != null; parent = parent.offsetParent) { left += parent.offsetLeft; top += parent.offsetTop; } return new Rectangle(left, top, elem.offsetWidth, elem.offsetHeight); } private static void SaveBitmap(string path, int left, int top, int width, int height) { using (var bitmap = new Bitmap(width, height)) { using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(bitmap)) { g.CopyFromScreen( new Point(left, top), Point.Empty, new Size(width, height) ); } bitmap.Save(path, ImageFormat.Jpeg); } } private class ScreenshotCallbackArgs { public InternetExplorerClass InternetExplorerClass { get; set; } public string ScreenshotPath { get; set; } } } }

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SQLAuthority News – Pluralsight Course Review – Practices for Software Startups – Part 1 of 2

- by pinaldave

This is first part of the two part series of Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. The course is written by Stephen Forte (Blog | Twitter). Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of the venture backed company, Telerik, a leading vendor of developer and team productivity tools. Stephen is also a Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Professional, PMP, and also speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on application and database development. Stephen is also a board member of the Scrum Alliance. Startups – Everybodies Dream Start-up companies are an important topic right now – everyone wants to start their own business. It is also important to remember that all companies were a start up at one point – from your corner store to the giants like Microsoft and Apple. Research proves that not every start-up succeeds, in fact, most will fail before their first year. There are many reasons for this, and this could be due to the fact that there are many stages to a start-up company, and stumbling at any of these stages can lead to failure. It is important to understand what makes a start-up company succeed at all its hurdles to become successful. It is even important to define success. For most start-ups this would mean becoming their own independently functioning company or to be bought out for a hefty profit by a larger company. The idea of making a hefty profit by living your dream is extremely important, and you can even think of start-ups as the new craze. That’s why studying them is so important – they are very popular, but things have changed a lot since their inception. Starting the Startups Beginning a start-up company used to be difficult, but now facilities and information is widely available, and it is much easier. But that means it is much easier to fail, also. Previously to start your own company, everything was planned and organized, resources were ensured and backed up before beginning; even the idea of starting your own business was a big thing. Now anybody can do it, and the steps are simple and outlines everywhere – you can get online software and easily outsource , cloud source, or crowdsource a lot of your material. But without the type of planning previously required, things can often go badly. New Products – New Ideas – New World There are so many fantastic new products, but they don’t reach success all the time. I find start-up companies very interesting, and whenever I meet someone who is interested in the subject or already starting their own company, I always ask what they are doing, their plans, goals, market, etc. I am sorry to say that in most cases, they cannot answer my questions. It is true that many fantastic ideas fail because of bad decisions. These bad decisions were not made intentionally, but people were simply unaware of what they should be doing. This will always lead to failure. But I am happy to say that all these issues can be gone because Pluralsight is now offering a course all about start-ups by Stephen Forte. Stephen is a start up leader. He has successfully started many companies and most are still going strong, or have gone on to even bigger and better things. Beginning Course on Startup I have always thought start-ups are a fascinating subject, and decided to take his course, but it is three hours long. This would be hard to fit into my busy work day all at once, so I decided to do half of his course before my daughter wakes up, and the other half after she goes to sleep. The course is divided into six modules, so this would be easy to do. I began the first chapter early in the morning, at 5 am. Stephen jumped right into the middle of the subject in the very first module – designing your business plan. The first question you will have to answer to yourself, to others, and to investors is: What is your product and when will we be able to see it? So a very important concept is a “minimal viable product.” This means setting goals for yourself and your product. We all have large dreams, but your minimal viable product doesn’t have to be your final vision at the very first. For example: Apple is a giant company, but it is still evolving. Steve Jobs didn’t envision the iPhone 6 at the very beginning. He had to start at the first iPhone and do his market research, and the idea evolved into the technology you see now. So for yourself, you should decide a beginning and stop point. Do your market research. Determine who you want to reach, what audience you want for your product. You can have a great idea that simply will not work in the market, do need, bottlenecks, lack of resources, or competition. There is a lot of research that needs to be done before you even write a business plan, and Stephen covers it in the very first chapter. The Team – Unique Key to Success After jumping right into the subject in the very first module, I wondered what Stephen could have in store for me for the rest of the course. Chapter number two is building a team. Having a team is important regardless of what your startup is. You can be a true visionary with endless ideas and energy, but one person can still not do everything. It is important to decide from the very beginning if you will have cofounders, team leaders, and how many employees you’ll need. Even more important, you’ll need to decide what kind of team you want – what personalities, skills, and type of energy you want each of your employees to bring. Do you want to have an A+ team with a B- idea, or do you have a B- idea that needs an A+ team to sell it? Stephen asks all the hard questions! I was especially impressed by his insight on developing. You have to decide if you need developers, how many, and what their skills should be. I found this insight extremely useful for everyday usage, not just for start-up companies. I would apply this kind of information in management at any position. An amazing team will build an amazing product – and that doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up company or a small team working for a much larger business. Customer Development – The Ultimate Obective Chapter three was about customer development. According to Stephen, there are four different steps to develop a customer base. The first question to ask yourself is if you are envisioning a large customer base buying a few products each, or a small, dedicated base that buys a lot of your product – quantity vs. Quality. He also discusses how to earn, retain, and get more customers. He also says that each customer should be placed in a different role – some will be like investors, who regularly spend with you and invest their money in your business. It is then your job to take that investment and turn it into a better product in the future. You need to deal with their money properly – think of it is as theirs as investors, not yours as profit. At the end of this module I felt that only Stephen could provide this kind of insight, and then he listed all the resources he took his information from. I have never seen a group of people so passionate about their customers. It was indeed a long day for me. In tomorrow’s part 2 we will discuss rest of the three module and also will see a quick video of the Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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TFS, G.I. Joe and Under-doing

If I were to rank the most consistently irritating parts of my work day, using TFS would come in first by a wide margin. Even repeated network outages this week seem like a pleasant reprieve from this monolithic beast. This is not a reflexive anti-Microsoft feeling, that attitude just wouldnt work for a consultant who does .NET development. It is also not an utter dismissal of TFS as worthless; Ive seen people use it effectively on several projects. So why? Ill start with a laundry list of shortcomings. An out of the box UI for work items that is insultingly bad, a source control system that is confoundingly fragile when handling merges, folder renames and long file names, the arcane XML wizardry necessary to customize a template and a build system that adds an extra layer of oddness on top of msbuild. Im sure my legion of readers will soon point out to me how I can work around all these issues, how this is fixed in TFS 2010 or with this add-in, and how once you have everything set up, youre fine. And theyd be right, any one of these problems could be worked around. If not dirty laundry, what else? I thought about it for a while, and came to the conclusion that TFS is so irritating to me because it represents a vision of software development that I find unappealing. To expand upon this, lets start with some wisdom from those great PSAs at the end of the G.I. Joe cartoons of the 80s: Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. In software development, Id go further and say knowing is more than half the battle. Understanding the dimensions of the problem you are trying to solve, the needs of the users, the value that your software can provide are more than half the battle. Implementation of this understanding is not easy, but it is not even possible without this knowledge. Assuming we have a fixed amount of time and mental energy for any project, why does this spell trouble for TFS? If you think about what TFS is doing, its offering you a huge array of options to track the day to day implementation of your project. From tasks, to code churn, to test coverage. All valuable metrics, but only in exchange for valuable time to get it all working. In addition, when you have a shiny toy like TFS, the temptation is to feel obligated to use it. So the push from TFS is to encourage a project manager and team to focus on process and metrics around process. You can get great visibility, and graphs to show your project stakeholders, but none of that is important if you are not implementing the right product. Not just unimportant, these activities can be harmful as they drain your time and sap your creativity away from the rest of the project. To be more concrete, lets suppose your organization has invested the time to create a template for your projects and trained people in how to use it, so there is no longer a big investment of time for each project to get up and running. First, Id challenge if that template could be specific enough to be full featured and still applicable for any project. Second, the very existence of this template would be a indication to a project manager that the success of their project was somehow directly related to fitting management of that project into this format. Again, while the capabilities are wonderful, the mirage is there; just get everything into TFS and your project will run smoothly. Ill close the loop on this first topic by proposing a thought experiment. Think of the projects youve worked on. How many times have you been chagrined to discover youve implemented the wrong feature, misunderstood how a feature should work or just plain spent too much time on a screen that nobody uses? That sounds like a really worthwhile area to invest time in improving. How about going back to these projects and thinking about how many times you wished you had optimized the state change flow of your tasks or been embarrassed to not have a code churn report linked back to the latest changeset? With thanks to the Real American Heroes, Ill move on to a more current influence, that of the developers at 37signals, and their philosophy towards software development. This philosophy, fully detailed in the books Getting Real and Rework, is a vision of software that under does the competition. This is software that is deliberately limited in functionality in order to concentrate fully on making sure ever feature that is there is awesome and needed. Why is this relevant? Well, in one of those fun seeming paradoxes in life, constraints can be a spark for creativity. Think Twitter, the small screen of an iPhone, the limitations of HTML for applications, the low memory limits of older or embedded system. As long as there is some freedom within those constraints, amazing things emerge. For project management, some of the most respected people in the industry recommend using just index cards, pens and tape. They argue that with change the constant in software development, your process should be as limited (yet rigorous) as possible. Looking at TFS, this is not a system designed to under do anybody. It is a big jumble of components and options, with every feature you could think of. Predictably this means many basic functions are hard to use. For task management, many people just use an Excel spreadsheet linked up to TFS. Not a stirring endorsement of the tooling there. TFS as a whole would be far more appealing to me if there was less of it, but better. Id cut 50% of the features to make the other half really amaze and inspire me. And thats really the heart of the matter. TFS has great promise and I want to believe it can work better. But ultimately it focuses your attention on a lot of stuff that doesnt really matter and then clamps down your creativity in a mess of forms and dialogs obscuring what does. --- Relevant Links --- All those great G.I. Joe PSAs are on YouTube, including lots of mashed up versions. A simple Google search will get you on the right track.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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Who IS Brian Solis?

- by Michael Snow

Q: Brian, Welcome to the WebCenter Blog. Can you tell our readers your current role and what career path brought you here? A: I’m proudly serving as a principal analyst at Altimeter Group, a research based advisory firm in Silicon Valley. My career path, well, let’s just say it’s a long and winding road. As a kid, I was fascinated with technology. I learned programming at an early age and found myself naturally drawn to all things tech. I started my career as a database programmer at a technology marketing agency in Southern California. When I saw the chance to work with tech companies and help them better market their capabilities to businesses and consumers, I switched focus from programming to marketing and advertising. As technologist, my approach to marketing was different. I didn’t believe in hype, fluff or buzz words. I believed in translating features into benefits and specifications and capabilities into solutions for real world problems and opportunities. In the mid 90’s I experimented with direct to consumer/customer engagement in dedicated technology forums and boards. I quickly realized that the entire approach to do so would need to change. Therefore, I learned and developed new methods for a more social and informed way of engaging people in ways that helped them, marketed the company, and also tied to tangible benefits for the company. This work would lead me to start an agency in 1999 dedicated to interactive marketing. As I continued to experiment with interactive platforms, I developed interesting methods for converting one-to-many forms of media into one-to-one-to-many programs. I ran that company until joining Altimeter Group. Along the way, in the early 2000s, I realized that everything was changing and that there were others like me finding success in what would become a more social form of media. I dedicated a significant amount of my time to sharing everything that I learned in the form of articles, blogs, and eventually books. My mission became to share my experience with anyone who’d listen. It would later become much bigger than marketing, this would lead to a decade of work, that still continues, in business transformation. Then and now, I find myself always assuming the role of a student. Q: As an industry analyst & technology change evangelist, what are you primarily focused on these days? A: As a digital analyst, I study how disruptive technology impacts business. As an aspiring social scientist, I study how technology affects human behavior. I explore both horizons professionally and personally to better understand the future of popular culture and also the opportunities that exist for organizations to improve relationships and experiences with customers and the people that are important to them. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? A: The line between work and life isn’t blurred it’s been overtly crossed and erased. We live in an always on society. The digital lifestyle keeps us connected to one another it keeps us connected all the time. Whether your sending or checking email, trying to catch up, or simply trying to get ahead, people are spending the equivalent of an extra day at work in the time they spend out of work…working. That’s absurd. It’s a matter of survival. It’s also a matter of unintended, subconscious self-causation. We brought this on ourselves and continue to do so. Think about your day. You’re in meetings for the better part of each day. You probably spend evenings and weekends catching up on email and actually doing the work you couldn’t get to during the day. And, your co-workers and executives are doing the same thing. So if you try to slow down, you find yourself at a disadvantage as you’re willfully pulling yourself out of an unfortunate culture of whenever wherever business dynamics. If you’re unresponsive or unreachable, someone within your organization or on your team is accessible. Over time, this could contribute to unfavorable impressions. I choose to steer my life balance in ways that complement one another. But, I don’t pretend to have this figured out by any means. In fact, I find myself swimming upstream like those around me. It’s essentially a competition for relevance and at some point I’ll learn how to earn attention and relevance while redrawing the line between work and life. Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? A: The easy answer is that people can keep up with me at briansolis.com. But, I also try to reach people where their attention is focused. Whether it’s Facebook (facebook.com/briansolis), Twitter (@briansolis), Google+ (+briansolis), Youtube (briansolis.tv) or through books and conferences, people can usually find me in a place of their choosing. Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon? A: I spent some time with the Oracle team reviewing the idea of Digital Darwinism and how technology and society are evolving faster than many organizations can adapt. Digital Darwinism: How Brands Can Survive the Rapid Evolution of Society and Technology Thursday, December 13, 2012, 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast? A: We’re inviting guests to join us online as we dive into the future of business and how the convergence of technology and connected consumerism would ultimately impact how business is done. It’ll be an exciting and revealing conversation that explores just how much everything is changing. We’ll also review the importance of adapting to emergent trends and how to compete for the future. It’s important to recognize that change is not happening to us, it’s happening because of us. We are part of the revolution and therefore we need to help organizations adapt from the inside out. Watch the Entire Oracle Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series On-Demand and Stay Tuned for More to Come in 2013!

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Cloud Based Load Testing Using TF Service & VS 2013

- by Tarun Arora [Microsoft MVP]

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TarunArora/archive/2013/06/30/cloud-based-load-testing-using-tf-service-amp-vs-2013.aspx One of the new features announced as part of the Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Preview is ‘Cloud Based Load Testing’. In this blog post I’ll walk you through, What is Cloud Based Load Testing? How have I been using this feature? – Success story! Where can you find more resources on this feature? What is Cloud Based Load Testing? It goes without saying that performance testing your application not only gives you the confidence that the application will work under heavy levels of stress but also gives you the ability to test how scalable the architecture of your application is. It is important to know how much is too much for your application! Working with various clients in the industry I have realized that the biggest barriers in Load Testing & Performance Testing adoption are, High infrastructure and administration cost that comes with this phase of testing Time taken to procure & set up the test infrastructure Finding use for this infrastructure investment after completion of testing Is cloud the answer? 100% Visual Studio Compatible Scalable and Realistic Start testing in < 2 minutes Intuitive Pay only for what you need Use existing on premise tests on cloud There are a lot of vendors out there offering Cloud Based Load Testing, to name a few, Load Storm Soasta Blaze Meter Blitz And others… The question you may want to ask is, why should you go with Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test offering. If you are a Microsoft shop or already have investments in Microsoft technologies, you’ll see great benefit in the natural integration this offers with existing Microsoft products such as Visual Studio and Windows Azure. For example, your existing Web tests authored in Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2012 will run on the cloud without requiring any modifications what so ever. Microsoft’s cloud test rig also supports API based testing, for example, if you are building a WPF application which consumes WCF services, you can write unit tests to invoke the WCF service, these tests can be run on the cloud test rig and loaded with ‘N’ concurrent users for performance testing. If you have your assets already hosted in the Azure and possibly in the same data centre as the Cloud test rig, your Azure app will not incur a usage cost because of the generated traffic since the traffic is coming from the same data centre. The licensing or pricing information on Microsoft’s cloud based Load test service is yet to be announced, but I would expect this to be priced attractively to match the market competition. The only additional configuration required for running load tests on Microsoft Cloud based Load Tests service is to select the Test run location as Run tests using Visual Studio Team Foundation Service, How have I been using Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test Service? I have been part of the Microsoft Cloud Based Load Test Service advisory council for the last 7 months. This gave the opportunity to see the product shape up from concept to working solution. I was also the first person outside of Microsoft to try this offering out. This gave me the opportunity to test real world application at various clients using the Microsoft Load Test Service and provide real world feedback to the Microsoft product team. One of the most recent systems I tested using the Load Test Service has been an insurance quote generation engine. This insurance quote generation engine is, hosted in Windows Azure expected to get quote requests from across the globe expected to handle 5 Million quote requests in a day (not clear how this load will be distributed across the day) There was no way, I could simulate such kind of load from on premise without standing up additional hardware. But Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test service allowed me to test my key performance testing scenarios, i.e. Simulate expected Load, Endurance Testing, Threshold Testing and Testing for Latency. Simulating expected load: approach to devising a load pattern My approach to devising a load test pattern has been to run the test scenario with 1 user to figure out the response time. Then work out how many users are required to reach the target load. So, for example, to invoke 1 quote from the quote engine software takes 0.5 seconds. Now if you do the math, 1 quote request by 1 user = 0.5 seconds quotes generated by 1 user in 24 hour = 1 * (((2 * 60) * 60) * 24) = 172,800 quotes generated by 30 users in 24 hours = 172,800 * 30 = 5,184,000 This was a very simple example, if your application requires more concurrent users to test scenario’s such as caching, etc then you can devise your own load pattern, some examples of load test patterns can be found here. Endurance Testing To test for endurance, I loaded the quote generation engine with an expected fixed user load and ran the test for very long duration such as over 48 hours and observed the affect of the long running test on the Azure infrastructure. Currently Microsoft Load Test service does not support metrics from the machine under test. I used Azure diagnostics to begin with, but later started using Cerebrata Azure Diagnostics Manager to capture the metrics of the machine under test. Threshold Testing To figure out how much user load the application could cope with before falling on its belly, I opted to step load the quote generation engine by incrementing user load with different variations of incremental user load per minute till the application crashed out and forced an IIS reset. Testing for Latency Currently the Microsoft Load Test service does not support generating geographically distributed load, I however, deployed the insurance quote generation engine in different Azure data centres and ran the same set of performance tests to measure for latency. Because I could compare load test results from different runs by exporting the results to excel (this feature is provided out of the box right from Visual Studio 2010) I could see the different in response times. More resources on Microsoft Cloud based Load Test Service A few important links to get you started, Download Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Preview Getting started guide for load testing using Team Foundation Service Troubleshooting guide for FAQs and known issues Team Foundation Service forum for questions and support Detailed demo and presentation (link to Tech-Ed session recording) Detailed demo and presentation (link to Build session recording) There a few limits on the usage of Microsoft Cloud based Load Test service that you can read about here. If you have any feedback on Microsoft Cloud based Load Test service, feel free to share it with the product team via the Visual Studio User Voice forum. I hope you found this useful. Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Stay tuned!

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RSS feeds in Orchard

- by Bertrand Le Roy

When we added RSS to Orchard, we wanted to make it easy for any module to expose any contents as a feed. We also wanted the rendering of the feed to be handled by Orchard in order to minimize the amount of work from the module developer. A typical example of such feed exposition is of course blog feeds. We have an IFeedManager interface for which you can get the built-in implementation through dependency injection. Look at the BlogController constructor for an example: public BlogController( IOrchardServices services, IBlogService blogService, IBlogSlugConstraint blogSlugConstraint, IFeedManager feedManager, RouteCollection routeCollection) { If you look a little further in that same controller, in the Item action, you’ll see a call to the Register method of the feed manager: _feedManager.Register(blog); This in reality is a call into an extension method that is specialized for blogs, but we could have made the two calls to the actual generic Register directly in the action instead, that is just an implementation detail: feedManager.Register(blog.Name, "rss", new RouteValueDictionary { { "containerid", blog.Id } }); feedManager.Register(blog.Name + " - Comments", "rss", new RouteValueDictionary { { "commentedoncontainer", blog.Id } }); What those two effective calls are doing is to register two feeds: one for the blog itself and one for the comments on the blog. For each call, the name of the feed is provided, then we have the type of feed (“rss”) and some values to be injected into the generic RSS route that will be used later to route the feed to the right providers. This is all you have to do to expose a new feed. If you’re only interested in exposing feeds, you can stop right there. If on the other hand you want to know what happens after that under the hood, carry on. What happens after that is that the feedmanager will take care of formatting the link tag for the feed (see FeedManager.GetRegisteredLinks). The GetRegisteredLinks method itself will be called from a specialized filter, FeedFilter. FeedFilter is an MVC filter and the event we’re interested in hooking into is OnResultExecuting, which happens after the controller action has returned an ActionResult and just before MVC executes that action result. In other words, our feed registration has already been called but the view is not yet rendered. Here’s the code for OnResultExecuting: model.Zones.AddAction("head:after", html => html.ViewContext.Writer.Write( _feedManager.GetRegisteredLinks(html))); This is another piece of code whose execution is differed. It is saying that whenever comes time to render the “head” zone, this code should be called right after. The code itself is rendering the link tags. As a result of all that, here’s what can be found in an Orchard blog’s head section: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Tales from the Evil Empire" href="/rss?containerid=5" /> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Tales from the Evil Empire - Comments" href="/rss?commentedoncontainer=5" /> The generic action that these two feeds point to is Index on FeedController. That controller has three important dependencies: an IFeedBuilderProvider, an IFeedQueryProvider and an IFeedItemProvider. Different implementations of these interfaces can provide different formats of feeds, such as RSS and Atom. The Match method enables each of the competing providers to provide a priority for themselves based on arbitrary criteria that can be found on the FeedContext. This means that a provider can be selected based not only on the desired format, but also on the nature of the objects being exposed as a feed or on something even more arbitrary such as the destination device (you could imagine for example giving shorter text only excerpts of posts on mobile devices, and full HTML on desktop). The key here is extensibility and dynamic competition and collaboration from unknown and loosely coupled parts. You’ll find this pattern pretty much everywhere in the Orchard architecture. The RssFeedBuilder implementation of IFeedBuilderProvider is also a regular controller with a Process action that builds a RssResult, which is itself a thin ActionResult wrapper around an XDocument. Let’s get back to the FeedController’s Index action. After having called into each known feed builder to get its priority on the currently requested feed, it will select the one with the highest priority. The next thing it needs to do is to actually fetch the data for the feed. This again is a collaborative effort from a priori unknown providers, the implementations of IFeedQueryProvider. There are several implementations by default in Orchard, the choice of which is again done through a Match method. ContainerFeedQuery for example chimes in when a “containerid” parameter is found in the context (see URL in the link tag above): public FeedQueryMatch Match(FeedContext context) { var containerIdValue = context.ValueProvider.GetValue("containerid"); if (containerIdValue == null) return null; return new FeedQueryMatch { FeedQuery = this, Priority = -5 }; } The actual work is done in the Execute method, which finds the right container content item in the Orchard database and adds elements for each of them. In other words, the feed query provider knows how to retrieve the list of content items to add to the feed. The last step is to translate each of the content items into feed entries, which is done by implementations of IFeedItemBuilder. There is no Match method this time. Instead, all providers are called with the collection of items (or more accurately with the FeedContext, but this contains the list of items, which is what’s relevant in most cases). Each provider can then choose to pick those items that it knows how to treat and transform them into the format requested. This enables the construction of heterogeneous feeds that expose content items of various types into a single feed. That will be extremely important when you’ll want to expose a single feed for all your site. So here are feeds in Orchard in a nutshell. The main point here is that there is a fair number of components involved, with some complexity in implementation in order to allow for extreme flexibility, but the part that you use to expose a new feed is extremely simple and light: declare that you want your content exposed as a feed and you’re done. There are cases where you’ll have to dive in and provide new implementations for some or all of the interfaces involved, but that requirement will only arise as needed. For example, you might need to create a new feed item builder to include your custom content type but that effort will be extremely focused on the specialized task at hand. The rest of the system won’t need to change. So what do you think?

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