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• 11 Types of Developers

  - by Lee Brandt

  Jack Dawson Jack Dawson is the homeless drifter in Titanic. At one point in the movie he says, “I figure life’s a gift, and I don’t intend on wasting it.” He is happy to wander wherever life takes him. He works himself from place to place, making just enough money to make it to his next adventure. The “Jack Dawson” developer clings on to any new technology as the ‘next big thing’, and will find ways to shoe-horn it in to places where it is not a fit. He is very appealing to the other developers because they want to try the newest techniques and tools too, He will only stay until the new technology either bores him or becomes problematic. Jack will also be hard to find once the technology has been implemented, because he will be on to the next shiny thing. However, having a Jack Dawson on your team can be beneficial. Jack can be a great ally when attempting to convince a stodgy, corporate entity to upgrade. Jack usually has an encyclopedic recall of all the new features of the technology upgrade and is more than happy to interject them in any conversation. Tom Smykowski Tom is the neurotic employee in Office Space, and is deathly afraid of being fired. He will do only what is necessary to keep the status quo. He believes as long as nothing changes, his job is safe. He will scoff at anything new and be the naysayer during any change initiative. Tom can be useful in off-setting Jack Dawson. Jack will constantly be pushing for change and Tom will constantly be fighting it. When you see that Jack is getting kind of bored with a new technology and Tom has finally stopped wetting himself at the mere mention of it, then it is probably the sweet spot of beginning to implement that new technology (providing it is the right tool for the job). Ray Consella Ray is the guy who built the Field of Dreams. He took a risk. Sometimes he screwed it up, but he knew he didn’t want to end up regretting not attempting it. He constantly doubted himself, but he knew he had to keep going. Granted, he was doing what the voices in his head were telling him to do, but my point is he was driven to do something that most people considered crazy. Even when his friends, his wife and even he told himself he was crazy, somewhere inside himself, he knew it was the right thing to do. These are the innovators. These are the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of the world. The take risks, they fail, they learn and the get better. Obviously, this kind of person thrives in start-ups and smaller companies, but that is due to their natural aversion to bureaucracy. They want to see their ideas put into motion quickly, and withdrawn quickly if it doesn’t work. Short feedback cycles are essential to Ray. He wants to know if his idea is working or not. He wants to modify or reverse his idea if it is not working or makes things worse. These are the agilistas. May I always be one.

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• SQL SERVER – Data Pages in Buffer Pool – Data Stored in Memory Cache

  - by pinaldave

  This will drop all the clean buffers so we will be able to start again from there. Now, run the following script and check the execution plan of the query. Have you ever wondered what types of data are there in your cache? During SQL Server Trainings, I am usually asked if there is any way one can know how much data in a table is stored in the memory cache? The more detailed question I usually get is if there are multiple indexes on table (and used in a query), were the data of the single table stored multiple times in the memory cache or only for a single time? Here is a query you can run to figure out what kind of data is stored in the cache. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT COUNT(*) AS cached_pages_count, name AS BaseTableName, IndexName, IndexTypeDesc FROM sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors AS bd INNER JOIN ( SELECT s_obj.name, s_obj.index_id, s_obj.allocation_unit_id, s_obj.OBJECT_ID, i.name IndexName, i.type_desc IndexTypeDesc FROM ( SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) AS name, index_id ,allocation_unit_id, OBJECT_ID FROM sys.allocation_units AS au INNER JOIN sys.partitions AS p ON au.container_id = p.hobt_id AND (au.type = 1 OR au.type = 3) UNION ALL SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) AS name, index_id, allocation_unit_id, OBJECT_ID FROM sys.allocation_units AS au INNER JOIN sys.partitions AS p ON au.container_id = p.partition_id AND au.type = 2 ) AS s_obj LEFT JOIN sys.indexes i ON i.index_id = s_obj.index_id AND i.OBJECT_ID = s_obj.OBJECT_ID ) AS obj ON bd.allocation_unit_id = obj.allocation_unit_id WHERE database_id = DB_ID() GROUP BY name, index_id, IndexName, IndexTypeDesc ORDER BY cached_pages_count DESC; GO Now let us run the query above and observe the output of the same. We can see in the above query that there are four columns. Cached_Pages_Count lists the pages cached in the memory. BaseTableName lists the original base table from which data pages are cached. IndexName lists the name of the index from which pages are cached. IndexTypeDesc lists the type of index. Now, let us do one more experience here. Please note that you should not run this test on a production server as it can extremely reduce the performance of the database. DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS This will drop all the clean buffers and we will be able to start again from there. Now run following script and check the execution plan for the same. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT UnitPrice, ModifiedDate FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail WHERE SalesOrderDetailID BETWEEN 1 AND 100 GO The execution plans contain the usage of two different indexes. Now, let us run the script that checks the pages cached in SQL Server. It will give us the following output. It is clear from the Resultset that when more than one index is used, datapages related to both or all of the indexes are stored in Memory Cache separately. Let me know what you think of this article. I had a great pleasure while writing this article because I was able to write on this subject, which I like the most. In the next article, we will exactly see what data are cached and those that are not cached, using a few undocumented commands. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: DMV, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL DMV

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• Innovative SPARC: Lighting a Fire Under Oracle's New Hardware Business

  - by Paulo Folgado

  "There's a certain level of things you can do with commercially available parts," says Oracle Executive Vice President Mike Splain. But, he notes, you can do so much more if you design the parts yourself. Mike Splain,EVP, OracleYou can, for example, design cryptographic accelerators into your microprocessors so customers can run their networks fully encrypted if they choose.Of course, it helps if you've already built multiple processing "cores" into those chips so they can handle all that encrypting and decrypting while still getting their other work done.System on a ChipAs the leader of Oracle Microelectronics, Mike knows how implementing clever innovations in silicon can give systems a real competitive advantage.The SPARC microprocessors that his team designed at Sun pioneered the concept of multiple cores several years ago, and the UltraSPARC T2 processor--the industry's first "system on a chip"--packs up to eight cores per chip, each running as many as eight threads at once. That's the most cores and threads of any general-purpose processor. Looking back, Mike points out that the real value of large enterprise-class servers was their ability to run a lot of very large applications in parallel."The beauty of our CMT [chip multi-threading] machines is you can get that same kind of parallel-processing capability at a much lower cost and in a much smaller footprint," he says.The Whole StackWhat has Mike excited these days is that suddenly the opportunity to innovate is much bigger as part of Oracle."In my group, we used to look up the software stack and say, 'We can do any innovation we want, provided the only thing we have to change is what's in the Solaris operating system'--or maybe Java," he says. "If we wanted to change things beyond that, we'd have to go outside the walls of Sun and we'd have to convince the vendors: 'You have to align with us, you have to test with us, you have to build for us, and then you'll reap the benefits.' Now we get access to the entire stack. We can look all the way through the stack and say, 'Okay, what would make the database go faster? What would make the middleware go faster?'"Changing the WorldMike and his microelectronics team also like the fact that Oracle is not just any software company. We're #1 in database, middleware, business intelligence, and more."We're like all the other engineers from Sun; we believe we can change the world, if we can just figure out how to get people to pay attention to us," he says. "Now there's a mechanism at Oracle--much more so than we ever had at Sun."He notes, too, that every innovation in SPARC has involved some combination of hardware and softwareoptimization."Take our cryptography framework, for example. Sure, we can accelerate rapidly, but the Solaris OS has to provide the right set of interfaces that applications can tap into," Mike says. "Same thing with our multicore architecture. We have to have software that can utilize all those threads and run in parallel." His engineers, he points out, have never been interested in producing chips that sell as mere components."Our chips are always designed to go into systems and be combined with various pieces of software," he says. "Our job is to enable the creation of systems."

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• Regular Expressions Cookbook Is in The Money—Win a Copy

  - by Jan Goyvaerts

  %COOKBOOKFRAME%You may have heard some people say that most book authors never get any royalties. That’s not true because most authors get an advance royalty that is paid before the book is published. That’s the author’s main incentive for writing the book, at least as far as money is concerned. (If money is your main concern, don’t write books.) What is true is that most authors never see any money beyond the advance royalty. Royalty rates are very low. A 10% royalty of the publisher’s price is considered normal. The publisher’s price is usually 45% of the retail price. So if you pay full price in a bookstore, the author gets 4.5% of your money. If there’s more than one author, they split the royalty. It doesn’t take a math degree to figure out that a book needs to sell quite a few copies for the royalty to add up to a meaningful amount of money. But Steven and I must have done something right. Regular Expressions Cookbook is in the money. My royalty statement for the 3rd quartier of 2009, which is the 2nd quarter that the book was on the market, came with a check. I actually received it last month but didn’t get around to blogging about. The amount of the check is insignificant. The point is that the balance is no longer negative. I’m taking this opportunity to pat myself and my co-author on the back. To celebrate the occassion O’Reilly has offered to sponsor a give-away of five (5) copies of Regular Expressions Cookbook. These are the rules of the game: You must post a comment to this blog article including your actual name and actual email address. Names are published, email addresses are not. Comments are moderated by myself (Jan Goyvaerts). If I consider a comment to be offensive or spam it will not be published and not be eligible for any prize. If you don’t know what to say in the comment, just wish me a happy 100000nd birthday, so I don’t have to feel so bad about entering the 6-bit era. Each person commenting has only one chance to win, regardless of the number of comments posted. O’Reilly will be provided with the names and email addresses of the winners (and those email addresses only) in order to arrange delivery. Each winner can choose to receive a printed copy or ebook (DRM-free PDF). If you choose the printed book, O’Reilly pays for shipping to anywhere in the world but not for any duties or taxes your country may impose on books imported from the USA. If you choose the ebook, you’ll need to create an O’Reilly account that is then granted access to the PDF download. You can make your choice after you’ve won, so it doesn’t influence your chance of winning. Contest ends 28 February 2010, GMT+7 (Thai time). Chosen by five calls to Random(78)+1 in Delphi 2010, the winners are: 48: Xiaozu 45: David Chisholm 19: Miquel Burns 33: Aaron Rice 17: David Laing Thanks to everybody who participated. The winners have been notified by email on how to collect their prize.

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• Amazon Product Advertising API SOAP Namespace Changes

  - by Rick Strahl

  About two months ago (twowards the end of February 2012 I think) Amazon decided to change the namespace of the Product Advertising API. The error that would come up was: <ItemSearchResponse > was not expected. If you've used the Amazon Product Advertising API you probably know that Amazon has made it a habit to break the services every few years or so and I guess last month was about the time for another one. Basically the service namespace of the document has been changed and responses from the service just failed outright even though the rest of the schema looks fine. Now I looked around for a while trying to find a recent update to the Product Advertising API - something semi-official looking but everything is dated around 2009. Really??? And it's not just .NET - the newest thing on the sample/APIs is dated early 2011 and a handful of 2010 samples. There are newer full APIs for the 'cloud' offerings, but the Product Advertising API apparently isn't part of that. After searching for quite a bit trying to trace this down myself and trying some of the newer samples (which also failed) I found an obscure forum post that describes the solution of getting past the namespace issue. FWIW, I've been using an old version of the Product Advertising API using the old Microsoft WSE3 services (pre-WCF), which provides some of the WS* security features required by the Amazon service. The fix for this code is to explicitly override the namespace declaration on each of the imported service method signatures. The old service namespace (at least on my build) was: http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2009-03-31 and it should be changed to: http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2011-08-01 Change it on the class header:[Microsoft.Web.Services3.Messaging.SoapService("http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2011-08-01")] [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute(typeof(Property[]))] [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute(typeof(BrowseNode[]))] [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute(typeof(TransactionItem[]))] public partial class AWSECommerceService : Microsoft.Web.Services3.Messaging.SoapClient { and on all method signatures:[Microsoft.Web.Services3.Messaging.SoapMethodAttribute("http://soap.amazon.com/ItemSearch")] [return: System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("ItemSearchResponse", Namespace="http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2011-08-01")] public ItemSearchResponse ItemSearch(ItemSearch ItemSearch1) { Microsoft.Web.Services3.SoapEnvelope results = base.SendRequestResponse("ItemSearch", ItemSearch1); return ((ItemSearchResponse)(results.GetBodyObject(typeof(ItemSearchResponse), this.SoapServiceAttribute.TargetNamespace))); } It's easy to do with a Search and Replace on the above strings. Amazon Services <rant> FWIW, I've not been impressed by Amazon's service offerings. While the services work well, their documentation and tool support is absolutely horrendous. I was recently working with a customer on an old AWS application and their old API had been completely removed with a new API that wasn't even a close match. One old API call resulted in requiring three different APIs to perform the same functionality. We had to re-write the entire piece from scratch essentially. The documentation was downright wrong, and incomplete and so scattered it was next to impossible to follow. The examples weren't examples at all - they're mockups of real service calls with fake data that didn't even provide everything that was required to make same service calls work. Additionally there appears to be just about no public support from Amazon, only peer support which is sparse at best - and getting a hold of somebody at Amazon, even for pay seems to be mythical task. It's a terrible business model they have going. I can't see why anybody would put themselves through this sort of customer and development experience. Sad really, but an experience we see more and more these days. Nobody puts in the time to document anything anymore, leaving it to devs to figure this stuff out over and over again… </rant>© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in CSharp  Web Services   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• From the Tips Box: Pre-installation Prep Work Makes Service Pack Upgrades Smoother

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Last month Microsoft rolled out Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and, like many SP releases, quite a few people are hanging back to see what happens. If you want to update but still error on the side of caution, reader Ron Troy  offers a step-by-step guide. Ron’s cautious approach does an excellent job minimizing the number of issues that could crop up in a Service Pack upgrade by doing a thorough job updating your driver sets and clearing out old junk before you roll out the update. Read on to see how he does it: Just wanted to pass on a suggestion for people worried about installing Service Packs.  I came up with a ‘method’ a couple years back that seems to work well. Run Windows / Microsoft Update to get all updates EXCEPT the Service Pack. Use Secunia PSI to find any other updates you need. Use CCleaner or the Windows disk cleanup tools to get rid of all the old garbage out there.  Make sure that you include old system updates. Obviously, back up anything you really care about.  An image backup can be real nice to have if things go wrong. Download the correct SP version from Microsoft.com; do not use Windows / Microsoft Update to get it.  Make sure you have the 64 bit version if that’s what you have installed on your PC. Make sure that EVERYTHING that affects the OS is up to date.  That includes all sorts of drivers, starting with video and audio.  And if you have an Intel chipset, use the Intel Driver Utility to update those drivers.  It’s very quick and easy.  For the video and audio drivers, some can be updated by Intel, some by utilities on the vendor web sites, and some you just have to figure out yourself.  But don’t be lazy here; old drivers and Windows Service Packs are a poor mix. If you have 3rd party software, check to see if they have any updates for you.  They might not say that they are for the Service Pack but you cut your risk of things not working if you do this. Shut off the Antivirus software (especially if 3rd party). Reboot, hitting F8 to get the SafeMode menu.  Choose SafeMode with Networking. Log into the Administrator account to ensure that you have the right to install the SP. Run the SP.  It won’t be very fancy this way.  Maybe 45 minutes later it will reboot and then finish configuring itself, finally letting you log in. Total installation time on most of my PC’s was about 1 hour but that followed hours of preparation on each. On a separate note, I recently got on the Nvidia web site and their utility told me I had a new driver available for my GeForce 8600M GS.  This laptop had come with Vista, now has Win 7 SP1.  I had a big surprise from this driver update; the Windows Experience Score on the graphics side went way up.  Kudo’s to Nvidia for doing a driver update that actually helps day to day usage.  And unlike ATI’s updates (which I need for my AGP based system), this update was fairly quick and very easy.  Also, Nvidia drivers have never, as I can recall, given me BSOD’s, many of which I’ve gotten from ATI (TDR errors).How to Enable Google Chrome’s Secret Gold IconHTG Explains: What’s the Difference Between the Windows 7 HomeGroups and XP-style Networking?Internet Explorer 9 Released: Here’s What You Need To Know

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• How do I fix my resolution after Directx install through Steam?

  - by Justin

  I'm a bit long-winded so see bottom for quick version and specs. Friendly Hello: Hello all on these askUbuntu pages, I just recently built my own computer and decided to switch to Ubuntu for the extra coolness. I've been learning a lot through all this, and mostly been trying to figure out issues on my own (read: Google searches). However, I couldn't seem to find others with this problem so I've come here for help. Detailed Recount: So I just used WINE and WINETRICKS to install Steam. All went well and it worked. Then I went to trying a game out. I remembered that Orcs Must Die! worked from http://www.steamgamesonlinux.com/ so I tried that out. After selecting to download it, that's when the problem occurred. The screen suddenly zoomed in!!! I think it's the resolution right? Half the screen is cut off and I can't see parts of the right side of windows. My theory is that this is due to Direct X being installed through Steam, as Steam automatically installed it as I chose to download the game. It didn't even ask me to install Direct X or not ): It all happened so fast. This all being said, the game works fine! It looks a little strange, as if the resolution was off, but it plays just fine. What I did so far: Restarted my computer. Didn't work -_- Researched Steam installing DirectX on Ubuntu then messing up resolution and couldn't really find anything. Researched uninstalling DirectX from Ubuntu but only found uninstalling DirectX after having been installed with Wine, not through Steam. Got mad and ate my feelings. Tried "xrandr -s 0" but it didn't do anything. Ran xrandr alone and terminal showed this: Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 640 x 480, maximum 16384 x 16384 DVI-I-0 connected 640x480+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm 640x480 59.9*+ 320x240 120.1 DVI-I-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) HDMI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) DP-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) DVI-D-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) DP-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) About now I was mad so I played Odin's Sphere then took a nap. Back to it! I entered the following: xrandr --output DVI-I-0 --mode 1024x768 But I was met with this message: xrandr: cannot find mode 1024x768 I get the same messages for 800x600, 1400x1050, and seemingly any other combination of numbers. I then tried Going into System Settings then Displays, then playing around in there. My Resolution is set to 640x480 and there are no other options for me to choose from. Rotation has Normal, Clockwise, Counter Clockwise, and 180 Degrees. It's set to Normal and I haven't messed with that. Launcher Placement has Unknown and All Displays as its two options. It's set to Unknown, but moving it to All Displays doesn't seem to do anything. Finally, when I click Detect Displays, nothing seems to happen. Quick Version: Linux noob. Steam installed with Wine and Winetricks. Steam downloaded and installed game + DirectX. Resolution messed up now (I think; pretty sure), can't fix it, very annoying, no idea what's going on, halp! Specs: Ubuntu Version 12.04 Wine Version 1.4.1 Have not changed any settings in Wine Using Winetricks Graphics Card: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=4361#sp Drivers: Proprietary (Installing those were a LOT of fun) Also let it be known that I have a DVI to VGA cord running from my Graphics card to my monitor. If any more information is needed I am ready to report. Thank You: Thanks a lot for your help and all the work you do to support noob ubuntuers like me (:

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• Observations From The Corner of a Starbucks

  - by Chris Williams

  I’ve spent the last 3 days sitting in a Starbucks for 4-8 hours at a time. As a result, I’ve observed a lot of interesting behavior and people (most of whom were uninteresting themselves.) One of the things I’ve noticed is that most people don’t sit down. They come in, get their drink and go. The ones that do sit down, stay much longer than it takes to consume their drink. The drink is just an incidental purchase. Certainly not the reason they are here. Most of the people who sit also have laptops. Probably around 75%. Only a few have kids (with them) but the ones that do, have very small kids. Toddlers or younger. Of all the “campers” only a small percentage are wearing headphone, presumably because A) external noise doesn’t bother them or B) they aren’t working on anything important. My buddy George falls into category A, but he grew up in a house full of people. Silence freaks him out far more than noise. My brother and I, on the other hand, were both only children and don’t handle noisy distractions well. He needs it quiet (like a tomb) and I need music. Go figure… I can listen to Britney Spears mixed with Apoptygma Berzerk and Anthrax and crank out 30 pages, but if your toddler is banging his spoon on the table, you’re getting a dirty look… unless I have music, then all is right with the world. Anyway, enough about me. Most of the people who come in as a group are smiling when they enter. Half as many are smiling when they leave. People who come in alone typically aren’t smiling at all. The average age, over the last three days seems to be early 30s… with a couple of senior citizens and teenagers at either end of the curve. The teenagers almost never stay. They have better stuff to do on a nice day. The senior citizens are split nearly evenly between campers and in&outs. Most of the non-solo campers have 1 person with a laptop, while the other reads the paper or a book. Some campers bring multiple laptops… but only really look at one of them. This Starbucks has a drive through. The line is almost never more than 2-3 cars long but apparently a lot of the in&out people would rather come in and stand in line behind (up to) 5 people. The music in here sucks. My musical tastes can best be described as eclectic to bad, but I can still get work done (see above.) I find the music in this particular Starbucks to be discordant and jarring. At this Starbucks, the coffee lingo is apparently something that is meant to occur between employees only. The nice lady at the counter can handle orders in plain English and translate them to Baristaspeak (Baristese?) quite efficiently. If you order in Baristaspeak however, she will look confused and repeat your order back to you in plain English to confirm you actually meant what you said. Then she will say it in Baristaspeak to the lady making your drink. Nobody in this Starbucks (other than the Baristas) makes eye-contact… at least not with me. Of course that may be indicative of a separate issue. ;)

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• 2010 April Fools Joke

  - by Dane Morgridge

  I started at my current job at the end of March last year and there were some pretty funny April fools jokes.  Nothing super crazy, but pretty funny.  One guy came in and there was a tree in his cube.  We (me and the rest of my team) were planning for a couple of weeks on what we could do that would be just awesome.  We had a lot of really good ideas but nothing was spectacular.  Then Steve Andrews had a brilliant idea (yes it's true).  Since we have internal DNS servers we could redirect DNS to our internal servers for a site such as cnn.com.  Then we would lift the code from the site and create our own home page that would contain news about people in the company.  Steve was actually laughing so hard when he thought of the idea that it took him almost 30 minutes to spit it out. I thought, "this is perfect". I had enlisted a couple of people to help come up with the stories and at the same time we were trying to figure out how to get everybody to the site the morning of the 1st.  Then it hit me.  We could have the main article be one of my getting picked up by the FBI on hacking charges.  Then Chris (my boss) could send an email out telling everyone that I would not be there today and direct them to the site.  That would for sure get everyone to go to cnn.com first thing and see our prank.  I begun the process of looking for photos I could crop myself into and found the perfect one.  Then my wife took a good pic with our Canon 40D and I went to work.  The night before I didn't have any other stories due to everyone being really busy at work, but I decided to go ahead with just the FBI bust on it's own.  I got everything working and tested and coordinated with Chris for me to come in late so no one would see me at the office until after everyone had seen the joke. And so the morning of April fools came and I was waiting at home and the email was perfect.  Chris told everyone that I wouldn't be in and that not to answer any questions if you got any calls from anybody.  The Photoshop job I did was not perfect, but good enough and I even wrote an article with it that went into more detail about how I had been classified as a terrorist and all kinds of stuff. People at work started getting the emails and a few people didn't realize it was a joke (as I had hoped), including some from senior management (one person in particular who shall remain nameless in this post).  Emails started flying around about how to contain the situation and how to handle bad PR.  He basically bought it hook, line and sinker and then went in to crisis mode.  It was awesome! He did finally realize it was a joke and I will likely print and frame the email he sent out.  In short, April fools this year was a huge success.

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• Type Casting variables in PHP: Is there a practical example?

  - by Stephen

  PHP, as most of us know, has weak typing. For those who don't, PHP.net says: PHP does not require (or support) explicit type definition in variable declaration; a variable's type is determined by the context in which the variable is used. Love it or hate it, PHP re-casts variables on-the-fly. So, the following code is valid: $var = "10"; $value = 10 + $var; var_dump($value); // int(20) PHP also alows you to explicitly cast a variable, like so: $var = "10"; $value = 10 + $var; $value = (string)$value; var_dump($value); // string(2) "20" That's all cool... but, for the life of me, I cannot conceive of a practical reason for doing this. I don't have a problem with strong typing in languages that support it, like Java. That's fine, and I completely understand it. Also, I'm aware of—and fully understand the usefulness of—type hinting in function parameters. The problem I have with type casting is explained by the above quote. If PHP can swap types at-will, it can do so even after you force cast a type; and it can do so on-the-fly when you need a certain type in an operation. That makes the following valid: $var = "10"; $value = (int)$var; $value = $value . ' TaDa!'; var_dump($value); // string(8) "10 TaDa!" So what's the point? Can anyone show me a practical application or example of type casting—one that would fail if type casting were not involved? I ask this here instead of SO because I figure practicality is too subjective. Edit in response to Chris' comment Take this theoretical example of a world where user-defined type casting makes sense in PHP: You force cast variable $foo as int -- (int)$foo. You attempt to store a string value in the variable $foo. PHP throws an exception!! <--- That would make sense. Suddenly the reason for user defined type casting exists! The fact that PHP will switch things around as needed makes the point of user defined type casting vague. For example, the following two code samples are equivalent: // example 1 $foo = 0; $foo = (string)$foo; $foo = '# of Reasons for the programmer to type cast $foo as a string: ' . $foo; // example 2 $foo = 0; $foo = (int)$foo; $foo = '# of Reasons for the programmer to type cast $foo as a string: ' . $foo; UPDATE Guess who found himself using typecasting in a practical environment? Yours Truly. The requirement was to display money values on a website for a restaurant menu. The design of the site required that trailing zeros be trimmed, so that the display looked something like the following: Menu Item 1 .............. $ 4 Menu Item 2 .............. $ 7.5 Menu Item 3 .............. $ 3 The best way I found to do that wast to cast the variable as a float: $price = '7.50'; // a string from the database layer. echo 'Menu Item 2 .............. $ ' . (float)$price; PHP trims the float's trailing zeros, and then recasts the float as a string for concatenation.

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• Intel I217LM ethernet controller not detected by Ubuntu 12.04LTS

  - by Alexandr Kurilin

  My last installation of Ubuntu 12.04 on a machine using an ASUS Q87M-E motherboard with an Intel I217LM Ethernet controller has failed to detect the ethernet card. The only thing displayed by ifconfig -a is the loopback. I double-checked in the BIOS, and the controller should be online. $ rfkill list all 0: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no $ lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Haswell DRAM Controller (rev 06) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Haswell PCI Express x16 Controller (rev 06) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 06) 00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Haswell HD Audio Controller (rev 06) 00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point USB xHCI Host Controller (rev 04) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point MEI Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:16.3 Serial controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point KT Controller (rev 04) 00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Device 153a (rev 04) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Lynx Point HD Audio Controller (rev 04) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point LPC Controller (rev 04) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point 6-Port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 04) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Lynx Point SMBus Controller (rev 04) $ lsmod Module Size Used by vesafb 13844 1 snd_hda_codec_realtek 224173 1 arc4 12529 2 joydev 17693 0 usbhid 47238 0 hid 99636 1 usbhid rfcomm 47604 0 rt73usb 31735 0 crc_itu_t 12707 1 rt73usb rt2x00usb 20808 1 rt73usb rt2x00lib 55326 2 rt73usb,rt2x00usb mac80211 506862 2 rt2x00usb,rt2x00lib cfg80211 205774 2 rt2x00lib,mac80211 eeepc_wmi 13109 0 bnep 18281 2 asus_wmi 24456 1 eeepc_wmi sparse_keymap 13890 1 asus_wmi psmouse 97485 0 bluetooth 180153 10 rfcomm,bnep ppdev 17113 0 snd_hda_intel 33719 6 snd_hda_codec 127706 2 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel snd_seq_midi 13324 0 snd_hwdep 17764 1 snd_hda_codec snd_rawmidi 30748 1 snd_seq_midi serio_raw 13211 0 snd_pcm 97275 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec snd_seq_midi_event 14899 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 61929 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event snd_timer 29990 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14540 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq parport_pc 32866 1 snd 79041 21 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_rawmidi,snd_pcm,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device video 19651 0 soundcore 15091 1 snd wmi 19256 1 asus_wmi snd_page_alloc 18529 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm mac_hid 13253 0 lp 17799 0 parport 46562 3 ppdev,parport_pc,lp $ ifconfig lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:1091 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:1091 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:80048 (80.0 KB) TX bytes:80048 (80.0 KB) wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:fd:07:91:a8:b9 inet addr:172.16.42.4 Bcast:172.16.42.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::2fd:7ff:fe91:a8b9/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:56644 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:36417 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:85270918 (85.2 MB) TX bytes:3413849 (3.4 MB) additionally, running sudo lshw -C network returns: *-network UNCLAIMED description: Ethernet Controller [...] I'm pretty stumped at this point. This doesn't sound like a very uncommon ethernet controller and I figured it would be picked up by the system. Does anybody have advice for how to deal with this? Anything specific I should look into to figure out what could be causing this? Edit: It seems that following the guide on the Intel e1000e drivers page allowed the card to start working. Is this a real fix or is there a better way?

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• When to implement: Together with or after the source product?

  - by Jeremy Oosthuizen

  Somebody recently relayed a prospect's question to me: How hard would it be to implement OUBI after the source product (CC&B, WAM or NMS) has already been implemented? Fact is that MOST non-OUBI Data Warehouse / Business Intelligence implementations take place after the source application(s) are in place and hopefully stable. If an organization decides that they need better reporting and management information, then the logical path (see The Data Warehouse Institute's Data Warehouse Maturity Model) is to a Data Warehouse -- no matter when their last applications were implemented. If there is a pre-built Data Warehouse for their specific application, or even for the desired business process in their industry, they're in luck. Else they have to design and build from scratch, using a toolset. The implementation of a toolset is unlike the implementation of OUBI which, like OBI Apps, contain pre-built ETL routines and user content. Much has been written before about the advantages of that. So, because OUBI is designed specifically for Oracle Utilities transactional products, we often implement them in parallel -- with OUBI lagging a little behind by necessity, like Reporting. Customers know from the start they're going to need the solution, and therefore purchase the products at the same time. My biggest argument FOR a parallel installation/implementation of OUBI with the source product is two-fold: - There could be things (which is the technical term for data elements) that customers figure out they need when implementing OUBI, which are often easier added to the source product's implementation project, than to add later; - OUBI's ETL often points out errors (severe or not) with converted data, which are easier to fix during the source product's implementation project, or it may even be impossible to fix afterwards. The Conversion routines sometimes miss these errors, because the source system can live with the not-quite-perfect converted data. If the data can't be properly extracted, i.e. the proper Dimensions linked to the Facts, then it can't get into OUBI. That means it can't be analyzed effectively along with the rest of the organization's data. Then there is also the throw-away-work argument, which may be significant. The operational / transactional system cannot go live without reports on Day 1. A lot of those reports would be taken care of by the implementation of OUBI. If OUBI is implemented after go-live, those reports STILL have to be built during the source product's implementation project, but they become throw-away after the OUBI implementation. I have sometimes been told that it is better to implement OUBI after the source product, because it cuts down on scope and risk for the source product's implementation project. All I can say to that, is bah humbug. No, seriously, given the arguments above, planning has to include the OUBI implementation and it has to be managed properly -- just like any other implementation. If so, it should not add any risk and it should be included in the scope from the start. The answer to the prospect's question is therefore that it is not that much more difficult; after all, most DW/BI implemenations are done like that. They just have to consider the points above.

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• Why Cornell University Chose Oracle Data Masking

  - by Troy Kitch

  One of the eight Ivy League schools, Cornell University found itself in the unfortunate position of having to inform over 45,000 University community members that their personal information had been breached when a laptop was stolen. To ensure this wouldn’t happen again, Cornell took steps to ensure that data used for non-production purposes is de-identified with Oracle Data Masking. A recent podcast highlights why organizations like Cornell are choosing Oracle Data Masking to irreversibly de-identify production data for use in non-production environments. Organizations often copy production data, that contains sensitive information, into non-production environments so they can test applications and systems using “real world” information. Data in non-production has increasingly become a target of cyber criminals and can be lost or stolen due to weak security controls and unmonitored access. Similar to production environments, data breaches in non-production environments can cost millions of dollars to remediate and cause irreparable harm to reputation and brand. Cornell’s applications and databases help carry out the administrative and academic mission of the university. They are running Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions that include highly sensitive faculty, student, alumni, and prospective student data. This data is supported and accessed by a diverse set of developers and functional staff distributed across the university. Several years ago, Cornell experienced a data breach when an employee’s laptop was stolen.  Centrally stored backup information indicated there was sensitive data on the laptop. With no way of knowing what the criminal intended, the university had to spend significant resources reviewing data, setting up service centers to handle constituent concerns, and provide free credit checks and identity theft protection services—all of which cost money and took time away from other projects. To avoid this issue in the future Cornell came up with several options; one of which was to sanitize the testing and training environments. “The project management team was brought in and they developed a project plan and implementation schedule; part of which was to evaluate competing products in the market-space and figure out which one would work best for us.  In the end we chose Oracle’s solution based on its architecture and its functionality.” – Tony Damiani, Database Administration and Business Intelligence, Cornell University The key goals of the project were to mask the elements that were identifiable as sensitive in a consistent and efficient manner, but still support all the previous activities in the non-production environments. Tony concludes,  “What we saw was a very minimal impact on performance. The masking process added an additional three hours to our refresh window, but it was well worth that time to secure the environment and remove the sensitive data. I think some other key points you can keep in mind here is that there was zero impact on the production environment. Oracle Data Masking works in non-production environments only. Additionally, the risk of exposure has been significantly reduced and the impact to business was minimal.” With Oracle Data Masking organizations like Cornell can: Make application data securely available in non-production environments Prevent application developers and testers from seeing production data Use an extensible template library and policies for data masking automation Gain the benefits of referential integrity so that applications continue to work Listen to the podcast to hear the complete interview.  Learn more about Oracle Data Masking by registering to watch this SANS Institute Webcast and view this short demo.

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• ASP.NET Routing not working on IIS 7.0

  - by Rick Strahl

  I ran into a nasty little problem today when deploying an application using ASP.NET 4.0 Routing to my live server. The application and its Routing were working just fine on my dev machine (Windows 7 and IIS 7.5), but when I deployed (Windows 2008 R1 and IIS 7.0) Routing would just not work. Every time I hit a routed url IIS would just throw up a 404 error: This is an IIS error, not an ASP.NET error so this doesn’t actually come from ASP.NET’s routing engine but from IIS’s handling of expressionless URLs. Note that it’s clearly falling through all the way to the StaticFile handler which is the last handler to fire in the typical IIS handler list. In other words IIS is trying to parse the extension less URL and not firing it into ASP.NET but failing. As I mentioned on my local machine this all worked fine and to make sure local and live setups match I re-copied my Web.config, double checked handler mappings in IIS and re-copied the actual application assemblies to the server. It all looked exactly matched. However no workey on the server with IIS 7.0!!! Finally, totally by chance, I remembered the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests attribute flag on the modules key in web.config and set it to true: <system.webServer> <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"> <add name="ScriptCompressionModule" type="Westwind.Web.ScriptCompressionModule,Westwind.Web" /> </modules> </system.webServer> And lo and behold, Routing started working on the live server and IIS 7.0! This seems really obvious now of course, but the really tricky thing about this is that on IIS 7.5 this key is not necessary. So on my Windows 7 machine ASP.NET Routing was working just fine without the key set. However on IIS 7.0 on my live server the same missing setting was not working. On IIS 7.0 this key must be present or Routing will not work. Oddly on IIS 7.5 it appears that you can’t even turn off the behavior – setting runtAllManagedModuleForAllRequests="false" had no effect at all and Routing continued to work just fine even with the flag set to false, which is NOT what I would have expected. Kind of disappointing too that Windows Server 2008 (R1) can’t be upgraded to IIS 7.5. It sure seems like that should have been possible since the OS server core changes in R2 are pretty minor. For the future I really hope Microsoft will allow updating IIS versions without tying them explicitly to the OS. It looks like that with the release of IIS Express Microsoft has taken some steps to untie some of those tight OS links from IIS. Let’s hope that’s the case for the future – it sure is nice to run the same IIS version on dev and live boxes, but upgrading live servers is too big a deal to do just because an updated OS release came out. Moral of the story – never assume that your dev setup will work as is on the live setup. It took me forever to figure this out because I assumed that because my web.config on the local machine was fine and working and I copied all relevant web.config data to the server it can’t be the configuration settings. I was looking everywhere but in the .config file forever before getting desperate and remembering the flag when I accidentally checked the intellisense settings in the modules key. Never assume anything. The other moral is: Try to keep your dev machine and server OS’s in sync whenever possible. Maybe it’s time to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 R2 after all. More info on Extensionless URLs in IIS Want to find out more exactly on how extensionless Urls work on IIS 7? The check out  How ASP.NET MVC Routing Works and its Impact on the Performance of Static Requests which goes into great detail on the complexities of the process. Thanks to Jeff Graves for pointing me at this article – a great linked reference for this topic!© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in IIS7  Windows  

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• SQL SERVER – Fix: Error : 402 The data types ntext and varchar are incompatible in the equal to operator

  - by pinaldave

  Some errors are very simple to understand but the solution of the same is not easy to figure out. Here is one of the similar errors where it clearly suggests where the problem is but does not tell what is the solution. Additionally, there are multiple solutions so developers often get confused with which one is correct and which one is not correct. Let us first recreate scenario and understand where the problem is. Let us run following USE Tempdb GO CREATE TABLE TestTable (ID INT, MyText NTEXT) GO SELECT ID, MyText FROM TestTable WHERE MyText = 'AnyText' GO DROP TABLE TestTable GO When you run above script it will give you following error. Msg 402, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 The data types ntext and varchar are incompatible in the equal to operator. One of the questions I often receive is that voucher is for sure compatible to equal to operator, then why does this error show up. Well, the answer is much simpler I think we have not understood the error message properly. Please see the image below. The next and varchar are not compatible when compared with each other using equal sign. Now let us change the data type on the right side of the string to nvarchar from varchar. To do that we will put N’ before the string. USE Tempdb GO CREATE TABLE TestTable (ID INT, MyText NTEXT) GO SELECT ID, MyText FROM TestTable WHERE MyText = N'AnyText' GO DROP TABLE TestTable GO When you run above script it will give following error. Msg 402, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 The data types ntext and nvarchar are incompatible in the equal to operator. You can see that error message also suggests that now we are comparing next to nvarchar. Now as we have understood the error properly, let us see various solutions to the above problem. Solution 1: Convert the data types to match with each other using CONVERT function. Change the datatype of the MyText to nvarchar. SELECT ID, MyText FROM TestTable WHERE CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX), MyText) = N'AnyText' GO Solution 2: Convert the data type of columns from NTEXT to NVARCHAR(MAX) (TEXT to VARCHAR(MAX) ALTER TABLE TestTable ALTER COLUMN MyText NVARCHAR(MAX) GO Now you can run the original query again and it will work fine. Solution 3: Using LIKE command instead of Equal to command. SELECT ID, MyText FROM TestTable WHERE MyText LIKE 'AnyText' GO Well, any of the three of the solutions will work. Here is my suggestion if you can change the column data type from ntext or text to nvarchar or varchar, you should follow that path as text and ntext datatypes are marked as deprecated. All developers any way to change the deprecated data types in future, it will be a good idea to change them right early. If due to any reason you can not convert the original column use Solution 1 for temporary fix. Solution 3 is the not the best solution and use it as a last option. Did I miss any other method? If yes, please let me know and I will add the solution to original blog post with due credit. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Error Messages, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Oracle Text query parser

  - by Roger Ford

  Oracle Text provides a rich query syntax which enables powerful text searches.However, this syntax isn't intended for use by inexperienced end-users.  If you provide a simple search box in your application, you probably want users to be able to type "Google-like" searches into the box, and have your application convert that into something that Oracle Text understands.For example if your user types "windows nt networking" then you probably want to convert this into something like"windows ACCUM nt ACCUM networking".  But beware - "NT" is a reserved word, and needs to be escaped.  So let's escape all words:"{windows} ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}".  That's fine - until you start introducing wild cards. Then you must escape only non-wildcarded searches:"win% ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}".  There are quite a few other "gotchas" that you might encounter along the way.Then there's the issue of scoring.  Given a query for "oracle text query syntax", it would be nice if we could score a full phrase match higher than a hit where all four words are present but not in a phrase.  And then perhaps lower than that would be a document where three of the four terms are present.  Progressive relaxation helps you with this, but you need to code the "progression" yourself in most cases.To help with this, I've developed a query parser which will take queries in Google-like syntax, and convert them into Oracle Text queries. It's designed to be as flexible as possible, and will generate either simple queries or progressive relaxation queries. The input string will typically just be a string of words, such as "oracle text query syntax" but the grammar does allow for more complex expressions:  word : score will be improved if word exists  +word : word must exist  -word : word CANNOT exist  "phrase words" : words treated as phrase (may be preceded by + or -)  field:(expression) : find expression (which allows +,- and phrase as above) within "field". So for example if I searched for   +"oracle text" query +syntax -ctxcatThen the results would have to contain the phrase "oracle text" and the word syntax. Any documents mentioning ctxcat would be excluded from the results. All the instructions are in the top of the file (see "Downloads" at the bottom of this blog entry).  Please download the file, read the instructions, then try it out by running "parser.pls" in either SQL*Plus or SQL Developer.I am also uploading a test file "test.sql". You can run this and/or modify it to run your own tests or run against your own text index. test.sql is designed to be run from SQL*Plus and may not produce useful output in SQL Developer (or it may, I haven't tried it).I'm putting the code up here for testing and comments. I don't consider it "production ready" at this point, but would welcome feedback.  I'm particularly interested in comments such as "The instructions are unclear - I couldn't figure out how to do XXX" "It didn't work in my environment" (please provide as many details as possible) "We can't use it in our application" (why not?) "It needs to support XXX feature" "It produced an invalid query output when I fed in XXXX" Downloads: parser.pls test.sql

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• Adventures in MVVM &ndash; ViewModel Location and Creation

  - by Brian Genisio's House Of Bilz

  More Adventures in MVVM In this post, I am going to explore how I prefer to attach ViewModels to my Views.  I have published the code to my ViewModelSupport project on CodePlex in case you'd like to see how it works along with some examples.  Some History My approach to View-First ViewModel creation has evolved over time.  I have constructed ViewModels in code-behind.  I have instantiated ViewModels in the resources sectoin of the view. I have used Prism to resolve ViewModels via Dependency Injection. I have created attached properties that use Dependency Injection containers underneath.  Of all these approaches, I continue to find issues either in composability, blendability or maintainability.  Laurent Bugnion came up with a pretty good approach in MVVM Light Toolkit with his ViewModelLocator, but as John Papa points out, it has maintenance issues.  John paired up with Glen Block to make the ViewModelLocator more generic by using MEF to compose ViewModels.  It is a great approach, but I don’t like baking in specific resolution technologies into the ViewModelSupport project. I bring these people up, not to name drop, but to give them credit for the place I finally landed in my journey to resolve ViewModels.  I have come up with my own version of the ViewModelLocator that is both generic and container agnostic.  The solution is blendable, configurable and simple to use.  Use any resolution mechanism you want: MEF, Unity, Ninject, Activator.Create, Lookup Tables, new, whatever. How to use the locator 1. Create a class to contain your resolution configuration: public class YourViewModelResolver: IViewModelResolver { private YourFavoriteContainer container = new YourFavoriteContainer(); public YourViewModelResolver() { // Configure your container } public object Resolve(string viewModelName) { return container.Resolve(viewModelName); } } Examples of doing this are on CodePlex for MEF, Unity and Activator.CreateInstance. 2. Create your ViewModelLocator with your custom resolver in App.xaml: <VMS:ViewModelLocator x:Key="ViewModelLocator"> <VMS:ViewModelLocator.Resolver> <local:YourViewModelResolver /> </VMS:ViewModelLocator.Resolver> </VMS:ViewModelLocator> 3. Hook up your data context whenever you want a ViewModel (WPF): <Border DataContext="{Binding YourViewModelName, Source={StaticResource ViewModelLocator}}"> This example uses dynamic properties on the ViewModelLocator and passes the name to your resolver to figure out how to compose it. 4. What about Silverlight? Good question.  You can't bind to dynamic properties in Silverlight 4 (crossing my fingers for Silverlight 5), but you CAN use string indexing: <Border DataContext="{Binding [YourViewModelName], Source={StaticResource ViewModelLocator}}"> But, as John Papa points out in his article, there is a silly bug in Silverlight 4 (as of this writing) that will call into the indexer 6 times when it binds.  While this is little more than a nuisance when getting most properties, it can be much more of an issue when you are resolving ViewModels six times.  If this gets in your way, the solution (as pointed out by John), is to use an IndexConverter (instantiated in App.xaml and also included in the project): <Border DataContext="{Binding Source={StaticResource ViewModelLocator}, Converter={StaticResource IndexConverter}, ConverterParameter=YourViewModelName}"> It is a bit uglier than the WPF version (this method will also work in WPF if you prefer), but it is still not all that bad.  Conclusion This approach works really well (I suppose I am a bit biased).  It allows for composability from any mechanisim you choose.  It is blendable (consider serving up different objects in Design Mode if you wish... or different constructors… whatever makes sense to you).  It works in Cider.  It is configurable.  It is flexible.  It is the best way I have found to manage View-First ViewModel hookups.  Thanks to the guys mentioned in this article for getting me to something I love using.  Enjoy.

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• How Exactly Is One Linux OS “Based On” Another Linux OS?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  When reviewing different flavors of Linux, you’ll frequently come across phrases like “Ubuntu is based on Debian” but what exactly does that mean? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader PLPiper is trying to get a handle on how Linux variants work: I’ve been looking through quite a number of Linux distros recently to get an idea of what’s around, and one phrase that keeps coming up is that “[this OS] is based on [another OS]“. For example: Fedora is based on Red Hat Ubuntu is based on Debian Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu For someone coming from a Mac environment I understand how “OS X is based on Darwin”, however when I look at Linux Distros, I find myself asking “Aren’t they all based on Linux..?” In this context, what exactly does it mean for one Linux OS to be based on another Linux OS? So, what exactly does it mean when we talk about one version of Linux being based off another version? The Answer SuperUser contributor kostix offers a solid overview of the whole system: Linux is a kernel — a (complex) piece of software which works with the hardware and exports a certain Application Programming Interface (API), and binary conventions on how to precisely use it (Application Binary Interface, ABI) available to the “user-space” applications. Debian, RedHat and others are operating systems — complete software environments which consist of the kernel and a set of user-space programs which make the computer useful as they perform sensible tasks (sending/receiving mail, allowing you to browse the Internet, driving a robot etc). Now each such OS, while providing mostly the same software (there are not so many free mail server programs or Internet browsers or desktop environments, for example) differ in approaches to do this and also in their stated goals and release cycles. Quite typically these OSes are called “distributions”. This is, IMO, a somewhat wrong term stemming from the fact you’re technically able to build all the required software by hand and install it on a target machine, so these OSes distribute the packaged software so you either don’t need to build it (Debian, RedHat) or they facilitate such building (Gentoo). They also usually provide an installer which helps to install the OS onto a target machine. Making and supporting an OS is a very complicated task requiring a complex and intricate infrastructure (upload queues, build servers, a bug tracker, and archive servers, mailing list software etc etc etc) and staff. This obviously raises a high barrier for creating a new, from-scratch OS. For instance, Debian provides ca. 37k packages for some five hardware architectures — go figure how much work is put into supporting this stuff. Still, if someone thinks they need to create a new OS for whatever reason, it may be a good idea to use an existing foundation to build on. And this is exactly where OSes based on other OSes come into existence. For instance, Ubuntu builds upon Debian by just importing most packages from it and repackaging only a small subset of them, plus packaging their own, providing their own artwork, default settings, documentation etc. Note that there are variations to this “based on” thing. For instance, Debian fosters the creation of “pure blends” of itself: distributions which use Debian rather directly, and just add a bunch of packages and other stuff only useful for rather small groups of users such as those working in education or medicine or music industry etc. Another twist is that not all these OSes are based on Linux. For instance, Debian also provide FreeBSD and Hurd kernels. They have quite tiny user groups but anyway. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Silverlight Cream for May 08, 2010 -- #858

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Phil Middlemiss, Jaime Rodriguez, Senthil Kumar, Mike Snow, DaveDev, Gergely Orosz, Kirupa, Cheryl Simmons, András Velvárt, Dan Wahlin, Michael D. Brown, and Ben Rush. Shoutouts: Erik Mork and crew have their latest up: This Week In Silverlight – Where’s the Tablet? Chris Rouw has a good link post and instructions on WCF RIA services: Deploying and Configuring Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services From SilverlightCream.com: Quick and Easy Sscalable Rounded Bevels Phil Middlemiss duplicates some bevel-edged rectangles in Blend, and they look great. Now you don't have to import all the other PhotoShop bits to get those things looking the way you want! A transparent Windows PHONE FAQ Jaime Rodriguez combined a bunch of information into a WP7 FAQ that he's going to keep up to date, so bookmark the page. He also has links to the Training Kit, on and offline versions. Windows Phone Developer Training Kit April Refresh is now available for Download Thanks to Senthil Kumar, I found out there is an April refresh of the WP7 Training kit at Channel 9 -- go get yours now --- I'll still be here when you get back! Silverlight Tip of the Day #16 – Working with IgnoreImageCache Mike Snow's Tip of the day #16 covers IgnoreImageCache and like many other things in life, until you read Mike's post you may be surprised at how it works. DoodlePad – A fun, free, sketching application for Windows Phone 7 DaveDev has a new WP7 App up that lets you or your kids 'Doodle' on the phone... could be a note, or could be a drawing... good post with all the links you need to get this cranked up on the emulator. Printing in Silverlight: Printing Charts and Auto Scaling Gergely Orosz's latest post is a very useful one on auto-scaling charts to fit a printed page and then getting them to print. Smoothly Scrolling a ListBox Check out the smooth scrolling Kirupa has on the ListBox near the top of his post... all good stuff... you wanna know how to do that! Plus... it's dead simple and all in Blend :) http://www.sparklingclient.com/wheres-the-silverlight-tablet/ Cheryl Simmons has a great tip up at the SilverlightSDK if you haven't burned through to figure it out yet ... changing the watermark on a DatePicker control... looks great! The story of a wicked bug András Velvárt tells a story of a bug that just defied logic or being found. Read how he tracked it down and what it actually was... could save you some time. Story learned: if I have a problem that bad, I'm calling András :) Text Trimming in Silverlight 4 Dan Wahlin gives a quick run-through of what TextBox trimming is, and then by a good real example... check it out and start using it in your projects. Enterprise Patterns with WCF RIA Services Michael D. Brown has an article in MSDN Magazine on RIA Services. Great information and link-packed article, with all the source avialable for download. Building Custom Players with the Silverlight Media Framework Ben Rush has a nice long tutorial on the Silverlight Media Framework up on the MSDN Magazine site ... lots of information in there. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Combining Scrum, TFS2010 and Email to keep everyone in the loop

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Often you will receive rich information from your Product Owner (Customer) about tasks. That information can be in the form of Word documents, HTML Emails and Pictures, but you generally receive them in the context of an Email. You need to keep these so your Team can refer to it later, and so you can send a “done” when the task has been completed. This preserves the “history” of the task and allows you to keep relevant partied included in any future conversation. At SSW we keep the original email so that we can reply Done and delete the email. But keeping it in your email does not help other members of the team if they complete the task and need to send the “done”. Worse yet, the description field in Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS 2010) does not support HTML and images, nor does the default task template support an “interested parties” or CC field. You can attach this content manually, but it can be time consuming. Figure: Description only supports plain text, and History supports HTML with no images   What should we do? At SSW we always follow the rules, and it just so happened that we have rules to both achieve this, and to make it easier. You should follow the existing Rules to Better Project Management  and attach the email to your task so you can refer to and reply to it later when you close the task: Do you know what Outlook add-ins you need? Describe the work item request in an email Use Outlook Add-in to move the email to a TFS Work Item When replying to an email with “done” you should follow: Do you update Team Companion template, so the email "subject" doesn't change? Do you update Team Companion template, so you can generate a proper "done" mail? Following these simple rules will help your Product Owner understand you better, and allow your team to more effectively collaborate with each other. An added bonus is that as we are keeping the email history in sync with TFS. When you “reply all” to the email all of the interested partied to the Task are also included. This notified those that may have been blocked by your task to keep up to date with its status. This has been published as Do you know to ensure that relevant emails are attached to tasks in our Rules to Better Scrum using TFS. What could we do better? I would like to see this process automated so that we capture the information correctly in the task without the need to use email. This would require a change to the process template in Team Foundation Server to add an “Interested Parties” field. Each reply to the email would need to be automatically processed into a Work Item. This could be done by adding a task identifier as the first item in the “Relates to” email header, and copying in an email address that you watch. This would then parse out the relevant information and add the new message to the history, update the “Interested parties” field and attach the Images. Upon reflection, it may even be possible, but more difficult to do this using ONLY the History field and including some of the header information in there to the build a done email with history. This would not currently deal with email “forks” well, but I think it would be adequate for our needs. It would be nice if we could find time to implement this, but currently it is but a pipe dream. Maybe Microsoft could implement something in the next version of Team Foundation Server, and in the mean time we have a process that works well. Technorati Tags: Scrum,SSW Rules,TFS 2010,TFS 2008

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• Non-standard installation (installing Linux from Linux)

  - by Evan Plaice

  So, here's my setup. I have one partition with the newest version installed, a second partition with an older version installed (as a backup just in case), a swap partition that both share, and a boot partition so the bootloader doesn't need to be setup after each upgrade. Partitions: sda1 ext3 /boot sda2 ext4 / (current version) sda3 ext4 / (old version) sda4 swap /swap sda5 ntfs (contains folders symbolically linked to /home on /) So far it has been a very good setup. I can create new boot loaders without screwing it up and adding my personal files into a new install is as simple as creating some symbolic links (the partition is NTFS in case I need to load windows on the system again). Here's the issue. I'd like to be able to drop the install into /distro on the current version and install a new version on / on the old version effectively replacing/upgrading it. The goal is to be able to just swap out new versions as they are released while maintaining redundancy in case I don't like th update. So far I have: downloaded the install.iso created a folder in /distro copied the install.iso into /distro extracted vmlinuz and initrd.lz into /distro Then I modified /boot/grub/menu.lst with the following entry: title Install Linux root (hd0,1) kernel /distro/vmlinuz initrd /distro/initrd.lz vmlinuz loads perfectly but it says it can't find initrd.lz on boot. I have also tried to uncompress the image with: unlzma < initrd.lz > initrd.img And, updating the menu.lst file to match; but that doesn't work either. I'm assuming that vmlinuz (linux kernel) loads, fires up the virtual filesystem by creating a ramdisk (initrd), mounts the iso, and launches the installer. Am I missing something here? Update: First, I wanted to say that the accepted answer would have been the best option if I was doing a normal Ubuntu install. Unfortunately, I was installing Linux Mint (which lacks the script needed to make debootstrap work. So the problem I with the above approach was, I was missing the command that vmlinuz (linux kernel) needed to execute to start boot into LiveCD mode. By looking in the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file I found what I was missing. Although this method will work, it requires that the installation files reside on their own partition. I took the easy route and used unetbootin to drop the LiveCD on a usb drive and booted from that. Like I said before. Debootstrap would have been the ideal solution here. Even though I couldn't use it I wrote down the steps it would've taken to use it. Step One: Format sda3 (the partition with the old copy of linux that's being overwritten) I used gparted to format it as ext4 from within the current linux install. How this is done varies based on what tools you prefer to use. Step Two: Mount the newly formatted partition (we'll call the mount ubuntu for simplicity) sudo mkdir /mnt/ubuntu sudo mount -o -loop /dev/sda3 /mnt/ubuntu Step Three: Get debootstrap sudo apt-get install debootstrap Step Four: Mount the install disk (replace ubuntu.iso with the name if your install disk) sudo mkdir /media/cdrom sudo mount -o loop ~/ubuntu.iso /media/cdrom Step Five: Install the OS using debootstrap (replace fiesty with the version you're installing and amd64 with your processor's architecture) sudo debootstrap --arch amd64 fiesty /mnt/ubuntu file:/media/cdrom The settings here varies. While I loaded debootstrap using an install iso, you can also have debootstrap automatically download and install if with a repository link (While most of these repositories contain debian versions I'm still not clear as to whether Ubuntu has similar repositories). Here a list of the debian package repositories and their mirrors. This is how you'd deploy debootstrap if you were doing it directly from a repository: sudo debootstrap --arch amd64 squeeze /mnt/debian http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian Here's the link that I primarily used to figure this out.

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• Autoscaling in a modern world&hellip;. Part 4

  - by Steve Loethen

  Now that I have the rules and services XML files in the cloud, it is time to sever the bounds of earth and live totally in the cloud.  I have to host the Autoscaling object in Azure as well, point it to the rules, tell it the management certs and get out of the way. A couple of questions.  Where to host?  The most obvious place to me was a worker role.  A simple, single purpose worker role, doing nothing but watching my app.  Here are the steps I used. 1) Created a project.  Separate project from my web site.  I wanted to be able to run the web in the cloud and the autoscaler local for debugging purposes.  Seemed like the easiest way.  2) Add the Wasabi block to the project. 3) Configure the settings.  I used the same settings used for the console app.  It points to the same web role, uses the same rules file.  4) Make sure the certification needed to manage the role is added to the cert store in the sky (“LocalMachine” and “My” are default locations). I ran the worker role in the local fabric.  It worked.  I then published to the cloud, and verified it worked again.  Here is what my code looked like. public override bool OnStart() { Trace.WriteLine("Set Default Connection Limit", "Information"); // Set the maximum number of concurrent connections ServicePointManager.DefaultConnectionLimit = 12; Trace.WriteLine("Set up configuration change code", "Information"); // set up config CloudStorageAccount.SetConfigurationSettingPublisher((configName, configSetter) => configSetter(RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue(configName))); Trace.WriteLine("Get current diagnostic configuration", "Information"); // Get current diagnostic configuration DiagnosticMonitorConfiguration dmc = DiagnosticMonitor.GetDefaultInitialConfiguration(); Trace.WriteLine("Set Diagnostic Buffer Size", "Information"); // Set Diagnostic Buffer size dmc.Logs.BufferQuotaInMB = 4; Trace.WriteLine("Set log transfer period", "Information"); // Set log transfer period dmc.Logs.ScheduledTransferPeriod = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1); Trace.WriteLine("Set log verbosity", "Information"); // Set log filter to verbose dmc.Logs.ScheduledTransferLogLevelFilter = LogLevel.Verbose; Trace.WriteLine("Start the diagnostic monitor", "Information"); // Start the diagnostic monitor DiagnosticMonitor.Start("Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString", dmc); Trace.WriteLine("Get the current Autoscaler from the EntLib Container", "Information"); // Get the current Autoscaler from the EntLib Container scaler = EnterpriseLibraryContainer.Current.GetInstance<Autoscaler>(); Trace.WriteLine("Start the autoscaler", "Information"); // Start the autoscaler scaler.Start(); Trace.WriteLine("call the base class OnStart", "Information"); // call the base class OnStart return base.OnStart(); } public override void OnStop() { Trace.WriteLine("Stop the Autoscaler", "Information"); // Stop the Autoscaler scaler.Stop(); } I did have to turn on some basic logging for wasabi, which will cover in the next post.  This let me figure out that I hadn’t done the certificate step.

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• SQL SERVER – Another lesser known feature of SQL Server Management Studio 2012 – Guest Post by Balmukund Lakhani

  - by Pinal Dave

  This is a fantastic blog post from my dear friend Balmukund ( blog | twitter | facebook ). He had presented a fantastic session in our last UG and there were lots of requests from attendees that he blogs about it. Well, here is the blog post about the same very popular UG session. Let us read the entire blog post in the voice of the Balmukund himself. In one of my previous guest blog on SQL Authority, I wrote about “Additional Connection Parameter” tab of login screen in SQL Server Management Studio (a.k.a. SSMS). On the similar lines, this blog is going to show little less known new feature of login main screen (“Connect to Server”) of SSMS 2012. You might have seen below screen countless times and you might wonder what is there is blog about in this simple screen. Well, continue reading and you would get the answer. Many times, DBA have to login to production server from non-regular machine, may be a developer’s workstation. Once you login to SQL, do your work and close the management studio. Do you know that your server name is saved in management studio? Of course, very useful feature because you may not like to type server name/IP address every time. Whatever servers you have connected, it would be stored by management studio. But sometime, it’s annoying! What you would do if you want SQL Server Management Studio to forget “all” the servers listed in drop down of Server name? To do that, you need to know how and where it’s stored. You can use one of my favorite tool from sysinternals called Process Monitor (also known as ProcMon) and easily figure out that this is stored in a file under your windows user profile. Below is the file in SQL 2008 R2 Management Studio. %appdata%\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Shell\SqlStudio.bin For SQL Server 2012, here is what we can see in ProcMon So, the path is %appdata%\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Shell\SqlStudio.bin So far, you might wonder, where is the new feature? I have been asked by many users to delete entries from SSMS “Connect to Server” server name list. Well, unofficially, you can delete the file directly which we found via ProcMon. Note that delete file to get rid of server list is not officially supported by Microsoft. Better way to achieve this is provided in SSMS 2012. To delete the servers from the list, highlight the name we want to delete (via keyboard or mouse) and then press delete key via keyboard. We can’t be multi-select and has to be done one by one. We can delete as many entries we want. I have delete few from first screenshot taken and here is the modified version. This is not available in SQL 2008 R2 and its previous version. This came from feedback given to SQL Server Product group. Hope you have learned something new today! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Building a project in VS that depends on a static and dynamic library

  - by fg nu

  Noob noobin'. I would appreciate some very careful handholding in setting up an example in Visual Studio 2010 Professional where I am trying to build a project which links: a previously built static library, for which the VS project folder is "C:\libjohnpaul\" a previously built dynamic library, for which the VS project folder is "C:\libgeorgeringo\" These are listed as Recipes 1.11, 1.12 and 1.13 in the C++ Cookbook. The project fails to compile for me with unresolved dependencies (see details below), and I can't figure out why. Project 1: Static Library The following are the header and source files that were compiled in this project. I was able to compile this project fine in VS2010, to the named standard library "libjohnpaul.lib" which lives in the folder ("C:/libjohnpaul/Release/"). // libjohnpaul/john.hpp #ifndef JOHN_HPP_INCLUDED #define JOHN_HPP_INCLUDED void john( ); // Prints "John, " #endif // JOHN_HPP_INCLUDED // libjohnpaul/john.cpp #include <iostream> #include "john.hpp" void john( ) { std::cout << "John, "; } // libjohnpaul/paul.hpp #ifndef PAUL_HPP_INCLUDED #define PAUL_HPP_INCLUDED void paul( ); // Prints " Paul, " #endif // PAUL_HPP_INCLUDED // libjohnpaul/paul.cpp #include <iostream> #include "paul.hpp" void paul( ) { std::cout << "Paul, "; } // libjohnpaul/johnpaul.hpp #ifndef JOHNPAUL_HPP_INCLUDED #define JOHNPAUL_HPP_INCLUDED void johnpaul( ); // Prints "John, Paul, " #endif // JOHNPAUL_HPP_INCLUDED // libjohnpaul/johnpaul.cpp #include "john.hpp" #include "paul.hpp" #include "johnpaul.hpp" void johnpaul( ) { john( ); paul( ); Project 2: Dynamic Library Here are the header and source files for the second project, which also compiled fine with VS2010, and the "libgeorgeringo.dll" file lives in the directory "C:\libgeorgeringo\Debug". // libgeorgeringo/george.hpp #ifndef GEORGE_HPP_INCLUDED #define GEORGE_HPP_INCLUDED void george( ); // Prints "George, " #endif // GEORGE_HPP_INCLUDED // libgeorgeringo/george.cpp #include <iostream> #include "george.hpp" void george( ) { std::cout << "George, "; } // libgeorgeringo/ringo.hpp #ifndef RINGO_HPP_INCLUDED #define RINGO_HPP_INCLUDED void ringo( ); // Prints "and Ringo\n" #endif // RINGO_HPP_INCLUDED // libgeorgeringo/ringo.cpp #include <iostream> #include "ringo.hpp" void ringo( ) { std::cout << "and Ringo\n"; } // libgeorgeringo/georgeringo.hpp #ifndef GEORGERINGO_HPP_INCLUDED #define GEORGERINGO_HPP_INCLUDED // define GEORGERINGO_DLL when building libgerogreringo.dll # if defined(_WIN32) && !defined(__GNUC__) # ifdef GEORGERINGO_DLL # define GEORGERINGO_DECL _ _declspec(dllexport) # else # define GEORGERINGO_DECL _ _declspec(dllimport) # endif # endif // WIN32 #ifndef GEORGERINGO_DECL # define GEORGERINGO_DECL #endif // Prints "George, and Ringo\n" #ifdef __MWERKS__ # pragma export on #endif GEORGERINGO_DECL void georgeringo( ); #ifdef __MWERKS__ # pragma export off #endif #endif // GEORGERINGO_HPP_INCLUDED // libgeorgeringo/ georgeringo.cpp #include "george.hpp" #include "ringo.hpp" #include "georgeringo.hpp" void georgeringo( ) { george( ); ringo( ); } Project 3: Executable that depends on the previous libraries Lastly, I try to link the aforecompiled static and dynamic libraries into one project called "helloBeatlesII" which has the project directory "C:\helloBeatlesII" (note that this directory does not nest the other project directories). The linking process that I did is described below: To the "helloBeatlesII" solution, I added the solutions "libjohnpaul" and "libgeorgeringo"; then I changed the properties of the "helloBeatlesII" project to additionally point to the include directories of the other two projects on which it depends ("C:\libgeorgeringo\libgeorgeringo" & "C:\libjohnpaul\libjohnpaul"); added "libgeorgeringo" and "libjohnpaul" to the project dependencies of the "helloBeatlesII" project and made sure that the "helloBeatlesII" project was built last. Trying to compile this project gives me the following unsuccessful build: 1------ Build started: Project: helloBeatlesII, Configuration: Debug Win32 ------ 1Build started 10/13/2012 5:48:32 PM. 1InitializeBuildStatus: 1 Touching "Debug\helloBeatlesII.unsuccessfulbuild". 1ClCompile: 1 helloBeatles.cpp 1ManifestResourceCompile: 1 All outputs are up-to-date. 1helloBeatles.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol "void __cdecl georgeringo(void)" (?georgeringo@@YAXXZ) referenced in function _main 1helloBeatles.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol "void __cdecl johnpaul(void)" (?johnpaul@@YAXXZ) referenced in function _main 1E:\programming\cpp\vs-projects\cpp-cookbook\helloBeatlesII\Debug\helloBeatlesII.exe : fatal error LNK1120: 2 unresolved externals 1 1Build FAILED. 1 1Time Elapsed 00:00:01.34 ========== Build: 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 2 up-to-date, 0 skipped ========== At this point I decided to call in the cavalry. I am new to VS2010, so in all likelihood I am missing something straightforward.

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• Using 3G/UMTS in Mauritius

  After some conversation, threads in online forum and mailing lists I thought about writing this article on how to setup, configure and use 3G/UMTS connections on Linux here in Mauritius. Personally, I can only share my experience with Emtel Ltd. but try to give some clues about how to configure Orange as well. Emtel 3G/UMTS surf stick Emtel provides different surf sticks from Huawei. Back in 2007, I started with an E220 that wouldn't run on Windows Vista either. Nowadays, you just plug in the surf stick (ie. E169) and usually the Network Manager will detect the new broadband modem. Nothing to worry about. The Linux Network Manager even provides a connection profile for Emtel here in Mauritius and establishing the Internet connection is done in less than 2 minutes... even quicker. Using wvdial Old-fashioned Linux users might not take Network Manager into consideration but feel comfortable with wvdial. Although that wvdial is primarily used with serial port attached modems, it can operate on USB ports as well. Following is my configuration from /etc/wvdial.conf: [Dialer Defaults]Phone = *99#Username = emtelPassword = emtelNew PPPD = yesStupid Mode = 1Dial Command = ATDT[Dialer emtel]Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0Baud = 3774000Init2 = ATZInit3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0Init4 = AT+cgdcont=1,"ip","web"ISDN = 0Modem Type = Analog Modem The values of user name and password are optional and can be configured as you like. In case that your SIM card is protected by a pin - which is highly advised, you might another dialer section in your configuration file like so: [Dialer pin]Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0Init1 = AT+CPIN=0000 This way you can "daisy-chain" your command to establish your Internet connection like so: wvdial pin emtel And it works auto-magically. Depending on your group assignments (dialout), you might have to sudo the wvdial statement like so: sudo wvdial pin emtel Orange parameters As far as I could figure out without really testing it myself, it is also necessary to set the Access Point (AP) manually with Orange. Well, although it is pretty obvious a lot of people seem to struggle. The AP value is "orange". [Dialer orange]Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0Baud = 3774000Init2 = ATZInit3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0Init4 = AT+cgdcont=1,"ip","orange"ISDN = 0Modem Type = Analog Modem And you are done. Official Linux support from providers It's just simple: Forget it! The people at the Emtel call center are completely focused on the hardware and Mobile Connect software application provided by Huawei and are totally lost in case that you confront them with other constellations. For example, my wife's netbook has an integrated 3G/UMTS modem from Ericsson. Therefore, no need to use the Huawei surf stick at all and of course we use the existing software named Wireless Manager instead of. Now, imagine to mention at the help desk: "Ehm, sorry but what's Mobile Connect?" And Linux after all might give the call operator sleepless nights... Who knows? Anyways, I hope that my article and configuration could give you a helping hand and that you will be able to connect your Linux box with 3G/UMTS surf sticks here in Mauritius.

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