local variable - Page 424

C# ?? null coalescing operator

- by anirudha

the null coalescing operator is used for set the value when object is null. if object have some value that nothing change and still have their default value they have. string str = "i am string"; string message = str ?? "it is null"; the message have same value as str variable because str not null. if str is null that message have value “it is null”; as declared in statement. coalescing operator does not work on nullable operator such as int?

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Refresh bounded taskflows across regions using InputParameters

- by raghu.yadav

Usecase1 : Selecting record from table in left region reflects dependent detail form of same table in right region using InputParameters Here is the example given by Andre Example Three important crux to be known from above example. 1) create primary key attribute in pagedef of the table in region1 2) add inputparameter name in taskflow inputparameters of region2 3) bind primary key attribute from page definition to above inputparameters in main page where above 2 regions dropped. UseCase2 : Selecting record from location table in left region reflects corresponding department records from department table in right regions. 1) create bind variable on location id in departmentVO. 2) create inputparameter say LocationParam, with type Number, value as #{pageFlowScope.LocationParam} 3) assign LocationId param from pagedef to LocationParam in taskflow2 4) create ExecuteWithParam action in region2 pagedef and invoke the same on IfRefresh condition. during run time - steps executes in backwards (3,2,1)..i,e as user selects column in location table, it assigns location from pagedef to locationParam and then to PageFlowScope and from there to view criteria.

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Best methods for Lazy Initialization with properties

- by Stuart Pegg

I'm currently altering a widely used class to move as much of the expensive initialization from the class constructor into Lazy Initialized properties. Below is an example (in c#): Before: public class ClassA { public readonly ClassB B; public void ClassA() { B = new ClassB(); } } After: public class ClassA { private ClassB _b; public ClassB B { get { if (_b == null) { _b = new ClassB(); } return _b; } } } There are a fair few more of these properties in the class I'm altering, and some are not used in certain contexts (hence the Laziness), but if they are used they're likely to be called repeatedly. Unfortunately, the properties are often also used inside the class. This means there is a potential for the private variable (_b) to be used directly by a method without it being initialized. Is there a way to make only the public property (B) available inside the class, or even an alternative method with the same initialized-when-needed?

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Coding error at open URL

- by Lobo

Hi, I have the following method to open a URL API String c=""; URL direccionURL; try { direccionURL = new URL("http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.0/users/523725"); BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader( direccionURL.openStream())); String inputLine; while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) c+=inputLine; in.close(); } catch (MalformedURLException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } catch (IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } return c; In the end, the "c" variable contains a set of characters that are not the same I get if I open the same URL with a browser. Why?, What am I doing wrong? Thank's for help. Regards!

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Are there real world applications where the use of prefix versus postfix operators matters?

- by Kenneth

In college it is taught how you can do math problems which use the ++ or -- operators on some variable referenced in the equation such that the result of the equation would yield different results if you switched the operator from postfix to prefix or vice versa. Are there any real world applications of using postfix or prefix operator where it makes a difference as to which you use? It doesn't seem to me (maybe I just don't have enough experience yet in programming) that there really is much use to having the different operators if it only applies in math equations. EDIT: Suggestions so far include: function calls //f(++x) != f(x++) loop comparison //while (++i < MAX) != while (i++ < MAX)

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Platform Builder: Building Cloned Code from Multiple OS Versions

- by Bruce Eitman

My career goal is to delete more code than I write, and so far I have been fairly successful. But of course once in a while I need to clone code from the public tree which is contrary to my goal. Usually what follows is a new OS release. To help reach my goal, my team uses the same BSP code for multiple versions of the OS. That means that we need to handle the cloned code so that the correct code builds for the OS version that we are working on. To handle this we could use SKIPBUILD in the sources file, but that gets messy if the cloned code contains multiple folders. The solution that we use is to have a parent folder with subfolders that contain the OS version number. Example: PM |-PM500 |-PM600 |-PM700 The version number corresponds to the environment variable _WINCEOSVER. Then we have a simple DIRS file in the parent folder: DIRS=PM$( _WINCEOSVER) Which automatically selects the folder that goes with the OS version that we are building. Copyright © 2010 – Bruce Eitman All Rights Reserved

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Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths

- by Renso

Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths ASP.Net includes quite a plethora of properties to retrieve path information about the current request, control and application. There's a ton of information available about paths on the Request object, some of it appearing to overlap and some of it buried several levels down, and it can be confusing to find just the right path that you are looking for. To keep things straight I thought it a good idea to summarize the path options along with descriptions and example paths. I wrote a post about this a long time ago in 2004 and I find myself frequently going back to that page to quickly figure out which path I’m looking for in processing the current URL. Apparently a lot of people must be doing the same, because the original post is the second most visited even to this date on this blog to the tune of nearly 500 hits per day. So, I decided to update and expand a bit on the original post with a little more information and clarification based on the original comments. Request Object Paths Available Here's a list of the Path related properties on the Request object (and the Page object). Assume a path like http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx for the paths below where webstore is the name of the virtual. Request Property Description and Value ApplicationPath Returns the web root-relative logical path to the virtual root of this app. /webstore/ PhysicalApplicationPath Returns local file system path of the virtual root for this app. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore PhysicalPath Returns the local file system path to the current script or path. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore\admin\paths.aspx Path FilePath CurrentExecutionFilePath All of these return the full root relative logical path to the script page including path and scriptname. CurrentExcecutionFilePath will return the ‘current’ request path after a Transfer/Execute call while FilePath will always return the original request’s path. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath Returns an ASP.NET root relative virtual path to the script or path for the current request. If in a Transfer/Execute call the transferred Path is returned. ~/admin/paths.aspx PathInfo Returns any extra path following the script name. If no extra path is provided returns the root-relative path (returns text in red below). string.Empty if no PathInfo is available. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx/ExtraPathInfo RawUrl Returns the full root relative URL including querystring and extra path as a string. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 Url Returns a fully qualified URL including querystring and extra path. Note this is a Uri instance rather than string. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 UrlReferrer The fully qualified URL of the page that sent the request. This is also a Uri instance and this value is null if the page was directly accessed by typing into the address bar or using an HttpClient based Referrer client Http header. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/default.aspx?Info Control.TemplateSourceDirectory Returns the logical path to the folder of the page, master or user control on which it is called. This is useful if you need to know the path only to a Page or control from within the control. For non-file controls this returns the Page path. /webstore/admin/ As you can see there’s a ton of information available there for each of the three common path formats: Physical Path is an OS type path that points to a path or file on disk. Logical Path is a Web path that is relative to the Web server’s root. It includes the virtual plus the application relative path. ~/ (Root-relative) Path is an ASP.NET specific path that includes ~/ to indicate the virtual root Web path. ASP.NET can convert virtual paths into either logical paths using Control.ResolveUrl(), or physical paths using Server.MapPath(). Root relative paths are useful for specifying portable URLs that don’t rely on relative directory structures and very useful from within control or component code. You should be able to get any necessary format from ASP.NET from just about any path or script using these mechanisms. ~/ Root Relative Paths and ResolveUrl() and ResolveClientUrl() ASP.NET supports root-relative virtual path syntax in most of its URL properties in Web Forms. So you can easily specify a root relative path in a control rather than a location relative path: <asp:Image runat="server" ID="imgHelp" ImageUrl="~/images/help.gif" /> ASP.NET internally resolves this URL by using ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif") to arrive at the root-relative URL of /webstore/images/help.gif which uses the Request.ApplicationPath as the basepath to replace the ~. By convention any custom Web controls also should use ResolveUrl() on URL properties to provide the same functionality. In your own code you can use Page.ResolveUrl() or Control.ResolveUrl() to accomplish the same thing: string imgPath = this.ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif"); imgHelp.ImageUrl = imgPath; Unfortunately ResolveUrl() is limited to WebForm pages, so if you’re in an HttpHandler or Module it’s not available. ASP.NET Mvc also has it’s own more generic version of ResolveUrl in Url.Decode: <script src="<%= Url.Content("~/scripts/new.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script> which is part of the UrlHelper class. In ASP.NET MVC the above sort of syntax is actually even more crucial than in WebForms due to the fact that views are not referencing specific pages but rather are often path based which can lead to various variations on how a particular view is referenced. In a Module or Handler code Control.ResolveUrl() unfortunately is not available which in retrospect seems like an odd design choice – URL resolution really should happen on a Request basis not as part of the Page framework. Luckily you can also rely on the static VirtualPathUtility class: string path = VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/admin/paths.aspx"); VirtualPathUtility also many other quite useful methods for dealing with paths and converting between the various kinds of paths supported. One thing to watch out for is that ToAbsolute() will throw an exception if a query string is provided and doesn’t work on fully qualified URLs. I wrote about this topic with a custom solution that works fully qualified URLs and query strings here (check comments for some interesting discussions too). Similar to ResolveUrl() is ResolveClientUrl() which creates a fully qualified HTTP path that includes the protocol and domain name. It’s rare that this full resolution is needed but can be useful in some scenarios. Mapping Virtual Paths to Physical Paths with Server.MapPath() If you need to map root relative or current folder relative URLs to physical URLs or you can use HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(). Inside of a Page you can do the following: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("~/scripts/ww.jquery.js")); MapPath is pretty flexible and it understands both ASP.NET style virtual paths as well as plain relative paths, so the following also works. string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("scripts/silverlight.js"); as well as dot relative syntax: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("../scripts/jquery.js"); Once you have the physical path you can perform standard System.IO Path and File operations on the file. Remember with physical paths and IO or copy operations you need to make sure you have permissions to access files and folders based on the Web server user account that is active (NETWORK SERVICE, ASPNET typically). Note the Server.MapPath will not map up beyond the virtual root of the application for security reasons. Server and Host Information Between these settings you can get all the information you may need to figure out where you are at and to build new Url if necessary. If you need to build a URL completely from scratch you can get access to information about the server you are accessing: Server Variable Function and Example SERVER_NAME The of the domain or IP Address wwww.west-wind.com or 127.0.0.1 SERVER_PORT The port that the request runs under. 80 SERVER_PORT_SECURE Determines whether https: was used. 0 or 1 APPL_MD_PATH ADSI DirectoryServices path to the virtual root directory. Note that LM typically doesn’t work for ADSI access so you should replace that with LOCALHOST or the machine’s NetBios name. /LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT/webstore Request.Url and Uri Parsing If you still need more control over the current request URL or you need to create new URLs from an existing one, the current Request.Url Uri property offers a lot of control. Using the Uri class and UriBuilder makes it easy to retrieve parts of a URL and create new URLs based on existing URL. The UriBuilder class is the preferred way to create URLs – much preferable over creating URIs via string concatenation. Uri Property Function Scheme The URL scheme or protocol prefix. http or https Port The port if specifically specified. DnsSafeHost The domain name or local host NetBios machine name www.west-wind.com or rasnote LocalPath The full path of the URL including script name and extra PathInfo. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx Query The query string if any ?id=1 The Uri class itself is great for retrieving Uri parts, but most of the properties are read only if you need to modify a URL in order to change it you can use the UriBuilder class to load up an existing URL and modify it to create a new one. Here are a few common operations I’ve needed to do to get specific URLs: Convert the Request URL to an SSL/HTTPS link For example to take the current request URL and converted it to a secure URL can be done like this: UriBuilder build = new UriBuilder(Request.Url); build.Scheme = "https"; build.Port = -1; // don't inject portUri newUri = build.Uri; string newUrl = build.ToString(); Retrieve the fully qualified URL without a QueryString AFAIK, there’s no native routine to retrieve the current request URL without the query string. It’s easy to do with UriBuilder however: UriBuilder builder = newUriBuilder(Request.Url); builder.Query = ""; stringlogicalPathWithoutQuery = builder.ToString();

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New Bundling and Minification Support (ASP.NET 4.5 Series)

- by ScottGu

This is the sixth in a series of blog posts I'm doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next release of .NET and Visual Studio include a ton of great new features and capabilities. With ASP.NET 4.5 you'll see a bunch of really nice improvements with both Web Forms and MVC - as well as in the core ASP.NET base foundation that both are built upon. Today’s post covers some of the work we are doing to add built-in support for bundling and minification into ASP.NET - which makes it easy to improve the performance of applications. This feature can be used by all ASP.NET applications, including both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms solutions. Basics of Bundling and Minification As more and more people use mobile devices to surf the web, it is becoming increasingly important that the websites and apps we build perform well with them. We’ve all tried loading sites on our smartphones – only to eventually give up in frustration as it loads slowly over a slow cellular network. If your site/app loads slowly like that, you are likely losing potential customers because of bad performance. Even with powerful desktop machines, the load time of your site and perceived performance can make an enormous customer perception. Most websites today are made up of multiple JavaScript and CSS files to separate the concerns and keep the code base tight. While this is a good practice from a coding point of view, it often has some unfortunate consequences for the overall performance of the website. Multiple JavaScript and CSS files require multiple HTTP requests from a browser – which in turn can slow down the performance load time. Simple Example Below I’ve opened a local website in IE9 and recorded the network traffic using IE’s built-in F12 developer tools. As shown below, the website consists of 5 CSS and 4 JavaScript files which the browser has to download. Each file is currently requested separately by the browser and returned by the server, and the process can take a significant amount of time proportional to the number of files in question. Bundling ASP.NET is adding a feature that makes it easy to “bundle” or “combine” multiple CSS and JavaScript files into fewer HTTP requests. This causes the browser to request a lot fewer files and in turn reduces the time it takes to fetch them. Below is an updated version of the above sample that takes advantage of this new bundling functionality (making only one request for the JavaScript and one request for the CSS): The browser now has to send fewer requests to the server. The content of the individual files have been bundled/combined into the same response, but the content of the files remains the same - so the overall file size is exactly the same as before the bundling. But notice how even on a local dev machine (where the network latency between the browser and server is minimal), the act of bundling the CSS and JavaScript files together still manages to reduce the overall page load time by almost 20%. Over a slow network the performance improvement would be even better. Minification The next release of ASP.NET is also adding a new feature that makes it easy to reduce or “minify” the download size of the content as well. This is a process that removes whitespace, comments and other unneeded characters from both CSS and JavaScript. The result is smaller files, which will download and load in a browser faster. The graph below shows the performance gain we are seeing when both bundling and minification are used together: Even on my local dev box (where the network latency is minimal), we now have a 40% performance improvement from where we originally started. On slow networks (and especially with international customers), the gains would be even more significant. Using Bundling and Minification inside ASP.NET The upcoming release of ASP.NET makes it really easy to take advantage of bundling and minification within projects and see performance gains like in the scenario above. The way it does this allows you to avoid having to run custom tools as part of your build process – instead ASP.NET has added runtime support to perform the bundling/minification for you dynamically (caching the results to make sure perf is great). This enables a really clean development experience and makes it super easy to start to take advantage of these new features. Let’s assume that we have a simple project that has 4 JavaScript files and 6 CSS files: Bundling and Minifying the .css files Let’s say you wanted to reference all of the stylesheets in the “Styles” folder above on a page. Today you’d have to add multiple CSS references to get all of them – which would translate into 6 separate HTTP requests: The new bundling/minification feature now allows you to instead bundle and minify all of the .css files in the Styles folder – simply by sending a URL request to the folder (in this case “styles”) with an appended “/css” path after it. For example: This will cause ASP.NET to scan the directory, bundle and minify the .css files within it, and send back a single HTTP response with all of the CSS content to the browser. You don’t need to run any tools or pre-processor to get this behavior. This enables you to cleanly separate your CSS into separate logical .css files and maintain a very clean development experience – while not taking a performance hit at runtime for doing so. The Visual Studio designer will also honor the new bundling/minification logic as well – so you’ll still get a WYSWIYG designer experience inside VS as well. Bundling and Minifying the JavaScript files Like the CSS approach above, if we wanted to bundle and minify all of our JavaScript into a single response we could send a URL request to the folder (in this case “scripts”) with an appended “/js” path after it: This will cause ASP.NET to scan the directory, bundle and minify the .js files within it, and send back a single HTTP response with all of the JavaScript content to the browser. Again – no custom tools or builds steps were required in order to get this behavior. And it works with all browsers. Ordering of Files within a Bundle By default, when files are bundled by ASP.NET they are sorted alphabetically first, just like they are shown in Solution Explorer. Then they are automatically shifted around so that known libraries and their custom extensions such as jQuery, MooTools and Dojo are loaded before anything else. So the default order for the merged bundling of the Scripts folder as shown above will be: Jquery-1.6.2.js Jquery-ui.js Jquery.tools.js a.js By default, CSS files are also sorted alphabetically and then shifted around so that reset.css and normalize.css (if they are there) will go before any other file. So the default sorting of the bundling of the Styles folder as shown above will be: reset.css content.css forms.css globals.css menu.css styles.css The sorting is fully customizable, though, and can easily be changed to accommodate most use cases and any common naming pattern you prefer. The goal with the out of the box experience, though, is to have smart defaults that you can just use and be successful with. Any number of directories/sub-directories supported In the example above we just had a single “Scripts” and “Styles” folder for our application. This works for some application types (e.g. single page applications). Often, though, you’ll want to have multiple CSS/JS bundles within your application – for example: a “common” bundle that has core JS and CSS files that all pages use, and then page specific or section specific files that are not used globally. You can use the bundling/minification support across any number of directories or sub-directories in your project – this makes it easy to structure your code so as to maximize the bunding/minification benefits. Each directory by default can be accessed as a separate URL addressable bundle. Bundling/Minification Extensibility ASP.NET’s bundling and minification support is built with extensibility in mind and every part of the process can be extended or replaced. Custom Rules In addition to enabling the out of the box - directory-based - bundling approach, ASP.NET also supports the ability to register custom bundles using a new programmatic API we are exposing. The below code demonstrates how you can register a “customscript” bundle using code within an application’s Global.asax class. The API allows you to add/remove/filter files that go into the bundle on a very granular level: The above custom bundle can then be referenced anywhere within the application using the below <script> reference: Custom Processing You can also override the default CSS and JavaScript bundles to support your own custom processing of the bundled files (for example: custom minification rules, support for Saas, LESS or Coffeescript syntax, etc). In the example below we are indicating that we want to replace the built-in minification transforms with a custom MyJsTransform and MyCssTransform class. They both subclass the CSS and JavaScript minifier respectively and can add extra functionality: The end result of this extensibility is that you can plug-into the bundling/minification logic at a deep level and do some pretty cool things with it. 2 Minute Video of Bundling and Minification in Action Mads Kristensen has a great 90 second video that shows off using the new Bundling and Minification feature. You can watch the 90 second video here. Summary The new bundling and minification support within the next release of ASP.NET will make it easier to build fast web applications. It is really easy to use, and doesn’t require major changes to your existing dev workflow. It is also supports a rich extensibility API that enables you to customize it however you want. You can easily take advantage of this new support within ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET Web Pages based applications. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I use Twitter to-do quick posts and share links. My Twitter handle is: @scottgu

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NullReferenceException when accessing variables in a 2D array in Unity

- by Syed

I have made a class including variables in Monodevelop which is: public class GridInfo : MonoBehaviour { public float initPosX; public float initPosY; public bool inUse; public int f; public int g; public int h; public GridInfo parent; public int y,x; } Now I am using its class variable in another class, Map.cs which is: public class Map : MonoBehaviour { public static GridInfo[,] Tile = new GridInfo[17, 23]; void Start() { Tile[0,0].initPosX = initPosX; //Line 49 } } I am not getting any error on runtime, but when I play in unity it is giving me error NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object Map.Start () (at Assets/Scripts/Map.cs:49) I am not inserting this script in any gameobject, as Map.cs will make a GridInfo type array, I have also tried using variables using GetComponent, where is the problem ?

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Mac OS X Server Open Directory does not push Software Update settings to clients

- by joxl

I have an Xserve G5 running Mac OS X Server 10.5.8 configured as an Open Directory master. I have also enabled and configured Software Update service on the machine. The SUS is configured to serve Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard clients (see http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10297359#10297359) The clients bound to the OD are a variety of Mac's running OS X 10.4, 10.5 or 10.6. In Workgroup Manager, I have created 3 machine groups for each client OS. Each group is configured with a custom SUS URL, and the managed client computers are members accordingly (see http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10493154#10493154) My problem is that the server pushes the SUS settings to some of the client machines, but not all. When I first configured all this stuff on the server (a few weeks ago) I was closely monitoring a few of the client machines to confirm that they received the custom settings. I noticed that some of the clients (10.4/5/6 alike) seemed to get the settings immediately, others didn't show the new settings until after a reboot. As I said, results are mixed across OS's, but some clients will not "sync" at all. My immediate thought was to unbind/rebind the problematic machines. I did this on several client computers with no success. For example, today I was working on one of the Tiger clients. I noticed it was not pointed at my local SUS, so I checked the OD binding; it was fine. Just to be sure I unbound the machine. Next, I checked WM and confirmed the computer record was gone. I noticed the machine group still had a residual (broken?) member from the unbound client; I manually removed this. Finally, I re-bound the client to OD and re-added the machine to it's correct group in WM. Unfortunately, the client still pings apple's SUS for updates. Just to play it safe I rebooted the client, but to no avail, it will not see my local SUS. To confirm that there is nothing wrong with the server, or the client's connection to it, forcefully pointed the machine at my SUS: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL "$LOCAL_SUS_URL" and the machine successfully updated off my local server. Great, successful updates, but problem not solved. I've done exhaustive reading on discussions.apple.com (not saying I read everything, I'm just saying I have read a lot) without a good answer. The discouraging thing is that a lot of OD problems I've read about only result in the sysadmin completely reinstalling the server, or OD, or some other similarly heavy-handed operation. At this point, I am not willing to go that route. I still have hope that I can find the reason for this flaky behavior. If anyone can point me in a helpful direction it would be much appreciated. EDIT: Indeed, some files are being pushed to the client: # from client machine: $ sudo find /Library -type f -name com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist /Library/Managed Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist /Library/Managed Preferences/username/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist A few weeks ago, prior to my (previously mentioned) modifications, the SUS was still running "stock". Which meant it could not serve SL (10.6) machines. At that time, the Software Update settings were setup in WM under User Groups. This didn't make any sense because some users work on multiple machines with different OS's. Before creating Machine Groups in WM, I deleted all the SU settings from the User Group Preferences. This just makes the whole thing more confusing, because when I see a file here: /Library/Managed Preferences/username/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist I assume it's still remaining from the "old" settings, because I wouldn't think a Machine Setting belongs there. Despite all the com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist hanging around under the Managed Preferences, why does the client machine still call home to Apple and not my SUS? # on client machine: $ date Tue Jan 25 17:01:46 EST 2011 $ softwareupdate --list Software Update Tool Copyright 2002-2005 Apple No new software available. switch terminals... # on server: $ tail -n1 /var/log/swupd/swupd_access_log 10.x.x.x - - [25/Jan/2011:15:54:29 -0500] XXXX POST "/cgi-bin/SoftwareUpdateServerStats" 200 13 ... Notice the date of the client softwareupdate and the latest access to the SUS server; the server never heard a peep from that client.

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Decompilers - Myth or Fact ?

- by Simon

Lately I have been thinking of application security and binaries and decompilers. (FYI- Decompilers is just an anti-complier, the purpose is to get the source back from the binary) Is there such thing as "Perfect Decompiler"? or are binaries safe from reverse engineering? (For clarity sake, by "Perfect" I mean the original source files with all the variable names/macros/functions/classes/if possible comments in the respective headers and source files used to get the binary) What are some of the best practices used to prevent reverse engineering of software? Is it a major concern? Also is obfuscation/file permissions the only way to prevent unauthorized hacks on scripts? (call me a script-junky if you should)

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Book Review - Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan

- by BuckWoody

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

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Dynamic DNS registration for VPN clients

- by Eric Falsken

I've got a VPN server set up in my Active Directory on a remote network. (VPN Server is separate box from DNS/AD) When I dial into the network (client machine is not a member of the AD) the machine does not register its IP or Hostname in the DNS. I've played with all possible combinations of DHCP and RRAS-allocated IP pools, and none of them seem to cause my client to register. Is it because my client has to be a member of the domain? Are there some security settins I can tweak so that it can register its hostname/ip? I've looked in the event logs (System and Security) for the AD, DNS, DHCP, RRAS, and the client machine, and don't see anything relating to DNS Registration. Here's the IPConfig on the client machine (once connected): PPP adapter My VPN Name: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : mydomain.local Description . . . . . . . . . . . : My VPN Name Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.22(Preferred) Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.255 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.52 <- DC1 192.168.1.53 <- DC2 NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled Edit: It looks like my clients are not recieving the DHCP Scoope Options. I found this great article in Microsoft's KB. So the problem here is that the VPN Server "pre-reserves" the DHCP addresses, but then you have to add the DHCP Relay Agent to relay the secondary request for scope options. My problem is that the DHCP Relay Agent isn't relaying to the local DHCP server (same box as the VPN/RRAS). I've configured the DHCP Relay Agent according to this KB, but it dosn't work for a local DHCP server. (I see the request count increasing, but no responses) I was able to get everything working by specifying the DNS server and domain name in the VPN connection properties on the client. But am still unable to assign it (or the default gateway) dynamically via DHCP. The client also has to be a member of the remote domain.

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DocumentDB - Another Azure NoSQL Storage Service

- by Shaun

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2014/08/25/documentdb---another-azure-nosql-storage-service.aspxMicrosoft just released a bunch of new features for Azure on 22nd and one of them I was interested in most is DocumentDB, a document NoSQL database service on the cloud. Quick Look at DocumentDB We can try DocumentDB from the new azure preview portal. Just click the NEW button and select the item named DocumentDB to create a new account. Specify the name of the DocumentDB, which will be the endpoint we are going to use to connect later. Select the capacity unit, resource group and subscription. In resource group section we can select which region our DocumentDB will be located. Same as other azure services select the same location with your consumers of the DocumentDB, for example the website, web services, etc.. After several minutes the DocumentDB will be ready. Click the KEYS button we can find the URI and primary key, which will be used when connecting. Now let's open Visual Studio and try to use the DocumentDB we had just created. Create a new console application and install the DocumentDB .NET client library from NuGet with the keyword "DocumentDB". You need to select "Include Prerelase" in NuGet Package Manager window since this library was not yet released. Next we will create a new database and document collection under our DocumentDB account. The code below created an instance of DocumentClient with the URI and primary key we just copied from azure portal, and create a database and collection. And it also prints the document and collection link string which will be used later to insert and query documents. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var endpoint = new Uri("https://shx.documents.azure.com:443/"); 4: var key = "LU2NoyS2fH0131TGxtBE4DW/CjHQBzAaUx/mbuJ1X77C4FWUG129wWk2oyS2odgkFO2Xdif9/ZddintQicF+lA=="; 5: 6: var client = new DocumentClient(endpoint, key); 7: Run(client).Wait(); 8: 9: Console.WriteLine("done"); 10: Console.ReadKey(); 11: } 12: 13: static async Task Run(DocumentClient client) 14: { 15: 16: var database = new Database() { Id = "testdb" }; 17: database = await client.CreateDatabaseAsync(database); 18: Console.WriteLine("database link = {0}", database.SelfLink); 19: 20: var collection = new DocumentCollection() { Id = "testcol" }; 21: collection = await client.CreateDocumentCollectionAsync(database.SelfLink, collection); 22: Console.WriteLine("collection link = {0}", collection.SelfLink); 23: } Below is the result from the console window. We need to copy the collection link string for future usage. Now if we back to the portal we will find a database was listed with the name we specified in the code. Next we will insert a document into the database and collection we had just created. In the code below we pasted the collection link which copied in previous step, create a dynamic object with several properties defined. As you can see we can add some normal properties contains string, integer, we can also add complex property for example an array, a dictionary and an object reference, unless they can be serialized to JSON. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var endpoint = new Uri("https://shx.documents.azure.com:443/"); 4: var key = "LU2NoyS2fH0131TGxtBE4DW/CjHQBzAaUx/mbuJ1X77C4FWUG129wWk2oyS2odgkFO2Xdif9/ZddintQicF+lA=="; 5: 6: var client = new DocumentClient(endpoint, key); 7: 8: // collection link pasted from the result in previous demo 9: var collectionLink = "dbs/AAk3AA==/colls/AAk3AP6oFgA=/"; 10: 11: // document we are going to insert to database 12: dynamic doc = new ExpandoObject(); 13: doc.firstName = "Shaun"; 14: doc.lastName = "Xu"; 15: doc.roles = new string[] { "developer", "trainer", "presenter", "father" }; 16: 17: // insert the docuemnt 18: InsertADoc(client, collectionLink, doc).Wait(); 19: 20: Console.WriteLine("done"); 21: Console.ReadKey(); 22: } the insert code will be very simple as below, just provide the collection link and the object we are going to insert. 1: static async Task InsertADoc(DocumentClient client, string collectionLink, dynamic doc) 2: { 3: var document = await client.CreateDocumentAsync(collectionLink, doc); 4: Console.WriteLine(await JsonConvert.SerializeObjectAsync(document, Formatting.Indented)); 5: } Below is the result after the object had been inserted. Finally we will query the document from the database and collection. Similar to the insert code, we just need to specify the collection link so that the .NET SDK will help us to retrieve all documents in it. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var endpoint = new Uri("https://shx.documents.azure.com:443/"); 4: var key = "LU2NoyS2fH0131TGxtBE4DW/CjHQBzAaUx/mbuJ1X77C4FWUG129wWk2oyS2odgkFO2Xdif9/ZddintQicF+lA=="; 5: 6: var client = new DocumentClient(endpoint, key); 7: 8: var collectionLink = "dbs/AAk3AA==/colls/AAk3AP6oFgA=/"; 9: 10: SelectDocs(client, collectionLink); 11: 12: Console.WriteLine("done"); 13: Console.ReadKey(); 14: } 15: 16: static void SelectDocs(DocumentClient client, string collectionLink) 17: { 18: var docs = client.CreateDocumentQuery(collectionLink + "docs/").ToList(); 19: foreach(var doc in docs) 20: { 21: Console.WriteLine(doc); 22: } 23: } Since there's only one document in my collection below is the result when I executed the code. As you can see all properties, includes the array was retrieve at the same time. DocumentDB also attached some properties we didn't specified such as "_rid", "_ts", "_self" etc., which is controlled by the service. DocumentDB Benefit DocumentDB is a document NoSQL database service. Different from the traditional database, document database is truly schema-free. In a short nut, you can save anything in the same database and collection if it could be serialized to JSON. We you query the document database, all sub documents will be retrieved at the same time. This means you don't need to join other tables when using a traditional database. Document database is very useful when we build some high performance system with hierarchical data structure. For example, assuming we need to build a blog system, there will be many blog posts and each of them contains the content and comments. The comment can be commented as well. If we were using traditional database, let's say SQL Server, the database schema might be defined as below. When we need to display a post we need to load the post content from the Posts table, as well as the comments from the Comments table. We also need to build the comment tree based on the CommentID field. But if were using DocumentDB, what we need to do is to save the post as a document with a list contains all comments. Under a comment all sub comments will be a list in it. When we display this post we just need to to query the post document, the content and all comments will be loaded in proper structure. 1: { 2: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 3: "title": "xxxxx", 4: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 5: "postedOn": "08/25/2014 13:55", 6: "comments": 7: [ 8: { 9: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 10: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 11: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 14:00", 12: "commentedBy": "xxx" 13: }, 14: { 15: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 16: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 17: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 14:10", 18: "commentedBy": "xxx", 19: "comments": 20: [ 21: { 22: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 23: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 24: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 14:18", 25: "commentedBy": "xxx", 26: "comments": 27: [ 28: { 29: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 30: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 31: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 18:22", 32: "commentedBy": "xxx", 33: } 34: ] 35: }, 36: { 37: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 38: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 39: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 15:02", 40: "commentedBy": "xxx", 41: } 42: ] 43: }, 44: { 45: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 46: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 47: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 14:30", 48: "commentedBy": "xxx" 49: } 50: ] 51: } DocumentDB vs. Table Storage DocumentDB and Table Storage are all NoSQL service in Microsoft Azure. One common question is "when we should use DocumentDB rather than Table Storage". Here are some ideas from me and some MVPs. First of all, they are different kind of NoSQL database. DocumentDB is a document database while table storage is a key-value database. Second, table storage is cheaper. DocumentDB supports scale out from one capacity unit to 5 in preview period and each capacity unit provides 10GB local SSD storage. The price is $0.73/day includes 50% discount. For storage service the highest price is $0.061/GB, which is almost 10% of DocumentDB. Third, table storage provides local-replication, geo-replication, read access geo-replication while DocumentDB doesn't support. Fourth, there is local emulator for table storage but none for DocumentDB. We have to connect to the DocumentDB on cloud when developing locally. But, DocumentDB supports some cool features that table storage doesn't have. It supports store procedure, trigger and user-defined-function. It supports rich indexing while table storage only supports indexing against partition key and row key. It supports transaction, table storage supports as well but restricted with Entity Group Transaction scope. And the last, table storage is GA but DocumentDB is still in preview. Summary In this post I have a quick demonstration and introduction about the new DocumentDB service in Azure. It's very easy to interact through .NET and it also support REST API, Node.js SDK and Python SDK. Then I explained the concept and benefit of using document database, then compared with table storage. Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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SQL SERVER – Install Samples Database Adventure Works for SQL Server 2012

- by pinaldave

AdventureWorks is a Sample Database shipped with SQL Server and it can be downloaded from CodePlex site. AdventureWorks has replaced Northwind and Pubs from the sample database in SQL Server 2005.The Microsoft team keeps updating the sample database as they release new versions. For SQL Server 2012 RTM Samples AdventureWorks Database is released: AdventureWorks2012 Data File AdventureWorks2012 Case Sensitive Data File You can download either of the datafile and create database using the same. Here is the script which demonstrates how to create sample database in SQL Server 2012. CREATE DATABASE AdventureWorks2012 ON (FILENAME = 'D:\AdventureWorks2012_Data.mdf') FOR ATTACH_REBUILD_LOG ; Please specify your filepath in the filename variable. Here is the link for additional downloads. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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Date and Time Support in SQL Server 2008

- by Aamir Hasan

Using the New Date and Time Data Types Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} 1. The new date and time data types in SQL Server 2008 offer increased range and precision and are ANSI SQL compatible. 2. Separate date and time data types minimize storage space requirements for applications that need only date or time information. Moreover, the variable precision of the new time data type increases storage savings in exchange for reduced accuracy. 3. The new data types are mostly compatible with the original date and time data types and use the same Transact-SQL functions. 4. The datetimeoffset data type allows you to handle date and time information in global applications that use data that originates from different time zones. SELECT c.name, p.* FROM politics pJOIN country cON p.country = c.codeWHERE YEAR(Independence) < 1753ORDER BY IndependenceGO8. Highlight the SELECT statement and click Execute ( ) to show the use of some of the date functions.T-SQLSELECT c.name AS [Country Name], CONVERT(VARCHAR(12), p.Independence, 107) AS [Independence Date], DATEDIFF(YEAR, p.Independence, GETDATE()) AS [Years Independent (appox)], p.GovernmentFROM politics pJOIN country cON p.country = c.codeWHERE YEAR(Independence) < 1753ORDER BY IndependenceGO10. Select the SET DATEFORMAT statement and click Execute ( ) to change the DATEFORMAT to day-month-year.T-SQLSET DATEFORMAT dmyGO11. Select the DECLARE and SELECT statements and click Execute ( ) to show how the datetime and datetime2 data types interpret a date literal.T-SQLSET DATEFORMAT dmyDECLARE @dt datetime = '2008-12-05'DECLARE @dt2 datetime2 = '2008-12-05'SELECT MONTH(@dt) AS [Month-Datetime], DAY(@dt) AS [Day-Datetime]SELECT MONTH(@dt2) AS [Month-Datetime2], DAY(@dt2) AS [Day-Datetime2]GO12. Highlight the DECLARE and SELECT statements and click Execute ( ) to use integer arithmetic on a datetime variable.T-SQLDECLARE @dt datetime = '2008-12-05'SELECT @dt + 1GO13. Highlight the DECLARE and SELECT statements and click Execute ( ) to show how integer arithmetic is not allowed for datetime2 variables.T-SQLDECLARE @dt2 datetime = '2008-12-05'SELECT @dt2 + 1GO14. Highlight the DECLARE and SELECT statements and click Execute ( ) to show how to use DATE functions to do simple arithmetic on datetime2 variables.T-SQLDECLARE @dt2 datetime2(7) = '2008-12-05'SELECT DATEADD(d, 1, @dt2)GO15. Highlight the DECLARE and SELECT statements and click Execute ( ) to show how the GETDATE function can be used with both datetime and datetime2 data types.T-SQLDECLARE @dt datetime = GETDATE();DECLARE @dt2 datetime2(7) = GETDATE();SELECT @dt AS [GetDate-DateTime], @dt2 AS [GetDate-DateTime2]GO16. Draw attention to the values returned for both columns and how they are equal.17. Highlight the DECLARE and SELECT statements and click Execute ( ) to show how the SYSDATETIME function can be used with both datetime and datetime2 data types.T-SQLDECLARE @dt datetime = SYSDATETIME();DECLARE @dt2 datetime2(7) = SYSDATETIME();SELECT @dt AS [Sysdatetime-DateTime], @dt2 AS [Sysdatetime-DateTime2]GO18. Draw attention to the values returned for both columns and how they are different.Programming Global Applications with DateTimeOffset 2. If you have not previously created the SQLTrainingKitDB database while completing another demo in this training kit, highlight the CREATE DATABASE statement and click Execute ( ) to do so now.T-SQLCREATE DATABASE SQLTrainingKitDBGO3. Select the USE and CREATE TABLE statements and click Execute ( ) to create table datetest in the SQLTrainingKitDB database.T-SQLUSE SQLTrainingKitDBGOCREATE TABLE datetest ( id integer IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY, datetimecol datetimeoffset, EnteredTZ varchar(40)); Reference:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=E9C68E1B-1E0E-4299-B498-6AB3CA72A6D7&displaylang=en

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MSCC: Purpose and benefits of Version Control Systems (VCS)

Unfortunately, there was no monthly meetup during May. Which means that it was even more important and interesting to go forward with a great topic for this month. Earlier this year I already spoke to Nayar Joolfoo about doing a presentation on version control systems (VCS), and he gladly agreed since then. It was just about finding the right date for the action. Furthermore, it was also a great coincidence that Avinash Meetoo announced on social media networks that Knowledge 7 is about to have a new training on "Effective git" - which correlates to a book title Avinash is currently working on - all the best with your approach on this and reach out to our MSCC craftsmen for recessions. Once again a big Thank you to Orange Ebene Accelerator on providing the venue for us, and the MSCC members involved on securing the time slot for our event. Unfortunately, it's kind of tough to get an early confirmation for our meetups these days. I'll keep you posted on that one as there are some interesting and exciting options coming up soon. Okay, let's talk about the meeting and version control systems again. As usual, I'm going to put my first impression of the meetup: "Absolutely great topic, questions and discussions on version control systems, like git or VSO. I was also highly pleased by the number of first timers and female IT geeks. Hopefully, we will be able to keep this trend for future get-togethers." And I really have to emphasise the amount of fresh blood coming to our gathering. Also, during the initial phase it was surprising to see that exactly those first-timers, most of them students at various campuses here on the island, had absolutely no idea about version control systems. More about further down... Reactions of other attendees If I counted correctly, we had a total of 17 attendees this month, and I'd like to give you feedback from some of them: "Inspiring. Helped me understand more about GIT." -- Sean on event comments "Joined the meetup today with literally no idea what is a version control system. I have several reasons why I should be starting to use VCS as from NOW in my projects. Thanks Nayar, Jochen and other participants :)" -- Yudish on event comments "Was present today and I'm very satisfied.I was not aware if there was a such tool like git available. Thanks to those who contributed for this meetup.It was great. Learned a lot from this meetup!!" -- Leonardo on event comments "Seriously, I can see how it’s going to ease my task and help me save time. Gone are the issues with files backups. And since I’ll be doing my dissertation this year, using Git would help me a lot for my backups and I’m grateful to Nayar for the great explanation." -- Swan-Iyah on MSCC meetup : Version Controls Hopefully, I'll be able to get some other sources - personal blogs preferred - on our meeting. Geeks, thank you so much for those encouraging comments. It's really great to experience that we, all members of the MSCC, are doing the right thing to get more IT information out, and to help each other to improve and evolve in our professional careers. Our agenda of the day Honestly, we had a bumpy start... First, I was battling a little bit with the movable room divider in order to maximize the space. I mean, we had 24 RSVPs and usually there might additional people coming along. Then, for what ever reason, we were facing power outages - actually twice in short periods. Not too good for the projector after all, but hey it went smooth for the rest of the time being. And last but not least... our first speaker Nayar got stuck somewhere on the road. ;-) Anyway, not a real show-stopper and we used the time until Nayar's arrival to introduce ourselves a little bit. It is always important for me to get to know the "newbies" a little bit, and as a result we had lots of students of university - first year, second year and recent graduates - among them. Surprisingly, none of them was ever in contact with version control systems at all. I mean, this is a shocking discovery! Similar to the ability of touch-typing I'd say that being able to use (and master) any kind of version control system is compulsory in any job in the IT industry. Seriously, I'm wondering what is being taught during the classes on the campus. All of them have to work on semester assessments or final projects, even in small teams of 2-4 people. That's the perfect occasion to get started with VCS. Already in this phase, we had great input from more experienced VCS users, like Sean, Avinash and myself. git - a modern approach to VCS - Nayar What a tour! Nayar gave us the full round of git from start to finish, even touching some more advanced techniques. First, he started to explain about the importance of version control systems as an essential tool for software developers, even working alone on a project, and the ability to have a kind of "time machine" that allows you to inspect and revert to a previous version of source code at any time. Then he showed how easy it is to install git on an Ubuntu based system but also mentioned that git is literally available for any operating system, like Windows, Mac OS X and of course other Linux distributions. Next, he showed us how to set the initial configuration values of user name and email address which simplifies the daily usage of the git client while working with your repositories. Then he initialised and added a new repository for some local development of a blogging software. All commands were done using the command line interface (CLI) so that they can be repeated on any system as reference. The syntax and the procedure is always the same, and Nayar clearly mentioned this to the attendees. Now, having a git repository in place it was about time to work on some "important" changes on the blogging software - just for the sake of demonstrating the ease of use and power of git. One interesting question came very early: "How many commands do we have to learn? It looks quite difficult at the moment" - Well, rest assured that during daily development circles you will need less than 10 git commands on a regular base: git add, commit, push, pull, checkout, and merge And Nayar demo'd all of them. Much to the delight of everyone he also showed gitk which is the git repository browser. It's an UI tool to display changes in a repository or a selected set of commits. This includes visualizing the commit graph, showing information related to each commit, and the files in the trees of each revision. Using gitk to display and browse information of a local git repository And last but not least, we took advantage of the internet connectivity and reached out to various online portals offering git hosting for free. Nayar showed us how to push the local repository into a remote system on github. Showing the web-based git browser and history handling, and then also explained and demo'd on how to connect to existing online repositories in order to get access to either your own source code or other people's open source projects. Next to github, we also spoke about bitbucket and gitlab as potential online platforms for your projects. Have a look at the conditions and details about their free service packages and what you can get additionally as a paying customer. Usually, you already get a lot of services for up to five users for free but there might be other important aspects that might have an impact on your decision. Anyways, moving git-based repositories between systems is a piece of cake, and changing online platforms is possible at any stage of your development. Visual Studio Online (VSO) - Jochen Well, Nayar literally covered all elements of working with git during his session, including the use of external online platforms. So, what would be the advantage of talking about Visual Studio Online (VSO)? First of all, VSO is "just another" online platform for hosting and managing git repositories on remote systems, equivalent to github, bitbucket, or any other web site. At the moment (of writing), Microsoft also provides a free package of up to five users / developers on a git repository but there is more in that package. Of course, it is related to software development on the Windows systems and the bonds are tightened towards the use of Visual Studio but out of experience you are absolutely not restricted to that. Connecting a Linux or Mac OS X machine with a git client or an integrated development environment (IDE) like Eclipse or Xcode works as smooth as expected. So, why should one opt in for VSO? Well, one of the main aspects that I would like to mention here is that VSO integrates the Application Life Cycle Methodology (ALM) of Microsoft in their platform. Meaning that you get agile project management with Backlogs, Sprints, Burn-down charts as well as the ability to track tasks, bug reports and work items next to collaborative team chats. It's the whole package of agile development you'll get. And, something I mentioned briefly during the begin of our meeting, VSO gives you the possibility of an automated continuous integrated (CI) process which builds and can run tests of your source code after each commit of changes. Having a proper CI strategy is also part of the Clean Code Developer practices - on Level Green actually -, and not only simplifies your life as a software developer but also reduces the sources of potential errors. Seamless integration and automated deployment between Microsoft Azure Web Sites and git repository But my favourite feature is the seamless continuous deployment to Microsoft Azure. Especially, while working on web projects it's absolutely astounishing that as soon as you commit your chances it just takes a couple of seconds until your modifications are deployed and available on your Azure-hosted web sites. Upcoming Events and networking Due to the adjusted times, everybody was kind of hungry and we didn't follow up on networking or upcoming events - very unfortunate to my opinion and this will have an impact on future planning of our meetups. Because I rather would like to see more conversations during and at the end of our meetings than everyone just packing their laptops, bags and accessories and rush off to grab some food. I was hoping to get some information regarding this year's Code Challenge - supposedly to be organised during July? Maybe someone could leave a comment on that - but I couldn't get any updates. Well, I'll keep digging... In case that you would like to get more into git and how to use it effectively, please check out Knowledge 7's upcoming course on "Effective git". Thanks Avinash for your vital input into today's conversation and I'm looking forward to get a grip on your book title very soon. My resume of the day Do not work in IT without any kind of version control system! Seriously, without a VCS in place you're doing it wrong. It's like driving a car without seat belts attached or riding your bike without safety helmet. You don't do that! End of discussion. ;-) Nowadays, having access to free (as in cost) tools to install on your machine and numerous online platforms to host your source code for free for up to five users it's a no-brainer to get yourself familiar with VCS. Today's sessions gave a good overview on how to start using git and how to connect to various remote services like github or VSO.

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Deleting multiple objects in a AWS S3 bucket with s3curl.pl?

- by user183394

I have been trying to use the AWS "official" command line tool s3curl.pl to test out the recently announced multi-object delete. Here is what I have done: First, I tested out the s3curl.pl with a set of credentials without a hitch: $ s3curl.pl --id=s3 -- http://testbucket-0.s3.amazonaws.com/|xmllint --format - % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 884 0 884 0 0 4399 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 5703 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <ListBucketResult xmlns="http://s3.amazonaws.com/doc/2006-03-01/"> <Name>testbucket-0</Name> <Prefix/> <Marker/> <MaxKeys>1000</MaxKeys> <IsTruncated>false</IsTruncated> <Contents> <Key>file_1</Key> <LastModified>2012-03-22T17:08:17.000Z</LastModified> <ETag>"ee0e521a76524034aaa5b331842a8b4e"</ETag> <Size>400000</Size> <Owner> <ID>e6d81ea69572270e58d3814ab674df8c8f1fd5d502669633a4951bdd5185f7f4</ID> <DisplayName>zackp</DisplayName> </Owner> <StorageClass>STANDARD</StorageClass> </Contents> <Contents> <Key>file_2</Key> <LastModified>2012-03-22T17:08:19.000Z</LastModified> <ETag>"6b32cbf8219a59690a9f69ba6ff3f590"</ETag> <Size>600000</Size> <Owner> <ID>e6d81ea69572270e58d3814ab674df8c8f1fd5d502669633a4951bdd5185f7f4</ID> <DisplayName>zackp</DisplayName> </Owner> <StorageClass>STANDARD</StorageClass> </Contents> </ListBucketResult> Then, I following the s3curl.pl's usage instructions: s3curl.pl --help Usage /usr/local/bin/s3curl.pl --id friendly-name (or AWSAccessKeyId) [options] -- [curl-options] [URL] options: --key SecretAccessKey id/key are AWSAcessKeyId and Secret (unsafe) --contentType text/plain set content-type header --acl public-read use a 'canned' ACL (x-amz-acl header) --contentMd5 content_md5 add x-amz-content-md5 header --put <filename> PUT request (from the provided local file) --post [<filename>] POST request (optional local file) --copySrc bucket/key Copy from this source key --createBucket [<region>] create-bucket with optional location constraint --head HEAD request --debug enable debug logging common curl options: -H 'x-amz-acl: public-read' another way of using canned ACLs -v verbose logging Then, I tried the following, and always got back error. I would appreciated it very much if someone could point out where I made a mistake? $ s3curl.pl --id=s3 --post multi_delete.xml -- http://testbucket-0.s3.amazonaws.com/?delete <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Error><Code>SignatureDoesNotMatch</Code><Message>The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided. Check your key and signing method.</Message><StringToSignBytes>50 4f 53 54 0a 0a 0a 54 68 75 2c 20 30 35 20 41 70 72 20 32 30 31 32 20 30 30 3a 35 30 3a 30 38 20 2b 30 30 30 30 0a 2f 7a 65 74 74 61 72 2d 74 2f 3f 64 65 6c 65 74 65</StringToSignBytes><RequestId>707FBE0EB4A571A8</RequestId><HostId>mP3ZwlPTcRqARQZd6gU4UvBrxGBNIVa0VVe5p0rqGmq5hM65RprwcG/qcXe+pmDT</HostId><SignatureProvided>edkNGuugiSFe0ku4eGzkh8kYgHw=</SignatureProvided><StringToSign>POST Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:50:08 +0000 The file multi_delete.xml contains the following: cat multi_delete.xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Delete> <Quiet>true</Quiet> <Object> <Key>file_1</Key> <VersionId> </VersionId>> </Object> <Object> <Key>file_2</Key> <VersionId> </VersionId> </Object> </Delete> Thanks for any help! --Zack

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VSFTPD Unable to set write permissions on folder

- by Frank Astin

I've just set up my first FTP server with VSFTPD on cent os . I can connect to it fine using a user in the group ftp-users but I get read only access . I've tried several different CHMOD codes on the folder (even 777) all to no avail . This is the tutorial I used to set up the server http://tinyurl.com/73pyuxz hopefully you'll be able to see something I missed. Thanks in advance . Requested Config File : # Example config file /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf # # The default compiled in settings are fairly paranoid. This sample file # loosens things up a bit, to make the ftp daemon more usable. # Please see vsftpd.conf.5 for all compiled in defaults. # # READ THIS: This example file is NOT an exhaustive list of vsftpd options. # Please read the vsftpd.conf.5 manual page to get a full idea of vsftpd's # capabilities. # # Allow anonymous FTP? (Beware - allowed by default if you comment this out). anonymous_enable=NO # # Uncomment this to allow local users to log in. local_enable=YES # # Uncomment this to enable any form of FTP write command. write_enable=YES # # Default umask for local users is 077. You may wish to change this to 022, # if your users expect that (022 is used by most other ftpd's) local_umask=022 # # Uncomment this to allow the anonymous FTP user to upload files. This only # has an effect if the above global write enable is activated. Also, you will # obviously need to create a directory writable by the FTP user. #anon_upload_enable=YES # # Uncomment this if you want the anonymous FTP user to be able to create # new directories. #anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES # # Activate directory messages - messages given to remote users when they # go into a certain directory. dirmessage_enable=YES # # The target log file can be vsftpd_log_file or xferlog_file. # This depends on setting xferlog_std_format parameter xferlog_enable=YES # # Make sure PORT transfer connections originate from port 20 (ftp-data). connect_from_port_20=YES # # If you want, you can arrange for uploaded anonymous files to be owned by # a different user. Note! Using "root" for uploaded files is not # recommended! #chown_uploads=YES #chown_username=whoever # # The name of log file when xferlog_enable=YES and xferlog_std_format=YES # WARNING - changing this filename affects /etc/logrotate.d/vsftpd.log #xferlog_file=/var/log/xferlog # # Switches between logging into vsftpd_log_file and xferlog_file files. # NO writes to vsftpd_log_file, YES to xferlog_file xferlog_std_format=YES # # You may change the default value for timing out an idle session. #idle_session_timeout=600 # # You may change the default value for timing out a data connection. #data_connection_timeout=120 # # It is recommended that you define on your system a unique user which the # ftp server can use as a totally isolated and unprivileged user. #nopriv_user=ftpsecure # # Enable this and the server will recognise asynchronous ABOR requests. Not # recommended for security (the code is non-trivial). Not enabling it, # however, may confuse older FTP clients. #async_abor_enable=YES # # By default the server will pretend to allow ASCII mode but in fact ignore # the request. Turn on the below options to have the server actually do ASCII # mangling on files when in ASCII mode. # Beware that on some FTP servers, ASCII support allows a denial of service # attack (DoS) via the command "SIZE /big/file" in ASCII mode. vsftpd # predicted this attack and has always been safe, reporting the size of the # raw file. # ASCII mangling is a horrible feature of the protocol. #ascii_upload_enable=YES #ascii_download_enable=YES # # You may fully customise the login banner string: #ftpd_banner=Welcome to blah FTP service. # # You may specify a file of disallowed anonymous e-mail addresses. Apparently # useful for combatting certain DoS attacks. #deny_email_enable=YES # (default follows) #banned_email_file=/etc/vsftpd/banned_emails # # You may specify an explicit list of local users to chroot() to their home # directory. If chroot_local_user is YES, then this list becomes a list of # users to NOT chroot(). #chroot_list_enable=YES # (default follows) #chroot_list_file=/etc/vsftpd/chroot_list # # You may activate the "-R" option to the builtin ls. This is disabled by # default to avoid remote users being able to cause excessive I/O on large # sites. However, some broken FTP clients such as "ncftp" and "mirror" assume # the presence of the "-R" option, so there is a strong case for enabling it. #ls_recurse_enable=YES # # When "listen" directive is enabled, vsftpd runs in standalone mode and # listens on IPv4 sockets. This directive cannot be used in conjunction # with the listen_ipv6 directive. listen=YES # # This directive enables listening on IPv6 sockets. To listen on IPv4 and IPv6 # sockets, you must run two copies of vsftpd whith two configuration files. # Make sure, that one of the listen options is commented !! #listen_ipv6=YES pam_service_name=vsftpd userlist_enable=YES tcp_wrappers=YES

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F# for the C# Programmer

- by mbcrump

Are you a C# Programmer and can’t make it past a day without seeing or hearing someone mention F#? Today, I’m going to walk you through your first F# application and give you a brief introduction to the language. Sit back this will only take about 20 minutes. Introduction Microsoft's F# programming language is a functional language for the .NET framework that was originally developed at Microsoft Research Cambridge by Don Syme. In October 2007, the senior vice president of the developer division at Microsoft announced that F# was being officially productized to become a fully supported .NET language and professional developers were hired to create a team of around ten people to build the product version. In September 2008, Microsoft released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP), an official beta release, of the F# distribution . In December 2008, Microsoft announced that the success of this CTP had encouraged them to escalate F# and it is now will now be shipped as one of the core languages in Visual Studio 2010 , alongside C++, C# 4.0 and VB. The F# programming language incorporates many state-of-the-art features from programming language research and ossifies them in an industrial strength implementation that promises to revolutionize interactive, parallel and concurrent programming. Advantages of F# F# is the world's first language to combine all of the following features: Type inference: types are inferred by the compiler and generic definitions are created automatically. Algebraic data types: a succinct way to represent trees. Pattern matching: a comprehensible and efficient way to dissect data structures. Active patterns: pattern matching over foreign data structures. Interactive sessions: as easy to use as Python and Mathematica. High performance JIT compilation to native code: as fast as C#. Rich data structures: lists and arrays built into the language with syntactic support. Functional programming: first-class functions and tail calls. Expressive static type system: finds bugs during compilation and provides machine-verified documentation. Sequence expressions: interrogate huge data sets efficiently. Asynchronous workflows: syntactic support for monadic style concurrent programming with cancellations. Industrial-strength IDE support: multithreaded debugging, and graphical throwback of inferred types and documentation. Commerce friendly design and a viable commercial market. Lets try a short program in C# then F# to understand the differences. Using C#: Create a variable and output the value to the console window: Sample Program. using System; namespace ConsoleApplication9 { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var a = 2; Console.WriteLine(a); Console.ReadLine(); } } } A breeze right? 14 Lines of code. We could have condensed it a bit by removing the “using” statment and tossing the namespace. But this is the typical C# program. Using F#: Create a variable and output the value to the console window: To start, open Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2008. Note: If using VS2008, then please download the SDK first before getting started. If you are using VS2010 then you are already setup and ready to go. So, click File-> New Project –> Other Languages –> Visual F# –> Windows –> F# Application. You will get the screen below. Go ahead and enter a name and click OK. Now, you will notice that the Solution Explorer contains the following: Double click the Program.fs and enter the following information. Hit F5 and it should run successfully. Sample Program. open System let a = 2 Console.WriteLine a As Shown below: Hmm, what? F# did the same thing in 3 lines of code. Show me the interactive evaluation that I keep hearing about. The F# development environment for Visual Studio 2010 provides two different modes of execution for F# code: Batch compilation to a .NET executable or DLL. (This was accomplished above). Interactive evaluation. (Demo is below) The interactive session provides a > prompt, requires a double semicolon ;; identifier at the end of a code snippet to force evaluation, and returns the names (if any) and types of resulting definitions and values. To access the F# prompt, in VS2010 Goto View –> Other Window then F# Interactive. Once you have the interactive window type in the following expression: 2+3;; as shown in the screenshot below: I hope this guide helps you get started with the language, please check out the following books for further information. F# Books for further reading Foundations of F# Author: Robert Pickering An introduction to functional programming with F#. Including many samples, this book walks through the features of the F# language and libraries, and covers many of the .NET Framework features which can be leveraged with F#. Functional Programming for the Real World: With Examples in F# and C# Authors: Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet An introduction to functional programming for existing C# developers written by Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet. This book explains the core principles using both C# and F#, shows how to use functional ideas when designing .NET applications and presents practical examples such as design of domain specific language, development of multi-core applications and programming of reactive applications.

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SSH Login to an EC2 instance failing with previously working keys...

- by Matthew Savage

We recently had an issues where I had rebooted our EC2 instance (Ubuntu x86_64, version 9.10 server) and due to an EC2 issue the instance needed to be stopped and was down for a few days. Now I have been able to bring the instance back online I cannot connect to SSH using the keypair which previously worked. Unfortunately SSH is the only way to get into this server, and while I have another system running in its place there are a number of things I would like to try and retrieve from the machine. Running SSH in verbose mode yields the following: [Broc-MBP.local]: Broc:~/.ssh ? ssh -i ~/.ssh/EC2Keypair.pem -l ubuntu ec2-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com -vvv OpenSSH_5.2p1, OpenSSL 0.9.8l 5 Nov 2009 debug1: Reading configuration data /Users/Broc/.ssh/config debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh_config debug2: ssh_connect: needpriv 0 debug1: Connecting to ec2-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com [184.73.109.130] port 22. debug1: Connection established. debug3: Not a RSA1 key file /Users/Broc/.ssh/EC2Keypair.pem. debug2: key_type_from_name: unknown key type '-----BEGIN' debug3: key_read: missing keytype debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug2: key_type_from_name: unknown key type '-----END' debug3: key_read: missing keytype debug1: identity file /Users/Broc/.ssh/EC2Keypair.pem type -1 debug3: Not a RSA1 key file /Users/Broc/.ssh/id_rsa. debug2: key_type_from_name: unknown key type '-----BEGIN' debug3: key_read: missing keytype debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug3: key_read: missing whitespace debug2: key_type_from_name: unknown key type '-----END' debug3: key_read: missing keytype debug1: identity file /Users/Broc/.ssh/id_rsa type 1 debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version OpenSSH_5.1p1 Debian-6ubuntu2 debug1: match: OpenSSH_5.1p1 Debian-6ubuntu2 pat OpenSSH* debug1: Enabling compatibility mode for protocol 2.0 debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.2 debug2: fd 3 setting O_NONBLOCK debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT received debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1,diffie-hellman-group14-sha1,diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: ssh-rsa,ssh-dss debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: aes128-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes256-ctr,arcfour256,arcfour128,aes128-cbc,3des-cbc,blowfish-cbc,cast128-cbc,aes192-cbc,aes256-cbc,arcfour,[email protected] debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: aes128-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes256-ctr,arcfour256,arcfour128,aes128-cbc,3des-cbc,blowfish-cbc,cast128-cbc,aes192-cbc,aes256-cbc,arcfour,[email protected] debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: hmac-md5,hmac-sha1,[email protected],hmac-ripemd160,[email protected],hmac-sha1-96,hmac-md5-96 debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: hmac-md5,hmac-sha1,[email protected],hmac-ripemd160,[email protected],hmac-sha1-96,hmac-md5-96 debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: none,[email protected],zlib debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: none,[email protected],zlib debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: first_kex_follows 0 debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: reserved 0 debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1,diffie-hellman-group14-sha1,diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: ssh-rsa,ssh-dss debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: aes128-cbc,3des-cbc,blowfish-cbc,cast128-cbc,arcfour128,arcfour256,arcfour,aes192-cbc,aes256-cbc,[email protected],aes128-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes256-ctr debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: aes128-cbc,3des-cbc,blowfish-cbc,cast128-cbc,arcfour128,arcfour256,arcfour,aes192-cbc,aes256-cbc,[email protected],aes128-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes256-ctr debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: hmac-md5,hmac-sha1,[email protected],hmac-ripemd160,[email protected],hmac-sha1-96,hmac-md5-96 debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: hmac-md5,hmac-sha1,[email protected],hmac-ripemd160,[email protected],hmac-sha1-96,hmac-md5-96 debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: none,[email protected] debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: none,[email protected] debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: first_kex_follows 0 debug2: kex_parse_kexinit: reserved 0 debug2: mac_setup: found hmac-md5 debug1: kex: server->client aes128-ctr hmac-md5 none debug2: mac_setup: found hmac-md5 debug1: kex: client->server aes128-ctr hmac-md5 none debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_REQUEST(1024<1024<8192) sent debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_GROUP debug2: dh_gen_key: priv key bits set: 123/256 debug2: bits set: 500/1024 debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_INIT sent debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_REPLY debug3: check_host_in_hostfile: filename /Users/Broc/.ssh/known_hosts debug3: check_host_in_hostfile: match line 106 debug3: check_host_in_hostfile: filename /Users/Broc/.ssh/known_hosts debug3: check_host_in_hostfile: match line 106 debug1: Host 'ec2-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com' is known and matches the RSA host key. debug1: Found key in /Users/Broc/.ssh/known_hosts:106 debug2: bits set: 521/1024 debug1: ssh_rsa_verify: signature correct debug2: kex_derive_keys debug2: set_newkeys: mode 1 debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS sent debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS debug2: set_newkeys: mode 0 debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS received debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_REQUEST sent debug2: service_accept: ssh-userauth debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_ACCEPT received debug2: key: /Users/Broc/.ssh/id_rsa (0x100125f70) debug2: key: /Users/Broc/.ssh/EC2Keypair.pem (0x0) debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey debug3: start over, passed a different list publickey debug3: preferred publickey,keyboard-interactive,password debug3: authmethod_lookup publickey debug3: remaining preferred: keyboard-interactive,password debug3: authmethod_is_enabled publickey debug1: Next authentication method: publickey debug1: Offering public key: /Users/Broc/.ssh/id_rsa debug3: send_pubkey_test debug2: we sent a publickey packet, wait for reply debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey debug1: Trying private key: /Users/Broc/.ssh/EC2Keypair.pem debug1: read PEM private key done: type RSA debug3: sign_and_send_pubkey debug2: we sent a publickey packet, wait for reply debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey debug2: we did not send a packet, disable method debug1: No more authentication methods to try. Permission denied (publickey). [Broc-MBP.local]: Broc:~/.ssh ? So, right now I'm really at a loss and not sure what to do. While I've already got another system taking the place of this one I'd really like to have access back :|

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vsftpd not allowing uploads. 550 response

- by Josh

I've set vsftpd up on a centos box. I keep trying to upload files but I keep getting "550 Failed to change directory" and "550 Could not get file size." Here's my vsftpd.conf # The default compiled in settings are fairly paranoid. This sample file # loosens things up a bit, to make the ftp daemon more usable. # Please see vsftpd.conf.5 for all compiled in defaults. # # READ THIS: This example file is NOT an exhaustive list of vsftpd options. # Please read the vsftpd.conf.5 manual page to get a full idea of vsftpd's # capabilities. # # Allow anonymous FTP? (Beware - allowed by default if you comment this out). anonymous_enable=YES # # Uncomment this to allow local users to log in. local_enable=YES # # Uncomment this to enable any form of FTP write command. write_enable=YES # # Default umask for local users is 077. You may wish to change this to 022, # if your users expect that (022 is used by most other ftpd's) local_umask=022 # # Uncomment this to allow the anonymous FTP user to upload files. This only # has an effect if the above global write enable is activated. Also, you will # obviously need to create a directory writable by the FTP user. anon_upload_enable=YES # # Uncomment this if you want the anonymous FTP user to be able to create # new directories. anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES anon_other_write_enable=YES # # Activate directory messages - messages given to remote users when they # go into a certain directory. dirmessage_enable=YES # # The target log file can be vsftpd_log_file or xferlog_file. # This depends on setting xferlog_std_format parameter xferlog_enable=YES # # Make sure PORT transfer connections originate from port 20 (ftp-data). connect_from_port_20=YES # # If you want, you can arrange for uploaded anonymous files to be owned by # a different user. Note! Using "root" for uploaded files is not # recommended! #chown_uploads=YES #chown_username=whoever # # The name of log file when xferlog_enable=YES and xferlog_std_format=YES # WARNING - changing this filename affects /etc/logrotate.d/vsftpd.log #xferlog_file=/var/log/xferlog # # Switches between logging into vsftpd_log_file and xferlog_file files. # NO writes to vsftpd_log_file, YES to xferlog_file xferlog_std_format=NO # # You may change the default value for timing out an idle session. #idle_session_timeout=600 # # You may change the default value for timing out a data connection. #data_connection_timeout=120 # # It is recommended that you define on your system a unique user which the # ftp server can use as a totally isolated and unprivileged user. #nopriv_user=ftpsecure # # Enable this and the server will recognise asynchronous ABOR requests. Not # recommended for security (the code is non-trivial). Not enabling it, # however, may confuse older FTP clients. #async_abor_enable=YES # # By default the server will pretend to allow ASCII mode but in fact ignore # the request. Turn on the below options to have the server actually do ASCII # mangling on files when in ASCII mode. # Beware that on some FTP servers, ASCII support allows a denial of service # attack (DoS) via the command "SIZE /big/file" in ASCII mode. vsftpd # predicted this attack and has always been safe, reporting the size of the # raw file. # ASCII mangling is a horrible feature of the protocol. #ascii_upload_enable=YES #ascii_download_enable=YES # # You may fully customise the login banner string: #ftpd_banner=Welcome to blah FTP service. # # You may specify a file of disallowed anonymous e-mail addresses. Apparently # useful for combatting certain DoS attacks. #deny_email_enable=YES # (default follows) #banned_email_file=/etc/vsftpd/banned_emails # # You may specify an explicit list of local users to chroot() to their home # directory. If chroot_local_user is YES, then this list becomes a list of # users to NOT chroot(). #chroot_list_enable=YES # (default follows) #chroot_list_file=/etc/vsftpd/chroot_list # # You may activate the "-R" option to the builtin ls. This is disabled by # default to avoid remote users being able to cause excessive I/O on large # sites. However, some broken FTP clients such as "ncftp" and "mirror" assume # the presence of the "-R" option, so there is a strong case for enabling it. #ls_recurse_enable=YES # # When "listen" directive is enabled, vsftpd runs in standalone mode and # listens on IPv4 sockets. This directive cannot be used in conjunction # with the listen_ipv6 directive. listen=YES # This directive enables listening on IPv6 sockets. To listen on IPv4 and IPv6 # sockets, you must run two copies of vsftpd whith two configuration files. # Make sure, that one of the listen options is commented !! #listen_ipv6=YES pam_service_name=vsftpd userlist_enable=YES tcp_wrappers=YES log_ftp_protocol=YES banner_file=/etc/vsftpd/issue local_root=/var/www guest_enable=YES guest_username=ftpusr ftp_username=nobody

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Tracking pages with variables in GA

- by Imran

Recently I have updated my site, it now passes a variable on some links like so... www.mysite.com/1234/?play=true I've noticed in Google Analytics it records www.mysite.com/1234/ and www.mysite.com/1234/?play=true as two different URL's. Is there a way to merge them because they are after all just one page, It makes "Top Content" for example hard to read because of dupilicates. I've read about something called canonical link tag which may help this? My blog has this already inserted into the head but it doesnt make a difference. Any suggestions?

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Dynamically creating astar node map by triangular polygonal map

- by jett

My game's map format uses a bunch of triangles to make up the platforms and terrain in 2d. Right now I can set up a 2d array of nodes for the astar algorithm that basically is a bunch of rectangles across the maps x and y that can be set to "wall" if the a* algorithm should try to go around it. However I want a function in the map loader to create the node overlay if the nodes are not specified. I was thinking if more than n percent of the a* rectangle overlaid on map was filled by polygons I could mark that entry in the array as "wall". However I'm stuck on how to do this(or even start) where/when the triangles can be overlapping and also of variable size.

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Windows 7 client can't connect to CentOS PPTP VPN

- by Chris

Have a Macintosh (10.8.2) that connects just fine to a CentOS 6.0 virtual private server (OpenVZ, with PPP added by the host) via PPTP. A Windows 7 Home Premium client (virtualized in Sun's Virtual Box), on the same computer, using the same Ethernet connection, cannot connect to the Linux VPN server. I have iptables disabled (for testing) on the Linux box. I have the Windows firewall turned off. /var/log/messages looks like this, for a Windows connection: Oct 12 18:44:30 production pptpd[1880]: CTRL: Client 66.104.246.168 control connection started Oct 12 18:44:30 production pptpd[1880]: CTRL: Starting call (launching pppd, opening GRE) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: Plugin /usr/lib/pptpd/pptpd-logwtmp.so loaded. Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: pptpd-logwtmp: $Version$ Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: pppd options in effect: Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: debug#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: nologfd#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: dump#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: plugin /usr/lib/pptpd/pptpd-logwtmp.so#011#011# (from command line) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: require-mschap-v2#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: refuse-pap#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: refuse-chap#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: refuse-mschap#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: name pptpd#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: pptpd-original-ip 66.104.246.168#011#011# (from command line) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: 115200#011#011# (from command line) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: lock#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: local#011#011# (from command line) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: novj#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: novjccomp#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: ipparam 66.104.246.168#011#011# (from command line) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: proxyarp#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: 192.168.97.1:192.168.97.10#011#011# (from command line) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: nobsdcomp#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: require-mppe-128#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: mppe-stateful#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0 Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: Using interface ppp0 Oct 12 18:44:30 production pppd[1881]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/pts/1 (At this point the Windows machine displays a dialog, reading: "Verifying user name and password...") Oct 12 18:45:00 production pppd[1881]: LCP: timeout sending Config-Requests Oct 12 18:45:00 production pppd[1881]: Connection terminated. Oct 12 18:45:00 production pppd[1881]: Modem hangup Oct 12 18:45:00 production pppd[1881]: Exit. Oct 12 18:45:00 production pptpd[1880]: GRE: read(fd=6,buffer=8059660,len=8196) from PTY failed: status = -1 error = Input/output error, usually caused by unexpected termination of pppd, check option syntax and pppd logs Oct 12 18:45:00 production pptpd[1880]: CTRL: PTY read or GRE write failed (pty,gre)=(6,7) Oct 12 18:45:00 production pptpd[1880]: CTRL: Client 66.104.246.168 control connection finished The Macintosh connecting looks like this in /var/log/messages: Oct 12 18:50:49 production pptpd[1920]: CTRL: Client 66.104.246.168 control connection started Oct 12 18:50:49 production pptpd[1920]: CTRL: Starting call (launching pppd, opening GRE) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: Plugin /usr/lib/pptpd/pptpd-logwtmp.so loaded. Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: pptpd-logwtmp: $Version$ Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: pppd options in effect: Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: debug#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: nologfd#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: dump#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: plugin /usr/lib/pptpd/pptpd-logwtmp.so#011#011# (from command line) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: require-mschap-v2#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: refuse-pap#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: refuse-chap#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: refuse-mschap#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: name pptpd#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: pptpd-original-ip 66.104.246.168#011#011# (from command line) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: 115200#011#011# (from command line) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: lock#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: local#011#011# (from command line) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: novj#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: novjccomp#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: ipparam 66.104.246.168#011#011# (from command line) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: proxyarp#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: 192.168.97.1:192.168.97.10#011#011# (from command line) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: nobsdcomp#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: require-mppe-128#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: mppe-stateful#011#011# (from /etc/ppp/options.pptpd) Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0 Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: Using interface ppp0 Oct 12 18:50:49 production pppd[1921]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/pts/1 Oct 12 18:50:52 production pppd[1921]: MPPE 128-bit stateless compression enabled Oct 12 18:50:52 production pppd[1921]: Unsupported protocol 'IPv6 Control Protocol' (0x8057) received Oct 12 18:50:52 production pppd[1921]: Unsupported protocol 'Apple Client Server Protocol Control' (0x8235) received Oct 12 18:50:52 production pppd[1921]: Cannot determine ethernet address for proxy ARP Oct 12 18:50:52 production pppd[1921]: local IP address 192.168.97.1 Oct 12 18:50:52 production pppd[1921]: remote IP address 192.168.97.10 Oct 12 18:50:52 production pppd[1921]: pptpd-logwtmp.so ip-up ppp0 chris 66.104.246.168 I'm baffled...

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