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• Getting jQuery slideshow animation to stop on click

  - by hollyb

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

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• Recursion problem; completely lost

  - by timeNomad

  So I've been trying to solve this assignment whole day, just can't get it. The following function accepts 2 strings, the 2nd (not 1st) possibly containing *'s (asterisks). An * is a replacement for a string (empty, 1 char or more), it can appear appear (only in s2) once, twice, more or not at all, it cannot be adjacent to another * (ab**c), no need to check that. public static boolean samePattern(String s1, String s2) It returns true if strings are of the same pattern. It must be recursive, not use any loops, static & global variables. Can use local variables & method overloading. Can use only these methods: charAt(i), substring(i), substring(i, j), length(). Examples: 1: TheExamIsEasy; 2: "The*xamIs*y" --- true 1: TheExamIsEasy; 2: "Th*mIsEasy*" --- true 1: TheExamIsEasy; 2: "*" --- true 1: TheExamIsEasy; 2: "TheExamIsEasy" --- true 1: TheExamIsEasy; 2: "The*IsHard" --- FALSE I tried comparing the the chars one by one using charAt until an asterisk is encountered, then check if the asterisk is an empty one by comparing is successive char (i+1) with the char of s1 at position i, if true -- continue recursion with i+1 as counter for s2 & i as counter for s1; if false -- continue recursion with i+1 as counters for both. Continue this until another asterisk is found or end of string. I dunno, my brain loses track of things, can't concentrate, any pointers / hints? Am I in the right direction? Also, it's been told that a backtracking technique is to be used to solve this. My code so far (doesn't do the job, even theoretically): public static boolean samePattern(String s1, String s2) { if (s1.equals(s2) || s2 == "*") { return true; } return samePattern(s1, s2, 1); } public static boolean samePattern(String s1, String s2, int i) { if (s1.equals(s2)) return true; if (i == s2.length() - 1) // No *'s found -- not same pattern. return false; if (s1.substring(0, i).equals(s2.substring(0, i))) samePattern(s1, s2, i+1); else if (s2.charAt(i-1) == '*') samePattern(s1.substring(0, i-1), s2.substring(0, i), 1); // new smaller strings. else samePattern(s1.substring(1), s2, i); }

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• Why does Scala apply thunks automatically, sometimes?

  - by Anonymouse

  At just after 2:40 in ShadowofCatron's Scala Tutorial 3 video, it's pointed out that the parentheses following the name of a thunk are optional. "Buh?" said my functional programming brain, since the value of a function and the value it evaluates to when applied are completely different things. So I wrote the following to try this out. My thought process is described in the comments. object Main { var counter: Int = 10 def f(): Int = { counter = counter + 1; counter } def runThunk(t: () => Int): Int = { t() } def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = { val a = f() // I expect this to mean "apply f to no args" println(a) // and apparently it does val b = f // I expect this to mean "the value f", a function value println(b) // but it's the value it evaluates to when applied to no args println(b) // and the evaluation happens immediately, not in the call runThunk(b) // This is an error: it's not println doing something funny runThunk(f) // Not an error: seems to be val doing something funny } }   To be clear about the problem, this Scheme program (and the console dump which follows) shows what I expected the Scala program to do. (define counter (list 10)) (define f (lambda () (set-car! counter (+ (car counter) 1)) (car counter))) (define runThunk (lambda (t) (t))) (define main (lambda args (let ((a (f)) (b f)) (display a) (newline) (display b) (newline) (display b) (newline) (runThunk b) (runThunk f)))) > (main) 11 #<procedure:f> #<procedure:f> 13   After coming to this site to ask about this, I came across this answer which told me how to fix the above Scala program: val b = f _ // Hey Scala, I mean f, not f() But the underscore 'hint' is only needed sometimes. When I call runThunk(f), no hint is required. But when I 'alias' f to b with a val then apply it, it doesn't work: the evaluation happens in the val; and even lazy val works this way, so it's not the point of evaluation causing this behaviour.   That all leaves me with the question: Why does Scala sometimes automatically apply thunks when evaluating them? Is it, as I suspect, type inference? And if so, shouldn't a type system stay out of the language's semantics? Is this a good idea? Do Scala programmers apply thunks rather than refer to their values so much more often that making the parens optional is better overall? Examples written using Scala 2.8.0RC3, DrScheme 4.0.1 in R5RS.

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• A NSMutableArray is destroying my life!

  - by camilo

  EDITED to show the relevant part of the code Hi. There's a strange problem with an NSMutableArray which I'm just not understanding... Explaining: I have a NSMutableArray, defined as a property (nonatomic, retain), synthesized, and initialized with 29 elements. realSectionNames = [[NSMutableArray alloc] initWithCapacity:29]; After the initialization, I can insert elements as I wish and everything seems to be working fine. While I'm running the application, however, if I insert a new element in the array, I can print the array in the function where I inserted the element, and everything seems ok. However, when I select a row in the table, and I need to read that array, my application crashes. In fact, it cannot even print the array anymore. Is there any "magical and logical trick" everybody should know when using a NSMutableArray that a beginner like myself can be missing? Thanks a lot. I declare my array as realSectionNames = [[NSMutableArray alloc] initWithCapacity:29]; I insert objects in my array with [realSectionNames addObject:[category categoryFirstLetter]]; although I know i can also insert it with [realSectionNames insertObject:[category categoryFirstLetter] atIndex:i]; where the "i" is the first non-occupied position. After the insertion, I reload the data of my tableView. Printing the array before or after reloading the data shows it has the desired information. After that, selecting a row at the table makes the application crash. This realSectionNames is used in several UITableViewDelegate functions, but for the case it doesn't matter. What truly matters is that printing the array in the beginning of the didSelectRowAtIndexPath function crashes everything (and of course, doesn't print anything). I'm pretty sure it's in that line, for printing anything he line before works (example): NSLog(@"Anything"); NSLog(@"%@", realSectionNames); gives the output: 2010-03-24 15:16:04.146 myApplicationExperience[3527:207] Anything [Session started at 2010-03-24 15:16:04 +0000.] GNU gdb 6.3.50-20050815 (Apple version gdb-967) (Tue Jul 14 02:11:58 UTC 2009) Copyright 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc. GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions. Type "show copying" to see the conditions. There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details. This GDB was configured as "i386-apple-darwin".sharedlibrary apply-load-rules all Attaching to process 3527. Still not understanding what kind of stupidity I've done this time... maybe it's not too late to follow the career of brain surgeon?

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• Returning currently displayed index of an array Javascript...

  - by Jeff Kindred

  I have a simple array with x number of items. I am displaying them individually via a link click... I want to update a number that say 1 of 10. when the next one is displayed i want it to display 2 of 10 etc... I have looked all around and my brain is fried right now... I know its simple I just cant get it out. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> <title>Page Title</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" charset="utf-8"/> <script type="text/javascript"> var quotations = new Array() quotations[0]= "1" quotations[1]= "2" quotations[2]= "3" quotations[3]= "4" quotations[4]= "5" quotations[5]= "6" quotations[6]= "7" numQuotes = quotations.length; curQuote = 1; function move( xflip ) { curQuote = curQuote + xflip; if (curQuote > numQuotes) { curQuote = 1 ; } if (curQuote == 0) { curQuote = numQuotes ; } document.getElementById('quotation').innerHTML=quotations[curQuote - 1]; } var curPage = //this is where the current index should go </script> </head> <body> <div id="quotation"> <script type="text/javascript">document.write(quotations[0]);</script> </div> <div> <p><a href="javascript();" onclick="move(-1)">GO back</a> <script type="text/javascript">document.write(curPage + " of " + numQuotes)</script> <a href="javascript();" onclick="move(1)">GO FORTH</a></p> </div> </body> </html>

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• boost::spirit::karma using the alternatives operator (|) with conditions

  - by Ingemar

  I'm trying to generate a string from my own class called Value using boost::spirit::karma, but i got stuck with this. I've tried to extract my problem into a simple example. I want to generate a String with karma from instances of the following class: class Value { public: enum ValueType { BoolType, NumericType }; Value(bool b) : type_(BoolType), value_(b) {} Value(const double d) : type_(NumericType), value_(d) {}; ValueType type() { return type_; } operator bool() { return boost::get<bool>(value_); } operator double() { return boost::get<double>(value_); } private: ValueType type_; boost::variant<bool, double> value_; }; Here you can see what I'm tying to do: int main() { using karma::bool_; using karma::double_; using karma::rule; using karma::eps; std::string generated; std::back_insert_iterator<std::string> sink(generated); rule<std::back_insert_iterator<std::string>, Value()> value_rule = bool_ | double_; Value bool_value = Value(true); Value double_value = Value(5.0); karma::generate(sink, value_rule, bool_value); std::cout << generated << "\n"; generated.clear(); karma::generate(sink, value_rule, double_value); std::cout << generated << "\n"; return 0; } The first call to karma::generate() works fine because the value is a bool and the first generator in my rule also "consumes" a bool. But the second karma::generate() fails with boost::bad_get because karma tries to eat a bool and calls therefore Value::operator bool(). My next thought was to modify my generator rule and use the eps() generator together with a condition but here i got stuck: value_rule = (eps( ... ) << bool_) | (eps( ... ) << double_); I'm unable to fill the brackets of the eps generator with sth. like this (of course not working): eps(value.type() == BoolType) I've tried to get into boost::phoenix, but my brain seems not to be ready for things like this. Please help me! here is my full example (compiling but not working): main.cpp

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• Refactoring Singleton Overuse

  - by drharris

  Today I had an epiphany, and it was that I was doing everything wrong. Some history: I inherited a C# application, which was really just a collection of static methods, a completely procedural mess of C# code. I refactored this the best I knew at the time, bringing in lots of post-college OOP knowledge. To make a long story short, many of the entities in code have turned out to be Singletons. Today I realized I needed 3 new classes, which would each follow the same Singleton pattern to match the rest of the software. If I keep tumbling down this slippery slope, eventually every class in my application will be Singleton, which will really be no logically different from the original group of static methods. I need help on rethinking this. I know about Dependency Injection, and that would generally be the strategy to use in breaking the Singleton curse. However, I have a few specific questions related to this refactoring, and all about best practices for doing so. How acceptable is the use of static variables to encapsulate configuration information? I have a brain block on using static, and I think it is due to an early OO class in college where the professor said static was bad. But, should I have to reconfigure the class every time I access it? When accessing hardware, is it ok to leave a static pointer to the addresses and variables needed, or should I continually perform Open() and Close() operations? Right now I have a single method acting as the controller. Specifically, I continually poll several external instruments (via hardware drivers) for data. Should this type of controller be the way to go, or should I spawn separate threads for each instrument at the program's startup? If the latter, how do I make this object oriented? Should I create classes called InstrumentAListener and InstrumentBListener? Or is there some standard way to approach this? Is there a better way to do global configuration? Right now I simply have Configuration.Instance.Foo sprinkled liberally throughout the code. Almost every class uses it, so perhaps keeping it as a Singleton makes sense. Any thoughts? A lot of my classes are things like SerialPortWriter or DataFileWriter, which must sit around waiting for this data to stream in. Since they are active the entire time, how should I arrange these in order to listen for the events generated when data comes in? Any other resources, books, or comments about how to get away from Singletons and other pattern overuse would be helpful.

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• Move an object in the direction of a bezier curve?

  - by Sent1nel

  I have an object with which I would like to make follow a bezier curve and am a little lost right now as to how to make it do that based on time rather than the points that make up the curve. .::Current System::. Each object in my scene graph is made from position, rotation and scale vectors. These vectors are used to form their corresponding matrices: scale, rotation and translation. Which are then multiplied in that order to form the local transform matrix. A world transform (Usually the identity matrix) is then multiplied against the local matrix transform. class CObject { public: // Local transform functions Matrix4f GetLocalTransform() const; void SetPosition(const Vector3f& pos); void SetRotation(const Vector3f& rot); void SetScale(const Vector3f& scale); // Local transform Matrix4f m_local; Vector3f m_localPostion; Vector3f m_localRotation; // rotation in degrees (xrot, yrot, zrot) Vector3f m_localScale; } Matrix4f CObject::GetLocalTransform() { Matrix4f out(Matrix4f::IDENTITY); Matrix4f scale(), rotation(), translation(); scale.SetScale(m_localScale); rotation.SetRotationDegrees(m_localRotation); translation.SetTranslation(m_localTranslation); out = scale * rotation * translation; } The big question I have are 1) How do I orientate my object to face the tangent of the Bezier curve? 2) How do I move that object along the curve without just setting objects position to that of a point on the bezier cuve? Heres an overview of the function thus far void CNodeControllerPieceWise::AnimateNode(CObject* pSpatial, double deltaTime) { // Get object latest pos. Vector3f posDelta = pSpatial->GetWorldTransform().GetTranslation(); // Get postion on curve Vector3f pos = curve.GetPosition(m_t); // Get tangent of curve Vector3f tangent = curve.GetFirstDerivative(m_t); } Edit: sorry its not very clear. I've been working on this for ages and its making my brain turn to mush. I want the object to be attached to the curve and face the direction of the curve. As for movement, I want to object to follow the curve based on the time this way it creates smooth movement throughout the curve.

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• two sql queries in one place

  - by Luke

  <?php $results = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM ".TBL_SUB_RESULTS." WHERE user_submitted != '$_SESSION[username]' AND home_user = '$_SESSION[username]' OR away_user = '$_SESSION[username]' ") ; $num_rows = mysql_num_rows($results); if ($num_rows > 0) { while( $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($results)) { extract($row); $q = mysql_query("SELECT name FROM ".TBL_FRIENDLY." WHERE id = '$ccompid'"); while( $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($q)) { extract($row); ?> <table cellspacing="10" style='border: 1px dotted' width="300" bgcolor="#eeeeee"> <tr> <td><b><? echo $name; ?></b></td> </tr><tr> <td width="100"><? echo $home_user; ?></td> <td width="50"><? echo $home_score; ?></td> <td>-</td> <td width="50"><? echo $away_score; ?></td> <td width="100"><? echo $away_user; ?></td> </tr><tr> <td colspan="2"><A HREF="confirmresult.php?fixid=<? echo $fix_id; ?>">Accept / Decline</a></td> </tr></table><br> <? } } } else { echo "<b>You currently have no results awaiting confirmation</b>"; } ?> I am trying to run two queries as you can see. But they aren't both working. Is there a better way to structure this, I am having a brain freeze! Thanks OOOH by the way, my SQL wont stay in this form! I will protect it afterwards

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• Restrict sprite movement to vertical and horizontal

  - by Daniel Granger

  I have been battling with this for some time and my noob brain can't quite work it out. I have a standard tile map and currently use the following code to move my enemy sprite around the map -(void) movePlayer:(ccTime)deltaTime { if (CGPointEqualToPoint(self.position, requestedPosition)) return; float step = kPlayerSpeed * deltaTime; float dist = ccpDistance(self.position, requestedPosition); CGPoint vectorBetweenAB = ccpSub(self.position, requestedPosition); if (dist <= step) { self.position = requestedPosition; [self popPosition]; } else { CGPoint normVectorBetweenAB = ccpNormalize(vectorBetweenAB); CGPoint movementVectorForThisFrame = ccpMult(normVectorBetweenAB, step); if (abs(vectorBetweenAB.x) > abs(vectorBetweenAB.y)) { if (vectorBetweenAB.x > 0) { [self runAnimation:walkLeft]; } else { [self runAnimation:walkRight]; } } else { if (vectorBetweenAB.y > 0) { [self runAnimation:walkDown]; } else { [self runAnimation:walkUp]; } } if (self.position.x > movementVectorForThisFrame.x) { movementVectorForThisFrame.x = -movementVectorForThisFrame.x; } if (self.position.y > movementVectorForThisFrame.y) { movementVectorForThisFrame.y = -movementVectorForThisFrame.y; } self.position = ccpAdd(self.position, movementVectorForThisFrame); } } movePlayer: is called by the classes updateWithDeltaTime: method. the ivar requestedPosition is set in the updateWithDeltaTime method as well, it basically gets the next point out of a queue to move to. These points can be anywhere on the map, so if they are in a diagonal direction from the enemy the enemy sprite will move directly to that point. But how do I change the above code to restrict the movement to vertical and horizontal movement only so that the enemies movement 'staircases' its way along a diagonal path, taking the manhattan distance (I think its called). As shown by my crude drawing below... S being the start point F being the finish and the numbers being each intermediate point along its path to create a staircase type diagonal movement. Finally I intend to be able to toggle this behaviour on and off, so that I can choose whether or not I want the enemy to move free around the map or be restricted to this horizontal / vertical movement only. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |F| | | | | | | | | |5|4| | | | | | | | | |3|2| | | | | | | | | |1|S| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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• Using Upstart to manage Unicorn w/ rbenv + bundler binstubs w/ ruby-local-exec shebang

  - by codykrieger

  Alright, this is melting my brain. It might have something to do with the fact that I don't understand Upstart as well as I should. Sorry in advance for the long question. I'm trying to use Upstart to manage a Rails app's Unicorn master process. Here is my current /etc/init/app.conf: description "app" start on runlevel [2] stop on runlevel [016] console owner # expect daemon script APP_ROOT=/home/deploy/app PATH=/home/deploy/.rbenv/shims:/home/deploy/.rbenv/bin:$PATH $APP_ROOT/bin/unicorn -c $APP_ROOT/config/unicorn.rb -E production # >> /tmp/upstart.log 2>&1 end script # respawn That works just fine - the Unicorns start up great. What's not great is that the PID detected is not of the Unicorn master, it's of an sh process. That in and of itself isn't so bad, either - if I wasn't using the automagical Unicorn zero-downtime deployment strategy. Because shortly after I send -USR2 to my Unicorn master, a new master spawns up, and the old one dies...and so does the sh process. So Upstart thinks my job has died, and I can no longer restart it with restart or stop it with stop if I want. I've played around with the config file, trying to add -D to the Unicorn line (like this: $APP_ROOT/bin/unicorn -c $APP_ROOT/config/unicorn.rb -E production -D) to daemonize Unicorn, and I added the expect daemon line, but that didn't work either. I've tried expect fork as well. Various combinations of all of those things can cause start and stop to hang, and then Upstart gets really confused about the state of the job. Then I have to restart the machine to fix it. I think Upstart is having problems detecting when/if Unicorn is forking because I'm using rbenv + the ruby-local-exec shebang in my $APP_ROOT/bin/unicorn script. Here it is: #!/usr/bin/env ruby-local-exec # # This file was generated by Bundler. # # The application 'unicorn' is installed as part of a gem, and # this file is here to facilitate running it. # require 'pathname' ENV['BUNDLE_GEMFILE'] ||= File.expand_path("../../Gemfile", Pathname.new(__FILE__).realpath) require 'rubygems' require 'bundler/setup' load Gem.bin_path('unicorn', 'unicorn') Additionally, the ruby-local-exec script looks like this: #!/usr/bin/env bash # # `ruby-local-exec` is a drop-in replacement for the standard Ruby # shebang line: # # #!/usr/bin/env ruby-local-exec # # Use it for scripts inside a project with an `.rbenv-version` # file. When you run the scripts, they'll use the project-specified # Ruby version, regardless of what directory they're run from. Useful # for e.g. running project tasks in cron scripts without needing to # `cd` into the project first. set -e export RBENV_DIR="${1%/*}" exec ruby "$@" So there's an exec in there that I'm worried about. It fires up a Ruby process, which fires up Unicorn, which may or may not daemonize itself, which all happens from an sh process in the first place...which makes me seriously doubt the ability of Upstart to track all of this nonsense. Is what I'm trying to do even possible? From what I understand, the expect stanza in Upstart can only be told (via daemon or fork) to expect a maximum of two forks.

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• How should I ask for help in getting my emails to stop bouncing?

  - by Gregg Williams

  For several months, people have been telling me that emails they sent to me have been bouncing back, marked as undeliverable. The bounce message would contain portions like this: Final-Recipient: rfc822;[email protected] Action: failed Status: 5.7.1 Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550 5.7.1 <[email protected]>... Recipient declines email from 69.64.159.2, <spamhaus-xbl>, Ref: http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=69.64.159.2 Clicking the link on the last line, the destination page told me that "this IP address is infected with/emitting spamware/spamtrojan traffic and needs to be fixed." I could temporarily de-list this node by clicking a link on that page, but it would get back on the list and more emails to me to bounce. I own a domain, innerpaths.net, and I normally use [email protected] for my email. I have my domain registrar, namecheap.com, forward all email from innerpaths.net to the email account [email protected]. (BTW, I had this same problem at a former registrar. I changed registrars, hoping that would fix the problem. It didn't.) Trying to isolate the problem, I asked namecheap.com what I should do. Their answer, though substantial, left me scratching my head: We have received feedback from our upstream provider which informed us that the mail server that you are trying to email subscribes to a 3rd party blacklist service which they appear to be listed on at the present time and is causing destination mail server to reject the messages. Being blocked with one of these services can happen to anyone for many reasons and is something that is beyond our control. 3rd party blacklist services require companies whose mail servers they have blacklisted, pay fees in order to be removed from their lists. As we cannot pay fees to blacklist services which require them for removal, you should contact your email provider and have them whitelist our mail server IP address: 69.64.157.73. My best guess is that I should email my ISP, sonic.net, tell them what is going on and ask them to whitelist the IP address 69.64.157.73. (If not, please let me know.) But I want to know what is going on and how email works. I understand that there's a device at location 69.64.159.2 that is doing something bad that causes the "destination mail server [sonic.net's, I assume --gw] to reject the messages." I know that email is sent through multiple devices in a way that eventually gets it to its destination. Beyond that, here are my questions: 1) I thought the Internet "routed around damage." Why does email starting at namecheap.com always (or is it 'sometimes'?) go through 69.64.159.2? 2) Who is the "upstream provider" that the namecheap.com representative mentions, and what is their role? 3) How does having sonic.net's whitelisting namecheap.com's mail server prevent my email being bounced by 69.64.159.2? I've searched the Internet for answers but have found nothing useful. Thanks for whatever answers you can provide.

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• Is it possible to repair a Cisco 3500 XL (3548) switch with POST Error messages?

  - by Alex

  I've got an old Cisco 3500 XL, and it seems to have hardware issues. I've loaded the latest IOS and cleared all config. Does anyone have any experience fixing the switch core? I'm a reasonably competent SMD solderer, can I replace/reflow some chips? I've checked the power supply voltages and it's all within tolerance, and no visible signs of any component damage. Some chips are hot to the touch. I understand that these were EOL as of 2007, but should have a lifetime warranty for the electronics. I don't have a Cisco support contract, so I can't file a ticket. What should I do? Console output: switch: dir flash: Directory of flash:/ 2 -rwx 1811584 <date> c3500xl-c3h2s-mz.120-5.WC17.bin 1799680 bytes available (1812992 bytes used) switch: boot Loading "flash:c3500xl-c3h2s-mz.120-5.WC17.bin"...################################################################################################################################################################################### File "flash:c3500xl-c3h2s-mz.120-5.WC17.bin" uncompressed and installed, entry point: 0x3000 executing... Restricted Rights Legend Use, duplication, or disclosure by the Government is subject to restrictions as set forth in subparagraph (c) of the Commercial Computer Software - Restricted Rights clause at FAR sec. 52.227-19 and subparagraph (c) (1) (ii) of the Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software clause at DFARS sec. 252.227-7013. cisco Systems, Inc. 170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, California 95134-1706 Cisco Internetwork Operating System Software IOS (tm) C3500XL Software (C3500XL-C3H2S-M), Version 12.0(5)WC17, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1) Copyright (c) 1986-2007 by cisco Systems, Inc. Compiled Tue 13-Feb-07 15:04 by antonino Image text-base: 0x00003000, data-base: 0x00352924 Initializing C3500XL flash... flashfs[1]: 1 files, 1 directories flashfs[1]: 0 orphaned files, 0 orphaned directories flashfs[1]: Total bytes: 3612672 flashfs[1]: Bytes used: 1812992 flashfs[1]: Bytes available: 1799680 flashfs[1]: flashfs fsck took 3 seconds. flashfs[1]: Initialization complete. ...done Initializing C3500XL flash. C3500XL POST: System Board Test: Passed C3500XL POST: Daughter Card Test: Passed C3500XL POST: CPU Buffer Test: Passed C3500XL POST: CPU Notify RAM Test: Passed C3500XL POST: CPU Interface Test: Passed C3500XL POST: Testing Switch Core: Passed Error with Switch Core BIST test Phase 0. Returns: Test Complete Low : 0x0FFFFFFF, Test Complete High : 0xFFFFFFFE Test Phase Low : 0x00000040, Test Phase High : 0x00000000 Test Phase Third : 0x00000000, Test Complete Third : 0x000001F8 C3500XL POST FAILURE: Testing Switch Core: Failed C3500XL POST FAILURE: Testing Buffer Table: Failed C3500XL POST FAILURE: Data Buffer Test: Failed C3500XL POST FAILURE: Configuring Switch Parameters: Failed C3500XL POST FAILURE: Switch Core BIST failed. C3500XL POST FAILURE: Cannot test Modules due to failure of Switch Core POST Del Mar Failure (0th Del Mar): req system failed to init C3500XL POST FAILURE: C3500XL POST FAILURE: ATM: required system failed to init C3500XL POST: Ethernet Controller Test: Passed C3500XL POST FAILURE: MII Test: Failed C3500XL POST FAILURE: Error waiting for Ethernet Controller and SW_PARAMS C3500XL POST FAILURE: Initialization/POST failed C3500XL POST FAILURE: AT: Failing because system POST failed Exception (8192)! Debug Exception (Could be NULL pointer dereference) CPU Register Context: Vector = 0x00002000 PC = 0x000F36F4 MSR = 0x00029200 CR = 0x22000024 LR = 0x000F6964 CTR = 0x001DE46C XER = 0x00000000 R0 = 0x00000000 R1 = 0x004E2580 R2 = 0x00000000 R3 = 0x00000000 R4 = 0x00000001 R5 = 0x00000000 R6 = 0x004E2718 R7 = 0x004E2718 R8 = 0x00000008 R9 = 0x00000000 R10 = 0x0000FFFF R11 = 0x00480000 R12 = 0x42000024 R13 = 0x00000000 R14 = 0x00000000 R15 = 0x00000000 R16 = 0x00000000 R17 = 0x00000000 R18 = 0x00000000 R19 = 0x00000000 R20 = 0x00000000 R21 = 0x00000000 R22 = 0x00000000 R23 = 0x00000000 R24 = 0x00000000 R25 = 0x00000020 R26 = 0x004E2718 R27 = 0x004E2718 R28 = 0x00000020 R29 = 0x00002513 R30 = 0x00000001 R31 = 0x00000000 Stack trace: PC = 0x000F36F4, SP = 0x004E2580 Frame 00: SP = 0x004E25A0 PC = 0x40000016 Frame 01: SP = 0x004E2618 PC = 0x000F6964 Frame 02: SP = 0x004E26A8 PC = 0x000F76DC Frame 03: SP = 0x004E26C8 PC = 0x000E8114 Frame 04: SP = 0x004E26F0 PC = 0x001F5BF8 Frame 05: SP = 0x004E2710 PC = 0x001F5CF4 Frame 06: SP = 0x004E2748 PC = 0x0023F4DC Frame 07: SP = 0x004E2750 PC = 0x0023E650 Frame 08: SP = 0x004E27C8 PC = 0x0023E89C Frame 09: SP = 0x004E27E0 PC = 0x0028AF34 Frame 10: SP = 0x004E27E8 PC = 0x001E38F8 Frame 11: SP = 0x004E2808 PC = 0x001E39A8 Frame 12: SP = 0x004E2820 PC = 0x0014E220 Frame 13: SP = 0x004E28C8 PC = 0x0014E39C Frame 14: SP = 0x00000000 PC = 0x001EB510

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• Do hard drive enclosures fail/is it the HDD or enclosure?

  - by x0a

  I'm having a whole host of problems with an external hard drive that was working just fine a couple of hours ago. I've had this problem before once, and that was about 3 months ago, here's what I documented: So a couple of hours ago I turned off all my computers and shut off the power to all my devices in my room, then went and turned the power off at the main switch so I could change an outlet. A couple hours later, after I've already slowly turned everything back on, I go to my xbox to try and watch a movie and it can't seem to list any of the movies I've got. So I go to my desktop to find that my external hard drive isn't there.. even though it's on and connected. It's also stationary and hidden behind something so there's not a whole lot of tampering/physical wear to that external. I plug it into my laptop to try and see what's going on. It starts making this endless loud screeching noise. None of that clicking that's usually associated with hd damage. It's not listed in my computers, and it shows up in Disk Management as "uninitialized" asking me to choose between two different partition types. After carefully disconnecting it and connecting it back, it asks me to format it, which I cancel. I start googling about my issue, starting to accept the situation, torn as hell and helpless and just about ready to toss the thing. Suddenly the screeching stops, after almost 45 minutes of it going, and Disk Management lists the drive as "Online" and "Healthy". Explorer pops up with all my files! I'm still being really careful with it and weary and treating it as though it's in fragile shape. I've downloaded some S.M.A.R.T. software to read the values and everything is listed as "OK" . No reallocated sectors, no read errors, no seek errors. I also ran a quick self-test, which completed without error. Everything seems fine. It looks to be a perfectly healthy external hard drive. So what the hell was that about? Was it doing some sort of maintenance or self-test? How am I supposed to tell the difference? I would've undoubtedly killed the drive for sure if had it gone on a bit longer. I've got the same problem now, with one exception: it doesn't magically reappear after the screeching stops. Occasionally I manage to get some S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics information, which basically reads everything as fine. The only problem is that my HD isn't initializing (so I can't access anything in it). I'm able to successfully run a quick smart test but not an extended one (I've only tried it once but got conflicting indications as to whether it was actually making any progress or not (was stuck on Random read test). So, final question (if all else fails): Could the hard drive enclosure be failing rather than the HDD? Is this a likely possibility at all? How would I know?

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• Compiling examples for consuming the REST Endpoints for WCF Service using Agatha

  - by REA_ANDREW

  I recently made two contributions to the Agatha Project by Davy Brion over on Google Code, and one of the things I wanted to follow up with was a post showing examples and some, seemingly required tid bits.  The contributions which I made where: To support StructureMap To include REST (JSON and XML) support for the service contract The examples which I have made, I want to format them so they fit in with the current format of examples over on Agatha and hopefully create and submit a third patch which will include these examples to help others who wish to use these additions. Whilst building these examples for both XML and JSON I have learnt a couple of things which I feel are not really well documented, but are extremely good practice and once known make perfect sense.  I have chosen a real basic e-commerce context for my example Requests and Responses, and have also made use of the excellent tool AutoMapper, again on Google Code. Setting the scene I have followed the Pipes and Filters Pattern with the IQueryable interface on my Repository and exposed the following methods to query Products: IQueryable<Product> GetProducts(); IQueryable<Product> ByCategoryName(this IQueryable<Product> products, string categoryName) Product ByProductCode(this IQueryable<Product> products, String productCode) I have an interface for the IProductRepository but for the concrete implementation I have simply created a protected getter which populates a private List<Product> with 100 test products with random data.  Another good reason for following an interface based approach is that it will demonstrate usage of my first contribution which is the StructureMap support.  Finally the two Domain Objects I have made are Product and Category as shown below: public class Product { public String ProductCode { get; set; } public String Name { get; set; } public Decimal Price { get; set; } public Decimal Rrp { get; set; } public Category Category { get; set; } }   public class Category { public String Name { get; set; } }   Requirements for the REST Support One of the things which you will notice with Agatha is that you do not have to decorate your Request and Response objects with the WCF Service Model Attributes like DataContract, DataMember etc… Unfortunately from what I have seen, these are required if you want the same types to work with your REST endpoint.  I have not tried but I assume the same result can be achieved by simply decorating the same classes with the Serializable Attribute.  Without this the operation will fail. Another surprising thing I have found is that it did not work until I used the following Attribute parameters: Name Namespace e.g. [DataContract(Name = "GetProductsRequest", Namespace = "AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests")] public class GetProductsRequest : Request { }   Although I was surprised by this, things kind of explained themselves when I got round to figuring out the exact construct required for both the XML and the REST.  One of the things which you already know and are then reminded of is that each of your Requests and Responses ultimately inherit from an abstract base class respectively. This information needs to be represented in a way native to the format being used.  I have seen this in XML but I have not seen the format which is required for the JSON. JSON Consumer Example I have used JQuery to create the example and I simply want to make two requests to the server which as you will know with Agatha are transmitted inside an array to reduce the service calls.  I have also used a tool called json2 which is again over at Google Code simply to convert my JSON expression into its string format for transmission.  You will notice that I specify the type of Request I am using and the relevant Namespace it belongs to.  Also notice that the second request has a parameter so each of these two object are representing an abstract Request and the parameters of the object describe it. <script type="text/javascript"> var bodyContent = $.ajax({ url: "http://localhost:50348/service.svc/json/processjsonrequests", global: false, contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", type: "POST", processData: true, data: JSON.stringify([ { __type: "GetProductsRequest:AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests" }, { __type: "GetProductsByCategoryRequest:AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests", CategoryName: "Category1" } ]), dataType: "json", success: function(msg) { alert(msg); } }).responseText; </script>   XML Consumer Example For the XML Consumer example I have chosen to use a simple Console Application and make a WebRequest to the service using the XML as a request.  I have made a crude static method which simply reads from an XML File, replaces some value with a parameter and returns the formatted XML.  I say crude but it simply shows how XML Templates for each type of Request could be made and then have a wrapper utility in whatever language you use to combine the requests which are required.  The following XML is the same Request array as shown above but simply in the XML Format. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <ArrayOfRequest xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/Agatha.Common" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <Request i:type="a:GetProductsRequest" xmlns:a="AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests"/> <Request i:type="a:GetProductsByCategoryRequest" xmlns:a="AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests"> <a:CategoryName>{CategoryName}</a:CategoryName> </Request> </ArrayOfRequest>   It is funny because I remember submitting a question to StackOverflow asking whether there was a REST Client Generation tool similar to what Microsoft used for their RestStarterKit but which could be applied to existing services which have REST endpoints attached.  I could not find any but this is now definitely something which I am going to build, as I think it is extremely useful to have but also it should not be too difficult based on the information I now know about the above.  Finally I thought that the Strategy Pattern would lend itself really well to this type of thing so it can accommodate for different languages. I think that is about it, I have included the code for the example Console app which I made below incase anyone wants to have a mooch at the code.  As I said above I want to reformat these to fit in with the current examples over on the Agatha project, but also now thinking about it, make a Documentation Web method…{brain ticking} :-) Cheers for now and here is the final bit of code: static void Main(string[] args) { var request = WebRequest.Create("http://localhost:50348/service.svc/xml/processxmlrequests"); request.Method = "POST"; request.ContentType = "text/xml"; using(var writer = new StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream())) { writer.WriteLine(GetExampleRequestsString("Category1")); } var response = request.GetResponse(); using(var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream())) { Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd()); } Console.ReadLine(); } static string GetExampleRequestsString(string categoryName) { var data = File.ReadAllText(Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location), "ExampleRequests.xml")); data = data.Replace("{CategoryName}", categoryName); return data; } }

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• AutoMapper MappingFunction from Source Type of NameValueCollection

  - by REA_ANDREW

  I have had a situation arise today where I need to construct a complex type from a source of a NameValueCollection.  A little while back I submitted a patch for the Agatha Project to include REST (JSON and XML) support for the service contract.  I realized today that as useful as it is, it did not actually support true REST conformance, as REST should support GET so that you can use JSONP from JavaScript directly meaning you can query cross domain services.  My original implementation for POX and JSON used the POST method and this immediately rules out JSONP as from reading, JSONP only works with GET Requests. This then raised another issue.  The current operation contract of Agatha and one of its main benefits is that you can supply an array of Request objects in a single request, limiting the about of server requests you need to make.  Now, at the present time I am thinking that this will not be the case for the REST imlementation but will yield the benefits of the fact that : The same Request objects can be used for SOAP and RST (POX, JSON) The construct of the JavaScript functions will be simpler and more readable It will enable the use of JSONP for cross domain REST Services The current contract for the Agatha WcfRequestProcessor is at time of writing the following: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessRequests")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] Response[] Process(params Request[] requests); [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessOneWayRequests", IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] void ProcessOneWayRequests(params OneWayRequest[] requests); }   My current proposed solution, and at the very early stages of my concept is as follows: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRestJsonRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name="process")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] Response[] Process(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); [OperationContract(Name="processoneway",IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process-one-way/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] void ProcessOneWayRequests(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); }   Now this part I have not yet implemented, it is the preliminart step which I have developed which will allow me to take the name of the Request Type and the NameValueCollection and construct the complex type which is that of the Request which I can then supply to a nested instance of the original IWcfRequestProcessor  and work as it should normally.  To give an example of some of the urls which you I envisage with this method are: http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getweather/?location=london http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getproductsbycategory/?categoryid=1 http://www.url.om/service.svc/json/process/sayhello/?name=andy Another reason why my direction has gone to a single request for the REST implementation is because of restrictions which are imposed by browsers on the length of the url.  From what I have read this is on average 2000 characters.  I think that this is a very acceptable usage limit in the context of using 1 request, but I do not think this is acceptable for accommodating multiple requests chained together.  I would love to be corrected on that one, I really would but unfortunately from what I have read I have come to the conclusion that this is not the case. The mapping function So, as I say this is just the first pass I have made at this, and I am not overly happy with the try catch for detecting types without default constructors.  I know there is a better way but for the minute, it escapes me.  I would also like to know the correct way for adding mapping functions and not using the anonymous way that I have used.  To achieve this I have used recursion which I am sure is what other mapping function use. As you do have to go as deep as the complex type is. public static object RecurseType(NameValueCollection collection, Type type, string prefix) { try { var returnObject = Activator.CreateInstance(type); foreach (var property in type.GetProperties()) { foreach (var key in collection.AllKeys) { if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) || key.Length > prefix.Length) { var propertyNameToMatch = String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) ? key : key.Substring(property.Name.IndexOf(prefix) + prefix.Length + 1); if (property.Name == propertyNameToMatch) { property.SetValue(returnObject, Convert.ChangeType(collection.Get(key), property.PropertyType), null); } else if(property.GetValue(returnObject,null) == null) { property.SetValue(returnObject, RecurseType(collection, property.PropertyType, String.Concat(prefix, property.PropertyType.Name)), null); } } } } return returnObject; } catch (MissingMethodException) { //Quite a blunt way of dealing with Types without default constructor return null; } }   Another thing is performance, I have not measured this in anyway, it is as I say the first pass, so I hope this can be the start of a more perfected implementation.  I tested this out with a complex type of three levels, there is no intended logical meaning to the properties, they are simply for the purposes of example.  You could call this a spiking session, as from here on in, now I know what I am building I would take a more TDD approach.  OK, purists, why did I not do this from the start, well I didn’t, this was a brain dump and now I know what I am building I can. The console test and how I used with AutoMapper is as follows: static void Main(string[] args) { var collection = new NameValueCollection(); collection.Add("Name", "Andrew Rea"); collection.Add("Number", "1"); collection.Add("AddressLine1", "123 Street"); collection.Add("AddressNumber", "2"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeCountry", "United Kingdom"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeNumber", "3"); AutoMapper.Mapper.CreateMap<NameValueCollection, Person>() .ConvertUsing(x => { return(Person) RecurseType(x, typeof(Person), null); }); var person = AutoMapper.Mapper.Map<NameValueCollection, Person>(collection); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); Console.WriteLine(person.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Line1); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Country); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Number); Console.ReadLine(); }   Notice the convention that I am using and that this method requires you do use.  Each property is prefixed with the constructed name of its parents combined.  This is the convention used by AutoMapper and it makes sense. I can also think of other uses for this including using with ASP.NET MVC ModelBinders for creating a complex type from the QueryString which is itself is a NameValueCollection. Hope this is of some help to people and I would welcome any code reviews you could give me. References: Agatha : http://code.google.com/p/agatha-rrsl/ AutoMapper : http://automapper.codeplex.com/   Cheers for now, Andrew   P.S. I will have the proposed solution for a more complete REST implementation for AGATHA very soon. 

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• Interesting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web server

  - by jamiet

  I overheard/read a couple of things today that really made me, data junkie that I am, take a step back and think, “Hmmm, yeah, that could be really interesting” and I wanted to make a note of them here so that (a) I could bring them to the attention of anyone that happens to read this and (b) I can maybe come back here in a few years and see if either of these have come to fruition. Your phone as a web server While listening to Jon Udell’s (twitter) “Interviews with Innovators Podcast” today in which he interviewed Herbert Van de Sompel (twitter) about his Momento project. During the interview Jon and Herbert made the following remarks: Jon: [some people] really had this vision of a web of servers, the notion that every node on the internet, every connected entity, is potentially a server and a client…we can see where we’re getting to a point where these endpoint devices we have in our pockets are going to be massively capable and it may be in the not too distant future that significant chunks of the web archive will be cached all over the place including on your own machine… Herbert: wasn’t it Opera who at one point turned your browser into a server? That really got my brain ticking. We all carry a mobile phone with us and therefore we all potentially carry a mobile web server with us as well and to my mind the only thing really stopping that from happening is the capabilities of the phone hardware, the capabilities of the network infrastructure and the will to just bloody do it. Certainly all the standards required for addressing a web server on a phone already exist (to this uninitiated observer DNS and IPv6 seem to solve that problem) so why not? I tweeted about the idea and Rory Street answered back with “why would you want a phone to be a web server?”: Its a fair question and one that I would like to try and answer. Mobile phones are increasingly becoming our window onto the world as we use them to upload messages to Twitter, record our location on FourSquare or interact with our friends on Facebook but in each of these cases some other service is acting as our intermediary; to see what I’m thinking you have to go via Twitter, to see where I am you have to go to FourSquare (I’m using ‘I’ liberally, I don’t actually use FourSquare before you ask). Why should this have to be the case? Why can’t that data be decentralised? Why can’t we be masters of our own data universe? If my phone acted as a web server then I could expose all of that information without needing those intermediary services. I see a time when we can pass around URLs such as the following: http://jamiesphone.net/location/current - Where is Jamie right now? http://jamiesphone.net/location/2010-04-21 – Where was Jamie on 21st April 2010? http://jamiesphone.net/thoughts/current – What’s on Jamie’s mind right now? http://jamiesphone.net/blog – What documents is Jamie sharing with me? http://jamiesphone.net/calendar/next7days – Where is Jamie planning to be over the next 7 days? and those URLs get served off of the phone in our pockets. If we govern that data then we can control who has access to it and (crucially) how long its available for. Want to wipe yourself off the face of the web? its pretty easy if you’re in control of all the data – just turn your phone off. None of this exists today but I look forward to a time when it does. Opera really were onto something last June when they announced Opera Unite (admittedly Unite only works because Opera provide an intermediary DNS-alike system – it isn’t totally decentralised). Opening up Twitter annotations Last week Twitter held their first developer conference called Chirp where they announced an upcoming new feature called ‘Twitter Annotations’; in short this will allow us to attach metadata to a Tweet thus enhancing the tweet itself. Think of it as a richer version of hashtags. To think of it another way Twitter are turning their data into a humongous Entity-Attribute-Value or triple-tuple store. That alone has huge implications both for the web and Twitter as a whole – the ability to enrich that 140 characters data and thus make it more useful is indeed compelling however today I stumbled upon a blog post from Eugene Mandel entitled Tweet Annotations – a Way to a Metadata Marketplace? where he proposed the idea of allowing tweets to have metadata added by people other than the person who tweeted the original tweet. This idea really fascinated me especially when I read some of the potential uses that Eugene and his commenters suggested. They included: Amazon could attach an ISBN to a tweet that mentions a book. Specialist clients apps for book lovers could be built up around this metadata. Advertisers could pay to place adverts in metadata. The revenue generated from those adverts could be shared with the tweeter or people who add the metadata. Granted, allowing anyone to add metadata to a tweet has the potential to create a spam problem the like of which we haven’t even envisaged but spam hasn’t halted the growth of the web and neither should it halt the growth of data annotations either. The original tweeter should of course be able to determine who can add metadata and whether it should be moderated. As Eugene says himself: Opening publishing tweet annotations to anyone will open the way to a marketplace of metadata where client developers, data mining companies and advertisers can add new meaning to Twitter and build innovative businesses. What Eugene and his followers did not mention is what I think is potentially the most fascinating use of opening up annotations. Google’s success today is built on their page rank algorithm that measures the validity of a web page by the number of incoming links to it and the page rank of the sites containing those links – its a system built on reputation. Twitter annotations could open up a new paradigm however – let’s call it People rank- where reputation can be measured by the metadata that people choose to apply to links and the websites containing those links. Its not hard to see why Google and Microsoft have paid big bucks to get access to the Twitter firehose! Neither of these features, phones as a web server or the ability to add annotations to other people’s tweets, exist today but I strongly believe that they could dramatically enhance the web as we know it today. I hope to look back on this blog post in a few years in the knowledge that these ideas have been put into place. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• I&rsquo;m sorry RPGs, it&rsquo;s not you, it&rsquo;s me: The birth of my game idea

  - by George Clingerman

  One of the things I’ve had to give up in order to have some development time at night is gaming. It’s something I refused to admit for years but I’ve just had to face the facts. I’m no longer a gamer. I just don’t have hours and hours of free time to pour into gaming and when I do have hours and hours of free time I want to pour them into game development. That doesn’t mean I don’t game at all! I play games pretty much every day. It just means I’ve moved more into the casual game realm. It’s all I have time for when juggling priorities in my life. That means that games like Gears of War 2 sit shrink wrapped on my shelf and although I popped Dragon Age into my Xbox 360 one time, I barely made it through the opening sequence and haven’t had time to sit down and play again. Instead I’m playing short games like Jamestown, Atom Zombie Smasher, Fortix or if I have time to jump in and play a few rounds maybe some Monday Night Combat or Team Fortress 2. These are games I can instantly get into and play for just a short period of time and then walk away. Breath of Death VII saved my life: Back in the day (way, way back in the day) I used to be a pretty big RPG fan. Not big by a lot of RPG gamers' standards (most of the RPGs RPG fans about I’ve never heard of) but I used to LOVE to play them on the NES, SNES and Genesis and considered that my genre. Final Fantasy, Shining in the Darkness, Bard’s Tale, Faxanadu, Shadowrun, Ultima, Dragon Warrior, Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star, Shining Force and well the list could go on but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head. I loved playing RPGs and they were my games of choice. After my first son was born (this was just about 12 years ago), I tried to continue playing RPGs and purchased games like Baldur’s Gate I & II, Neverwinter Nights, Fable, then a few of the Final Fantasy’s then Kingdom Hearts. I kept buying these games and then only playing for about fifteen minutes and never getting back to them. I still loved RPGs but they just no longer fit into my life (I still haven’t accepted that since I still purchased Dragon Age II for some reason and convinced myself I’d find the time). Adding three more sons to the mix (that’s 4 total) didn’t help much to finding more RPG time (except for Breath of Death VII and other XBLIG RPG titles, thanks guys!) All work and no RPG: A few months ago as I was sitting thinking about the lack of RPGs in my life and talking to my wife about why I wish RPGs were different and easier for a dad like me to get into. She seemed like she was listening, so I started listing all the things that made them impossible for me to play. Here’s a short list I came up with. They take 15 billion hours to complete I have a few minutes at a time I can grab to play them if I want to have time to code. At that rate it would take me 9 trillion years to beat just one RPG. There’s such long spans of times between when I can play them I forget what I was even doing so I have to spend most of the playtime I have just figuring that out and then my play time is over. Repeat. I’ll never finish one and since it takes so long to get to the fun part in an RPG, I’m never having fun. RPGs aren’t fun if you don’t have hours to play them at a time. As you can see based on my science and math, RPGs aren’t fun for me any more. From there my brain started toying around with ideas of RPGs that would work for me. They would have to be a short RPG, you know one you could beat in a single play session. A dad sized play session. I started thinking, wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a fifteen minute RPG? That got me laughing and I took that as a good sign that it sounded fun and so I thought about it a little more. I immediately discarded the idea of doing a real RPG. I’m sure a short RPG like that could be done but it wasn’t the vibe that I had in my head. No this was going to be something that just had the core essence of an RPG. In reality what I’d be making would be more of an arcade style game. One with high scores and lots of crazy action on the screen. And that’s when it hit me. It would be a speed run RPG. That’s the basics of the game I’m working on.   The Elevator Pitch: It’s a 2D top down RPG themed arcade game focused on speed. It sounds like an RPG, smells like an RPG but it’s merely emulating an RPG. The game is focused on fun and mayhem in RPG form with players leveling up in seconds instead of hours and rushing to finish quests as quickly as possible because they’ve only got fifteen minutes before EVIL overtakes the world. If the player takes longer than fifteen minutes, it’s game over man. One to four player co-operative play to really see just how fast players can level up and beat the game. Gamers will compete on leaderboards for bragging rights for fastest 1, 2, 3, and 4 player speed runs, lowest leveled characters to beat the game, highest leveled characters to beat the game and so on. Times will be tracked for everything from how long a player sat distributing stats, equipping items, talking to NPCs to running around the level. These stats will be shown at the end of each quest/level so the players can work on improving their speed run for that part of the game next time around. It’s the perfect RPG for those of us who only have fifteen minutes of game time! Where I’m at: I’m still at the prototyping stage attempting to but all the basic framework pieces in place that will at minimum give me one level to rush through. I’ve been working on this prototype for about a month now though so I’m going to have to step it up a bit or I’m not going to get finished in time (remember I’ve only got 85 days left!) Lots of the game code is in place (although pretty sloppy) but I still can’t play through that first quest/level just yet. That’s my goal to finish up by the end of next Sunday (3/25/2012). You can all hold me to that and cheer me on or heckle me throughout the week. Either way that should help me stay a bit more motivated and focused. In my head this feels like it’s going to be a fun game so I’m looking forward to seeing how it actually plays!

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• Thursday Community Keynote: "By the Community, For the Community"

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Sharat Chander, JavaOne Community Chairperson, began Thursday's Community Keynote. As part of the morning’s theme of "By the Community, For the Community," Chander noted that 60% of the material at the 2012 JavaOne conference was presented by Java Community members. "So next year, when the call for papers starts, put-in your submissions," he urged.From there, Gary Frost, Principal Member of Technical Staff, AMD, expanded upon Sunday's Strategy Keynote exploration of Project Sumatra, an OpenJDK project targeted at bringing Java to heterogeneous computing platforms (which combine the CPU and the parallel processor of the GPU into a single piece of silicon). Sumatra entails enhancing the JVM to make maximum use of these advanced platforms. Within this development space, AMD created the Aparapi API, which converts Java bytecode into OpenCL for execution on such GPU devices. The Aparapi API was open sourced in September 2011.Whether it was zooming-in on a Mandelbrot set, "the game of life," or a swarm of 10,000 Dukes in a space-bound gravitational dance, Frost's demos, using an Aparapi/OpenCL implementation, produced stunningly faster display results. He indicated that the Java 9 timeframe is where they see Project Sumatra coming to ultimate fruition, employing the Lamdas of Java 8.Returning to the theme of the keynote, Donald Smith, Director, Java Product Management, Oracle, explored a mind map graphic demonstrating the importance of Community in terms of fostering innovation. "It's the sharing and mixing of culture, the diversity, and the rapid prototyping," he said. Within this topic, Smith, brought up a panel of representatives from Cloudera, Eclipse, Eucalyptus, Perrone Robotics, and Twitter--ideal manifestations of community and innovation in the world of Java.Marten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems, explored his company's open source cloud software platform, written in Java, and used by gaming companies, technology companies, media companies, and more. Chris Aniszczyk, Operations Engineering,Twitter, noted the importance of the JVM in terms of their multiple-language development environment. Mike Olson, CEO, Cloudera, described his company's Apache Hadoop-based software, support, and training. Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation, noted that they have about 270 tools projects at Eclipse, with 267 of them written in Java. Milinkovich added that Eclipse will even be going into space in 2013, as part of the control software on various experiments aboard the International Space Station. Lastly, Paul Perrone, CEO, Perrone Robotics, detailed his company's robotics and automation software platform built 100% on Java, including Java SE and Java ME--"on rat, to cat, to elephant-sized systems." Milinkovic noted that communities are by nature so good at innovation because of their very openness--"The more open you make your innovation process, the more ideas are challenged, and the more developers are focused on justifying their choices all the way through the process."From there, Georges Saab, VP Development Java SE OpenJDK, continued the topic of innovation and helping the Java Community to "Make the Future Java." Martijn Verburg, representing the London Java Community (winner of a Duke's Choice Award 2012 for their activity in OpenJDK and JCP), soon joined Saab onstage. Verburg detailed the LJC's "Adopt a JSR" program--"to get day-to-day developers more involved in the innovation that's happening around them."  From its London launching pad, the innovative program has spread to Brazil, Morocco, Latvia, India, and more.Other active participants in the program joined Verburg onstage--Ben Evans, London Java Community; James Gough, Stackthread; Bruno Souza, SOUJava; Richard Warburton, jClarity; and Cecelia Borg, Oracle--OpenJDK Onboarding. Together, the group explored the goals and tasks inherent in the Adopt a JSR program--from organizing hack days (testing prototype implementations), to managing mailing lists and forums, to triaging issues, to evangelism—all with the goal of fostering greater community/developer involvement, but equally importantly, building better open standards. “Come join us, and make your ecosystem better!" urged Verburg.Paul Perrone returned to profile the latest in his company's robotics work around Java--including the AARDBOTS family of smaller robotic vehicles, running the Perrone MAX platform on top of the Java JVM. Perrone took his "Rumbles" four-wheeled robot out for a spin onstage--a roaming, ARM-based security-bot vehicle, complete with IR, ultrasonic, and "cliff" sensors (the latter, for the raised stage at JavaOne). As an ultimate window into the future of robotics, Perrone displayed a "head-set" controller--a sensor directed at the forehead to monitor brainwaves, for the someday-implementation of brain-to-robot control.Then, just when it seemed this might be the end of the day's futuristic offerings, a mystery voice from offstage pronounced "I've got some toys"--proving to be guest-visitor James Gosling, there to explore his cutting-edge work with Liquid Robotics. While most think of robots as something with wheels or arms or lasers, Gosling explained, the Liquid Robotics vehicle is an entirely new and innovative ocean-going 'bot. Looking like a floating surfboard, with an attached set of underwater wings, the autonomous devices roam the oceans using only the energy of ocean waves to propel them, and a single actuated rudder to steer. "We have to accomplish all guidance just by wiggling the rudder," Gosling said. The devices offer applications from self-installing weather buoy, to pollution monitoring station, to marine mammal monitoring device, to climate change data gathering, to even ocean life genomic sampling. The early versions of the vehicle used C code on very tiny industrial micro controllers, where they had to "count the bytes one at a time."  But the latest generation vehicles, which just hit the water a week or so ago, employ an ARM processor running Linux and the ARM version of JDK 7. Gosling explained that vehicle communication from remote locations is achieved via the Iridium satellite network. But because of the costs of this communication path, the data must be sent in very small bursts--using SBD short burst data. "It costs $1/kb, so that rules everything in the software design,” said Gosling. “If you were trying to stream a Netflix video over this, it would cost a million dollars a movie. …We don't have a 'big data' problem," he quipped. There are currently about 150 Liquid Robotics vehicles out traversing the oceans. Gosling demonstrated real time satellite tracking of several vehicles currently at sea, noting that Java is actually particularly good at AI applications--due to the language having garbage collection, which facilitates complex data structures. To close-out his time onstage, Gosling of course participated in the ceremonial Java tee-shirt toss out to the audience…In parting, Chander passed the JavaOne Community Chairperson baton to Stephen Chin, Java Technology Evangelist, Oracle. Onstage in full motorcycle gear, Chin noted that he'll soon be touring Europe by motorcycle, meeting Java Community Members and streaming live via UStream--the ultimate manifestation of community and technology!  He also reminded attendees of the upcoming JavaOne Latin America 2012, São Paulo, Brazil (December 4-6, 2012), and stated that the CFP (call for papers) at the conference has been extended for one more week. "Remember, December is summer in Brazil!" Chin said.

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• You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development Expert if&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  So, all you aspiring SharePoint experts out there (especially those of you who put “expert” in your resumes).  It’s time for a cold cool splash of reality. More than likely you are NOT an expert (I know I’m not). Yes, you may have some expertise in certain aspects in SharePoint (it’s questionable if I have THAT some days), but make sure you’ve got the basics down before you start throwing that word “expert” around. I know that it becomes frustrating to those looking to hire SharePoint people and having to sift through all the resumes of those who think very highly of themselves and their skills only to find those gaping holes in common best practices. I’m much more willing to hire a decent dev who KNOWS they are not an expert than to hire a decent+ dev who THINKS they are an expert.  So… I’ve compiled a small reality check for you SharePoint Devs. and a “red flag” check for those of you wishing to hire a SharePoint developer. If any of these apply to you, you are probably not a SharePoint Development Expert. You are not a SharePoint Development Expert if you manually copy your DLLs Seriously, I don’t care if you write the best code in the world. If you are manually copying files to each web front end you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert. Yes, I realize the admins are generally the ones who do the actual deployments, but if you don’t know how to create solution packages for your admins, you are going to end up doing more damage than good some day. There are TONS of tools out there to help generate deployable solutions for you. You have ZERO excuse. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you can’t tell me the main artifacts of a solution package Directly related to the first one. If you don’t know what the Manifest, DDF, WSP, and Feature files are and how they are used in a solution package, you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. I’m not asking you to be able to write them all from scratch (heck, I can’t even do that), but you MUST know what they are and how to tweak them if necessary. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know what a Content Type or a Site Column is You would be absolutely amazed at how many “Expert” SharePoint Developers have NEVER EVER created a Content Type or Site Column or even know what they are. I mean, why would you ever want to create those when you can just do everything as a custom list or custom field? right???? (that’s sarcasm). You also need to know how to package a Content Type and a Site Column into a deployable package by the way. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you have not created at least one Web Part, Workflow, Timer Job, and Event Handler. If you haven’t written at least one of each, you don’t fully understand what they do or their limitations. Again, I expect NO ONE to be able to write these things blind. I think the last time I wrote an application from scratch without copying and pasting from another project I had done before was back in 1994? Seriously, coding is like a Sour Dough starter, you get it from someone else and keep adding to it. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know how to properly dispose of objects Another biggie with zero excuse for getting it wrong. It is so well known that you must dispose of your SPWeb and SPSite objects that if you aren’t doing it then you are not an expert. Heck, if you utilize “using” when handling SPWeb and SPSite objects and don’t realize that it disposes of those objects for you, then you are not a SharePoint Development expert. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you do not know how to properly elevate privileges Just one of those development basics that any decent SharePoint Developer has got to have down and understand how and why it’s used You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know all of the development options available to SharePoint and when they should be used Okay… so all you hard core .NET SharePoint dev geeks take a moment to listen. You may be the most top not SharePoint .NET developer in the world, but if you are opening Visual Studio to solve every problem in SharePoint, then you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. The SharePoint developer’s tool kit is growing every day with tools like Visual Studio, Data View Web Parts, XSL, jQuery, SPServices, etc. etc… If you don’t have the ability to at least recognize that “hey, you can basically do the same thing here but just dropping in Easy Tabs instead of writing some weird web part” then you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert AND you are doing a huge disservice to your clients and customers. You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development expert if you call yourself an Expert So, truth telling time. I’m not an expert. There, I said it. I feel so much better. Now, I realize the word “expert” has been used with my name before, but I am quick to point out that I KNOW the experts and know that they will help me if I need it, but I’m not an expert in all things SharePoint. The minute you take on that moniker you are setting yourself up for a fall. It’s too big, there’s too much to know, and there’s WAY too much you can do wrong. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you are not involved in the community I expect to get the most flack for this one, but it’s always a huge red flag for me when someone says they are an expert and has ZERO knowledge of the SharePoint community. The SharePoint community is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to be an effective SharePoint developer, admin, architect, power user or whatever the heck you are!! The community keeps you sane, tells you when you are NOT using a best practice, recommends the best practice, and even knows when Microsoft is giving you the wrong information (*gasp* it does happen). If you can’t tell me who you are following on twitter, who's blog you read, what conferences you attend, or name the experts who you monitor to make sure you are not doing something stupid, then you are probably doing something stupid. Again, not asking you to be a speaker, blogger, or the least bit extroverted but you should be at LEAST stalking the experts. So… what’s the point? So… yeah… what’s my point in all this. Well, first of all let me point out that this is by far not a finished list and I could come up with a LOT more specific “deep dive” questions, but these should be high enough level that even non experts can recognize and ask them. If you have some common ones you run into let me know and add them in the comments below. Also, keep in mind I’m not saying you as a developer HAVE to know EVERYTHING, but you DO need to know what you don’t know and proudly and honestly state “I don’t know, but I’ll learn and find out”.  Those of us hiring SharePoint developers and know and have a passion for SharePoint are not looking for that elusive “expert” who knows everything. We are looking for someone who “gets it”, has a similar passion, great attitude, an understanding that they DON’T know everything, and a desire to do it right.  I would bet money that most SharePoint development disasters happen because of “experts” who think they know everything rather than the developer who is cautious and knows he doesn’t. Lastly, I know there’s a raging debate over what a “SharePoint Developer” is (I should know, as I keep bringing it up). So, obviously this blog post is more closely tied to the .NET side of SharePoint development and less towards the client side, middle tier, or whatever you want to call it. So, let’s please not get that argument going here as well…  Thanks

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• Too Many Kittens To Juggle At Once

  - by Bil Simser

  Ahh, the Internet. That crazy, mixed up place where one tweet turns into a conversation between dozens of people and spawns a blogpost. This is the direct result of such an event this morning. It started innocently enough, with this: Then followed up by a blog post by Joel here. In the post, Joel introduces us to the term Business Solutions Architect with mad skillz like InfoPath, Access Services, Excel Services, building Workflows, and SSRS report creation, all while meeting the business needs of users in a SharePoint environment. I somewhat disagreed with Joel that this really wasn’t a new role (at least IMHO) and that a good Architect or BA should really be doing this job. As Joel pointed out when you’re building a SharePoint team this kind of role is often overlooked. Engineers might be able to build workflows but is the right workflow for the right problem? Michael Pisarek wrote about a SharePoint Business Architect a few months ago and it’s a pretty solid assessment. Again, I argue you really shouldn’t be looking for roles that don’t exist and I don’t suggest anyone create roles to hire people to fill them. That’s basically creating a solution looking for problems. Michael’s article does have some great points if you’re lost in the quagmire of SharePoint duties though (and I especially like John Ross’ quote “The coolest shit is worthless if it doesn’t meet business needs”). SharePoinTony summed it up nicely with “SharePoint Solutions knowledge is both lacking and underrated in most environments. Roles help”. Having someone on the team who can dance between a business user and a coder can be difficult. Remember the idea of telling something to someone and them passing it on to the next person. By the time the story comes round the circle it’s a shadow of it’s former self with little resemblance to the original tale. This is very much business requirements as they’re told by the user to a business analyst, written down on paper, read by an architect, tuned into a solution plan, and implemented by a developer. Transformations between what was said, what was heard, what was written down, and what was developed can be distant cousins. Not everyone has the skill of communication and even less have negotiation skills to suit the SharePoint platform. Negotiation is important because not everything can be (or should be) done in SharePoint. Sometimes it’s just not appropriate to build it on the SharePoint platform but someone needs to know enough about the platform and what limitations it might have, then communicate that (and/or negotiate) with a customer or user so it’s not about “You can’t have this” to “Let’s try it this way”. Visualize the possible instead of denying the impossible. So what is the right SharePoint team? My cromag brain came with a fairly simpleton answer (and I’m sure people will just say this is a cop-out). The perfect SharePoint team is just enough people to do the job that know the technology and business problem they’re solving. Bridge the gap between business need and technology platform and you have an architect. Communicate the needs of the business effectively so the entire team understands it and you have a business analyst. Can you get this with full time workers? Maybe but don’t expect miracles out of the gate. Also don’t take a consultant’s word as gospel. Some consultants just don’t have the diversity of the SharePoint platform to be worth their value so be careful. You really need someone who knows enough about SharePoint to be able to validate a consultants knowledge level. This is basically try for any consultant, not just a SharePoint one. Specialization is good and needed. A good, well-balanced SharePoint team is one of people that can solve problems with work with the technology, not against it. Having a top developer is great, but don’t rely on them to solve world hunger if they can’t communicate very well with users. An expert business analyst might be great at gathering requirements so the entire team can understand them, but if it means building 100% custom solutions because they don’t fit inside the SharePoint boundaries isn’t of much value. Just repeat. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. A few people pointed out Nick Inglis’ article Excluding The Information Professional In SharePoint. It’s a good read too and hits home that maybe some developers and IT pros need some extra help in the information space. If you’re in an organization that needs labels on people, come up with something everyone understands and go with it. If that’s Business Solutions Architect, SharePoint Advisor, or Guy Who Knows A Lot About Portals, make it work for you. We all wish that one person could master all that is SharePoint but we also know that doesn’t scale very well and you quickly get into the hit-by-a-bus syndrome (with the organization coming to a full crawl when the guy or girl goes on vacation, gets sick, or pops out a baby). There are too many gaps in SharePoint knowledge to have any one person know it all and too many kittens to juggle all at once. We like to consider ourselves experts in our field, but trying to tackle too many roles at once and we end up being mediocre jack of all trades, master of none. Don't fall into this pit. It's a deep, dark hole you don't want to try to claw your way out of. Trust me. Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. In the end I don’t disagree with Joel. SharePoint is a beast and not something that should be taken on by newbies. If you just read “Teach Yourself SharePoint in 24 Hours” and want to go build your corporate intranet or the next killer business solution with all your new found knowledge plan to pony up consultant dollars a few months later when everything goes to Hell in a handbasket and falls over. I’m not saying don’t build solutions in SharePoint. I’m just saying that building effective ones takes skill like any craft and not something you can just cobble together with a little bit of cursory knowledge. Thanks to *everyone* who participated in this tweet rush. It was fun and educational.

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

  - by Adam M.

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

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• Underwriting in a New Frontier: Spurring Innovation

  - by [email protected]

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Susan Keuer, product strategy manager for Oracle Insurance, shares her experiences and insight from the 2010 Association of Home Office Underwriters (AHOU) Annual Conference, April 11-14, in San Antonio, Texas    How can I be more innovative in underwriting?  It's a common question I hear from insurance carriers, producers and others, so it was no surprise that it was the key theme at the recent 2010 AHOU Annual Conference.  This year's event drew more than 900 insurance professionals involved in the underwriting process across life and annuities, property and casualty and reinsurance from around the globe, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, Bahamas, and more, to San Antonio - a Texas city where innovation transformed a series of downtown drainage canals into its premiere River Walk tourist destination.   CNN's Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta kicked off the conference with a phenomenal opening session that drove home the theme of the conference, "Underwriting in a New Frontier:  Spurring Innovation."   Drawing from his own experience as a neurosurgeon treating critically injured medical patients in the field in Iraq, Gupta inspired audience members to think outside the box during the underwriting process. He shared a compelling story of operating on a soldier who had suffered a head-related trauma in a field hospital.  With minimal supplies available Gupta used a Black and Decker saw to operate on the soldier's head and reduce pressure on his swelling brain. Drawing from this example, Gupta encouraged underwriters to think creatively, be innovative, and consider new tools and sources of information, such as social networking sites, during the underwriting process. So as you are looking at risk take into consideration all resources you have available.    Gupta also stressed the concept of IKIGAI - noting that individuals who believe that their life is worth living are less likely to die than are their counterparts without this belief.  How does one quantify this approach to life or thought process when evaluating risk?  Could this be something to consider as a "category" in the near future? How can this same belief in your own work spur innovation?   The role of technology was a hot topic of discussion throughout the conference.  Sessions delved into the latest in underwriting software to the rise of social media and how it is being increasingly integrated into underwriting process and solutions.  In one session a trio of panelists representing the carrier, producer and vendor communities stressed the importance to underwriters of leveraging new technology and the plethora of online information sources, which all could be used to accurately, honestly and consistently evaluate the risk throughout the underwriting process.   Another focused on the explosion of social media noting:  1.    Social media is growing exponentially - About eight percent of Americans used social media five years ago. Today about 46 percent of Americans do so, with 85 percent of financial services professionals using social media in their work.  2.    It will impact your business - Underwriters reconfirmed over and over that they are increasingly using "free" tools that are available in cyberspace in lieu of more costly solutions, such as inspection reports conducted by individuals in the field.  3.    Information is instantly available on the Web, anytime, anywhere - LinkedIn was mentioned as a way to connect to peers in the underwriting community and producers alike.  Many carriers and agents also are using Facebook to promote their company to customers - and as a point-of-entry to allow them to perform some functionality - such as accessing product marketing information versus directing users to go to the carrier's own proprietary website.  Other carriers have released their tight brand marketing to allow their producers to drive more business to their personal Facebook site where they offer innovative tools such as Application Capture or asking medical information in a more relaxed fashion.     Other key topics at the conference included the economy, ongoing industry consolidation, real-estate valuations as an asset and input into the underwriting process, and producer trends.  All stressed a "back to basics" approach for low cost, term products.   Finally, Connie Merritt, RN, PHN, entertained the large group of atttendees with audience-engaging insight on how to "Tame the Lions in Your Life - Dealing with Complainers, Bullies, Grump and Curmudgeon." Merritt noted "we are too busy for our own good." She shared how her overachieving personality had impacted her life.  Audience members then were asked to pick red, yellow, blue, or green shapes, without knowing that each one represented a specific personality trait.  For example, those who picked blue were the peacemakers. Those who choose yellow were social - the hint was to "Be Quiet Longer."  She then offered these "lion taming" steps:   1.    Admit It 2.    Accept It 3.    Let Go 4.    Be Present (which paralleled Gupta's IKIGAI concept)   When thinking about underwriting I encourage you to be present in the moment and think creatively, but don't be afraid to look ahead to the future and be an innovator.  I hope to see you at next year's AHOU Annual Conference, May 1-4, 2011 at The Mirage in Las Vegas, Nev.     Susan Keuer is the product strategy manager for new business underwriting.  She brings more than 20 years of insurance industry experience working with leading insurance carriers and technology companies to her role on the product strategy team for life/annuities solutions within the Oracle Insurance Global Business Unit  

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• Security in Software

  The term security has many meanings based on the context and perspective in which it is used. Security from the perspective of software/system development is the continuous process of maintaining confidentiality, integrity, and availability of a system, sub-system, and system data. This definition at a very high level can be restated as the following: Computer security is a continuous process dealing with confidentiality, integrity, and availability on multiple layers of a system. Key Aspects of Software Security Integrity Confidentiality Availability Integrity within a system is the concept of ensuring only authorized users can only manipulate information through authorized methods and procedures. An example of this can be seen in a simple lead management application.  If the business decided to allow each sales member to only update their own leads in the system and sales managers can update all leads in the system then an integrity violation would occur if a sales member attempted to update someone else’s leads. An integrity violation occurs when a team member attempts to update someone else’s lead because it was not entered by the sales member.  This violates the business rule that leads can only be update by the originating sales member. Confidentiality within a system is the concept of preventing unauthorized access to specific information or tools.  In a perfect world the knowledge of the existence of confidential information/tools would be unknown to all those who do not have access. When this this concept is applied within the context of an application only the authorized information/tools will be available. If we look at the sales lead management system again, leads can only be updated by originating sales members. If we look at this rule then we can say that all sales leads are confidential between the system and the sales person who entered the lead in to the system. The other sales team members would not need to know about the leads let alone need to access it. Availability within a system is the concept of authorized users being able to access the system. A real world example can be seen again from the lead management system. If that system was hosted on a web server then IP restriction can be put in place to limit access to the system based on the requesting IP address. If in this example all of the sales members where accessing the system from the 192.168.1.23 IP address then removing access from all other IPs would be need to ensure that improper access to the system is prevented while approved users can access the system from an authorized location. In essence if the requesting user is not coming from an authorized IP address then the system will appear unavailable to them. This is one way of controlling where a system is accessed. Through the years several design principles have been identified as being beneficial when integrating security aspects into a system. These principles in various combinations allow for a system to achieve the previously defined aspects of security based on generic architectural models. Security Design Principles Least Privilege Fail-Safe Defaults Economy of Mechanism Complete Mediation Open Design Separation Privilege Least Common Mechanism Psychological Acceptability Defense in Depth Least Privilege Design PrincipleThe Least Privilege design principle requires a minimalistic approach to granting user access rights to specific information and tools. Additionally, access rights should be time based as to limit resources access bound to the time needed to complete necessary tasks. The implications of granting access beyond this scope will allow for unnecessary access and the potential for data to be updated out of the approved context. The assigning of access rights will limit system damaging attacks from users whether they are intentional or not. This principle attempts to limit data changes and prevents potential damage from occurring by accident or error by reducing the amount of potential interactions with a resource. Fail-Safe Defaults Design PrincipleThe Fail-Safe Defaults design principle pertains to allowing access to resources based on granted access over access exclusion. This principle is a methodology for allowing resources to be accessed only if explicit access is granted to a user. By default users do not have access to any resources until access has been granted. This approach prevents unauthorized users from gaining access to resource until access is given. Economy of Mechanism Design PrincipleThe Economy of mechanism design principle requires that systems should be designed as simple and small as possible. Design and implementation errors result in unauthorized access to resources that would not be noticed during normal use. Complete Mediation Design PrincipleThe Complete Mediation design principle states that every access to every resource must be validated for authorization. Open Design Design PrincipleThe Open Design Design Principle is a concept that the security of a system and its algorithms should not be dependent on secrecy of its design or implementation Separation Privilege Design PrincipleThe separation privilege design principle requires that all resource approved resource access attempts be granted based on more than a single condition. For example a user should be validated for active status and has access to the specific resource. Least Common Mechanism Design PrincipleThe Least Common Mechanism design principle declares that mechanisms used to access resources should not be shared. Psychological Acceptability Design PrincipleThe Psychological Acceptability design principle refers to security mechanisms not make resources more difficult to access than if the security mechanisms were not present Defense in Depth Design PrincipleThe Defense in Depth design principle is a concept of layering resource access authorization verification in a system reduces the chance of a successful attack. This layered approach to resource authorization requires unauthorized users to circumvent each authorization attempt to gain access to a resource. When designing a system that requires meeting a security quality attribute architects need consider the scope of security needs and the minimum required security qualities. Not every system will need to use all of the basic security design principles but will use one or more in combination based on a company’s and architect’s threshold for system security because the existence of security in an application adds an additional layer to the overall system and can affect performance. That is why the definition of minimum security acceptably is need when a system is design because this quality attributes needs to be factored in with the other system quality attributes so that the system in question adheres to all qualities based on the priorities of the qualities. Resources: Barnum, Sean. Gegick, Michael. (2005). Least Privilege. Retrieved on August 28, 2011 from https://buildsecurityin.us-cert.gov/bsi/articles/knowledge/principles/351-BSI.html Saltzer, Jerry. (2011). BASIC PRINCIPLES OF INFORMATION PROTECTION. Retrieved on August 28, 2011 from  http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/protection/Basic.html Barnum, Sean. Gegick, Michael. (2005). Defense in Depth. Retrieved on August 28, 2011 from  https://buildsecurityin.us-cert.gov/bsi/articles/knowledge/principles/347-BSI.html Bertino, Elisa. (2005). Design Principles for Security. Retrieved on August 28, 2011 from  http://homes.cerias.purdue.edu/~bhargav/cs526/security-9.pdf

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• Hard drive mounted at / , duplicate mounted hard drive after using MountManager

  - by HellHarvest

  possible duplicate post I'm running 12.04 64bit. My system is a dual boot for both Ubuntu and Windows7. Both operating systems are sharing the drive named "Elements". My volume named "Elements" is a 1TB SATA NTFS hard drive that shows up twice in the side bar in nautilus. One of the icons is functional and even has the convenient "eject" icon next to it. Below is a picture of the left menu in Nautilus, with System Monitor-File Systems tab open on top of it. Can someone advise me about how to get rid of this extra icon? I think the problem is much more deep-rooted than just a GUI glitch on Nautilus' part. The other icon does nothing but spit out the following error when I click on it (image below). This only happened AFTER I tried using Mount Manager to automate mounting the drive at start up. I've already uninstalled Mount Manager, and restarted, but the problem didn't go away. The hard drive does mount automatically now, so I guess that's cool. But now, every time I boot up now and open Nautilus, BOTH of these icons appear, one of which is fictitious and useless. According to the image above and the outputs of several other commands, it appears to be mounted at / In which case, no matter where I am in Nautilus when I try to click on that icon, of course it will tell me that that drive is in use by another program... Nautilus. I'm afraid of trying to unmount this hard drive (sdb6) because of where it appears to be mounted. I'm kind of a noob, and I have this gut feeling that tells me trying to unmount a drive at / will destroy my entire file system. This fear was further strengthened by the output of "$ fsck" at the very bottom of this post. Error immediately below when that 2nd "Elements" hard drive is clicked in Nautilus: Unable to mount Elements Mount is denied because the NTFS volume is already exclusively opened. The volume may be already mounted, or another software may use it which could be identified for example by the help of the 'fuser' command. It's odd to me that that error message above claims that it's an NTFS volume when everything else tell me that it's an ext4 volume. The actual hard drive "Elements" is in fact an NTFS volume. Here's the output of a few commands and configuration files that may be of interest: $ fuser -a / /: 2120r 2159rc 2160rc 2172r 2178rc 2180rc 2188r 2191rc 2200rc 2203rc 2205rc 2206r 2211r 2212r 2214r 2220r 2228r 2234rc 2246rc 2249rc 2254rc 2260rc 2261r 2262r 2277rc 2287rc 2291rc 2311rc 2313rc 2332rc 2334rc 2339rc 2343rc 2344rc 2352rc 2372rc 2389rc 2422r 2490r 2496rc 2501rc 2566r 2573rc 2581rc 2589rc 2592r 2603r 2611rc 2613rc 2615rc 2678rc 2927r 2981r 3104rc 4156rc 4196rc 4206rc 4213rc 4240rc 4297rc 5032rc 7609r 7613r 7648r 9593rc 18829r 18833r 19776r $ sudo df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb6 496G 366G 106G 78% / udev 2.0G 4.0K 2.0G 1% /dev tmpfs 791M 1.5M 790M 1% /run none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock none 2.0G 672K 2.0G 1% /run/shm /dev/sda1 932G 312G 620G 34% /media/Elements /home/solderblob/.Private 496G 366G 106G 78% /home/solderblob /dev/sdb2 188G 100G 88G 54% /media/A2B24EACB24E852F /dev/sdb1 100M 25M 76M 25% /media/System Reserved $ sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00093cab Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 2048 1953519615 976758784 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT Disk /dev/sdb: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders, total 1465149168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000e8d9b Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sdb2 206848 392378768 196085960+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sdb3 392380414 1465147391 536383489 5 Extended /dev/sdb5 1456762880 1465147391 4192256 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdb6 392380416 1448374271 527996928 83 Linux /dev/sdb7 1448376320 1456758783 4191232 82 Linux swap / Solaris Partition table entries are not in disk order $ cat /etc/fstab # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> UUID=77039a2a-83d4-47a1-8a8c-a2ec4e4dfd0e / ext4 defaults 0 1 UUID=F6549CC4549C88CF /media/Elements ntfs-3g users 0 0 $ sudo blkid /dev/sda1: LABEL="Elements" UUID="F6549CC4549C88CF" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb1: LABEL="System Reserved" UUID="5CDE130FDE12E156" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb2: UUID="A2B24EACB24E852F" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb6: UUID="77039a2a-83d4-47a1-8a8c-a2ec4e4dfd0e" TYPE="ext4" $ sudo blkid -c /dev/null (appears to be exactly the same as above) /dev/sda1: LABEL="Elements" UUID="F6549CC4549C88CF" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb1: LABEL="System Reserved" UUID="5CDE130FDE12E156" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb2: UUID="A2B24EACB24E852F" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb6: UUID="77039a2a-83d4-47a1-8a8c-a2ec4e4dfd0e" TYPE="ext4" $ mount /dev/sdb6 on / type ext4 (rw) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw) none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620) tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755) none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880) none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) /dev/sda1 on /media/Elements type fuseblk (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) /home/solderblob/.Private on /home/solderblob type ecryptfs (ecryptfs_check_dev_ruid,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=16,ecryptfs_unlink_sigs,ecryptfs_sig=76a47b0175afa48d,ecryptfs_fnek_sig=391b2d8b155215f7) gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/solderblob/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=solderblob) /dev/sdb2 on /media/A2B24EACB24E852F type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,default_permissions,blksize=4096) /dev/sdb1 on /media/System Reserved type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,default_permissions,blksize=4096) $ ls -a . A2B24EACB24E852F Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS amd64 .. Elements System Reserved $ cat /proc/mounts rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0 proc /proc proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0 udev /dev devtmpfs rw,relatime,size=2013000k,nr_inodes=503250,mode=755 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0 tmpfs /run tmpfs rw,nosuid,relatime,size=809872k,mode=755 0 0 /dev/disk/by-uuid/77039a2a-83d4-47a1-8a8c-a2ec4e4dfd0e / ext4 rw,relatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 none /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw,relatime 0 0 none /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw,relatime 0 0 none /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw,relatime 0 0 none /run/lock tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k 0 0 none /run/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime 0 0 /dev/sda1 /media/Elements fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other,blksize=4096 0 0 binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0 /home/solderblob/.Private /home/solderblob ecryptfs rw,relatime,ecryptfs_fnek_sig=391b2d8b155215f7,ecryptfs_sig=76a47b0175afa48d,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=16,ecryptfs_unlink_sigs 0 0 gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/solderblob/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1000 0 0 /dev/sdb2 /media/A2B24EACB24E852F fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096 0 0 /dev/sdb1 /media/System\040Reserved fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096 0 0 gvfs-fuse-daemon /root/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0 0 0 $ fsck fsck from util-linux 2.20.1 e2fsck 1.42 (29-Nov-2011) /dev/sdb6 is mounted. WARNING!!! The filesystem is mounted. If you continue you ***WILL*** cause ***SEVERE*** filesystem damage. Do you really want to continue<n>? no check aborted.

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