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• Plymouth and GRUB do not show at all

  - by WarriorIng64

  I am using Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit as my only OS on my desktop computer, which used to only run Ubuntu 10.04 LTS until I had the time to upgrade it with a fresh install. It uses integrated NVIDIA graphics (listed as a GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 by the NVIDIA X Server Settings utility) with the current proprietary driver as provided by the Additional Drivers utility, and has a VGA connection to a 1680x1050 Acer monitor. I used to get the (ugly-looking version of) Plymouth graphical boot screen while under 10.04. It didn't look that great, but I was fine with it. Now, it doesn't show on 11.04 at all during boot (I just get an error message in a moving gray box from the monitor saying "Input Not Supported"), and only rarely it will show on shutdown, all garbled up. I could not get GRUB to show during boot while holding down Shift, either (same error message), but pressing Enter while it should be up starts the system normally. A picture of the error message I was getting: Once fully booted, the system still shows the login screen and desktop just fine. Any information on how to troubleshoot this would be appreciated. If there's any hardware-specific stuff I forgot to include here, let me know the relevant commands to run in a comment below. Things that I've tried: Running plymouth in a framebuffer: no effect Booting with nomodeset as my grub boot: option no effect Booting with nomodeset and plymouth in a framebuffer: no effect other than Plymouth showing during shutdown only Following the Softpedia instructions for fixing Plymouth's resolution: Problem mostly solved, except logo does not show in Plymouth during boot, and both grub and Plymouth are slightly off-center #4 above, but with nomodeset removed as a grub boot option: same effect as #4 #5 above, but with vt.handoff=7 added as a grub boot option: same effect as #4 I have added the current contents of /etc/default/grub as requested in the comments: # If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update # /boot/grub/grub.cfg. # For full documentation of the options in this file, see: # info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration' GRUB_DEFAULT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian` GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video=uvesafb:mode_option=1280x1024-24,mtrr=3,scroll=ywrap" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" # Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs # This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains # the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...) #GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef" # Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only) #GRUB_TERMINAL=console # The resolution used on graphical terminal # note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE # you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo' GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x1024 # Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux #GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true # Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries #GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true" # Uncomment to get a beep at grub start #GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1" CURRENT STATUS: I forgot to uncomment one line as per "things that I've tried" #4, so I took care of that. I can now see GRUB during startup when I hold Shift and a normal-looking Plymouth during shutdown...but Plymouth during boot is now just a solid purple screen. In each case, it's displayed a little off-center to the left, with a thin black bar running down the right side of the monitor. The error pictured above no longer shows. I'd say this problem is about 2/3 solved now. UPDATE: After Natty started freezing up on me, I decided to dual-boot with Oneiric, which unfortunately shows the same problems. Rather than trying all these workarounds though, I decided to do what I should have done from the start and file a pair of bug reports. LAST UPDATE: Bug 850908 has been confirmed as a legitimate nouveaufb bug. I have overwritten my 11.04 partition with 12.04 LTS, and I can confirm at this time that the issue is present there, as well. I will now flag this question to be closed, yet I hope it was helpful for anyone who experienced similar issues; if you are still having the same problem as me, please go there and mark yourself as affected. Thanks!

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• Share Files and Folders and Internet between Guest OS and the Host in Hyper-V

  - by Manesh Karunakaran

  For those who are familiar with the VirtualPC, vmWare and VirtualBox environments will be quite irritated to find out that there is no direct way to share files from the Host machine to the Virtualized guest environment. This is a good thing from a CIO perspective because there’s excellent isolation for the virtualized environments this way, but for the developer junkies like us, this is an irritant, especially for those who have nuked their Windows 7 OS and installed Windows Server 2008 R2 for all the the SharePoint friendliness that it offers. Here’s a quick 5 minutes howto on Enabling Shared Folders and Internet Access for the Hyper-V images, for those who are still struggling with this. Step 1: Add a Virtual Network Adapter to your Guest OS For this, shut down the guest machine, go to its settings and add a Virtual Network Adapter as given in the images below     Step 2: Enable Virtual Networking in Hyper-V   Setting this up is very easy. In the Hyper-V Manager, under Actions (right panel), click the Virtual Network Manager. In the Virtual Network Manager in the Create virtual network panel, select Internal and click the Add button.        At this point if you open Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections you will be able to see the new Network Adapter, Now name it to something meaningful other than Network Adapter X. Now you can add this network to each of your virtual machines, but at this point, unless you assign an IP address in each connection, you won't be able to do much.   Step 3: Enable Internet Connection Sharing so that Guest OS’es also can connect to the internet. To enable ICS follow these steps: Click on the network icon in the tray of your host machine and select Network and Sharing Center. From there click Manage network connections. Select the network adapter that you use to access the Internet. Right click it and select Properties. In the properties dialog select the Sharing tab. On this tab check the box that says "Allow other network users..." and then set the Home networking connection to be the network adapter that was created above (now you see why I said to rename it to something useful). Now your virtual machines that have this network connection will automatically get an IP address and will be able to connect to the Internet (provided your internet connection is working). Because each adapter also gets an automatic address you can now share files and folders between your host and your virtual machines which is important since you can't just drag-and-drop files like you can with Virtual PC.   Step 4: Create a Shared Folder in the Host Machine and use it in the Guest machine. Right click on the folder that you want to Share and select ‘Share with\Specific People’ and specify who all can access the share. Open the Guest OS from Hyper V Navigate to Start > Run and type in the Address of the Share (Or Map a Drive to the Share) Bingo! The Share opens!! :)   Now you can share as many files and folders as you want between the host and the guest, and you also have internet access inside the Virtual machines. Hope that helps.   Technorati Tags: Shared folder,Hyper-V,Share Files,Share files and folders between guest and host,Hyper-V Networking,Share Internet Access in Hyper-V,Internet,Files,Shared folders in Hyper-V

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• Ubuntu 12.10 broken, shutdown while updating

  - by UnknownDude

  I got the following problem: My PC shutdown while upgrading from 12.04 to 12.10. Everything seems to work but I can't install the missing updates. It always tells me to run apt-get install -f, but when I do so it just says: (It's in German, hope it doesn't matter) Paketlisten werden gelesen... Fertig Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut Statusinformationen werden eingelesen... Fertig Abhängigkeiten werden korrigiert... Fertig Die folgenden Pakete wurden automatisch installiert und werden nicht mehr benötigt: espeak gcc-4.6-base:i386 gir1.2-notify-0.7 libcamel-1.2-29 libebook-1.2-12 libedataserver-1.2-15 libgconf2-4 libgnome-bluetooth8 libgnome-menu2 libgnomekbd7 libgomp1:i386 libgweather-3-0 libimobiledevice2 libindicate5 libkpathsea5 libpoppler19 libusbmuxd1 python-gmenu Verwenden Sie »apt-get autoremove«, um sie zu entfernen. Die folgenden zusätzlichen Pakete werden installiert: nvidia-current-updates xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-mouse xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-fbdev xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-qxl xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware Vorgeschlagene Pakete: xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi gpointing-device-settings touchfreeze firmware-linux Die folgenden Pakete werden ENTFERNT: nvidia-current Die folgenden Pakete werden aktualisiert (Upgrade): nvidia-current-updates xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-mouse xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-fbdev xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-qxl xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware 20 aktualisiert, 0 neu installiert, 1 zu entfernen und 133 nicht aktualisiert. 8 nicht vollständig installiert oder entfernt. Es müssen noch 0 B von 70,6 MB an Archiven heruntergeladen werden. Nach dieser Operation werden 184 MB Plattenplatz freigegeben. Möchten Sie fortfahren [J/n]? j (Lese Datenbank ... 242727 Dateien und Verzeichnisse sind derzeit installiert.) Entfernen von nvidia-current ... Removing all DKMS Modules Error! There are no instances of module: nvidia-current 295.40 located in the DKMS tree. Done. Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/quirks-handler", line 26, in <module> import Quirks.quirkapplier File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/Quirks/quirkapplier.py", line 26, in <module> import XKit.xutils ImportError: No module named XKit.xutils dpkg: Fehler beim Bearbeiten von nvidia-current (--remove): Unterprozess installiertes pre-removal-Skript gab den Fehlerwert 1 zurück Trigger für bamfdaemon werden verarbeitet ... Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index... Trigger für libc-bin werden verarbeitet ... ldconfig deferred processing now taking place Fehler traten auf beim Bearbeiten von: nvidia-current E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) When I try to remove nvidia-current it tells me to run apt-get install -f. Do you guys have any idea? I don't want to reinstall my whole system, takes a lot of time to encrypt everything again and so on.

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• Friday Fun: Spell Blazer

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you ready for some fun and adventure after a long week back at work? This week’s game combines jewel-matching style game play with an RPG story for an awesome mix of fun and fiction. Your goal is to help a young wizard reach the magic academy in Raven as the forces of darkness are building. Spell Blazer The object of the game is to help young Kaven reach the Lightcaster Academy in Raven alive, but he will encounter many dangers along the way. Are you ready to begin the quest? As soon as you click Start Game the intro will automatically begin. If this is your first time playing the game the intro provides a nice background story for the game and what is happening in the game environment. Once you are past the intro, you will see a map of the region with your starting point in the Farmlands, various towns and the roads connecting them, along with your final destination of Raven. Notice that some of the roads are different colors…those colors indicate the “danger levels” for each part of your journey (green = good, yellow = some danger, etc.). To begin your journey click on the Town of Goose with your mouse. You will encounter your first monster part of the way towards Goose. This first round takes you through the game play process step-by-step. Once you have clicked Okay you will see the details about the monster you have just encountered. It is very important that you do not click on Fight! or Flee! until viewing and noting the types of spells that the monster is resistant to or has a weakness against. Choose your spells wisely based on the information provided about the monster. Keep in mind that the healing spell can be very useful depending on the monster you meet and your current health status. Note: Spells shown in order here are Healing, Fireball, Icebolt, & Lightning. Ready to fight! The first battle will also explain how to fight…click Okay to get started. Once the main window is in full view there are details that you need to look at. Beneath each of the combatants you will see the three attacks that each brings to the battle and at the bottom you will see their respective health points. We got lucky and had an Icebolt attack that we could utilize on the first play! Note: You can exchange two squares without making a match in order to try and line up an attack. While it happened too quickly to capture in our screenshot, there will be cool lightning bolt effects shoot out from matched up squares to the opposite combatant. You will also see the amount of damage inflicted from a particular attack on top of the avatars. Victory! Once you have won a round of combat a window will appear showing the amount of gold coins left behind by the monster. When you reach a town you will have the opportunity to stop over and rest or directly continue on with your journey. On to Halgard after a good rest! Play Spell Blazer Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video] Convert or View Documents Online Easily with Zoho, No Account Required Build a Floor Scrubbing Robot out of Computer Fans and a Frisbee Serene Blue Windows Wallpaper for Your Desktop 2011 International Space Station Calendar Available for Download (Free) Ultimate Elimination – Lego Black Ops [Video]

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• Make Text and Images Easier to Read with the Windows 7 Magnifier

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Do you have impaired vision or find it difficult to read small print on your computer screen? Today, we’ll take a closer look at how to magnify that hard to read content with the Magnifier in Windows 7. Magnifier was available in previous versions of Windows, but the Windows 7 version comes with some notable improvements. There are now three screen modes in Magnifier. Full Screen and Lens mode, however, require Windows Aero to be enabled. If your computer doesn’t support Aero, or if you’re not using am Aero theme, Magnifier will only work in Docked mode. Using Magnifier in Windows 7 You can find the Magnifier by going to Start > All Programs > Accessories > Ease of Access > Magnifier.   Alternately, you can type magnifier into the Search box in the Start Menu and hit Enter. On the Magnifier toolbar, choose your View mode by clicking Views and choosing from the available options. Clicking the plus (+) and minus (-) buttons will zoom in or zoom out. You can change the zoom in/out percentage by adjusting the slider bar. You can also enable color inversion and select tracking options. Click OK when finished to save your settings.   After a brief period, the Magnifier Toolbar will switch to a magnifying glass icon. Simply click the magnifying glass to display the Magnifier Toolbar again.   Docked Mode In Docked mode, a portion of the screen is magnified and docked at the top of the screen. The rest of your desktop will remain in it’s normal state. You can then control which area of the screen is magnified by moving your mouse.   Full Screen Mode This magnifies your entire screen and follows your mouse as you move it around. If you loose track of where you are on the screen, use the Ctrl + Alt + Spacebar shortcut to preview where your mouse pointer is on the screen.   Lens Mode The Lens screen mode is similar to holding a magnifying glass up to your screen. Full screen mode magnifies the area around the mouse. The magnified area moves around the screen with your mouse.    Shortcut Keys Windows key + (+) to zoom in Windows key + (-) to zoom out Windows key + ESC to exit Ctrl + Alt + F – Full screen mode Ctrl + Alt + L – Lens mode Ctrl + Alt + D – Dock mode Ctrl + Alt + R – Resize the lens Ctrl + Alt + Spacebar – Preview full screen Conclusion Windows Magnifier is a nice little tool if you have impaired vision or just need to make items on the screen easier to read. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips New Features in WordPad and Paint in Windows 7How-To Geek on Lifehacker: How to Make Windows Vista Less AnnoyingUsing Comments in Word 2007 DocumentsMake Your PC Look Like Windows Phone 7Use Image Placeholders to Display Documents Faster in Word TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer XPS file format & XPS Viewer Explained Microsoft Office Web Apps Guide

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• Unreal Tournament 3 vs UDK: What Should I Choose?

  - by Matt Christian

  Many people in the mod community were very excited to see the release of the Unreal Developer Kit (UDK) a few months ago.  Along with generating excitement into a very dedicated community, it also introduced many new modders into a flourishing area of indie-development.  However, since UDK is free, most beginners jump right into UDK, which is OK though you might just benefit more from purchasing a shelf-copy of Unreal Tournament 3. UDK UDK is a free full version of UnrealEd (the editor environment used to create games like Gears of War 1/2, Bioshock 1/2, and of course Unreal Tournament 3).  The editor gives you all the features of the editor from the shelf-copy of the game plus some refinements in many of the tools.  (One of the first things you'll find about UnrealEd is that it's a collection of tools grouped into the same editor so it really isn't a single 'tool') Interestingly enough, Epic is allowing you to sell any game made in UDK with a few catches.  First off, you must purchase a liscense for your game (which, I THINK is aproximately $99 starting).  Secondly, you must pay 25% of all profits for the first $5,000 of your game revenue to them (about $1250).  Finally, you cannot use any of the 'media' provided in UDK for your game.  UDK provides sample meshes, textures, materials, sounds, and other sample pieces of media pulled (mostly) from Unreal Tournament 3. The final point here will really determine whether you should use UDK.  There is a very small amount of media provided in UDK for someone to go in and begin creating levels without first developing your own meshes, textures, and other media.  Sure, you can slap together a few unique levels, though you will end up finding yourself restriced to the same items over and over and over.  This is absolutely how professional game development is; you are 'given' (typically liscensed or built in-house) an engine/editor and you begin creating all the content for the game and placing it.  UDK is aimed toward those who really want to build their game content from scratch with a currently existing engine.  It is not suited for someone who would like to simply build levels and quick mods without learning external 3D programs and image editing software. Unreal Tournament 3 Unless you have a serious grudge against FPS's, Epic, or your computer sucks, there really is no reason not to own this game for PC.  You can pick it up on Steam or Amazon for around $20 brand new.  Not only are you provided with a full single-player and multiplayer game, but you are given the entire UnrealEd 3.0 including all of the content used to build UT3.  If you want to start building levels and mods quickly for UT3, you should absolutely pick up a shelf-copy. However, as off-the-shelf UT3 is a few years old now, the tools have not been updated for quite a while.  Compared to UDK, the menus are more difficult to navigate through and take more time getting used to.  Since UDK is updated almost every month, there are new inclusions to the editor that may not be in UT3 (including the future addition of 3D!).  I haven't worked enough with shelf UT3 to see if there are more features in UDK or if they both feature the same stuff in different forms, however you should remember that the Unreal Engine 3.0 has undergone numerous upgrades between it's launch and Gears of War 2 (in fact, Epic had a conference to show off what changed just between the Gears of Wars games). Since UT3 has much more core content, someone who wants to focus on level editing or modding the core UT3 game may find their needs better suited with an off-the-shelf copy of UT3.  If that level designer has a team that is generating custom assets, they may be better off with UDK. The choice is now yours...

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• Windows Azure Use Case: New Development

  - by BuckWoody

  This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Description: Computing platforms evolve over time. Originally computers were directed by hardware wiring - that, the “code” was the path of the wiring that directed an electrical signal from one component to another, or in some cases a physical switch controlled the path. From there software was developed, first in a very low machine language, then when compilers were created, computer languages could more closely mimic written statements. These language statements can be compiled into the lower-level machine language still used by computers today. Microprocessors replaced logic circuits, sometimes with fewer instructions (Reduced Instruction Set Computing, RISC) and sometimes with more instructions (Complex Instruction Set Computing, CISC). The reason this history is important is that along each technology advancement, computer code has adapted. Writing software for a RISC architecture is significantly different than developing for a CISC architecture. And moving to a Distributed Architecture like Windows Azure also has specific implementation details that our code must follow. But why make a change? As I’ve described, we need to make the change to our code to follow advances in technology. There’s no point in change for its own sake, but as a new paradigm offers benefits to our users, it’s important for us to leverage those benefits where it makes sense. That’s most often done in new development projects. It’s a far simpler task to take a new project and adapt it to Windows Azure than to try and retrofit older code designed in a previous computing environment. We can still use the same coding languages (.NET, Java, C++) to write code for Windows Azure, but we need to think about the architecture of that code on a new project so that it runs in the most efficient, cost-effective way in a Distributed Architecture. As we receive new requests from the organization for new projects, a distributed architecture paradigm belongs in the decision matrix for the platform target. Implementation: When you are designing new applications for Windows Azure (or any distributed architecture) there are many important details to consider. But at the risk of over-simplification, there are three main concepts to learn and architect within the new code: Stateless Programming - Stateless program is a prime concept within distributed architectures. Rather than each server owning the complete processing cycle, the information from an operation that needs to be retained (the “state”) should be persisted to another location c(like storage) common to all machines involved in the process.  An interesting learning process for Stateless Programming (although not unique to this language type) is to learn Functional Programming. Server-Side Processing - Along with developing using a Stateless Design, the closer you can locate the code processing to the data, the less expensive and faster the code will run. When you control the network layer, this is less important, since you can send vast amounts of data between the server and client, allowing the client to perform processing. In a distributed architecture, you don’t always own the network, so it’s performance is unpredictable. Also, you may not be able to control the platform the user is on (such as a smartphone, PC or tablet), so it’s imperative to deliver only results and graphical elements where possible.  Token-Based Authentication - Also called “Claims-Based Authorization”, this code practice means instead of allowing a user to log on once and then running code in that context, a more granular level of security is used. A “token” or “claim”, often represented as a Certificate, is sent along for a series or even one request. In other words, every call to the code is authenticated against the token, rather than allowing a user free reign within the code call. While this is more work initially, it can bring a greater level of security, and it is far more resilient to disconnections. Resources: See the references of “Nondistributed Deployment” and “Distributed Deployment” at the top of this article for more information with graphics:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658120.aspx  Stack Overflow has a good thread on functional programming: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/844536/advantages-of-stateless-programming  Another good discussion on Stack Overflow on server-side processing is here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3064018/client-side-or-server-side-processing Claims Based Authorization is described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee335707.aspx

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• 6 Prominent Features of New GMail User Interface

  - by Gopinath

  GMail’s user interface has got a big make over today and the new user interface is available to everyone. We can switch to the new user interface by click on “Switch to the new look” link available at the bottom right of GMail (If you are on IE 6 or similar type of bad browsers, you will not see the option!). I switched to the new user interface as soon I noticed the link and played with it for sometime. In this post I want to share the prominent features of all new GMail interface. 1. All New Conversations Interface GMail’s threaded conversations is a game changing feature when it was first introduced by Google. For  a long time we have not seen much updates to the threaded conversation views. In the new GMail interface, threaded conversation sports a great new look – conversations are always visible in a horizontal fashion as opposed to stack interface of earlier version. When you open a conversation, you get a quick glance of individual thread without expanding the thread. Readability is improved a lot now.  Check image after the break 2. Sender Profile Photos In Email Threads Did you observe the above screenshot of conversations view? It has profile images of the participants in the thread. Identifying person of a thread is much more easy. 3. Advanced Search Box Search is the heart of Google’s business and it’s their flagship technology. GMail’s search interface is enhanced to let you quickly find the required e-mails. Also you can create mail filters from the search box without leaving the screen or opening up a new popup. 4. Gmail Automatically Resizing To Fit Multiple Devices There is no doubt that this is post PC era where people started using more of tablets and big screen smartphones than ever. The new user interface of GMail automatically resizes itself to fit the size of screen seamlessly. 5. HD Images For Your Themes, Sourced from iStockphoto Are you bored with minimalistic GMail interface and the few flashy themes? Here comes GMail HD themes backed by stock photographs sourced from iStockPhoto website. If you have a widescreen HD monitor then decorate your inbox with beautiful themes. 6. Resize Labels & Chat Panels Now you got a splitter between Labels & Chat panel that lets resize their height as you prefer. Also Label panel auto expands its height when you mouse over to show you hidden labels if any. Video – overview of new GMail features This article titled,6 Prominent Features of New GMail User Interface, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• MIXing it Up a Bit

  - by andrewbrust

  Another March, another MIX.  For the fifth year running now, Microsoft has chosen to put on a conference aimed less at software development, per se, and more at the products, experiences and designs that software development can generate.  In all four prior MIX events, the focus of the show, its keynotes and breakout sessions has been on Web products.  On day 1 of MIX 2010 that focus shifted to Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7). What little we had seen of WP7 had been shown to us in a keynote presentation, given by Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain last month.  And today, Mr. Belfiore reprised his showmanship for the MIX 2010 audience.  Joe showed us the ins and outs of WP7 and, in a breakout session, even gave us a sneak peek of Office (specifically, Excel) on WP7.  We didn’t get to see that one month ago in Barcelona, nor did get to see email messages opened for reading, which we saw today. But beyond a tour of the phone itself, impressive though that is, we got to see apps running on it.  Those apps included Associated Press news, Seesmic (a major Twitter client) and Foursquare (a social media darling).  All three ran, ran well, and looked markedly different and better from their corresponding versions on iPhone and Android.  And the games we saw looked even better. To me though, the best demos involved the creation of WP7 apps, using Silverlight in Visual Studio and Expression Blend.  These demos were so effective because they showed important apps being built in very few steps, and by Microsoft executives to boot.  Scott Guthrie showed us how to build a Twitter API app in Visual Strudio.   Jon Harris showed us how to build a photo management and viewer application in Expression Blend, using virtually no code.  Demos of apps built from scratch to F5 without the benefit of a teacher, could be challenging.  But they went off fine, without a hitch and without a ton of opaque, generated code.  Everything written, be it C# or XAML, was easily understood, and the results were impressive. That means lots of developers can do this, and I think it means a lot will.  What I’ve seen, thus far, of iPhone and Android development looks very tedious by comparison.  Development for those platforms involve a collection of tools that integrate only to a point.  Dev work for WP7 involves use of Visual Studio, Silverlight and the same debugging experience .NET developers already know.  This was very exciting for me. All the demos harkened back to days of building apps for with Visual Basic…design the front-end, put in code-behind and then hit F5.  And that makes sense, because the phone platform, and the PC of the early 90s are both, essentially, client OS machines.  The Web was minimal and the “device” was everything. Same is true of this phone.  It’s a client app contraption that fits in your pocket. And if the platforms are comparable, hopefully so too will be the draw of ease-of-development.   WP7 has the potential to make mobile developers want to switch over, and to convince enterprise developers to get into the phone scene.  Will this propel the new phone platform to new heights, and restore Microsoft’s competiveness in the mobile arena? I hope so.  I think so.  And if Microsoft uses developers to build themselves a victory, that would be beneficial and would show that Microsoft has learned from its failures, as well as its successes.  Today I saw a few beautiful apps.  Tomorrow I hope I see a slew of others; maybe not as polished, but plentiful, attractive and stable.  That would be a victory for Microsoft, and for developers.  And it would show everyone else that developers are the kingmakers.  They need cheap, efficient dev tools and lots of respect.  Microsoft has always been the company to provide that.  Hopefully, with WP7, they will return to that persona and see how very timeless it is.

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• Speeding up procedural texture generation

  - by FalconNL

  Recently I've begun working on a game that takes place in a procedurally generated solar system. After a bit of a learning curve (having neither worked with Scala, OpenGL 2 ES or Libgdx before), I have a basic tech demo going where you spin around a single procedurally textured planet: The problem I'm running into is the performance of the texture generation. A quick overview of what I'm doing: a planet is a cube that has been deformed to a sphere. To each side, a n x n (e.g. 256 x 256) texture is applied, which are bundled in one 8n x n texture that is sent to the fragment shader. The last two spaces are not used, they're only there to make sure the width is a power of 2. The texture is currently generated on the CPU, using the updated 2012 version of the simplex noise algorithm linked to in the paper 'Simplex noise demystified'. The scene I'm using to test the algorithm contains two spheres: the planet and the background. Both use a greyscale texture consisting of six octaves of 3D simplex noise, so for example if we choose 128x128 as the texture size there are 128 x 128 x 6 x 2 x 6 = about 1.2 million calls to the noise function. The closest you will get to the planet is about what's shown in the screenshot and since the game's target resolution is 1280x720 that means I'd prefer to use 512x512 textures. Combine that with the fact the actual textures will of course be more complicated than basic noise (There will be a day and night texture, blended in the fragment shader based on sunlight, and a specular mask. I need noise for continents, terrain color variation, clouds, city lights, etc.) and we're looking at something like 512 x 512 x 6 x 3 x 15 = 70 million noise calls for the planet alone. In the final game, there will be activities when traveling between planets, so a wait of 5 or 10 seconds, possibly 20, would be acceptable since I can calculate the texture in the background while traveling, though obviously the faster the better. Getting back to our test scene, performance on my PC isn't too terrible, though still too slow considering the final result is going to be about 60 times worse: 128x128 : 0.1s 256x256 : 0.4s 512x512 : 1.7s This is after I moved all performance-critical code to Java, since trying to do so in Scala was a lot worse. Running this on my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S3), however, produces a more problematic result: 128x128 : 2s 256x256 : 7s 512x512 : 29s Already far too long, and that's not even factoring in the fact that it'll be minutes instead of seconds in the final version. Clearly something needs to be done. Personally, I see a few potential avenues, though I'm not particularly keen on any of them yet: Don't precalculate the textures, but let the fragment shader calculate everything. Probably not feasible, because at one point I had the background as a fullscreen quad with a pixel shader and I got about 1 fps on my phone. Use the GPU to render the texture once, store it and use the stored texture from then on. Upside: might be faster than doing it on the CPU since the GPU is supposed to be faster at floating point calculations. Downside: effects that cannot (easily) be expressed as functions of simplex noise (e.g. gas planet vortices, moon craters, etc.) are a lot more difficult to code in GLSL than in Scala/Java. Calculate a large amount of noise textures and ship them with the application. I'd like to avoid this if at all possible. Lower the resolution. Buys me a 4x performance gain, which isn't really enough plus I lose a lot of quality. Find a faster noise algorithm. If anyone has one I'm all ears, but simplex is already supposed to be faster than perlin. Adopt a pixel art style, allowing for lower resolution textures and fewer noise octaves. While I originally envisioned the game in this style, I've come to prefer the realistic approach. I'm doing something wrong and the performance should already be one or two orders of magnitude better. If this is the case, please let me know. If anyone has any suggestions, tips, workarounds, or other comments regarding this problem I'd love to hear them.

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• Windows Azure Use Case: New Development

  - by BuckWoody

  This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Description: Computing platforms evolve over time. Originally computers were directed by hardware wiring - that, the “code” was the path of the wiring that directed an electrical signal from one component to another, or in some cases a physical switch controlled the path. From there software was developed, first in a very low machine language, then when compilers were created, computer languages could more closely mimic written statements. These language statements can be compiled into the lower-level machine language still used by computers today. Microprocessors replaced logic circuits, sometimes with fewer instructions (Reduced Instruction Set Computing, RISC) and sometimes with more instructions (Complex Instruction Set Computing, CISC). The reason this history is important is that along each technology advancement, computer code has adapted. Writing software for a RISC architecture is significantly different than developing for a CISC architecture. And moving to a Distributed Architecture like Windows Azure also has specific implementation details that our code must follow. But why make a change? As I’ve described, we need to make the change to our code to follow advances in technology. There’s no point in change for its own sake, but as a new paradigm offers benefits to our users, it’s important for us to leverage those benefits where it makes sense. That’s most often done in new development projects. It’s a far simpler task to take a new project and adapt it to Windows Azure than to try and retrofit older code designed in a previous computing environment. We can still use the same coding languages (.NET, Java, C++) to write code for Windows Azure, but we need to think about the architecture of that code on a new project so that it runs in the most efficient, cost-effective way in a Distributed Architecture. As we receive new requests from the organization for new projects, a distributed architecture paradigm belongs in the decision matrix for the platform target. Implementation: When you are designing new applications for Windows Azure (or any distributed architecture) there are many important details to consider. But at the risk of over-simplification, there are three main concepts to learn and architect within the new code: Stateless Programming - Stateless program is a prime concept within distributed architectures. Rather than each server owning the complete processing cycle, the information from an operation that needs to be retained (the “state”) should be persisted to another location c(like storage) common to all machines involved in the process.  An interesting learning process for Stateless Programming (although not unique to this language type) is to learn Functional Programming. Server-Side Processing - Along with developing using a Stateless Design, the closer you can locate the code processing to the data, the less expensive and faster the code will run. When you control the network layer, this is less important, since you can send vast amounts of data between the server and client, allowing the client to perform processing. In a distributed architecture, you don’t always own the network, so it’s performance is unpredictable. Also, you may not be able to control the platform the user is on (such as a smartphone, PC or tablet), so it’s imperative to deliver only results and graphical elements where possible.  Token-Based Authentication - Also called “Claims-Based Authorization”, this code practice means instead of allowing a user to log on once and then running code in that context, a more granular level of security is used. A “token” or “claim”, often represented as a Certificate, is sent along for a series or even one request. In other words, every call to the code is authenticated against the token, rather than allowing a user free reign within the code call. While this is more work initially, it can bring a greater level of security, and it is far more resilient to disconnections. Resources: See the references of “Nondistributed Deployment” and “Distributed Deployment” at the top of this article for more information with graphics:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658120.aspx  Stack Overflow has a good thread on functional programming: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/844536/advantages-of-stateless-programming  Another good discussion on Stack Overflow on server-side processing is here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3064018/client-side-or-server-side-processing Claims Based Authorization is described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee335707.aspx

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• Installing Eclipse for OSB Development

  - by James Taylor

  OSB provides 2 methods for OSB development, the OSB console, and Eclipse. This post deals with a typical development environment with OSB installed on a remote server and the developer requiring an IDE on their PC for development. As at 11.1.1.4 Eclipse is only IDE supported for OSB development. We are hoping OSB will support JDeveloper in the future. To get the download for Eclipse use the download WebLogic Server with the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, e.g. wls1034_oepe111161_win32.exe.To ensure the Eclipse version is compatible with your OSB version I recommend using the Eclipse that comes with the supported WLS server, e.g. OSB 11.1.1.4 you would install WLS 10.3.4+oepe.The install is a 2 step process, install the base Eclipse, then install the OSB plugins. In this example I'm using the 11.1.1.4 install for windows, your versions may differ. You need to download 2 programs, WebLogic Server with the oepe plugin for your OS, and the Oracle Service Bus which is generally generic. Place these files in a directory of your choice. Start the executable I create a new Oracle Home for this installation as it don't want to impact on my JDeveloper install or any other Oracle products installed on my machine. Ignore the support / email notifications Choose a custom install as we only want to install the minimum for Eclipse. If you really want you can do a typical and install everything. Deselect all products then select the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. This will select the minimum prerequisites required for install. As I'm only going to use this home for OSB Development I deselect the JRockit JVM. Accept the locations for the installs. If running on a Windows environment you will be asked to start a Node Manger service. This is optional. I have chosen to ignore. Select the user permissions you require, I have set to default. Do a last check to see if the values are correct and continue to install. The install should start. The install should complete successfully. I chose not to run the Quick Start. Extract the OSB download to a location of your choice and double click on the setup.exe. You may be asked to supply a correct java location. Point this to the java installed in your OS. I'm running Windows 7 so I used the 64bit version. Skip the software updates. Set the OSB home to the location of the WLS home installed above Choose a custom install as all we want to install is the OSB Eclipse Plugins. Select OSB IDE. For the rest of the install screens accept the defaults. Start the install There is no need to configure a WLS domain if you only intend to deploy to the remote server. If you need to do this there are other sites how to configure via the configuration wizard. Start Eclipse to make sure the OSB Plugin has been created. In the top right drop down you should see OSB as an option. Connecting to the remote server, select the Server Tab at the bottom Right-click in that frame and select Server. Chose the remote server version and the hostname Provide and name for your server if necessary, and accept the defaults Enter connection details for the remote server Click on the Remote server and it should validate stating its status.Now you ready to develop, Happy developing!

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• PPPD Is Locking the Modem and Not Releasing It

  - by Skid

  Got an issue with PPPD on one of our system, we have a PC that is used to talk to remote sites via a dial up connection, the modem can both connect out to the sites and the sites also dial back in. Currently I'm having an issue where some times a site ether dials in or we dial out, and it connects, but then blocks the modem and throws and error to kern.log. Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503745] INFO: task pppd:8142 blocked for more than 120 seconds. Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503750] "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message. Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503753] pppd D ffffffff8180cb40 0 8142 1 0x00000000 Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503759] ffff8800ac1f5dc8 0000000000000086 ffff8800ac1f5fd8 00000000000137c0 Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503765] ffff8800ac1f4010 00000000000137c0 00000000000137c0 00000000000137c0 Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503770] ffff8800ac1f5fd8 00000000000137c0 ffffffff81c13020 ffff880135df5b80 Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503775] Call Trace: Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503784] [<ffffffff8166ba29>] schedule+0x29/0x70 Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503790] [<ffffffff813db005>] tty_ldisc_ref_wait+0x65/0xb0 Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503796] [<ffffffff813f3061>] ? uart_ioctl+0xd1/0x1c0 Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503801] [<ffffffff81076960>] ? wake_up_bit+0x40/0x40 Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503806] [<ffffffff813d3fa0>] tty_ioctl+0x2c0/0x9a0 Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503810] [<ffffffff811d0549>] ? fcntl_setlk+0x69/0x200 Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503815] [<ffffffff81195f79>] do_vfs_ioctl+0x99/0x330 Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503820] [<ffffffff81195212>] ? do_fcntl+0x232/0x410 Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503823] [<ffffffff811962b1>] sys_ioctl+0xa1/0xb0 Aug 26 14:23:57 TM-SCADA kernel: [191233.503829] [<ffffffff81674e69>] system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b The syslog trace stops at "Serial connection established". Aug 28 06:00:03 TM-SCADA pppd[10358]: pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0 Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: abort on (NO CARRIER) Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: abort on (NO DIALTONE) Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: abort on (ERROR) Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: abort on (NO ANSWER) Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: abort on (BUSY) Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: abort on (Username/Password Incorrect) Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: send (atz^M) Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: expect (OK) Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: atz^M^M Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: OK Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: -- got it Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: send (atx0^M) Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: expect (OK) Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: ^M Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: atx0^M^M Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: OK Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: -- got it Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: send (atdt0123456789^M) Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: expect (CONNECT/ARQ) Aug 28 06:00:04 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: ^M Aug 28 06:00:30 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: atdt0123456789^M^M Aug 28 06:00:30 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: CONNECT/ARQ Aug 28 06:00:30 TM-SCADA chat[10360]: -- got it Aug 28 06:00:30 TM-SCADA pppd[10358]: Serial connection established. I've only found two ways to release the modem in this condition, the first is to turn the modem off and on again, the second is to delete the serial lock file, and then SIGKILL pppd. Now I could write into our software to do the latter if the modem is locked, but I would rather stop it from locking in the first place if at all possible. The reason I put this issue in the askubuntu is because we used to use OpenSuse and never had an issue with it, admittedly that was version 11.2 or earlier so its still and old kernel, but I figured I would ask here first anyway. Any suggestions of places to look would be appreciated.

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• Microsoft Ergonomic 7000 keyboard + mouse lag

  - by user115210

  I recently bought a new Microsoft Ergonomic 7000 keyboard. I started to use it with my Ubuntu 12.04 and it lags all the time. I try to be more specific: Even on a minor CPU usage the mouse lags. By minor I mean firefox loading a webpage, or opening an application like conky, gnome-terminal etc. When higher CPU usage occurs the keyboard is lagging too, but by this I mean it misses my hits, so what I type won't appear later. What I tried so far (and did not work)? Disable autosuspend (echo -1 to sys/bus/usb.../autosuspend) and at the same place set level to "on". I have tried several video drivers: Vesa, radeon, newest catalyst (and catalyst beta too) When my keyboard and/or mouse lags I tried an other USB keyboard which works perfectly and the same for the mouse. I tried the keyboard and mouse on a different computer with Linux (Ubuntu, Arch, OpenSuse) too, the same problem appears but not on Windows. I tried to replace the battery sets, and to change channel on the dongle. And also tried to use the dongle from other USB ports. On the same time I am able to use any other wireless mouse. I changed the XkbModel to "microsoft7000" but it did not solve anything. About the hardware: AMD A8 3870K - Radeon HD6550D 8 GB of memory 4 GB of swap (which is almost never used) Here are my PC's details: lsusb: Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 007 Device 002: ID 045e:071d Microsoft Corp. Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0461:4ea7 Primax Electronics, Ltd lspci: 00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 12h Processor Root Complex 00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI BeaverCreek [Radeon HD 6550D] 00:11.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson SATA Controller [IDE mode] (rev 40) 00:12.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson USB OHCI Controller (rev 11) 00:12.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson USB EHCI Controller (rev 11) 00:13.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson USB OHCI Controller (rev 11) 00:13.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson USB EHCI Controller (rev 11) 00:14.0 SMBus: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson SMBus Controller (rev 13) 00:14.1 IDE interface: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson IDE Controller 00:14.2 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson Azalia Controller (rev 01) 00:14.3 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson LPC Bridge (rev 11) 00:14.4 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson PCI Bridge (rev 40) 00:14.5 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson USB OHCI Controller (rev 11) 00:15.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Device 43a0 00:15.1 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Device 43a1 00:16.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson USB OHCI Controller (rev 11) 00:16.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson USB EHCI Controller (rev 11) 00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 12h/14h Processor Function 0 (rev 43) 00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 12h/14h Processor Function 1 00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 12h/14h Processor Function 2 00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 12h/14h Processor Function 3 00:18.4 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 12h/14h Processor Function 4 00:18.5 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 12h/14h Processor Function 6 00:18.6 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 12h/14h Processor Function 5 00:18.7 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 12h/14h Processor Function 7 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 06) dmesg | tail -n 150: http://pastebin.com/sGUAAiUe cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log: http://pastebin.com/fny7ZkN4 Note: The Icon7 Twister Evolution is the replacement mouse to use.

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• Desktop login fails, terminal works

  - by Tobias

  I have a freshly setup 12.04 LTS pc system (120 GB SSD, 1 TB HDD, 16 GiB RAM); since a few days, I can't login to the graphical desktop anymore: there is very short flashing shell window which disappears very quickly, and I'm confronted with the login screen again. I believe there is something about modprobe and vbox, but I can't read it fast enough ... I can login to a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F1). It did not help to chown all contents of my home directory to me:my-group, like suggested here. This is what I could find in /var/log, grepping for the date and time (I inserted linebreaks after <my-hostname>; real time values preserved): auth.log: <date> 22:43:01 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_succeed_if(lightdm:auth): requirement "user ingroup nopasswdlogin" not met by user "tobias" <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_unix(lightdm:session): session closed for user lightdm <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_unix(lightdm:session): session opened for user tobias by (uid=0) <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_ck_connector(lightdm:session): nox11 mode, ignoring PAM_TTY :0 <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_unix(lightdm:session): session closed for user tobias <date> 22:43:09 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_unix(lightdm:session): session opened for user lightdm by (uid=0) <date> 22:43:09 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_ck_connector(lightdm:session): nox11 mode, ignoring PAM_TTY :0 <date> 22:43:10 <my-hostname> lightdm: pam_succeed_if(lightdm:auth): requirement "user ingroup nopasswdlogin" not met by user "tobias" <date> 22:43:10 <my-hostname> dbus[756]: [system] Rejected send message, 2 matched rules; type="method_call", sender="1:43" (uid=104 pid=1639 comm="/usr/lib/indicator-datetime/indicator-datetime-ser") interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties" member="GetAll" error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination=":1.15" (uid=0 pid=1005 comm="/usr/sbin/console-kit-daemon --no-daemon ") kern.log: <date> 22:43:00 <my-hostname> kernel: [ 16.084525] eth0: no IPv6 routers present syslog: <date> 22:43:00 <my-hostname> kernel: [ 16.084525] eth0: no IPv6 routers present <date> 22:43:01 <my-hostname> ntpdate[1492]: adjust time server 91.189.94.4 offset -0.162831 sec <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> acpid: client 969[0:0] has disconnected <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> acpid: client connected from 1553[0:0] <date> 22:43:08 <my-hostname> acpid: 1 client rule loaded I have Virtualbox and Truecrypt installed, but I can't think of a reason why they might prevent a graphical login. I'm confused: What is this about requirement "user ingroup nopasswdlogin" not met? I do login using a password, and the password works ok when logging in to a terminal! Can I somehow read the error output, e.g. by delaying it, redirecting it to a file, or having the system prompt me for pressing a key? Has possibly any recent update caused my problem? Should I install the pending updates? How, btw, without access to the graphical UI? I have some working knowledge about the Linux shell, but I'm new to Ubuntu. Any help would be appreciated.

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• Windows Azure Emulators On Your Desktop

  - by BuckWoody

  Many people feel they have to set up a full Azure subscription online to try out and develop on Windows Azure. But you don’t have to do that right away. In fact, you can download the Windows Azure Compute Emulator – a “cloud development environment” – right on your desktop. No, it’s not for production use, and no, you won’t have other people using your system as a cloud provider, and yes, there are some differences with Production Windows Azure, but you’ll be able code, run, test, diagnose, watch, change and configure code without having any connection to the Internet at all. The best thing about this approach is that when you are ready to deploy the code you’ve been testing, a few clicks deploys it to your subscription when you make one.   So what deep-magic does it take to run such a thing right on your laptop or even a Virtual PC? Well, it’s actually not all that difficult. You simply download and install the Windows Azure SDK (you can even get a free version of Visual Studio for it to run on – you’re welcome) from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsazure/cc974146.aspx   This SDK will also install the Windows Azure Compute Emulator and the Windows Azure Storage Emulator – and then you’re all set. Right-click the icon for Visual Studio and select “Run as Administrator”:    Now open a new “Cloud” type of project:   Add your Web and Worker Roles that you want to code:   And when you’re done with your design, press F5 to start the desktop version of Azure:   Want to learn more about what’s happening underneath? Right-click the tray icon with the Azure logo, and select the two emulators to see what they are doing:          In the configuration files, you’ll see a “Use Development Storage” setting. You can call the BLOB, Table or Queue storage and it will all run on your desktop. When you’re ready to deploy everything to Windows Azure, you simply change the configuration settings and add the storage keys and so on that you need.   Want to learn more about all this?   Overview of the Windows Azure Compute Emulator: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg432968.aspx Overview of the Windows Azure Storage Emulator: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg432983.aspx January 2011 Training Kit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=413E88F8-5966-4A83-B309-53B7B77EDF78&displaylang=en      

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• #iPad at One Week: A Great Device Made with a Heavy Hand

  - by andrewbrust

  I have now had my iPad for a little over a week. In that time, Apple introduced the world to its iPhone OS 4 (and the SDK agreement’s draconian new section 3.3.1), HP introduced is Slate, and Microsoft got ready to launch Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. And through it all I have used my iPad. I've used it for email, calendar, controlling my Sonos, and writing an essay. I've used it for getting on TripIt and Twitter, and surfing the Web. I've used it for online banking, and online ordering and delivery of food. And the verdict? Honestly? I think it's a great device and I thoroughly enjoy using it. The screen is bright and vibrant. I am surprisingly fast and accurate when I type on it. The touch screen's responsiveness is nearly flawless. The software, including a number of third party applications, include pleasing animations and use of color that make it fun to get work done. And speaking of work, the Exchange integration is, dare I say it, robust. Not as full-featured as on a PC or Windows Mobile device, but still offering core functionality and, so far at least, without bugs. The UI is intuitive, not just to me, but also to my 5 1/2 year old, and also to my nearly-3-year-old son. They picked it up and, with just just a few pointers from me, they almost immediately knew what to do, whether they were looking at photos (and swiping/flicking along as they did so), using a drawing program, playing a game, or watching YouTube videos. The younger of the two of them even tried to get up on a chair and grab the thing today. He dropped it, from about 4 feet off the ground. And it's still fine. (Meanwhile, I'll be keeping it on a higher shelf.) I cannot fully describe yet what makes this form factor and this product so appealing. Maybe it's that it's an always-on device. Maybe it's just being able to hold such a nice, relatively large display so close. Maybe it's the design sensibility, that seems to pervade throughout the app ecosystem. Or maybe it's that one's fingers, and not pens or mice, are the software's preferred input device. Whatever the attraction, it's strong. And no matter how much I tend to root for Microsoft and against Apple, Cupertino has, in my mind, scored big, Can Microsoft compete? Yes, but not with the Windows 7 standard UI (nor with individual OEMs’ own UIs on top). I hope Microsoft builds a variant of the Windows Phone 7 specifically for tablet devices. And I hope they make it clear that all developers, and programming languages, are welcome to the platform. Once that’s established, the OEMs have to build great hardware with fast, responsive touch screens, under Microsoft's watchful eye. That may be the hardest part of getting this right. No matter what, Microsoft's got a fight on its hands. I don't know if it can count on winning that fight, either. But Silverlight and Live Tiles could certainly help. And so can treating developers like adults.  Apple seems intent on treating their devs like kids, and then giving the kids a curfew.  For that, dev-friendly Microsoft may one day give thanks.

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• Impressions of my ASUS eee slate EP121 - Dual core 4GB, 64GB SSD

  - by tonyrogerson

  This thing is lovely, very nice bluetooth keyboard that has nice feedback on the keypress, there is no mouse but you can use the stylus or get yourself a bluetooth mouse, me, I've opted for a Microsoft ARC mouse which is a delight to use, the USB doors are a pain to open for the first time if like me you don't have any finger nails. It came as a suprise that the slate shows four processors, Dual Core with multi-threading, I didn't really look at the processor I was more interested in the amount of memory and the SSD; you don't get the full 4GB even with the 64 bit version of Windows 7 installed (which I immediately upgraded to Ultimate through my MSDN subscription). The box is extremely responsive - extremely, it loads Winword in literally a second. I've got office 2010 and onenote 2010 on there now; one problem is that on applying all (43) windows updates since the upgrade the machine is still sat on step 3 of 3 on the start up configuring updates screen after about an hour, you can't turn this machine off without using a paper clip to reset it and as I have just found you need a paper clip :). Installing Windows 7 SP1 was effortless. One of the first things I did on it was to reduce the size of the font, by default its set at 125%, my eye sight is ok :) so I've set that back down. Amazon Kindle for the PC works really well, plenty of text on the screen when viewed portrait, the case it comes with also allows the slate to stand up in various positions - portrait, horizontal - seems stable enough. The wireless works well, seems to have a better signal than my other two laptop machines which is good news. The gadget passed the pose test at work :). I use offline files to keep a copy of all my work stuff locally, I'm not sure what it is, well, its probably my server but whenever I try and sync it runs for a couple of minutes then fails with network name no longer contactable, funnily enough its fine from my big laptop so I can only guess this may be a driver type issue on the EP121 itself - very odd and very annoying. I do a lot of presenting and need to plug into a VGA project because most sites that's all that is offered, the EP121 has a mini-hdmi output which is great except for this scenario, hdmi is digital, vga is analogue, you will struggle to find a cost effective solution, I found HDFury and also a device HP do, however, a better solution appears to be getting a USB graphics adapter for instance the one I've ordered is the ClimaxDigital USB 2.0 to DVI,VGA or HDMI Adaptor which gives everything I need - VGA and DVI output and great resolution as well - ok, so fingers crossed because I'm presenting next Wednesday in Edinburgh and not taking my 300kg lenovo w700 (I'm sure my back just sighed in relief) - it certainly works really well on my LED TV, the install was simple - it just works! One of the several reasons for buying this piece of kit was to use it on my LED TV to remote into my main machine to check stuff whilst sat in my living room, also to watch webcasts and lecture videos in comfort away from my office, because of the wireless speed and limitation I'm opting for a USB network adapter from Belkin - that will also allow me to take advantage of my home gigabit network, there are only 2 usb ports on the slate so I'm going to knock up a hub so connecting it in is straight forward and simple, I'm also going to purchase a second power supply so I don't have to faff about with that either.I now have the developer x64 edition of SQL Server 2008 R2, yes everything :) - about 16GB left to play with on the machine now but that will be fine, I'll put AdventureWorks on there so I can play and demo stuff which is all I'm after from this, my development machine is significantly more powerful and meets my storage needs too.Travel test this weekend and next week, I'm in Dundee for my final exam for the masters degree.

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• RPi and Java Embedded GPIO: Sensor Reading using Java Code

  - by hinkmond

  And, now to program the Java code for reading the fancy-schmancy static electricity sensor connected to your Raspberry Pi, here is the source code we'll use: First, we need to initialize ourselves... /* * Java Embedded Raspberry Pi GPIO Input app */ package jerpigpioinput; import java.io.FileWriter; import java.io.RandomAccessFile; import java.text.DateFormat; import java.text.SimpleDateFormat; import java.util.Calendar; /** * * @author hinkmond */ public class JerpiGPIOInput { static final String GPIO_IN = "in"; // Add which GPIO ports to read here static String[] GpioChannels = { "7" }; /** * @param args the command line arguments */ public static void main(String[] args) { try { /*** Init GPIO port(s) for input ***/ // Open file handles to GPIO port unexport and export controls FileWriter unexportFile = new FileWriter("/sys/class/gpio/unexport"); FileWriter exportFile = new FileWriter("/sys/class/gpio/export"); for (String gpioChannel : GpioChannels) { System.out.println(gpioChannel); // Reset the port unexportFile.write(gpioChannel); unexportFile.flush(); // Set the port for use exportFile.write(gpioChannel); exportFile.flush(); // Open file handle to input/output direction control of port FileWriter directionFile = new FileWriter("/sys/class/gpio/gpio" + gpioChannel + "/direction"); // Set port for input directionFile.write(GPIO_IN); directionFile.flush(); } And, next we will open up a RandomAccessFile pointer to the GPIO port. /*** Read data from each GPIO port ***/ RandomAccessFile[] raf = new RandomAccessFile[GpioChannels.length]; int sleepPeriod = 10; final int MAXBUF = 256; byte[] inBytes = new byte[MAXBUF]; String inLine; int zeroCounter = 0; // Get current timestamp with Calendar() Calendar cal; DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss.SSS"); String dateStr; // Open RandomAccessFile handle to each GPIO port for (int channum=0; channum Then, loop forever to read in the values to the console. // Loop forever while (true) { // Get current timestamp for latest event cal = Calendar.getInstance(); dateStr = dateFormat.format(cal.getTime()); // Use RandomAccessFile handle to read in GPIO port value for (int channum=0; channum Rinse, lather, and repeat... Compile this Java code on your host PC or Mac with javac from the JDK. Copy over the JAR or class file to your Raspberry Pi, "sudo -i" to become root, then start up this Java app in a shell on your RPi. That's it! You should see a "1" value get logged each time you bring a statically charged item (like a balloon you rub on the cat) near the antenna of the sensor. There you go. You've just seen how Java Embedded technology on the Raspberry Pi is an easy way to access sensors. Hinkmond

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• Deploying an SSL Application to Windows Azure &ndash; The Dark Secret

  - by ToStringTheory

  When working on an application that had been in production for some time, but was about to have a shopping cart added to it, the necessity for SSL certificates came up.  When ordering the certificates through the vendor, the certificate signing request (CSR) was generated through the providers (http://register.com) web interface, and within a day, we had our certificate. At first, I thought that the certification process would be the hard part…  Little did I know that my fun was just beginning… The Problem I’ll be honest, I had never really secured a site before with SSL.  This was a learning experience for me in the first place, but little did I know that I would be learning more than the simple procedure.  I understood a bit about SSL already, the mechanisms in how it works – the secure handshake, CA’s, chains, etc…  What I didn’t realize was the importance of the CSR in the whole process.  Apparently, when the CSR is created, a public key is created at the same time, as well as a private key that is stored locally on the PC that generated the request.  When the certificate comes back and you import it back into IIS (assuming you used IIS to generate the CSR), all of the information is combined together and the SSL certificate is added into your store. Since at the time the certificate had been ordered for our site, the selection to use the online interface to generate the CSR was chosen, the certificate came back to us in 5 separate files: A root certificate – (*.crt file) An intermediate certifcate – (*.crt file) Another intermediate certificate – (*.crt file) The SSL certificate for our site – (*.crt file) The private key for our certificate – (*.key file) Well, in case you don’t know much about Windows Azure and SSL certificates, the first thing you should learn is that certificates can only be uploaded to Azure if they are in a PFX package – securable by a password.  Also, in the case of our SSL certificate, you need to include the Private Key with the file.  As you can see, we didn’t have a PFX file to upload. If you don’t get the simple PFX from your hosting provider, but rather the multiple files, you will soon find out that the process has turned from something that should be simple – to one that borders on a circle of hell… Probably between the fifth and seventh somewhere… The Solution The solution is to take the files that make up the certificates chain and key, and combine them into a file that can be imported into your local computers store, as well as uploaded to Windows Azure.  I can not take the credit for this information, as I simply researched a while before finding out how to do this. Download the OpenSSL for Windows toolkit (Win32 OpenSSL v1.0.1c) Install the OpenSSL for Windows toolkit Download and move all of your certificate files to an easily accessible location (you'll be pointing to them in the command prompt, so I put them in a subdirectory of the OpenSSL installation) Open a command prompt Navigate to the folder where you installed OpenSSL Run the following command: openssl pkcs12 -export –out {outcert.pfx} –inkey {keyfile.key}      –in {sslcert.crt} –certfile {ca1.crt} –certfile (ca2.crt) From this command, you will get a file, outcert.pfx, with the sum total of your ssl certificate (sslcert.crt), private key {keyfile.key}, and as many CA/chain files as you need {ca1.crt, ca2.crt}. Taking this file, you can then import it into your own IIS in one operation, instead of importing each certificate individually.  You can also upload the PFX to Azure, and once you add the SSL certificate links to the cloud project in Visual Studio, your good to go! Conclusion When I first looked around for a solution to this problem, there were not many places online that had the information that I was looking for.  While what I ended up having to do may seem obvious, it isn’t for everyone, and I hope that this can at least help one developer out there solve the problem without hours of work!

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• Windows Azure Emulators On Your Desktop

  - by BuckWoody

  Many people feel they have to set up a full Azure subscription online to try out and develop on Windows Azure. But you don’t have to do that right away. In fact, you can download the Windows Azure Compute Emulator – a “cloud development environment” – right on your desktop. No, it’s not for production use, and no, you won’t have other people using your system as a cloud provider, and yes, there are some differences with Production Windows Azure, but you’ll be able code, run, test, diagnose, watch, change and configure code without having any connection to the Internet at all. The best thing about this approach is that when you are ready to deploy the code you’ve been testing, a few clicks deploys it to your subscription when you make one.   So what deep-magic does it take to run such a thing right on your laptop or even a Virtual PC? Well, it’s actually not all that difficult. You simply download and install the Windows Azure SDK (you can even get a free version of Visual Studio for it to run on – you’re welcome) from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsazure/cc974146.aspx   This SDK will also install the Windows Azure Compute Emulator and the Windows Azure Storage Emulator – and then you’re all set. Right-click the icon for Visual Studio and select “Run as Administrator”:    Now open a new “Cloud” type of project:   Add your Web and Worker Roles that you want to code:   And when you’re done with your design, press F5 to start the desktop version of Azure:   Want to learn more about what’s happening underneath? Right-click the tray icon with the Azure logo, and select the two emulators to see what they are doing:          In the configuration files, you’ll see a “Use Development Storage” setting. You can call the BLOB, Table or Queue storage and it will all run on your desktop. When you’re ready to deploy everything to Windows Azure, you simply change the configuration settings and add the storage keys and so on that you need.   Want to learn more about all this?   Overview of the Windows Azure Compute Emulator: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg432968.aspx Overview of the Windows Azure Storage Emulator: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg432983.aspx January 2011 Training Kit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=413E88F8-5966-4A83-B309-53B7B77EDF78&displaylang=en      

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• Swap not available on System Monitor

  - by Zaki

  I had a swap partition of 1GB (RAM 1GB, Ubuntu 12.04 lts). Now swap is not shown on System Monitor neither can I hibernate my pc (sudo pm-hibernate). blkid output: /dev/sda1: UUID="B8B4FBB1B4FB706C" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda2: UUID="2ea7d608-2d89-4e41-9436-d05cb3ce8871" TYPE="swap" /dev/sda3: UUID="3219d03a-67e4-454b-8ce7-a27831846e35" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sda5: LABEL="Softwares" UUID="AC1CC3301CC2F47C" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda6: LABEL="Education" UUID="1E103E6C103E4B53" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda7: LABEL="Recreation" UUID="2CC8D181C8D149AA" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda8: LABEL="Miscellaneous" UUID="0274D6B174D6A727" TYPE="ntfs" /etc/fstab # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 # / was on /dev/sda6 during installation UUID=3219d03a-67e4-454b-8ce7-a27831846e35 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation UUID=2ea7d608-2d89-4e41-9436-d05cb3ce8871 none swap sw 0 0 free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 991 867 123 0 27 418 -/+ buffers/cache: 421 569 Swap: 0 0 0 cat /proc/swaps Filename Type Size Used Priority fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 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: 0x9f369f36 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 63 31471334 15735636 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 31471616 33470447 999416 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda3 33472512 62539775 14533632 83 Linux /dev/sda4 62541045 312592769 125025862+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sda5 62541108 125066024 31262458+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda6 125066088 187591004 31262458+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda7 187591068 250115984 31262458+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda8 250116048 312576704 31230328+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT swapon --all swapon: /dev/sda2: swapon failed: Invalid argument dmesg | grep -A 5 -B 5 -i swap [ 9.487404] EXT4-fs (sda3): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 131645 [ 9.487413] EXT4-fs (sda3): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 131330 [ 9.487418] EXT4-fs (sda3): 16 orphan inodes deleted [ 9.487420] EXT4-fs (sda3): recovery complete [ 9.578600] EXT4-fs (sda3): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) [ 20.580539] Swap area shorter than signature indicates [ 20.588363] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [ 20.619443] udevd[330]: starting version 175 [ 20.649959] lp: driver loaded but no devices found [ 20.662972] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810 [ 20.675515] i915 0000:00:02.0: setting latency timer to 64 -- [ 72.288573] PM: thaw of drv:sr dev:3:0:0:0 complete after 178.143 msecs [ 72.288578] PM: thaw of drv:scsi_device dev:3:0:0:0 complete after 178.136 msecs [ 72.299677] PM: thaw of drv:scsi_device dev:2:0:0:0 complete after 189.270 msecs [ 72.309473] PM: thaw of devices complete after 202.763 msecs [ 72.309668] PM: writing image. [ 72.309670] PM: Cannot find swap device, try swapon -a. [ 72.309699] PM: Cannot get swap writer [ 72.329896] Restarting tasks ... done. [ 72.331777] PM: Basic memory bitmaps freed [ 72.331792] video LNXVIDEO:00: Restoring backlight state [ 72.420048] option1 ttyUSB0: option_instat_callback: error -84 [ 72.804047] option1 ttyUSB0: option_instat_callback: error -84 -- [ 145.960625] sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0 [ 145.972036] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk [ 172.430508] PPP BSD Compression module registered [ 172.455583] PPP Deflate Compression module registered [ 332.260789] type=1400 audit(1381814763.342:27): apparmor="DENIED" operation="capable" parent=1 profile="/usr/sbin/cupsd" pid=636 comm="cupsd" pid=636 comm="cupsd" capability=36 capname="block_suspend" [ 1913.030998] Swap area shorter than signature indicates [ 2022.530155] type=1400 audit(1381816453.610:28): apparmor="DENIED" operation="capable" parent=1 profile="/usr/sbin/cupsd" pid=636 comm="cupsd" pid=636 comm="cupsd" capability=36 capname="block_suspend" [ 4062.729509] Swap area shorter than signature indicates Please help. Thanks in advance. df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda3 14G 6.1G 7.0G 47% / udev 488M 4.0K 488M 1% /dev tmpfs 199M 868K 198M 1% /run none 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock none 496M 224K 496M 1% /run/shm

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• What information must never appear in logs?

  - by MainMa

  I'm about to write the company guidelines about what must never appear in logs (trace of an application). In fact, some developers try to include as many information as possible in trace, making it risky to store those logs, and extremely dangerous to submit them, especially when the customer doesn't know this information is stored, because she never cared about this and never read documentation and/or warning messages. For example, when dealing with files, some developers are tempted to trace the names of the files. For example before appending file name to a directory, if we trace everything on error, it will be easy to notice for example that the appended name is too long, and that the bug in the code was to forget to check for the length of the concatenated string. It is helpful, but this is sensitive data, and must never appear in logs. In the same way: Passwords, IP addresses and network information (MAC address, host name, etc.)¹, Database accesses, Direct input from user and stored business data must never appear in trace. So what other types of information must be banished from the logs? Are there any guidelines already written which I can use? ¹ Obviously, I'm not talking about things as IIS or Apache logs. What I'm talking about is the sort of information which is collected with the only intent to debug the application itself, not to trace the activity of untrusted entities. Edit: Thank you for your answers and your comments. Since my question is not too precise, I'll try to answer the questions asked in the comments: What I'm doing with the logs? The logs of the application may be stored in memory, which means either in plain on hard disk on localhost, in a database, again in plain, or in Windows Events. In every case, the concern is that those sources may not be safe enough. For example, when a customer runs an application and this application stores logs in plain text file in temp directory, anybody who has a physical access to the PC can read those logs. The logs of the application may also be sent through internet. For example, if a customer has an issue with an application, we can ask her to run this application in full-trace mode and to send us the log file. Also, some application may sent automatically the crash report to us (and even if there are warnings about sensitive data, in most cases customers don't read them). Am I talking about specific fields? No. I'm working on general business applications only, so the only sensitive data is business data. There is nothing related to health or other fields covered by specific regulations. But thank you to talk about that, I probably should take a look about those fields for some clues about what I can include in guidelines. Isn't it easier to encrypt the data? No. It would make every application much more difficult, especially if we want to use C# diagnostics and TraceSource. It would also require to manage authorizations, which is not the easiest think to do. Finally, if we are talking about the logs submitted to us from a customer, we must be able to read the logs, but without having access to sensitive data. So technically, it's easier to never include sensitive information in logs at all and to never care about how and where those logs are stored.

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• What are some good questions (and good/bad answers) to ask at an interview to gauge the competency of the company/team?

  - by Wayne M

  I'm already familiar with the Joel Test, but it's been my experience that some of the questions there have the answers "massaged" to make the company seem better than it is. I've had several jobs in the past that, for instance, claimed they had a QA process and did unit testing, and what they really meant is "The programmers test the app, and test with the debugger and via trial-and-error."; they said they used SVN but they just lumped everything into one giant repository and had no concept of branching/merging or anything more complicated than updating and committing; said they can build in one step and what they really mean is it's "one step" to copy dozens of files by hand from the programmer's PC to the live server. How do you go about properly gauging a company's environment to make sure that it's a well-evolved company and not stuck on doing things a certain way because they've done it for years and they're ignorant of change? You can almost never ask to see their source code, so you're stuck trying to figure out if the interviewer's answer is accurate or BS to make the company seem good. Besides the Joel Test what are some other good questions to get the proper feel for a company, and more importantly what are some good and bad answers that could indicate a good or bad company? I mean something like (take at face value, please, it's all I could think of at short notice): Question: How does the software team apply the SOLID principles and Inversion of Control to their code? Good Answer: We adhere to SOLID wherever possible; we use TDD so it kind of forces us to write abstract, testable code. We use Ninject for our IoC container because it's fairly easy to configure - it was that or StructureMap but I find Ninject a bit more intuitive, and who doesn't like ninjas? You're not a pirate, are you? Bad Answer: Our code is pretty secure, yeah. And what's this Inversion of Control thing? I've never heard of it before. You see what I did there. The "good" answer uses facts to back it up and has a bit of "in crowd" humor; the bad answer shows complete ignorance of the question - not necessarily a bad thing if you are interviewing for a manger/director position, but a terrible answer and a huge red flag if you're interviewing as a developer and talking to a senior developer or manager! My biggest problem at the moment is being able to take a generic response and gauge whether it's the good or bad answer; more often than not it's the bad kind and I find myself frustrated almost from day one at the new job. I suppose I could name drop if I ask about specific things (e.g. "Do you write unit tests?" and if the answer is yes, ask if they use NUnit, MbUnit or something else; if they mention data access ask if they use a clean ORM like NHibernate or something more coupled like EF or Linq) but is there another way short of being resolute to actually call the interview on things (which will almost certainly result in not getting the job, but if they are skirting the question it's probably not a job I want).

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• Mind Reading with the Raspberry Pi

  - by speakjava

  Mind Reading With The Raspberry Pi At JavaOne in San Francisco I did a session entitled "Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert? Java and the Raspberry Pi".  As part of this I showed some demonstrations of things I'd done using Java on the Raspberry Pi.  This is the first part of a series of blog entries that will cover all the different aspects of these demonstrations. A while ago I had bought a MindWave headset from Neurosky.  I was particularly interested to see how this worked as I had had the opportunity to visit Neurosky several years ago when they were still developing this technology.  At that time the 'headset' consisted of a headband (very much in the Bjorn Borg style) with a sensor attached and some wiring that clearly wasn't quite production ready.  The commercial version is very simple and easy to use: there are two sensors, one which rests on the skin of your forehead, the other is a small clip that attaches to your earlobe. Typical EEG sensors used in hospitals require lots of sensors and they all need copious amounts of conductive gel to ensure the electrical signals are picked up.  Part of Neurosky's innovation is the development of this simple dry-sensor technology.  Having put on the sensor and turned it on (it powers off a single AAA size battery) it collects data and transmits it to a USB dongle plugged into a PC, or in my case a Raspberry Pi. From a hacking perspective the USB dongle is ideal because it does not require any special drivers for any complex, low level USB communication.  Instead it appears as a simple serial device, which on the Raspberry Pi is accessed as /dev/ttyUSB0.  Neurosky have published details of the command protocol.  In addition, the MindSet protocol document, including sample code for parsing the data from the headset, can be found here. To get everything working on the Raspberry Pi using Java the first thing was to get serial communications going.  Back in the dim distant past there was the Java Comm API.  Sadly this has grown a bit dusty over the years, but there is a more modern open source project that provides compatible and enhanced functionality, RXTXComm.  This can be installed easily on the Pi using sudo apt-get install librxtx-java.  Next I wrote a library that would send commands to the MindWave headset via the serial port dongle and read back data being sent from the headset.  The design is pretty simple, I used an event based system so that code using the library could register listeners for different types of events from the headset.  You can download a complete NetBeans project for this here.  This includes javadoc API documentation that should make it obvious how to use it (incidentally, this will work on platforms other than Linux.  I've tested it on Windows without any issues, just by changing the device name to something like COM4). To test this I wrote a simple application that would connect to the headset and then print the attention and meditation values as they were received from the headset.  Again, you can download the NetBeans project for that here. Oracle recently released a developer preview of JavaFX on ARM which will run on the Raspberry Pi.  I thought it would be cool to write a graphical front end for the MindWave data that could take advantage of the built in charts of JavaFX.  Yet another NetBeans project is available here.  Screen shots of the app, which uses a very nice dial from the JFxtras project, are shown below. I probably should add labels for the EEG data so the user knows which is the low alpha, mid gamma waves and so on.  Given that I'm not a neurologist I suspect that it won't increase my understanding of what the (rather random looking) traces mean. In the next blog I'll explain how I connected a LEGO motor to the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi and then used my mind to control the motor!

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