home premium - Page 455

read integers from a file into a vector in C++

- by user2922063

I am trying to read an unknown number of double values stored on separate lines from a text file into a vector called rainfall. My code won't compile; I am getting the error no match for 'operator>>' in 'inputFile >> rainfall' for the while loop line. I understand how to read in from a file into an array, but we are required to use vectors for this project and I'm not getting it. I appreciate any tips you can give on my partial code below. vector<double> rainfall; // a vector to hold rainfall data // open file ifstream inputFile("/home/shared/data4.txt"); // test file open if (inputFile) { int count = 0; // count number of items in the file // read the elements in the file into a vector while ( inputFile >> rainfall ) { rainfall.push_back(count); ++count; } // close the file

Read the article

Too many apache processes, killing the CPU

- by RULE101

I am noticed that too many apache processes killing the CPU in my dedicated server. 14193 (Trace) (Kill) nobody 0 66.1 0.0 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL 14128 (Trace) (Kill) nobody 0 65.9 0.0 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL 14136 (Trace) (Kill) nobody 0 65.9 0.0 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL 14129 (Trace) (Kill) nobody 0 65.8 0.0 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL 13419 (Trace) (Kill) nobody 0 65.7 0.0 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL 13421 (Trace) (Kill) nobody 0 65.7 0.0 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL 13426 (Trace) (Kill) nobody 0 65.7 0.0 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL 13428 (Trace) (Kill) nobody 0 65.7 0.0 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL 13429 (Trace) (Kill) nobody 0 65.7 0.0 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL 12173 (Trace) (Kill) nobody 0 65.5 0.0 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL 14073 (Trace) (Kill) nobody 0 65.5 0.0 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL I am getting high load email notification from cpanel during the day. FROM httpd.conf Include "/usr/local/apache/conf/includes/pre_main_global.conf" Include "/usr/local/apache/conf/includes/pre_main_2.conf" LoadModule bwlimited_module modules/mod_bwlimited.so LoadModule h264_streaming_module /usr/local/apache/modules/mod_h264_streaming.so AddHandler h264-streaming.extensions .mp4 Include "/usr/local/apache/conf/php.conf" Include "/usr/local/apache/conf/includes/errordocument.conf" ErrorLog "logs/error_log" ScriptAliasMatch ^/?controlpanel/?$ /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/redirect.cgi ScriptAliasMatch ^/?cpanel/?$ /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/redirect.cgi ScriptAliasMatch ^/?kpanel/?$ /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/redirect.cgi ScriptAliasMatch ^/?securecontrolpanel/?$ /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/sredirect.cgi ScriptAliasMatch ^/?securecpanel/?$ /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/sredirect.cgi ScriptAliasMatch ^/?securewhm/?$ /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/swhmredirect.cgi ScriptAliasMatch ^/?webmail/?$ /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/wredirect.cgi ScriptAliasMatch ^/?whm/?$ /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/whmredirect.cgi RewriteEngine on AddType text/html .shtml Alias /akopia /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/interchange/share/akopia/ Alias /bandwidth /usr/local/bandmin/htdocs/ Alias /img-sys /usr/local/cpanel/img-sys/ Alias /interchange /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/interchange/share/interchange/ Alias /interchange-5 /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/interchange/share/interchange-5/ Alias /java-sys /usr/local/cpanel/java-sys/ Alias /mailman/archives /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/archives/public/ Alias /pipermail /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/archives/public/ Alias /sys_cpanel /usr/local/cpanel/sys_cpanel/ ScriptAlias /cgi-sys /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/ ScriptAlias /mailman /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/cgi-bin/ <Directory "/"> AllowOverride All Options All </Directory> <Directory "/usr/local/apache/htdocs"> Options All AllowOverride None Require all granted </Directory> <Files ~ "^error_log$"> Order allow,deny Deny from all Satisfy All </Files> <Files ".ht*"> Require all denied </Files> <IfModule log_config_module> LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" common CustomLog "logs/access_log" common <IfModule logio_module> LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" %I %O" combinedio </IfModule> </IfModule> <IfModule alias_module> ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/" </IfModule> <Directory "/usr/local/apache/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options All Require all granted </Directory> <IfModule mime_module> TypesConfig conf/mime.types AddType application/x-compress .Z AddType application/x-gzip .gz .tgz </IfModule> <IfModule prefork.c> Mutex default mpm-accept </IfModule> <IfModule mod_log_config.c> LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" common LogFormat "%{Referer}i -> %U" referer LogFormat "%{User-agent}i" agent CustomLog logs/access_log common </IfModule> <IfModule worker.c> Mutex default mpm-accept </IfModule> # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Direct modifications to the Apache configuration file may be lost upon subsequent regeneration of the # # configuration file. To have modifications retained, all modifications must be checked into the # # configuration system by running: # # /usr/local/cpanel/bin/apache_conf_distiller --update # # To see if your changes will be conserved, regenerate the Apache configuration file by running: # # /usr/local/cpanel/bin/build_apache_conf # # and check the configuration file for your alterations. If your changes have been ignored, then they will # # need to be added directly to their respective template files. # # # # It is also possible to add custom directives to the various "Include" files loaded by this httpd.conf # # For detailed instructions on using Include files and the apache_conf_distiller with the new configuration # # system refer to the documentation at: http://www.cpanel.net/support/docs/ea/ea3/customdirectives.html # # # # This configuration file was built from the following templates: # # /var/cpanel/templates/apache2/main.default # # /var/cpanel/templates/apache2/main.local # # /var/cpanel/templates/apache2/vhost.default # # /var/cpanel/templates/apache2/vhost.local # # /var/cpanel/templates/apache2/ssl_vhost.default # # /var/cpanel/templates/apache2/ssl_vhost.local # # # # Templates with the '.local' extension will be preferred over templates with the '.default' extension. # # The only template updated by the apache_conf_distiller is main.default. # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # PidFile logs/httpd.pid # Defined in /var/cpanel/cpanel.config: apache_port Listen 0.0.0.0:80 User nobody Group nobody ExtendedStatus On ServerAdmin [email protected] ServerName server.powerlabel.net LogLevel warn # These can be set in WHM under 'Apache Global Configuration' Timeout 300 ServerSignature On <IfModule prefork.c> </IfModule> RewriteEngine on RewriteMap LeechProtect prg:/usr/local/cpanel/bin/leechprotect Mutex file:/usr/local/apache/logs rewrite-map <IfModule !mod_ruid2.c> UserDir public_html </IfModule> <IfModule mod_ruid2.c> UserDir disabled </IfModule> # DirectoryIndex is set via the WHM -> Service Configuration -> Apache Setup -> DirectoryIndex Priority DirectoryIndex index.html.var index.htm index.html index.shtml index.xhtml index.wml index.perl index.pl index.plx index.ppl index.cgi index.jsp index.js index.jp index.php4 index.php3 index.php index.phtml default.htm default.html home.htm index.php5 Default.html Default.htm home.html # SSLCipherSuite can be set in WHM under 'Apache Global Configuration' SSLPassPhraseDialog builtin SSLUseStapling on SSLStaplingCache shmcb:/usr/local/apache/logs/stapling_cache_shmcb(256000) SSLSessionCache shmcb:/usr/local/apache/logs/ssl_gcache_data_shmcb(1024000) SSLSessionCacheTimeout 300 Mutex file:/usr/local/apache/logs ssl-cache SSLRandomSeed startup builtin SSLRandomSeed connect builtin # Defined in /var/cpanel/cpanel.config: apache_ssl_port Listen 0.0.0.0:443 AddType application/x-x509-ca-cert .crt AddType application/x-pkcs7-crl .crl AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl .plx .ppl .perl AddHandler server-parsed .shtml AddType text/html .shtml AddType application/x-tar .tgz AddType text/vnd.wap.wml .wml AddType image/vnd.wap.wbmp .wbmp AddType text/vnd.wap.wmlscript .wmls AddType application/vnd.wap.wmlc .wmlc AddType application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc .wmlsc <Location /whm-server-status> SetHandler server-status Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow from 127.0.0.1 </Location> # SUEXEC is supported Include "/usr/local/apache/conf/includes/pre_virtualhost_global.conf" Include "/usr/local/apache/conf/includes/pre_virtualhost_2.conf" What can cause this and how can i fix it ?

Read the article

My computer freezes irregularly

- by Manhim

My computer started to freeze at irregular times for 3 weeks now. Please note that this question change with each things that i try. (For additional details) What happens My computer freezes, the video stops. (No graphic glitches, it just stops) Sound keeps playing up to some time (Usually 10-30 seconds) then stops playing. Sometimes, randomly, the screen on my G-15 keyboard flickers and I see caracters not at the right places. Usually happens for about 1-2 seconds and a bit before my computer freezes. I have to keep the power button pressed for 4 seconds to shut my computer down. I still hear my hard drives and fans working. Sometimes it works with no problems for a full day, some other times it just keeps freezing each time I restart my computer and I have to leave it for the rest of the day. Sometimes my mouse freezes for a fraction of a second (Like 0.01 to 0.2 seconds) quite randomly, usually before it freezes. No errors spotted by the "Action center" unlike when I had problems with my last video card on this system (Driver errors). My G-15 LCD screen also freezes. Sometimes my G-15 LCD screen flickers and caracters gets caried around temporary under heavy load. Now, most of the times, the BIOS hard disks boot order gets reversed for some reason and I have to put it to the right one and save each times I boot. (Might be unrelated, not sure, but it first started yesterday) Sometimes the BIOS doesn't detect my 750GB hard drive plugged in SATA1. What I did so far I have had similar problems in the past and I had changed my hard drive (It was faulty), so I tested my software RAID-0 array and it was faulty so I changed it. (I reinstalled Windows 7 with this part). I also tested with unplugging my secondary hard drive. My CPU was running at about 100 degree Celsius, I removed the dust between the fans and the heatsink and it's now between 45-55. I ran a CPU stress-test and it didn't freeze during the tests (using Prime95 on all cores) Ran a memory test (using memtest86+) for a single pass and there were no errors. Ran a GPU stress test with ati-tools and furmark and it didn't freeze during the tests. (No artefacts either) I had troubles with my graphic card when I got it, but I think that it got fixed with a driver update. I checked the voltages in my BIOS setup and they all seemed ok (±0.2 I think). I have ran on the computer without problems with Fedora 15 on an external hard drive (Appart that it couldn't load Gnome 3 and was reverting to Gnome 2, didn't want to install drivers since I use it on multiple computers) I used it to backup my files from the raid array to my 1TB hard drive for the reinstallation of Windows. (So the crashes only happenned on Windows) [The external hard drive is plugged directly on a SATA port] I contacted EVGA (My graphic card vendor) and pointed them on this question, I'm looking for an answer. Ran sensors on Fedora 15 and got this output: http://pastebin.com/0BHJnAvu Ran 6 short different CPU stress test on Fedora 15 (Haven't found any complete stress testers for Linux) and it didn't crash. Changed the thermal paste to some Artic Silver 5 for my CPU and stress tested the CPU, temperature was at 50 idle, then 64 highest and slowly went down to 62 during the test. Ran some stress testing with a temporary graphic card and it went ok. Ran furmark stress test with my original graphic card and it freezed again. GPU had a temp of 74C, a CPU temp of 58C and a mobo temp of 40C or 45C (Dunno which one it is from SpeedFan). Ran a furmark stress test and a CPU stress test at the same time, results: http://pastebin.com/2t6PLpdJ I have been using my computer without stressing it for about 2 hours now and no crashes yet. I also have disabled the AMD Cool'n'quiet function on the BIOS for a more regular power to the CPU. When I ran Furmark without C'n'q my computer didn't freeze but I had a "Driver Kernel Error" that have recovered (And Furmark crashed) all that while running a CPU stress test. The computer eventually frozed without me being at it, but this time my screen just went on sleep and I couldn't wake it. Using the stability tester in nTune my computer freezed again (In the same manner as before). I notived that Speedfan gives me a -12V of -16.97V and a -5V of -8.78V. I wonder if these numbers are reliable and if they are good or bad. I have swapped my G-15 with another basic USB keyboard (HP) and I have ran furmark for about 10 minutes with a CPU stability test running each 60 seconds for 30 seconds and my computer haven't crashed yet. Ran some more extended tests without my G-15 and it freezed like it usually do. Removed the nForce Hard disk controler. Disabled command queuing in the NVIDIA nForce SATA Controller for both port 0 and port 1 (Errors from the logs) Used CPUID HwMonitor, here are the voltages: http://pastebin.com/dfM7p4jV Changed some configurations in the motherboard BIOS: Disabled PEG Link Mode, Changed AI Tuning to Standard, Disabled the 1394 Controller, Disabled HD Audio, Disabled JMicron RAID controller and Disabled SATA Raid. When it happens When I play video games (Mostly) When I play flash games (Second most) When I'm looking at my desktop background (It rarely happens when I have a window open, but it does, sometimes) When my Graphic card and my CPU are stressed. Sometimes when my Graphic card is stressed. Never happenned while stressing only the CPU. Sometimes when my CPU is stressed. Specs Windows Seven x64 Home Premium Motherboard: M2N-SLI Deluxe CPU: AMD Phenom 9950 x2 @ 2.6GHz Memory: Kingston 4x2GB Dual Channel (Pretty basic memory sticks) Hard drives: Was 2x250GB (Western digital caviar) in raid-0 + 1TB (WD caviar black), I replaced the raid array with a 750GB (WD caviar black) [Yes I removed the array from the raid configurations] 750W Power supply No overcloking. Ever. There have been some power-downs like 4-5 weeks ago, but the problem didn't start immediately after. (I wasn't home, so my computer got shut-down) Event logs (Warnings, errors and critical errors) for the last 24 hours: http://pastebin.com/Bvvk31T7 My current to-try list Reinstall the drivers and software 1 by 1 and do extensive stress testing between each. Update the BIOS firmware to the most recent stable one. Change my motherboard. Status updates Keeping only the last 3 (28/06 04pm) More stress testing and still pass the tests. (28/06 03pm) Been stress testing for 10 minute straight now and 5 minutes with both CPU and GPU being stressed at the same time. (28/06 03pm) Stress-testing right now, so far no problems. A little hope Tests with Furmark and Prime95. Testing Windows bare-bone: 30 Minutes stress, no freeze. Installing an Anti-virus and some software, restarting computer. Testing with Anti-virus and some software (No drivers installed): 30 Minutes stress, no freeze. Installing audio drivers, restarting computer. Testing with the audio drivers: 30 Minutes stress, no freeze. Installing the latest graphic drivers from EVGA's website (without 3d vision since I don't use it), restarting computer. Testing with the graphic drivers: 30 Minutes stress, no freeze. Configuring Windows to my liking and installing more softwares. In this situation, how can I successfully pin-point the current hardware problem? (If it's a hardware problem) Because I don't really have the budget to just forget and replace everything. I also don't really have hardware to test-replace current hardware.

Read the article

apt-get update mdadm scary warnings

- by user568829

Just ran an apt-get update on one of my dedicated servers to be left with a relatively scary warning: Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ... update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686-bigmem W: mdadm: the array /dev/md/1 with UUID c622dd79:496607cf:c230666b:5103eba0 W: mdadm: is currently active, but it is not listed in mdadm.conf. if W: mdadm: it is needed for boot, then YOUR SYSTEM IS NOW UNBOOTABLE! W: mdadm: please inspect the output of /usr/share/mdadm/mkconf, compare W: mdadm: it to /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf, and make the necessary changes. W: mdadm: the array /dev/md/2 with UUID 24120323:8c54087c:c230666b:5103eba0 W: mdadm: is currently active, but it is not listed in mdadm.conf. if W: mdadm: it is needed for boot, then YOUR SYSTEM IS NOW UNBOOTABLE! W: mdadm: please inspect the output of /usr/share/mdadm/mkconf, compare W: mdadm: it to /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf, and make the necessary changes. W: mdadm: the array /dev/md/6 with UUID eef74de5:9267b2a1:c230666b:5103eba0 W: mdadm: is currently active, but it is not listed in mdadm.conf. if W: mdadm: it is needed for boot, then YOUR SYSTEM IS NOW UNBOOTABLE! W: mdadm: please inspect the output of /usr/share/mdadm/mkconf, compare W: mdadm: it to /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf, and make the necessary changes. W: mdadm: the array /dev/md/5 with UUID 5d45b20c:04d8138f:c230666b:5103eba0 W: mdadm: is currently active, but it is not listed in mdadm.conf. if W: mdadm: it is needed for boot, then YOUR SYSTEM IS NOW UNBOOTABLE! W: mdadm: please inspect the output of /usr/share/mdadm/mkconf, compare W: mdadm: it to /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf, and make the necessary changes. As instructed I inspected the output of /usr/share/mdadm/mkconf and compared with /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf and they are quite different. Here is the /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf contents: # mdadm.conf # # Please refer to mdadm.conf(5) for information about this file. # # by default, scan all partitions (/proc/partitions) for MD superblocks. # alternatively, specify devices to scan, using wildcards if desired. DEVICE partitions # auto-create devices with Debian standard permissions CREATE owner=root group=disk mode=0660 auto=yes # automatically tag new arrays as belonging to the local system HOMEHOST <system> # instruct the monitoring daemon where to send mail alerts MAILADDR root # definitions of existing MD arrays ARRAY /dev/md0 level=raid1 num-devices=2 UUID=b93b0b87:5f7c2c46:0043fca9:4026c400 ARRAY /dev/md1 level=raid1 num-devices=2 UUID=c0fa8842:e214fb1a:fad8a3a2:28f2aabc ARRAY /dev/md2 level=raid1 num-devices=2 UUID=cdc2a9a9:63bbda21:f55e806c:a5371897 ARRAY /dev/md3 level=raid1 num-devices=2 UUID=eca75495:9c9ce18c:d2bac587:f1e79d80 # This file was auto-generated on Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:32:16 +0100 # by mkconf $Id$ And here is the out put from /usr/share/mdadm/mkconf # mdadm.conf # # Please refer to mdadm.conf(5) for information about this file. # # by default, scan all partitions (/proc/partitions) for MD superblocks. # alternatively, specify devices to scan, using wildcards if desired. DEVICE partitions # auto-create devices with Debian standard permissions CREATE owner=root group=disk mode=0660 auto=yes # automatically tag new arrays as belonging to the local system HOMEHOST <system> # instruct the monitoring daemon where to send mail alerts MAILADDR root # definitions of existing MD arrays ARRAY /dev/md1 UUID=c622dd79:496607cf:c230666b:5103eba0 ARRAY /dev/md2 UUID=24120323:8c54087c:c230666b:5103eba0 ARRAY /dev/md5 UUID=5d45b20c:04d8138f:c230666b:5103eba0 ARRAY /dev/md6 UUID=eef74de5:9267b2a1:c230666b:5103eba0 # This configuration was auto-generated on Sat, 25 Feb 2012 13:10:00 +1030 # by mkconf 3.1.4-1+8efb9d1+squeeze1 As I understand it I need to replace the four lines that start with 'ARRAY' in the /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf file with the different four 'ARRAY' lines from the /usr/share/mdadm/mkconf output. When I did this and then ran update-initramfs -u there were no more warnings. Is what I have done above correct? I am now terrified of rebooting the server for fear it will not reboot and being a remote dedicated server this would certainly mean downtime and possibly would be expensive to get running again. FOLLOW UP (response to question): the output from mount: /dev/md1 on / type ext3 (rw,usrquota,grpquota) tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755) tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620) /dev/md2 on /boot type ext2 (rw) /dev/md5 on /tmp type ext3 (rw) /dev/md6 on /home type ext3 (rw,usrquota,grpquota) mdadm --detail /dev/md0 mdadm: md device /dev/md0 does not appear to be active. mdadm --detail /dev/md1 /dev/md1: Version : 0.90 Creation Time : Sun Aug 14 09:43:08 2011 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 31463232 (30.01 GiB 32.22 GB) Used Dev Size : 31463232 (30.01 GiB 32.22 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Preferred Minor : 1 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Sat Feb 25 14:03:47 2012 State : clean Active Devices : 2 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 UUID : c622dd79:496607cf:c230666b:5103eba0 Events : 0.24 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 1 0 active sync /dev/sda1 1 8 17 1 active sync /dev/sdb1 mdadm --detail /dev/md2 /dev/md2: Version : 0.90 Creation Time : Sun Aug 14 09:43:09 2011 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 104320 (101.89 MiB 106.82 MB) Used Dev Size : 104320 (101.89 MiB 106.82 MB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Preferred Minor : 2 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Sat Feb 25 13:20:20 2012 State : clean Active Devices : 2 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 UUID : 24120323:8c54087c:c230666b:5103eba0 Events : 0.30 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 2 0 active sync /dev/sda2 1 8 18 1 active sync /dev/sdb2 mdadm --detail /dev/md3 mdadm: md device /dev/md3 does not appear to be active. mdadm --detail /dev/md5 /dev/md5: Version : 0.90 Creation Time : Sun Aug 14 09:43:09 2011 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 2104448 (2.01 GiB 2.15 GB) Used Dev Size : 2104448 (2.01 GiB 2.15 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Preferred Minor : 5 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Sat Feb 25 14:09:03 2012 State : clean Active Devices : 2 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 UUID : 5d45b20c:04d8138f:c230666b:5103eba0 Events : 0.30 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 5 0 active sync /dev/sda5 1 8 21 1 active sync /dev/sdb5 mdadm --detail /dev/md6 /dev/md6: Version : 0.90 Creation Time : Sun Aug 14 09:43:09 2011 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 453659456 (432.64 GiB 464.55 GB) Used Dev Size : 453659456 (432.64 GiB 464.55 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Preferred Minor : 6 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Sat Feb 25 14:10:00 2012 State : active Active Devices : 2 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 UUID : eef74de5:9267b2a1:c230666b:5103eba0 Events : 0.31 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 6 0 active sync /dev/sda6 1 8 22 1 active sync /dev/sdb6 FOLLOW UP 2 (response to question): Output from /etc/fstab /dev/md1 / ext3 defaults,usrquota,grpquota 1 1 devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 #usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs noauto 0 0 /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0 /dev/dvd /media/dvd auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0 # # # /dev/md2 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/sda3 swap swap pri=42 0 0 /dev/sdb3 swap swap pri=42 0 0 /dev/md5 /tmp ext3 defaults 0 0 /dev/md6 /home ext3 defaults,usrquota,grpquota 1 2

Read the article

Trouble connecting to vsftpd on ubuntu server

- by littleK

I have installed Ubuntu Server 10.10 and I am using it to host a domain that I have. I am trying to set up FTP for the server, but I am running into some problems. I have successfully installed vsFTPd and I have opened up ports 20, 21 on my firewall. In my vsFTPd configuration, I have enabled SSL. Every time I try to connect to my server via FTP, I receive a "Connection Refused" error. I have had a little more success with SSL disabled, however the connection process will time out after the LIST command (but it does accept my authentication). Here is my vsFTPd configuration, the SSL stuff is at the bottom: # Example config file /etc/vsftpd.conf # # The default compiled in settings are fairly paranoid. This sample file # loosens things up a bit, to make the ftp daemon more usable. # Please see vsftpd.conf.5 for all compiled in defaults. # # READ THIS: This example file is NOT an exhaustive list of vsftpd options. # Please read the vsftpd.conf.5 manual page to get a full idea of vsftpd's # capabilities. # # # Run standalone? vsftpd can run either from an inetd or as a standalone # daemon started from an initscript. listen=YES # # Run standalone with IPv6? # Like the listen parameter, except vsftpd will listen on an IPv6 socket # instead of an IPv4 one. This parameter and the listen parameter are mutually # exclusive. #listen_ipv6=YES # # Allow anonymous FTP? (Disabled by default) anonymous_enable=NO # # Uncomment this to allow local users to log in. local_enable=YES # # Uncomment this to enable any form of FTP write command. write_enable=YES # # Default umask for local users is 077. You may wish to change this to 022, # if your users expect that (022 is used by most other ftpd's) #local_umask=022 # # Uncomment this to allow the anonymous FTP user to upload files. This only # has an effect if the above global write enable is activated. Also, you will # obviously need to create a directory writable by the FTP user. #anon_upload_enable=YES # # Uncomment this if you want the anonymous FTP user to be able to create # new directories. #anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES # # Activate directory messages - messages given to remote users when they # go into a certain directory. dirmessage_enable=YES # # If enabled, vsftpd will display directory listings with the time # in your local time zone. The default is to display GMT. The # times returned by the MDTM FTP command are also affected by this # option. use_localtime=YES # # Activate logging of uploads/downloads. xferlog_enable=YES # # Make sure PORT transfer connections originate from port 20 (ftp-data). connect_from_port_20=YES # # If you want, you can arrange for uploaded anonymous files to be owned by # a different user. Note! Using "root" for uploaded files is not # recommended! #chown_uploads=YES #chown_username=whoever # # You may override where the log file goes if you like. The default is shown # below. #xferlog_file=/var/log/vsftpd.log # # If you want, you can have your log file in standard ftpd xferlog format. # Note that the default log file location is /var/log/xferlog in this case. #xferlog_std_format=YES # # You may change the default value for timing out an idle session. #idle_session_timeout=600 # # You may change the default value for timing out a data connection. #data_connection_timeout=120 # # It is recommended that you define on your system a unique user which the # ftp server can use as a totally isolated and unprivileged user. #nopriv_user=ftpsecure # # Enable this and the server will recognise asynchronous ABOR requests. Not # recommended for security (the code is non-trivial). Not enabling it, # however, may confuse older FTP clients. #async_abor_enable=YES # # By default the server will pretend to allow ASCII mode but in fact ignore # the request. Turn on the below options to have the server actually do ASCII # mangling on files when in ASCII mode. # Beware that on some FTP servers, ASCII support allows a denial of service # attack (DoS) via the command "SIZE /big/file" in ASCII mode. vsftpd # predicted this attack and has always been safe, reporting the size of the # raw file. # ASCII mangling is a horrible feature of the protocol. #ascii_upload_enable=YES #ascii_download_enable=YES # # You may fully customise the login banner string: #ftpd_banner=Welcome to blah FTP service. # # You may specify a file of disallowed anonymous e-mail addresses. Apparently # useful for combatting certain DoS attacks. #deny_email_enable=YES # (default follows) #banned_email_file=/etc/vsftpd.banned_emails # # You may restrict local users to their home directories. See the FAQ for # the possible risks in this before using chroot_local_user or # chroot_list_enable below. #chroot_local_user=YES # # You may specify an explicit list of local users to chroot() to their home # directory. If chroot_local_user is YES, then this list becomes a list of # users to NOT chroot(). #chroot_local_user=YES #chroot_list_enable=YES # (default follows) #chroot_list_file=/etc/vsftpd.chroot_list # # You may activate the "-R" option to the builtin ls. This is disabled by # default to avoid remote users being able to cause excessive I/O on large # sites. However, some broken FTP clients such as "ncftp" and "mirror" assume # the presence of the "-R" option, so there is a strong case for enabling it. #ls_recurse_enable=YES # # Debian customization # # Some of vsftpd's settings don't fit the Debian filesystem layout by # default. These settings are more Debian-friendly. # # This option should be the name of a directory which is empty. Also, the # directory should not be writable by the ftp user. This directory is used # as a secure chroot() jail at times vsftpd does not require filesystem # access. secure_chroot_dir=/var/run/vsftpd/empty # # This string is the name of the PAM service vsftpd will use. pam_service_name=vsftpd # # This option specifies the location of the RSA certificate to use for SSL # encrypted connections. rsa_cert_file=/etc/ssl/private/vsftpd.pem # SSL ssl_enable=YES allow_anon_ssl=NO force_local_data_ssl=YES force_local_logins_ssl=YES ssl_tlsv1=YES ssl_sslv2=YES ssl_sslv3=YES Thanks!

Read the article

Can't Get Virtual Users Setup in VSFTPD -Tried Everything

- by N.T.

Have Ubuntu 11.10 with vsftpd installed and working. Can not get virtual users setup at all? Vsftpd will allow main Ubuntu owner account to login, but nothing else? I've followed several tutorials on adding virtual users, but nothing works? I just need to add 2 virtual users and have them be able to upload files to vsftpd Ubuntu computer from other computers on my Lan network. Everywhere I've looked, people just point toward tutorials on adding virtual users, but that just is NOT working. I've been struggling with this for over a week now! PLEASE Help. Thanks. I'll even give a donation if someone can figure this out. here is the vsftpd.conf file I am using. I copied the original, and make a new one, every time I try a tutorial. So far, none have worked. Here is the vsftpd.conf file I'm using. (I hope this helps?) # Example config file /etc/vsftpd.conf # # The default compiled in settings are fairly paranoid. This sample file # loosens things up a bit, to make the ftp daemon more usable. # Please see vsftpd.conf.5 for all compiled in defaults. # # READ THIS: This example file is NOT an exhaustive list of vsftpd options. # Please read the vsftpd.conf.5 manual page to get a full idea of vsftpd's # capabilities. # # # Run standalone? vsftpd can run either from an inetd or as a standalone # daemon started from an initscript. listen=YES # # Run standalone with IPv6? # Like the listen parameter, except vsftpd will listen on an IPv6 socket # instead of an IPv4 one. This parameter and the listen parameter are mutually # exclusive. #listen_ipv6=YES # # Allow anonymous FTP? (Disabled by default) anonymous_enable=YES # # Uncomment this to allow local users to log in. local_enable=YES # # Uncomment this to enable any form of FTP write command. write_enable=YES # # Default umask for local users is 077. You may wish to change this to 022, # if your users expect that (022 is used by most other ftpd's) local_umask=022 # # Uncomment this to allow the anonymous FTP user to upload files. This only # has an effect if the above global write enable is activated. Also, you will # obviously need to create a directory writable by the FTP user. #anon_upload_enable=YES # # Uncomment this if you want the anonymous FTP user to be able to create # new directories. anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES # # Activate directory messages - messages given to remote users when they # go into a certain directory. dirmessage_enable=YES # # If enabled, vsftpd will display directory listings with the time # in your local time zone. The default is to display GMT. The # times returned by the MDTM FTP command are also affected by this # option. use_localtime=YES # # Activate logging of uploads/downloads. xferlog_enable=YES # # Make sure PORT transfer connections originate from port 20 (ftp-data). connect_from_port_20=YES # # If you want, you can arrange for uploaded anonymous files to be owned by # a different user. Note! Using "root" for uploaded files is not # recommended! #chown_uploads=YES #chown_username=whoever # # You may override where the log file goes if you like. The default is shown # below. #xferlog_file=/var/log/vsftpd.log # # If you want, you can have your log file in standard ftpd xferlog format. # Note that the default log file location is /var/log/xferlog in this case. xferlog_std_format=YES # # You may change the default value for timing out an idle session. #idle_session_timeout=600 # # You may change the default value for timing out a data connection. #data_connection_timeout=120 # # It is recommended that you define on your system a unique user which the # ftp server can use as a totally isolated and unprivileged user. #nopriv_user=ftpsecure # # Enable this and the server will recognise asynchronous ABOR requests. Not # recommended for security (the code is non-trivial). Not enabling it, # however, may confuse older FTP clients. #async_abor_enable=YES # # By default the server will pretend to allow ASCII mode but in fact ignore # the request. Turn on the below options to have the server actually do ASCII # mangling on files when in ASCII mode. # Beware that on some FTP servers, ASCII support allows a denial of service # attack (DoS) via the command "SIZE /big/file" in ASCII mode. vsftpd # predicted this attack and has always been safe, reporting the size of the # raw file. # ASCII mangling is a horrible feature of the protocol. #ascii_upload_enable=YES #ascii_download_enable=YES # # You may fully customise the login banner string: ftpd_banner=Welcome to Sage FTP service. # # You may specify a file of disallowed anonymous e-mail addresses. Apparently # useful for combatting certain DoS attacks. #deny_email_enable=YES # (default follows) #banned_email_file=/etc/vsftpd.banned_emails # # You may restrict local users to their home directories. See the FAQ for # the possible risks in this before using chroot_local_user or # chroot_list_enable below. chroot_local_user=YES # # You may specify an explicit list of local users to chroot() to their home # directory. If chroot_local_user is YES, then this list becomes a list of # users to NOT chroot(). #chroot_local_user=YES #chroot_list_enable=YES # (default follows) #chroot_list_file=/etc/vsftpd.chroot_list # # You may activate the "-R" option to the builtin ls. This is disabled by # default to avoid remote users being able to cause excessive I/O on large # sites. However, some broken FTP clients such as "ncftp" and "mirror" assume # the presence of the "-R" option, so there is a strong case for enabling it. #ls_recurse_enable=YES # # Debian customization # # Some of vsftpd's settings don't fit the Debian filesystem layout by # default. These settings are more Debian-friendly. # # This option should be the name of a directory which is empty. Also, the # directory should not be writable by the ftp user. This directory is used # as a secure chroot() jail at times vsftpd does not require filesystem # access. secure_chroot_dir=/var/run/vsftpd/empty # # This string is the name of the PAM service vsftpd will use. pam_service_name=vsftpd local_root=/media/FilesDrive # # This option specifies the location of the RSA certificate to use for SSL # encrypted connections. rsa_cert_file=/etc/ssl/private/vsftpd.pem

Read the article

Why are my hard drives failing?

- by WishCow

I have a small Ubuntu server running at home, with 2 HDDs. There are two software raids (raid1) on the disks, managed by mdadm, which I believe is irrelevant, but mentioning it anyway. Both of the HDDs are Western Digital, and have been used for around 2 years, when one of them started making clicking noises, and died. I figured that maybe it's natural after 2 years, so I bought a new one, and resynced the raid arrays. After about a month, the other drive also died. I didn't get suspicious, since both drives have been bought at the same time, it's not that surprising to see both of them near each other, so I bought another one. So far, 2 old drives failed, and 2 brand new in the system. After one month, one of the new drives died. This is when it started getting suspicious. Since the PC was put together from some really old parts (think AthlonXP), I figured that maybe the motherboard's SATA controller is the culprit. Of course you can't switch parts easily in an old PC like this, so I bought a whole system, new MB, new CPU, new RAM. Took the just failed drive back, since it was under warranty, and got it replaced. So it is up to 2 failed drives from the old ones, and 1 failed drive from the new ones. No problems, for 1 month. After that errors were creeping up again in /var/log/messages, and mdadm was reporting raid array failures. I started tearing my hair out. Everything is new in the system, it's up to the third brand new HDD, it's simply not possible that all of the new drives that I bought were faulty. Let's see what is still common... the cables. Okay, long shot, let's replace the SATA cables. Take HDD back, smile to the guy at the counter and say that I'm really unlucky. He replaces the HDD. I come home, one month passes and one of HDDs fails, again. I'm not joking. Two of the brand new HDDs have failed. Maybe it's a bug in the OS. Let's see what the manufacturer's testing tool says. Download testing tool, burn it to a CD, reboot, leave HDD testing overnight. Test says that the drive is faulty, and I should back up everything, if I still can. I don't know what's happening, but it does not look like a software problem, something is definitely thrashing the HDDs. I should mention now, that the whole system is in a shoebox. Since there are a load of "build your own ikea case" stuff, I thought there shouldn't be any problems throwing the thing in a box, and stuffing it away somewhere. The box is well ventilated, but I thought that just maybe the drives were overheating. There is no other possible answer to this. So I took the HDD back, and got it replaced (for the 3rd time), and bought HDD coolers. And just now, I have heard the sound of doom. click click whizzzzzzzzz. SSH into the box: You have new mail! mail r 1 DegradedArrayEvent on /dev/md0 ... dmesg output: [47128.000051] ata3: lost interrupt (Status 0x50) [47128.000097] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 58588863 [47128.000134] md: super_written gets error=-5, uptodate=0 [48043.976054] ata3: lost interrupt (Status 0x50) [48043.976086] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen [48043.976132] ata3.00: cmd c8/00:18:bf:40:52/00:00:00:00:00/e1 tag 0 dma 12288 in [48043.976135] res 40/00:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout) [48043.976208] ata3.00: status: { DRDY } [48043.976241] ata3: soft resetting link [48044.148446] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133 [48044.148457] ata3.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0 [48044.148477] ata3: EH complete Recap: No possibility of overheating 6 drives have failed, 4 of those have been brand new. I'm not sure now that the original two have been faulty, or suffered the same thing that the new ones. There is nothing common in the system, apart from the OS which is Ubuntu Karmic now (started with Jaunty). New MB, new CPU, new RAM, new SATA cables. No, the little holes on the HDD are not covered I'm crying. Really. I don't have the face to return to the store now, it's not possible for 4 drives to fail under 4 months. A few ideas that I have been thinking: Is it possible that I fuck up something when I partition and resync the drives? Can it be so bad that it physicaly wrecks the drive? (since the vendor supplied tool says that the drive is damaged) I do the partitoning with fdisk, and use the same block size for the raid1 partitions (I check the exact block sizes with fdisk -lu) Is it possible that the linux kernel or mdadm, or something is not compatible with this exact brand of HDDs, and thrashes them? Is it possible that it may be the shoebox? Try placing it somewhere else? It's under a shelf now, so humidity is not a problem either. Is it possible that a normal PC case will solve my problem (I'm going to shoot myself then)? I will get a picture tomorrow. Am I just simply cursed? Any help or speculation is greatly appreciated. Edit: The power strip is guarded against overvoltage. Edit2: I have moved inbetween these 4 months, so the possibility of the cause being "dirty" electricity in both places, is very low. Edit3: I have checked the voltages in the BIOS (couldn't borrow a multimeter), and they are all seem correct, the biggest discrepancy is in the 12V, because it's supplying 11.3. Should I be worried about that? Edit4: I put my desktop PC's PSU into the server. The BIOS reported much more accurate voltage readings, and also it has successfully rebuilt the raid1 array, which took some 3-4 hours, so I feel a little positive now. Will get a new PSU tomorrow to test with that. Also, attaching the picture about the box: (disregard the 3rd drive)

Read the article

Make errors when compiling HPL-2.1 on MOSIX-clustered Debian server

- by tlake

I'm trying to compile HPL 2.1 on a MOSIX-clustered Debian server, but the make process terminates with errors as seen below. Included are my makefile and two versions of output: one from a standard execution, and one from an execution run with the debug flag. Any help and guidance would be very much appreciated! The makefile: # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # - shell -------------------------------------------------------------- # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # SHELL = /bin/bash # CD = cd CP = cp LN_S = ln -s MKDIR = mkdir RM = /bin/rm -f TOUCH = touch # # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # - Platform identifier ------------------------------------------------ # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # ARCH = Linux_PII_CBLAS # # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # - HPL Directory Structure / HPL library ------------------------------ # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # TOPdir = $(HOME)/hpl-2.1 INCdir = $(TOPdir)/include BINdir = $(TOPdir)/bin/$(ARCH) LIBdir = $(TOPdir)/lib/$(ARCH) # HPLlib = $(LIBdir)/libhpl.a # # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # - Message Passing library (MPI) -------------------------------------- # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # MPinc tells the C compiler where to find the Message Passing library # header files, MPlib is defined to be the name of the library to be # used. The variable MPdir is only used for defining MPinc and MPlib. # MPdir = /usr/local MPinc = -I$(MPdir)/include MPlib = $(MPdir)/lib/libmpi.so # # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # - Linear Algebra library (BLAS or VSIPL) ----------------------------- # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # LAinc tells the C compiler where to find the Linear Algebra library # header files, LAlib is defined to be the name of the library to be # used. The variable LAdir is only used for defining LAinc and LAlib. # LAdir = $(HOME)/CBLAS/lib LAinc = LAlib = $(LAdir)/cblas_LINUX.a # # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # - F77 / C interface -------------------------------------------------- # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # You can skip this section if and only if you are not planning to use # a BLAS library featuring a Fortran 77 interface. Otherwise, it is # necessary to fill out the F2CDEFS variable with the appropriate # options. **One and only one** option should be chosen in **each** of # the 3 following categories: # # 1) name space (How C calls a Fortran 77 routine) # # -DAdd_ : all lower case and a suffixed underscore (Suns, # Intel, ...), [default] # -DNoChange : all lower case (IBM RS6000), # -DUpCase : all upper case (Cray), # -DAdd__ : the FORTRAN compiler in use is f2c. # # 2) C and Fortran 77 integer mapping # # -DF77_INTEGER=int : Fortran 77 INTEGER is a C int, [default] # -DF77_INTEGER=long : Fortran 77 INTEGER is a C long, # -DF77_INTEGER=short : Fortran 77 INTEGER is a C short. # # 3) Fortran 77 string handling # # -DStringSunStyle : The string address is passed at the string loca- # tion on the stack, and the string length is then # passed as an F77_INTEGER after all explicit # stack arguments, [default] # -DStringStructPtr : The address of a structure is passed by a # Fortran 77 string, and the structure is of the # form: struct {char *cp; F77_INTEGER len;}, # -DStringStructVal : A structure is passed by value for each Fortran # 77 string, and the structure is of the form: # struct {char *cp; F77_INTEGER len;}, # -DStringCrayStyle : Special option for Cray machines, which uses # Cray fcd (fortran character descriptor) for # interoperation. # F2CDEFS = # # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # - HPL includes / libraries / specifics ------------------------------- # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # HPL_INCLUDES = -I$(INCdir) -I$(INCdir)/$(ARCH) $(LAinc) $(MPinc) HPL_LIBS = $(HPLlib) $(LAlib) $(MPlib) # # - Compile time options ----------------------------------------------- # # -DHPL_COPY_L force the copy of the panel L before bcast; # -DHPL_CALL_CBLAS call the cblas interface; # -DHPL_CALL_VSIPL call the vsip library; # -DHPL_DETAILED_TIMING enable detailed timers; # # By default HPL will: # *) not copy L before broadcast, # *) call the BLAS Fortran 77 interface, # *) not display detailed timing information. # HPL_OPTS = -DHPL_CALL_CBLAS # # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # HPL_DEFS = $(F2CDEFS) $(HPL_OPTS) $(HPL_INCLUDES) # # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # - Compilers / linkers - Optimization flags --------------------------- # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # CC = /usr/bin/gcc CCNOOPT = $(HPL_DEFS) CCFLAGS = $(HPL_DEFS) -fomit-frame-pointer -O3 -funroll-loops # # On some platforms, it is necessary to use the Fortran linker to find # the Fortran internals used in the BLAS library. # LINKER = ~/BLAS LINKFLAGS = $(CCFLAGS) # ARCHIVER = ar ARFLAGS = r RANLIB = echo # # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Make output: ~/BLAS -DHPL_CALL_CBLAS -I/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/include -I/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/include/Linux_PII_CBLAS -I/usr/local/include -fomit-frame-pointer -O3 -funroll-loops -o /homes/laket/hpl-2.1/bin/Linux_PII_CBLAS/xhpl HPL_pddriver.o HPL_pdinfo.o HPL_pdtest.o /homes/laket/hpl-2.1/lib/Linux_PII_CBLAS/libhpl.a /homes/laket/CBLAS/lib/cblas_LINUX.a /usr/local/lib/libmpi.so /bin/bash: /homes/laket/BLAS: Is a directory make[2]: *** [dexe.grd] Error 126 make[2]: Target `all' not remade because of errors. make[2]: Leaving directory `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/testing/ptest/Linux_PII_CBLAS' make[1]: *** [build_tst] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1' make: *** [build] Error 2 make: Target `all' not remade because of errors. Make -d output: Considering target file `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/lib/Linux_PII_CBLAS/libhpl.a'. Looking for an implicit rule for `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/lib/Linux_PII_CBLAS/libhpl.a'. Trying pattern rule with stem `libhpl.a'. Trying implicit prerequisite `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/lib/Linux_PII_CBLAS/libhpl.a,v'. Trying pattern rule with stem `libhpl.a'. Trying implicit prerequisite `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/lib/Linux_PII_CBLAS/RCS/libhpl.a,v'. Trying pattern rule with stem `libhpl.a'. Trying implicit prerequisite `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/lib/Linux_PII_CBLAS/RCS/libhpl.a'. Trying pattern rule with stem `libhpl.a'. Trying implicit prerequisite `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/lib/Linux_PII_CBLAS/s.libhpl.a'. Trying pattern rule with stem `libhpl.a'. Trying implicit prerequisite `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/lib/Linux_PII_CBLAS/SCCS/s.libhpl.a'. No implicit rule found for `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/lib/Linux_PII_CBLAS/libhpl.a'. Finished prerequisites of target file `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/lib/Linux_PII_CBLAS/libhpl.a'. No need to remake target `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/lib/Linux_PII_CBLAS/libhpl.a'. Finished prerequisites of target file `dexe.grd'. Must remake target `dexe.grd'. ~/BLAS -DHPL_CALL_CBLAS -I/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/include -I/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/include/Linux_PII_CBLAS -I/usr/local/include -fomit-frame-pointer -O3 -funroll-loops -o /homes/laket/hpl-2.1/bin/Linux_PII_CBLAS/xhpl HPL_pddriver.o HPL_pdinfo.o HPL_pdtest.o /homes/laket/hpl-2.1/lib/Linux_PII_CBLAS/libhpl.a /homes/laket/CBLAS/lib/cblas_LINUX.a /usr/local/lib/libmpi.so Putting child 0x0129a2c0 (dexe.grd) PID 24853 on the chain. Live child 0x0129a2c0 (dexe.grd) PID 24853 /bin/bash: /homes/laket/BLAS: Is a directory make[2]: Reaping losing child 0x0129a2c0 PID 24853 *** [dexe.grd] Error 126 Removing child 0x0129a2c0 PID 24853 from chain. Failed to remake target file `dexe.grd'. Finished prerequisites of target file `dexe'. Giving up on target file `dexe'. Finished prerequisites of target file `all'. Giving up on target file `all'. make[2]: Target `all' not remade because of errors. make[2]: Leaving directory `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1/testing/ptest/Linux_PII_CBLAS' Reaping losing child 0x010ce900 PID 24841 make[1]: *** [build_tst] Error 2 Removing child 0x010ce900 PID 24841 from chain. Failed to remake target file `build_tst'. make[1]: Leaving directory `/homes/laket/hpl-2.1' Reaping losing child 0x00d91ae0 PID 24774 make: *** [build] Error 2 Removing child 0x00d91ae0 PID 24774 from chain. Failed to remake target file `build'. Finished prerequisites of target file `install'. make: Target `all' not remade because of errors. Giving up on target file `install'. Finished prerequisites of target file `all'. Giving up on target file `all'. Thanks!

Read the article

Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

- by mbcrump

Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created. Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands. For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

Read the article

Using PHP OCI8 with 32-bit PHP on Windows 64-bit

- by christopher.jones

The world migration from 32-bit to 64-bit operating systems is gaining pace. However I've seen a couple of customers having difficulty with the PHP OCI8 extension and Oracle DB on Windows 64-bit platforms. The errors vary depending how PHP is run. They may appear in the Apache or PHP log: Unable to load dynamic library 'C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\ext\php_oci8_11g.dll' - %1 is not a valid Win32 application. or Warning oci_connect(): OCIEnvNlsCreate() failed. There is something wrong with your system - please check that PATH includes the directory with Oracle Instant Client libraries Other than IIS permission issues a common cause seems to be trying to use PHP with libraries from an Oracle 64-bit database on the same machine. There is currently no 64-bit version of PHP on http://php.net/ so there is a library mismatch. A solution is to install Oracle Instant Client 32-bit and make sure that PHP uses these libraries, while not interferring with the 64-bit database on the same machine. Warning: The following hacky steps come untested from a Linux user: Unzip Oracle Instant Client 32-bit and move it to C:\WINDOWS\SYSWOW64\INSTANTCLIENT_11_2. You may need to do this in a console with elevated permissions. Edit your PATH environment variable and insert C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\INSTANTCLIENT_11_2 in the directory list before the entry for the Oracle Home library. Windows makes it so all 32-bit applications that reference C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 actually see the contents of the C:\WINDOWS\SYSWOW64 directory. Your 64-bit database won't find an Instant Client in the real, physical C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 directory and will continue to use the database libraries. Some of our Windows team are concerned about this hack and prefer a more "correct" solution that (i) doesn't require changing the Windows system directory (ii) doesn't add to the "memory" burden about what was configured on the system (iii) works when there are multiple database versions installed. The solution is to write a script which will set the 64-bit (or 32-bit) Oracle libraries in the path as needed before invoking the relevant bit-ness application. This does have a weakness when the application is started as a service. As a footnote: If you don't have a local database and simply need to have 32-bit and 64-bit Instant Client accessible at the same time, try the "symbolic" link approach covered in the hack in this OTN forum thread. Reminder warning: This blog post came untested from a Linux user.

Read the article

Friday Fun: Favorite Games to Play in Chrome

- by Asian Angel

Online games can provide a perfect break while you are working and being able to choose from a multitude of games makes it even better. If you are a game addict then you will definitely want to have a look at the Game Button extension for Chrome. Game Button in Action Once the extension has finished installing you are ready to enjoy all that gaming goodness. To get started just click on the “Toolbar Button” and choose a game category. For our example we chose “Shooting Games”. Once you select a game category a new window will open. Towards the lower right corner you will be able to access a scrollable drop-down menu and choose the game that you would like to play. Note: Some of these games come with sounds that can not be turned off so you may want to have the volume lowered all the way or your speakers temporarily turned off if you are at work. For our first game we chose “Snowball Throw”. Notice that there is a nice variety such as “DinoKids – Archery” to games like “Secret Agent”. You can see that our game was nicely sized…not too small and not too large. Go go snowballs! This is definitely a fun one to try…the best approach for this one is to use one hand for clicking the mouse and the other hand for moving it at the same time. If desired you can post your score and see other high scores afterwards. For our second game we decided to try “Target Shooter Firing Range”. This one is definitely a little harder because you have to be extremely precise while moving as quickly as possible. Not too bad for the score but that is ok. You will certainly be able to have fun finding the games that will become your favorites while enjoying the nice variety. Conclusion If you love online games and want a good variety to choose from then the Game Button extension will make a nice addition to your browser. Links Download the Game Button extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Play a New Random Game Each Day in ChromeFriday Fun: Get Your Mario OnFriday Fun: Go Retro with PacmanFriday Fun: Play Air Hockey in Google ChromeFriday Fun: Five More Time Wasting Online Games TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Recycle ! Find That Elusive Icon with FindIcons Looking for Good Windows Media Player 12 Plug-ins? Find Out the Celebrity You Resemble With FaceDouble Whoa ! Use Printflush to Solve Printing Problems

Read the article

Turn Non-Resizeable Windows into Rezieable Windows

- by Asian Angel

Are you frustrated with Windows app windows that can not be resized at all? Now you can apply some “attitude adjustment” and resize those windows with ResizeEnable. Before Everyone is familiar with the many app windows in their Windows OS that simply can not be resized. What you need is cooperation, not attitude. For our example we chose the “Taskbar and Start Menu Properties Window”…notice the cursor in the lower right corner. No resizing satisfaction available at all… After The program comes in a zip file with three files as shown here. Once you have unzipped the program place it in an appropriate “Program Files Folder”, create a shortcut, and you are ready to go. There will be a “System Tray Icon” with only two “Context Menu” items…“About & Quit”. Here is a quick look at the “About Window” that tells you exactly what ResizeEnable does. Notice that it does state that you may occasionally have a window that may not respond correctly. Now back to our “Taskbar and Start Menu Properties Window”. Notice the resizing cursor in the lower right corner….time for some fun! During our test the “Taskbar and Start Menu Properties Window” was suddenly a dream to resize. Daring to stretch the window even further…now that is what you call “stretching” the window out in comparison to its’ original size! Think of all the windows that will be much easier to work with now… Conclusion If you have been frustrated with non-resizeable windows then ResizeEnable will certainly bring a smile to your face as you watch those windows suddenly become a lot more cooperative. This is definitely one app that is worth adding to your system. Links Download ResizeEnable (zip file) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Resize Any Textbox or Textarea in FirefoxTurn on Remote Desktop in Windows 7 or VistaSave 1-4% More Battery Life With Windows Vista Battery SaverQuick Tip: Disable Search History Display in Windows 7Turn Off Windows Explorer Click Sounds in Windows 7 or Vista 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser Scan for Viruses in Ubuntu using ClamAV Replace Your Windows Task Manager With System Explorer Create Talking Photos using Fotobabble

Read the article

Special Activities in the OTN Lounge

- by Bob Rhubart

What is the OTN Lounge? It's the place for Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne attendees to hang out, get off your feet, rest up between sessions, recharge your laptop, tablet, or phone, connect with other community members, pick the brains of subject matter experts and community leaders, enjoy some refreshments (coffee and soft drinks in the morning, beer in the afternoon), and avoid the crowds by watching keynote presentations on a plasma screen. But in addition to general chillaxin' the OTN Lounge also hosts several special activities throughout the week… OTN Lounge Special Activities Sunday Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge Kick-off (7:00pm - 8:30pm)Want to learn more about Oracle Social Network? Love working with APIs? Enter the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge and build your dream integration with Oracle's secure, purposeful social network for business. Demonstrate your skills, work with the latest and greatest and compete for $500 in Amazon gift cards. Go to theappslab.com/osnregisterr Read and agree to the terms and rules. Register yourself with your name, corporate email address, and company. Watch your inbox for a confirmation email from Oracle Social Network. Start coding (individual or teams welcome) Show off your work to the judges in the OTN Lounge, Wednesday, 4:00pm - 6:00pm Monday (Lounge hours: 8:00am - 7:00pm) RAC Attack (9:00am - 1:00pm) Learn about Oracle Real Application Clustering (RAC) in this collaborative event. You'll work with experts from the IOUG RAC SIG to get an Oracle Database 11gR2 RAC cluster running inside a virtual machine. For more information: RAC attack at Oracle Open World (Pythian Blog) RAC Attack - Oracle Cluster Database at Home/Events (WikiBooks) Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge Office Hours (4:00pm - 8:00pm)Meet the people behind Oracle Social Network. Tuesday (Lounge hours: 8:00am - 7:00pm) RAC Attack (9:00am - 1:00pm) Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge Office Hours (4:30pm - 8:00pm) Oracle Database / Oracle Fusion Middleware Tweet Meet (4:30pm - 6:00pm) Free as in beer! Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware tweeters, gather in the OTN Lounge for refreshments and conversation with fellow tweeters and Oracle Database and Middleware experts. Wednesday (Lounge Hours: 8:00am - 6:00pm) RAC Attack (9:00am - 1:00pm) Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge Judging (4:00pm - 6:00pm) ADF Oracle ADF / Oracle Fusion Middleware Meet-up (4:30pm - 5:30pm) Join other Oracle ADF and Oracle Fusion Middleware developers and meet the product managers and engineers behind Oracle ADF, ADF Mobile, and ADF Essentials. Did we mention free beer? Thursday (Lounge Hours: 8:00am - 2:00pm) RAC Attack (9:00am - 1:00pm) The OTN Lounge is located in the Howard St .tent, located by no small coincidence on Howard St. between 3rd and 4th, directly between Moscone North and Moscone South. An Oracle OpenWorld or JavaOne conference badge is required for access to the OTN Lounge.

Read the article

View Maps and Get Directions in Google Chrome

- by Asian Angel

Every so often we all need to look at a map for reference purposes or to get directions. If you are looking for a great quick reference app then join us as we look at the Mini Google Maps extension for Google Chrome. Mini Google Maps in Action While this may look like a rather basic map extension there is more to it than meets the eye at first glance. Here is the default view when you open Mini Google Maps for the first time. Things that we really liked about this extension were: Three different aerial views available (Map, Satellite, & Terrain) Three different viewing sizes available (and the extension remembers your chosen size) The ability to get directions in combination with a map We decided to try each of the viewing sizes available…here you can see the “Medium Setting”. Notice that the scale stays the same but you get more territory included to view. Then the “Large Setting”…which we infinitely preferred to the others. Once again look at the amount of territory included by default…very nice. Switching over to the “Satellite View”… Followed by the “Terrain View”. For our first example we decided to peek at Vancouver, British Columbia. After zooming out a little bit we had a very nice looking map. For the next test we asked for directions from Vancouver to Toronto. Both the directions and map turned out very well. And just for fun we looked up Paris, France with the “Satellite View”. Conclusion If you find yourself needing to view a map or get directions often then the Mini Google Maps extension will be a very useful tool for you. Links Download the Mini Google Maps extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Get Maps and Directions to Your Contacts in Outlook 2007Stupid Geek Tricks: Browse the Web from OutlookView the Time & Date in Chrome When Hiding Your TaskbarHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserAccess Google Chrome’s Special Pages the Easy Way 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

Read the article

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Released

- by ScottGu

The final release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 is now available. Download and Install Today MSDN subscribers, as well as WebsiteSpark/BizSpark/DreamSpark members, can now download the final releases of Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 through the MSDN subscribers download center. If you are not an MSDN Subscriber, you can download free 90-day trial editions of Visual Studio 2010. Or you can can download the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++. These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out). If you are looking for an easy way to setup a new machine for web-development you can automate installing ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, IIS, SQL Server Express and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express really quickly with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (just click the install button on the page). What is new with VS 2010 and .NET 4 Today’s release is a big one – and brings with it a ton of new feature and capabilities. One of the things we tried hard to focus on with this release was to invest heavily in making existing applications, projects and developer experiences better. What this means is that you don’t need to read 1000+ page books or spend time learning major new concepts in order to take advantage of the release. There are literally thousands of improvements (both big and small) that make you more productive and successful without having to learn big new concepts in order to start using them. Below is just a small sampling of some of the improvements with this release: Visual Studio 2010 IDE Visual Studio 2010 now supports multiple-monitors (enabling much better use of screen real-estate). It has new code Intellisense support that makes it easier to find and use classes and methods. It has improved code navigation support for searching code-bases and seeing how code is called and used. It has new code visualization support that allows you to see the relationships across projects and classes within projects, as well as to automatically generate sequence diagrams to chart execution flow. The editor now supports HTML and JavaScript snippet support as well as improved JavaScript intellisense. The VS 2010 Debugger and Profiling support is now much, much richer and enables new features like Intellitrace (aka Historical Debugging), debugging of Crash/Dump files, and better parallel debugging. VS 2010’s multi-targeting support is now much richer, and enables you to use VS 2010 to target .NET 2, .NET 3, .NET 3.5 and .NET 4 applications. And the infamous Add Reference dialog now loads much faster. TFS 2010 is now easy to setup (you can now install the server in under 10 minutes) and enables great source-control, bug/work-item tracking, and continuous integration support. Testing (both automated and manual) is now much, much richer. And VS 2010 Premium and Ultimate provide much richer architecture and design tooling support. VB and C# Language Features VB and C# in VS 2010 both contain a bunch of new features and capabilities. VB adds new support for automatic properties, collection initializers, and implicit line continuation support among many other features. C# adds support for optional parameters and named arguments, a new dynamic keyword, co-variance and contra-variance, and among many other features. ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2 With ASP.NET 4, Web Forms controls now render clean, semantically correct, and CSS friendly HTML markup. Built-in URL routing functionality allows you to expose clean, search engine friendly, URLs and increase the traffic to your Website. ViewState within applications can now be more easily controlled and made smaller. ASP.NET Dynamic Data support has been expanded. More controls, including rich charting and data controls, are now built-into ASP.NET 4 and enable you to build applications even faster. New starter project templates now make it easier to get going with new projects. SEO enhancements make it easier to drive traffic to your public facing sites. And web.config files are now clean and simple. ASP.NET MVC 2 is now built-into VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4, and provides a great way to build web sites and applications using a model-view-controller based pattern. ASP.NET MVC 2 adds features to easily enable client and server validation logic, provides new strongly-typed HTML and UI-scaffolding helper methods. It also enables more modular/reusable applications. The new <%: %> syntax in ASP.NET makes it easier to HTML encode output. Visual Studio 2010 also now includes better tooling support for unit testing and TDD. In particular, “Consume first intellisense” and “generate from usage" support within VS 2010 make it easier to write your unit tests first, and then drive your implementation from them. Deploying ASP.NET applications gets a lot easier with this release. You can now publish your Websites and applications to a staging or production server from within Visual Studio itself. Visual Studio 2010 makes it easy to transfer all your files, code, configuration, database schema and data in one complete package. VS 2010 also makes it easy to manage separate web.config configuration files settings depending upon whether you are in debug, release, staging or production modes. WPF 4 and Silverlight 4 WPF 4 includes a ton of new improvements and capabilities including more built-in controls, richer graphics features (cached composition, pixel shader 3 support, layoutrounding, and animation easing functions), a much improved text stack (with crisper text rendering, custom dictionary support, and selection and caret brush options). WPF 4 also includes a bunch of support to enable you to take advantage of new Windows 7 features – including multi-touch and Windows 7 shell integration. Silverlight 4 will launch this week as well. You can watch my Silverlight 4 launch keynote streamed live Tuesday (April 13th) at 8am Pacific Time. Silverlight 4 includes a ton of new capabilities – including a bunch for making it possible to build great business applications and out of the browser applications. I’ll be doing a separate blog post later this week (once it is live on the web) that talks more about its capabilities. Visual Studio 2010 now includes great tooling support for both WPF and Silverlight. The new VS 2010 WPF and Silverlight designer makes it much easier to build client applications as well as build great line of business solutions, as well as integrate and bind with data. Tooling support for Silverlight 4 with the final release of Visual Studio 2010 will be available when Silverlight 4 releases to the web this week. SharePoint and Azure Visual Studio 2010 now includes built-in support for building SharePoint applications. You can now create, edit, build, and debug SharePoint applications directly within Visual Studio 2010. You can also now use SharePoint with TFS 2010. Support for creating Azure-hosted applications is also now included with VS 2010 – allowing you to build ASP.NET and WCF based applications and host them within the cloud. Data Access Data access has a lot of improvements coming to it with .NET 4. Entity Framework 4 includes a ton of new features and capabilities – including support for model first and POCO development, default support for lazy loading, built-in support for pluralization/singularization of table/property names within the VS 2010 designer, full support for all the LINQ operators, the ability to optionally expose foreign keys on model objects (useful for some stateless web scenarios), disconnected API support to better handle N-Tier and stateless web scenarios, and T4 template customization support within VS 2010 to allow you to customize and automate how code is generated for you by the data designer. In addition to improvements with the Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL with .NET 4 also includes a bunch of nice improvements. WCF and Workflow WCF includes a bunch of great new capabilities – including better REST, activation and configuration support. WCF Data Services (formerly known as Astoria) and WCF RIA Services also now enable you to easily expose and work with data from remote clients. Windows Workflow is now much faster, includes flowchart services, and now makes it easier to make custom services than before. More details can be found here. CLR and Core .NET Library Improvements .NET 4 includes the new CLR 4 engine – which includes a lot of nice performance and feature improvements. CLR 4 engine now runs side-by-side in-process with older versions of the CLR – allowing you to use two different versions of .NET within the same process. It also includes improved COM interop support. The .NET 4 base class libraries (BCL) include a bunch of nice additions and refinements. In particular, the .NET 4 BCL now includes new parallel programming support that makes it much easier to build applications that take advantage of multiple CPUs and cores on a computer. This work dove-tails nicely with the new VS 2010 parallel debugger (making it much easier to debug parallel applications), as well as the new F# functional language support now included in the VS 2010 IDE. .NET 4 also now also has the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) library built-in – which makes it easier to use dynamic language functionality with .NET. MEF – a really cool library that enables rich extensibility – is also now built-into .NET 4 and included as part of the base class libraries. .NET 4 Client Profile The download size of the .NET 4 redist is now much smaller than it was before (the x86 full .NET 4 package is about 36MB). We also now have a .NET 4 Client Profile package which is a pure sub-set of the full .NET that can be used to streamline client application installs. C++ VS 2010 includes a bunch of great improvements for C++ development. This includes better C++ Intellisense support, MSBuild support for projects, improved parallel debugging and profiler support, MFC improvements, and a number of language features and compiler optimizations. My VS 2010 and .NET 4 Blog Series I’ve been cranking away on a blog series the last few months that highlights many of the new VS 2010 and .NET 4 improvements. The good news is that I have about 20 in-depth posts already written. The bad news (for me) is that I have about 200 more to go until I’m done! I’m going to try and keep adding a few more each week over the next few months to discuss the new improvements and how best to take advantage of them. Below is a list of the already written ones that you can check out today: Clean Web.Config Files Starter Project Templates Multi-targeting Multiple Monitor Support New Code Focused Web Profile Option HTML / ASP.NET / JavaScript Code Snippets Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010 VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements WPF 4 Add Reference Dialog Improvements SEO Improvements with ASP.NET 4 Output Cache Extensibility with ASP.NET 4 Built-in Charting Controls for ASP.NET and Windows Forms Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 - Client IDs Optional Parameters and Named Arguments in C# 4 - and a cool scenarios with ASP.NET MVC 2 Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers and Implicit Line Continuation Support with VB 2010 New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output using ASP.NET 4 JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010 Stay tuned to my blog as I post more. Also check out this page which links to a bunch of great articles and videos done by others. VS 2010 Installation Notes If you have installed a previous version of VS 2010 on your machine (either the beta or the RC) you must first uninstall it before installing the final VS 2010 release. I also recommend uninstalling .NET 4 betas (including both the client and full .NET 4 installs) as well as the other installs that come with VS 2010 (e.g. ASP.NET MVC 2 preview builds, etc). The uninstalls of the betas/RCs will clean up all the old state on your machine – after which you can install the final VS 2010 version and should have everything just work (this is what I’ve done on all of my machines and I haven’t had any problems). The VS 2010 and .NET 4 installs add a bunch of new managed assemblies to your machine. Some of these will be “NGEN’d” to native code during the actual install process (making them run fast). To avoid adding too much time to VS setup, though, we don’t NGEN all assemblies immediately – and instead will NGEN the rest in the background when your machine is idle. Until it finishes NGENing the assemblies they will be JIT’d to native code the first time they are used in a process – which for large assemblies can sometimes cause a slight performance hit. If you run into this you can manually force all assemblies to be NGEN’d to native code immediately (and not just wait till the machine is idle) by launching the Visual Studio command line prompt from the Windows Start Menu (Microsoft Visual Studio 2010->Visual Studio Tools->Visual Studio Command Prompt). Within the command prompt type “Ngen executequeueditems” – this will cause everything to be NGEN’d immediately. How to Buy Visual Studio 2010 You can can download and use the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++. These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out). You can buy a new copy of VS 2010 Professional that includes a 1 year subscription to MSDN Essentials for $799. MSDN Essentials includes a developer license of Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, SQL Server 2008 DataCenter R2, and 20 hours of Azure hosting time. Subscribers also have access to MSDN’s Online Concierge, and Priority Support in MSDN Forums. Upgrade prices from previous releases of Visual Studio are also available. Existing Visual Studio 2005/2008 Standard customers can upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 Professional for a special $299 retail price until October. You can take advantage of this VS Standard->Professional upgrade promotion here. Web developers who build applications for others, and who are either independent developers or who work for companies with less than 10 employees, can also optionally take advantage of the Microsoft WebSiteSpark program. This program gives you three copies of Visual Studio 2010 Professional, 1 copy of Expression Studio, and 4 CPU licenses of both Windows 2008 R2 Web Server and SQL 2008 Web Edition that you can use to both develop and deploy applications with at no cost for 3 years. At the end of the 3 years there is no obligation to buy anything. You can sign-up for WebSiteSpark today in under 5 minutes – and immediately have access to the products to download. Summary Today’s release is a big one – and has a bunch of improvements for pretty much every developer. Thank you everyone who provided feedback, suggestions and reported bugs throughout the development process – we couldn’t have delivered it without you. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

Read the article

Watch YouTube in Windows 7 Media Center

- by Mysticgeek

Have you been looking for a way to watch your favorite viral videos from YouTube and Dailymotion from the couch? Today we take a look at an easy to use plugin which allows you to watch streaming video in Windows 7 Media Center. Install Macrotube The first thing we need to do is download and install the plugin called Macrotube (link below) following the defaults through the install wizard. After it’s installed, open Windows 7 Media Center and you’ll find Macrotube in the main menu. Currently there are three services available…YouTube, Dailymotion, and MSN Soapbox. Just select the service where you want to check out some videos. You can browse through different subjects or categories… Or you can search the the service by typing in what you’re looking for…with your remote or keyboard. There is the ability to drill down you search content by date, rating, views, and relevance. There are a few settings available such as the language beta, auto updates, and appearance. Now just kick back and browse through the different services and watch what you want from the comfort of your couch or on your computer. Conclusion This neat project is still in development and the developer is continuing to add changes through updates. It only works with Windows 7 Media Player, but there is a 32 & 64-bit version. Sometimes we experiences certain videos that wouldn’t play and it did crash a few times, but that is to be expected with a work in progress. But overall, this is a cool plugin that will allow you to watch your favorite online content from WMC. Download Macrotube and get more details and troubleshooting help fro the GreenButton forum Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Integrate Hulu Desktop and Windows Media Center in Windows 7Automatically Start Windows 7 Media Center in Live TV ModeWatch TV Programming Without a TV Tuner In Window 7 Media CenterAutomatically Mount and View ISO files in Windows 7 Media Center TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 NachoFoto Searches Images in Real-time Office 2010 Product Guides Google Maps Place marks – Pizza, Guns or Strip Clubs Monitor Applications With Kiwi LocPDF is a Visual PDF Search Tool Download Free iPad Wallpapers at iPad Decor

Read the article

Grounded in Dublin

- by Mike Dietrich

Friday's hands-on workshop in the Oracle office in Dublin was quite good fun for everybody - except for Mick who has just recognized that his Ryanair flight back to Cork has been canceled (So I hope you've returned home well!) and me as my flights back to Munich via London City had been canceled as well. It's always good to have somebody in the workshop from Air Lingus so I've got hourly information what's going in in the Irish airspace (and now I know that the system dealing with such situations is an well prepared Oracle database which runs just like a switch watch - Thanks again for all your support!!! Was great to talk to you!!!). But to be honest, there are worse places to be grounded for a few days than Dublin. At least it gave me the chance to do something which I never had time enough before when visiting Oracle Ireland: a bit of sightseeing. When I've realized that nothing seems to move over the weekend I started organizing my travel back yesterday. It was no fun at all because there's no single system to book such a travel. Figuring out all possibilities and options going back to Munich was the first challange. Irish Ferries webpage was moaning with all the unexpected load (currently it's fully down). Hotel booking websites showed vacancies in Holyhead but didn't let me book. And calling them just reveiled that there are no rooms left. Haven't stayed overnight in a train station for quite a while ;-) The website of VirginTrains puzzled me with offering a seat at an enormous price for a train ride from Holyhead to London Euston (Thanks, Sir Richard Branson!) just to tell me after I booked a ticket that there are no seats left (but I traveled German railsways a few weeks ago from Düsseldorf to Frankfurt sitting on the floor as well). Eurostar's website let me choose tickets through the tunnel to tell me in the final step that the ticket cannot be confirmed as there are no seats left - but the next check again showed bookable seats - must be a database from some other vendor which has no proper row level locking ... hm ...?! Finally the TGV page for the speed train to Stuttgart and then the ICE to Munich was not allowing searches for quite a while - but ultimately ... after 4.5 hours of searching, waiting, sending credit card information again and again ... So if you have a few spare fingers please keep them crossed :-) And good luck to all my colleagues traveling back from the Exadata training in Berlin. As Mike Appleyard, my colleague from the UK presales team wrote: "Dublin and Berlin aren't too bad a place to get stuck... ;-)"

Read the article

Using Durandal to Create Single Page Apps

- by Stephen.Walther

A few days ago, I gave a talk on building Single Page Apps on the Microsoft Stack. In that talk, I recommended that people use Knockout, Sammy, and RequireJS to build their presentation layer and use the ASP.NET Web API to expose data from their server. After I gave the talk, several people contacted me and suggested that I investigate a new open-source JavaScript library named Durandal. Durandal stitches together Knockout, Sammy, and RequireJS to make it easier to use these technologies together. In this blog entry, I want to provide a brief walkthrough of using Durandal to create a simple Single Page App. I am going to demonstrate how you can create a simple Movies App which contains (virtual) pages for viewing a list of movies, adding new movies, and viewing movie details. The goal of this blog entry is to give you a sense of what it is like to build apps with Durandal. Installing Durandal First things first. How do you get Durandal? The GitHub project for Durandal is located here: https://github.com/BlueSpire/Durandal The Wiki — located at the GitHub project — contains all of the current documentation for Durandal. Currently, the documentation is a little sparse, but it is enough to get you started. Instead of downloading the Durandal source from GitHub, a better option for getting started with Durandal is to install one of the Durandal NuGet packages. I built the Movies App described in this blog entry by first creating a new ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application with the Basic Template. Next, I executed the following command from the Package Manager Console: Install-Package Durandal.StarterKit As you can see from the screenshot of the Package Manager Console above, the Durandal Starter Kit package has several dependencies including: · jQuery · Knockout · Sammy · Twitter Bootstrap The Durandal Starter Kit package includes a sample Durandal application. You can get to the Starter Kit app by navigating to the Durandal controller. Unfortunately, when I first tried to run the Starter Kit app, I got an error because the Starter Kit is hard-coded to use a particular version of jQuery which is already out of date. You can fix this issue by modifying the App_Start\DurandalBundleConfig.cs file so it is jQuery version agnostic like this: bundles.Add( new ScriptBundle("~/scripts/vendor") .Include("~/Scripts/jquery-{version}.js") .Include("~/Scripts/knockout-{version}.js") .Include("~/Scripts/sammy-{version}.js") // .Include("~/Scripts/jquery-1.9.0.min.js") // .Include("~/Scripts/knockout-2.2.1.js") // .Include("~/Scripts/sammy-0.7.4.min.js") .Include("~/Scripts/bootstrap.min.js") ); The recommendation is that you create a Durandal app in a folder off your project root named App. The App folder in the Starter Kit contains the following subfolders and files: · durandal – This folder contains the actual durandal JavaScript library. · viewmodels – This folder contains all of your application’s view models. · views – This folder contains all of your application’s views. · main.js — This file contains all of the JavaScript startup code for your app including the client-side routing configuration. · main-built.js – This file contains an optimized version of your application. You need to build this file by using the RequireJS optimizer (unfortunately, before you can run the optimizer, you must first install NodeJS). For the purpose of this blog entry, I wanted to start from scratch when building the Movies app, so I deleted all of these files and folders except for the durandal folder which contains the durandal library. Creating the ASP.NET MVC Controller and View A Durandal app is built using a single server-side ASP.NET MVC controller and ASP.NET MVC view. A Durandal app is a Single Page App. When you navigate between pages, you are not navigating to new pages on the server. Instead, you are loading new virtual pages into the one-and-only-one server-side view. For the Movies app, I created the following ASP.NET MVC Home controller: public class HomeController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } } There is nothing special about the Home controller – it is as basic as it gets. Next, I created the following server-side ASP.NET view. This is the one-and-only server-side view used by the Movies app: @{ Layout = null; } <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Index</title> </head> <body> <div id="applicationHost"> Loading app.... </div> @Scripts.Render("~/scripts/vendor") <script type="text/javascript" src="~/App/durandal/amd/require.js" data-main="/App/main"></script> </body> </html> Notice that I set the Layout property for the view to the value null. If you neglect to do this, then the default ASP.NET MVC layout will be applied to the view and you will get the <!DOCTYPE> and opening and closing <html> tags twice. Next, notice that the view contains a DIV element with the Id applicationHost. This marks the area where virtual pages are loaded. When you navigate from page to page in a Durandal app, HTML page fragments are retrieved from the server and stuck in the applicationHost DIV element. Inside the applicationHost element, you can place any content which you want to display when a Durandal app is starting up. For example, you can create a fancy splash screen. I opted for simply displaying the text “Loading app…”: Next, notice the view above includes a call to the Scripts.Render() helper. This helper renders out all of the JavaScript files required by the Durandal library such as jQuery and Knockout. Remember to fix the App_Start\DurandalBundleConfig.cs as described above or Durandal will attempt to load an old version of jQuery and throw a JavaScript exception and stop working. Your application JavaScript code is not included in the scripts rendered by the Scripts.Render helper. Your application code is loaded dynamically by RequireJS with the help of the following SCRIPT element located at the bottom of the view: <script type="text/javascript" src="~/App/durandal/amd/require.js" data-main="/App/main"></script> The data-main attribute on the SCRIPT element causes RequireJS to load your /app/main.js JavaScript file to kick-off your Durandal app. Creating the Durandal Main.js File The Durandal Main.js JavaScript file, located in your App folder, contains all of the code required to configure the behavior of Durandal. Here’s what the Main.js file looks like in the case of the Movies app: require.config({ paths: { 'text': 'durandal/amd/text' } }); define(function (require) { var app = require('durandal/app'), viewLocator = require('durandal/viewLocator'), system = require('durandal/system'), router = require('durandal/plugins/router'); //>>excludeStart("build", true); system.debug(true); //>>excludeEnd("build"); app.start().then(function () { //Replace 'viewmodels' in the moduleId with 'views' to locate the view. //Look for partial views in a 'views' folder in the root. viewLocator.useConvention(); //configure routing router.useConvention(); router.mapNav("movies/show"); router.mapNav("movies/add"); router.mapNav("movies/details/:id"); app.adaptToDevice(); //Show the app by setting the root view model for our application with a transition. app.setRoot('viewmodels/shell', 'entrance'); }); }); There are three important things to notice about the main.js file above. First, notice that it contains a section which enables debugging which looks like this: //>>excludeStart(“build”, true); system.debug(true); //>>excludeEnd(“build”); This code enables debugging for your Durandal app which is very useful when things go wrong. When you call system.debug(true), Durandal writes out debugging information to your browser JavaScript console. For example, you can use the debugging information to diagnose issues with your client-side routes: (The funny looking //> symbols around the system.debug() call are RequireJS optimizer pragmas). The main.js file is also the place where you configure your client-side routes. In the case of the Movies app, the main.js file is used to configure routes for three page: the movies show, add, and details pages. //configure routing router.useConvention(); router.mapNav("movies/show"); router.mapNav("movies/add"); router.mapNav("movies/details/:id"); The route for movie details includes a route parameter named id. Later, we will use the id parameter to lookup and display the details for the right movie. Finally, the main.js file above contains the following line of code: //Show the app by setting the root view model for our application with a transition. app.setRoot('viewmodels/shell', 'entrance'); This line of code causes Durandal to load up a JavaScript file named shell.js and an HTML fragment named shell.html. I’ll discuss the shell in the next section. Creating the Durandal Shell You can think of the Durandal shell as the layout or master page for a Durandal app. The shell is where you put all of the content which you want to remain constant as a user navigates from virtual page to virtual page. For example, the shell is a great place to put your website logo and navigation links. The Durandal shell is composed from two parts: a JavaScript file and an HTML file. Here’s what the HTML file looks like for the Movies app: <h1>Movies App</h1> <div class="container-fluid page-host">  </div> And here is what the JavaScript file looks like: define(function (require) { var router = require('durandal/plugins/router'); return { router: router, activate: function () { return router.activate('movies/show'); } }; }); The JavaScript file contains the view model for the shell. This view model returns the Durandal router so you can access the list of configured routes from your shell. Notice that the JavaScript file includes a function named activate(). This function loads the movies/show page as the first page in the Movies app. If you want to create a different default Durandal page, then pass the name of a different age to the router.activate() method. Creating the Movies Show Page Durandal pages are created out of a view model and a view. The view model contains all of the data and view logic required for the view. The view contains all of the HTML markup for rendering the view model. Let’s start with the movies show page. The movies show page displays a list of movies. The view model for the show page looks like this: define(function (require) { var moviesRepository = require("repositories/moviesRepository"); return { movies: ko.observable(), activate: function() { this.movies(moviesRepository.listMovies()); } }; }); You create a view model by defining a new RequireJS module (see http://requirejs.org). You create a RequireJS module by placing all of your JavaScript code into an anonymous function passed to the RequireJS define() method. A RequireJS module has two parts. You retrieve all of the modules which your module requires at the top of your module. The code above depends on another RequireJS module named repositories/moviesRepository. Next, you return the implementation of your module. The code above returns a JavaScript object which contains a property named movies and a method named activate. The activate() method is a magic method which Durandal calls whenever it activates your view model. Your view model is activated whenever you navigate to a page which uses it. In the code above, the activate() method is used to get the list of movies from the movies repository and assign the list to the view model movies property. The HTML for the movies show page looks like this: <table> <thead> <tr> <th>Title</th><th>Director</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody data-bind="foreach:movies"> <tr> <td data-bind="text:title"></td> <td data-bind="text:director"></td> <td><a data-bind="attr:{href:'#/movies/details/'+id}">Details</a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <a href="#/movies/add">Add Movie</a> Notice that this is an HTML fragment. This fragment will be stuffed into the page-host DIV element in the shell.html file which is stuffed, in turn, into the applicationHost DIV element in the server-side MVC view. The HTML markup above contains data-bind attributes used by Knockout to display the list of movies (To learn more about Knockout, visit http://knockoutjs.com). The list of movies from the view model is displayed in an HTML table. Notice that the page includes a link to a page for adding a new movie. The link uses the following URL which starts with a hash: #/movies/add. Because the link starts with a hash, clicking the link does not cause a request back to the server. Instead, you navigate to the movies/add page virtually. Creating the Movies Add Page The movies add page also consists of a view model and view. The add page enables you to add a new movie to the movie database. Here’s the view model for the add page: define(function (require) { var app = require('durandal/app'); var router = require('durandal/plugins/router'); var moviesRepository = require("repositories/moviesRepository"); return { movieToAdd: { title: ko.observable(), director: ko.observable() }, activate: function () { this.movieToAdd.title(""); this.movieToAdd.director(""); this._movieAdded = false; }, canDeactivate: function () { if (this._movieAdded == false) { return app.showMessage('Are you sure you want to leave this page?', 'Navigate', ['Yes', 'No']); } else { return true; } }, addMovie: function () { // Add movie to db moviesRepository.addMovie(ko.toJS(this.movieToAdd)); // flag new movie this._movieAdded = true; // return to list of movies router.navigateTo("#/movies/show"); } }; }); The view model contains one property named movieToAdd which is bound to the add movie form. The view model also has the following three methods: 1. activate() – This method is called by Durandal when you navigate to the add movie page. The activate() method resets the add movie form by clearing out the movie title and director properties. 2. canDeactivate() – This method is called by Durandal when you attempt to navigate away from the add movie page. If you return false then navigation is cancelled. 3. addMovie() – This method executes when the add movie form is submitted. This code adds the new movie to the movie repository. I really like the Durandal canDeactivate() method. In the code above, I use the canDeactivate() method to show a warning to a user if they navigate away from the add movie page – either by clicking the Cancel button or by hitting the browser back button – before submitting the add movie form: The view for the add movie page looks like this: <form data-bind="submit:addMovie"> <fieldset> <legend>Add Movie</legend> <div> <label> Title: <input data-bind="value:movieToAdd.title" required /> </label> </div> <div> <label> Director: <input data-bind="value:movieToAdd.director" required /> </label> </div> <div> <input type="submit" value="Add" /> <a href="#/movies/show">Cancel</a> </div> </fieldset> </form> I am using Knockout to bind the movieToAdd property from the view model to the INPUT elements of the HTML form. Notice that the FORM element includes a data-bind attribute which invokes the addMovie() method from the view model when the HTML form is submitted. Creating the Movies Details Page You navigate to the movies details Page by clicking the Details link which appears next to each movie in the movies show page: The Details links pass the movie ids to the details page: #/movies/details/0 #/movies/details/1 #/movies/details/2 Here’s what the view model for the movies details page looks like: define(function (require) { var router = require('durandal/plugins/router'); var moviesRepository = require("repositories/moviesRepository"); return { movieToShow: { title: ko.observable(), director: ko.observable() }, activate: function (context) { // Grab movie from repository var movie = moviesRepository.getMovie(context.id); // Add to view model this.movieToShow.title(movie.title); this.movieToShow.director(movie.director); } }; }); Notice that the view model activate() method accepts a parameter named context. You can take advantage of the context parameter to retrieve route parameters such as the movie Id. In the code above, the context.id property is used to retrieve the correct movie from the movie repository and the movie is assigned to a property named movieToShow exposed by the view model. The movie details view displays the movieToShow property by taking advantage of Knockout bindings: <div> <h2 data-bind="text:movieToShow.title"></h2> directed by <span data-bind="text:movieToShow.director"></span> </div> Summary The goal of this blog entry was to walkthrough building a simple Single Page App using Durandal and to get a feel for what it is like to use this library. I really like how Durandal stitches together Knockout, Sammy, and RequireJS and establishes patterns for using these libraries to build Single Page Apps. Having a standard pattern which developers on a team can use to build new pages is super valuable. Once you get the hang of it, using Durandal to create new virtual pages is dead simple. Just define a new route, view model, and view and you are done. I also appreciate the fact that Durandal did not attempt to re-invent the wheel and that Durandal leverages existing JavaScript libraries such as Knockout, RequireJS, and Sammy. These existing libraries are powerful libraries and I have already invested a considerable amount of time in learning how to use them. Durandal makes it easier to use these libraries together without losing any of their power. Durandal has some additional interesting features which I have not had a chance to play with yet. For example, you can use the RequireJS optimizer to combine and minify all of a Durandal app’s code. Also, Durandal supports a way to create custom widgets (client-side controls) by composing widgets from a controller and view. You can download the code for the Movies app by clicking the following link (this is a Visual Studio 2012 project): Durandal Movie App

Read the article

Manage Files Easier With Aero Snap in Windows 7

- by Mysticgeek

Before the days of Aero Snap you would need to arrange your Windows in some weird way to see all of your files. Today we show you how to quickly use the Aero Snap feature get it done in few key strokes in Windows 7. You can of course navigate the windows in Explorer to get them so you can see everything side by side, or use a free utility like Cubic Explorer. Getting Explorer Windows Side by Side The process is actually simple but quite useful when looking for a large amount of data. Right-click the Windows Explorer icon on the taskbar and click Windows Explorer. Our first window opens up and you can certainly drag it over the the right or left side of the screen but the quickest method we’re using is the “Windows Key+Right Arrow” key combo (make sure to hold the Windows key down). Now the Windows is nicely placed on the right side. Next we want to open the other window, simply right-click the Explorer icon again and click Windows Explorer. Now we have our second window open, and all we need to do this time is use the Windows Key+Left Arrow combination. There we go! Now you should be able to browse your files a lot more simply than relying on the expanding tree method (as much). You can actually use this method to snap a window to all four corners of your screen if you don’t feel like dragging it. Once you play with Aero Snap more you may enjoy it, but if you still despise it, you can disable it too! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Multitask Like a Pro with AquaSnapUse Windows Vista Aero through Remote Desktop ConnectionEasily Disable Win 7 or Vista’s Aero Before Running an Application (Such as a Video Game)Understanding Windows Vista Aero Glass RequirementsFree Storage With AOL’s Xdrive (Online Storage Series) TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Awesome Lyrics Finder for Winamp & Windows Media Player Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images Get Wildlife Photography Tips at BBC’s PhotoMasterClasses

Read the article

Display System Information on Your Desktop with Desktop Info

- by Asian Angel

Do you like to monitor your system but do not want a complicated app to do it with? If you love simplicity and easy configuration then join us as we look at Desktop Info. Desktop Info in Action Desktop Info comes in a zip file format so you will need to unzip the app, place it into an appropriate “Program Files Folder”, and create a shortcut. Do NOT delete the “Read Me File”…this will be extremely useful to you when you make changes to the “Configuration File”. Once you have everything set up you are ready to start Desktop Info up. This is the default layout and set of listings displayed when you start Desktop Info up for the first time. The font colors will be a mix of colors as seen here and the font size will perhaps be a bit small but those are very easy to change if desired. You can access the “Context Menu” directly over the “information area”…so no need to look for it in the “System Tray”. Notice that you can easily access that important “Read Me File” from here… The full contents of the configuration file (.ini file) are displayed here so that you can see exactly what kind of information can be displayed using the default listings. The first section is “Options”…you will most likely want to increase the font size while you are here. Then “Items”… If you are unhappy with any of the font colors in the “information area” this is where you can make the changes. You can turn information display items on or off here. And finally “Files, Registry, & Event Logs”. Here is our displayed information after a few tweaks in the configuration file. Very nice. Conclusion If you have been looking for a system information app that is simple and easy to set up then you should definitely give Desktop Info a try. Links Download Desktop Info Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Ask the Readers: What are Your Computer’s Hardware Specs?Allow Remote Control To Your Desktop On UbuntuHow To Get Detailed Information About Your PCGet CPU / System Load Average on Ubuntu LinuxEnable Remote Desktop (VNC) on Kubuntu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Test Drive Windows 7 Online Download Wallpapers From National Geographic Site Spyware Blaster v4.3 Yes, it’s Patch Tuesday Generate Stunning Tag Clouds With Tagxedo Install, Remove and HIDE Fonts in Windows 7

Read the article

Creating STA COM compatible ASP.NET Applications

- by Rick Strahl

When building ASP.NET applications that interface with old school COM objects like those created with VB6 or Visual FoxPro (MTDLL), it's extremely important that the threads that are serving requests use Single Threaded Apartment Threading. STA is a COM built-in technology that allows essentially single threaded components to operate reliably in a multi-threaded environment. STA's guarantee that COM objects instantiated on a specific thread stay on that specific thread and any access to a COM object from another thread automatically marshals that thread to the STA thread. The end effect is that you can have multiple threads, but a COM object instance lives on a fixed never changing thread. ASP.NET by default uses MTA (multi-threaded apartment) threads which are truly free spinning threads that pay no heed to COM object marshaling. This is vastly more efficient than STA threading which has a bit of overhead in determining whether it's OK to run code on a given thread or whether some sort of thread/COM marshaling needs to occur. MTA COM components can be very efficient, but STA COM components in a multi-threaded environment always tend to have a fair amount of overhead. It's amazing how much COM Interop I still see today so while it seems really old school to be talking about this topic, it's actually quite apropos for me as I have many customers using legacy COM systems that need to interface with other .NET applications. In this post I'm consolidating some of the hacks I've used to integrate with various ASP.NET technologies when using STA COM Components. STA in ASP.NET Support for STA threading in the ASP.NET framework is fairly limited. Specifically only the original ASP.NET WebForms technology supports STA threading directly via its STA Page Handler implementation or what you might know as ASPCOMPAT mode. For WebForms running STA components is as easy as specifying the ASPCOMPAT attribute in the @Page tag:<%@ Page Language="C#" AspCompat="true" %> which runs the page in STA mode. Removing it runs in MTA mode. Simple. Unfortunately all other ASP.NET technologies built on top of the core ASP.NET engine do not support STA natively. So if you want to use STA COM components in MVC or with class ASMX Web Services, there's no automatic way like the ASPCOMPAT keyword available. So what happens when you run an STA COM component in an MTA application? In low volume environments - nothing much will happen. The COM objects will appear to work just fine as there are no simultaneous thread interactions and the COM component will happily run on a single thread or multiple single threads one at a time. So for testing running components in MTA environments may appear to work just fine. However as load increases and threads get re-used by ASP.NET COM objects will end up getting created on multiple different threads. This can result in crashes or hangs, or data corruption in the STA components which store their state in thread local storage on the STA thread. If threads overlap this global store can easily get corrupted which in turn causes problems. STA ensures that any COM object instance loaded always stays on the same thread it was instantiated on. What about COM+? COM+ is supposed to address the problem of STA in MTA applications by providing an abstraction with it's own thread pool manager for COM objects. It steps in to the COM instantiation pipeline and hands out COM instances from its own internally maintained STA Thread pool. This guarantees that the COM instantiation threads are STA threads if using STA components. COM+ works, but in my experience the technology is very, very slow for STA components. It adds a ton of overhead and reduces COM performance noticably in load tests in IIS. COM+ can make sense in some situations but for Web apps with STA components it falls short. In addition there's also the need to ensure that COM+ is set up and configured on the target machine and the fact that components have to be registered in COM+. COM+ also keeps components up at all times, so if a component needs to be replaced the COM+ package needs to be unloaded (same is true for IIS hosted components but it's more common to manage that). COM+ is an option for well established components, but native STA support tends to provide better performance and more consistent usability, IMHO. STA for non supporting ASP.NET Technologies As mentioned above only WebForms supports STA natively. However, by utilizing the WebForms ASP.NET Page handler internally it's actually possible to trick various other ASP.NET technologies and let them work with STA components. This is ugly but I've used each of these in various applications and I've had minimal problems making them work with FoxPro STA COM components which is about as dififcult as it gets for COM Interop in .NET. In this post I summarize several STA workarounds that enable you to use STA threading with these ASP.NET Technologies: ASMX Web Services ASP.NET MVC WCF Web Services ASP.NET Web API ASMX Web Services I start with classic ASP.NET ASMX Web Services because it's the easiest mechanism that allows for STA modification. It also clearly demonstrates how the WebForms STA Page Handler is the key technology to enable the various other solutions to create STA components. Essentially the way this works is to override the WebForms Page class and hijack it's init functionality for processing requests. Here's what this looks like for Web Services:namespace FoxProAspNet { public class WebServiceStaHandler : System.Web.UI.Page, IHttpAsyncHandler { protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { IHttpHandler handler = new WebServiceHandlerFactory().GetHandler( this.Context, this.Context.Request.HttpMethod, this.Context.Request.FilePath, this.Context.Request.PhysicalPath); handler.ProcessRequest(this.Context); this.Context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); } public IAsyncResult BeginProcessRequest( HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb, object extraData) { return this.AspCompatBeginProcessRequest(context, cb, extraData); } public void EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult result) { this.AspCompatEndProcessRequest(result); } } public class AspCompatWebServiceStaHandlerWithSessionState : WebServiceStaHandler, IRequiresSessionState { } } This class overrides the ASP.NET WebForms Page class which has a little known AspCompatBeginProcessRequest() and AspCompatEndProcessRequest() method that is responsible for providing the WebForms ASPCOMPAT functionality. These methods handle routing requests to STA threads. Note there are two classes - one that includes session state and one that does not. If you plan on using ASP.NET Session state use the latter class, otherwise stick to the former. This maps to the EnableSessionState page setting in WebForms. This class simply hooks into this functionality by overriding the BeginProcessRequest and EndProcessRequest methods and always forcing it into the AspCompat methods. The way this works is that BeginProcessRequest() fires first to set up the threads and starts intializing the handler. As part of that process the OnInit() method is fired which is now already running on an STA thread. The code then creates an instance of the actual WebService handler factory and calls its ProcessRequest method to start executing which generates the Web Service result. Immediately after ProcessRequest the request is stopped with Application.CompletRequest() which ensures that the rest of the Page handler logic doesn't fire. This means that even though the fairly heavy Page class is overridden here, it doesn't end up executing any of its internal processing which makes this code fairly efficient. In a nutshell, we're highjacking the Page HttpHandler and forcing it to process the WebService process handler in the context of the AspCompat handler behavior. Hooking up the Handler Because the above is an HttpHandler implementation you need to hook up the custom handler and replace the standard ASMX handler. To do this you need to modify the web.config file (here for IIS 7 and IIS Express): <configuration> <system.webServer> <handlers> <remove name="WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0" /> <add name="Asmx STA Web Service Handler" path="*.asmx" verb="*" type="FoxProAspNet.WebServiceStaHandler" precondition="integrated"/> </handlers> </system.webServer> </configuration> (Note: The name for the WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0 might be slightly different depending on your server version. Check the IIS Handler configuration in the IIS Management Console for the exact name or simply remove the handler from the list there which will propagate to your web.config). For IIS 5 & 6 (Windows XP/2003) or the Visual Studio Web Server use:<configuration> <system.web> <httpHandlers> <remove path="*.asmx" verb="*" /> <add path="*.asmx" verb="*" type="FoxProAspNet.WebServiceStaHandler" /> </httpHandlers> </system.web></configuration> To test, create a new ASMX Web Service and create a method like this: [WebService(Namespace = "http://foxaspnet.org/")] [WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)] public class FoxWebService : System.Web.Services.WebService { [WebMethod] public string HelloWorld() { return "Hello World. Threading mode is: " + System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState(); } } Run this before you put in the web.config configuration changes and you should get: Hello World. Threading mode is: MTA Then put the handler mapping into Web.config and you should see: Hello World. Threading mode is: STA And you're on your way to using STA COM components. It's a hack but it works well! I've used this with several high volume Web Service installations with various customers and it's been fast and reliable. ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC has quickly become the most popular ASP.NET technology, replacing WebForms for creating HTML output. MVC is more complex to get started with, but once you understand the basic structure of how requests flow through the MVC pipeline it's easy to use and amazingly flexible in manipulating HTML requests. In addition, MVC has great support for non-HTML output sources like JSON and XML, making it an excellent choice for AJAX requests without any additional tools. Unlike WebForms ASP.NET MVC doesn't support STA threads natively and so some trickery is needed to make it work with STA threads as well. MVC gets its handler implementation through custom route handlers using ASP.NET's built in routing semantics. To work in an STA handler requires working in the Page Handler as part of the Route Handler implementation. As with the Web Service handler the first step is to create a custom HttpHandler that can instantiate an MVC request pipeline properly:public class MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler : Page, IHttpAsyncHandler, IRequiresSessionState { private RequestContext _requestContext; public MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { if (requestContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("requestContext"); _requestContext = requestContext; } public IAsyncResult BeginProcessRequest(HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb, object extraData) { return this.AspCompatBeginProcessRequest(context, cb, extraData); } protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { var controllerName = _requestContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("controller"); var controllerFactory = ControllerBuilder.Current.GetControllerFactory(); var controller = controllerFactory.CreateController(_requestContext, controllerName); if (controller == null) throw new InvalidOperationException("Could not find controller: " + controllerName); try { controller.Execute(_requestContext); } finally { controllerFactory.ReleaseController(controller); } this.Context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); } public void EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult result) { this.AspCompatEndProcessRequest(result); } public override void ProcessRequest(HttpContext httpContext) { throw new NotSupportedException("STAThreadRouteHandler does not support ProcessRequest called (only BeginProcessRequest)"); } } This handler code figures out which controller to load and then executes the controller. MVC internally provides the information needed to route to the appropriate method and pass the right parameters. Like the Web Service handler the logic occurs in the OnInit() and performs all the processing in that part of the request. Next, we need a RouteHandler that can actually pick up this handler. Unlike the Web Service handler where we simply registered the handler, MVC requires a RouteHandler to pick up the handler. RouteHandlers look at the URL's path and based on that decide on what handler to invoke. The route handler is pretty simple - all it does is load our custom handler: public class MvcStaThreadRouteHandler : IRouteHandler { public IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { if (requestContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("requestContext"); return new MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler(requestContext); } } At this point you can instantiate this route handler and force STA requests to MVC by specifying a route. The following sets up the ASP.NET Default Route:Route mvcRoute = new Route("{controller}/{action}/{id}", new RouteValueDictionary( new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }), new MvcStaThreadRouteHandler()); RouteTable.Routes.Add(mvcRoute); To make this code a little easier to work with and mimic the behavior of the routes.MapRoute() functionality extension method that MVC provides, here is an extension method for MapMvcStaRoute(): public static class RouteCollectionExtensions { public static void MapMvcStaRoute(this RouteCollection routeTable, string name, string url, object defaults = null) { Route mvcRoute = new Route(url, new RouteValueDictionary(defaults), new MvcStaThreadRouteHandler()); RouteTable.Routes.Add(mvcRoute); } } With this the syntax to add route becomes a little easier and matches the MapRoute() method:RouteTable.Routes.MapMvcStaRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); The nice thing about this route handler, STA Handler and extension method is that it's fully self contained. You can put all three into a single class file and stick it into your Web app, and then simply call MapMvcStaRoute() and it just works. Easy! To see whether this works create an MVC controller like this: public class ThreadTestController : Controller { public string ThreadingMode() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } } Try this test both with only the MapRoute() hookup in the RouteConfiguration in which case you should get MTA as the value. Then change the MapRoute() call to MapMvcStaRoute() leaving all the parameters the same and re-run the request. You now should see STA as the result. You're on your way using STA COM components reliably in ASP.NET MVC. WCF Web Services running through IIS WCF Web Services provide a more robust and wider range of services for Web Services. You can use WCF over HTTP, TCP, and Pipes, and WCF services support WS* secure services. There are many features in WCF that go way beyond what ASMX can do. But it's also a bit more complex than ASMX. As a basic rule if you need to serve straight SOAP Services over HTTP I 'd recommend sticking with the simpler ASMX services especially if COM is involved. If you need WS* support or want to serve data over non-HTTP protocols then WCF makes more sense. WCF is not my forte but I found a solution from Scott Seely on his blog that describes the progress and that seems to work well. I'm copying his code below so this STA information is all in one place and quickly explain. Scott's code basically works by creating a custom OperationBehavior which can be specified via an [STAOperation] attribute on every method. Using his attribute you end up with a class (or Interface if you separate the contract and class) that looks like this: [ServiceContract] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] public string HelloWorldMta() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } // Make sure you use this custom STAOperationBehavior // attribute to force STA operation of service methods [STAOperationBehavior] [OperationContract] public string HelloWorldSta() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } } Pretty straight forward. The latter method returns STA while the former returns MTA. To make STA work every method needs to be marked up. The implementation consists of the attribute and OperationInvoker implementation. Here are the two classes required to make this work from Scott's post:public class STAOperationBehaviorAttribute : Attribute, IOperationBehavior { public void AddBindingParameters(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Channels.BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters) { } public void ApplyClientBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ClientOperation clientOperation) { // If this is applied on the client, well, it just doesn’t make sense. // Don’t throw in case this attribute was applied on the contract // instead of the implementation. } public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DispatchOperation dispatchOperation) { // Change the IOperationInvoker for this operation. dispatchOperation.Invoker = new STAOperationInvoker(dispatchOperation.Invoker); } public void Validate(OperationDescription operationDescription) { if (operationDescription.SyncMethod == null) { throw new InvalidOperationException("The STAOperationBehaviorAttribute " + "only works for synchronous method invocations."); } } } public class STAOperationInvoker : IOperationInvoker { IOperationInvoker _innerInvoker; public STAOperationInvoker(IOperationInvoker invoker) { _innerInvoker = invoker; } public object[] AllocateInputs() { return _innerInvoker.AllocateInputs(); } public object Invoke(object instance, object[] inputs, out object[] outputs) { // Create a new, STA thread object[] staOutputs = null; object retval = null; Thread thread = new Thread( delegate() { retval = _innerInvoker.Invoke(instance, inputs, out staOutputs); }); thread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); thread.Start(); thread.Join(); outputs = staOutputs; return retval; } public IAsyncResult InvokeBegin(object instance, object[] inputs, AsyncCallback callback, object state) { // We don’t handle async… throw new NotImplementedException(); } public object InvokeEnd(object instance, out object[] outputs, IAsyncResult result) { // We don’t handle async… throw new NotImplementedException(); } public bool IsSynchronous { get { return true; } } } The key in this setup is the Invoker and the Invoke method which creates a new thread and then fires the request on this new thread. Because this approach creates a new thread for every request it's not super efficient. There's a bunch of overhead involved in creating the thread and throwing it away after each thread, but it'll work for low volume requests and insure each thread runs in STA mode. If better performance is required it would be useful to create a custom thread manager that can pool a number of STA threads and hand off threads as needed rather than creating new threads on every request. If your Web Service needs are simple and you need only to serve standard SOAP 1.x requests, I would recommend sticking with ASMX services. It's easier to set up and work with and for STA component use it'll be significantly better performing since ASP.NET manages the STA thread pool for you rather than firing new threads for each request. One nice thing about Scotts code is though that it works in any WCF environment including self hosting. It has no dependency on ASP.NET or WebForms for that matter. STA - If you must STA components are a pain in the ass and thankfully there isn't too much stuff out there anymore that requires it. But when you need it and you need to access STA functionality from .NET at least there are a few options available to make it happen. Each of these solutions is a bit hacky, but they work - I've used all of them in production with good results with FoxPro components. I hope compiling all of these in one place here makes it STA consumption a little bit easier. I feel your pain :-) Resources Download STA Handler Code Examples Scott Seely's original STA WCF OperationBehavior Article© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in FoxPro ASP.NET .NET COM Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

Read the article

Skip “Next Links” with the PageZipper Bookmarklet

- by Asian Angel

No matter what browser you use sooner or later you will run across a website with an endless number of “next links” used for the sole purpose of generating page views. Now you can simply scroll through those articles without the “next links” using the PageZipper Bookmarklet. The Problem Here is a perfect example of a page view generating article. As you can see our browser is in a non-maximized state and the first part of the article takes up very little room in the browser window. Absolutely horrible… The PageZipper Bookmarklet in Action The bookmarklet is very easy to set up in your browser…simply drag it to your “Bookmarks Toolbar” and you are ready to go. Switching tabs back to the article we never even needed to refresh the page. One nice little click on our new bookmarklet and… It immediately went to work. When you use PageZipper you will see a page count in the upper right corner of the browser window area as shown here. You can see the transition between pages here…nice and smooth. When using the bookmarklet just keep scrolling down as needed to read the entire article. Six pages of reading condensed into one without having to click a single link. Now that is nice! Conclusion If you despise those irritating “next links” then the PageZipper Bookmarklet will be a perfect addition to your favorite browser. Links Add the PageZipper Bookmarklet to Your Favorite Browser Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Merge a Series of Web Pages into One with PageZipperSee Where Shortened URLs “Link To” in Your Favorite BrowserBookmarklet Fun: Check Google Analytics for Today [update]Add a Google Translation Bar to Your Favorite BrowserShare Your Favorite Webpages with the AddThis Bookmarklet 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser

Read the article

Is Your ASP.NET Development Server Not Working?

- by Paulo Morgado

Since Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio comes with a development web server: the ASP.NET Development Server. I’ve been using this web server for simple test projects since than with Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 in Windows XP Professional on my work laptop and Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista 64bit Ultimate and Windows 7 64bit Ultimate at my home desktop without any problems (apart the known custom identity problem, that is). When I received my new work laptop, I installed Windows Vista 64bit Enterprise and Visual Studio 2008 and, for my surprise, the ASP.NET Development Server wasn’t working. I started looking for differences between the laptop environment and the desktop environment and the most notorious differences were: System Laptop Desktop SKU Windows Vista 64bit Enterprise Windows Vista 64bit Ultimate Joined to a Domain Yes No Anti-Virus McAffe ESET After asserting that no domain policies were being applied to my laptop and domain user and nothing was being logged by the ant-virus, my suspicions turned to the fact that the laptop was running an Enterprise SKU and the desktop was running an Ultimate SKU. After having problems with other applications I was sure that problem was the Enterprise SKU, but never found a solution to the problem. Because I wasn’t doing any web development at the time, I left it alone. After upgrading to Windows 7, the problem persisted but, because I wasn’t doing any web development at the time, once again, I left it alone. Now that I installed Visual Studio 2010 I had to solve this. After searching around forums and blogs that either didn’t offer an answer or offered very complicated workarounds that, sometimes, involved messing with the registry, I came to the conclusion that the solution is, in fact, very simple. When Windows Vista is installed, hosts file, according to this contains this definition: 127.0.0.1 localhost ::1 localhost This was not what I had on my laptop hosts file. What I had was this: #127.0.0.1 localhost #::1 localhost I might have changed it myself, but from the amount of people that I found complaining about this problem on Windows Vista, this was probably the way it was. The installation of Windows 7 leaves the hosts file like this: #127.0.0.1 localhost #::1 localhost And although the ASP.NET Development Server works fine on Windows 7 64bit Ultimate, on Windows 7 64bit Enterprise it needs to be change to this: 127.0.0.1 localhost ::1 localhost And I suspect it’s the same with Windows Vista 64bit Enterprise.

Read the article

Save Web Articles to Read Later with Instapaper

- by Mysticgeek

Have you ever come across a bunch of great articles that you want to read online, but just don’t have the time? Today we take a look at an online service that allows you to read your articles later, either online, or on an iPhone, or eReader. Instapaper Instapaper is an awesome tool that allows you to save web pages so you can read them at a later time. Not only does it save an online article to read later, but also gives you several choices for where you want to read it. Sign up for a free account, and drag the “Read Later” bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar in your browser. To save a page you’ll need to be logged into your account. When you’re at a page that you can’t read right away, just click on the Read Later button in the bookmarks bar. After clicking the Read Later button, a small message is displayed indicating that the page has been saved to the Instapaper site. Save as many pages as you want, and when you’re ready to read them, go to the Instapaper site and you’ll see a list of the articles you saved. You can click on the link to go directly to the saved oage, read it as text (leaving out a bunch of images), or archive the article for later. One of the really appealing beta features is you can save the article in .mobi format for a Kindle, or ePub format for other eReaders such a the Sony Reader. Another neat feature is the “Instapaper Text” bookmarklet that lets you view an article on a graphics heavy page with only text, but doesn’t save it to your account. Before After There are also other cool features such as iPhone Apps, Kindle automatic wireless delivery, send items to Google Reader, and more. If you wish you could collect all of the neat articles you run across each day for reading later via multiple formats, Instapaper is a great tool for the job. Check Out Instapaper Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Save Pages for Later With Reading List Extension for FirefoxGreat Geek SitesAbout the GeekHow-To Geek Changes in ProgressMake Outlook 2007 Mark Items as Read When Viewed in Reading Pane TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver Optimize your computer the Microsoft way Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data

Read the article

A Taxonomy of Numerical Methods v1

- by JoshReuben

Numerical Analysis – When, What, (but not how) Once you understand the Math & know C++, Numerical Methods are basically blocks of iterative & conditional math code. I found the real trick was seeing the forest for the trees – knowing which method to use for which situation. Its pretty easy to get lost in the details – so I’ve tried to organize these methods in a way that I can quickly look this up. I’ve included links to detailed explanations and to C++ code examples. I’ve tried to classify Numerical methods in the following broad categories: Solving Systems of Linear Equations Solving Non-Linear Equations Iteratively Interpolation Curve Fitting Optimization Numerical Differentiation & Integration Solving ODEs Boundary Problems Solving EigenValue problems Enjoy – I did ! Solving Systems of Linear Equations Overview Solve sets of algebraic equations with x unknowns The set is commonly in matrix form Gauss-Jordan Elimination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Jordan_elimination C++: http://www.codekeep.net/snippets/623f1923-e03c-4636-8c92-c9dc7aa0d3c0.aspx Produces solution of the equations & the coefficient matrix Efficient, stable 2 steps: · Forward Elimination – matrix decomposition: reduce set to triangular form (0s below the diagonal) or row echelon form. If degenerate, then there is no solution · Backward Elimination –write the original matrix as the product of ints inverse matrix & its reduced row-echelon matrix à reduce set to row canonical form & use back-substitution to find the solution to the set Elementary ops for matrix decomposition: · Row multiplication · Row switching · Add multiples of rows to other rows Use pivoting to ensure rows are ordered for achieving triangular form LU Decomposition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LU_decomposition C++: http://ganeshtiwaridotcomdotnp.blogspot.co.il/2009/12/c-c-code-lu-decomposition-for-solving.html Represent the matrix as a product of lower & upper triangular matrices A modified version of GJ Elimination Advantage – can easily apply forward & backward elimination to solve triangular matrices Techniques: · Doolittle Method – sets the L matrix diagonal to unity · Crout Method - sets the U matrix diagonal to unity Note: both the L & U matrices share the same unity diagonal & can be stored compactly in the same matrix Gauss-Seidel Iteration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Seidel_method C++: http://www.nr.com/forum/showthread.php?t=722 Transform the linear set of equations into a single equation & then use numerical integration (as integration formulas have Sums, it is implemented iteratively). an optimization of Gauss-Jacobi: 1.5 times faster, requires 0.25 iterations to achieve the same tolerance Solving Non-Linear Equations Iteratively find roots of polynomials – there may be 0, 1 or n solutions for an n order polynomial use iterative techniques Iterative methods · used when there are no known analytical techniques · Requires set functions to be continuous & differentiable · Requires an initial seed value – choice is critical to convergence à conduct multiple runs with different starting points & then select best result · Systematic - iterate until diminishing returns, tolerance or max iteration conditions are met · bracketing techniques will always yield convergent solutions, non-bracketing methods may fail to converge Incremental method if a nonlinear function has opposite signs at 2 ends of a small interval x1 & x2, then there is likely to be a solution in their interval – solutions are detected by evaluating a function over interval steps, for a change in sign, adjusting the step size dynamically. Limitations – can miss closely spaced solutions in large intervals, cannot detect degenerate (coinciding) solutions, limited to functions that cross the x-axis, gives false positives for singularities Fixed point method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_iteration C++: http://books.google.co.il/books?id=weYj75E_t6MC&pg=PA79&lpg=PA79&dq=fixed+point+method++c%2B%2B&source=bl&ots=LQ-5P_taoC&sig=lENUUIYBK53tZtTwNfHLy5PEWDk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wezDUPW1J5DptQaMsIHQCw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=fixed%20point%20method%20%20c%2B%2B&f=false Algebraically rearrange a solution to isolate a variable then apply incremental method Bisection method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisection_method C++: http://numericalcomputing.wordpress.com/category/algorithms/ Bracketed - Select an initial interval, keep bisecting it ad midpoint into sub-intervals and then apply incremental method on smaller & smaller intervals – zoom in Adv: unaffected by function gradient à reliable Disadv: slow convergence False Position Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_position_method C++: http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/126100-bisection-and-false-position-methods/ Bracketed - Select an initial interval , & use the relative value of function at interval end points to select next sub-intervals (estimate how far between the end points the solution might be & subdivide based on this) Newton-Raphson method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_method C++: http://www-users.cselabs.umn.edu/classes/Summer-2012/csci1113/index.php?page=./newt3 Also known as Newton's method Convenient, efficient Not bracketed – only a single initial guess is required to start iteration – requires an analytical expression for the first derivative of the function as input. Evaluates the function & its derivative at each step. Can be extended to the Newton MutiRoot method for solving multiple roots Can be easily applied to an of n-coupled set of non-linear equations – conduct a Taylor Series expansion of a function, dropping terms of order n, rewrite as a Jacobian matrix of PDs & convert to simultaneous linear equations !!! Secant Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secant_method C++: http://forum.vcoderz.com/showthread.php?p=205230 Unlike N-R, can estimate first derivative from an initial interval (does not require root to be bracketed) instead of inputting it Since derivative is approximated, may converge slower. Is fast in practice as it does not have to evaluate the derivative at each step. Similar implementation to False Positive method Birge-Vieta Method http://mat.iitm.ac.in/home/sryedida/public_html/caimna/transcendental/polynomial%20methods/bv%20method.html C++: http://books.google.co.il/books?id=cL1boM2uyQwC&pg=SA3-PA51&lpg=SA3-PA51&dq=Birge-Vieta+Method+c%2B%2B&source=bl&ots=QZmnDTK3rC&sig=BPNcHHbpR_DKVoZXrLi4nVXD-gg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=R-_DUK2iNIjzsgbE5ID4Dg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Birge-Vieta%20Method%20c%2B%2B&f=false combines Horner's method of polynomial evaluation (transforming into lesser degree polynomials that are more computationally efficient to process) with Newton-Raphson to provide a computational speed-up Interpolation Overview Construct new data points for as close as possible fit within range of a discrete set of known points (that were obtained via sampling, experimentation) Use Taylor Series Expansion of a function f(x) around a specific value for x Linear Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_interpolation C++: http://www.hamaluik.com/?p=289 Straight line between 2 points à concatenate interpolants between each pair of data points Bilinear Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_interpolation C++: http://supercomputingblog.com/graphics/coding-bilinear-interpolation/2/ Extension of the linear function for interpolating functions of 2 variables – perform linear interpolation first in 1 direction, then in another. Used in image processing – e.g. texture mapping filter. Uses 4 vertices to interpolate a value within a unit cell. Lagrange Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_polynomial C++: http://www.codecogs.com/code/maths/approximation/interpolation/lagrange.php For polynomials Requires recomputation for all terms for each distinct x value – can only be applied for small number of nodes Numerically unstable Barycentric Interpolation http://epubs.siam.org/doi/pdf/10.1137/S0036144502417715 C++: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/621445-barycentric-coordinates-c-code-check/ Rearrange the terms in the equation of the Legrange interpolation by defining weight functions that are independent of the interpolated value of x Newton Divided Difference Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_polynomial C++: http://jee-appy.blogspot.co.il/2011/12/newton-divided-difference-interpolation.html Hermite Divided Differences: Interpolation polynomial approximation for a given set of data points in the NR form - divided differences are used to approximately calculate the various differences. For a given set of 3 data points , fit a quadratic interpolant through the data Bracketed functions allow Newton divided differences to be calculated recursively Difference table Cubic Spline Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spline_interpolation C++: https://www.marcusbannerman.co.uk/index.php/home/latestarticles/42-articles/96-cubic-spline-class.html Spline is a piecewise polynomial Provides smoothness – for interpolations with significantly varying data Use weighted coefficients to bend the function to be smooth & its 1st & 2nd derivatives are continuous through the edge points in the interval Curve Fitting A generalization of interpolating whereby given data points may contain noise à the curve does not necessarily pass through all the points Least Squares Fit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_squares C++: http://www.ccas.ru/mmes/educat/lab04k/02/least-squares.c Residual – difference between observed value & expected value Model function is often chosen as a linear combination of the specified functions Determines: A) The model instance in which the sum of squared residuals has the least value B) param values for which model best fits data Straight Line Fit Linear correlation between independent variable and dependent variable Linear Regression http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression C++: http://www.oocities.org/david_swaim/cpp/linregc.htm Special case of statistically exact extrapolation Leverage least squares Given a basis function, the sum of the residuals is determined and the corresponding gradient equation is expressed as a set of normal linear equations in matrix form that can be solved (e.g. using LU Decomposition) Can be weighted - Drop the assumption that all errors have the same significance –-> confidence of accuracy is different for each data point. Fit the function closer to points with higher weights Polynomial Fit - use a polynomial basis function Moving Average http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_average C++: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/17860/A-Simple-Moving-Average-Algorithm Used for smoothing (cancel fluctuations to highlight longer-term trends & cycles), time series data analysis, signal processing filters Replace each data point with average of neighbors. Can be simple (SMA), weighted (WMA), exponential (EMA). Lags behind latest data points – extra weight can be given to more recent data points. Weights can decrease arithmetically or exponentially according to distance from point. Parameters: smoothing factor, period, weight basis Optimization Overview Given function with multiple variables, find Min (or max by minimizing –f(x)) Iterative approach Efficient, but not necessarily reliable Conditions: noisy data, constraints, non-linear models Detection via sign of first derivative - Derivative of saddle points will be 0 Local minima Bisection method Similar method for finding a root for a non-linear equation Start with an interval that contains a minimum Golden Search method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_section_search C++: http://www.codecogs.com/code/maths/optimization/golden.php Bisect intervals according to golden ratio 0.618.. Achieves reduction by evaluating a single function instead of 2 Newton-Raphson Method Brent method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent's_method C++: http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/cpp_src/brent/brent.cpp Based on quadratic or parabolic interpolation – if the function is smooth & parabolic near to the minimum, then a parabola fitted through any 3 points should approximate the minima – fails when the 3 points are collinear , in which case the denominator is 0 Simplex Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_algorithm C++: http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/article.php/c17505/Simplex-Optimization-Algorithm-and-Implemetation-in-C-Programming.htm Find the global minima of any multi-variable function Direct search – no derivatives required At each step it maintains a non-degenerative simplex – a convex hull of n+1 vertices. Obtains the minimum for a function with n variables by evaluating the function at n-1 points, iteratively replacing the point of worst result with the point of best result, shrinking the multidimensional simplex around the best point. Point replacement involves expanding & contracting the simplex near the worst value point to determine a better replacement point Oscillation can be avoided by choosing the 2nd worst result Restart if it gets stuck Parameters: contraction & expansion factors Simulated Annealing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing C++: http://code.google.com/p/cppsimulatedannealing/ Analogy to heating & cooling metal to strengthen its structure Stochastic method – apply random permutation search for global minima - Avoid entrapment in local minima via hill climbing Heating schedule - Annealing schedule params: temperature, iterations at each temp, temperature delta Cooling schedule – can be linear, step-wise or exponential Differential Evolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_evolution C++: http://www.amichel.com/de/doc/html/ More advanced stochastic methods analogous to biological processes: Genetic algorithms, evolution strategies Parallel direct search method against multiple discrete or continuous variables Initial population of variable vectors chosen randomly – if weighted difference vector of 2 vectors yields a lower objective function value then it replaces the comparison vector Many params: #parents, #variables, step size, crossover constant etc Convergence is slow – many more function evaluations than simulated annealing Numerical Differentiation Overview 2 approaches to finite difference methods: · A) approximate function via polynomial interpolation then differentiate · B) Taylor series approximation – additionally provides error estimate Finite Difference methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_difference_method C++: http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/ETD/Available/etd-051807-164436/unrestricted/EAMPADU.pdf Find differences between high order derivative values - Approximate differential equations by finite differences at evenly spaced data points Based on forward & backward Taylor series expansion of f(x) about x plus or minus multiples of delta h. Forward / backward difference - the sums of the series contains even derivatives and the difference of the series contains odd derivatives – coupled equations that can be solved. Provide an approximation of the derivative within a O(h^2) accuracy There is also central difference & extended central difference which has a O(h^4) accuracy Richardson Extrapolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richardson_extrapolation C++: http://mathscoding.blogspot.co.il/2012/02/introduction-richardson-extrapolation.html A sequence acceleration method applied to finite differences Fast convergence, high accuracy O(h^4) Derivatives via Interpolation Cannot apply Finite Difference method to discrete data points at uneven intervals – so need to approximate the derivative of f(x) using the derivative of the interpolant via 3 point Lagrange Interpolation Note: the higher the order of the derivative, the lower the approximation precision Numerical Integration Estimate finite & infinite integrals of functions More accurate procedure than numerical differentiation Use when it is not possible to obtain an integral of a function analytically or when the function is not given, only the data points are Newton Cotes Methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%E2%80%93Cotes_formulas C++: http://www.siafoo.net/snippet/324 For equally spaced data points Computationally easy – based on local interpolation of n rectangular strip areas that is piecewise fitted to a polynomial to get the sum total area Evaluate the integrand at n+1 evenly spaced points – approximate definite integral by Sum Weights are derived from Lagrange Basis polynomials Leverage Trapezoidal Rule for default 2nd formulas, Simpson 1/3 Rule for substituting 3 point formulas, Simpson 3/8 Rule for 4 point formulas. For 4 point formulas use Bodes Rule. Higher orders obtain more accurate results Trapezoidal Rule uses simple area, Simpsons Rule replaces the integrand f(x) with a quadratic polynomial p(x) that uses the same values as f(x) for its end points, but adds a midpoint Romberg Integration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romberg's_method C++: http://code.google.com/p/romberg-integration/downloads/detail?name=romberg.cpp&can=2&q= Combines trapezoidal rule with Richardson Extrapolation Evaluates the integrand at equally spaced points The integrand must have continuous derivatives Each R(n,m) extrapolation uses a higher order integrand polynomial replacement rule (zeroth starts with trapezoidal) à a lower triangular matrix set of equation coefficients where the bottom right term has the most accurate approximation. The process continues until the difference between 2 successive diagonal terms becomes sufficiently small. Gaussian Quadrature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_quadrature C++: http://www.alglib.net/integration/gaussianquadratures.php Data points are chosen to yield best possible accuracy – requires fewer evaluations Ability to handle singularities, functions that are difficult to evaluate The integrand can include a weighting function determined by a set of orthogonal polynomials. Points & weights are selected so that the integrand yields the exact integral if f(x) is a polynomial of degree <= 2n+1 Techniques (basically different weighting functions): · Gauss-Legendre Integration w(x)=1 · Gauss-Laguerre Integration w(x)=e^-x · Gauss-Hermite Integration w(x)=e^-x^2 · Gauss-Chebyshev Integration w(x)= 1 / Sqrt(1-x^2) Solving ODEs Use when high order differential equations cannot be solved analytically Evaluated under boundary conditions RK for systems – a high order differential equation can always be transformed into a coupled first order system of equations Euler method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_method C++: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Euler_method First order Runge–Kutta method. Simple recursive method – given an initial value, calculate derivative deltas. Unstable & not very accurate (O(h) error) – not used in practice A first-order method - the local error (truncation error per step) is proportional to the square of the step size, and the global error (error at a given time) is proportional to the step size In evolving solution between data points xn & xn+1, only evaluates derivatives at beginning of interval xn à asymmetric at boundaries Higher order Runge Kutta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runge%E2%80%93Kutta_methods C++: http://www.dreamincode.net/code/snippet1441.htm 2nd & 4th order RK - Introduces parameterized midpoints for more symmetric solutions à accuracy at higher computational cost Adaptive RK – RK-Fehlberg – estimate the truncation at each integration step & automatically adjust the step size to keep error within prescribed limits. At each step 2 approximations are compared – if in disagreement to a specific accuracy, the step size is reduced Boundary Value Problems Where solution of differential equations are located at 2 different values of the independent variable x à more difficult, because cannot just start at point of initial value – there may not be enough starting conditions available at the end points to produce a unique solution An n-order equation will require n boundary conditions – need to determine the missing n-1 conditions which cause the given conditions at the other boundary to be satisfied Shooting Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_method C++: http://ganeshtiwaridotcomdotnp.blogspot.co.il/2009/12/c-c-code-shooting-method-for-solving.html Iteratively guess the missing values for one end & integrate, then inspect the discrepancy with the boundary values of the other end to adjust the estimate Given the starting boundary values u1 & u2 which contain the root u, solve u given the false position method (solving the differential equation as an initial value problem via 4th order RK), then use u to solve the differential equations. Finite Difference Method For linear & non-linear systems Higher order derivatives require more computational steps – some combinations for boundary conditions may not work though Improve the accuracy by increasing the number of mesh points Solving EigenValue Problems An eigenvalue can substitute a matrix when doing matrix multiplication à convert matrix multiplication into a polynomial EigenValue For a given set of equations in matrix form, determine what are the solution eigenvalue & eigenvectors Similar Matrices - have same eigenvalues. Use orthogonal similarity transforms to reduce a matrix to diagonal form from which eigenvalue(s) & eigenvectors can be computed iteratively Jacobi method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobi_method C++: http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/classes/acs2_2008/openmp/jacobi/jacobi.html Robust but Computationally intense – use for small matrices < 10x10 Power Iteration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_iteration For any given real symmetric matrix, generate the largest single eigenvalue & its eigenvectors Simplest method – does not compute matrix decomposition à suitable for large, sparse matrices Inverse Iteration Variation of power iteration method – generates the smallest eigenvalue from the inverse matrix Rayleigh Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh's_method_of_dimensional_analysis Variation of power iteration method Rayleigh Quotient Method Variation of inverse iteration method Matrix Tri-diagonalization Method Use householder algorithm to reduce an NxN symmetric matrix to a tridiagonal real symmetric matrix vua N-2 orthogonal transforms Whats Next Outside of Numerical Methods there are lots of different types of algorithms that I’ve learned over the decades: Data Mining – (I covered this briefly in a previous post: http://geekswithblogs.net/JoshReuben/archive/2007/12/31/ssas-dm-algorithms.aspx ) Search & Sort Routing Problem Solving Logical Theorem Proving Planning Probabilistic Reasoning Machine Learning Solvers (eg MIP) Bioinformatics (Sequence Alignment, Protein Folding) Quant Finance (I read Wilmott’s books – interesting) Sooner or later, I’ll cover the above topics as well.

Search Results

Search found 14372 results on 575 pages for 'home premium'.

Page 455/575 | < Previous Page | 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 | Next Page >

- by user2922063

- by RULE101

- by Manhim

- by user568829

- by littleK

- by N.T.

- by WishCow

- by tlake

- by mbcrump

- by christopher.jones

- by Asian Angel

- by Asian Angel

- by Bob Rhubart

- by Asian Angel

- by ScottGu

- by Mysticgeek

- by Mike Dietrich

- by Stephen.Walther

- by Mysticgeek

- by Asian Angel

- by Rick Strahl

- by Asian Angel

- by Paulo Morgado

- by Mysticgeek

- by JoshReuben

< Previous Page | 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 | Next Page >