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• Create Shortcuts for Your Favorite or Most Used Folders in Ubuntu

  - by Asian Angel

  Do you have certain folders that you access often each day but are only available through the Places Menu or Nautilus? See how easy it is to create shortcuts for your desktop and taskbar with our quick tutorial. To get started open Nautilus and locate the folders that you want to make new shortcuts for. For our example we chose Ubuntu One. Right click on the chosen folder and select Make Link. Your new shortcut will appear with the text Link to “Folder Name” and an Arrow Shortcut Marker attached. If you are happy with your new shortcut as is, then drag it to your desktop or taskbar as desired. We created the shortcut twice in our example…once for the desktop and once for the taskbar. For our example we decided to customize the taskbar shortcut a bit. To customize your shortcut right click on the shortcut and select Properties. Note: The desktop shortcut is limited on the amount you can customize it (name change and addition of up to four emblems to the folder). From here you can rename the shortcut and change the icon as desired. A quick name change and new icon made a huge improvement in how our taskbar shortcut looked. Note: The link for the icon we used is shown below. A little touch-up to our desktop shortcut and both are looking good. Download the Ubuntu Cloud Icon *Icon is 128*128 pixels and comes in .png format. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Macs Don’t Make You Creative! So Why Do Artists Really Love Apple? MacX DVD Ripper Pro is Free for How-To Geek Readers (Time Limited!) HTG Explains: What’s a Solid State Drive and What Do I Need to Know? How to Get Amazing Color from Photos in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Learn To Adjust Contrast Like a Pro in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Have You Ever Wondered How Your Operating System Got Its Name? Create Shortcuts for Your Favorite or Most Used Folders in Ubuntu Create Custom Sized Thumbnail Images with Simple Image Resizer [Cross-Platform] Etch a Circuit Board using a Simple Homemade Mixture Sync Blocker Stops iTunes from Automatically Syncing The Journey to the Mystical Forest [Wallpaper] Trace Your Browser’s Roots on the Browser Family Tree [Infographic]

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• Understanding Data Science: Recent Studies

  - by Joe Lamantia

  If you need such a deeper understanding of data science than Drew Conway's popular venn diagram model, or Josh Wills' tongue in cheek characterization, "Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician." two relatively recent studies are worth reading.   'Analyzing the Analyzers,' an O'Reilly e-book by Harlan Harris, Sean Patrick Murphy, and Marck Vaisman, suggests four distinct types of data scientists -- effectively personas, in a design sense -- based on analysis of self-identified skills among practitioners.  The scenario format dramatizes the different personas, making what could be a dry statistical readout of survey data more engaging.  The survey-only nature of the data,  the restriction of scope to just skills, and the suggested models of skill-profiles makes this feel like the sort of exercise that data scientists undertake as an every day task; collecting data, analyzing it using a mix of statistical techniques, and sharing the model that emerges from the data mining exercise.  That's not an indictment, simply an observation about the consistent feel of the effort as a product of data scientists, about data science.  And the paper 'Enterprise Data Analysis and Visualization: An Interview Study' by researchers Sean Kandel, Andreas Paepcke, Joseph Hellerstein, and Jeffery Heer considers data science within the larger context of industrial data analysis, examining analytical workflows, skills, and the challenges common to enterprise analysis efforts, and identifying three archetypes of data scientist.  As an interview-based study, the data the researchers collected is richer, and there's correspondingly greater depth in the synthesis.  The scope of the study included a broader set of roles than data scientist (enterprise analysts) and involved questions of workflow and organizational context for analytical efforts in general.  I'd suggest this is useful as a primer on analytical work and workers in enterprise settings for those who need a baseline understanding; it also offers some genuinely interesting nuggets for those already familiar with discovery work. We've undertaken a considerable amount of research into discovery, analytical work/ers, and data science over the past three years -- part of our programmatic approach to laying a foundation for product strategy and highlighting innovation opportunities -- and both studies complement and confirm much of the direct research into data science that we conducted. There were a few important differences in our findings, which I'll share and discuss in upcoming posts.

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• 3rd Party Tools: dbForge Studio for SQL Server

  - by Greg Low

  I've been taking a look at some of the 3rd party tools for SQL Server. Today, I looked at DBForge Studio for SQL Server from the team at DevArt. Installation was smooth. I did find it odd that it defaults to SQL authentication, not to Windows but either works fine. I like the way they have followed the SQL Server Management Studio visual layout. That will make the product familiar to existing SQL Server Management Studio users. I was keen to see what the database diagram tools are like. I found that the layouts generated where quite good, and certainly superior to the built-in SQL Server ones in SSMS. I didn't find any easy way to just add all tables to the diagram though. (That might just be me). One thing I did like was that it doesn't get confused when you have role playing dimensions. Multiple foreign key relationships between two tables display sensibly, unlike with the standard SQL Server version. It was pleasing to see a printing option in the diagramming tool. I found the database comparison tool worked quite well. There are a few UI things that surprised me (like when you add a new connection to a database, it doesn't select the one you just added by default) but generally it just worked as advertised, and the code that was generated looked ok. I used the SQL query editor and found the code formatting to be quite fast and while I didn't mind the style that it used by default, it wasn't obvious to me how to change the format. In Tools/Options I found things that talked about Profiles but I wasn't sure if that's what I needed. The help file pointed me in the right direction and I created a new profile. It's a bit odd that when you create a new profile, that it doesn't put you straight into editing the profile. At first I didn't know what I'd done. But as soon as I chose to edit it, I found that a very good range of options were available. When entering SQL code, the code completion options are quick but even though they are quite complete, one of the real challenges is in making them useful. Note in the following that while the options shown are correct, none are actually helpful: The Query Profiler seemed to work quite well. I keep wondering when the version supplied with SQL Server will ever have options like finding the most expensive operators, etc. Now that it's deprecated, perhaps never but it's great to see the third party options like this one and like SQL Sentry's Plan Explorer having this functionality. I didn't do much with the reporting options as I use SQL Server Reporting Services. Overall, I was quite impressed with this product and given they have a free trial available, I think it's worth your time taking a look at it.

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• Commandline Purge in AS11

  - by Dheeraj Kumar

  AS11 - B2B offering consists of numerous features that have been made available via commandline approach. Most of these are supplement to the already available User Interface based approach. One such is purging of runtime data. The commandline purge option enables the users to purge the runtime data, based on various criteria. This is an ANT based command, provides the flexibility to selectively set the criteria to purge the runtime data. Providing the command line option also enables the administrator to purge in bulk, without visiting the B2B UI, which can also be used for automation purpose By default archival is turned on for purge activity. As a pre-requisite, the respective folder needs to be configured in database with the proper permission. When no filename is provided for archived data, the sysdate will be considered for filename. Below are the various options to purge the runtime data Normal 0 Option ANT option   Message state -Dmsgstate   Date range -Dfromdate,  -Dtodate Format : dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm AM/PM Trading partner -Dtp   Direction -Ddirection   Message Type -Dmsgtype   Agreement Name -Dagreement   IdType/ value -Didtype,  -Didvalue   Archive -Darchive True/false By default true Archive file name -Darchivename File name (optional), will be used when archive is set to true. Normal 0 Note: When using -Darchivename the value must be a unique file name. An existing file name used with -Darchivename throws an exception v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 Below are the few of ant commands and various options.   Purge based on date range and message state: Normal 0 ant -f ant-b2b-util.xml b2bpurge -Dmode=RT -Dfromdate="19/12/2009 1:04 AM" -Dtodate="19/12/2009 1:05 AM" -Dmsgstate=MSG_COMPLETE -Darchivename="filename.dmp"  Purge based on direction: Normal 0 ant -f ant-b2b-util.xml b2bpurge -Dmode=RT -Ddirection="OUTBOUND" Normal 0 Purge based on agreement Name: Normal 0 ant -f ant-b2b-util.xml b2bpurge -Dmode=RT -Dagreement="agreement_name" Normal 0 Purge based on Trading partner Name: Normal 0 ant -f ant-b2b-util.xml b2bpurge -Dmode=RT -Dtp=GlobalChips Normal 0 Purge based on Message State: Normal 0 ant -f ant-b2b-util.xml b2bpurge -Dmode=RT -Dmsgstate="MSG_COMPLETE" Normal 0 ant -f ant-b2b-util.xml b2bpurge -Dmode=RT -Ddirection="OUTBOUND" -Dmsgstate="MSG_COMPLETE"

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• A big flat text file or a HTML site for language documentation?

  - by Bad Sector

  A project of mine is a small embeddable Tcl-like scripting language, LIL. While i'm mostly making it for my own use, i think it is interesting enough for others to use, so i want it to have a nice (but not very "wordy") documentation. So far i'm using a single flat readme.txt file. It explains the language's syntax, features, standard functions, how to use the C API, etc. Also it is easy to scan and read in almost every environment out there, from basic text-only terminals to full-fledged high-end graphical desktop environments. However, while i tried to keep things nicely formatted (as much as this is possible in plain text), i still think that being a big (and growing) wall of text, it isn't as easy on the eyes as it could be. Also i feel that sometimes i'm not writing as much as i want in order to avoid expanding the text too much. So i thought i could use another project of mine, QuHelp, which is basically a help site generator for sites like this one with a sidebar that provides a tree of topics/subtopics and offline full text search. With this i can use HTML to format the documentation and if i use QuHelp for some other project that uses LIL, i can import LIL's documentation as part of the other project's documentation. However converting the existing documentation to QuHelp/HTML isn't a small task, especially when it comes to functions (i'll need to put more detail on them than what currently exists in the readme.txt file). Also it loses the wide range of availability that it currently has (even if QuHelp's generated code degrades gracefully down to console-only web browsers, plain text is readable from everywhere, including from popular editors such as Vim and Emacs - i had someone once telling me that he likes LIL's documentation because it is readable without leaving his editor). So, my question is simply this: should i keep the documentation as it is now in the form of a single readme.txt file or should i convert it to something like the site i mentioned above? There is also the option to do both, but i'm not sure if i'll be able to always keep them in sync or if it is worth the effort. After asking around in IRC i've got mixed answers: some liked the wide availability of the single text file, others said that it is looks as bad as a man page (personally i don't mind that - i can read man pages just fine - but other people might have issues reading them). What do you think?

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• SQL SERVER – Reseting Identity Values for All Tables

  - by pinaldave

  Sometime email requesting help generates more questions than the motivation to answer them. Let us go over one of the such examples. I have converted the complete email conversation to chat format for easy consumption. I almost got a headache after around 20 email exchange. I am sure if you can read it and feel my pain. DBA: “I deleted all of the data from my database and now it contains table structure only. However, when I tried to insert new data in my tables I noticed that my identity values starts from the same number where they actually were before I deleted the data.” Pinal: “How did you delete the data?” DBA: “Running Delete in Loop?” Pinal: “What was the need of such need?” DBA: “It was my development server and I needed to repopulate the database.” Pinal: “Oh so why did not you use TRUNCATE which would have reset the identity of your table to the original value when the data got deleted? This will work only if you want your database to reset to the original value. If you want to set any other value this may not work.” DBA: (silence for 2 days) DBA: “I did not realize it. Meanwhile I regenerated every table’s schema and dropped the table and re-created it.” Pinal: “Oh no, that would be extremely long and incorrect way. Very bad solution.” DBA: “I understand, should I just take backup of the database before I insert the data and when I need, I can use the original backup to restore the database. This way I will have identity beginning with 1.” Pinal: “This going totally downhill. It is wrong to do so on multiple levels. Did you even read my earlier email about TRUNCATE.” DBA: “Yeah. I found it in spam folder.” Pinal: (I decided to stay silent) DBA: (After 2 days) “Can you provide me script to reseed identity for all of my tables to value 1 without asking further question.” Pinal: USE DATABASE; EXEC sp_MSForEachTable ' IF OBJECTPROPERTY(object_id(''?''), ''TableHasIdentity'') = 1 DBCC CHECKIDENT (''?'', RESEED, 1)' GO Our conversation ended here. If you have directly jumped to this statement, I encourage you to read the conversation one time. There is difference between reseeding identity value to 1 and reseeding it to original value – I will write an another blog post on this subject in future. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Selectively Exposing Functionallity in .Net

  - by David V. Corbin

  Any developer should be aware of the principles of encapsulation, cross-tier isolation, and cross-functional separation of concerns. However, it seems the few take the time to consider the adage of "minimal yet complete"1 when developing the software. Consider the exposure of "business objects" to the user interface. Some common situations occur: Accessing a given element requires a compound set of calls that do not "make sense" to the User Interface. More information than absolutely required is exposed to the user interface It would be much cleaner if a custom interface was provided that exposed exactly (and only) the information that is required by the consumer. Achieving this using conventional techniques would require the creation (and maintenance!) of custom classes to filter and transpose the information into the ideal format. Determining the ROI on this approach can be very difficult to ascertain, and as a result it is often ignored completely. There is another approach, which is largely made practical by virtual of the Action and Func delegates. From a callers point of view, the following two samples can be used interchangeably:     interface ISomeInterface     {         void SampleMethod1(string param);         string SamepleMethod2(string param);     }       class ISomeInterface     {         public Action<string> SampleMethod1 {get; }         public Func<string,string> SamepleMethod2 {get; }     }   The capabilities this simple changes enable are significant (and remember it does not cange the syntax at the call site): The delegates can be initialized to directly call the proper method of any target class. The delegates can be dynamically updated based on the current state. The "interface" can NOT be cast to the concrete class (which often exposes more functionallity). This patterns By limiting the interface to the exact functionallity required, the reduced surface area will typically result in lower development, testing and maintenance costs. We are currently in the process of posting a project on CodePlex which illustrates this (and many other) techniques which have proven helpful in creating robust yet flexible solutions that are highly efficient2 and maintainable. This post will be updated as soon as the project is published. 1) Credit: Scott  Meyers, Effective C++, Addison-Wesley 1992 2) For those who read my previous post on performance it should be noted that the use of delegates is on the same order of magnitude (actually a tiny amount faster) as conventional interfaces.

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• Network Your Computers & Devices: Step by Step

  - by The Geek

  If you’re looking for a great book to help you learn more about Windows home networking, there’s a new book on the market by our good friend Ciprian, and published by none other than Microsoft Press. Note: our friend Ciprian has been a guest contributor here on How-To Geek in the past, and he’s not only a geek that knows what he’s talking about, he’s also one of the more honest and decent people I’ve worked with. In his spare time, he runs the 7 Tutorials web site. The Book One of the great things about this book is that you aren’t limited to just Windows networking—it also explains how to connect Windows 7, XP, Vista, Mac OS X, and even Linux on the same network and share folders and devices between them. Everything in the book is written in a typical How-To Geek step-by-step format, with plenty of screenshots and pictures to help you through the process. Book Outline If you’re going to be spending some money on the book, you probably want to know what it’s all about, and since the Amazon page doesn’t give, well, much information at all, here’s the entire outline for you: Setting Up a Router and Devices Setting User Account on All Computers Setting Up Your Libraries on All Windows 7 Computers Creating the Network Customizing Network Sharing Settings in Windows 7 Creating the Homegroup and Joining Windows 7 Computers Sharing Libraries and Folders Sharing and Working with Devices Streaming Media Over the Network and the Internet Sharing Between Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 Computers Sharing Between Mac OS X and Windows 7 Computers Sharing Between Ubuntu Linux and Windows 7 Computers Keeping the Network Secure Setting Up Parental Controls Troubleshooting Network and Internet Problems It’s a great book, with loads of information, and compared to most tech books isn’t very expensive—only $19.79 for the paperback and $9.99 for the Kindle version. Well worth it, and hey, it’s an official Microsoft Press book—written by a How-To Geek guest author. Network Your Computers & Devices Step by Step [Amazon] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC 2011 International Space Station Calendar Available for Download (Free) Ultimate Elimination – Lego Black Ops [Video] BotSync Enables Secure FTP File Synchronization on Android Devices Enjoy Beautiful City Views with the Cityscape Theme for Windows 7 Luigi Installs Any OS on Google’s Cr-48 Notebook DIY iPad Stylus Offers Pen-Based Interaction on the Cheap

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• Commit Review Questions

  - by Wes McClure

  Note: in this article when I refer to a commit, I mean the commit you plan to share with the rest of the team, if you have local commits that you plan to amend/combine, I am referring to the final result. In time you will find these easier to do as you develop, however, all of these are valuable before checking in!  The pre commit review is a nice time to polish what might have been several hours of intense work, during which these things were the last things on your mind!  If you are concerned about losing your work in the process of responding to these questions, first do a check-in and amend it as you go (assuming you are using a tool such as git that supports this), rolling the result into one nice commit for everyone else.  Did you review your commit, change by change, with a diff utility? If not, this is a list of reasons why you might want to start! Did you test your changes? If the test is valuable to be automated, is it? If it’s a manual testing scenario, did you at least try the basics manually? Are the additions/changes formatted consistently with the rest of the project? Lots of automated tools can help here, don’t try to manually format the code, that’s a waste of time and as a human you will fail repeatedly. Are these consistent: tabs versus spaces, indentation, spacing, braces, line breaks, etc Resharper is a great example of a tool that can automate this for you (.net) Are naming conventions respected? Did you accidently use abbreviations, unless you have a good reason to use them? Does capitalization match the conventions in the project/language? Are files partitioned? Sometimes we add new code in existing files in a pinch, it’s a good idea to split these out if they don’t belong ie: are new classes defined in new files, if this is something your project values? Is there commented out code? If you are removing an existing feature, get rid of it, that is why we have VCS If it’s not done yet, then why are you checking it in? Perhaps a stash commit (git)? Did you leave debug or unnecessary changes? Do you understand all of the changes? http://geekswithblogs.net/wesm/archive/2012/04/11/programming-doesnrsquot-have-to-be-magic.aspx Are there spelling mistakes? Including your commit message! Is your commit message concise? Is there follow up work? Are there tasks you didn’t write down that you need to follow up with? Are readability or reorganization changes needed? This might be amended into the final commit, or it might be future work that needs added to the backlog. Are there other things your team values that you should review?

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• Part 1 Basic Webtrends REST Examples

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  In this entry I just want to cover some examples of how to connect to Webtrends DX Web Services.  The DX Web Services use REST as the architecture, providing simple URI based end points to connect to.  With the Webtrends SDK you can connect to these services with your account information.  Here are the basic steps to retrieve a profile list, the reports from one of those profiles, and then the report you want from that report list. First step is to create a Webtrends User. WebTrends.Sdk.Account.User webtrendsUser = new Account.User(); webtrendsUser.UserName = username; webtrendsUser.Password = password; webtrendsUser.AccountName = account; After you create the Webtrends User, simple request a profile list by getting list of ProfileDefinition Objects. List<WebTrends.Sdk.Profile.ProfileDefinition> profiles = WebTrends.Sdk.Factory.NavigationFactory.BuildListing(webtrendsUser); Next you will want to grab a report based on the profile you are in and your credentials. List<WebTrends.Sdk.Report.ReportDefinition> reports = WebTrends.Sdk.Factory.NavigationFactory.BuildListing(profiles[i], webtrendsUser); In the code above, i would equate to the specific profile you want from the retrieved list of profiles in the profiles list.  The common scenario is that one has pulled the profiles into a drop down, combo, or list box that the user can select.  Then when the user selects the specific profile that profile object can then be used to pull the List of ReportDefinitions. Once we have the report definitions, all sorts of criteria can be added together to query for a specific report.  This is also were things can get a little tricky.  For instance, take a look at the code below. WebTrends.Sdk.Factory.ReportFactory.CreateDimensionalReport( report.ID.ToString(), profiles[i].ID.ToString(), "2010m01", webtrendsUser); The CreateDimensionalReport takes 4 parameters for this particular overload.  The report ID, profile ID, the Webtrends Date Format, and the Webtrends User Object.  There are a number of other overloads available within this factory's method that allow for passing the specific REST URI, and other criteria to retrieve the report of your choice.  In the near future we will be adding some more to this method also, which will provide more flexibility without needing to use the full REST URI. I will have more on this, so all you Coders out there using Webtrends DX Services, I hope this is helpful!  Enjoy. Original Entry

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• Advantages and disadvantages of building a single page web application

  - by ryanzec

  I'm nearing the end of a prototyping/proof of concept phase for a side project I'm working on, and trying to decide on some larger scale application design decisions. The app is a project management system tailored more towards the agile development process. One of the decisions I need to make is whether or not to go with a traditional multi-page application or a single page application. Currently my prototype is a traditional multi-page setup, however I have been looking at backbone.js to clean up and apply some structure to my Javascript (jQuery) code. It seems like while backbone.js can be used in multi-page applications, it shines more with single page applications. I am trying to come up with a list of advantages and disadvantages of using a single page application design approach. So far I have: Advantages All data has to be available via some sort of API - this is a big advantage for my use case as I want to have an API to my application anyway. Right now about 60-70% of my calls to get/update data are done through a REST API. Doing a single page application will allow me to better test my REST API since the application itself will use it. It also means that as the application grows, the API itself will grow since that is what the application uses; no need to maintain the API as an add-on to the application. More responsive application - since all data loaded after the initial page is kept to a minimum and transmitted in a compact format (like JSON), data requests should generally be faster, and the server will do slightly less processing. Disadvantages Duplication of code - for example, model code. I am going to have to create models both on the server side (PHP in this case) and the client side in Javascript. Business logic in Javascript - I can't give any concrete examples on why this would be bad but it just doesn't feel right to me having business logic in Javascript that anyone can read. Javascript memory leaks - since the page never reloads, Javascript memory leaks can happen, and I would not even know where to begin to debug them. There are also other things that are kind of double edged swords. For example, with single page applications, the data processed for each request can be a lot less since the application will be asking for the minimum data it needs for the particular request, however it also means that there could be a lot more small request to the server. I'm not sure if that is a good or bad thing. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of single page web applications that I should keep in mind when deciding which way I should go for my project?

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• SQL SERVER – Get 2 of My Books FREE at Koenig Tech Day – Where Technologies Converge!

  - by pinaldave

  As a regular reader of my blog – you must be aware of that I love to write books and talk about various subjects of my book. The founders of Koenig Solutions are my very old friends, I know them for many years. They have been my biggest supporter of my books. Coming weekend they have a technology event at their Bangalore Location. Every attendee of the technology event will get a set of two books worth Rs. 450 – ‘SQL Server Interview Questions And Answers‘ and ‘SQL Wait Stats Joes 2 Pros‘. I am going to cover a couple of topics of the books and present  as well. I am very confident that every attendee will be having a great time. I will be covering following subjects: SQL Server Tricks and Tips for Blazing Fast Performance Slow Running Queries (SQL) are the most common problem that developers face while working with SQL Server. While it is easy to blame the SQL Server for unsatisfactory performance, however the issue often persists with the way queries have been written, and how SQL Server has been set up. The session will focus on the ways of identifying problems that slow down SQL Servers, and tricks to fix them. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. After the session is over – I will point to what exact location in the book where you can continue for the further learning. I am pretty excited, this is more like book reading but in entire different format. The one day event will cover four technologies in four separate interactive sessions on: Microsoft SQL Server Security VMware/Virtualization ASP.NET MVC Date of the event: Dec 15, 2012 9 AM to 6PM. Location of the event:  Koenig Solutions Ltd. # 47, 4th Block, 100 feet Road, 3rd Floor, Opp to Shanthi Sagar, Koramangala, Bangalore- 560034 Mobile : 09008096122 Office : 080- 41127140 Organizers have informed me that there are very limited seats for this event and technical session based on my book will start at Sharp 9 AM. If you show up late there are chances that you will not get any seats. Registration for the event is a MUST. Please visit this link for further information. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• To Bit or Not To Bit

  - by Johnm

  'Twas a long day of troubleshooting and firefighting and now, with most of the office vacant, you face a blank scripting window to create a new table in his database. Many questions circle your mind like dirty water gurgling down the bathtub drain: "How normalized should this table be?", "Should I use an identity column?", "NVarchar or Varchar?", "Should this column be NULLABLE?", "I wonder what apple blue cheese bacon cheesecake tastes like?" Well, there are times when the mind goes it's own direction. A Bit About Bit At some point during your table creation efforts you will encounter the decision of whether to use the bit data type for a column. The bit data type is an integer data type that recognizes only the values of 1, 0 and NULL as valid. This data type is often utilized to store yes/no or true/false values. An example of its use would be a column called [IsGasoline] which would be intended to contain the value of 1 if the row's subject (a car) had a gasoline engine and a 0 if the subject did not have a gasoline engine. The bit data type can even be found in some of the system tables of SQL Server. For example, the sysssispackages table in the msdb database which contains SQL Server Integration Services Package information for the packages stored in SQL Server. This table contains a column called [IsEncrypted]. A value of 1 indicates that the package has been encrypted while the value of 0 indicates that it is not. I have learned that the most effective way to disperse the crowd that surrounds the office coffee machine is to engage into SQL Server debates. The bit data type has been one of the most reoccurring, as well as the most enjoyable, of these topics. It contains a practical side and a philosophical side. Practical Consideration This data type certainly has its place and is a valuable option for database design; but it is often used in situations where the answer is really not a pure true/false response. In addition, true/false values are not very informative or scalable. Let's use the previously noted [IsGasoline] column for illustration. While on the surface it appears to be a rather simple question when evaluating a car: "Does the car have a gasoline engine?" If the person entering data is entering a row for a Jeep Liberty, the response would be a 1 since it has a gasoline engine. If the person is entering data is entering a row for a Chevrolet Volt, the response would be a 0 since it is an electric engine. What happens when a person is entering a row for the gasoline/electric hybrid Toyota Prius? Would one person's conclusion be consistent with another person's conclusion? The argument could be made that the current intent for the database is to be used only for pure gasoline and pure electric engines; but this is where the scalability issue comes into play. With the use of a bit data type a database modification and data conversion would be required if the business decided to take on hybrid engines. Whereas, alternatively, if the int data type were used as a foreign key to a reference table containing the engine type options, the change to include the hybrid option would only require an entry into the reference table. Philosophical Consideration Since the bit data type is often used for true/false or yes/no data (also called Boolean) it presents a philosophical conundrum of what to do about the allowance of the NULL value. The inclusion of NULL in a true/false or yes/no response simply violates the logical principle of bivalence which states that "every proposition is either true or false". If NULL is not true, then it must be false. The mathematical laws of Boolean logic support this concept by stating that the only valid values of this scenario are 1 and 0. There is another way to look at this conundrum: NULL is also considered to be the absence of a response. In other words, it is the equivalent to "undecided". Anyone who watches the news can tell you that polls always include an "undecided" option. This could be considered a valid option in the world of yes/no/dunno. Through out all of these considerations I have discovered one absolute certainty: When you have found a person, or group of persons, who are willing to entertain a philosophical debate of the bit data type, you have found some true friends.

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• Windows Azure Diagnostics: Next to Useless?

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  To quote my good friend Christian: “Tracing is probably one of the most discussed topics in the Windows Azure world. Not because it is freaking cool – but because it can be very tedious and partly massively counter-intuitive.” <rant> The .NET Framework has this wonderful facility called TraceSource. You define a named trace and route that to a configurable listener. This gives you a lot of flexibility – you can create a single trace file – or multiple ones. There is even nice tooling around that. SvcTraceViewer from the SDK let’s you open the XML trace files – you can filter and sort by trace source and event type, aggreate multiple files…blablabla. Just what you would expect from a decent tracing infrastructure. Now comes Windows Azure. I was already were grateful that starting with the SDK 1.2 we finally had a way to do tracing and diagnostics in the cloud (kudos!). But the way the Azure DiagnosticMonitor is currently implemented – could be called flawed. The Azure SDK provides a DiagnosticsMonitorTraceListener – which is the right way to go. The only problem is, that way this works is, that all traces (from all sources) get written to an ETW trace. Then the DiagMon listens to these traces and copies them periodically to your storage account. So far so good. But guess what happens to your nice trace files: the trace source names get “lost”. They appear in your message text at the end. So much for filtering and sorting and aggregating (regex #fail or #win??). Every trace line becomes an entry in a Azure Storage Table – the svclog format is gone. So much for the existing tooling. To solve that problem, one workaround was to write your own trace listener (!) that creates svclog files inside of local storage and use the DiagMon to copy those. Christian has a blog post about that. OK done that. Now it turns out that this mechanism does not work anymore in 1.3 with FullIIS (see here). Quoting: “Some IIS 7.0 logs not collected due to permissions issues...The root cause to both of these issues is the permissions on the log files.” And the workaround: “To read the files yourself, log on to the instance with a remote desktop connection.” Now then have fun with your multi-instance deployments…. </rant>

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• Apache2 Syntex, cant acces 000-default

  - by enrique2334

  I have been using Apache2 and webmin with my raspberry pi. after a restart and reinstalations apache wont start. > sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart apache2: Syntax error on line 268 of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf: Could not open configuration file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default: No such file or directory Action 'configtest' failed. The Apache error log may have more information. failed! The file 000-default is there and unopenable permisions to root-root My apache2.conf file looks like this (bottom half) # ErrorLog: The location of the error log file. # If you do not specify an ErrorLog directive within a <VirtualHost> # container, error messages relating to that virtual host will be # logged here. If you *do* define an error logfile for a <VirtualHost> # container, that host's errors will be logged there and not here. # ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log # # LogLevel: Control the number of messages logged to the error_log. # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit, # alert, emerg. # LogLevel debug # Include module configuration: Include mods-enabled/*.load Include mods-enabled/*.conf # Include list of ports to listen on and which to use for name based vhosts Include ports.conf # # The following directives define some format nicknames for use with # a CustomLog directive (see below). # If you are behind a reverse proxy, you might want to change %h into %{X-Forwarded-For}i # LogFormat "%v:%p %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" vhost_combined LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O" common LogFormat "%{Referer}i -> %U" referer LogFormat "%{User-agent}i" agent # Include of directories ignores editors' and dpkg's backup files, # see the comments above for details. # Include generic snippets of statements Include conf.d/ # Include the virtual host configurations: Include sites-enabled/ <VirtualHost *:80> DocumentRoot /var/www <Directory /var/www> allow from all Options +Indexes </Directory> ServerName IMASERVER </VirtualHost> does anyone know what the cause of this?

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• Heightmap in Shader not working

  - by CSharkVisibleBasix

  I'm trying to implement GPU based geometry clipmapping and have problems to apply a simple heightmap to my terrain. For the heightmap I use a simple texture with the surface format "single". I've taken the texture from here. To apply it to my terrain, I use the following shader code: texture Heightmap; sampler2D HeightmapSampler = sampler_state { Texture = <Heightmap>; MinFilter = Point; MagFilter = Point; MipFilter = Point; AddressU = Mirror; AddressV = Mirror; }; Vertex Shader: float4 worldPos = mul(float4(pos.x,0.0f,pos.y, 1.0f), worldMatrix); float elevation = tex2Dlod(HeightmapSampler, float4(worldPos.x, worldPos.z,0,0)); worldPos.y = elevation * 128; The complete vertex shader (also containig clipmapping transforms) looks like this: float4x4 View : View; float4x4 Projection : Projection; float3 CameraPos : CameraPosition; float LODscale; //The LOD ring index 0:highest x:lowest float2 Position; //The position of the part in the world texture Heightmap; sampler2D HeightmapSampler = sampler_state { Texture = <Heightmap>; MinFilter = Point; MagFilter = Point; MipFilter = Point; AddressU = Mirror; AddressV = Mirror; }; //Accept only float2 because we extract 3rd dim out of Heightmap float4 wireframe_VS(float2 pos : POSITION) : POSITION{ float4x4 worldMatrix = float4x4( LODscale, 0, 0, 0, 0, LODscale, 0, 0, 0, 0, LODscale, 0, - Position.x * 64 * LODscale + CameraPos.x, 0, Position.y * 64 * LODscale + CameraPos.z, 1); float4 worldPos = mul(float4(pos.x,0.0f,pos.y, 1.0f), worldMatrix); float elevation = tex2Dlod(HeightmapSampler, float4(worldPos.x, worldPos.z,0,0)); worldPos.y = elevation * 128; float4 viewPos = mul(worldPos, View); float4 projPos = mul(viewPos, Projection); return projPos; }

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• Action delegate in C#

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  In last few posts about I have written lots of things about delegates and this post is also part of that series. In this post we are going to learn about Action delegates in C#.  Following is a list of post related to delegates. Delegates in C#. Multicast Delegates in C#. Func Delegates in C#. Action Delegates in c#: As per MSDN action delegates used to pass a method as parameter without explicitly declaring custom delegates. Action Delegates are used to encapsulate method that does not have return value. C# 4.0 Action delegates have following different variants like following. It can take up to 16 parameters. Action – It will be no parameter and does not return any value. Action(T) Action(T1,T2) Action(T1,T2,T3) Action(T1,T2,T3,T4) Action(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5) Action(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6) Action(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6,T7) Action(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6,T7,T8) Action(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6,T7,T8,T9) Action(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6,T7,T8,T9,T10) Action(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6,T7,T8,T9,T10,T11) Action(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6,T7,T8,T9,T10,T11,T12) Action(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6,T7,T8,T9,T10,T11,T12,T13) Action(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6,T7,T8,T9,T10,T11,T12,T13,T14) Action(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6,T7,T8,T9,T10,T11,T12,T13,T14,T15) Action(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6,T7,T8,T9,T10,T11,T12,T13,T14,T15,T16) So for this Action delegate you can have up to 16 parameters for Action.  Sound interesting!!… Enough theory now. It’s time to implement real code. Following is a code for that. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; namespace DelegateExample { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Action<String> Print = p => Console.WriteLine(p); Action<String,String> PrintAnother = (p1,p2)=> Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} {1}",p1,p2)); Print("Hello"); PrintAnother("Hello","World"); } } } In the above code you can see that I have created two Action delegate Print and PrintAnother. Print have one string parameter and its printing that. While PrintAnother have two string parameter and printing both the strings via Console.Writeline. Now it’s time to run example and following is the output as expected. That’s it. Hope you liked it. Stay tuned for more updates!!

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• How do I set up nvidia graphics adapter to put out 1080p, it seems to be using interlace mode>

  - by keepitsimpleengineer

  After upgrading to 12.04, my mythbuntu client/server seems to be running in 1080i, the clue comes from: [ 1176.117] (II) NVIDIA(0): Setting mode "1920x1080_60i" [ 1231.340] (II) NVIDIA(0): Setting mode "DFP-1:1920x1080_60@1920x1080+0+0" This is from Xorg.0.log. This whole thing started from video tearing when watching Mythtv recordings. It didn't happen in 10.10. Should I use "TVStandard" "HD1080p" in the screen section since this is a dedicated HTPC? It only connects to an HDTV (1080p) via hdmi. Here is the current xorg.conf file: # nvidia-settings: X configuration file generated by nvidia-settings # nvidia-settings: version 270.29 (buildd@allspice) Fri Feb 25 14:42:07 UTC 2011 Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 # commented out by update-manager, HAL is now used and auto-detects devices # Keyboard settings are now read from /etc/default/console-setup # InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard" # commented out by update-manager, HAL is now used and auto-detects devices # Keyboard settings are now read from /etc/default/console-setup # InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer" Option "Xinerama" "0" EndSection Section "Files" FontPath "unix/:7100" EndSection # commented out by update-manager, HAL is now used and auto-detects devices # Keyboard settings are now read from /etc/default/console-setup #Section "InputDevice" # # generated from default # Identifier "Mouse0" # Driver "mouse" # Option "Protocol" "auto" # Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" # Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no" # Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" #EndSection # commented out by update-manager, HAL is now used and auto-detects devices # Keyboard settings are now read from /etc/default/console-setup #Section "InputDevice" # # generated from default # Identifier "Keyboard0" # Driver "kbd" #EndSection Section "Monitor" # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "SAMSUNG" HorizSync 26.0 - 81.0 VertRefresh 24.0 - 75.0 Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" BoardName "GeForce GT 240" Option "TripleBuffer" "1" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Device0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 24 Option "TwinView" "0" Option "metamodes" "DFP: nvidia-auto-select +0+0" SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection After a little digging, the question changes slightly, to wit... Per Chapter 19 of nvidia README... "If the EDID for the display device reported a preferred mode timing, and that mode timing is considered a valid mode, then that mode is used as the "nvidia-auto-select" mode." The EDID for my HDMI connected LCD monitor says use first device as preferred. Prefer first detailed timing : Yes Also: (--) NVIDIA(0): EDID maximum pixel clock : 230.0 MHz The list: (from startx -- -verbose 6 ) (--) NVIDIA(0): Detailed Timings: (--) NVIDIA(0): 1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz (--) NVIDIA(0): Pixel Clock : 148.50 MHz (--) NVIDIA(0): HRes, HSyncStart : 1920, 2008 (--) NVIDIA(0): HSyncEnd, HTotal : 2052, 2200 (--) NVIDIA(0): VRes, VSyncStart : 1080, 1084 (--) NVIDIA(0): VSyncEnd, VTotal : 1089, 1125 (--) NVIDIA(0): H/V Polarity : +/+ This is the actual mode selected: (from xorg.0.log) (--) NVIDIA(0): 1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz (--) NVIDIA(0): Pixel Clock : 74.18 MHz (--) NVIDIA(0): HRes, HSyncStart : 1920, 2008 (--) NVIDIA(0): HSyncEnd, HTotal : 2052, 2200 (--) NVIDIA(0): VRes, VSyncStart : 1080, 1084 (--) NVIDIA(0): VSyncEnd, VTotal : 1094, 1124 (--) NVIDIA(0): H/V Polarity : +/+ (--) NVIDIA(0): Extra : Interlaced (--) NVIDIA(0): CEA Format : 5 So my HTPC is down-converting to 1080i and then the Monitor is up-converting to 1080p How can I fix this, please?

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• SQL – What ACID stands in the Database? – Contest to Win 24 Amazon Gift Cards and Joes 2 Pros 2012 Kit

  - by Pinal Dave

  We love puzzles. One of the brain’s main task is to solve puzzles. Sometime puzzles are very complicated (e.g Solving Rubik Cube or Sodoku)  and sometimes the puzzles are very simple (multiplying 4 by 8 or finding the shortest route while driving). It is always to solve puzzle and it creates an experience which humans are not able to forget easily. The best puzzles are the one where one has to do multiple things to reach to the final goal. Let us do something similar today. We will have a contest where you can participate and win something interesting. Contest This contest have two parts. Question 1: What ACID stands in the Database? This question seems very easy but here is the twist. Your answer should explain minimum one of the properties of the ACID in detail. If you wish you can explain all the four properties of the ACID but to qualify you need to explain minimum of the one properties. Question 2: What is the size of the installation file of NuoDB for any specific platform. You can answer this question following format – NuoDB installation file is of size __ MB for ___ Platform. Click on the Download the Link and download your installation file for NuoDB. You can post figure out the file size from the properties of the file. We have exciting content prizes for the winners. Prizes 1) 24 Amazon Gift Cards of USD 10 for next 24 hours. One card at every hour. (Open anywhere in the world) 2) One grand winner will get Joes 2 Pros SQL Server 2012 Training Kit worth USD 249. (Open where Amazon ship books). Amazon | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5  Rules The contest will be open till July 21, 2013. All the valid comments will be hidden till the result is announced. The winners will be announced on July 24, 2013. Hint: Download NuoDB  Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• WPF Control Toolkits Comparison for LOB Apps

  In preparation for a new WPF project Ive been researching options for WPF Control toolkits.  While we want a lot of the benefits of WPF, the application is a fairly typical line of business application (LOB).  So were not focused on things like media and animations, but instead a simple, solid, intuitive, and modern user interface that allows for well architected separation of business logic and presentation layers. While WPF is mature, it hasnt lived the long life that Winforms has yet, so there is still a lot of room for third party and community control toolkits to fill the gaps between the controls that ship with the Framework.  There are two such gaps I was concerned about.  As this is an LOB app, we have needs for presenting lots of data and not surprisingly much of it is in grid format with the need for high performance, grouping, inline editing, aggregation, printing and exporting and things that weve been doing with LOB apps for a long time.  In addition we want a dashboard style for the UI in which the user can rearrange and shrink and grow tiles that house the content and functionality.  From a cost perspective, building these types of well performing controls from scratch doesnt make sense.  So I evaluated what you get from the .NET Framework along with a few different options for control toolkits.  I tried to be fairly thorough, but know that this isnt a detailed benchmarking comparison or intense evaluation.  Its just meant to be a feature set comparison to be used when thinking about building an LOB app in WPF.  I tried to list important feature differences and notes based on my experience with the trial versions and what I found in documentation and reference materials and samples.  Ive also listed the importance of the controls based on how I think they are needed in LOB apps.  There are several toolkits available, but given I dont have unlimited time, I picked just a few.  Maybe Ill add on more later.  The toolkits I compared are: Teleriks RadControls for WPF since I had heard some good things about Telerik Infragistics NetAdvantage WPF since both I and the customer have some experience with the vendors tools WPF Toolkit on codeplex since many of my colleagues have used it Blacklight codeplex project which had WPF support for the Tile View control  (with Release 4.3 WPF is not going to be supported in favor of focusing only on SilverLight controls, so I dropped that from the comparison) Click Here to Download the WPF Control Toolkits Comparison Hopefully this helps someone out there.  Feel free to post a comment on your experiences or if you think something I listed is incorrect or missing.  Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Any suggested approaches to track bugs/defects?

  - by deostroll

  What is the best way to track defect sources in tfs? We have various teams for a project like the vulnerability team, the customer, pre-sales, etc. We give a build and these teams independently test it. They do not have access to our tfs system. So they usually send in their defects via email. It will usually be send in an excel format. Our testing team takes these up and logs them into tfs. Sometimes they modify the original defect description (in excel) and add the expected/actual results. Sometimes they miss to cite the source. I am talking about managing the various sources as such. Is there a way we can add these sources into tfs, and actually link this particular source with the defects, with individual comments associated with them (saying where in the source we can find the actual material for the defect). Edit: I don't know if there is a way to manage various sources. Consider this: the vulnerability assessment team has come out with defects/suggestions. They captured it into an excel and passed that on to the testing team (in my case). The testing team takes the responsibility of elaborating the defect and logging it in tfs. Now say that the excel has come with 20 defect items. This is my source. (It answers the question where did this defect come from). So ultimately when I am looking at a bug I know from where it came from - I'll ultimately be looking at the email sent from the VA team which has the excel or the excel file itself sent by the VA team. It may be one of the 20 items in that excel. How should the tester link to this source just once? On the contrary, it does not make sense for the tester to attach the same excel 20 times (i.e. attach the same excel for the 20 defects while logging it into tfs) right? I hope you get my point.

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• How To: Spell Check InfoPath web form in SharePoint 2010

  - by Jeremy Ramos

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/JeremyRamos/archive/2013/11/07/how-to-spell-check-infopath-web-form-in-sharepoint-2010.aspxThis is a sequel to my 2011 post about How To: Spell Check InfoPath Web Form in SharePoint. This time I will share how I managed to achieve Spell Checking in SharePoint 2010. This time round, we have changed our Online Forms strategy to use Custom lists instead of Form Libraries. I thought everything will be smooth sailing as we are using all OOTB features. So, we customised a Custom list form using InfoPath and added a few Rich Text Boxes (Spell Check is a requirement for this specific project). All is good in the InfoPath client including the Spell Checker so, happy days, I published straight away.Here comes the surprises now. I browsed to my Custom List and clicked Add New Item. This launched my Form in a modal dialog format. I went to my Rich Text Boxes to check the spell checker, and voila, it's disabled!I tried hacking the FormServer.aspx and the CustomSpellCheckEntirePage.js again but the new FormServer.aspx behaves differently than of MOSS 2007's. I searched for answers in many blogs to no avail. Often ending up being linked to my old blog post. I also tried placing the spell check javascript into a Content Editor Webpart of the Item's New Form and Edit form. It is launching the Spell Check dialog but it's not spellchecking the page correctly.At this point, I decided I needed to get my project across ASAP so enough with experimentations and logged a ticket with Microsoft Premier Support.On a call with the Support Engineer, I browsed through the Custom List and to the item to demonstrate my problem. Suddenly, the Spell Check tab in the toolbar is now Enabled! Surprised? Not much, it's Microsoft!Anyway, to cut my story short, here is a summary of my solution:Navigate to your Custom ListIn the Ribbon Toolbar, navigate to List > Customize List > Form Web Parts > Content Type Forms > (Item) New Form. This will display the newifs.aspx which is the page displayed when Add New Item is clicked. This page, just like any other SharePoint page, contains webparts. In this case, we have the InfoPath Form Web Part.Add a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) on top of the InfoPath Form Web Part. (A blank CEWP would do for this example)Navigate to Page and click Stop EditingClick Add New Item again and navigate to a Rich Text box. Tadah! The Spell Check tab is now enabled!Do the same steps for the (Item) Edit Form to enable Spell Checks when editing an item.This "no code" solution discovered purely by accident!

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• The Joy Of Hex

  - by Jim Giercyk

  While working on a mainframe integration project, it occurred to me that some basic computer concepts are slipping into obscurity. For example, just about anyone can tell you that a 64-bit processor is faster than a 32-bit processer. A grade school child could tell you that a computer “speaks” in ‘1’s and ‘0’s. Some people can even tell you that there are 8 bits in a byte. However, I have found that even the most seasoned developers often can’t explain the theory behind those statements. That is not a knock on programmers; in the age of IntelliSense, what reason do we have to work with data at the bit level? Many computer theory classes treat bit-level programming as a thing of the past, no longer necessary now that storage space is plentiful. The trouble with that mindset is that the world is full of legacy systems that run programs written in the 1970’s.  Today our jobs require us to extract data from those systems, regardless of the format, and that often involves low-level programming. Because it seems knowledge of the low-level concepts is waning in recent times, I thought a review would be in order.       CHARACTER: See Spot Run HEX: 53 65 65 20 53 70 6F 74 20 52 75 6E DECIMAL: 83 101 101 32 83 112 111 116 32 82 117 110 BINARY: 01010011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01010011 01110000 01101111 01110100 00100000 01010010 01110101 01101110 In this example, I have broken down the words “See Spot Run” to a level computers can understand – machine language.     CHARACTER:  The character level is what is rendered by the computer.  A “Character Set” or “Code Page” contains 256 characters, both printable and unprintable.  Each character represents 1 BYTE of data.  For example, the character string “See Spot Run” is 12 Bytes long, exclusive of the quotation marks.  Remember, a SPACE is an unprintable character, but it still requires a byte.  In the example I have used the default Windows character set, ASCII, which you can see here:  http://www.asciitable.com/ HEX:  Hex is short for hexadecimal, or Base 16.  Humans are comfortable thinking in base ten, perhaps because they have 10 fingers and 10 toes; fingers and toes are called digits, so it’s not much of a stretch.  Computers think in Base 16, with numeric values ranging from zero to fifteen, or 0 – F.  Each decimal place has a possible 16 values as opposed to a possible 10 values in base 10.  Therefore, the number 10 in Hex is equal to the number 16 in Decimal.  DECIMAL:  The Decimal conversion is strictly for us humans to use for calculations and conversions.  It is much easier for us humans to calculate that [30 – 10 = 20] in decimal than it is for us to calculate [1E – A = 14] in Hex.  In the old days, an error in a program could be found by determining the displacement from the entry point of a module.  Since those values were dumped from the computers head, they were in hex. A programmer needed to convert them to decimal, do the equation and convert back to hex.  This gets into relative and absolute addressing, a topic for another day.  BINARY:  Binary, or machine code, is where any value can be expressed in 1s and 0s.  It is really Base 2, because each decimal place can have a possibility of only 2 characters, a 1 or a 0.  In Binary, the number 10 is equal to the number 2 in decimal. Why only 1s and 0s?  Very simply, computers are made up of lots and lots of transistors which at any given moment can be ON ( 1 ) or OFF ( 0 ).  Each transistor is a bit, and the order that the transistors fire (or not fire) is what distinguishes one value from  another in the computers head (or CPU).  Consider 32 bit vs 64 bit processing…..a 64 bit processor has the capability to read 64 transistors at a time.  A 32 bit processor can only read half as many at a time, so in theory the 64 bit processor should be much faster.  There are many more factors involved in CPU performance, but that is the fundamental difference.    DECIMAL HEX BINARY 0 0 0000 1 1 0001 2 2 0010 3 3 0011 4 4 0100 5 5 0101 6 6 0110 7 7 0111 8 8 1000 9 9 1001 10 A 1010 11 B 1011 12 C 1100 13 D 1101 14 E 1110 15 F 1111   Remember that each character is a BYTE, there are 2 HEX characters in a byte (called nibbles) and 8 BITS in a byte.  I hope you enjoyed reading about the theory of data processing.  This is just a high-level explanation, and there is much more to be learned.  It is safe to say that, no matter how advanced our programming languages and visual studios become, they are nothing more than a way to interpret bits and bytes.  There is nothing like the joy of hex to get the mind racing.

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• Memory Glutton

  - by AreYouSerious

  I have to admit that I can't get enough storage. I have hard drives just sitting around in case I need to move somthing, or I'm going to a friends and either they want something I have or I want something they might have. What I'm going to talk about today is cost effective memory for devices. I don't know how this particualr device will work in a camera, as That's not what I use in my camera, in fact I don't have a camera that doesn't either use SD, or the old compact flash card, that's not so compact anymore. There's this thing that uses two micro sd cards to double the capacity of your memory, and it costs about 4 bucks, without the Micro SD card. I have had one for about a year and was going to throw it away because I couldn't get it to work with my computer, or with my Sony Reader. However I found out by one last ditch effort that this thing works beautifully with my Sony PSP. there is no software to speak of associated with this thing, you simply put in two SD cards of the same size... (if you put in two different sizes it will still work, you'll only double the smallest cards size though) and format through the psp. Viola you know have a 29 GB memory card for your PSP. why is this important ? well for starters you can carry more music and more videos. Second if you have gone the way of the hacker.... you can store more games on your card... There are just a few things you have to note.... I speak from experience... you have to use the usb connection to the PSP to do any file moving, as I said previously said card doesn't play well with my computers or card readers... I not saying it won't work at all, just hasn't work with anything I own. Second. If for some reason you try to Hack/crack your PSP don't attempt to delete a game from the psp, use the usb file browser to remove games. if you delete from the PSP you are likely to have to move all your files off, reformat and start again... just a couple things I have noticed... if I had done something like that.   anyway, Here's a link.... http://www.photofast-adapter.com/  and if you want to buy one, get it off ebay, I've seen them as low as $1.99

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• Converting LINQ to Twitter to Twitter API v1.1

  - by Joe Mayo

  Twitter recently updated their API to v1.1 (Current status: API v1.1). Naturally, LINQ to Twitter  needed to be updated too. This blog post outlines the changes made to LINQ to Twitter during this conversion and highlights important features that LINQ to Twitter developers will want to know. Overall Impact Generally speaking, Twitter API v1.1 is semantically very much the same as it’s predecessor. The base URL changed and so did a few resource segments, but the resources themselves are still intact. The good news is that LINQ to Twitter has always shielded the developer from this plumbing, so the entities, types, and filters didn’t change much at all.  The following sections describe what did  change. Authentication In Twitter API v1.0 authentication was not required for some resources, such as user timelines and search. However, that’s all changed because *all* queries must be authenticated in Twitter API v1.1. LINQ to Twitter has various types of authorizers you can use, supporting whatever OAuth options are available via Twitter.  You can see the LINQ to Twitter documentation, Securing Your Applications, for more info on OAuth support. The New Search One of the larger changes to the API was Search. To be more specific, the Search entity now contains a List<Status>, named Statuses, to hold results.  Additionally, any meta-data associated with the search is now in a property named SearchMetaData. The change to the Search entity and responses is the big change, but the good news is that your Search query syntax doesn’t change. Different Rate Limits The issue of rate limits itself is contentious, but this discussion is focused on the coding experience and I’ll leave the politics to those who prefer to engage in that activity. What’s important here is that both headers and resources have changed. You should review Twitter’s Rate Limit documentation to understand what the changes mean.  A quick explanation is that rate limits are applied individually to each resource in 15 minute time intervals. In LINQ to Twitter these changes surface on the Help entity, via HelpType.RateLimits. The RateLimits query has a Resources filter where you can specify a comma-separated list of categories to return rate limit info for.  The results materialize in the RateLimits dictionary, keyed on category. The Help entity also has a RateLimitsAuthorizationContext, holding the Access Token for the user performing queries – and to whom the rate limits apply. In addition to the new RateLimits query, there are new RateLimit headers that appear in the query response, whose HTTP header name is of the form X-Rate-Limit… which is different from the previous header name. LINQ to Twitter surfaces these headers via the existing properties of the TwitterContext instance. For anyone who retrieved rate limit information via the Headers property of TwitterContext, you should be aware of the new header names.  I haven’t done anything with Feature rate limit properties yet, but they appear to no longer be available – this will require more follow-up. Error Handling Twitter API v1.1 has a new format for Error Codes & Responses. LINQ to Twitter wraps these messages in the TwitterQueryException, which has been updated appropriately. The Message property of TwitterQueryException now reflects the Twitter error message, when available. There’s also a new ErrorCode that’s populated with the message error code. Parameters Most parameters stayed the same, but one of interest is Include Entities (different from LINQ to Twitter data object entities). Entities are metadata hanging off tweets, that provide start/end position in the tweet and other information for mentions, urls, hash tags, and media. Entities used to not be included unless you specified you wanted them. Now, in v1.1, entities are included by default for all APIs that return a Status.  If you were always setting IncludeEntities to true, then you won’t see a change. However, be aware that you’ll now be receiving additional data in your response from Twitter, which will explain a sudden increase in bandwidth utilization. This might or might not  matter to you  depending on the requirements of your application, but you should be aware of it. Everything Else There might be small changes here and there that I haven’t mentioned, but these were the ones you should be most aware of.  Streams didn’t change, but Twitter will be deprecating username/password authentication on public streams, in favor of OAuth, so you’ll be seeing me make that change some time in the future.  Also, Twitter will continue to evolve the API and you can expect that LINQ to Twitter will change accordingly. Summary The big changes to Twitter API were Authentication, Search, Rate Limits, and Error Handling. All API calls must be authenticated. You’ll need to change your code to read Search results differently, but the query is much the same as you use now. There’s a new RateLimits API, one of the Help queries.  Also, the new error messages are integrated into TwitterQueryException. Besides these changes, I expect  most others to be small or affect a smaller percentage of developers.  You can get the latest version of LINQ to Twitter from NuGet or visit the LINQ to Twitter download page at CodePlex.com.   @JoeMayo

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