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• Non-Dom Element Event Binding with jQuery

  - by Rick Strahl

  Yesterday I had a short discussion with Dave Reed on Twitter regarding setting up fake ‘events’ on objects that are hookable. jQuery makes it real easy to bind events on DOM elements and with a little bit of extra work (that I didn’t know about) you can also set up binding to non-DOM element ‘event’ bindings. Assume for a second that you have a simple JavaScript object like this: var item = { sku: "wwhelp" , foo: function() { alert('orginal foo function'); } }; and you want to be notified when the foo function is called. You can use jQuery to bind the handler like this: $(item).bind("foo", function () { alert('foo Hook called'); } ); Binding alone won’t actually cause the handler to be triggered so when you call: item.foo(); you only get the ‘original’ message. In order to fire both the original handler and the bound event hook you have to use the .trigger() function: $(item).trigger("foo"); Now if you do the following complete sequence: var item = { sku: "wwhelp" , foo: function() { alert('orginal foo function'); } }; $(item).bind("foo", function () { alert('foo hook called'); } ); $(item).trigger("foo"); You’ll see the ‘hook’ message first followed by the ‘original’ message fired in succession. In other words, using this mechanism you can hook standard object functions and chain events to them in a way similar to the way you can do with DOM elements. The main difference is that the ‘event’ has to be explicitly triggered in order for this to happen rather than just calling the method directly. .trigger() relies on some internal logic that checks for event bindings on the object (attached via an expando property) which .trigger() searches for in its bound event list. Once the ‘event’ is found it’s called prior to execution of the original function. This is pretty useful as it allows you to create standard JavaScript objects that can act as event handlers and are effectively hookable without having to explicitly override event definitions with JavaScript function handlers. You get all the benefits of jQuery’s event methods including the ability to hook up multiple events to the same handler function and the ability to uniquely identify each specific event instance with post fix string names (ie. .bind("MyEvent.MyName") and .unbind("MyEvent.MyName") to bind MyEvent). Watch out for an .unbind() Bug Note that there appears to be a bug with .unbind() in jQuery that doesn’t reliably unbind an event and results in a elem.removeEventListener is not a function error. The following code demonstrates: var item = { sku: "wwhelp", foo: function () { alert('orginal foo function'); } }; $(item).bind("foo.first", function () { alert('foo hook called'); }); $(item).bind("foo.second", function () { alert('foo hook2 called'); }); $(item).trigger("foo"); setTimeout(function () { $(item).unbind("foo"); // $(item).unbind("foo.first"); // $(item).unbind("foo.second"); $(item).trigger("foo"); }, 3000); The setTimeout call delays the unbinding and is supposed to remove the event binding on the foo function. It fails both with the foo only value (both if assigned only as “foo” or “foo.first/second” as well as when removing both of the postfixed event handlers explicitly. Oddly the following that removes only one of the two handlers works: setTimeout(function () { //$(item).unbind("foo"); $(item).unbind("foo.first"); // $(item).unbind("foo.second"); $(item).trigger("foo"); }, 3000); this actually works which is weird as the code in unbind tries to unbind using a DOM method that doesn’t exist. <shrug> A partial workaround for unbinding all ‘foo’ events is the following: setTimeout(function () { $.event.special.foo = { teardown: function () { alert('teardown'); return true; } }; $(item).unbind("foo"); $(item).trigger("foo"); }, 3000); which is a bit cryptic to say the least but it seems to work more reliably. I can’t take credit for any of this – thanks to Dave Reed and Damien Edwards who pointed out some of these behaviors. I didn’t find any good descriptions of the process so thought it’d be good to write it down here. Hope some of you find this helpful.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery  

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• Using C# 4.0’s DynamicObject as a Stored Procedure Wrapper

  - by EltonStoneman

  [Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman] Overview Ignoring the fashion, I still make a lot of use of DALs – typically when inheriting a codebase with an established database schema which is full of tried and trusted stored procedures. In the DAL a collection of base classes have all the scaffolding, so the usual pattern is to create a wrapper class for each stored procedure, giving typesafe access to parameter values and output. DAL calls then looks like instantiate wrapper-populate parameters-execute call:       using (var sp = new uspGetManagerEmployees())     {         sp.ManagerID = 16;         using (var reader = sp.Execute())         {             //map entities from the output         }     }   Or rolling it all into a fluent DAL call – which is nicer to read and implicitly disposes the resources:   This is fine, the wrapper classes are very simple to handwrite or generate. But as the codebase grows, you end up with a proliferation of very small wrapper classes: The wrappers don't add much other than encapsulating the stored procedure call and giving you typesafety for the parameters. With the dynamic extension in .NET 4.0 you have the option to build a single wrapper class, and get rid of the one-to-one stored procedure to wrapper class mapping. In the dynamic version, the call looks like this:       dynamic getUser = new DynamicSqlStoredProcedure("uspGetManagerEmployees", Database.AdventureWorks);     getUser.ManagerID = 16;       var employees = Fluently.Load<List<Employee>>()                             .With<EmployeeMap>()                             .From(getUser);   The important difference is that the ManagerId property doesn't exist in the DynamicSqlStoredProcedure class. Declaring the getUser object with the dynamic keyword allows you to dynamically add properties, and the DynamicSqlStoredProcedure class intercepts when properties are added and builds them as stored procedure parameters. When getUser.ManagerId = 16 is executed, the base class adds a parameter call (using the convention that parameter name is the property name prefixed by "@"), specifying the correct SQL Server data type (mapping it from the type of the value the property is set to), and setting the parameter value. Code Sample This is worked through in a sample project on github – Dynamic Stored Procedure Sample – which also includes a static version of the wrapper for comparison. (I'll upload this to the MSDN Code Gallery once my account has been resurrected). Points worth noting are: DynamicSP.Data – database-independent DAL that has all the data plumbing code. DynamicSP.Data.SqlServer – SQL Server DAL, thin layer on top of the generic DAL which adds SQL Server specific classes. Includes the DynamicSqlStoredProcedure base class. DynamicSqlStoredProcedure.TrySetMember. Invoked when a dynamic member is added. Assumes the property is a parameter named after the SP parameter name and infers the SqlDbType from the framework type. Adds a parameter to the internal stored procedure wrapper and sets its value. uspGetManagerEmployees – the static version of the wrapper. uspGetManagerEmployeesTest – test fixture which shows usage of the static and dynamic stored procedure wrappers. The sample uses stored procedures from the AdventureWorks database in the SQL Server 2008 Sample Databases. Discussion For this scenario, the dynamic option is very favourable. Assuming your DAL is itself wrapped by a higher layer, the stored procedure wrapper classes have very little reuse. Even if you're codegening the classes and test fixtures, it's still additional effort for very little value. The main consideration with dynamic classes is that the compiler ignores all the members you use, and evaluation only happens at runtime. In this case where scope is strictly limited that's not an issue – but you're relying on automated tests rather than the compiler to find errors, but that should just encourage better test coverage. Also you can codegen the dynamic calls at a higher level. Performance may be a consideration, as there is a first-time-use overhead when the dynamic members of an object are bound. For a single run, the dynamic wrapper took 0.2 seconds longer than the static wrapper. The framework does a good job of caching the effort though, so for 1,000 calls the dynamc version still only takes 0.2 seconds longer than the static: You don't get IntelliSense on dynamic objects, even for the declared members of the base class, and if you've been using class names as keys for configuration settings, you'll lose that option if you move to dynamics. The approach may make code more difficult to read, as you can't navigate through dynamic members, but you do still get full debugging support.     var employees = Fluently.Load<List<Employee>>()                             .With<EmployeeMap>()                             .From<uspGetManagerEmployees>                             (                                 i => i.ManagerID = 16,                                 x => x.Execute()                             );

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• C# Java Objective-C need expert advices

  - by Kevino

  Which platform as the edge today in 2012 with the rise of cloud computing, mobile development and the revolution of HTML5/Javascript between J2EE, .Net framework and IOS Objective-C ??? I want to start learning 1 language between Java, C# and Objective-C and get back into programming after 14 years and I don't know which to choose I need expert advices... I already know a little C++ and I remember my concepts in example pointers arithmetic, class etc so I tend to prefer learning C# and Objective-C but I've been told by some experienced programmers that Windows 8 could flop and .Net could be going away slowly since C++ and Html5/Javascript could be king in mobile is that true ? and that C# is more advanced compared to Java with Linq/Lambda... but not truly as portable if we consider android, etc but Java as a lot going for him too Scala, Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, JPython etc etc so I am lost Please help me, and don't close this right away I really need help and expert advices thanks you very much ANSWER : ElYusubov : thanks for everything please continue with the answers/explanations I just did some native C++ in dos mode in 1998 before Cli and .Net I don't know the STL,Templates, Win32 or COM but I remember a little the concept of memory management and oop etc I already played around a little with C# 1.0 in 2002 but things changed a lot with linq and lambda... I am here because I talked with some experienced programmers and authors of some the best selling programming books like apress wrox and deitel and they told me a few things are likely to happen like .Net could be on his way out because of Html5/Javascript combo could kill xaml and C++ native apps on mobile dev will outperform them by a lot... Secondly ios and android are getting so popular that mobile dev is the future so Objective-C is very hard to ignore so why get tied down in Windows long term (.Net) compared to Java (android)... but again android is very fragmented, they also said Windows 8 RT will give you access to only a small part of the .Net framework... so that's what they think so I don't know which direction to choose I wanted to learn C# & .Net but what if it die off or Windows 8 flop Windows Phone marketshare really can't compare to ios... so I'll be stuck that's why I worry is Java safer long term or more versatile if you want 'cause of the support for android ??

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• Feedback on "market manipulation", a peripheral game mechanic for a satirical MMO

  - by BerndBrot

  This question asks for feedback on a specific game-mechanic. Since there is not one right feedback on a game mechanic, I tried to provide enough context and guidelines to still make it possible for users to rate answers and to accept an answer as the best answer (following these criteria from Writer.SE's meta website). Please comment if you have any suggestions on how I could improve the question in that regard. So, let's begin with the game itself and some of its elements which are relevant for this question. Context I'm working on a satirical, text-based multiplayer adventure and role-playing game set in modern-day London. The game resolves around the concept of sin and features a myriad of (venomous) allusions to all the things that go wrong in this world. Players can choose between character classes like bullshit artist (consultant), bankster, lawyer, mobster, celebrity, politician, etc. In order to complete the game, the player has to live so sinfully with regard to any of the seven deadly sins that a demon is willing to offer them a contract of sponsorship. On their quest to live a sinful live, characters explore more and more locations of modern-day London (on a GoogleMap), fight "monsters" like insurance sales agents or Jehovah's Witnesses, and complete quests, like building a PowerPoint presentation out of marketing buzz words or keeping up a number of substance abuse effects in order to progress on the gluttony path. Battles are turn based with both combatants having a deck of cards, with which they try to make their enemy give in to temptations of all sorts. Tempted enemies sometimes become contacts (an item drop mechanic), which can be exploited for various benefits, depending on their area of influence (finance, underworld, bureaucracy, etc.), level of influence, and kind of sway that the player has over them (bribed, seduced, threatened, etc.) Once a contract has been exploited, the player loses that contact. Most actions require turns. Turns are limited, but refill each day. Criteria A number of peripheral game mechanics are supposed to represent real world abuses and mischief in a humorous way integrate real world data and events to strengthen the feeling of relevance of the game's humor with regard to real world problems add fun ways of interacting with other players add ways for players to express themselves through game-play Market manipulation is one such peripheral game mechanic and should fulfill all of these goals. Market manipulation This is my initial design of the mechanic: Players can enter the London Stock Exchange (LSE) (without paying a turn) LSE displays the stock prices of a number of companies in industries like weapons or tobacco as well as some derivatives based on wheat and corn. The stock prices are calculated based on the actual stock prices of these companies and derivatives (in real time) any market manipulations that were conducted by the players any market corrections of the system Players can buy and sell shares with cash, a resource in the game, at current in-game market value (without paying a turn). Players can manipulate the market, i.e. let the price of a share either rise or fall, by some amount, over a certain period of time. Manipulating the market requires 1 turn A contact in the financial sector (see above). The higher the level of influence of the contact, the stronger the effect of the manipulation on the stock price, and/or the shorter it takes for the manipulation to manifest itself. Market manipulation also adds a crime to the player's record. (There are a multitude of ways to take care of that, but it is still another "cost" of market manipulations.) The system continuously corrects market manipulations by letting the in-game prices converge towards their real world counterparts at a rate of 2% of the difference between the two per hour. Because of this market correction mechanism, pushing up prices (and screwing down prices) becomes increasingly difficult the higher (lower) the price already is. Whenever food prices reach a certain level, in-game stories are posted about hunger catastrophes happening somewhere far, far away (maybe with links to real world news stories). Whenever a player sells a certain number of shares with a sufficiently high margin, they are mentioned in that day's in-game financial news. Since the number of stock options is very limited, players will inevitably collide in their efforts to manipulate the market in their favor. Hopefully, it will also be a fun side-arena for guilds and covenants to fight each other. Question(s) What do you think of this mechanism given the criteria for peripheral game mechanics that I specified for my game? Do you have any ideas how the mechanic could be improved with regard to these criteria (or otherwise)? Could it be improved to allow for more expressive game-play, or involve an allusion to some other real world madness (like short selling, leveraging, or some other banking magic)? Are there any game-theoretic problems with this mechanic, like maybe certain dominant individual strategies that, collectively, lead to every player profiting and thus eliminating the idea of market manipulation PVP? Also, if you like (or dislike) this question, feel free to participate in the discussion on GDSE meta: "Should we be more lax with regard to SE's question/answer format to make game design questions possible?"

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• SQL SERVER – Disabled Index and Update Statistics

  - by pinaldave

  When we try to update the statistics, it throws an error as if the clustered index is disabled. Now let us enable the clustered index only and attempt to update the statistics of the table right after that. Have you ever come across the situation where a conversation never gets over and it continues even though original point of discussion has passed. I am facing the same situation in the case of Disabled Index. Here is the link to original conversations. SQL SERVER – Disable Clustered Index and Data Insert – Reader had a issue here with Disabled Index SQL SERVER – Understanding ALTER INDEX ALL REBUILD with Disabled Clustered Index – Reader asked the effect of Rebuilding Indexes The same reader asked me today – “I understood what the disabled indexes do; what is their effect on statistics. Is it true that even though indexes are disabled, they continue updating the statistics?“ The answer is very interesting: If you have disabled clustered index, you will be not able to update the statistics at all for any index. If you have enabled clustered index and disabled non clustered index when you update the statistics of the table, it automatically updates the statistics of the ALL (disabled and enabled – both) the indexes on the table. If you are not satisfied with the answer, let us go over a simple example. I have written necessary comments in the code itself to have a clear idea. USE tempdb GO -- Drop Table if Exists IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.objects WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID(N'[dbo].[TableName]') AND type IN (N'U')) DROP TABLE [dbo].[TableName] GO -- Create Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TableName]( [ID] [int] NOT NULL, [FirstCol] [varchar](50) NULL ) GO -- Insert Some data INSERT INTO TableName SELECT 1, 'First' UNION ALL SELECT 2, 'Second' UNION ALL SELECT 3, 'Third' UNION ALL SELECT 4, 'Fourth' UNION ALL SELECT 5, 'Five' GO -- Create Clustered Index ALTER TABLE [TableName] ADD CONSTRAINT [PK_TableName] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([ID] ASC) GO -- Create Nonclustered Index CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_NonClustered_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] ([FirstCol] ASC) GO -- Check that all the indexes are enabled SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), Name, type_desc, is_disabled FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'TableName' GO Now let us update the statistics of the table and check the statistics update date. -- Update the stats of table UPDATE STATISTICS TableName WITH FULLSCAN GO -- Check Statistics Last Updated Datetime SELECT name AS index_name, STATS_DATE(OBJECT_ID, index_id) AS StatsUpdated FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('TableName') GO Now let us disable the indexes and check if they are disabled using sys.indexes. -- Disable Indexes -- Disable Nonclustered Index ALTER INDEX [IX_NonClustered_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] DISABLE GO -- Disable Clustered Index ALTER INDEX [PK_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] DISABLE GO -- Check that all the indexes are disabled SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), Name, type_desc, is_disabled FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'TableName' GO Let us try to update the statistics of the table. -- Update the stats of table UPDATE STATISTICS TableName WITH FULLSCAN GO /* -- Above operation should thrown following error Msg 1974, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Cannot perform the specified operation on table 'TableName' because its clustered index 'PK_TableName' is disabled. */ When we try to update the statistics it throws an error as it clustered index is disabled. Now let us enable the clustered index only and attempt to update the statistics of the table right after that. -- Now let us rebuild clustered index only ALTER INDEX [PK_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] REBUILD GO -- Check that all the indexes status SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), Name, type_desc, is_disabled FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'TableName' GO -- Check Statistics Last Updated Datetime SELECT name AS index_name, STATS_DATE(OBJECT_ID, index_id) AS StatsUpdated FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('TableName') GO -- Update the stats of table UPDATE STATISTICS TableName WITH FULLSCAN GO -- Check Statistics Last Updated Datetime SELECT name AS index_name, STATS_DATE(OBJECT_ID, index_id) AS StatsUpdated FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('TableName') GO We can clearly see that even though the nonclustered index is disabled it is also updated. If you do not need a nonclustered index, I suggest you to drop it as keeping them disabled is an overhead on your system. This is because every time the statistics are updated for system all the statistics for disabled indexesare also updated. -- Clean up DROP TABLE [TableName] GO The complete script is given below for easy reference. USE tempdb GO -- Drop Table if Exists IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.objects WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID(N'[dbo].[TableName]') AND type IN (N'U')) DROP TABLE [dbo].[TableName] GO -- Create Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TableName]( [ID] [int] NOT NULL, [FirstCol] [varchar](50) NULL ) GO -- Insert Some data INSERT INTO TableName SELECT 1, 'First' UNION ALL SELECT 2, 'Second' UNION ALL SELECT 3, 'Third' UNION ALL SELECT 4, 'Fourth' UNION ALL SELECT 5, 'Five' GO -- Create Clustered Index ALTER TABLE [TableName] ADD CONSTRAINT [PK_TableName] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([ID] ASC) GO -- Create Nonclustered Index CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_NonClustered_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] ([FirstCol] ASC) GO -- Check that all the indexes are enabled SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), Name, type_desc, is_disabled FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'TableName' GO -- Update the stats of table UPDATE STATISTICS TableName WITH FULLSCAN GO -- Check Statistics Last Updated Datetime SELECT name AS index_name, STATS_DATE(OBJECT_ID, index_id) AS StatsUpdated FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('TableName') GO -- Disable Indexes -- Disable Nonclustered Index ALTER INDEX [IX_NonClustered_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] DISABLE GO -- Disable Clustered Index ALTER INDEX [PK_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] DISABLE GO -- Check that all the indexes are disabled SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), Name, type_desc, is_disabled FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'TableName' GO -- Update the stats of table UPDATE STATISTICS TableName WITH FULLSCAN GO /* -- Above operation should thrown following error Msg 1974, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Cannot perform the specified operation on table 'TableName' because its clustered index 'PK_TableName' is disabled. */ -- Now let us rebuild clustered index only ALTER INDEX [PK_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] REBUILD GO -- Check that all the indexes status SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), Name, type_desc, is_disabled FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'TableName' GO -- Check Statistics Last Updated Datetime SELECT name AS index_name, STATS_DATE(OBJECT_ID, index_id) AS StatsUpdated FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('TableName') GO -- Update the stats of table UPDATE STATISTICS TableName WITH FULLSCAN GO -- Check Statistics Last Updated Datetime SELECT name AS index_name, STATS_DATE(OBJECT_ID, index_id) AS StatsUpdated FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('TableName') GO -- Clean up DROP TABLE [TableName] GO Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Optimization, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Statistics

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• Emperors don’t come cheap

  - by RoyOsherove

  “Sorry” I replied in a polite email. “Maybe next year, when budgets allow for this”. It was addressed to the organizer of TechEd US, which was to be in New Orleans this year. Man, I would have loved to be in new Orleans this year, but, I guess these guys only understand one language – and I won’t be their puppy any more. You see, they wouldn’t pay for my business class flight to TechEd from Israel. Me– the great emperor of unit testing?! travelling coach for 12 hours? No thanks. I have better things to do! And this is after last year, they only invited me to have one talk throughout the conference. one talk. After the year before I was on the top ten speakers list of that conference?! No sir! They did give it a good try, though. They said they can pay up to 4,000$ per flight cost for me, and that they only found a flight at about 5460$. “Unacceptable” I told them when they asked if I would pay the difference. And that was that. Goodbye teched. As I closed up gmail, wondering if I should have told them that I found a similar flight at 4,300$, and came back to the living room, I told my wife, all full of myself “I just canceled teched”. “Oh good” she said. Not even looking at me as she tried to feed our one year old. “did you tell them you need to cancel because you already have another flight that month and your wife won’t let you travel more than once a month anymore?” “Yeah right” I said. Just what I need – for people to realize I’m totally whipped. I still need an ounce of dignity. “I told those bastards that if they want me they have to make an effort. People like me don’t come cheap, you know?” “You’re an idiot for not telling them the real reason.” She handed me the baby.  “What if they found a flight that matches their budget? How would you have gotten away from that engagement?” . She put on “Lost” on the media center and sat next to me. I did not reply.

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• Commercial Drupal Modules & Themes

  - by Ravish

  A discussion at Drupal.org forums prompted me to give my input about commercial ecosystem around Open Source Content Management Systems. WordPress and Joomla have been growing rapidly since past few years. But, growth rate of Drupal seems to be almost flat. Despite being the most powerful CMS around, Drupal is still not being adopted by masses. Many people will argue that Drupal is not targeted towards masses, but developers. I agree, Drupal is more of a development platform than a consumer CMS. Drupal is ‘many things to many people’, and I can build almost any type of website with it. Drupal is being used for building blogs, corporate websites, Intranet portals, social networking and even a project management system. Looking at the wide array of Drupal implementations, it deserves to be the most widely adopted CMS. I believe there are few challenges that Drupal community needs to overcome. To understand these challenges, I surveyed some webmasters who use Joomla or WordPress but not Drupal. I asked them why they don’t want to use Drupal, following are the responses I got from them: Drupal is too complicated, takes time to learn. Drupal is great, but its admin panel is overwhelming. I couldn’t find any nice themes for Drupal. There is no WYSIWYG editor in Drupal. Most Drupal modules do not work out of the box. There aren’t enough modules like Ubercart which provides any out of the box functionality. I tried modules like CCK, Views and Panels. After wasting several hours struggling with them, I decided to give up on Drupal. I don’t use Drupal because of pushbutton and Garland theme. I had hard time trying to customize Garland and it messed up the whole layout. There are no premium modules and themes for Drupal. Joomla has tons of awesome themes and modules. I don’t want a million hacks like CCK, Views, Tokens, Pathauto, ImageCache and CTools just to run a simple website. Most of the complaints from users are related to the learning and development curve involved with Drupal, and the lack of ecosystem. While most of the problems will be gone in Drupal 7, ecosystem is something that needs to be built by the Drupal community. Drupal distributions are a great step forward. There are few awesome Drupal distributions available like Open Publish, Open Atrium and Drupal Commons. I predict, there will be a wave of many powerful Drupal distributions after Drupal 7 release. Many of them will be user-friendly and commercial supported. Following is my post at Drupal.org forums: Quote from: http://drupal.org/node/863776#comment-3313836 Brian Gardner (StudioPress) and Woo Themes launched premium WordPress themes in 2007, the developer community did not accept it at first. Moreover, they were not even GPL licensed. There was an outcry in WordPress community against them. Following that, most premium theme providers switched to GPL licensing. Despite controversies, users voted for premium theme and plugins by buying them. Inspired by their success, hundreds of other developers started to sell premium themes and plugins. It is now the acceptable and in fact most popular business model among WordPress community. Matt Mullenweg once told me, they would not support premium themes. If he supported, developers would no more give out free GPL themes & plugins. He pointed me towards Joomla, there were hardly any nice free themes & modules available. Now two years forward, premium products are not just accepted but embraced by the WordPress community – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/commercial/ The quality and number of themes & modules has increased, even the free ones. This also helped to boost the adoption and ecosystem of WordPress. Today, state of Drupal is like WordPress was in 2007. There are hardly any out of the box solutions available for Drupal. Ubercart, Open Publish and Open Atrium are the only ones I can think of. Many of the popular Drupal modules are patches and hole-fillers. Thankfully, these hole-filler modules are going to be in Drupal 7 core. Drupal 7 and distributions will spawn a new array of solutions built upon Drupal. Soon, we will have more like Ubercarts and Open Atriums. If commercial solutions can help fuel this ecosystem and growth, Drupal community will accept them eventually. This debate will not stop your customers from buying your product. If your product is awesome, they will vote for you by buying your product.

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• June Oracle Technology Network NEW Member Benefits - books books and more books!!!

  - by Cassandra Clark

  As we mentioned a few posts ago we are working to bring Oracle Technology Network members NEW benefits each month. Listed below are several discounts on technology books brought to you by Apress, Pearson, CRC Press and Packt Publishing. Happy reading!!! Apress Offers - Get 50% off the eBook below using promo code ORACLEJUNEJCCF. Pro ODP.NET for Oracle Database 11g By Edmund T. Zehoo This book is a comprehensive and easy-to-understand guide for using the Oracle Data Provider (ODP) version 11g on the .NET Framework. It also outlines the core GoF (Gang of Four) design patterns and coding techniques employed to build and deploy high-impact mission-critical applications using advanced Oracle database features through the ODP.NET provider. Pearson Offers - Get 35% off all titles listed below using code OTNMEMBER. SOA Design Patterns | Thomas Earl | ISBN: 0136135161 In cooperation with experts and practitioners throughout the SOA community, best-selling author Thomas Erl brings together the de facto catalog of design patterns for SOA and service-orientation. Oracle Performance Survival Guide | Guy Harrison | ISBN: 9780137011957 The fast, complete, start-to-finish guide to optimizing Oracle performance. Core JavaServer Faces, Third Edition | David Geary and Cay S. Horstmann | ISBN: 9780137012893 Provides everything you need to master the powerful and time-saving features of JSF 2.0? Solaris Security Essentials | ISBN: 9780137012336 A superb guide to deploying and managing secure computer environments.? Effective C#, Second Edition | Bill Wagner | ISBN: 9780321658708 Respected .NET expert Bill Wagner identifies fifty ways you can leverage the full power of the C# 4.0 language to express your designs concisely and clearly. CRC Press Offers - Use 813DA to get 20% off this the title below. Secure and Resilient Software Development This book illustrates all phases of the secure software development life cycle. It details quality software development strategies that stress resilience requirements with precise, actionable, and ground-level inputs. Packt Publishing Offers - Use the promo code "Java35June", to save 35% off of each eBook mentioned below. JSF 2.0 Cookbook By Anghel Leonard ISBN: 978-1-847199-52-2 Packed with fast, practical solutions and techniques for JavaServer Faces developers who want to push past the JSF basics. JavaFX 1.2 Application Development Cookbook By Vladimir Vivien ISBN: 978-1-847198-94-5 Fast, practical solutions and techniques for building powerful, responsive Rich Internet Applications in JavaFX.

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• Windows Phone 7 Design using Expression Blend - Resources

  - by Nikita Polyakov

  I’ve been doing a series of talks across Florida regarding Windows Phone 7 Design using Microsoft Expression Blend 4. I discuss the WP7 phone and application experience; show how to use Expression Blend toolset to effectively design such apps. Next presentation is on 5/4/2010 at 6:30PM EST will be a webcast format over LiveMeeting at Ft. Lauderdale Online group. Registration and the LiveMeeting link are both here: http://www.fladotnet.com/Reg.aspx?EventID=459 [I will post a link if it’s recorded]   Here are the resources from my presentations: The Biggest source is the Windows Phone UI and Design Language video from MIX10 Windows Phone 7 Design Guide as it’s found on the WP7 Dev Home Page Study The Silverlight Mobile Tutorials on official Silverlight website I will be blogging a separate entry for a new demo app that will showcase the elements I presented. I suggest you actually watch all of the MIX videos about SL and Design as great primer to get you thinking the WP7 way.   A lot happening with WP7Dev and it’s just the beginning! So watch these Twitter accounts and blogs: @Ckindel - Charlie Kindel - WP7 Dev Head http://blogs.msdn.com/ckindel @WP7Dev - Official Dev Twitter @WP7 - Official WP7 Twitter Peter Torr - http://blogs.msdn.com/ptorr Mike Harsh - http://blogs.msdn.com/mharsh Shawn Oster - http://www.shawnoster.com   Other worthwhile mention my local friends speaking and blogging about Windows Phone 7: Bill Reiss is doing great presentations on Building games with XNA for Windows Phone 7. Be on the lookout for those around Florida. Bill is a Silverlight MVP and has a legacy of XNA and Silverlight games, see his site. Kevin Wolf aka ByteMaster he is a Device Application Developer MVP with tremendous experience building mobile applications. He has developed WinMo-GF a multi-platform gaming framework. Get these tools and get creating! You will need the following components installed in this order: Expression Blend 4 Beta Windows Phone Developer Tools Microsoft Expression Blend Add-in Preview for Windows Phone Microsoft Expression Blend SDK Preview for Windows Phone Want more training? Don’t forget that Channel 9 has complete walkthroughs of their WP7 Training Kit posted online. PS: To continue with all this design talk check out Microsoft .toolbox “Learn to create Silverlight applications using Expression Studio and to apply fundamental design principles.” A great website with a lot of design tutorials set up as a wonderful full course on design all for free, including a great forum community and neat little avatars you can build yourself.

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• Oracle CRM Day Barcelona

  - by Oracle Aplicaciones

  Normal 0 21 false false false ES X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Normal 0 21 false false false ES X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} El pasado 25 de Noviembre, con la colaboración de Abast, Birchman y Omega CRM, Oracle celebró en Barcelona la 2ª edición del CRM Day, donde presentaron las últimas tendencias europeas de CRM a través del Estudio realizado por IDC. Con su formato de conferencias + coloquios + asesorías individuales, todos los asistentes dispusieron de la posibilidad de compartir experiencias y mejores prácticas con los expertos de oracle así como con el resto de asistentes.

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• SQL SERVER – Fix Error: Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error ’80040e07' or Microsoft SQL Native Client error ’80040e07'

  - by pinaldave

  I quite often receive questions where users are looking for solution to following error: Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error ’80040e07′ Syntax error converting datetime from character string. OR Microsoft SQL Native Client error ’80040e07′ Syntax error converting datetime from character string. If you have ever faced above error – I have a very simple solution for you. The solution is being very check date which is inserted in the datetime column. This error often comes up when application or user is attempting to enter an incorrect date into the datetime field. Here is one of the examples – one of the reader was using classing ASP Application with OLE DB provider for SQL Server. When he tried to insert following script he faced above mentioned error. INSERT INTO TestTable (ID, MyDate) VALUES (1, '01-Septeber-2013') The reason for the error was simple as he had misspelled September word. Upon correction of the word, he was able to successfully insert the value and error was not there. Incorrect values or the typo’s are not the only reason for this error. There can be issues with cast or convert as well. If you try to attempt following code using SQL Native Client or in your application you will also get similar errors. SELECT CONVERT (datetime, '01-Septeber-2013', 112) The reason here is very simple, any conversion attempt or any other kind of operation on incorrect date/time string can lead to the above error. If you not using embeded dynamic code in your application language but using attempting similar operation on incorrect datetime string you will get following error. Msg 241, Level 16, State 1, Line 2 Conversion failed when converting date and/or time from character string. Remember: Check your values of the string when you are attempting to convert them to string – either there can be incorrect values or they may be incorrectly formatted. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL DateTime, SQL Error Messages, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Integrating Oracle Forms Applications 11g Into SOA (4-6/Mai/10)

  - by Claudia Costa

  Workshop Description This is a Free workshop of 3 days is targeted at Oracle Forms professionals interested in integrating Oracle Forms into a Service Oriented Architecture. The workshop highlights how Forms can be part of a Service Oriented Architecture, how the Oracle Forms functionalities make it possible to integrate existing (or new) Forms applications with new or existing development utilizing the Service Oriented Architecture concepts. The goal is to understand the incremental approach that Forms provides to developers who need to extend their business platform to JEE, allowing Oracle Forms customers to retain their investment in Oracle Forms while leveraging the opportunities offered by complementing technologies. During the event the attendees will implement the Oracle Forms functionalities that make it possible to integrate with SOA. Register Now! Prerequisites ·         Knowledge of the Oracle Forms development environment (mandatory) ·         Basic knowledge of the Oracle database ·         Basic knowledge of the Java Programming Language ·         Basic knowledge of Oracle Jdeveloper or another Java IDE   System Requirements   This workshop requires attendees to provide their own laptops for this class. Attendee laptops must meet the following minimum hardware/software requirements:   ·         Laptop/PC with minimum 4 GB RAM ·         Oracle Database ·         Oracle Forms 11g R1 PS1 (WebLogic Server 10.1.3.2 + Portal, Forms, Reports and Discoverer ) ·         Oracle JDeveloper 11g R1 PS1 http://download.oracle.com/otn/java/jdeveloper/1112/jdevstudio11112install.exe ·         TCP-IP Loopback Adapter Installation (before the SOASuite installation) ·         Oracle SOASuite 11g R1 PS1 (without BAM component) When asked for an admin password, please use 'welcome1 http://download.oracle.com/otn/nt/middleware/11g/ofm_rcu_win_11.1.1.2.0_disk1_1of1.zip http://download.oracle.com/otn/nt/middleware/11g/ofm_soa_generic_11.1.1.2.0_disk1_1of1.zip ·         Oracle BI Publisher 10.1.3.4.1 http://download.oracle.com/otn/nt/ias/101341/bipublisher_windows_x86_101341.zip ·         Oracle BI Publisher Desktop 10.1.3.4. http://download.oracle.com/otn/nt/ias/101341/bipublisher_desktop_windows_x86_101341.zip   ·         At least 1 Oracle Forms solution already upgraded to the Oracle FMW 11g platform.   ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Horário e Local:   4-6 de Maio / 9:30-18:00h Oracle, Porto Salvo Register Here Para mais informação por favor contacte: [email protected]

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• SQL SERVER – LCK_M_XXX – Wait Type – Day 15 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  Locking is a mechanism used by the SQL Server Database Engine to synchronize access by multiple users to the same piece of data, at the same time. In simpler words, it maintains the integrity of data by protecting (or preventing) access to the database object. From Book On-Line: LCK_M_BU Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire a Bulk Update (BU) lock. LCK_M_IS Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire an Intent Shared (IS) lock. LCK_M_IU Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire an Intent Update (IU) lock. LCK_M_IX Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire an Intent Exclusive (IX) lock. LCK_M_S Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire a Shared lock. LCK_M_SCH_M Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire a Schema Modify lock. LCK_M_SCH_S Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire a Schema Share lock. LCK_M_SIU Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire a Shared With Intent Update lock. LCK_M_SIX Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire a Shared With Intent Exclusive lock. LCK_M_U Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire an Update lock. LCK_M_UIX Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire an Update With Intent Exclusive lock. LCK_M_X Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire an Exclusive lock. LCK_M_XXX Explanation: I think the explanation of this wait type is the simplest. When any task is waiting to acquire lock on any resource, this particular wait type occurs. The common reason for the task to be waiting to put lock on the resource is that the resource is already locked and some other operations may be going on within it. This wait also indicates that resources are not available or are occupied at the moment due to some reasons. There is a good chance that the waiting queries start to time out if this wait type is very high. Client application may degrade the performance as well. You can use various methods to find blocking queries: EXEC sp_who2 SQL SERVER – Quickest Way to Identify Blocking Query and Resolution – Dirty Solution DMV – sys.dm_tran_locks DMV – sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks Reducing LCK_M_XXX wait: Check the Explicit Transactions. If transactions are very long, this wait type can start building up because of other waiting transactions. Keep the transactions small. Serialization Isolation can build up this wait type. If that is an acceptable isolation for your business, this wait type may be natural. The default isolation of SQL Server is ‘Read Committed’. One of my clients has changed their isolation to “Read Uncommitted”. I strongly discourage the use of this because this will probably lead to having lots of dirty data in the database. Identify blocking queries mentioned using various methods described above, and then optimize them. Partition can be one of the options to consider because this will allow transactions to execute concurrently on different partitions. If there are runaway queries, use timeout. (Please discuss this solution with your database architect first as timeout can work against you). Check if there is no memory and IO-related issue using the following counters: Checking Memory Related Perfmon Counters SQLServer: Memory Manager\Memory Grants Pending (Consistent higher value than 0-2) SQLServer: Memory Manager\Memory Grants Outstanding (Consistent higher value, Benchmark) SQLServer: Buffer Manager\Buffer Hit Cache Ratio (Higher is better, greater than 90% for usually smooth running system) SQLServer: Buffer Manager\Page Life Expectancy (Consistent lower value than 300 seconds) Memory: Available Mbytes (Information only) Memory: Page Faults/sec (Benchmark only) Memory: Pages/sec (Benchmark only) Checking Disk Related Perfmon Counters Average Disk sec/Read (Consistent higher value than 4-8 millisecond is not good) Average Disk sec/Write (Consistent higher value than 4-8 millisecond is not good) Average Disk Read/Write Queue Length (Consistent higher value than benchmark is not good) Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All the discussion of Wait Stats in this blog is generic and varies from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – What the Business Says Is Not What the Business Wants

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is written in response to T-SQL Tuesday hosted by Steve Jones. Steve raised a very interesting question; every DBA and Database Developer has already faced this situation. When I read the topic, I felt that I can write several different examples here. Today, I will cover this scenario, which seems quite amusing. Shrinking Database Earlier this year, I was working on SQL Server Performance Tuning consultancy; I had faced very interesting situation. No matter how much I attempt to reduce the fragmentation, I always end up with heavy fragmentation on the server. After careful research, I figured out that one of the jobs was continuously Shrinking the Database – which is a very bad practice. I have blogged about my experience over here SQL SERVER – SHRINKDATABASE For Every Database in the SQL Server. I removed the incorrect shrinking process right away; once it was removed, everything continued working as it should be. After a couple of days, I learned that one of their DBAs had put back the same DBCC process. I requested the Senior DBA to find out what is going on and he came up with the following reason: “Business Requirement.” I cannot believe this! Now, it was time for me to go deep into the subject. Moreover, it had become necessary to understand the need. After talking to the concerned people here, I understood what they needed. Please read the exact business need in their own language. The Shrinking “Business Need” “We shrink the database because if we take backup after shrinking the database, the size of the same is smaller. Once we take backup, we have to send it to our remote location site. Our business requirement is that we need to always make sure that the file is smallest when we transfer it to remote server.” The backup is not affected in any way if you shrink the database or not. The size of backup will be the same. After a couple of the tests, they agreed with me. Shrinking will create performance issues for the same as it will introduce heavy fragmentation in the database. The Real Solution The real business need was that they needed the smallest possible backup file. We finally implemented a quick solution which they are still using to date. The solution was compressed backup. I have written about this subject in detail few years before SQL SERVER – 2008 – Introduction to New Feature of Backup Compression. Compressed backup not only creates a small filesize but also increases the speed of the database as well. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Agile isn’t always Agile

  - by BuckWoody

  I want to make a disclaimer before I dive into this topic – At Microsoft we use all kinds of development methodologies, and I’ve worked in lots of other shops using lots of methodologies. This is one of those “religious” topics like which programming language or database is best, and is bound to generate some heat. But this isn’t pointed towards one particular event or company. But I really don’t like Agile. In particular, I really don’t like Scrum. Let me explain. Agile is a methodology for developing software that emphasizes adapting to change more so than the traditional “waterfall” method of developing software. Within Agile is a process called a “scrum” meeting. The pitch goes that in this quick, stand-up meeting the people involved in the development project (which should include the DBA, but very often doesn’t) go around the room stating what they are working on, when that will be finished and what is keeping them from getting finished (“blockers”, these are called). Sounds all very non-threatening – we’re just “enabling” the developers to work more efficiently. And that’s what we all want, isn’t it? Except it doesn’t work. In my experience (and yours might be VERY different) this just turns into a micro-management environment, where devs have to defend their daily work. Of all the work environments I hate the most, micro-management environments are THE worst. I don’t like workign in them, and I don’t like creating them. The other issue I have with Scrum is that it makes your whole team task-focused. Everyone wants to make sure that they are not the “long pole” in the meeting (meaning that they aren’t the one that gets all the attention) so they only focus on safe, quick tasks. And although you have all of the boxes checked, the project does not go well at all – even when it does finish. Before you comment (and please do comment) I fully realize that Agile <> Scrum. But in my experience, it sometimes turns into that. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Silverlight Cream for April 03, 2010 -- #829

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Scott Marlowe, Nokola, SilverLaw, Brad Abrams, Jeff Wilcox, Jesse Liberty, Alexey Zakharov, ondrejsv, Ward Bell, and David Anson. Shoutouts: Bart Czernicki has a post up about the latest with HTML5: HTML 5 is Born Old - Quake in HTML 5 I was sent a link to shoebox360 a while back and had to sign up to see the Silverlight use, but it does work very nice. I like the panoramic carousel in the viewer: shoebox360 Jeff Handley has a post up on RIA Services - Documentation Guidance and Community Samples... the team is looking for feedback from all of us Shawn Wildermuth posted his My MIX Talks' Source Code Laurent Bugnion posted his Sample code and slides for my TechDays10 (Belgium) talks From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight to WCF Cross Domain SecurityException Scott Marlowe wrote an article about an often-encountered security exception having to do with cross-domain policies. He details the problem, the response, the solution, and yet another problem/solution associated... good stuff, Scott! Simple Functions for HTML Interop You've seen Nokola's graphic work... how about some HTML Interop from him? He's exposing the code he uses in his work. New Video: ChildWindow Styling - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has a new video tutorial on Silerlight 3 ChildWindow Styling up - in German - but the video is language-agnostic :) Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing WCF (SOAP\WSDL) Services Brad Abrams' continuation in his RIA series is this one demonstrating exposing RIA Services as a Soap\WSDL service Silverlight 4: New parser implementation. New parser features. Jeff Wilcox has a post up highlighting some of the new features in Silverlight 4 such as a new parser implementation with new XAML features. New Video Series – Getting Started With Silverlight Jesse Liberty is starting a new video tutorial series that's going to build out to be a "complete survey of Silverlight programming". The first two are in this post and are Getting Started and Adding Controls to a Silverlight App... looks like good material, Jesse, and all the source is there for the taking as well. Silverlight layout hack: Centered content with fixed maxwidth Alexey Zakharov has a quick tip up on creating centered content with fixed maxwidth. He calls it a dirty trick... looks like code to me :) Silverlight DataForm’s autogenerated fields send empty strings to database ondrejsv points up a problem he had with the Toolkit's DataForm, and his solution to it... with code for all of us following along behind :) DevForce Extensibility With MEF InheritedExport Ward Bell has a post up describing how they got DevForce MEF'd up, and looks like a good post to get you all excited about MEF as well... lots of external links and good info. Tip: Read-only custom DependencyProperties don't exist in Silverlight, but can be closely approximated David Anson's latest Tip is about Read-only custom DependencyProperties in Silverlight -- which strictly is not possible, but he has a code example up that gets close. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Resources such as libraries, engines and frameworks to make Javacript-based MMORTS? [closed]

  - by hhh

  I am looking for resources outlined to make a MMORTS with Javascript as the client-side, probably just a simple canvas for the frontend. The guy in the video here mentions that JavaScript is one of the most misunderstood language -- and I do believe that. I think one can make quite cool games with it in the future. So I am now proactively looking for resources and perhaps some ideas. My first idea contained Node.js, C and NetBSD/bozohttpd (or the-4-7-chars' *ix-thing with green-logo -thing, move the q here) but I acknowledge my beginner -style approach -- this issue is broad and not only for one person to make it all-the-time-improved project! So I think perfect for community to tinker. Some games and examples possibly easy to make into MMORTS BrowserQuest here under MPL 2.0 and its content licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 (source here) [proprietary] LoU here and built with JS/Qooxdoo/c#/Windows-Server/ISS/etc, source. MY ANSWER BEGINS HERE TO BE MOVED BELOW, REQUIRING RE-OPENING. PLEASE, VOTE TO OPEN IT -- HELP US TO TINKER! My answer Generic Is there an MMO-related research body? Although about Android, certain things also appropriate with JS -game: Are there any 2D gaming libraries/frameworks/engines for Android? Why is it so hard to develop a MMO? Browser based MMO Architecture MMO architecture - Highly Scalable with Reporting capabilities What are the Elements of an MMO Game? Is this the right architecture for our MMORPG mobile game? Looking for architectures to develop massive multiplayer game server Information on seamless MMO server architecture Game-mechanics (search) Question sounding like about LoU: What are the different ways to balance an online multiplayer game where user spend different amounts of time online? Building an instance system What are the different ways to balance an online multiplayer game where user spend different amounts of time online? Hosting is it possible to make a MMO starting with scalable hosting? Should I keep login server apart from game server? MMO techniques, algorithms and resources for keeping bandwidth low? MMO Proxy Server Javascript and Client-based things What do I need to do a MMORTS in JavaScript with small amount of Developers? How to update the monsters in my MMO server using Node.js and Socket.IO Are there any good html 5 mmo design tutorials? Networking Loadbalancing Questions Something about TCP, routers, NAT, etc: How do I start writing an MMO game server? Who does the AI calculations in an MMO? They need someone more knowledgable to work with, a lot of cases where the same words mean different things. Data Structures What data structure should I use for a Diablo/WoW-style talent tree? Game Engine Need an engine for MMO mockup Helper sites http://www.gamedev.net/page/index.html

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• Silverlight Cream for May 02, 2010 -- #854

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Jason Young(-2-, -3-), Phil Middlemiss, Jeremy Likness, Victor Gaudioso, Kunal Chowdhury, Antoni Dol, and Jacek Ciereszko(-2-). Shoutout: Victor Gaudioso has aggregated All of My Silverlight Video Tutorials in One Place (revised again 05.02.10) From SilverlightCream.com: Unit Testing A Silverlight 'Simplified MVVM' Modal Popup Michael Washington's latest 'Simplified MVVM' post is published at The Code Project and is on Unit Testing with MVVM. Input Localization in Silverlight without IValueConverter Jason Young sent me some links to posts I've not seen... this first one is on localization by using the Language property of the Root Visual. MVVM – The Model - Part 1 – INotifyPropertyChanged Jason Young's next archive post is the first of a series on MVVM and Silverlight 4 ... implementing a simple ViewModel base class. Silverlight, WCF, and ASP.Net Configuration Gotchas Jason Young worked at tracking down the answers to some forum questions and in the process has produced a post of 'gotchas' with using WCF in Silverlight. A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 5 Phil Middlemiss has part 5 of his Chrome and Glass Theme tutorial up ... in this one, he's looking at the Progress Bar and Slider. Download the files and play along. Silverlight Out of Browser (OOB) Versions, Images, and Isolated Storage Jeremy Likness has a post up responding to his 3 major questions about OOB apps, and he has to code up for the sample too. New Silverlight Video Tutorial: How to Make a Slide In/Out Navigation Bar – All in Blend Victor Gaudioso's latest video tutorial is on building a Behavior for a Slide in/out Navigation bar... kinda like the menu sliders on my GlyphMap Utility... only easier! Command Binding in Silverlight 4 (Step-by-Step) Kunal Chowdhury has another post up at DotNetFunda, and this time he's talking about Command Binding in Silverlight 4 with an eye toward MVVM usage. The Silverlight PageCurl implementation Antoni Dol has a post up about doing a Page Curl effect in Silverlight. He has a manual up on the effect and full application code. How to center and scale Silverlight applications using ViewBox control Jacek Ciereszko has a couple posts up about centering and scaling your app with the ViewBox control. This first one is a code solution. Source is available, as is a Polish version. Silverlight Center And Scale Behavior Jacek Ciereszko's 2nd post, he provides a Behavior that handles the scaling and centering of the previous post. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• 2010 Collaboration Summit Impressions

  - by Elena Zannoni

  It's a bit late, but there you have it anyway. April 14 to 16 I attended the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in SFO. I was running two tracks, one on tracing and one on tools. You can see the tracks and the slides here: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit/slides I was pretty busy both days, Thursday with a whole day tracing track, Friday with a half day toolchain track. The sessions were well attended, the rooms were full, with people spilling in the hallways. Some new things were presented, like Kernelshark, by Steve Rostedt, a GUI (yes, believe it or not, a GUI) written in GTK. It is very nice, showing a timeline for traced kernel events, and you can zoom in and filter at will. It works on the latest kernels, and it requires some new things/fixes in GTK. I don't recall exactly what version of GTK though. Dominique Toupin from Ericsson presented something about user requirements for tracing. Mostly though about who's who in the embedded world, and eclipse. Masami and Mathieu presented an update on their work. See their slides. The interesting thing to me was of course the new version of uprobes w/o underlying utrace presented by Jim Keniston. At the end of the session we had a discussion about the future of utrace. Roland wasn't there, butTom Tromey (also from RedHat) collected the feedback. Basically we are at a standstill now that utrace has been rejected yet again. There wasn't much advise that anybody could give, except jokingly, we decided that the only way in is to make it a part of perf events. There needs to be another refactoring, but most of all, this "killer app" that would be enabled because of utrace hasn't materialized yet. We think that having a good debugging story on Linux is enough of a killer app, for instance allowing multiple tracers, and not relying on SIGCHLD etc. I think this wasn't completely clear to the kernel community. Trying to achieve debugging via a gdb stub inside the kernel interfacing to utrace and that is controlled via the gdb remote protocol also lost its appeal (thankfully, since the gdb remote protocol is archaic). Somebody would have to be creative in how to submit utrace. It doesn't have to be called utrace (it was really a random choice, for lack of a letter that was not already used in front of the word "trace"). So basically, I think the ideas behind utrace are sound, and the necessity of a new interface is acknowledged. But I believe the integration/submission process with the kernel folks has to restart from scratch, clean slate. We'll see. There are many conferences and meetings coming up in the near future where things can be discussed further. On the second day, Friday, we had the tools talks. It was interesting to observe the more "kernel" oriented people's behavior towards the gcc etc community. The first talk was by Mark Mitchell, about Gcc and its new plugin architecture. After that, Paolo talked about the new C++1x standard, which will be finalized in 2011. Many features are already implemented in the libstdc++ library and gcc and usable today. We had a few minutes (really, the half day track was quite short) where Bradley Kuhn from the Software Freedom Law Center explained the GPLv3 exception for gcc (due to the new gcc plugin architecture and the availability of the intermediate results from the compilation, which is a new thing). I will not try to explain, but basically you cannot take the result of the preprocessing and then use that in your own proprietary compiler. After, we had a talk by Ian Taylor about the new Gold linker. One good thing in that area is that they are trying to make gold the new default linker (for instance Fedora will use gold as the distro linker). However gold is very different from binutils' old linker. It doesn't use a linker script, for instance. The kernel has been linked with gold many times as an exercise (the ground work was done by Kris Van Hees), but this needs to be constantly tested/monitored because the kernel linker script is very complex, and uses esoteric features (Wenji is now monitoring that each kernel RC can be built with gold). It was positive that people are now aware of gold and the need for it to be ported to more architectures. It seems that the porting is very easy, with little arch dependent code. Finally Tom Tromey presented about gdb and the archer project. Archer is a development branch of gdb mostly done by RedHat, where they are focusing on better c++ printing, c++ expression parsing, and plugins. The archer work is merged regularly in the gdb mainline. In general it was a good conference. I did miss most of the first day, because that's when I flew in. But I caught a couple of talks. Nothing earth shattering, except for Google giving each person registered a free Android phone. Yey.

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• Easy Listening = CRM On Demand Podcasts

  - by Anne

  OK, here's my NEW favorite resource for CRM On Demand info -- podcasts! Specifically, the CRM On Demand Podcast site -- signed, sealed, and delivered with humor and know-how. Yes, I admit, I know the cast of characters. But let's face it, sometimes dealing with software is just soooo dry! Not so when discussed by the two main commentators, Louis Peters and Robert Davidson, whom someone once referred to as CRM On Demand's "Click and Clack." (Thought that was too good not to pass along!) Anyhow, another huge plus about the site is the option to listen OR to read. Out walking my dog or doing the dishes? Just turn up the podcast. Listening to music or watching TV? I'll read Louis's entertaining write-ups to glean great info about CRM On Demand in a very short period of time. So that you get a better understanding of why I like this site so much, here's a sampling of what's discussed: Five Things about Books of Business As Louis Peters put it in his entry, when you see "Five Things" in the title, "you'll know you're going to get some concrete advice that you can put to work right away." Well, Louis and Robert do just that, pointing you in the right direction when using Books of Business to segment data. Moving to Indexed Fields - A Rough Guide (only an article, not a podcast) I've read all about performance and even helped develop material around it. But nowhere have I heard indexed custom fields referred to as "super heroes." Louis and Robert use imaginative language to describe the process for moving your data to indexed fields for optimal performance. Data Access QA from the Forums I think that everyone would admit that data access and visibility is the most difficult topic to understand in CRM On Demand. Following up on their previous podcast on the same topic, Louis and Robert answer a few key questions from the many postings on the Oracle CRM On Demand forums. And I bet that the scenarios match many companies' business requirements...maybe even yours! We Need to Talk About Adoption Another expert, Tim Koehler, joins Louis to talk about how to drive user adoption: aligning product usage with business results, communicating why and how to use the product, getting feedback on usability, and so on. Hope I've made my point -- turn to these podcasts to hear knowledgeable folks discuss CRM On Demand tips and tricks in entertaining ways. One podcast is even called "SaaS Talk"!

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• I can't install using Wubi due to permission denied error

  - by Taksh Sharma

  I can't install ubuntu 11.10 inside my windows 7. It shows permission denied while installation. It gave a log file having the following data: 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: # Running tasklist... 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running select_target_dir... 03-29 20:19 INFO WindowsBackend: Installing into D:\ubuntu 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: ## Finished select_target_dir 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running create_dir_structure... 03-29 20:19 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir D:\ubuntu 03-29 20:19 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir D:\ubuntu\disks 03-29 20:19 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir D:\ubuntu\install 03-29 20:19 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir D:\ubuntu\install\boot 03-29 20:19 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir D:\ubuntu\disks\boot 03-29 20:19 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir D:\ubuntu\disks\boot\grub 03-29 20:19 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir D:\ubuntu\install\boot\grub 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: ## Finished create_dir_structure 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running uncompress_target_dir... 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: ## Finished uncompress_target_dir 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running create_uninstaller... 03-29 20:19 DEBUG WindowsBackend: Copying uninstaller E:\wubi.exe -> D:\ubuntu\uninstall-wubi.exe 03-29 20:19 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi UninstallString D:\ubuntu\uninstall-wubi.exe 03-29 20:19 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi InstallationDir D:\ubuntu 03-29 20:19 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi DisplayName Ubuntu 03-29 20:19 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi DisplayIcon D:\ubuntu\Ubuntu.ico 03-29 20:19 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi DisplayVersion 11.10-rev241 03-29 20:19 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi Publisher Ubuntu 03-29 20:19 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi URLInfoAbout http://www.ubuntu.com 03-29 20:19 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi HelpLink http://www.ubuntu.com/support 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: ## Finished create_uninstaller 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running copy_installation_files... 03-29 20:19 DEBUG WindowsBackend: Copying C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pylB911.tmp\data\custom-installation -> D:\ubuntu\install\custom-installation 03-29 20:19 DEBUG WindowsBackend: Copying C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pylB911.tmp\winboot -> D:\ubuntu\winboot 03-29 20:19 DEBUG WindowsBackend: Copying C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pylB911.tmp\data\images\Ubuntu.ico -> D:\ubuntu\Ubuntu.ico 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: ## Finished copy_installation_files 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running get_iso... 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: New task copy_file 03-29 20:19 DEBUG TaskList: ### Running copy_file... 03-29 20:23 ERROR TaskList: [Errno 13] Permission denied Traceback (most recent call last): File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\tasklist.py", line 197, in __call__ File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\utils.py", line 202, in copy_file IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied 03-29 20:23 DEBUG TaskList: # Cancelling tasklist 03-29 20:23 DEBUG TaskList: New task check_iso 03-29 20:23 ERROR root: [Errno 13] Permission denied Traceback (most recent call last): File "\lib\wubi\application.py", line 58, in run File "\lib\wubi\application.py", line 130, in select_task File "\lib\wubi\application.py", line 205, in run_cd_menu File "\lib\wubi\application.py", line 120, in select_task File "\lib\wubi\application.py", line 158, in run_installer File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\tasklist.py", line 197, in __call__ File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\utils.py", line 202, in copy_file IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied 03-29 20:23 ERROR TaskList: 'WindowsBackend' object has no attribute 'iso_path' Traceback (most recent call last): File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\tasklist.py", line 197, in __call__ File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\backend.py", line 579, in get_iso File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\backend.py", line 565, in use_iso AttributeError: 'WindowsBackend' object has no attribute 'iso_path' 03-29 20:23 DEBUG TaskList: # Cancelling tasklist 03-29 20:23 DEBUG TaskList: # Finished tasklist 03-29 20:29 INFO root: === wubi 11.10 rev241 === 03-29 20:29 DEBUG root: Logfile is c:\users\home\appdata\local\temp\wubi-11.10-rev241.log 03-29 20:29 DEBUG root: sys.argv = ['main.pyo', '--exefile="E:\\wubi.exe"'] 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: data_dir=C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\data 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: 7z=C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\bin\7z.exe 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: startup_folder=C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Fetching basic info... 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: original_exe=E:\wubi.exe 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: platform=win32 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: osname=nt 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: language=en_IN 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: encoding=cp1252 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: arch=amd64 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Parsing isolist=C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\data\isolist.ini 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Xubuntu-i386 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Xubuntu-amd64 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Kubuntu-amd64 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Mythbuntu-i386 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Ubuntu-amd64 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Ubuntu-i386 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Mythbuntu-amd64 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Kubuntu-i386 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: Fetching host info... 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: registry_key=Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows version=vista 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows_version2=Windows 7 Home Basic 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows_sp=None 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows_build=7601 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: gmt=5 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: country=IN 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: timezone=Asia/Calcutta 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows_username=Home 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: user_full_name=Home 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: user_directory=C:\Users\Home 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows_language_code=1033 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows_language=English 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: processor_name=Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU M 370 @ 2.40GHz 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: bootloader=vista 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: system_drive=Drive(C: hd 61135.1523438 mb free ntfs) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: drive=Drive(C: hd 61135.1523438 mb free ntfs) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: drive=Drive(D: hd 12742.5507813 mb free ntfs) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: drive=Drive(E: cd 0.0 mb free cdfs) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: drive=Drive(F: cd 0.0 mb free ) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: drive=Drive(G: hd 93.22265625 mb free fat32) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: drive=Drive(Q: hd 0.0 mb free ) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: uninstaller_path=D:\ubuntu\uninstall-wubi.exe 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: previous_target_dir=D:\ubuntu 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: previous_distro_name=Ubuntu 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: keyboard_id=67699721 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: keyboard_layout=us 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: keyboard_variant= 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: python locale=('en_IN', 'cp1252') 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: locale=en_IN 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: total_memory_mb=3893.859375 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Searching ISOs on USB devices 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Searching for local CDs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Ubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Ubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Kubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Kubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Xubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Xubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Mythbuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Mythbuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Ubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Ubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Kubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Kubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Xubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Xubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Mythbuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Mythbuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether E:\ is a valid Ubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: parsing info from str=Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Release i386 (20111012) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: parsed info={'name': 'Ubuntu', 'subversion': 'Release', 'version': '11.10', 'build': '20111012', 'codename': 'Oneiric Ocelot', 'arch': 'i386'} 03-29 20:29 INFO Distro: Found a valid CD for Ubuntu: E:\ 03-29 20:29 INFO root: Running the CD menu... 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsFrontend: __init__... 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsFrontend: on_init... 03-29 20:29 INFO WinuiPage: appname=wubi, localedir=C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\translations, languages=['en_IN', 'en'] 03-29 20:29 INFO WinuiPage: appname=wubi, localedir=C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\translations, languages=['en_IN', 'en'] 03-29 20:29 INFO root: CD menu finished 03-29 20:29 INFO root: Already installed, running the uninstaller... 03-29 20:29 INFO root: Running the uninstaller... 03-29 20:29 INFO CommonBackend: This is the uninstaller running 03-29 20:29 INFO WinuiPage: appname=wubi, localedir=C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\translations, languages=['en_IN', 'en'] 03-29 20:29 INFO root: Received settings 03-29 20:29 INFO WinuiPage: appname=wubi, localedir=C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\translations, languages=['en_IN', 'en'] 03-29 20:29 DEBUG TaskList: # Running tasklist... 03-29 20:29 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running Remove bootloader entry... 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: Could not find bcd id 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: undo_bootini C: 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: undo_configsys Drive(C: hd 61135.1523438 mb free ntfs) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: undo_bootini D: 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: undo_configsys Drive(D: hd 12742.5507813 mb free ntfs) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: undo_bootini G: 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: undo_configsys Drive(G: hd 93.22265625 mb free fat32) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: undo_bootini Q: 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: undo_configsys Drive(Q: hd 0.0 mb free ) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG TaskList: ## Finished Remove bootloader entry 03-29 20:29 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running Remove target dir... 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Deleting D:\ubuntu 03-29 20:29 DEBUG TaskList: ## Finished Remove target dir 03-29 20:29 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running Remove registry key... 03-29 20:29 DEBUG TaskList: ## Finished Remove registry key 03-29 20:29 DEBUG TaskList: # Finished tasklist 03-29 20:29 INFO root: Almost finished uninstalling 03-29 20:29 INFO root: Finished uninstallation 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Fetching basic info... 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: original_exe=E:\wubi.exe 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: platform=win32 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: osname=nt 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: arch=amd64 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Parsing isolist=C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\data\isolist.ini 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Xubuntu-i386 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Xubuntu-amd64 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Kubuntu-amd64 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Mythbuntu-i386 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Ubuntu-amd64 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Ubuntu-i386 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Mythbuntu-amd64 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Adding distro Kubuntu-i386 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: Fetching host info... 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: registry_key=Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows version=vista 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows_version2=Windows 7 Home Basic 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows_sp=None 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows_build=7601 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: gmt=5 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: country=IN 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: timezone=Asia/Calcutta 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows_username=Home 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: user_full_name=Home 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: user_directory=C:\Users\Home 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows_language_code=1033 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: windows_language=English 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: processor_name=Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU M 370 @ 2.40GHz 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: bootloader=vista 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: system_drive=Drive(C: hd 61134.8632813 mb free ntfs) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: drive=Drive(C: hd 61134.8632813 mb free ntfs) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: drive=Drive(D: hd 12953.140625 mb free ntfs) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: drive=Drive(E: cd 0.0 mb free cdfs) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: drive=Drive(F: cd 0.0 mb free ) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: drive=Drive(G: hd 93.22265625 mb free fat32) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: drive=Drive(Q: hd 0.0 mb free ) 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: uninstaller_path=None 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: previous_target_dir=None 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: previous_distro_name=None 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: keyboard_id=67699721 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: keyboard_layout=us 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: keyboard_variant= 03-29 20:29 DEBUG WindowsBackend: total_memory_mb=3893.859375 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Searching ISOs on USB devices 03-29 20:29 DEBUG CommonBackend: Searching for local CDs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Ubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Ubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Kubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Kubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Xubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Xubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Mythbuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp is a valid Mythbuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Ubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Ubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Kubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Kubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Xubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Xubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Mythbuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether D:\ is a valid Mythbuntu CD 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: does not contain D:\casper\filesystem.squashfs 03-29 20:29 DEBUG Distro: checking whether E:\ is a valid Ubuntu CD 03-29 20:29 INFO Distro: Found a valid CD for Ubuntu: E:\ 03-29 20:29 INFO root: Running the installer... 03-29 20:29 INFO WinuiPage: appname=wubi, localedir=C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\translations, languages=['en_IN', 'en'] 03-29 20:29 INFO WinuiPage: appname=wubi, localedir=C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\translations, languages=['en_IN', 'en'] 03-29 20:30 DEBUG WinuiInstallationPage: target_drive=C:, installation_size=8000MB, distro_name=Ubuntu, language=en_US, locale=en_US.UTF-8, username=taksh 03-29 20:30 INFO root: Received settings 03-29 20:30 INFO WinuiPage: appname=wubi, localedir=C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\translations, languages=['en_US', 'en'] 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: # Running tasklist... 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running select_target_dir... 03-29 20:30 INFO WindowsBackend: Installing into C:\ubuntu 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: ## Finished select_target_dir 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running create_dir_structure... 03-29 20:30 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir C:\ubuntu 03-29 20:30 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir C:\ubuntu\disks 03-29 20:30 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir C:\ubuntu\install 03-29 20:30 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir C:\ubuntu\install\boot 03-29 20:30 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir C:\ubuntu\disks\boot 03-29 20:30 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir C:\ubuntu\disks\boot\grub 03-29 20:30 DEBUG CommonBackend: Creating dir C:\ubuntu\install\boot\grub 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: ## Finished create_dir_structure 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running uncompress_target_dir... 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: ## Finished uncompress_target_dir 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running create_uninstaller... 03-29 20:30 DEBUG WindowsBackend: Copying uninstaller E:\wubi.exe -> C:\ubuntu\uninstall-wubi.exe 03-29 20:30 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi UninstallString C:\ubuntu\uninstall-wubi.exe 03-29 20:30 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi InstallationDir C:\ubuntu 03-29 20:30 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi DisplayName Ubuntu 03-29 20:30 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi DisplayIcon C:\ubuntu\Ubuntu.ico 03-29 20:30 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi DisplayVersion 11.10-rev241 03-29 20:30 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi Publisher Ubuntu 03-29 20:30 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi URLInfoAbout http://www.ubuntu.com 03-29 20:30 DEBUG registry: Setting registry key -2147483646 Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Wubi HelpLink http://www.ubuntu.com/support 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: ## Finished create_uninstaller 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running copy_installation_files... 03-29 20:30 DEBUG WindowsBackend: Copying C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\data\custom-installation -> C:\ubuntu\install\custom-installation 03-29 20:30 DEBUG WindowsBackend: Copying C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\winboot -> C:\ubuntu\winboot 03-29 20:30 DEBUG WindowsBackend: Copying C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Temp\pyl3487.tmp\data\images\Ubuntu.ico -> C:\ubuntu\Ubuntu.ico 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: ## Finished copy_installation_files 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: ## Running get_iso... 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: New task copy_file 03-29 20:30 DEBUG TaskList: ### Running copy_file... 03-29 20:34 ERROR TaskList: [Errno 13] Permission denied Traceback (most recent call last): File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\tasklist.py", line 197, in __call__ File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\utils.py", line 202, in copy_file IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied 03-29 20:34 DEBUG TaskList: # Cancelling tasklist 03-29 20:34 DEBUG TaskList: New task check_iso 03-29 20:34 ERROR root: [Errno 13] Permission denied Traceback (most recent call last): File "\lib\wubi\application.py", line 58, in run File "\lib\wubi\application.py", line 130, in select_task File "\lib\wubi\application.py", line 205, in run_cd_menu File "\lib\wubi\application.py", line 120, in select_task File "\lib\wubi\application.py", line 158, in run_installer File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\tasklist.py", line 197, in __call__ File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\utils.py", line 202, in copy_file IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied 03-29 20:34 ERROR TaskList: 'WindowsBackend' object has no attribute 'iso_path' Traceback (most recent call last): File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\tasklist.py", line 197, in __call__ File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\backend.py", line 579, in get_iso File "\lib\wubi\backends\common\backend.py", line 565, in use_iso AttributeError: 'WindowsBackend' object has no attribute 'iso_path' 03-29 20:34 DEBUG TaskList: # Cancelling tasklist 03-29 20:34 DEBUG TaskList: # Finished tasklist I have no idea what's the problem is. I'm a kind of newbie. I'm using win7 64bit, and installing as an administrator. Please help me out!

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• Extending NerdDinner: Adding Geolocated Flair

  - by Jon Galloway

  NerdDinner is a website with the audacious goal of “Organizing the world’s nerds and helping them eat in packs.” Because nerds aren’t likely to socialize with others unless a website tells them to do it. Scott Hanselman showed off a lot of the cool features we’ve added to NerdDinner lately during his popular talk at MIX10, Beyond File | New Company: From Cheesy Sample to Social Platform. Did you miss it? Go ahead and watch it, I’ll wait. One of the features we wanted to add was flair. You know about flair, right? It’s a way to let folks who like your site show it off in their own site. For example, here’s my StackOverflow flair: Great! So how could we add some of this flair stuff to NerdDinner? What do we want to show? If we’re going to encourage our users to give up a bit of their beautiful website to show off a bit of ours, we need to think about what they’ll want to show. For instance, my StackOverflow flair is all about me, not StackOverflow. So how will this apply to NerdDinner? Since NerdDinner is all about organizing local dinners, in order for the flair to be useful it needs to make sense for the person viewing the web page. If someone visits from Egypt visits my blog, they should see information about NerdDinners in Egypt. That’s geolocation – localizing site content based on where the browser’s sitting, and it makes sense for flair as well as entire websites. So we’ll set up a simple little callout that prompts them to host a dinner in their area: Hopefully our flair works and there is a dinner near your viewers, so they’ll see another view which lists upcoming dinners near them: The Geolocation Part Generally website geolocation is done by mapping the requestor’s IP address to a geographic area. It’s not an exact science, but I’ve always found it to be pretty accurate. There are (at least) three ways to handle it: You pay somebody like MaxMind for a database (with regular updates) that sits on your server, and you use their API to do lookups. I used this on a pretty big project a few years ago and it worked well. You use HTML 5 Geolocation API or Google Gears or some other browser based solution. I think those are cool (I use Google Gears a lot), but they’re both in flux right now and I don’t think either has a wide enough of an install base yet to rely on them. You might want to, but I’ve heard you do all kinds of crazy stuff, and sometimes it gets you in trouble. I don’t mean talk out of line, but we all laugh behind your back a bit. But, hey, it’s up to you. It’s your flair or whatever. There are some free webservices out there that will take an IP address and give you location information. Easy, and works for everyone. That’s what we’re doing. I looked at a few different services and settled on IPInfoDB. It’s free, has a great API, and even returns JSON, which is handy for Javascript use. The IP query is pretty simple. We hit a URL like this: http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip=74.125.45.100&timezone=false … and we get an XML response back like this… <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Response> <Ip>74.125.45.100</Ip> <Status>OK</Status> <CountryCode>US</CountryCode> <CountryName>United States</CountryName> <RegionCode>06</RegionCode> <RegionName>California</RegionName> <City>Mountain View</City> <ZipPostalCode>94043</ZipPostalCode> <Latitude>37.4192</Latitude> <Longitude>-122.057</Longitude> </Response> So we’ll build some data transfer classes to hold the location information, like this: public class LocationInfo { public string Country { get; set; } public string RegionName { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } public string ZipPostalCode { get; set; } public LatLong Position { get; set; } } public class LatLong { public float Lat { get; set; } public float Long { get; set; } } And now hitting the service is pretty simple: public static LocationInfo HostIpToPlaceName(string ip) { string url = "http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip={0}&timezone=false"; url = String.Format(url, ip); var result = XDocument.Load(url); var location = (from x in result.Descendants("Response") select new LocationInfo { City = (string)x.Element("City"), RegionName = (string)x.Element("RegionName"), Country = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), ZipPostalCode = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), Position = new LatLong { Lat = (float)x.Element("Latitude"), Long = (float)x.Element("Longitude") } }).First(); return location; } Getting The User’s IP Okay, but first we need the end user’s IP, and you’d think it would be as simple as reading the value from HttpContext: HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress But you’d be wrong. Sorry. UserHostAddress just wraps HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"], but that doesn’t get you the IP for users behind a proxy. That’s in another header, “HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR". So you can either hit a wrapper and then check a header, or just check two headers. I went for uniformity: string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; We’re almost set to wrap this up, but first let’s talk about our views. Yes, views, because we’ll have two. Selecting the View We wanted to make it easy for people to include the flair in their sites, so we looked around at how other people were doing this. The StackOverflow folks have a pretty good flair system, which allows you to include the flair in your site as either an IFRAME reference or a Javascript include. We’ll do both. We have a ServicesController to handle use of the site information outside of NerdDinner.com, so this fits in pretty well there. We’ll be displaying the same information for both HTML and Javascript flair, so we can use one Flair controller action which will return a different view depending on the requested format. Here’s our general flow for our controller action: Get the user’s IP Translate it to a location Grab the top three upcoming dinners that are near that location Select the view based on the format (defaulted to “html”) Return a FlairViewModel which contains the list of dinners and the location information public ActionResult Flair(string format = "html") { string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty( Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; var location = GeolocationService.HostIpToPlaceName(SourceIP); var dinners = dinnerRepository. FindByLocation(location.Position.Lat, location.Position.Long). OrderByDescending(p => p.EventDate).Take(3); // Select the view we'll return. // Using a switch because we'll add in JSON and other formats later. string view; switch (format.ToLower()) { case "javascript": view = "JavascriptFlair"; break; default: view = "Flair"; break; } return View( view, new FlairViewModel { Dinners = dinners.ToList(), LocationName = string.IsNullOrEmpty(location.City) ? "you" : String.Format("{0}, {1}", location.City, location.RegionName) } ); } Note: I’m not in love with the logic here, but it seems like overkill to extract the switch statement away when we’ll probably just have two or three views. What do you think? The HTML View The HTML version of the view is pretty simple – the only thing of any real interest here is the use of an extension method to truncate strings that are would cause the titles to wrap. public static string Truncate(this string s, int maxLength) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(s) || maxLength <= 0) return string.Empty; else if (s.Length > maxLength) return s.Substring(0, maxLength) + "..."; else return s; }   So here’s how the HTML view ends up looking: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<FlairViewModel>" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Nerd Dinner</title> <link href="/Content/Flair.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="nd-wrapper"> <h2 id="nd-header">NerdDinner.com</h2> <div id="nd-outer"> <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> <div id="nd-bummer"> Looks like there's no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create">host one</a>?</div> <% } else { %> <h3> Dinners Near You</h3> <ul> <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> <li> <%: Html.ActionLink(String.Format("{0} with {1} on {2}", item.Title.Truncate(20), item.HostedBy, item.EventDate.ToShortDateString()), "Details", "Dinners", new { id = item.DinnerID }, new { target = "_blank" })%></li> <% } %> </ul> <% } %> <div id="nd-footer"> More dinners and fun at <a target="_blank" href="http://nrddnr.com">http://nrddnr.com</a></div> </div> </div> </body> </html> You’d include this in a page using an IFRAME, like this: <IFRAME height=230 marginHeight=0 src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair" frameBorder=0 width=160 marginWidth=0 scrolling=no></IFRAME> The Javascript view The Javascript flair is written so you can include it in a webpage with a simple script include, like this: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair?format=javascript"></script> The goal of this view is very similar to the HTML embed view, with a few exceptions: We’re creating a script element and adding it to the head of the document, which will then document.write out the content. Note that you have to consider if your users will actually have a <head> element in their documents, but for website flair use cases I think that’s a safe bet. Since the content is being added to the existing page rather than shown in an IFRAME, all links need to be absolute. That means we can’t use Html.ActionLink, since it generates relative routes. We need to escape everything since it’s being written out as strings. We need to set the content type to application/x-javascript. The easiest way to do that is to use the <%@ Page ContentType%> directive. <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<NerdDinner.Models.FlairViewModel>" ContentType="application/x-javascript" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> document.write('<script>var link = document.createElement(\"link\");link.href = \"http://nerddinner.com/content/Flair.css\";link.rel = \"stylesheet\";link.type = \"text/css\";var head = document.getElementsByTagName(\"head\")[0];head.appendChild(link);</script>'); document.write('<div id=\"nd-wrapper\"><h2 id=\"nd-header\">NerdDinner.com</h2><div id=\"nd-outer\">'); <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-bummer\">Looks like there\'s no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create\">host one</a>?</div>'); <% } else { %> document.write('<h3> Dinners Near You</h3><ul>'); <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> document.write('<li><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com/<%: item.DinnerID %>\"><%: item.Title.Truncate(20) %> with <%: item.HostedBy %> on <%: item.EventDate.ToShortDateString() %></a></li>'); <% } %> document.write('</ul>'); <% } %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-footer\"> More dinners and fun at <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com\">http://nrddnr.com</a></div></div></div>'); Getting IP’s for Testing There are a variety of online services that will translate a location to an IP, which were handy for testing these out. I found http://www.itouchmap.com/latlong.html to be most useful, but I’m open to suggestions if you know of something better. Next steps I think the next step here is to minimize load – you know, in case people start actually using this flair. There are two places to think about – the NerdDinner.com servers, and the services we’re using for Geolocation. I usually think about caching as a first attack on server load, but that’s less helpful here since every user will have a different IP. Instead, I’d look at taking advantage of Asynchronous Controller Actions, a cool new feature in ASP.NET MVC 2. Async Actions let you call a potentially long-running webservice without tying up a thread on the server while waiting for the response. There’s some good info on that in the MSDN documentation, and Dino Esposito wrote a great article on Asynchronous ASP.NET Pages in the April 2010 issue of MSDN Magazine. But let’s think of the children, shall we? What about ipinfodb.com? Well, they don’t have specific daily limits, but they do throttle you if you put a lot of traffic on them. From their FAQ: We do not have a specific daily limit but queries that are at a rate faster than 2 per second will be put in "queue". If you stay below 2 queries/second everything will be normal. If you go over the limit, you will still get an answer for all queries but they will be slowed down to about 1 per second. This should not affect most users but for high volume websites, you can either use our IP database on your server or we can whitelist your IP for 5$/month (simply use the donate form and leave a comment with your server IP). Good programming practices such as not querying our API for all page views (you can store the data in a cookie or a database) will also help not reaching the limit. So the first step there is to save the geolocalization information in a time-limited cookie, which will allow us to look up the local dinners immediately without having to hit the geolocation service.

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• Seven Worlds will collide…. High Availability BI is not such a Distant Sun.

  - by Testas

  Over the last 5 years I have observed Microsoft persevere with the notion of Self Service BI over a series of conferences as far back as SQLBits V in Newport. The release of SQL Server 2012, improvements in Excel and the integration with SharePoint 2010 is making this a reality. Business users are now empowered to create their own BI reports through a number of different technologies such as PowerPivot, PowerView and Report Builder. This opens up a whole new way of working; improving staff productivity, promoting efficient decision making and delivering timely business reports. There is, however; a serious question to answer. What happens should any of these applications become unavailable? More to the point, how would the business react should key business users be unable to fulfil reporting requests for key management meetings when they require it?  While the introduction of self-service BI will provide instant access to the creation of management information reports, it will also cause instant support calls should the access to the data become unavailable. These are questions that are often overlooked when a business evaluates the need for self-service BI. But as I have written in other blog posts, the thirst for information is unquenchable once the business users have access to the data. When they are unable to access the information, you will be the first to know about it and will be expected to have a resolution to the downtime as soon as possible. The world of self-service BI is pushing reporting and analytical databases to the tier 1 application level for some of Coeo’s customers. A level that is traditionally associated with mission critical OLTP environments. There is recognition that by making BI readily available to the business user, provisions also need to be made to ensure that the solution is highly available so that there is minimal disruption to the business. This is where High Availability BI infrastructures provide a solution. As there is a convergence of technologies to support a self-service BI culture, there is also a convergence of technologies that need to be understood in order to provide the high availability architecture required to support the self-service BI infrastructure. While you may not be the individual that implements these components, understanding the concepts behind these components will empower you to have meaningful discussions with the right people should you put this infrastructure in place. There are 7 worlds that you will have to understand to successfully implement a highly available BI infrastructure   1.       Server/Virtualised server hardware/software 2.       DNS 3.       Network Load Balancing 4.       Active Directory 5.       Kerberos 6.       SharePoint 7.       SQL Server I have found myself over the last 6 months reaching out to knowledge that I learnt years ago when I studied for the Windows 2000 and 2003 (MCSE) Microsoft Certified System Engineer. (To the point that I am resuming my studies for the Windows Server 2008 equivalent to be up to date with newer technologies) This knowledge has proved very useful in the numerous engagements I have undertaken since being at Coeo, particularly when dealing with High Availability Infrastructures. As a result of running my session at SQLBits X and SQL Saturday in Dublin, the feedback I have received has been that many individuals desire to understand more of the concepts behind the first 6 “worlds” in the list above. Over the coming weeks, a series of blog posts will be put on this site to help understand the key concepts of each area as it pertains to a High Availability BI Infrastructure. Each post will not provide exhaustive coverage of the topic. For example DNS can be a book in its own right when you consider that there are so many different configuration options with Forward Lookup, Reverse Lookups, AD Integrated Zones and DNA forwarders to name some examples. What I want to do is share the pertinent points as it pertains to the BI infrastructure that you build so that you are equipped with the knowledge to have the right discussion when planning this infrastructure. Next, we will focus on the server infrastructure that will be required to support the High Availability BI Infrastructure, from both a physical box and virtualised perspective. Thanks   Chris

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• Learn about MySQL with the Authentic MySQL for Beginners course

  - by Antoinette O'Sullivan

  Learn about the MySQL Server and other MySQL products by taking the authentic MySQL for Beginners course. This course covers all the basics from MySQL download and installation, to relational database concepts and database design. This course is your first step to becoming a MySQL administrator. You can take this course through one of the following delivery types: Training-on-Demand: Start the class from your desk, at your base and within 24 hrs of registering. Read Ben Krug on Day 3 of his experience taking the MySQL for Beginners course Training-on-Demand option. Live-Virtual Class: Attend this live class from your own office - no travel required. Choose from a selection of events on the schedule to suit different timezones. Delivery languages include English and German. In-Class event: Attend this class in an education center. Events already on the schedule include:  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Mechelen, Belgium  14 January 2013  English  London, England  5 March 2013  English  Hamburg, Germany  25 March 2013  German  Munich, Germany  3 June 2013  German  Budapest, Hungary  5 February 2013  Hungary  Milan, Italy  11 February 2013  Italian  Rome, Italy  4 March 2013  Italian  Riga, Latvia  18 February 2013  Latvian  Amsterdam, Netherlands  21 May 2013  Dutch  Nieuwegein, Netherlands  18 February 2013  Dutch  Warsaw, Poland  18 February 2013  Polish  Lisbon, Portugal  25 March 2013  European Portugese  Porto, Portugal  25 March 2013  European Portugese  Barcelona, Spain  11 February 2013  Spanish  Madrid, Spain  22 April 2013  Spanish  Nairobi, Kenya  14 January 2013  English  Capetown, South Africa  22 July 2013  English  Pretoria, South Africa  22 April 2013  English  Petaling Jaya, Malaysia  28 January 2013  English  Ottawa, Canada  25 March 2013  English  Toronto, Canada  25 March 2013  English  Montreal, Canada 25 March 2013   English Mexico City, Mexico  14 January 2013   Spanish  San Pedro Garza Garcia, Mexico  5 February 2013  Spanish  Sao Paolo, Brazil  29 January 2013  Brazilian Portugese For more information on this or other courses on the authentic MySQL Curriculum, go to http://oracle.com/education/mysql. Note, many organizations deploy both Oracle Database and MySQL side by side to serve different needs, and as a database professional you can find training courses on both topics at Oracle University! Check out the upcoming Oracle Database training courses and MySQL training courses. Even if you're only managing Oracle Databases at this point of time, getting familiar with MySQL will broaden your career path with growing job demand.

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• What’s Your Tax Strategy? Automate the Tax Transfer Pricing Process!

  - by tobyehatch

  Does your business operate in multiple countries? Well, whether you like it or not, many local and international tax authorities inspect your tax strategy.  Legal, effective tax planning is perceived as a “moral” issue. CEOs are being asked to testify on their process of tax transfer pricing between multinational legal entities.  Marc Seewald, Senior Director of Product Management for EPM Applications specializing in all tax subjects and Product Manager for Oracle Hyperion Tax Provisioning, and Bart Stoehr, Senior Director of Product Strategy for Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management joined me for a discussion/podcast on this interesting subject.  So what exactly is “tax transfer pricing”? Marc defined it this way. “Tax transfer pricing is a profit allocation methodology required to be used by multinational corporations. Specifically, the ultimate goal of the transfer pricing is to ensure that the global multinational pays their fair share of income tax in each of their local markets. Specifically, it prevents companies from unfairly moving profit from ‘high tax’ countries to ‘low tax’ countries.” According to Marc, in today’s global economy, profitability can be significantly impacted by goods and services exchanged between the related divisions within a single multinational company.  To ensure that these cost allocations are done fairly, there are rules that govern the process. These rules ensure that intercompany allocations fairly represent the actual nature of the businesses activity- as if two divisions were unrelated - and provide a clear audit trail of how the costs have been allocated to prove that allocations fall within reasonable ranges.  What are the repercussions of improper tax transfer pricing? How important is it? Tax transfer pricing allocations can materially impact the amount of overall corporate income taxes paid by a company worldwide, in some cases by hundreds of millions of dollars!  Since so much tax revenue is at stake, revenue agencies like the IRS, and international regulatory bodies like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are pushing to reform and clarify reporting for tax transfer pricing. Most recently the OECD announced an “Action Plan for Base Erosion and Profit Shifting”. As Marc explained, the times are changing and companies need to be responsive to this issue. “It feels like every other week there is another company being accused of avoiding taxes,” said Marc. Most recently, Caterpillar was accused of avoiding billions of dollars in taxes. In the last couple of years, Apple, GE, Ikea, and Starbucks, have all been accused of tax avoidance. It’s imperative that companies like these have a clear and auditable tax transfer process that enables them to justify tax transfer pricing allocations and avoid steep penalties and bad publicity. Transparency and efficiency are what is needed when it comes to the tax transfer pricing process. Bart explained that tax transfer pricing is driving a deeper inspection of profit recognition specifically focused on the tax element of profit.  However, allocations needed to support tax profitability are nearly identical in process to allocations taking place in other parts of the finance organization. For example, the methods and processes necessary to arrive at tax profitability by legal entity are no different than those used to arrive at fully loaded profitability for a product line. In fact, there is a great opportunity for alignment across these two different functions.So it seems that tax transfer pricing should be reflected in profitability in general. Bart agreed and told us more about some of the critical sub-processes of an overall tax transfer pricing process within the Oracle solution for tax transfer pricing.  “First, there is a ton of data preparation, enrichment and pre-allocation data analysis that is managed in the Oracle Hyperion solution. This serves as the “data staging” to the next, critical sub-processes.  From here, we leverage the Oracle EPM platform’s ability to re-use dimensions and legal entity driver data and financial data with Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM).  Within HPCM, we manage the driver data, define the legal entity to legal entity allocation rules (like cost plus), and have the option to test out multiple, simultaneous tax transfer pricing what-if scenarios.  Once processed, a tax expert can evaluate the effectiveness of any one scenario result versus another via a variance analysis configured with HPCM’s pre-packaged reporting capability known as Oracle Hyperion SmartView for Office.”   Further, Bart explained that the ability to visibly demonstrate how a cost or revenue has been allocated is really helpful and auditable.  “HPCM’s Traceability Maps are that visual representation of all allocation flows that have been executed and is the tax transfer analyst’s best friend in maintaining clear documentation for tax transfer pricing audits. Simply click and drill as you inspect the chain of allocation definitions and results. Once final, the post-allocated tax data can be compared to the GL to create invoices and journal entries for posting to your GL system of choice.  Of course, there is a framework for overall governance of the journal entries, allocation percentages, and reporting to include necessary approvals.” Lastly, Marc explained that the key value in using the Oracle Hyperion solution for tax transfer pricing is that it keeps everything in alignment in one single place. Specifically, Oracle Hyperion effectively becomes the single book of record for the GAAP, management, and the tax set of books. There are many benefits to having one source of the truth. These include EFFICIENCY, CONTROLS and TRANSPARENCY.So, what’s your tax strategy? Why not automate the tax transfer pricing process!To listen to the entire podcast, click here.To learn more about Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM), click here.

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