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• laptop crashed: why?

  - by sds

  my linux (ubuntu 12.04) laptop crashed, and I am trying to figure out why. # last sds pts/4 :0 Tue Sep 4 10:01 still logged in sds pts/3 :0 Tue Sep 4 10:00 still logged in reboot system boot 3.2.0-29-generic Tue Sep 4 09:43 - 11:23 (01:40) sds pts/8 :0 Mon Sep 3 14:23 - crash (19:19) this seems to indicate a crash at 09:42 (= 14:23+19:19). as per another question, I looked at /var/log: auth.log: Sep 4 09:17:02 t520sds CRON[32744]: pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user root Sep 4 09:43:17 t520sds lightdm: pam_unix(lightdm:session): session opened for user lightdm by (uid=0) no messages file syslog: Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819975] CPU0: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started. kern.log: Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819969] CPU1: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819971] CPU2: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819974] CPU3: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819975] CPU0: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu I had a computation running until 9:24, but the system crashed 18 minutes later! kern.log has many pages of these: Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] total RAM covered: 8086M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 64K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 128K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 256K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 512K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 1M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 2M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 4M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 8M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 16M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] *BAD*gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 32M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: -16M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] *BAD*gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 64M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: -16M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 128M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 256M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 512M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 1G num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] *BAD*gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 2G num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: -1G does this mean that my RAM is bad?! it also says Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 2.944123] EXT4-fs (sda1): INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 2.944126] EXT4-fs (sda1): write access will be enabled during recovery Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 3.088001] firewire_core: created device fw0: GUID f0def1ff8fbd7dff, S400 Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 8.929243] EXT4-fs (sda1): orphan cleanup on readonly fs Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 8.929249] EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 658984 ... Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.343266] EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 525343 Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.343270] EXT4-fs (sda1): 56 orphan inodes deleted Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.343271] EXT4-fs (sda1): recovery complete Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.645799] EXT4-fs (sda1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) does this mean my HD is bad? As per FaultyHardware, I tried smartctl -l selftest, which uncovered no errors: smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-3.2.0-30-generic] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Seagate Momentus 7200.4 Device Model: ST9500420AS Serial Number: 5VJE81YK LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 0440defe3 Firmware Version: 0003LVM1 User Capacity: 500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: ATA-8-ACS revision 4 Local Time is: Mon Sep 10 16:40:04 2012 EDT SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED See vendor-specific Attribute list for marginal Attributes. General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x82) Offline data collection activity was completed without error. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever been run. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 0) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 1) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 109) minutes. Conveyance self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x103b) SCT Status supported. SCT Error Recovery Control supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 117 099 034 Pre-fail Always - 162843537 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 100 100 000 Pre-fail Always - 0 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 571 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 069 060 030 Pre-fail Always - 17210154023 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 174362787320258 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 571 184 End-to-End_Error 0x0032 100 100 099 Old_age Always - 0 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1 189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 061 043 045 Old_age Always In_the_past 39 (0 11 44 26) 191 G-Sense_Error_Rate 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 84 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 20 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 2434 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 039 057 000 Old_age Always - 39 (0 15 0 0) 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 041 041 000 Old_age Always - 162843537 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x000f 095 095 030 Pre-fail Always - 4540 (61955, 0) 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 254 Free_Fall_Sensor 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 4545 - SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1 SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS 1 0 0 Not_testing 2 0 0 Not_testing 3 0 0 Not_testing 4 0 0 Not_testing 5 0 0 Not_testing Selective self-test flags (0x0): After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk. If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay. Googling for the messages proved inconclusive, I can't even figure out whether the messages are routine or catastrophic. So, what do I do now?

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• Ubuntu 12.04 wireless (wifi) not working, can not upgrade to 12.10, touchpad gestures not working. What to do?

  - by Ritwik

  I installed ubuntu 12.04 LTS 3 days ago and since then wireless feature and touchpad gestures are not working. Tried everything on internet but still unsuccessful. I cant upgrade to ubuntu 12.10. These are the following comments I tried. Please help me. EDIT: just realized usb 3.0 is also not working. COMMAND lsb_release -r OUTPUT ----------------------------------------------------------------- Release: 12.04 ----------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND lspci OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------ 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 06) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor PCI Express x16 Controller (rev 06) 00:01.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor PCI Express x8 Controller (rev 06) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 06) 00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor HD Audio Controller (rev 06) 00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI (rev 05) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB EHCI #2 (rev 05) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #1 (rev d5) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #2 (rev d5) 00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #3 (rev d5) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB EHCI #1 (rev 05) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation HM86 Express LPC Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller 1 [AHCI mode] (rev 05) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 05) 07:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF117M [GeForce 610M/710M / GT 620M/625M/630M/720M] (rev a1) 08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller (rev 07) 09:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5229 PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01) 0f:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9565 / AR9565 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01) ------------------------------------------------------------------ COMMAND sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-generic OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-generic ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND cat /etc/lsb-release; uname -a OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS" Linux ritwik-PC 3.2.0-67-generic #101-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 15 17:46:11 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 net OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- 08:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller [10ec:8136] (rev 07) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device [103c:225d] Kernel driver in use: r8169 -- 0f:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9565 / AR9565 Wireless Network Adapter [168c:0036] (rev 01) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device [103c:217f] ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND lsusb OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:8008 Intel Corp. Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:8000 Intel Corp. ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND iwconfig OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND rfkill list all OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- 0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 1: hp-bluetooth: Bluetooth Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND lsmod OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- Module Size Used by snd_hda_codec_realtek 224215 1 bnep 18281 2 rfcomm 47604 0 bluetooth 180113 10 bnep,rfcomm parport_pc 32866 0 ppdev 17113 0 nls_iso8859_1 12713 1 nls_cp437 16991 1 vfat 17585 1 fat 61512 1 vfat snd_hda_intel 33719 3 snd_hda_codec 127706 2 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel snd_hwdep 17764 1 snd_hda_codec snd_pcm 97275 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec snd_seq_midi 13324 0 snd_rawmidi 30748 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq_midi_event 14899 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 61929 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event nouveau 775039 0 joydev 17693 0 snd_timer 29990 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14540 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq ttm 76949 1 nouveau uvcvideo 72627 0 snd 79041 15 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device videodev 98259 1 uvcvideo drm_kms_helper 46978 1 nouveau psmouse 98051 0 drm 241971 3 nouveau,ttm,drm_kms_helper i2c_algo_bit 13423 1 nouveau soundcore 15091 1 snd snd_page_alloc 18529 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm v4l2_compat_ioctl32 17128 1 videodev hp_wmi 18092 0 serio_raw 13211 0 sparse_keymap 13890 1 hp_wmi mxm_wmi 13021 1 nouveau video 19651 1 nouveau wmi 19256 2 hp_wmi,mxm_wmi mac_hid 13253 0 lp 17799 0 parport 46562 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp r8169 62190 0 ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND sudo su modprobe -v ath9k OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- insmod /lib/modules/3.2.0-67-generic/kernel/net/wireless/cfg80211.ko insmod /lib/modules/3.2.0-67-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath.ko insmod /lib/modules/3.2.0-67-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/ath9k_hw.ko insmod /lib/modules/3.2.0-67-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/ath9k_common.ko insmod /lib/modules/3.2.0-67-generic/kernel/net/mac80211/mac80211.ko insmod /lib/modules/3.2.0-67-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/ath9k.ko ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND do-release-upgrade OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- Err Upgrade tool signature 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.149 80] Err Upgrade tool 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.149 80] Fetched 0 B in 0s (0 B/s) WARNING:root:file 'quantal.tar.gz.gpg' missing Failed to fetch Fetching the upgrade failed. There may be a network problem. ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND sudo modprobe ath9k dmesg | grep ath9k NO OUTPUT FOR THEM COMMAND dmesg | grep -e ath -e 80211 OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 13.232372] type=1400 audit(1408867538.399:9): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/mission-control-5" pid=975 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 13.232615] type=1400 audit(1408867538.399:10): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/telepathy-*" pid=975 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 15.186599] ath3k: probe of 3-4:1.0 failed with error -110 [ 15.186635] usbcore: registered new interface driver ath3k [ 88.219329] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain [ 88.351665] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated: [ 88.351667] cfg80211: (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp) [ 88.351670] cfg80211: (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 88.351671] cfg80211: (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 88.351673] cfg80211: (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 88.351674] cfg80211: (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 88.351675] cfg80211: (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND sudo apt-get install touchpad-indicator OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: gir1.2-gconf-2.0 python-pyudev Suggested packages: python-qt4 python-pyside.qtcore The following NEW packages will be installed: gir1.2-gconf-2.0 python-pyudev touchpad-indicator 0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 84.1 kB of archives. After this operation, 1,136 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y Get:1 http://ppa.launchpad.net/atareao/atareao/ubuntu/ precise/main touchpad-indicator all 0.9.3.12-1ubuntu1 [46.5 kB] Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main gir1.2-gconf-2.0 amd64 3.2.5-0ubuntu2 [7,098 B] Get:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main python-pyudev all 0.13-1 [30.5 kB] Fetched 84.1 kB in 2s (31.6 kB/s) Selecting previously unselected package gir1.2-gconf-2.0. (Reading database ... 169322 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking gir1.2-gconf-2.0 (from .../gir1.2-gconf-2.0_3.2.5-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package python-pyudev. Unpacking python-pyudev (from .../python-pyudev_0.13-1_all.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package touchpad-indicator. Unpacking touchpad-indicator (from .../touchpad-indicator_0.9.3.12-1ubuntu1_all.deb) ... Processing triggers for bamfdaemon ... Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index... Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils ... Processing triggers for gnome-menus ... Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme ... Processing triggers for software-center ... INFO:softwarecenter.db.update:no translation information in database needed Setting up gir1.2-gconf-2.0 (3.2.5-0ubuntu2) ... Setting up python-pyudev (0.13-1) ... Setting up touchpad-indicator (0.9.3.12-1ubuntu1) ... ------------------------------------------------------------------- Not able to find ( drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/hw.c ) or ( drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/hw.h )

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• Calculated Fields - Idiosyncracies

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Calculated Fields and some of their Idiosyncrasies Did you try to write a calculate field formula directly into the screen? Good Luck – You’ll need it! Calculated Fields are a sophisticated OOB feature of SharePoint, so you could think that they are best left to the end users – at least to the power users. But they reach their limits before the “Professionals “do, and the tough ones come back to us anyway. Back to business; the simpler the formula, the easier it is. Still, use your favorite editor to write it, then cut it and paste it to the ridiculously small window. What about complex formulae? Write them in steps! Here is a case in point and an idiosyncrasy or two. Our welders need to be certified and recertified every two years. Some of them are certifiable…., but I digress. To be certified you need to pass an eye exam, and two more tests – test A and test B. for each of those you have an expiry date. When renewed, each expiry date is advanced by two years from the date of renewal. My users wanted a visual clue so that when the supervisor looks at the list, she’ll have a KPI symbol telling her if anything expired (Red), is going to expire within the next 90 days (Yellow) or is not to be worried about (green). Not all the dates are filled and any blank date implies a complete lack of certification in the particular requirement. Obviously, I needed to figure the minimal of these 3 dates – a simple enough formula: =MIN([Date_EyeExam], {Date_TestA], [Date_TestB]). Aha! Here is idiosyncrasy #1. When one of the dates is a null, MIN(Date1, Date2) returns the non null date. Null is construed as “Far, far away”. The funny thing is that when you compare it to Today, the null is the lesser one. So a null it is less than today, but not when MIN is calculated. Now, to me the fact that the welder does not have an exam date, is synonymous with his exam being prehistoric, or at least past due. So here is what I did: Solution: Let’s set a blank date to 1/1/1800. How will we do that? Use the IF. IF([Field] rel relValue, TrueValue, FalseValue). rel is any relationship operator <, >, <=, >=, =, <>. If the field is related to the relValue as prescribed, the “IF” returns the TrueValue, otherwise it returns the FalseValue. Thus: =IF([SomeDate]="",1/1/1800,[SomeDate]) will return 1/1/1800 if the date is blank and the date itself if not. So, using this formula, if the welder missed an exam, the returned exam date will be far in the past. It would be nice if we could take such a formula and make it into a reusable function. Alas, here is a calculated field serious shortcoming: You cannot write subs and functions!! Aha, but we can use interim calculated fields! So let’s create 3 calculated fields as follows: 1: c_DateTestA as a calculated field of the date type, with the formula:  IF([Date_TestA]="",1/1/1800,[Date_TestA]) 2: c_DateTestB as a calculated field of the date type, with the formula:  IF([Date_TestB]="",1/1/1800,[Date_TestB]) 3: c_DateEyeExam as a calculated field of the date type, with the formula:  IF([Date_EyeExam]="",1/1/1800,[Date_EyeExam]) And now use these to get c_MinDate. This is again a calculated field of type date with the formula: MIN(c_DateTestA, cDateTestB, c_DateEyeExam) Note that I missed the square parentheses. In “properly named fields – where there are no embedded spaces, we don’t need the square parentheses. I actually strongly recommend using underscores in place of spaces in all the field names in your lists. Among other things, it makes using CAML much simpler. Now, we still need to apply the KPI to this minimal date. I am going to use the available KPI graphics that come with SharePoint and are always available in your 12 hive. "/_layouts/images/kpidefault-2.gif" is the Red KPI "/_layouts/images/kpidefault-1.gif" is the Yellow KPI "/_layouts/images/kpidefault-0.gif" is the Green KPI And here is the nested IF formula that will do the trick: =IF(c_MinDate<=Today,"/_layouts/images/kpidefault-2.gif", IF(cMinDate<Today+90,"/_layouts/images/kpidefault-1.gif","/_layouts/images/kpidefault-0.gif")) Nice! BUT when I tested, it did not work! This is Idiosyncrasy #2: A calculated field based on a calculated field based on a calculated field does not work. You have to stop at two levels! Back to the drawing board: We have to reduce by one level. How? We’ll eliminate the c_DateX items in the formula and replace them with the proper IF formulae. Notice that this needs to be done with precision. You are much better off in doing it in your favorite line editor, than inside the cramped space that SharePoint gives you. So here is the result: MIN(IF([Date_TestA]="",1/1/1800,[ Date_TestA]), IF([Date_TestB]="",1/1/1800,[ Date_TestB]), 1/1/1800), IF([Date_EyeExam]="",1/1/1800,[Date_EyeExam])) Note that I bolded the parentheses and painted them red. They have to match for this formula to work. Now we can leave the KPI formula as is and test again. This time with SUCCESS! Conclusion: build the inner functions first, and then embed them inside the outer formulae. Do this as long as necessary. Use your favorite line editor. Limit yourself to 2 levels. That’s all folks! Almost! As soon as I finished doing all of the above, my users added yet another level of complexity. They added another test, a test that must be passed, but never expires and asked for yet another KPI, this time in Black to denote that any test is not just past due, but altogether missing. I just finished this. Let’s hope it ends here! And OH, the formula  =IF(c_MinDate<=Today,"/_layouts/images/kpidefault-2.gif",IF(cMinDate<Today+90,"/_layouts/images/kpidefault-1.gif","/_layouts/images/kpidefault-0.gif")) Deals with “Today” and this is a subject deserving a discussion of its own!  That’s all folks?! (and this time I mean it)

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• Combining Shared Secret and Certificates

  - by Michael Stephenson

  As discussed in the introduction article this walkthrough will explain how you can implement WCF security with the Windows Azure Service Bus to ensure that you can protect your endpoint in the cloud with a shared secret but also combine this with certificates so that you can identify the sender of the message.   Prerequisites As in the previous article before going into the walk through I want to explain a few assumptions about the scenario we are implementing but to keep the article shorter I am not going to walk through all of the steps in how to setup some of this. In the solution we have a simple console application which will represent the client application. There is also the services WCF application which contains the WCF service we will expose via the Windows Azure Service Bus. The WCF Service application in this example was hosted in IIS 7 on Windows 2008 R2 with AppFabric Server installed and configured to auto-start the WCF listening services. I am not going to go through significant detail around the IIS setup because it should not matter in relation to this article however if you want to understand more about how to configure WCF and IIS for such a scenario please refer to the following paper which goes into a lot of detail about how to configure this. The link is: http://tinyurl.com/8s5nwrz   Setting up the Certificates To keep the post and sample simple I am going to use the local computer store for all certificates but this bit is really just the same as setting up certificates for an example where you are using WCF without using Windows Azure Service Bus. In the sample I have included two batch files which you can use to create the sample certificates or remove them. Basically you will end up with: A certificate called PocServerCert in the personal store for the local computer which will be used by the WCF Service component A certificate called PocClientCert in the personal store for the local computer which will be used by the client application A root certificate in the Root store called PocRootCA with its associated revocation list which is the root from which the client and server certificates were created   For the sample Im just using development certificates like you would normally, and you can see exactly how these are configured and placed in the stores from the batch files in the solution using makecert and certmgr.   The Service Component To begin with let's look at the service component and how it can be configured to listen to the service bus using a shared secret but to also accept a username token from the client. In the sample the service component is called Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.Cert.Services. It has a single service which is the Visual Studio template for a WCF service when you add a new WCF Service Application so we have a service called Service1 with its Echo method. Nothing special so far!.... The next step is to look at the web.config file to see how we have configured the WCF service. In the services section of the WCF configuration you can see I have created my service and I have created a local endpoint which I simply used to do a little bit of diagnostics and to check it was working, but more importantly there is the Windows Azure endpoint which is using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding (note that this should also work just the same if your using netTcpRelayBinding). The key points to note on the above picture are the service behavior called MyServiceBehaviour and the service bus endpoints behavior called MyEndpointBehaviour. We will go into these in more detail later.   The Relay Binding The relay binding for the service has been configured to use the TransportWithMessageCredential security mode. This is the important bit where the transport security really relates to the interaction between the service and listening to the Azure Service Bus and the message credential is where we will use our certificate like we have specified in the message/clientCrentialType attribute. Note also that we have left the relayClientAuthenticationType set to RelayAccessToken. This means that authentication will be made against ACS for accessing the service bus and messages will not be accepted from any sender who has not been authenticated by ACS.   The Endpoint Behaviour In the below picture you can see the endpoint behavior which is configured to use the shared secret client credential for accessing the service bus and also for diagnostic purposes I have included the service registry element.     Hopefully if you are familiar with using Windows Azure Service Bus relay feature the above is very familiar to you and this is a very common setup for this section. There is nothing specific to the username token implementation here. The Service Behaviour Now we come to the bit with most of the certificate stuff in it. When you configure the service behavior I have included the serviceCredentials element and then setup to use the clientCertificate check and also specifying the serviceCertificate with information on how to find the servers certificate in the store.     I have also added a serviceAuthorization section where I will implement my own authorization component to perform additional security checks after the service has validated that the message was signed with a good certificate. I also have the same serviceSecurityAudit configuration to log access to my service. My Authorization Manager The below picture shows you implementation of my authorization manager. WCF will eventually hand off the message to my authorization component before it calls the service code. This is where I can perform some logic to check if the identity is allowed to access resources. In this case I am simple rejecting messages from anyone except the PocClientCertificate.     The Client Now let's take a look at the client side of this solution and how we can configure the client to authenticate against ACS but also send a certificate over to the service component so it can implement additional security checks on-premise. I have a console application and in the program class I want to use the proxy generated with Add Service Reference to send a message via the Azure Service Bus. You can see in my WCF client configuration below I have setup my details for the azure service bus url and am using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding.   Next is my configuration for the relay binding. You can see below I have configured security to use TransportWithMessageCredential so we will flow the token from a certificate with the message and also the RelayAccessToken relayClientAuthenticationType which means the component will validate against ACS before being allowed to access the relay endpoint to send a message.     After the binding we need to configure the endpoint behavior like in the below picture. This contains the normal transportClientEndpointBehaviour to setup the ACS shared secret configuration but we have also configured the clientCertificate to look for the PocClientCert.     Finally below we have the code of the client in the console application which will call the service bus. You can see that we have created our proxy and then made a normal call to a WCF in exactly the normal way but the configuration will jump in and ensure that a token is passed representing the client certificate.     Conclusion As you can see from the above walkthrough it is not too difficult to configure a service to use both a shared secret and certificate based token at the same time. This gives you the power and protection offered by the access control service in the cloud but also the ability to flow additional tokens to the on-premise component for additional security features to be implemented. Sample The sample used in this post is available at the following location: https://s3.amazonaws.com/CSCBlogSamples/Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.Cert.zip

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• Different Not Automatically Implies Better

  - by Alois Kraus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/11/05/154556.aspxRecently I was digging deeper why some WCF hosted workflow application did consume quite a lot of memory although it did basically only load a xaml workflow. The first tool of choice is Process Explorer or even better Process Hacker (has more options and the best feature copy&paste does work). The three most important numbers of a process with regards to memory are Working Set, Private Working Set and Private Bytes. Working set is the currently consumed physical memory (parts can be shared between processes e.g. loaded dlls which are read only) Private Working Set is the physical memory needed by this process which is not shareable Private Bytes is the number of non shareable which is only visible in the current process (e.g. all new, malloc, VirtualAlloc calls do create private bytes) When you have a bigger workflow it can consume under 64 bit easily 500MB for a 1-2 MB xaml file. This does not look very scalable. Under 64 bit the issue is excessive private bytes consumption and not the managed heap. The picture is quite different for 32 bit which looks a bit strange but it seems that the hosted VB compiler is a lot less memory hungry under 32 bit. I did try to repro the issue with a medium sized xaml file (400KB) which does contain 1000 variables and 1000 if which can be represented by C# code like this: string Var1; string Var2; ... string Var1000; if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Var1) ) { Console.WriteLine(“Var1”); } if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Var2) ) { Console.WriteLine(“Var2”); } ....   Since WF is based on VB.NET expressions you are bound to the hosted VB.NET compiler which does result in (x64) 140 MB of private bytes which is ca. 140 KB for each if clause which is quite a lot if you think about the actually present functionality. But there is hope. .NET 4.5 does allow now C# expressions for WF which is a major step forward for all C# lovers. I did create some simple patcher to “cross compile” my xaml to C# expressions. Lets look at the result: C# Expressions VB Expressions x86 x86 On my home machine I have only 32 bit which gives you quite exactly half of the memory consumption under 64 bit. C# expressions are 10 times more memory hungry than VB.NET expressions! I wanted to do more with less memory but instead it did consume a magnitude more memory. That is surprising to say the least. The workflow does initialize in about the same time under x64 and x86 where the VB code does it in 2s whereas the C# version needs 18s. Also nearly ten times slower. That is a too high price to pay for any bigger sized xaml workflow to convert from VB.NET to C# expressions. If I do reduce the number of expressions to 500 then it does need 400MB which is about half of the memory. It seems that the cost per if does rise linear with the number of total expressions in a xaml workflow.  Expression Language Cost per IF Startup Time C# 1000 Ifs x64 1,5 MB 18s C# 500 Ifs x64 750 KB 9s VB 1000 Ifs x64 140 KB 2s VB 500 Ifs x64 70 KB 1s Now we can directly compare two MS implementations. It is clear that the VB.NET compiler uses the same underlying structure but it has much higher offset compared to the highly inefficient C# expression compiler. I have filed a connect bug here with a harsher wording about recent advances in memory consumption. The funniest thing is that one MS employee did give an Azure AppFabric demo around early 2011 which was so slow that he needed to investigate with xperf. He was after startup time and the call stacks with regards to VB.NET expression compilation were remarkably similar. In fact I only found this post by googling for parts of my call stacks. … “C# expressions will be coming soon to WF, and that will have different performance characteristics than VB” … What did he know Jan 2011 what I did no know until today? ;-). He knew that C# expression will come but that they will not be automatically have better footprint. It is about time to fix that. In its current state C# expressions are not usable for bigger workflows. That also explains the headline for today. You can cheat startup time by prestarting workflows so that the demo looks nice and snappy but it does hurt scalability a lot since you do need much more memory than necessary. I did find the stacks by enabling virtual allocation tracking within XPerf which is still the best tool out there. But first you need to look at your process to check where the memory is hiding: For the C# Expression compiler you do not need xperf. You can directly dump the managed heap and check with a profiler of your choice. But if the allocations are happening on the Private Data ( VirtualAlloc ) you can find it with xperf. There is a nice video on channel 9 explaining VirtualAlloc tracking it in greater detail. If your data allocations are on the Heap it does mean that the C/C++ runtime did create a heap for you where all malloc, new calls do allocate from it. You can enable heap tracing with xperf and full call stack support as well which is doable via xperf like it is shown also on channel 9. Or you can use WPRUI directly: To make “Heap Usage” it work you need to set for your executable the tracing flags (before you start it). For example devenv.exe HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\devenv.exe DWORD TracingFlags 1 Do not forget to disable it after you did complete profiling the process or it will impact the startup time quite a lot. You can with xperf attach directly to a running process and collect heap allocation information from a gone wild process. Very handy if you need to find out what a process was doing which has arrived in a funny state. “VirtualAlloc usage” does work without explicitly enabling stuff for a specific process and is always on machine wide. I had issues on my Windows 7 machines with the call stack collection and the latest Windows 8.1 Performance Toolkit. I was told that WPA from Windows 8.0 should work fine but I do not want to downgrade.

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• Adventures in Windows 8: Working around the navigation animation issues in LayoutAwarePage

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  LayoutAwarePage is a pretty cool add-on to Windows 8 apps, which facilitates greatly the implementation of orientation-aware (portrait, landscape) as well as state-aware (snapped, filled, fullscreen) apps. It has however a few issues that are obvious when you use transformed elements on your page. Adding a LayoutAwarePage to your application If you start with a blank app, the MainPage is a vanilla Page, with no such feature. In order to have a LayoutAwarePage into your app, you need to add this class (and a few helpers) with the following operation: Right click on the Solution and select Add, New Item from the context menu. From the dialog, select a Basic Page (not a Blank Page, which is another vanilla page). If you prefer, you can also use Split Page, Items Page, Item Detail Page, Grouped Items Page or Group Detail Page which are all LayoutAwarePages. Personally I like to start with a Basic Page, which gives me more creative freedom. Adding this new page will cause Visual Studio to show a prompt asking you for permission to add additional helper files to the Common folder. One of these helpers in the LayoutAwarePage class, which is where the magic happens. LayoutAwarePage offers some help for the detection of orientation and state (which makes it a pleasure to design for all these scenarios in Blend, by the way) as well as storage for the navigation state (more about that in a future article). Issue with LayoutAwarePage When you use UI elements such as a background picture, a watermark label, logos, etc, it is quite common to do a few things with those: Making them partially transparent (this is especially true for background pictures; for instance I really like a black Page background with a half transparent picture placed on top of it). Transforming them, for instance rotating them a bit, scaling them, etc. Here is an example with a picture of my two beautiful daughters in the Bird Park in Kuala Lumpur, as well as a transformed TextBlock. The image has an opacity of 40% and the TextBlock a simple RotateTransform. If I create an application with a MainPage that navigates to this LayoutAwarePage, however, I will have a very annoying effect: The background picture appears with an Opacity of 100%. The TextBlock is not rotated. This lasts only for less than a second (during the navigation animation) before the elements “snap into place” and get their desired effect. Here is the XAML that cause the annoying effect: <common:LayoutAwarePage x:Name="pageRoot" x:Class="App13.BasicPage1" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:common="using:App13.Common" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d"> <Grid Style="{StaticResource LayoutRootStyle}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="140" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Image Source="Assets/el20120812025.jpg" Stretch="UniformToFill" Opacity="0.4" Grid.RowSpan="2" /> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Button x:Name="backButton" Click="GoBack" IsEnabled="{Binding Frame.CanGoBack, ElementName=pageRoot}" Style="{StaticResource BackButtonStyle}" /> <TextBlock x:Name="pageTitle" Grid.Column="1" Text="Welcome" Style="{StaticResource PageHeaderTextStyle}" /> </Grid> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" TextWrapping="Wrap" Text="Welcome to my Windows 8 Application" Grid.Row="1" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" FontFamily="Segoe UI Light" FontSize="70" FontWeight="Light" TextAlignment="Center" Foreground="#FFFFA200" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5" UseLayoutRounding="False" d:LayoutRounding="Auto" Margin="0,0,0,153"> <TextBlock.RenderTransform> <CompositeTransform Rotation="-6.545" /> </TextBlock.RenderTransform> </TextBlock> <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> [...] </VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> </Grid> </common:LayoutAwarePage> Solving the issue In order to solve this “snapping” issue, the solution is to wrap the elements that are transformed into an empty Grid. Honestly, to me it sounds like a bug in the LayoutAwarePage navigation animation, but thankfully the workaround is not that difficult: Simple change the main Grid as follows: <Grid Style="{StaticResource LayoutRootStyle}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="140" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid Grid.RowSpan="2"> <Image Source="Assets/el20120812025.jpg" Stretch="UniformToFill" Opacity="0.4" /> </Grid> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Button x:Name="backButton" Click="GoBack" IsEnabled="{Binding Frame.CanGoBack, ElementName=pageRoot}" Style="{StaticResource BackButtonStyle}" /> <TextBlock x:Name="pageTitle" Grid.Column="1" Text="Welcome" Style="{StaticResource PageHeaderTextStyle}" /> </Grid> <Grid Grid.Row="1"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" TextWrapping="Wrap" Text="Welcome to my Windows 8 Application" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" FontFamily="Segoe UI Light" FontSize="70" FontWeight="Light" TextAlignment="Center" Foreground="#FFFFA200" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5" UseLayoutRounding="False" d:LayoutRounding="Auto" Margin="0,0,0,153"> <TextBlock.RenderTransform> <CompositeTransform Rotation="-6.545" /> </TextBlock.RenderTransform> </TextBlock> </Grid> <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> [...] </Grid> Hopefully this will help a few people, I banged my head on the wall for a while before someone at Microsoft pointed me to the solution ;) Happy coding, Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Nokia Windows Phone 8 App Collection

  - by Tim Murphy

  I recently upgraded to a Nokia Lumia 920.  Along with it came the availability of a number of Nokia developed apps or apps that Nokia has made available from other developers.  Below is a summary of some of the ones that I have used to this point.  There are quite a few of them so I won’t be covering everything that is available. Nokia Maps I am quite pleased with the accuracy of Nokia Maps and not having to tap the screen for each turn any more.  The information on the screen is quite good as well.  The couple of improvements I would like to see are for the voice directions to include which street or exit you need to use and improve the search accuracy.  Bing maps had much better search results in my opinion. Nokia Drive This one really had me confused when I first setup the phone.  I was driving down the road and suddenly I am getting notification tones, but there were no visual notifications on the phone.  It seems that in their infinite wisdom Nokia thinks I don’t know when I am going over the speed limit and need to be told. ESPN I really liked my ESPN app on Windows Phone 7.5, but I am not getting the type of experience I was looking for out of this app.  While it allows me to pick my favorite teams, but there isn’t a pivot page or panorama page that shows a summary of my favorite teams.  I have also found that the live tile don’t update very often.  Over all I am rather disappointed compared app produced by ESPN. Smart Shoot I really need to get the kids to let me use this on.  I like the concept, but I need to spend more time with it.  The idea how running the camera through a continuous shooting mode and then picking the best is something that I have done with my DSLR and am glad to see it available here. Cinemagraph Here is a fun filter.  It doesn’t have the most accurate editing features, but it is fun to stop certain parts of a scene and let other parts move.  As a test I stopped the traffic on the highway and let the traffic on the frontage road flow.  It makes for a fun effect.  If nothing else it could be great for sending prank animations to your friends. YouSendIt I have only briefly touched this application.  What I don’t understand is why it is needed.  Most of the functionality seems to be similar to SkyDrive and it gives you less storage.  They only feature that seems to differentiate the app is the signature capability. Creative Studio This app has some nice quick edits, but it is not very comprehensive.  I am also not to thrilled with the user experience.  It puts you though an initial color cast series that I’m not sure why it is there.  Discovery of the remaining adjustments isn’t that great.  In the end I found myself wanting Thumbia back. Panorama This is one of the apps that I like.  I found it easy to use as it guides you with a target circle that you center for it to take the next pictures.  It also stitches the images with amazing speed.  The one thing I wish it had was the capability to turn the phone into portrait orientation and do a taller panorama.  Perhaps we will see this in the future. Nokia Music After getting over the missing album art I found that there were a number of missing features with this app as well.  I have a Zune HD and I am used to being able to go through my collection and adding songs, albums or artists to my now playing.  There also doesn’t seem to be a way to manage playlists that I have seen yet.  Other than that the UI is familiar and it give Nokia City Lens Augmented reality is a cool concept, but I still haven’t seen it implemented in a compelling fashion beyond a demo at TED a couple of years ago.  The app still leaves me wanting as well.  It does give an interesting toy.  It gives you the ability to look for general categories and see general direction and clusters of locations.  I think as this concept is better thought out it will become more compelling. Nokia Trailers I don’t know how often I will use this app, but I do like being able to see what movies are being promoted.  I can’t wait for The Hobbit to come out and the trailer was just what the doctor ordered.  I can see coming back to this app from time to time. PhotoBeamer PhotoBeamer is a strange beast that needs a better instruction manual.  It seems a lot like magic but very confusing.  I need some more testing, but I don’t think this is something that most people are going to understand quickly and may give up before getting it to work.  I may put an update here after playing with it further. Ringtone Maker The app was just published and it didn’t work very well for me. It couldn’t find 95% of the songs that Nokia Music was playing for me and crashed several times.  It also had songs named wrong that when I checked them in Nokia Music they were fine.  This app looks like it has a long way to go. Summary In all I think that Nokia is offering a well rounded set of initial applications that can get any new owner started.  There is definitely room for improvement in all of these apps.  The main need is usability upgrades.  I would guess that with feedback from users they will come up to acceptable levels.  Try them out and see if you agree. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Nokia,Lumia,Nokia Apps,ESPN,PhotoBeamer,City Lens,YouSendIt,Drive,Maps

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• What's new in EJB 3.2 ? - Java EE 7 chugging along!

  - by arungupta

  EJB 3.1 added a whole ton of features for simplicity and ease-of-use such as @Singleton, @Asynchronous, @Schedule, Portable JNDI name, EJBContainer.createEJBContainer, EJB 3.1 Lite, and many others. As part of Java EE 7, EJB 3.2 (JSR 345) is making progress and this blog will provide highlights from the work done so far. This release has been particularly kept small but include several minor improvements and tweaks for usability. More features in EJB.Lite Asynchronous session bean Non-persistent EJB Timer service This also means these features can be used in embeddable EJB container and there by improving testability of your application. Pruning - The following features were made Proposed Optional in Java EE 6 and are now made optional. EJB 2.1 and earlier Entity Bean Component Contract for CMP and BMP Client View of an EJB 2.1 and earlier Entity Bean EJB QL: Query Language for CMP Query Methods JAX-RPC-based Web Service Endpoints and Client View The optional features are moved to a separate document and as a result EJB specification is now split into Core and Optional documents. This allows the specification to be more readable and better organized. Updates and Improvements Transactional lifecycle callbacks in Stateful Session Beans, only for CMT. In EJB 3.1, the transaction context for lifecyle callback methods (@PostConstruct, @PreDestroy, @PostActivate, @PrePassivate) are defined as shown. @PostConstruct @PreDestroy @PrePassivate @PostActivate Stateless Unspecified Unspecified N/A N/A Stateful Unspecified Unspecified Unspecified Unspecified Singleton Bean's transaction management type Bean's transaction management type N/A N/A In EJB 3.2, stateful session bean lifecycle callback methods can opt-in to be transactional. These methods are then executed in a transaction context as shown. @PostConstruct @PreDestroy @PrePassivate @PostActivate Stateless Unspecified Unspecified N/A N/A Stateful Bean's transaction management type Bean's transaction management type Bean's transaction management type Bean's transaction management type Singleton Bean's transaction management type Bean's transaction management type N/A N/A For example, the following stateful session bean require a new transaction to be started for @PostConstruct and @PreDestroy lifecycle callback methods. @Statefulpublic class HelloBean {   @PersistenceContext(type=PersistenceContextType.EXTENDED)   private EntityManager em;    @TransactionAttribute(TransactionAttributeType.REQUIRES_NEW)   @PostConstruct   public void init() {        myEntity = em.find(...);   }   @TransactionAttribute(TransactionAttributeType.REQUIRES_NEW)    @PostConstruct    public void destroy() {        em.flush();    }} Notice, by default the lifecycle callback methods are not transactional for backwards compatibility. They need to be explicitly opt-in to be made transactional. Opt-out of passivation for stateful session bean - If your stateful session bean needs to stick around or it has non-serializable field then the bean can be opt-out of passivation as shown. @Stateful(passivationCapable=false)public class HelloBean {    private NonSerializableType ref = ... . . .} Simplified the rules to define all local/remote views of the bean. For example, if the bean is defined as: @Statelesspublic class Bean implements Foo, Bar {    . . .} where Foo and Bar have no annotations of their own, then Foo and Bar are exposed as local views of the bean. The bean may be explicitly marked @Local as @Local@Statelesspublic class Bean implements Foo, Bar {    . . .} then this is the same behavior as explained above, i.e. Foo and Bar are local views. If the bean is marked @Remote as: @Remote@Statelesspublic class Bean implements Foo, Bar {    . . .} then Foo and Bar are remote views. If an interface is marked @Local or @Remote then each interface need to be explicitly marked explicitly to be exposed as a view. For example: @Remotepublic interface Foo { . . . }@Statelesspublic class Bean implements Foo, Bar {    . . .} only exposes one remote interface Foo. Section 4.9.7 from the specification provide more details about this feature. TimerService.getAllTimers is a newly added convenience API that returns all timers in the same bean. This is only for displaying the list of timers as the timer can only be canceled by its owner. Removed restriction to obtain the current class loader, and allow to use java.io package. This is handy if you want to do file access within your beans. JMS 2.0 alignment - A standard list of activation-config properties is now defined destinationLookup connectionFactoryLookup clientId subscriptionName shareSubscriptions Tons of other clarifications through out the spec. Appendix A provide a comprehensive list of changes since EJB 3.1. ThreadContext in Singleton is guaranteed to be thread-safe. Embeddable container implement Autocloseable. A complete replay of Enterprise JavaBeans Today and Tomorrow from JavaOne 2012 can be seen here (click on CON4654_mp4_4654_001 in Media). The specification is still evolving so the actual property or method names or their actual behavior may be different from the currently proposed ones. Are there any improvements that you'd like to see in EJB 3.2 ? The EJB 3.2 Expert Group would love to hear your feedback. An Early Draft of the specification is available. The latest version of the specification can always be downloaded from here. Java EE 7 Specification Status EJB Specification Project JIRA of EJB Specification JSR Expert Group Discussion Archive These features will start showing up in GlassFish 4 Promoted Builds soon.

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• Sending notification after an event has remained open for a specified period

  - by Loc Nhan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Enterprise Manager (EM) 12c allows you to create an incident rule to send a notification and/or create an incident after an event has been open for a specified period. Such an incident rule will help prevent premature alerts on issues that may correct themselves within a certain amount of time. For example, there are some agents in an unstable network area, and often there are communication failures between the agents and the OMS lasting three, four minutes at a time. In this scenario, you may only want to receive alerts after an agent in that area has been in the Agent Unreachable status for at least five minutes. Note: Many non-target availability metrics allow users to specify the “number of occurrences” or the number of consecutive times metric values reach thresholds before a notification is sent. It is best to use the feature for such metrics. This article provides a step-by-step guide for creating an incident rule set to cater for the above scenario, that is, to create an incident and send a notification after the Agent Unreachable event has remained open for a five-minute duration. Steps to create the incident rule 1.     Log on to the console and navigate to Setup -> Incidents -> Incident Rules. Note: A non-super user requires the Create Enterprise Rule Set privilege, which is a resource privilege, to create an incident rule. The Incident Rules - All Enterprise Rules page displays. 2.     Click Create Rule Set … The Create Rule Set page displays. 3.     Enter a name for the rule set (e.g. Rule set for agents in flaky network areas), optionally enter a description, and leave everything else at default values, and click + Add. The Search and Select: Targets page pops up. Note:  While you can create a rule set for individual targets, it is a best practice to use a group for this purpose. 4.     Select an appropriate group, e.g. the AgentsInFlakyNework group. The Select button becomes enabled, click the button. The Create Rule Set page displays. 5.     Leave everything at default values, and click the Rules tab. The Create Rule Set page displays. 6.     Click Create… The Select Type of Rule to Create page pops up. 7.     Leave the Incoming events and updates to events option selected, and click Continue. The Create New Rule : Select Events page displays. 8.     Select Target Availability from the Type drop-down list. The page shows more options for Target Availability. 9.     Select the Specific events of type Target Availability option, and click + Add. The Select Target Availability events page pops up. 10.   Select Agent from the Target Type dropdown list. The page expands. 11.   Click the Agent unreachable checkbox, and click OK. Note: If you want to also receive a notification when the event is cleared, click the Agent unreachable end checkbox as well before clicking OK. The Create New Rule : Select Events page displays. 12.   Click Next. The Create New Rule : Add Actions page displays. 13.   Click + Add. The Add Actions page displays. 14.   Do the following: a.     Select the Only execute the actions if specified conditions match option (You don’t want the action to trigger always). The following options appear in the Conditions for Actions section. b.     Select the Event has been open for specified duration option. The Conditions for actions section expands. c.     Change the values of Event has been open for to 5 Minutes as shown below. d.     In the Create Incident or Update Incident section, click the Create Incident checkbox as following: e.     In the Notifications section, enter an appropriate EM user or email address in the E-mail To field. f.     Click Continue (in the top right hand corner). The Create New Rule : Add Actions page displays. 15.   Click Next. The Create New Rule : Specify name and Description page displays. 16.   Enter a rule name, and click Next. The Create New Rule : Review page appears. 17.   Click Continue, and proceed to save the rule set. The incident rule set creation completes. After one of the agents in the group specified in the rule set is stopped for over 5 minutes, EM will send a mail notification and create an incident as shown in the following screenshot. In conclusion, you have seen the steps to create an example incident rule set that only creates an incident and triggers a notification after an event has been open for a specified period. Such an incident rule can help prevent unnecessary incidents and alert notifications leaving EM administrators time to more important tasks. - Loc Nhan

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• Key Promoter for NetBeans

  - by Geertjan

  Whenever a menu item or toolbar button is clicked, it would be handy if NetBeans were to tell you 'hey, did you know, you can actually do this via the following keyboard shortcut', if a keyboard shortcut exists for the invoked action. After all, ultimately, a lot of developers would like to do everything with the keyboard and a key promoter feature of this kind is a helpful tool in learning the keyboard shortcuts related to the menu items and toolbar buttons you're clicking with your mouse. Above, you see the balloon message that appears for each menu item and toolbar button that you click and, below, you can see a list of all the actions that have been logged in the Notifications window. That happens automatically when an action is invoked (assuming the plugin described in this blog entry is installed), showing the display name of the action, together with the keyboard shortcut, which is presented as a hyperlink which, when clicked, re-invokes the action (which might not always be relevant, especially for context-sensitive actions, though for others it is quite useful, e.g., reopen the New Project wizard). And here's all the code. Notice that I'm hooking into the 'uigestures' functionality, which was suggested by Tim Boudreau, and I have added my own handler, which was suggested by Jaroslav Tulach, which gets a specific parameter from each new log entry handled by the 'org.netbeans.ui.actions' logger, makes sure that the parameter actually is an action, and then gets the relevant info from the action, if the relevant info exists: @OnShowingpublic class Startable implements Runnable {    @Override    public void run() {        Logger logger = Logger.getLogger("org.netbeans.ui.actions");        logger.addHandler(new StreamHandler() {            @Override            public void publish(LogRecord record) {                Object[] parameters = record.getParameters();                if (parameters[2] instanceof Action) {                    Action a = (Action) parameters[2];                    JMenuItem menu = new JMenuItem();                    Mnemonics.setLocalizedText(                            menu,                             a.getValue(Action.NAME).toString());                    String name = menu.getText();                    if (a.getValue(Action.ACCELERATOR_KEY) != null) {                        String accelerator = a.getValue(Action.ACCELERATOR_KEY).toString();                        NotificationDisplayer.getDefault().notify(                                name,                                 new ImageIcon("/org/nb/kp/car.png"),                                 accelerator,                                 new ActionListener() {                            @Override                            public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {                                a.actionPerformed(e);                            }                        });                    }                }            }        });    }} Indeed, inspired by the Key Promoter in IntelliJ IDEA. Interested in trying it out? If there's interest in it, I'll put it in the NetBeans Plugin Portal.

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• Maintenance plans love story

  - by Maria Zakourdaev

  There are about 200 QA and DEV SQL Servers out there.  There is a maintenance plan on many of them that performs a backup of all databases and removes the backup history files. First of all, I must admit that I’m no big fan of maintenance plans in particular or the SSIS packages in general.  In this specific case, if I ever need to change anything in the way backup is performed, such as the compression feature or perform some other change, I have to open each plan one by one. This is quite a pain. Therefore, I have decided to replace the maintenance plans with a stored procedure that will perform exactly the same thing.  Having such a procedure will allow me to open multiple server connections and just execute an ALTER PROCEDURE whenever I need to change anything in it. There is nothing like good ole T-SQL. The first challenge was to remove the unneeded maintenance plans. Of course, I didn’t want to do it server by server.  I found the procedure msdb.dbo.sp_maintplan_delete_plan, but it only has a parameter for the maintenance plan id and it has no other parameters, like plan name, which would have been much more useful. Now I needed to find the table that holds all maintenance plans on the server. You would think that it would be msdb.dbo.sysdbmaintplans but, unfortunately, regardless of the number of maintenance plans on the instance, it contains just one row.    After a while I found another table: msdb.dbo.sysmaintplan_subplans. It contains the plan id that I was looking for, in the plan_id column and well as the agent’s job id which is executing the plan’s package: That was all I needed and the rest turned out to be quite easy.  Here is a script that can be executed against hundreds of servers from a multi-server query window to drop the specific maintenance plans. DECLARE @PlanID uniqueidentifier   SELECT @PlanID = plan_id FROM msdb.dbo.sysmaintplan_subplans Where name like ‘BackupPlan%’   EXECUTE msdb.dbo.sp_maintplan_delete_plan @plan_id=@PlanID   The second step was to create a procedure that will perform  all of the old maintenance plan tasks: create a folder for each database, backup all databases on the server and clean up the old files. The script is below. Enjoy.   ALTER PROCEDURE BackupAllDatabases                                   @PrintMode BIT = 1 AS BEGIN          DECLARE @BackupLocation VARCHAR(500)        DECLARE @PurgeAferDays INT        DECLARE @PurgingDate VARCHAR(30)        DECLARE @SQLCmd  VARCHAR(MAX)        DECLARE @FileName  VARCHAR(100)               SET @PurgeAferDays = -14        SET @BackupLocation = '\\central_storage_servername\BACKUPS\'+@@servername               SET @PurgingDate = CONVERT(VARCHAR(19), DATEADD (dd,@PurgeAferDays,GETDATE()),126)               SET @FileName = '?_full_'+                      + REPLACE(CONVERT(VARCHAR(19), GETDATE(),126),':','-')                      +'.bak';          SET @SQLCmd = '               IF ''?'' <> ''tempdb'' BEGIN                      EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_create_subdir N'''+@BackupLocation+'\?\'' ;                        BACKUP DATABASE ? TO  DISK = N'''+@BackupLocation+'\?\'+@FileName+'''                      WITH NOFORMAT, NOINIT,  SKIP, REWIND, NOUNLOAD, COMPRESSION,  STATS = 10 ;                        EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_delete_file 0,N'''+@BackupLocation+'\?\'',N''bak'',N'''+@PurgingDate+''',1;               END'          IF @PrintMode = 1 BEGIN               PRINT @SQLCmd        END               EXEC sp_MSforeachdb @SQLCmd        END

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• Scrum Master Stephen Forte Teaches Agile Development, Silverlight and BI at GIDS 2010

  - by rajesh ahuja

  Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 – Gold Standard for India's Software Developer Ecosystem Bangalore, March 25, 2010: The author of several books on application and database development including Programming SQL Server 2008 and certified Scrum Master Stephen Forte is coming this summer to India's biggest summit for the developer ecosystem - Great Indian Developer Summit. At the summit, Stephen will conduct a workshop guaranteed to give attendees a jump start in taking a certified scrum master exam. Scrum, one of the most popular Agile project management and development methods, which is starting to be adopted at major corporations and on very large projects. After an introduction to the basics of Scrum like project planning and estimation, the Scrum Master, team, product owner and burn down, and of course the daily Scrum, Stephen will show many real world applications of the methodology drawn from his own experience as a Scrum Master. Negotiating with the business, estimation and team dynamics are all discussed as well as how to use Scrum in small organizations, large enterprise environments and consulting environments. Stephen will also discuss using Scrum with virtual teams and an off-shoring environment. He will then take a look at the tools we will use for Agile development, including planning poker, unit testing, and much more. On 20th April at the GIDS.NET Conference, Stephen will also conduct a series of sessions on Microsoft computing technologies. He will teach how to build data driven, n-tier Rich Internet Applications (RIA) with Silverlight 4.0. Line of business applications (LOB) in Silverlight 4.0 are easy by tapping the power of WCF RIA Services, the Silverlight Toolkit, and elevated out of browser support. Stephen's demo centric session will walk you through an example of building a LOB application with Silverlight 4.0. See how Silverlight and WCF RIA Services support domain logic, services, data binding, validation, server based paging, authentication, authorization and much more. Silverlight 4.0 means business. Silverlight runs C# and Visual Basic code, and so it seems natural that a business application might share some code between the Silverlight client and its ASP.NET Web server. You may want to run some code client-side for interactivity, but re-run that code on the server for security or reliability. This is possible, and there are several techniques you can use to accomplish this goal. In Stephen's second talk learn about the various techniques and their pros and cons. Some techniques work better in C#, others in VB. Still others are simpler with a little extra tooling or code-generation. Any serious Silverlight business application will almost certainly face this issue, and this session gets you going fast. In the third talk, Stephen will explain how to properly architect and deploy a BI application using a mix of some exciting new tools and some old familiar ones. He will start with a traditional relational transaction centric database (OLTP) and explore ways to build a data warehouse (OLAP), looking at the star and snowflake schemas. Next he will look at the process of extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) your OLTP data into your data warehouse. Different techniques for ETL will be described and the various tradeoffs will be discussed. Then he will look at using the warehouse for reporting, drill down, and data analysis in Microsoft Excel's PowerPivot 2010. The session will round off by showing how to properly build a cube and build a data analysis application on top of that cube, and conclude by looking at some tools to help with the data visualization process. Every year, GIDS is a game changer for several thousands of IT professionals, providing them with a competitive edge over their peers, enlightening them with bleeding-edge information most useful in their daily jobs, helping them network with world-class experts and visionaries, and providing them with a much needed thrust in their careers. Attend Great Indian Developer Summit to gain the information, education and solutions you seek. From post-conference workshops, breakout sessions by expert instructors, keynotes by industry heavyweights, enhanced networking opportunities, and more. About Great Indian Developer Summit Great Indian Developer Summit is the gold standard for India's software developer ecosystem for gaining exposure to and evaluating new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software and standards. Packed with premium knowledge, action plans and advise from been-there-done-it veterans, creators, and visionaries, the 2010 edition of Great Indian Developer Summit features focused sessions, case studies, workshops and power panels that will transform you into a force to reckon with. Featuring 3 co-located conferences: GIDS.NET, GIDS.Web, GIDS.Java and an exclusive day of in-depth tutorials - GIDS.Workshops, from 20 April to 24 April at the IISc campus in Bangalore. At GIDS you'll participate in hundreds of sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, engaging networking events, and the interact with the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/ A Saltmarch Media Press Release E: [email protected] Ph: +91 80 4005 1000

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• Ajax, Lizard Brain Web Design, JSF, Struts, JavaScript, Mobile Web, Flash, jQuery, GWT, Harmony at I

  - by Kim Won

  Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 – India's Biggest Polyglot Conference and Workshops for IT Software Professionals Bangalore, April 9, 2010: The GIDS.Web Conference and Workshops has announced the complete program of over 30 sessions on how browser and rich web technologies such as AJAX, DHTML, Mashups, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 technologies, and Rich UI technologies are making money and gaining market-share for some of the leading businesses in the world. The GIDS.Web track at Great Indian Developer Summit takes place 21 and 23 April 2010, at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. As one of the longest running independent developer conferences in India, GIDS.Web at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 is uniquely positioned to provide a blend of practical, pragmatic and immediately applicable knowledge and a glimpse of the future of technology. During 21 and 23 April 2010, GIDS.Web offers a multi-track conference, workshops, expo show floor, and networking opportunities. The first keynote at GIDS.Web is led by the leading Java EE and Ajax developer, speaker, and author Marty Hall. The best of India's Java and RIA programmers have learnt the subject from Marty's seminal books Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages (first and second editions), More Servlets and JavaServer Pages, and Core Web Programming (first and second editions) from Prentice Hall and Sun Microsystems Press. Marty's keynote address is a comparison of approaches to building rich Internet applications with Ajax. Marty says Ajax development is difficult, and there are several fundamentally different strategies to building Ajaxified Web applications. The keynote address will survey the three most important of these approaches: using an Ajax-enabled JavaScript library such as jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Dojo, or Ext/JS; using a Web framework such as JSF 2.0 or Struts 2 that has integrated Ajax support; using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to build "pure Java" Ajax applications. The talk will compare and contrast these three approaches, discussing the types of applications that fit best for each option. Over the course of the summit Marty will conduct several more sessions on "Choosing an Ajax/JavaScript Toolkit: A Comparison of the Most Popular JavaScript Libraries", "Pure Java Ajax: An Overview of GWT 2.0", "Integrated Ajax Support in JSF 2.0" and "Ajax Support in the Prototype JavaScript Library". The second keynote by the head of Adobe's Flash initiative in India, Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan, explores the state of art in web application development and identify trends that could transform the way we create and use web applications. The talk explains how the Adobe Flash Platform has fuelled this revolution with an integrated set of technologies for delivering the most compelling applications, content and video to the widest possible audience. The Director of Forum Nokia will explain how cloud computing coupled with mobile applications enable consumers to have access to powerful services and improved user experiences never before thought possible. IEEE's 2010 President-Elect Sorel Reisman's afternoon address steps to improve the IT profession in India. Featured talks at GID.Web also include: Web 2.0 Checklist - Deconstructing Modern Websites, Scott Davis Choosing an Ajax/JavaScript Toolkit: Comparison of Popular JavaScript Libraries, Marty Hall Lizard Brain Web Design, Scott Davis Effective Design Processes and Resources for Mobile Web Development, Arabella David NoSQL: The Shift to a Non-relational World, Nosh Petigara Open Source Web Debugging Tools, Matthew McCullough Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight 4.0, Stephen Forte Hadoop - Divide and Conquer, Matthew McCullough Adobe Flash Catalyst for Agile Interaction Design, Harish Sivaramakrishnan Using jQuery and AJAX to Build Front-ends for ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC, Pandurang Nayak First Steps to IT Heaven Through the Cloud. Part II: .WEB, Simone Brunozzi Building Rich Internet Applications with SL RIA Web Services, Pandurang Nayak Enriching Cloud Applications with Adobe Flash Platform, Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan Payments for the Web.future, Khurram Khan and Praveen Alavilli Longevity of Scalable Systems, Nishad Kamat Transform yourself into a Mobile App Developer Using Web Run Time, Balagopal K S Developing Multi Screen Applications on Adobe Flash Platform, Hemanth Sharma Why Harmony and For Whom?, Himanshu Goyal IIS Hosting Solution for ASP.net and PHP Web Sites, Nahas Mohammed Building Pluggable Web applications using Django, Lakshman Prasad Workshop: The 180-min AJAX and JSON Spike Class, Scott Davis Workshop: Essence of Functional Programming, Venkat Subramaniam Workshop: Agile Development, Tools, and Teams and Scrum Certification, Stephen Forte Workshop: PHP + Adobe Flex = Killer RIA, Shyamprasad P Workshop: Cloud Computing Boot Camp on the Google App Engine, Matthew McCullough Workshop: Building Data Centric Applications using Adobe Flex and Java, Prashant Singh Workshop: Building Your First Amazon App, Simone Brunozzi Workshop: Windows Azure Deep Dive, Ramaprasanna Chellamuthu Workshop: Monetizing your Apps with PayPal X Payments Platform, Khurram Khan, Praveen Alavilli Workshop: User Expereince Evaluation Model Walkthrough, Sanna Häiväläinen Sponsors of Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 include: Platinum sponsors Microsoft, Oracle Forum Nokia and Adobe; Gold sponsors Intel and SAP; Silver sponsors Quest Software, PayPal, Telerik and AMT. About Great Indian Developer Summit Great Indian Developer Summit is the gold standard for India's software developer ecosystem for gaining exposure to and evaluating new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software and standards. Packed with premium knowledge, action plans and advise from been-there-done-it veterans, creators, and visionaries, the 2010 edition of Great Indian Developer Summit features focused sessions, case studies, workshops and power panels that will transform you into a force to reckon with. Featuring 3 co-located conferences: GIDS.NET, GIDS.Web, GIDS.Java and an exclusive day of in-depth tutorials - GIDS.Workshops, from 20 April to 24 April at the IISc campus in Bangalore. At GIDS you'll participate in hundreds of sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, engaging networking events, and the interact with the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/ A Saltmarch Media Press Release E: [email protected] Ph: +91 80 4005 1000

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• What does a Software Developer actually do?

  - by chobo2

  Hi I am graduating from my Computer Science degree in a few weeks from now!! I started to look for my first job. For the last couple years I gotten really into web programming(Asp.net). My first choice would be to get a junior asp.net MVC developer but I don't any companies in my area use MVC yet or if they do they are not hiring. So my second choice would be a junior asp.net Webforms developer. My other choices after that would be forms applications, mobile applications using .Net and C#. As you can see I am looking for something with .Net. I spent the last couple years doing .Net projects for school, on my free time and love the Language and it would pain me right now to switch to something like php. So now I found a posting in my area for an Entry Software Developer. I like the fact that they are using .net and that it is entry job(I never worked in this industry and never had more then like a tutoring job so I want to for like intermediate jobs). Posting Are you looking for an exciting challenge within a dynamic, people-oriented culture where you can launch your technical career? Company Name Inc. is a technology consulting company, located in Canada, that designs, develops, and delivers real-time interactive applications accessed via the Internet as well as back-end tools to support these applications. Company Name provides a combination of out-of-the-box and customized solutions to an expanding list of partners and customers. POSITION SUMMARY As a member of our team, the successful candidate will be responsible for helping us increase the quality and stability of our software systems by working jointly and directly with both the Software Development teams and the QA Team. The primary mission of this role will be to substantially enhance our test automation suite. The incumbent will design and program automated tests (unit, integration, system, stress and load) in Visual Studio using C# and will develop sound processes that help us identify and resolve defects as early as possible. The successful incumbent will help us improve and enhance system functionality, reliability, performance and scalability. This role is specifically designed for an eager, bright, new graduate who is looking for a stepping stone into a software engineering role. We promote from within and invite new graduates to apply for this important position - which may lead to new opportunities. We also offer a generous professional development plan to help you on your way. You will be a key part of a team of experts that is responsible for improving the quality of our software by: • Designing, writing, and executing test plans and programmatic tests in Visual Studio using C# and NUnit for functional testing of our code, new features, regression, and performance test procedures. • Working with the engineers to design and build the stress and load testing framework which emulates tens and even hundreds of thousands of concurrent users via a distributed network interfacing with our Load Testing Lab. • Interfacing with both the Development Team and the QA Team to ensure risks are identified and managed. • Mentoring and leading the QA Team in programmatic test automation technologies and tools. MUST HAVE SKILLS / QUALIFICATIONS: • Diploma or higher Degree in Computer Science, or equivalent formal training. • Fundamental C# programming skills. • Knowledge of Internet technologies and Microsoft Windows platforms. • Knowledge of PC hardware. • Excellent communication skills (both oral and written). • Self-starter who takes initiative, requires minimal supervision, can handle multiple simultaneous tasks. • Detail-oriented, able to concentrate, and work quickly. • Proven diagnostic, analytical, and problem solving skills. NICE TO HAVE SKILLS: • Exposure to Visual Studio Team System or Visual Studio Test Edition. • Exposure in C# using NUnit. • Exposure to NUnit, HTTPUnit, and other automation tool suites. • Exposure to Performance/Stress/Load Testing. • Good understanding of relational databases (MS SQL Server). • Familiar with video and online multi-player games. As part of our team you will have the opportunity to work with a supportive team of experts, drive your own success, and ride the wave as we continually expand our team of experts. If you are interested in this opportunity, please send your resume to [email protected] with “Entry Level Software Developer” in the subject line. So that is the posting. To me it sounds like it is QA job. I don't have anything against QA jobs but alot of them seems to be your just clicking buttons and running scripts. Is this what a typical software developer does? Like I am so on the fence to apply for this job. On one side I am not sure how much programming I would be doing. Like I want to be at least half the time programming otherwise my skills will never improve since I will never be programming in teams and stuff. At the same time I have no experience in the industry so on the other side I am thinking just go for it and then maybe a year later try to get a full programming job(provided that I got the job). Yet if I am not programming in that job then that experience will not help me for the next job I find as I will be back a square one.

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• Thread scheduling Round Robin / scheduling dispatch

  - by MRP

  #include <pthread.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <semaphore.h> #define NUM_THREADS 4 #define COUNT_LIMIT 13 int done = 0; int count = 0; int quantum = 2; int thread_ids[4] = {0,1,2,3}; int thread_runtime[4] = {0,5,4,7}; pthread_mutex_t count_mutex; pthread_cond_t count_threshold_cv; void * inc_count(void * arg); static sem_t count_sem; int quit = 0; ///////// Inc_Count//////////////// void *inc_count(void *t) { long my_id = (long)t; int i; sem_wait(&count_sem); /////////////CRIT SECTION////////////////////////////////// printf("run_thread = %d\n",my_id); printf("%d \n",thread_runtime[my_id]); for( i=0; i < thread_runtime[my_id];i++) { printf("runtime= %d\n",thread_runtime[my_id]); pthread_mutex_lock(&count_mutex); count++; if (count == COUNT_LIMIT) { pthread_cond_signal(&count_threshold_cv); printf("inc_count(): thread %ld, count = %d Threshold reached.\n", my_id, count); } printf("inc_count(): thread %ld, count = %d, unlocking mutex\n",my_id, count); pthread_mutex_unlock(&count_mutex); sleep(1) ; }//End For sem_post(&count_sem); // Next Thread Enters Crit Section pthread_exit(NULL); } /////////// Count_Watch //////////////// void *watch_count(void *t) { long my_id = (long)t; printf("Starting watch_count(): thread %ld\n", my_id); pthread_mutex_lock(&count_mutex); if (count<COUNT_LIMIT) { pthread_cond_wait(&count_threshold_cv, &count_mutex); printf("watch_count(): thread %ld Condition signal received.\n", my_id); printf("watch_count(): thread %ld count now = %d.\n", my_id, count); } pthread_mutex_unlock(&count_mutex); pthread_exit(NULL); } ////////////////// Main //////////////// int main (int argc, char *argv[]) { int i; long t1=0, t2=1, t3=2, t4=3; pthread_t threads[4]; pthread_attr_t attr; sem_init(&count_sem, 0, 1); /* Initialize mutex and condition variable objects */ pthread_mutex_init(&count_mutex, NULL); pthread_cond_init (&count_threshold_cv, NULL); /* For portability, explicitly create threads in a joinable state */ pthread_attr_init(&attr); pthread_attr_setdetachstate(&attr, PTHREAD_CREATE_JOINABLE); pthread_create(&threads[0], &attr, watch_count, (void *)t1); pthread_create(&threads[1], &attr, inc_count, (void *)t2); pthread_create(&threads[2], &attr, inc_count, (void *)t3); pthread_create(&threads[3], &attr, inc_count, (void *)t4); /* Wait for all threads to complete */ for (i=0; i<NUM_THREADS; i++) { pthread_join(threads[i], NULL); } printf ("Main(): Waited on %d threads. Done.\n", NUM_THREADS); /* Clean up and exit */ pthread_attr_destroy(&attr); pthread_mutex_destroy(&count_mutex); pthread_cond_destroy(&count_threshold_cv); pthread_exit(NULL); } I am trying to learn thread scheduling, there is a lot of technical coding that I don't know. I do know in theory how it should work, but having trouble getting started in code... I know, at least I think, this program is not real time and its not meant to be. Some how I need to create a scheduler dispatch to control the threads in the order they should run... RR FCFS SJF ect. Right now I don't have a dispatcher. What I do have is semaphores/ mutex to control the threads. This code does run FCFS... and I have been trying to use semaphores to create a RR.. but having a lot of trouble. I believe it would be easier to create a dispatcher but I dont know how. I need help, I am not looking for answers just direction.. some sample code will help to understand a bit more. Thank you.

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• Windows 2008 RenderFarm Service: CreateProcessAsUser "Session 0 Isolation" and OpenGL

  - by holtavolt

  Hello, I have a legacy Windows server service and (spawned) application that works fine in XP-64 and W2K3, but fails on W2K8. I believe it is because of the new "Session 0 isolation " feature. (Note: As a StackOverflow newbie I'm being limited to one link in this post, so you'll need to scroll to bottom to lookup the links for '' items)* Consequently, I'm looking for code samples/security settings mojo that let you create a new process from a windows service for Windows 2008 Server such that I can restore (and possibly surpass) the previous behavior. I need a solution that: Creates the new process in a non-zero session to get around session-0 isolation restrictions (no access to graphics hardware from session 0) - the official MS line on this is: Because Session 0 is no longer a user session, services that are running in Session 0 do not have access to the video driver. This means that any attempt that a service makes to render graphics fails. Querying the display resolution and color depth in Session 0 reports the correct results for the system up to a maximum of 1920x1200 at 32 bits per pixel. The new process gets a windows station/desktop (e.g. winsta0/default) that can be used to create windows DCs. I've found a solution (that launches OK in an interactive session) for this here: *(Starting an Interactive Client Process in C++ - 2) The windows DC, when used as the basis for an *(OpenGL DescribePixelFormat enumeration - 3), is able to find and use the hardware-accelerated format (on a system appropriately equipped with OpenGL hardware.) Note that our current solution works OK on XP-64 and W2K3, except if a terminal services session is running (VNC works fine.) A solution that also allowed the process to work (i.e. run with OpenGL hardware acceleration even when a terminal services session is open) would be fanastic, although not required. I'm stuck at item #1 currently, and although there are some similar postings that discuss this (like *(this -4), and *(this - 5) - they are not suitable solutions, as there is no guarantee of a user session logged in already to "take" a session id from, nor am I running from a LocalSystem account (I'm running from a domain account for the service, for which I can adjust the privileges of, within reason, although I'd prefer to not have to escalate priorities to include SeTcbPrivileges.) For instance - here's a stub that I think should work, but always returns an error 1314 on the SetTokenInformation call (even though the AdjustTokenPrivileges returned no errors) I've used some alternate strategies involving "LogonUser" as well (instead of opening the existing process token), but I can't seem to swap out the session id. I'm also dubious about using the WTSActiveConsoleSessionId in all cases (for instance, if no interactive user is logged in) - although a quick test of the service running with no sessions logged in seemed to return a reasonable session value (1). I’ve removed error handling for ease of reading (still a bit messy - apologies) //Also tried using LogonUser(..) here OpenProcessToken(GetCurrentProcess(), TOKEN_QUERY | TOKEN_ADJUST_PRIVILEGES | TOKEN_ADJUST_SESSIONID | TOKEN_ADJUST_DEFAULT | TOKEN_ASSIGN_PRIMARY | TOKEN_DUPLICATE, &hToken) GetTokenInformation( hToken, TokenSessionId, &logonSessionId, sizeof(DWORD), &dwTokenLength ) DWORD consoleSessionId = WTSGetActiveConsoleSessionId(); /* Can't use this - requires very elevated privileges (LOCAL only, SeTcbPrivileges as well) if( !WTSQueryUserToken(consoleSessionId, &hToken)) ... */ DuplicateTokenEx(hToken, (TOKEN_QUERY | TOKEN_ADJUST_PRIVILEGES | TOKEN_ADJUST_SESSIONID | TOKEN_ADJUST_DEFAULT | TOKEN_ASSIGN_PRIMARY | TOKEN_DUPLICATE), NULL, SecurityIdentification, TokenPrimary, &hDupToken)) // Look up the LUID for the TCB Name privilege. LookupPrivilegeValue(NULL, SE_TCB_NAME, &tp.Privileges[0].Luid)) // Enable the TCB Name privilege in the token. tp.PrivilegeCount = 1; tp.Privileges[0].Attributes = SE_PRIVILEGE_ENABLED; if (!AdjustTokenPrivileges(hDupToken, FALSE, &tp, sizeof(TOKEN_PRIVILEGES), NULL, 0)) { DisplayError("AdjustTokenPrivileges"); ... } if (GetLastError() == ERROR_NOT_ALL_ASSIGNED) { DEBUG( "Token does not have the necessary privilege.\n"); } else { DEBUG( "No error reported from AdjustTokenPrivileges!\n"); } // Never errors here DEBUG(LM_INFO, "Attempting setting of sessionId to: %d\n", consoleSessionId ); if (!SetTokenInformation(hDupToken, TokenSessionId, &consoleSessionId, sizeof(DWORD))) *** ALWAYS FAILS WITH 1314 HERE *** All the debug output looks fine up until the SetTokenInformation call - I see session 0 is my current process session, and in my case, it's trying to set session 1 (the result of the WTSGetActiveConsoleSessionId). (Note that I'm logged into the W2K8 box via VNC, not RDC) So - a the questions: Is this approach valid, or are all service-initiated processes restricted to session 0 intentionally? Is there a better approach (short of "Launch on logon" and auto-logon for the servers?) Is there something wrong with this code, or a different way to create a process token where I can swap out the session id to indicate I want to spawn the process in a new session? I did try using LogonUser instead of OpenProcessToken, but that didn't work either. (I don't care if all spawned processes share the same non-zero session or not at this point.) Any help much appreciated - thanks! (You need to replace the 'zttp' with 'http' - StackOverflow restriction on one link in my newbie post) 2: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa379608(VS.85).aspx 3: http://www.opengl.org/resources/faq/technical/mswindows.htm 4: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2237696/creating-a-process-in-a-non-zero-session-from-a-service-in-windows-2008-server 5: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1602996/how-can-i-lauch-a-process-which-has-a-ui-from-windows-service

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• I never really understood: what is CGI?

  - by claws

  CGI is a Comman Gateway Interface. As the name says, it is a "common" gateway interface for everything. It is so trivial and naive from the name. I feel that I understood this and I felt this every time I encountered this word. But frankly, I didn't. I'm still confused. I am a PHP programmer. I did lot of web development. user (client) request for page --- webserver(-embedded PHP interpreter) ---- Server side(PHP) Script --- MySQL Server. Now say my PHP Script can fetch results from MySQL Server && MATLAB Server && Some other server. So, now PHP Script is the CGI? because its interface for the between webserver & All other servers? I don't know. Sometimes they call CGI, a technology & othertimes they call CGI a program or someother server. What exactly is CGI? Whats the big deal with /cgi-bin/*.cgi? Whats up with this? I don't know what is this cgi-bin directory on the server for. I don't know why they have *.cgi extensions. Why does Perl always comes in the way. CGI & Perl (language). I also don't know whats up with these two. Almost all the time I keep hearing these two in combination "CGI & Perl". This book is another great example CGI Programming with Perl Why not "CGI Programming with PHP/JSP/ASP". I never saw such things. CGI Programming in C this confuses me a lot. in C?? Seriously?? I don't know what to say. I"m just confused. "in C"?? This changes everything. Program needs to be compiled and executed. This entirely changes my view of web programming. When do I compile? How does the program gets executed (because it will be a machine code, so it must execute as a independent process). How does it communicate with the web server? IPC? and interfacing with all the servers (in my example MATLAB & MySQL) using socket programming? I'm lost!! They say that CGI is depreciated. Its no more in use. Is it so? What is its latest update? Once, I ran into a situation where I had to give HTTP PUT request access to web server (Apache HTTPD). Its a long back. So, as far as I remember this is what I did: Edited the configuration file of Apache HTTPD to tell webserver to pass all HTTP PUT requests to some put.php ( I had to write this PHP script) Implement put.php to handle the request (save the file to the location mentioned) People said that I wrote a CGI Script. Seriously, I didn't have clue what they were talking about. Did I really write CGI Script? I hope you understood what my confusion is. (Because I myself don't know where I'm confused). I request you guys to keep your answer as simple as possible. I really can't understand any fancy technical terminology. At least not in this case. EDIT: I found this amazing tutorial "CGI Programming Is Simple!" - CGI Tutorial Which explains the concepts in simplest possible way. I've only have one complaint about this tutorial. Just to make what ever he explained complete he should have shown the C code he used for generating response for those GET / POST requests. I've also added link to this tutorial to Wikipedia's article : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

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• Architecture choice about representation of collections in Business Objects

  - by Rajarshi

  I have made certain choices in my architecture which I request the community to review and comment. I am breaking up the post in smaller sections to make it easier to understand the context and then suggest/comment. I am sorry that the post is long, but is required to explain the context. What am I building A typical business application where there are application users, security roles, business operation/action rights based on roles and several business modules like Stock Receive, Stock Transfer, Sale Order, Sale Invoice, Sale Return, Stock Audit etc. and several reports. The application is a WinForm application since it has a lot of rich and responsive UI requirements and has to operate in disconnected mode (with a local SQL Server), most of the time. What have I done I have built a framework - nothing to boast about, but just a set of libraries that serves the repetative requirements of my application, e.g. authentication, role based authorization, data access, validation, exception handling, logging, change status tracking, presentation model compliance and reasonable loose coupling between components. No, I have not written everything from scratch, you can say I have consolidated many things together like some concepts from CSLA, Martin Fowler for Presentation Model, blocks from Enterprise Library, Unity etc. to build a set of libraries that will help my developers be productive quickly without having to look up Google for many of the technical requirements. I have tried to keep the framework generic so that it can be used in typical business applications and also tried to follow some best practices that will support the same Business Objects to be used in an ASP.NET MVC environment also. My present architecture serves my objectives well, and have built several modules (on WinForm) without much trouble. The architecture also lent itself well to build some usable prototype on ASP.NET MVC with the same set of business objects, without changing a single line of code. My Dilemma I have used Custom Business Objects since that gives me a clearer OOP representation of the problem scope in my solution scope, and helps me visualize my entire solution as collection of objects with data and behavior rather than having a set of relational data (DataSet) and implement behaviours (business logic, validation) etc. separately. With rich databinding support in .NET 2.0 binding Custom Business Objects to UI was a breeze. Now while building my business objects, I am still in a dilemma about representation of collections in business objects. Currently I am using DataSets to represent collections while I have seen many suggestions to implement custom collections. For example, in my vision, a typical Sale Invoice Object will contain 'Sales Invoice Items' as a collection. Now theoritically, I can accept that the each 'Sales Invoice Item' should have its own behavior along with their data (ItemCode, Name, Qty, Price etc.) but typically managing of Sale Invoice Items in a Sale Invoice is handled by the Sale Invoice Object itself, e.g. adding/removing Items from collection. Additionally, we can also put business logic/rules for the Sales Invoice Items like "Qty should not be greater than the ordered qty", "Price should be max 10% above the price in Sale Order" etc. in the Sale Invoice object itself. With that kind of a vision, I felt that most business object child collections can be managed by the parent itself, including add/remove from collection as well and implementing business logic for the collection items, hence the collection items hold nothing but data. Additionally, typical collections are represented in UI in Grids, where ability to support DataBinding becomes very important for any collection. Implementing a custom collection, in that case would also mean, I have to implement robust DataBinding support as well, for the collection, which is of course time consuming. Now, considering child collection behaviors are implemented in the parent and the need for DataBinding of child collections, I chose DataSet to represent any child collection in my business objects. In the above example of Sale Invoice I will have 'Invoice Number', 'Date', 'Customer' etc. as attributes of the 'Sale Invoice' but 'InvoiceItems' as a DataSet. Of course, when I say DataSet, it is not a vanilla dataset but an extended DataSet that supports business rule validation and the same role based security model of my framework to allow/deny any business operation to rows/columns of the DataSet, automatically. This approach has allowed easier collection management and databinding in my business objects and my developers are able to deliver modules rapidly. Questions Do you feel that the approach is reasonable? Do you see any shortcomings of this approach? I am recently thinking of using 'Typed DataSets' as child collections, for easier representation in code, that will allow me to write 'currentInvoice.InvoiceItems' (for the DataTable) and 'invoiceItem.ProductCode' or 'invoiceItem.Qty', instead of 'drow["ProductCode"].ToString()' or '(int)drow["Qty"]' etc. Does this choice have any demerits? Thank you if you have read so far and a salute if you still have the Energy to answer.

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• Am I crazy? (How) should I create a jQuery content editor?

  - by Brendon Muir

  Ok, so I created a CMS mainly aimed at Primary Schools. It's getting fairly popular in New Zealand but the one thing I hate with a passion is the largely bad quality of in browser WYSIWYG editors. I've been using KTML (made by InterAKT which was purchased by Adobe a few years ago). In my opinion this editor does a lot of great things (image editing/management, thumbnailing and pretty good content editing). Unfortunately time has had its nasty way with this product and new browsers are beginning to break features and generally degrade the performance of this tool. It's also quite scary basing my livelihood on a defunct product! I've been hunting, in fact I regularly hunt around to see if anything has changed in the WYSIWYG arena. The closest thing I've seen that excites me is the WYSIHAT framework, but they've decided to ignore a pretty relevant editing paradigm which I'm going to outline below. This is the idea for my proposed editor, and I don't know of any existing products that can do this properly: Right, so the traditional model for editing let's say a Page in a CMS is to log into a 'back end' and click edit on the page. This will then load another screen with the editor in it and perhaps a few other fields. More advanced CMS's will maybe have several editing boxes that are for different portions of the page. Anyway, the big problem with this way of doing things is that the user is editing a document outside of the final context it will appear in. In the simplest terms, this means the page template. Many things can be wrong, e.g. the with of the editing area might be different to the width of the actual template area. The height is nearly always fixed because existing editors always seem to use IFRAMES for backward compatibility. And there are plenty of other beefs which I'm sure you're quite aware of if you're in this development area. Here's my editor utopia: You click 'Edit Page': The actual page (with its actual template) displays. Portions of the page have been marked as editable via a class name. You click on one of these areas (in my case it'd just be the big 'body' area in the middle of the template) and a editing bar drops down from the top of the screen with all your standard controls (bold, italic, insert image etc...). Iframes are never used, instead we rely on setting contentEditable to true on the DIV's in question. Firefox 2 and IE6 can go away, let's move on. You can edit the page knowing exactly how it will look when you save it. Because all the styles for this template are loaded, your headings will look correct, everything will be just dandy. Is this such a radical concept? Why are we still content with TinyMCE and that other editor that is too embarrassing to use because it sounds like a swear word!? Let's face the facts: I'm a JavaScript novice. I did once play around in this area using the Javascript Anthology from SitePoint as a guide. It was quite a cool learning experience, but they of course used the IFRAME to make their lives easier. I tried to go a different route and just use contentEditable and even tried to sidestep the native content editing routines (execCommand) and instead wrote my own. They kind of worked but there were always issues. Now we have jQuery, and a few libraries that abstract things like IE's lack of Range support. I'm wondering, am I crazy, or is it actually a good idea to try and build an editor around this editing paradigm using jQuery and relevant plugins to make the job easier? My actual questions: Where would you start? What plugins do you know of that would help the most? Is it worth it, or is there a magical project that already exists that I should join in on? What are the biggest hurdles to overcome in a project like this? Am I crazy? I hope this question has been posted on the right board. I figured it is a technical question as I'm wanting to know specific hurdles and pitfalls to watch out for and also if it is technically feasible with todays technology. Looking forward to hearing peoples thoughts and opinions.

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• Does there exist an "idea checkout system" on the Internet?

  - by TimeSpace Traveller

  Greetings. I would like to ask the following question: is there anything on the Internet like an "idea checkout" system? Situation: I'm a software developer. Since my current job has started 2 years ago, my mentor at that time has pointed me to the open source world. I have only put little time to look at some of the open source projects, let alone any contribution. However, it is my wish to start developing something outside of the work. Well, except a little problem. I don't know what to develop! It is not about the technical knowledge; the problem is that, I am not a creative person. I am very good at analytical thinking, as well as debugging skills. When being told by my work partners to develop a solution, I could get it done without a problem. However, outside of work, I have no idea what to develop. When I look at the Internet, it seems that so many people have already been developing on so many interesting stuff, making me wonder what I could develop, so that I would not reinvent something already existed. That starts to make me wonder. On the Internet, is there anything like an "idea checkout" system or society? For example, some people would throw in as a software idea, and the system would keep it as an "inventory"; later, a potential software developer would "check out" the idea, just a how people would check out a book from the library. Then, the developer would check the "idea" back in, with a certain kind of work-in-progress or developed software, thus becoming an open-source project. I have just noticed that here at stackoverflow, there is a "Project-Ideas" tag, so perhaps that can provide me some ideas on what to develop; still, my wonder is about a system that people would provide ideas, and people would check out ideas to develop / implement into actual solution. Is there such a system or society existing anywhere on the Internet? Any input is welcome! Thank you very much. Update: Thank you for everyone who has answered my question. Certainly, "getting idea" is part of my problem; as a software developer, however, I'm concerned more than just "getting idea". What I am concerned more, as I have commented, is about the existence of such an idea exchanging ecosystem, capable to initiate open-source projects. I'll put an example here. Say, person A has an idea of music search program, but not search by the attributes of the music (composer, singer, publisher, lyrics, etc.); instead, he wants a program (and a database) to search a piece of music by melody. Very often, people only remember a piece of music by its melody, not even the name of the music (e.g. the music he wants was only once heard in a bookstore, but the melody just gets stuck in his head!). In order to find that piece, normally he would just need to blindly search for it, and spent a long time to do so. A search by melody would enable person A to find the piece much quicker. However, he would not want to personally work on it, not just because of the complexity (he is not a musician and/or programmer, knowing almost nothing about music systems in computer, search algorithms, etc.), but also legal issues (RIAA??), thus he would just like to keep the idea at some place, and let other people to work on that. Now, a developer (person B) may be at the same stage as I am right now, wishing to find something to develop, but not having an idea. With the idea exchanging ecosystem, person B will search, and somehow discover person A's music search idea, and feeling interested enough to work on it. So he "checks out" the idea, start working on it (at least a skeleton), and checks back in with the progress. An open-source project starts from here, fulfilling person A's wish, and person B's programming desire. The above is just an example, because there are already such systems exist on the Internet, but it illustrates what I think about the idea exchange system in my mind. My main concern is about idea exchanging ecosystem, not at personal and unorganized level, but at a semi-organized protocol that's specifically for software developers, having actual projects coming out as the fruits. Not about "projects", but about "ideas and product of ideas". Hopefully that would clear up some of the original idea of this question. Any input is welcome; in fact, I would like to hear as many people as possible how everyone thinks about this. Thank you very much!

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• How should I model the database for this problem? And which ORM can handle it?

  - by Kristof Claes

  I need to build some sort of a custom CMS for a client of ours. These are some of the functional requirements: Must be able to manage the list of Pages in the site Each Page can contain a number of ColumnGroups A ColumnGroup is nothing more than a list of Columns in a certain ColumnGroupLayout. For example: "one column taking up the entire width of the page", "two columns each taking up half of the width", ... Each Column can contain a number ContentBlocks Examples of a ContentBlock are: TextBlock, NewsBlock, PictureBlock, ... ContentBlocks can be given a certain sorting within a Column A ContentBlock can be put in different Columns so that content can be reused without having to be duplicated. My first quick draft of how this could look like in C# code (we're using ASP.NET 4.0 to develop the CMS) can be found at the bottom of my question. One of the technical requirements is that it must be as easy as possible to add new types of ContentBlocks to the CMS. So I would like model everything as flexible as possible. Unfortunately, I'm already stuck at trying to figure out how the database should look like. One of the problems I'm having has to do with sorting different types of ContentBlocks in a Column. I guess each type of ContentBlock (like TextBlock, NewsBlock, PictureBlock, ...) should have it's own table in the database because each has it's own different fields. A TextBlock might only have a field called Text whereas a NewsBlock might have fields for the Text, the Summary, the PublicationDate, ... Since one Column can have ContentBlocks located in different tables, I guess I'll have to create a many-to-many association for each type of ContentBlock. For example: ColumnTextBlocks, ColumnNewsBlocks and ColumnPictureBlocks. The problem I have with this setup is the sorting of the different ContentBlocks in a column. This could be something like this: TextBlock NewsBlock TextBlock TextBlock PictureBlock Where do I store the sorting number? If I store them in the associaton tables, I'll have to update a lot of tables when changing the sorting order of ContentBlocks in a Column. Is this a good approach to the problem? Basically, my question is: What is the best way to model this keeping in mind that it should be easy to add new types of ContentBlocks? My next question is: What ORM can deal with that kind of modeling? To be honest, we are ORM-virgins at work. I have been reading a bit about Linq-to-SQL and NHibernate, but we have no experience with them. Because of the IList in the Column class (see code below) I think we can rule out Linq-to-SQL, right? Can NHibernate handle the mapping of data from many different tables to one IList? Also keep in mind that this is just a very small portion of the domain. Other parts are Users belonging to a certain UserGroup having certain Permissions on Pages, ColumnGroups, Columns and ContentBlocks. The code (just a quick first draft): public class Page { public int PageID { get; set; } public string Title { get; set; } public string Description { get; set; } public string Keywords { get; set; } public IList<ColumnGroup> ColumnGroups { get; set; } } public class ColumnGroup { public enum ColumnGroupLayout { OneColumn, HalfHalf, NarrowWide, WideNarrow } public int ColumnGroupID { get; set; } public ColumnGroupLayout Layout { get; set; } public IList<Column> Columns { get; set; } } public class Column { public int ColumnID { get; set; } public IList<IContentBlock> ContentBlocks { get; set; } } public interface IContentBlock { string GetSummary(); } public class TextBlock : IContentBlock { public string GetSummary() { return "I am a piece of text."; } } public class NewsBlock : IContentBlock { public string GetSummary() { return "I am a news item."; } }

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• 2 javascripts problem

  - by pradeep

  <?php global $user; $userId = $user->uid; /* start with default */ $myresult = ""; /* All Includes - start */ include_once('db.php'); include_once('valid-scripts/validateData.php'); /* All Includes - end */ /* Build All required Variables - start */ $alias = $_GET['alias']; $product = $_GET['product']; $product = strtolower(substr($product,0,-1)); $master_table = $product.'_master'; $rating_master_table = $product.'_rating_master'; $rating_table = $product.'_rating'; $numProperties = 15; /* Build All required Variables - end */ /* Add all Styles required - start */ $myresult .= '<link href="/jquery.rating.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet"/>'; /* Add all Styles required - end */ /* Show Hide Variables/parameters - start */ include_once('all_include_files/show_hide.php'); /* Show Hide Variables/parameters - end */ /* All Javascript - start */ //$myresult .= '<script src="/jquery.rating.js" type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script>'; ?> <style> #tabs { //font-size: 90%; //margin: 20px 0; margin: 2px 0; } #tabs ul { float: right; background: #E3FEFA; width: 600px; //padding-top: 4px; } #tabs li { margin-left: 8px; list-style: none; } * html #tabs li { display: inline; /* ie6 double float margin bug */ } #tabs li, #tabs li a { float: left; } #tabs ul li a { text-decoration: none; //padding: 8px; color: #0073BF; font-weight: bold; } #tabs ul li.active { background: #CEE1EF url(/all_include_files/img/nav-right.gif) no-repeat right top; } #tabs ul li.active a { background: url(/all_include_files/img/nav-left.gif) no-repeat left top; color: #333333; } #tabs div { //background: #CEE1EF; clear: both; //padding: 20px; min-height: 200px; } #tabs div h3 { text-transform: uppercase; margin-bottom: 10px; letter-spacing: 1px; #tabs div p { line-height: 150%; } </style> <script src="/jquery.rating.js" type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script> <script src="/jquery.metadata.js" type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script> <script type='text/javascript'> function openComment(number) { alert('working'); $('#comment'+number).css('display',''); } $('.star').rating({ callback: function(value, link){ alert(value); } }); $(document).ready(function() { //$('#tabs div').hide(); //$('#tabs div:first').show(); $('#tabs ul li:first').addClass('active'); $('#tabs ul li a').click(function() { $('#tabs ul li').removeClass('active'); $(this).parent().addClass('active'); var currentTab = $(this).attr('href'); $('#tabs div').hide(); $(currentTab).show(); return false; }); $("#clickit").click(function() { $.post("/mobile/tablechange.php",{ p1:'<?php echo $brand ?>',p2:'<?php echo $model ?>',userid:'<?php echo $userid ?>' } ,function(data){ $("#changetable").html(data); }); }); $('div.expandable p').expander({ slicePoint: 200, // default is 100 expandText: 'more &raquo;', // default is 'read more...' collapseTimer: 0, // re-collapses after 5 seconds; default is 0, so no re-collapsing userCollapseText: '[^]' // default is '[collapse expanded text]' }); }); </script> <?php /* All Javascript - end */ /* Form Processing after submit - start */ /* Form Processing after submit - end */ /* Actual Form or Page - start */ /*fetch all data needed */ /* initial query */ $result_product = query_product_table($product,$alias); /*fetch property names of product */ $product_properties = master_table($master_table); /*rating table query */ $master_rating_properties = master_rating_table($rating_master_table); /*get user ratings*/ $user_ratings = user_ratings($userId,$alias,$rating_table); $myresult .= '<div class=\'Services\'>'; //$myresult .="<form name ='form1' id='form1' method = 'POST' action='".$_SERVER['php_self'] ."'>"; if(!$result_product) { header('Location: /page-not-found'); } else { $row_product = mysql_fetch_array($result_product); $myresult .= "<h3 class='newstyle'>".$row_product['alias']." <a style='float:right;padding-right:20px;color:white;text-decoration:underline;' href='/'>Back</a> </h3>"; /* start actual product display - start*/ $myresult .= "<div class=\"product\">"; /* start table 1*/ $myresult .= '<table border=\'0\' cellspacing=\'0\' cellpadding=\'0\' style=\'width:580px; table-layout:fixed;\'>'; $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .='<td valign=\'top\'>'; /* start table 2*/ $myresult .='<table width=\'100%\' border=\'0\' cellspacing=\'0\' cellpadding=\'0\'>'; $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<td valign=\'top\' style=\'width:164px;\'>'; /* start table 3*/ $myresult .= '<table style=\'width:164px;\' border=\'0\' cellspacing=\'0\' cellpadding=\'0\'>'; $myresult .= "<tr>"; /* start of the pic row */ $myresult .= '<td align=\'center\' class=\'various_product\'>'; if($row_product['pic'] != "") { $myresult .= '<ul id=\'mycarousel\' style=\'display:\';>'; $myresult .= '<li><a href=\'/all_image_scripts/origpicdisplay.php?product='.rawurlencode($product).'&alias='.rawurlencode($alias).'&picid=pic&p= \'rel=\'lightbox[roadtrip]\'><img src=\'/all_image_scripts/picdisplay1.php?product='.rawurlencode($product).'&alias='.rawurlencode($alias).'\'></img></a></li>'; for($p = 1; $p <= 4; $p++) { if($row_product['pic'.$p] != "") { $myresult .= '<li><a href=\'/all_image_scripts/origpicdisplay.php?product='.rawurlencode($product).'&alias='.rawurlencode($alias).'&picid=pic'.rawurlencode($p).'&p='.rawurlencode($p).'\' rel=\'lightbox[roadtrip]\'><img src=\'/all_image_scripts/thumbpicdisplay.php?product='.rawurlencode($product).'&alias='.rawurlencode($alias).'&picid=pic'.rawurlencode($p).'\'></img></a></li>'; } } $myresult .= '</ul>'; } else { $myresult .= "<img width='50' height='70' src='/images/no-image.gif'></img>"; } jcarousel_add('#mycarousel', array('horizontal' => TRUE,'scroll' => 1,'visible' => 1)); $myresult .= "</td>"; /* end display of pic td*/ $myresult .= "</tr>"; /* end display of pic tr*/ $myresult .= "</table></td>"; /* end display of pic table and earlier td - Still 1 open TR td table tr -hint*/ $myresult .= '<td style=\'width:450px;\'>'; /*table - 4*/ $myresult .= '<table width=\'100%\' border=\'0\' cellspacing=\'0\' cellpadding=\'0\' style=\'display:block;\'>'; /* Start showing property and values */ $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<td class=\'tick\'><img src=\'/images/ul_li_bg.gif\' width=\'12\' height=\'12\' /></td>'; $myresult .= '<td class=\'leftText\'>'.ucfirst($product).':</td>'; $myresult .= '<td class=\'rightText\'>'.$row_product['alias'] .'</td>'; $myresult .= "</tr>"; for($j = 3; $j <= 5 ; $j++){ if($product_properties['property'.$j.'_name'] != "") { if($row_product['property'.$j] != "") { $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<td class=\'tick\'><img src=\'/images/ul_li_bg.gif\' width=\'12\' height=\'12\' /></td>'; $myresult .= '<td class=\'leftText\'>'.$product_properties['property'.$j.'_name'].':</td>'; $myresult .= '<td class=\'rightText\'>'.$row_product['property'.$j] .'</td>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; } /* end if*/ } /* end if*/ } /* end for*/ /* show hide block */ $myresult .= '<tbody id=\'extra_properties\' style=\'display: none;\'>'; for($j = 6; $j <= 15 ; $j++){ if($product_properties['property'.$j.'_name'] != "") { if($row_product['property'.$j] != "") { $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<td class=\'tick\'><img src=\'/images/ul_li_bg.gif\' width=\'12\' height=\'12\' /></td>'; $myresult .= '<td class=\'leftText\'>'.$produtc_properties['property'.$j.'_name'].':</td>'; $myresult .= '<td class=\'rightText\'>'.$row_product['property'.$j] .'</td>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; } /* end if*/ } /* end if*/ } /* end for */ $myresult .= '</tbody>'; /* end show/hide tbody */ $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<td>'; $myresult .= '&nbsp;'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '<td>'; $myresult .= '&nbsp;'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '<td align=\'right\' style=\'text-align:right;text-decoration:underline;\'>'; $myresult .= '<a class=\'right_link\' href=\'javascript:showMore()\'>Show Additional Details...</a>'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; /* End showing property and values */ $showreview = 'display:'; /* review show hide */ /*$myresult .= '<tbody '.$showreview.'>'; $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<td colspan=\'2\'><span class=\'reviews\'>'; //check //$numreviews = getreviewcount($brand,$model,'mobile_user_reviews'); if($numreviews > 0) { $myresult .= '<a href=\'mobilereviews?alias='.rawurlencode($alias).'\'> <span>$numreviews Reviews</span></a>'; } else { $myresult .= " $numreviews Reviews"; } $myresult .= "</span></td>"; $myresult .= "</tr>"; */ $myresult .= "</tbody>"; /* review show hide - end */ /* count show hide */ $myresult .= '<tbody '.$showcount.'>'; $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<td colspan=\'2\'><span class=\'reviews\'>'; //check //$totalvotes = gettotalvotes($row['property1'],$row['property2'],'mobile_rating'); $myresult .= "</td>"; $myresult .= "</tr>"; $myresult .= "</tbody>"; /* count show hide - end */ $myresult .= "</table></td>"; /* end table 4 */ $myresult .= '</tr>'; /* end 1 row and remaining tr , td ,table */ $myresult .= '</table></td>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; /* remianing only 1 table */ /* ratings - positive last section starts here */ $max= array(); for ($l = 1 ; $l < 15; $l++){ if($row_product['property'.$l.'_avg']){ $maxarray = 0; $maxarray = $row_product['property'.$l.'_avg']; $max['rating'.$l.'_name'] = $maxarray; } } if(count($max) >0 ) { include('all_include_files/min_max_properties.php'); } if(($row_product['freshness'] <= strtotime("-3 month"))) { $image_type= 'old'; } else if(($row_product['freshness'] <= strtotime("-2 month"))) { $image_type= 'bitold'; } else if(($row_product['freshness'] <= strtotime("-1 month")) || ($row_product['freshness'] > strtotime("-1 month"))) { $image_type= 'new'; } $img_name = $image_type; $myresult .= "<tr>"; $myresult .= "<td>"; $myresult .= "<table width='100%' border='0'>"; $myresult .= "<tr>"; $myresult .= "<td width='170' class=\"ratingz\"><span><u>Overall rating</u></span></td>"; $myresult .= "<td width='150' class=\"ratingz\"><span><u>Positive</u></span></td>"; $myresult .= "<td width='150' class=\"ratingz\"><span><u>Negative</u></span></td>"; if($img_name == 'new'){ $images = "<img src='/sites/default/files/battery-discharging-100.png' width='40' height='40'></img>"; } else if($img_name == 'bitold'){ $images = "<img src='/sites/default/files/battery-discharging-80.png' width='40' height='40'></img>"; } else if($img_name == 'old'){ $images = "<img src='/sites/default/files/battery-discharging-0.png' width='40' height='40'></img>"; } else { $images = ""; } $myresult .= "<td rowspan='2'><p ".$showbattery.">". $images ."</p></td>"; $myresult .= "</tr>"; $myresult .= "<tr>"; $myresult .= "<td>"; $i++; for($k = 0.5; $k <= 10.0; $k+=0.5) { $overall = roundOff($row_product['overall_rating']); if($overall == $k) { $chk ="checked"; } else { $chk = ""; } $myresult .= '<input class=\'star {split:2}\' type=\'radio\' value=\''. $k .'\' '.$chk.' title=\''. $k.' out of 10 \' disabled />'; } $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '<td ><span>'.$positive.'</span></td>'; $myresult .= '<td ><span>'.$negative.'</span></td>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; $myresult .= '</table></td>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; /* ratings - positive last section ends here */ $myresult .= '<tr>'; if($row_product['description'] != ""){ if(words_count($row_product['description']) > 8){ $myresult .= '<td><p><span class=\'description\'><strong><u>Description</u>:</strong></span>&nbsp;&nbsp; <div class=\'expandable\'><p>'.$row_product['description'].'</div></p></p></td>'; } else { $myresult .= '<td><p><span class=\'description\'><strong><u>Description</u>:</strong></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;'. $row_product['description'] .'</p></td>'; } } $myresult .= '</tr>'; $myresult .= '</table>'; /* end 1st table */ $myresult .= '</div>'; /* start actual product display - end*/ /*start the form to take ratings */ $myresult .= '<div id=\'tabs\'>'; $myresult .= '<ul>'; $myresult .= '<li><a href=\'#tab-1\'>Ratings</a></li>'; $myresult .= '<li><a href=\'#tab-2\'>Click here to rate</a></li>'; $myresult .= '</ul>'; $myresult .= '<div id=\'tab-1\'>'; /* actual rating table - start - jsut display ratings */ $myresult .= '<table id=\'rounded-corner\'>'; /* thead - start */ $myresult .= '<thead>'; $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<th width=\'30%\' class=\'rounded-company\' scope=\'col\'><span style=\'font: normal 18px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#FFF;\'>Ratings</span></th>'; $myresult .= '<th width=\'70%\' colspan=\'2\'class=\'rounded-q4\' scope=\'col\'><a href=\'#rounded-corner\' id=\'clickit\' style=\'color:white;text-decoration:underline;\' $disabled ></a></th> '; /*$myresult .= '<th width=\'70%\' colspan=\'2\'class=\'rounded-q4\' scope=\'col\'><a href=\'#rounded-corner\' id=\'clickit\' style=\'color:white;text-decoration:underline;\' $disabled >Click here to rate</a></th> ';*/ $myresult .= '</tr>'; $myresult .= '</thead>'; /* thead - end */ /* tbody - start */ $myresult .= '<tbody>'; /*start printing the table wth feature and ratings */ for ($i = 1 ; $i < $numProperties; $i++){ if($master_rating_properties['rating'.$i.'_name']){ $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<td width=\'22%\'>'; $indfeature = 0; $indfeature = $row_product['property'.$i.'_avg']; $myresult .= $master_rating_properties['rating'.$i.'_name'].' ( '.$indfeature .')'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '<td colspan=\'0\' width=\'38%\' >'; $tocheck = $indfeature; for($k = 0.5; $k <= 10.0; $k+=0.5){ $tocheck = roundOff($tocheck); if(($tocheck) == $k) { $chk = "checked"; } else { $chk = ""; } $myresult .= '<input class=\'star {split:2}\' type=\'radio\' name=\'drating'.$i.'\' id=\'drating'.$i.''.$k.'\' value=\''. $k .'\' '.$chk.' title=\''. $k.' out of 10 \' disabled \'/>'; } /* for k loop end */ $myresult .= '</tr>'; } /* end if loop */ } /* end i for loop */ $myresult .= '</tbody>'; /* end tbody */ /* footer round corner start */ $myresult .= '<tfoot>'; $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<td class=\'rounded-foot-left\'>&nbsp;</td>'; $myresult .= '<td class=\'rounded-foot-right\' colspan=\'4\' >'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; $myresult .= '</tfoot>'; $myresult .= '</table>'; /*round corner table end */ $myresult .= '</div>'; /*end 1st tab */ /*start 2nd tab */ $myresult .= '<div id=\'tab-2\'>'; $myresult .= '<form name =\'form1\' id=\'form1\' method = \'POST\' action=\''.$_SERVER['php_self'] .'\'>'; /* actual rating table - start - actual rate/update */ $myresult .= '<table id=\'rounded-corner\'>'; /* thead - start */ $myresult .= '<thead>'; $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<th width=\'30%\' class=\'rounded-company\' scope=\'col\'><span style=\'font: normal 18px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#FFF;\'>Ratings</span></th>'; $myresult .= '<th width=\'70%\' colspan=\'2\'class=\'rounded-q4\' scope=\'col\'></th>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; $myresult .= '</thead>'; /* thead - end */ /* tbody - start */ $myresult .= '<tbody>'; unset($i); /*start printing the table wth feature and ratings */ for ($i = 1 ; $i < $numProperties; $i++){ if($master_rating_properties['rating'.$i.'_name']){ $myresult .= '<tr>'; /*fetch ratings and comments - 1st make it to null */ $indfeature = 0; $comment = ''; $indfeature = $user_ratings['rating'.$i]; if($indfeature == NULL){ $indfeature = 0; } $comment = $user_ratings['rating'.$i.'_comment']; $myresult .= '<td width=\'22%\'>'; $myresult .= $master_rating_properties['rating'.$i.'_name'].' ( '.$indfeature.' )'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '<td colspan=\'0\' width=\'38%\' >'; if(($userId != '0') && (is_array($user_ratings))) { $tocheck = $indfeature; } else { $tocheck = '0'; } for($k = 0.5; $k <= 10.0; $k+=0.5){ $tocheck = roundOff($tocheck); if(($tocheck) == $k) { $chk = "checked"; } else { $chk = ""; } $myresult .= '<input class=\'star {split:2}\' type=\'radio\' name=\'rating'.$i.'\' id=\'rating'.$i.''.$k.'\' value=\''. $k .'\' '.$chk.' title=\''. $k.' out of 10 \' '.$disabled.' \' />'; } /* for k loop end */ $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '<td width=\'40%\'>'; $myresult .= '<input title=\'Reason for this Rating.. \'type=\'text\' size=\'25\' name=\'comment'.$i.'\' id=\'comment'.$i.'\' style=\'display:;\' maxlength=\'255\' value="'.$comment.'">'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; } /* end if loop */ } /* end i for loop */ $myresult .= '</tbody>'; /* end tbody */ /* footer round corner start */ $myresult .= '<tfoot>'; $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<td class=\'rounded-foot-left\'>&nbsp;</td>'; $myresult .= '<td class=\'rounded-foot-right\' colspan=\'4\' >'; if(($userId != '0') && (is_array($user_ratings))) { $myresult .= '<input type=\'button\' id=\'update_form\' value=\'Update\'>'; } else { $myresult .= '<input type=\'button\' id=\'save_form\' value=\'Save\'>'; } $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; $myresult .= '</tfoot>'; $myresult .= '</table>'; /*round corner table end */ $myresult .= '</form>'; /*end the form to take ratings */ $myresult .= '</div>'; /*end 2nd tab */ $myresult .= '</div>'; /*end tabs div */ /* actual rating table - end */ /* 1st form ends here id- ratings_form */ } /* end of if loop result_product loop */ /* start table 3 - overall comment*/ $myresult .= '<table border=\'0\' cellspacing=\'0\' cellpadding=\'0\' style=\'width:580px; table-layout:fixed;\' id=\'rounded-corner\'>'; $myresult .= '<tbody>'; /* thead - start */ $myresult .= '<thead>'; $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<th width=\'100%\' colspan=\'2\' class=\'rounded-company\' scope=\'col\'><span style=\'font: normal 18px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#FFF;\'>Overall Comments</span></th>'; $myresult .= '<th colspan=\'3\' class=\'rounded-q4\' scope=\'col\'></th>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; $myresult .= '</thead>'; /* thead - end */ $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<td colspan=\'4\'>'; $myresult .= '<textarea title=\'OverAll Comment\' name=\'overall_comment\' cols=\'65\'></textarea>'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; $myresult .= '<tbody>'; $myresult .= '</table>'; /* end table 3 - overall comment*/ /* start table 4 - summary*/ $myresult .= '<table border=\'0\' cellspacing=\'0\' cellpadding=\'0\' style=\'width:580px; table-layout:fixed;\' id=\'rounded-corner\'>'; $myresult .= '<tbody>'; /* thead - start */ $myresult .= '<thead>'; $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<th colspan=\'2\' class=\'rounded-company\' scope=\'col\'><span style=\'font: normal 18px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#FFF;\'>Your Opinion</span></th>'; $myresult .= '<th colspan=\'2\'class=\'rounded-q4\' scope=\'col\'></th>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; $myresult .= '</thead>'; /* thead - end */ $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<td colspan=\'2\'>'; $myresult .= 'Do you Agree with the Ratings'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '<td colspan=\'2\'>'; $myresult .= 'Was the Information Helpful'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; $myresult .= '<tr>'; $myresult .= '<form name=\'form2\' id=\'form2\' method=\'post\'>'; $myresult .= '<td>'; $myresult .= '<input type=\'button\' class=\'agree\' value=\'agree\'>'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '<td>'; $myresult .= '<input type=\'button\' class=\'disagree\' value=\'disagree\'>'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '<input type=\'hidden\' name=\'agree_disagree\' id=\'agree_disagree\'>'; $myresult .= '</form>'; $myresult .= '<form name=\'form3\' id=\'form3\' method=\'post\'>'; $myresult .= '<td>'; $myresult .= '<input type=\'button\' class=\'helpful\' value=\'Helpful\'>'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '<td>'; $myresult .= '<input type=\'button\' class=\'nothelpful\' value=\'Not Helpful\'>'; $myresult .= '</td>'; $myresult .= '<input type=\'hidden\' name=\'help_nohelp\' id=\'help_nohelp\'>'; $myresult .= '</form>'; $myresult .= '</tr>'; $myresult .= '</tbody>'; $myresult .= '</table>'; /*end table 4 summary table */ $myresult .= '</div>'; /* Actual Form or Page - end */ echo $myresult; //echo 'Product: '.$product; //echo '<br/>Alias: '.$alias; ?> hey this code is working fine for me . as required. the star class code is taken from http://www.fyneworks.com/jquery/star-rating/ ... it works well.. but when i insert code to add tabs for content ,the starts is not visible at all. but when i check source code. the stars are actually there . dono whats the prob. any suggestions on this this is the tabs code $('#tabs div').hide(); ('#tabs div:first').show(); $('#tabs ul li:first').addClass('active'); $('#tabs ul li a').click(function() { $('#tabs ul li').removeClass('active'); $(this).parent().addClass('active'); var currentTab = $(this).attr('href'); $('#tabs div').hide(); $(currentTab).show(); return false; });

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• How to associate Wi-Fi beacon info with a virtual "location"?

  - by leander

  We have a piece of embedded hardware that will sense 802.11 beacons, and we're using this to make a map of currently visible bssid -> signalStrength. Given this map, we would like to make a determination: Is this likely to be a location I have been to before? If so, what is its ID? If not, I should remember this location: generate a new ID. Now what should I store (and how should I store it) to make future determinations easier? This is for an augmented-reality app/game. We will be using it to associate particular characters and events with "locations". The device does not have internet or cellular access, so using a geolocation service is out of consideration for the time being. (We don't really need to know where we are in reality, just be able to determine if we return there.) It isn't crucial that it be extremely accurate, but it would be nice if it was tolerant to signal strength changes or the occasional missing beacon. It should be usable in relatively low numbers of access points (e.g. rural house with one wireless router) or many (wandering around a dense metropolis). In the case of a city, it should change location every few minutes of walking (continuously-overlapping signals make this a bit more tricky in naive code). A reasonable number of false positives (match a location when we aren't actually there) is acceptable. The wrong character/event showing up just adds a bit of variety. False negatives (no location match) are a bit more troublesome: this will tend to add a better-matching new location to the saved locations, masking the old one. While we will have additional logic to ensure locations that the device hasn't seen in a while will "orphan" any associated characters or events (if e.g. you move to a different country), we'd prefer not to mask and eventually orphan locations you do visit regularly. Some technical complications: signalStrength is returned as 1-4; presumably it's related to dB, but we are not sure exactly how; in my experiments it tends to stick to either 1 or 4, but occasionally we see numbers in between. (Tech docs on the hardware are sparse.) The device completes a scan of one-quarter of the channel space every second; so it takes about 4-5 seconds to get a complete picture of what's around. The list isn't always complete. (We are making strides to fix this using some slight sampling period randomization, as recommended by the library docs. We're also investigating ways to increase the number of scans without killing our performance; the hardware/libs are poorly behaved when it comes to saturating the bus.) We have only kilobytes to store our history. We have a "working" impl now, but it is relatively naive, and flaky in the face of real-world Wi-Fi behavior. Rough pseudocode: // recordLocation() -- only store strength 4 locations m_savedLocations[g_nextId++] = filterForStrengthGE( m_currentAPs, 4 ); // determineLocation() bestPoints = -inf; foreach ( oldLoc in m_savedLocations ) { points = 0.0; foreach ( ap in m_currentAPs ) { if ( oldLoc.has( ap ) ) { switch ( ap.signalStrength ) { case 3: points += 1.0; break; case 4: points += 2.0; break; } } } points /= oldLoc.numAPs; if ( points > bestPoints ) { bestLoc = oldLoc; bestPoints = points; } } if ( bestLoc && bestPoints > 1.0 ) { if ( bestPoints >= (2.0 - epsilon) ) { // near-perfect match. // update location with any new high-strength APs that have appeared bestLoc.addAPs( filterForStrengthGE( m_currentAPs, 4 ) ); } return bestLoc; } else { return NO_MATCH; } We record a location currently only when we have NO_MATCH and the app determines it's time for a new event. (The "near-perfect match" code above would appear to make it harder to match in the future... It's mostly to keep new powerful APs from being associated with other locations, but you'd think we'd need something to counter this if e.g. an AP doesn't show up in the next 10 times I match a location.) I have a feeling that we're missing some things from set theory or graph theory that would assist in grouping/classification of this data, and perhaps providing a better "confidence level" on matches, and better robustness against missed beacons, signal strength changes, and the like. Also it would be useful to have a good method for mutating locations over time. Any useful resources out there for this sort of thing? Simple and/or robust approaches we're missing?

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• WPF Some styles not applied on DataTemplate controls

  - by Martin

  Hi, I am trying to learn something about WPF and I am quite amazed by its flexibility. However, I have hit a problem with Styles and DataTemplates, which is little bit confusing. I have defined below test page to play around a bit with styles etc and found that the Styles defined in <Page.Resources> for Border and TextBlock are not applied in the DataTemplate, but Style for ProgressBar defined in exactly the same way is applied. Source code (I just use Kaxaml and XamlPadX to view the result) <Page xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"> <Page.Resources> <Style TargetType="{x:Type Border}"> <Setter Property="Background" Value="SkyBlue"/> <Setter Property="BorderBrush" Value="Black"/> <Setter Property="BorderThickness" Value="2"/> <Setter Property="CornerRadius" Value="5"/> </Style> <Style TargetType="{x:Type TextBlock}"> <Setter Property="FontWeight" Value="Bold"/> </Style> <Style TargetType="{x:Type ProgressBar}"> <Setter Property="Height" Value="10"/> <Setter Property="Width" Value="100"/> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="Red"/> </Style> <XmlDataProvider x:Key="TestData" XPath="/TestData"> <x:XData> <TestData xmlns=""> <TestElement> <Name>Item 1</Name> <Value>25</Value> </TestElement> <TestElement> <Name>Item 2</Name> <Value>50</Value> </TestElement> </TestData> </x:XData> </XmlDataProvider> <HierarchicalDataTemplate DataType="TestElement"> <Border Height="45" Width="120" Margin="5,5"> <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" Margin="5,5" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" Text="{Binding XPath=Name}"/> <ProgressBar Value="{Binding XPath=Value}"/> </StackPanel> </Border> </HierarchicalDataTemplate> </Page.Resources> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center"> <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" VerticalAlignment="Center"> <Border Height="45" Width="120" Margin="5,5"> <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" Text="Item 1"/> <ProgressBar Value="25"/> </StackPanel> </Border> <Border Height="45" Width="120" Margin="5,5"> <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" Text="Item 2"/> <ProgressBar Value="50"/> </StackPanel> </Border> </StackPanel> <ListBox Margin="10,10" Width="140" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource TestData}, XPath=TestElement}"/> </StackPanel> </Page> I suspect it has something to do with default styles etc, but more puzzling is why some Styles are applied and some not. I cannot find an easy explanation for above anywhere and thus would like to ask if someone would be kind enough to explain this behaviour in lamens' terms with possible links to technical description, i.e. to MSDN or so. Thanks in advance for you support!

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• Unable to center text in IE but works in firefox

  - by greenpool

  Can somebody point out where I'm going wrong with the following code. Text inside td elements need to be centered except for Summary and Experience. This only appears to work in Firefox/chrome. In IE8 all td text are displayed as left-justified. No matter what I try it doesn't center it. Any particular reason why this would happen? Thanks. css #viewAll { font-family:"Trebuchet MS", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; width:100%; border-collapse:collapse; margin-left:10px; table-layout: fixed; } #viewAll td, #viewAll th { font-size:1.1em; border:1px solid #98bf21; word-wrap:break-word; text-align:center; overflow:hidden; } #viewAll tbody td{ padding:2px; } #viewAll th { font-size:1.1em; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:4px; background-color:#A7C942; color:#ffffff; } table <?php echo '<table id="viewAll" class="tablesorter">'; echo '<thead>'; echo '<tr align="center">'; echo '<th style="width:70px;">Product</th>'; echo '<th style="width:105px;">Prob</th>'; echo '<th style="width:105px;">I</th>'; echo '<th style="width:60px;">Status</th>'; echo '<th style="width:120px;">Experience</th>'; echo '<th style="width:200px;">Technical Summary</th>'; echo '<th style="width:80px;">Record Created</th>'; echo '<th style="width:80px;">Record Updated</th>'; echo '<th style="width:50px;">Open</th>'; echo '</tr>'; echo '</thead>'; echo '<tbody>'; while ($data=mysqli_fetch_array($result)){ #limiting the summary text displayed in the table $limited_summary = (strlen($data['summary']) > 300) ? substr(($data['summary']),0,300) . '...' : $data['summary']; $limited_exp = (strlen($data['exp']) > 300) ? substr(($data['exp']),0,300) . '...' : $data['exp']; echo '<tr align="center"> <td style="width:70px; text-align:center;">'.$data['product'].'</td>'; //if value is '-' do not display as link if ($data['prob'] != '-'){ echo '<td style="width:105px;">'.$data['prob'].'</a></td>'; } else{ echo '<td style="width:105px; ">'.$data['prob'].'</td>'; } if ($data['i'] != '-'){ echo '<td style="width:105px; ">'.$data['i'].'</a></td>'; } else{ echo '<td style="width:105px; ">'.$data['i'].'</td>'; } echo'<td style="width:40px; " >'.$data['status'].'</td> <td style="width:120px; text-align:left;">'.$limited_cust_exp.'</td> <td style="width:200px; text-align:left;">'.$limited_summary.'</td> <td style="width:80px; ">'.$data['created'].'</td> <td style="width:80px; ">'.$data['updated'].'</td>'; if (isset($_SESSION['username'])){ echo '<td style="width:50px; "> <form action="displayRecord.php" method="get">'.' <input type="hidden" name="id" value="'. $data['id'].'" style="text-decoration: none" /><input type="submit" value="Open" /></form></td>'; }else{ echo '<td style="width:50px; "> <form action="displayRecord.php" method="get">'.' <input type="hidden" name="id" value="'. $data['id'].'" style="text-decoration: none" /><input type="submit" value="View" /></form></td>'; } echo '</tr>'; }#end of while echo '</tbody>'; echo '</table>'; ?>

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