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• Can Google Employees See My Saved Google Chrome Passwords?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Storing your passwords in your web browser seems like a great time saver, but are the passwords secure and inaccessible to others (even employees of the browser company) when squirreled away? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader MMA is curious if Google employees have (or could have) access to the passwords he stores in Google Chrome: I understand that we are really tempted to save our passwords in Google Chrome. The likely benefit is two fold, You don’t need to (memorize and) input those long and cryptic passwords. These are available wherever you are once you log in to your Google account. The last point sparked my doubt. Since the password is available anywhere, the storage must in some central location, and this should be at Google. Now, my simple question is, can a Google employee see my passwords? Searching over the Internet revealed several articles/messages. Do you save passwords in Chrome? Maybe you should reconsider: Talks about your passwords being stolen by someone who has access to your computer account. Nothing mentioned about the central storage security and vulnerability. There is even a response from Chrome browser security tech lead about the first issue. Chrome’s insane password security strategy: Mostly along the same line. You can steal password from somebody if you have access to the computer account. How to Steal Passwords Saved in Google Chrome in 5 Simple Steps: Teaches you how to actually perform the act mentioned in the previous two when you have access to somebody else’s account. There are many more (including this one at this site), mostly along the same line, points, counter-points, huge debates. I refrain from mentioning them here, simply carry a search if you want to find them. Coming back to my original query, can a Google employee see my password? Since I can view the password using a simple button, definitely they can be unhashed (decrypted) even if encrypted. This is very different from the passwords saved in Unix-like OS’s where the saved password can never be seen in plain text. They use a one-way encryption algorithm to encrypt your passwords. This encrypted password is then stored in the passwd or shadow file. When you attempt to login, the password you type in is encrypted again and compared with the entry in the file that stores your passwords. If they match, it must be the same password, and you are allowed access. Thus, a superuser can change my password, can block my account, but he can never see my password. So are his concerns well founded or will a little insight dispel his worry? The Answer SuperUser contributor Zeel helps put his mind at ease: Short answer: No* Passwords stored on your local machine can be decrypted by Chrome, as long as your OS user account is logged in. And then you can view those in plain text. At first this seems horrible, but how did you think auto-fill worked? When that password field gets filled in, Chrome must insert the real password into the HTML form element – or else the page wouldn’t work right, and you could not submit the form. And if the connection to the website is not over HTTPS, the plain text is then sent over the internet. In other words, if chrome can’t get the plain text passwords, then they are totally useless. A one way hash is no good, because we need to use them. Now the passwords are in fact encrypted, the only way to get them back to plain text is to have the decryption key. That key is your Google password, or a secondary key you can set up. When you sign into Chrome and sync the Google servers will transmit the encrypted passwords, settings, bookmarks, auto-fill, etc, to your local machine. Here Chrome will decrypt the information and be able to use it. On Google’s end all that info is stored in its encrpyted state, and they do not have the key to decrypt it. Your account password is checked against a hash to log in to Google, and even if you let chrome remember it, that encrypted version is hidden in the same bundle as the other passwords, impossible to access. So an employee could probably grab a dump of the encrypted data, but it wouldn’t do them any good, since they would have no way to use it.* So no, Google employees can not** access your passwords, since they are encrypted on their servers. * However, do not forget that any system that can be accessed by an authorized user can be accessed by an unauthorized user. Some systems are easier to break than other, but none are fail-proof. . . That being said, I think I will trust Google and the millions they spend on security systems, over any other password storage solution. And heck, I’m a wimpy nerd, it would be easier to beat the passwords out of me than break Google’s encryption. ** I am also assuming that there isn’t a person who just happens to work for Google gaining access to your local machine. In that case you are screwed, but employment at Google isn’t actually a factor any more. Moral: Hit Win + L before leaving machine. While we agree with zeel that it’s a pretty safe bet (as long as your computer is not compromised) that your passwords are in fact safe while stored in Chrome, we prefer to encrypt all our logins and passwords in a LastPass vault. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Google Analytics on Android

  - by pjv

  There is a specific and official analytics SDK for native Android apps (note that I'm not talking about webpages in apps on a phone). This library basically sends pages and events to Google Analytics and you can view your analytics in exactly the same dashboard as for websites. Since my background is apps rather than websites, and since a lot of the Google Analytics terminology seems particularly inapplicable to a native app, I need some pointers. Please discuss my remarks, provide some clarification where you think I'm off-track, and above all share good experiences! 1. Page Views Pages mostly can match different Activities (and Dialogs) being displayed. Activities can be visible behind non-full-screen Activities however, though only the top-level Activity can be interacted. This sort-off clashes with a "(page) view". You'd also want at least one page view for each visit and therefore put one page view tracker in the Application class. However this does not constitute a window or sorts. Usually an Activity will open at the same time, so the time spent on that page will have been 0. This will influence your "time spent" statistics. How are these counted anyway? Moreover, there is a loose coupling between the Activities, by means of Intents. A user can, much like on any website, step in at any Activity, although usually this then concerns resuming the application where he left off. This makes that the hierarchy of Activities usually is very flat. And since there are no url's involved. What meaning would using slashes in page titles have, such as "/Home"? All pages would appear on an equal level in the reports, so no content drilldown. Non-unique page views seem to be counted as some kind of indicator of successfulness: how often does the visitor revisit the page. When the user rotates the screen however usually an Activity resumes again, thus making it a new page view. This happens a lot. Maybe a well-thought-through placement of the call might solve this, or placing several, I'm not sure. How to deal with Page Views? 2. Events I'd say there are two sorts: A user event Something that happened, usually as an indirect consequence of the above. The latter particularly is giving me headaches. First of all, many events aren't written in code any more, but pieced logically together by means of Intents. This means that there is no place to put the analytics call. You'd either have to give up this advantage and start doing it the old-fashioned way in favor of good analytics, or, just be missing some events. Secondly, as a developer you're not so much interested in when a user clicks a button, but if the action that should have been performed really was performed and what the result was. There seems to be no clear way to get resulting data into Google Analytics (what's up with the integers? I want to put in Strings!). The same that applies to the flat pages hierarchy, also goes for the event categories. You could do "vertical" categories (topically, that is), but some code is shared "horizontally" and the tracking will be equally shared. Just as with the Intents mechanism, inheritance makes it hard for you to put the tracking in the right places at all times. And I can't really imagine "horizontal" categories. Unless you start making really small categories, such as all the items form the same menu in one category, I have a hard time grasping the concept. Finally, how do you deal with cancelling? Usually you both have an explicit cancel mechanism by ways of a button, as well as the implicit cancel when the "back"-button is pressed to leave the activity and there were no changes. The latter also applies to "saves", when the back button is pressed and there ARE changes. How are you consequently going to catch all these if not by doing all the "back"-button work yourself? How to deal with events? 3. Goals For goal types I have choice of: URL Destination, Time on Site, and Pages/Visit. Most apps don't have a funnel that leads the user to some "registration done" or "order placed" page. Apps have either already been bought (in which case you want to stimulate the user to love your app, so that he might bring on new buyers) or are paid for by in-app ads. So URL Destination is not a very important goal. Time on Site also seems troublesome. First, I have some doubt on how this would be measured. Second, I don't necessarily want my user to spend a lot of time in my already paid app, just be active and content. Equivalently, why not mention how frequent a user uses your app? Regarding Pages/Visit I already mentioned how screen orientation changes blow up the page view numbers. In an app I'd be most interested in events/visit to measure the user's involvement/activity. If he's intensively using the app then he must be loving it right? Furthermore, I also have some small funnels (that do not lead to conversion though) that I want to see streamlined. In my mind those funnels would end in events rather than page views but that seems not to be possible. I could also measure clickthroughs on in-app ads, but then I'd need to track those as Page Views rather than Events, in view of "URL Destination". What are smart goals for apps and how can you fit them on top of Analytics? 4. Optimisation Is there a smart way to manually do what "Website Optimiser" does for websites? Most importantly, how would I track different landing page designs? 5. Traffic Sources Referrals deal with installation time referrals, if you're smart enough to get them included. But perhaps I'd also want to get some data which third-party app sends users to my app to perform some actions (this app interoperability is possible via Intents). Many of the terminologies related to "Traffic Sources" seem totally meaningless and there is no possibility of connecting in AdSense. What are smart uses of this data? 6. Visitors Of the "Browser capabilities", "Network Properties" and "Mobile" tabs, many things are pointless as they have no influence on / relation with my mostly offline app that won't use flash anyway. Only if you drill down far enough, can you get to OS versions, which do matter a lot. I even forgot where you could check what exact Android devices visited. What are smart uses of this data? How can you make the relevant info more prominent? 7. Other No in-page analytics. I have to register my app as a web-url (What!?)?

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• Refactoring an ERB Template to Haml

  - by Liam McLennan

  ERB is the default view templating system used by Ruby on Rails. Haml is an alternative templating system that uses whitespace to represent document structure. The example from the haml website shows the following equivalent markup: Haml ERB #profile .left.column #date= print_date #address= current_user.address .right.column #email= current_user.email #bio= current_user.bio <div id="profile"> <div class="left column"> <div id="date"><%= print_date %></div> <div id="address"><%= current_user.address %></div> </div> <div class="right column"> <div id="email"><%= current_user.email %></div> <div id="bio"><%= current_user.bio %></div> </div> </div> I like haml because it is concise and the significant whitespace makes it easy to see the structure at a glance. This post is about a ruby project but nhaml makes haml available for asp.net MVC also. The ERB Template Today I spent some time refactoring an ERB template to Haml. The template is called list.html.erb and its purpose is to render a list of tweets (twitter messages). <style> form { float: left; } </style> <h1>Tweets</h1> <table> <thead><tr><th></th><th>System</th><th>Human</th><th></th></tr></thead> <% @tweets.each do |tweet| %> <tr> <td><%= h(tweet['text']) %></td> <td><%= h(tweet['system_classification']) %></td> <td><%= h(tweet['human_classification']) %></td> <td><form action="/tweet/rate" method="post"> <%= token_tag %> <input type="submit" value="Positive"/> <input type="hidden" value="<%= tweet['id']%>" name="id" /> <input type="hidden" value="positive" name="rating" /> </form> <form action="/tweet/rate" method="post"> <%= token_tag %> <input type="submit" value="Neutral"/> <input type="hidden" value="<%= tweet['id']%>" name="id" /> <input type="hidden" value="neutral" name="rating" /> </form> <form action="/tweet/rate" method="post"> <%= token_tag %> <input type="submit" value="Negative"/> <input type="hidden" value="<%= tweet['id']%>" name="id" /> <input type="hidden" value="negative" name="rating" /> </form> </td> </tr> <% end %> </table> Haml Template: Take 1 My first step was to convert this page to a Haml template in place. Directly translating the ERB template to Haml resulted in: list.haml %style form {float: left;} %h1 Tweets %table %thead %tr %th %th System %th Human %th %tbody - @tweets.each do |tweet| %tr %td= tweet['text'] %td= tweet['system_classification'] %td= tweet['human_classification'] %td %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Positive"/> <input type="hidden" value="positive" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Neutral"/> <input type="hidden" value="neutral" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Negative"/> <input type="hidden" value="negative" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} end I like this better already but I can go further. Haml Template: Take 2 The haml documentation says to avoid using iterators so I introduced a partial template (_tweet.haml) as the template to render a single tweet. _tweet.haml %tr %td= tweet['text'] %td= tweet['system_classification'] %td= tweet['human_classification'] %td %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Positive"/> <input type="hidden" value="positive" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Neutral"/> <input type="hidden" value="neutral" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Negative"/> <input type="hidden" value="negative" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} and the list template is simplified to: list.haml %style form {float: left;} %h1 Tweets %table     %thead         %tr             %th             %th System             %th Human             %th     %tbody         = render(:partial => "tweet", :collection => @tweets) That is definitely an improvement, but then I noticed that _tweet.haml contains three form tags that are nearly identical.   Haml Template: Take 3 My first attempt, later aborted, was to use a helper to remove the duplication. A much better solution is to use another partial.  _rate_button.haml %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag %input{ :type => "submit", :value => rate_button[:rating].capitalize } %input{ :type => "hidden", :value => rate_button[:rating], :name => 'rating' } %input{ :type => "hidden", :value => rate_button[:id], :name => 'id' } and the tweet template is now simpler: _tweet.haml %tr %td= tweet['text'] %td= tweet['system_classification'] %td= tweet['human_classification'] %td = render( :partial => 'rate_button', :object => {:rating=>'positive', :id=> tweet['id']}) = render( :partial => 'rate_button', :object => {:rating=>'neutral', :id=> tweet['id']}) = render( :partial => 'rate_button', :object => {:rating=>'negative', :id=> tweet['id']}) list.haml remains unchanged. Summary I am extremely happy with the switch. No doubt there are further improvements that I can make, but I feel like what I have now is clean and well factored.

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• Wear and tear on server hard drive from filesystem polling by PHP script

  - by jackie

  So I'm working on a discussion platform, and various clients will visit http://host/thread.php, which will render the discussion thread to date in addition to a form to submit a new post. When a new post is submitted, I would like all of the other clients with browser windows open to have it appear in near-real-time. One of the constraints of my script is that it may not use a DBMS and it must stay in the filesystem. Additionally, I can't use any PECL/PEAR extensions like inotify or anything like that for IPC. The flow will look like this: Client A requests thread.php and the thread is so far empty, but nonetheless it opens a Server-Side Event at eventPusher.php. Client B does the same. Client A fills out a post in the form and and submits (POSTs) it to subHandler.php. ??? (subHandler stores the new submission into the main thread storefile which gets read from when a fresh, new client requests thread.php, in addition to somehow signalling to the continually-running eventPusher event-source that a new comment was posted and that it should echo the event-json to the client. How, exactly, it will send this signal I'm yet unsure of, but there are a few options that I've thought of -- this is the crux of the question, so see below for more clarification) eventPusher.php happily pushes the new event to the client and it shows up soon after it was originally submitted on all clients who have the page open's screens. Now for the #4 missing-link mystery-step, I see a few problems. I mean, either way, eventPusher is gonna be doing a while loop of some sort -- it's gonna be polling something, I think that much is clear. (If that's a bad assumption please do let me know.) Now, the simplest way would be subHandler gets invoked on the form submission, writes it to the main store in addition to newComments.xml, then exits without doing anything else. Then eventPusher checks in newComments.xml every X seconds (by the way, what would be a reasonable time interval here?) and if it finds something then it emits an event to the client. Now, my fear with this is that the server's hard drive will have to constantly start spinning up. Maybe this isn't the case, perhaps it would just get cached in RAM and the linux kernel would take care of this transparently such that filesystem access doesn't actually engage the device because the kernel knows that that particular file hasn't changed since last read. * idea #2: I have no idea how to go about this, but perhaps there is a variable scope that gets stored in general RAM on the system which can be read by any process. Like if we mega-exported a bash variable so that $new_post is normally false but it gets toggled to true by subHandler, and then back to flase once it's pushed to the client. I doubt there's such a variable scope in PHP directly, but I struggle with the concept of variable scope, I just can't seem to understand it no matter what I read on it. * idea #3: eventPusher queries ps in its whileloop for another instance of itself. If there's not another eventPusher active then it's highly unlikely that new comments will be getting submitted. It's okay if this only works =90% of the time, it doesn't need to be completely foolproof. * idea #4: eventPusher queries DMESG to see if that file's been written to recently. So to sum everything up, I need to have inter-php-script-communication in near-real-time that will work on a standard mod_php shared hosting setup without any elevated privileges, PHP addon modules, or other system adjustments that can't be done from the PHP script itself at runtime. With*out* spinning up the drive more than a few times. No SQL servers either. Apologies if my english isn't the best, I'm still trying to improve on it.

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• How to begin? Windows 8 Development

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Ok. I convinced you in my last post to do some Win8 development. You want a piece of that cake, or whatever your reasons may be. Good! Welcome to the club! Now let me ask you a question: what are you going to write? Ah. That’s the big one, isn’t it? What indeed? If you have been creating applications for computers before you’re in for quite a shock. The way people perceive apps on a tablet is quite different from what we know as applications. There’s a reason we call them apps instead of applications! Yes, technically they are applications but we don’t call them apps only because it sounds cool. The abbreviated form of the word applications itself is a pointer. Apps are small. Apps are focused. Apps are more lightweight. Apps do one thing but they do that one thing extremely good. In the ‘old’ days we wrote huge systems. We build ecosystems of services, screens, databases and more to create a system that provides value for the user. Think about it: what application do you use most at work? Can you in one sentence describe what it is, or what it does and yet still distinctively describe its purpose? I doubt you can. Let’s have a look at Outlouk. We all know it and we all love or hate it. But what is it? A mail program? No, there’s so much more there: calendar, contacts, RSS feeds and so on. Some call it a ‘collaboration’  application but that’s not really true as well. After all, why should a collaboration application give me my schedule for the day? I think the best way to describe Outlook is “client for Exchange”  although that isn’t accurate either. Anyway: Outlook is a great application but it’s not an ‘app’ and therefor not very suitable for WinRT. Ok. Disclaimer here: yes, you can write big applications for WinRT. Some will. But that’s not what 99.9% of the developers will do. So I am stating here that big applications are not meant for WinRT. If 0.01% of the developers think that this is nonsense then they are welcome to go ahead but for the majority here this is not what we’re talking about. So: Apps are small, lightweight and good at what they do but only at that. If you’re a Phone developer you already know that: Phone apps on any platform fit the description I have above. If you’ve ever worked in a large cooperation before you might have seen one of these before: the Mission Statement. It’s supposed to be a oneliner that sums up what the company is supposed to do. Funny enough: although this doesn’t work for large companies it does work for defining your app. A mission statement for an app describes what it does. If it doesn’t fit in the mission statement then your app is going to get to big and will fail. A statement like this should be in the following style “<your app name> is the best app to <describe single task>” Fill in the blanks, write it and go! Mmm.. not really. There are some things there we need to think about. But the statement is a very, very important one. If you cannot fit your app in that line you’re preparing to fail. Your app will become to big, its purpose will be unclear and it will be hard to use. People won’t download it and those who do will give it a bad rating therefor preventing that huge success you’ve been dreaming about. Stick to the statement! Ok, let’s give it a try: “PlanesAreCool” is the best app to do planespotting in the field. You might have seen these people along runways of airports: taking photographs of airplanes and noting down their numbers and arrival- and departure times. We are going to help them out with our great app! If you look at the statement, can you guess what it does? I bet you can. If you find out it isn’t clear enough of if it’s too broad, refine it. This is probably the most important step in the development of your app so give it enough time! So. We’ve got the statement. Print it out, stick it to the wall and look at it. What does it tell you? If you see this, what do you think the app does? Write that down. Sit down with some friends and talk about it. What do they expect from an app like this? Write that down as well. Brainstorm. Make a list of features. This is mine: Note planes Look up aircraft carriers Add pictures of that plane Look up airfields Notify friends of new spots Look up details of a type of plane Plot a graph with arrival and departure times Share new spots on social media Look up history of a particular aircraft Compare your spots with friends Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down wind conditions Write down the runway they take Look up weather conditions for next spotting day Invite friends to join you for a day of spotting. Now, I must make it clear that I am not a planespotter nor do I know what one does. So if the above list makes no sense, I apologize. There is a lesson: write apps for stuff you know about…. First of all, let’s look at our statement and then go through the list of features. Remove everything that has nothing to do with that statement! If you end up with an empty list, try again with both steps. Note planes Look up aircraft carriers Add pictures of that plane Look up airfields Notify friends of new spots Look up details of a type of plane Plot a graph with arrival and departure times Share new spots on social media Look up history of a particular aircraft Compare your spots with friends Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down wind conditions Write down the runway they take Look up weather conditions for next spotting day Invite friends to join you for a day of spotting. That's better. The things I removed could be pretty useful to a plane spotter and could be fun to write. But do they match the statement? I said that the app is for spotting in the field, so “look up airfields” doesn’t belong there: I know where I am so why look it up? And the same goes for inviting friends or looking up the weather conditions for tomorrow. I am at the airfield right now, looking through my binoculars at the planes. I know the weather now and I don’t care about tomorrow. If you feel the items you’ve crossed out are valuable, then why not write another app? One that says “SpotNoter” is the best app for preparing a day of spotting with my friends. That’s a different app! Remember: Win8 apps are small and very good at doing ONE thing, and one thing only! If you have made that list, it’s time to prepare the navigation of your app. The navigation is how users see your app and how they use it. We’ll do that next time!

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• PASS: SQLRally Thoughts

  - by Bill Graziano

  The PASS Board recently decided that we wouldn’t put another US-based SQLRally on the calendar until we had a chance to review the program. I wanted to provide some of my thinking around this. Keep in mind that this is the opinion of one Board member. The Board committed to complete two SQLRally events to determine if an event modeled between SQL Saturday and the Summit was viable. We’ve completed the two events and now it’s time to step back and review the program. This is my seventh year on the PASS Board. Over that time people have asked me why PASS does certain things. Many, many times my answer has been “Because that’s the way we did it last year”. And I am tired of giving that answer. We need to take a step back and review the US-based SQLRally before we schedule another one. It would be irresponsible for me as a Board member to commit resources to this without validating that what we’re doing makes sense for the organization and our members. I have no doubt that this was a great event for the attendees. We just need to validate it’s the best use of our resources. Please keep in mind that we haven’t cancelled the event. We’ve just said we need to review it before scheduling another one. My opinion is that some fairly serious changes are needed to the model before we consider it again – IF we do it again. I’ve come to that conclusion after speaking with the Dallas organizers, our HQ team, our Marketing team, other Board members (including one of the Orlando organizers), attendees in Orlando and Dallas and visiting other similar events. I should point out that their views aren’t unanimous on nearly any part of this event -- which is one of the reasons I want to take some time and think about this before continuing. I think it’s helpful to look at the original goals of what we were trying to accomplish. Andy Warren wrote these up in August of 2010. My summary of these goals and some thoughts on each one is below. Many of these thoughts revolve around the growth of SQL Saturdays. In the two years since that document was written these events have grown significantly. The largest SQL Saturdays are now over 500 people which mean they are nearly the same size as our recent SQLRally. Our goals included: Geographic diversity. We wanted an event in an area of the country that was away from any given Summit location. I think that’s still a valid goal. But we also have SQL Saturdays all over the country. What does SQLRally bring to this that SQLSaturday doesn’t? Speaker growth. One of the stated goals was to build a “farm club” for speakers. This gives us a way for speakers to work up to speaking at Summit by speaking in front of larger crowds. What does SQLRally bring to this that the larger SQL Saturdays aren’t providing? Pre-Conference speakers is one obvious answer here. Lower price. On a per-day basis, SQLRally is roughly 1/4th the price of the Summit. We wanted a way for people to experience something Summit-like at a lower price point. The challenge is that we are very budget constrained at that lower price point. International Event Model.  (I need to write more about this but I’m out of time.  I’ll cover it in the next installment.) There are a number of things I really like about SQLRally. I love the smaller conferences. They give me a chance to meet more people than at something the size of Summit. I like the two day format. That gives you two evenings to be at social events with people. Seeing someone a second day is a great way to build a bond with that person. That’s more difficult to do at a SQL Saturday. We also need to talk about the financial aspects of the event. Last year generated a small $17,000 profit on revenues of $200,000. Percentage-wise that’s reasonable but on an absolute basis it’s not a huge amount in our budget. We think this year will lose between $30,000 and $50,000 and take roughly 1,000 hours of HQ time. We don’t have detailed financials back yet but that’s our best guess at this point. Part of that was driven by using a convention center instead of a hotel. Until we get detailed financials back we won’t have the full picture around the financial impact. This event also takes time and mindshare from our Marketing team. This may sound like a small thing but please don’t underestimate it. Our original vision for this was something that would take very little time from our Marketing team and just a few mentions in the Connector. It turned out to need more than that. And all those mentions and emails take up space we could use to talk about other events and other programs. Last I wanted to talk about some of the things I’m thinking about. I don’t think it’s as simple as saying if we just fix “X” it all gets better. Is this that much better of an event than SQL Saturdays? What if we gave a few SQL Saturdays some extra resources? When SQL Saturdays were around 250 people that wasn’t as viable. With some of those events over 500 we need to reconsider this. We need to get back to a hotel venue. That will help with cost and networking. Is this the best use of the 1,000 HQ hours that we invested in the event? Is our price-point correct? I’m leaning toward raising our price closer to Summit on a per-day basis. I think this will let us put on a higher quality event and alleviate much of the budget pressure. Should growing speakers be a focus? Having top-line pre-conference speakers helps market the event. It will also have an impact on pricing and overall profit. We should also ask if it actually does grow speakers. How many of these people will eventually register for Summit? Attend chapters? Is SQLRally a driver into PASS or is it something that chapters, etc. drive people to? Should we have one paid day and one free instead of two paid days? This is a very interesting model that is used by SQLBits in the UK. This gives you the two day aspect as well as offering options for paid and free attendees. I’m very intrigued by this. Should we focus on a topic? Buried in the minutes is a discussion of whether PASS should have a Business Analytics conference separate from Summit. This is an interesting question to consider. Would making SQLRally be focused on a particular topic make it more attractive? Would that even be a SQLRally? Can PASS effectively manage the two events? (FYI - Probably not.) Would it help differentiate it from Summit and SQL Saturday? These are all questions that I think should be asked and answered before we do this event again. And we can’t do that if we don’t take time to have the discussion. I wanted to get this published before I take off for a few days of vacation. When I get back I’d like to write more about why the international events are different and talk about where we go from here.

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• Hour-long shutdown duration "shutting down hyper-v virtual machine management service"

  - by icelava

  I have a Windows 2008 R2 server that is a Hyper-V host (Dell PowerEdge T300). Today for the first time I encountered an odd situation; i lost connection with one of the guest machines but logging on physically it seems the guest OS is still running but no longer contactable via the network. I tried to shut down the guest machine (Windows XP) but it would not shut down, getting stuck in a "Not responding" dialog box that cannot be dismissed. I used the Hyper-V management console to reset the machine and it could not get out of resetting state. I tried to save another Windows 2003 guest machine, and it would be progress with its Saving state (0%). The other running Windows 2003 guest was stuck in the logon dialog. My first suspicion is perhaps one of the Windows update patches this week (10 Nov 2011) may something to do with it, which was still pending a system restart. Well, since I could not do anything with Hyper-V i proceeded with the Windows Update restart, and now it is stuck half an hour at "Shutting down hyper-v virtual machine management service" Prior to restarting I did not observe any hard disk errors reported in the system event log; doubt it is a disk-related condition. Shall I force a hard reboot? UPDATE Ok so i left it hanging over an hour while attending to other matters, and thankfully the host cleanly restarted. I can operate the guest machines fine now. Phew. Hyper-V must have been crawling for some reason. The VMs have been observed to become slow in the past when the host has been up for a long duration (two weeks to a month), but never this slow. Would love to know what types of performance monitoring items i can observe to give a hint why this can happen. UPDATE 2012-02-13 In the months ever since, Hyper-V has stalled into this state another two times. It appears so randomly and without any error event logs to hint what is causing it enter this "drunkard" state. Just an Hyper-V management service timeout. Log Name: System Source: Service Control Manager Date: 13/2/2012 9:16:48 AM Event ID: 7043 Task Category: None Level: Error Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: elune Description: The Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management service did not shut down properly after receiving a preshutdown control. Event Xml: <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event"> <System> <Provider Name="Service Control Manager" Guid="{555908d1-a6d7-4695-8e1e-26931d2012f4}" EventSourceName="Service Control Manager" /> <EventID Qualifiers="49152">7043</EventID> <Version>0</Version> <Level>2</Level> <Task>0</Task> <Opcode>0</Opcode> <Keywords>0x8080000000000000</Keywords> <TimeCreated SystemTime="2012-02-13T01:16:48.882901900Z" /> <EventRecordID>567844</EventRecordID> <Correlation /> <Execution ProcessID="764" ThreadID="8484" /> <Channel>System</Channel> <Computer>elune</Computer> <Security /> </System> <EventData> <Data Name="param1">Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management</Data> </EventData> </Event> The only means out of it is to restart the system.

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• git on HTTP with gitolite and nginx

  - by Arnaud

  I am trying to setup a server where my git repo would be accessible with HTTP(S). I am using gitolite and nginx (and gitlab for web interface but I doubt it makes any difference). I have searched the whole afternoon and I think I'm stuck. I have think I have understood that nginx needs fcgiwrap to work with gitolite, so I tried several configurations, but none of them work. My repositories are at /home/git/repositories. Here's the three nginx configurations I have tried. 1: location ~ /git(/.*) { gzip off; root /usr/lib/git-core; fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket; include /etc/nginx/fcgiwrap.conf; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend; fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT /usr/lib/git-core/; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME git-http-backend; fastcgi_param GIT_HTTP_EXPORT_ALL ""; fastcgi_param GIT_PROJECT_ROOT /home/git/repositories; fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $1; #fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED $document_root$fastcgi_path_info; } Result: > git clone http://myservername/projectname.git test/ Cloning into test... fatal: http://myservername/projectname.git/info/refs not found: did you run git update-server-info on the server? and > git clone http://myservername/git/projectname.git test/ Cloning into test... error: The requested URL returned error: 502 while accessing http://myservername/git/projectname.git/info/refs fatal: HTTP request failed 2: location ~ /git(/.*) { fastcgi_pass localhost:9001; include /etc/nginx/fcgiwrap.conf; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend; fastcgi_param GIT_HTTP_EXPORT_ALL ""; fastcgi_param GIT_PROJECT_ROOT /home/git/repositories; fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $1; } Result: > git clone http://myservername/projectname.git test/ Cloning into test... fatal: http://myservername/projectname.git/info/refs not found: did you run git update-server-info on the server? and > git clone http://myservername/git/projectname.git test/ Cloning into test... error: The requested URL returned error: 502 while accessing http://myservername/git/projectname.git/info/refs fatal: HTTP request failed 3: location ~ ^.*\.git/objects/([0-9a-f]+/[0-9a-f]+|pack/pack-[0-9a-f]+.(pack|idx))$ { root /home/git/repositories/; } location ~ ^.*\.git/(HEAD|info/refs|objects/info/.*|git-(upload|receive)-pack)$ { root /home/git/repositories; fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend; fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $uri; fastcgi_param GIT_PROJECT_ROOT /home/git/repositories; include /etc/nginx/fcgiwrap.conf; } Result: > git clone http://myservername/projectname.git test/ Cloning into test... error: The requested URL returned error: 502 while accessing http://myservername/projectname.git/info/refs fatal: HTTP request failed and > git clone http://myservername/git/projectname.git test/ Cloning into test... error: The requested URL returned error: 502 while accessing http://myservername/git/projectname.git/info/refs fatal: HTTP request failed Also note that with any of those configurations, when I try to clone with a project name that actually doesn't exist, I get a 502 error. Does anyone already succeeded in doing this? What am I doing wrong? Thanks. UPDATE: nginx error log file said: 2012/04/05 17:34:50 [crit] 21335#0: *50 connect() to unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket failed (13: Permission denied) while connecting to upstream, client: 192.168.12.201, server: myservername, request: "GET /git/oct_editor.git/info/refs HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket:", host: "myservername" So I changed permissions for /var/run/fcgiwrap.socket, and now I have : > git clone http://myservername/git/projectname.git test/ Cloning into test... error: The requested URL returned error: 403 while accessing http://myservername/git/projectname.git/info/refs fatal: HTTP request failed Here is the error.log file I have now: 2012/04/05 17:36:52 [error] 21335#0: *78 FastCGI sent in stderr: "Cannot chdir to script directory (/usr/lib/git-core/git/projectname.git/info)" while reading response header from upstream, client: 192.168.12.201, server: myservername, request: "GET /git/projectname.git/info/refs HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket:", host: "myservername" I keep on investigating.

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• All downloads being interrupted

  - by Jake

  System: Windows 7 Professional 64bit. 8GB RAM, Intel i5-2400 CPU, +300GB free on the hard drive. AVG Internet Security 2012 (enabled & disabled, with firewall enabled and disabled - no effect for either). This computer is less than a year old. Network: This problem is occurring on a single computer on a network with multiple computers. The router is a Motorola Netopia 3347-02 (DSL Modem/Wireless Router combined). The computer is plugged in directly to the modem, other computers are using the wireless successfully. The router has been reset. The only thing odd about the connection between the router and computer is that it is configured to allow RDP through, so it is assigned a static IP by the router and port forwarding is enabled for port 3389. Also, though I doubt it matters, a second wireless router is active behind this router providing a second network that some computers in the area use without issues. Details: All downloads initiated on this specific computer eventually fail, this includes streaming from youtube, specialized downloads (itunes), downloads from websites, FTP downloads, etc. Failure occurs with all browsers, but in chrome this is the process it takes: 1) Download begins normally, 2) At some point between (observed) 7MBs and 229MBs the download stops progressing (at this point, if watching chrome's task manager, you can see the network activity for the downloading tab drop to 0kps), 3) for some time the download sits there still attempting to complete, but will eventually display "123,049,871/0 B, Interrupted" (where the number is whatever it actually got to). The file I am using to test this is a very large .zip file located on a server I control, but the problem seems to occur on any site. The amount downloaded is completely random, and seems to be more time-based than anything (if I start a download immediately after the last one fails, it tends to get further than the last one). Small files can get through for this reason, though they can fail as well. In a test where I simultaneously downloaded the same file via HTTP (chrome) and FTP (windows explorer), both downloads failed at the same instant, though explorer displayed "Connection timed out" several minutes before chrome finally showed the download as interrupted. Other things I have tried based on advice given to people with similar/identical problems: Setting my MTU to 1492 (as described here: http://blog.thecompwiz.com/2011/08/networking-issues.html) Disabling write caching to the hard drive storing the download on an external device successfully transmitted +1GB file from one computer on the same network to this computer disabling indexing in the folder the download was being stored in disabling all security software checked to make sure all drivers were up to date read about 50 accounts with nearly exact descriptions of what I'm experiencing, none of which had a solution given Running Processes: Image Name PID Session Name Session# Mem Usage ========================= ======== ================ =========== ============ System Idle Process 0 Services 0 24 K System 4 Services 0 104,836 K smss.exe 332 Services 0 1,276 K csrss.exe 764 Services 0 5,060 K wininit.exe 820 Services 0 4,748 K csrss.exe 844 Console 1 23,764 K services.exe 876 Services 0 11,856 K lsass.exe 892 Services 0 14,420 K lsm.exe 900 Services 0 7,820 K winlogon.exe 944 Console 1 7,716 K svchost.exe 428 Services 0 12,744 K svchost.exe 796 Services 0 12,240 K svchost.exe 1036 Services 0 22,372 K svchost.exe 1084 Services 0 174,132 K svchost.exe 1112 Services 0 56,144 K svchost.exe 1288 Services 0 18,640 K svchost.exe 1404 Services 0 29,616 K spoolsv.exe 1576 Services 0 25,924 K svchost.exe 1616 Services 0 12,788 K AppleMobileDeviceService. 1728 Services 0 9,796 K avgwdsvc.exe 1820 Services 0 8,268 K mDNSResponder.exe 1844 Services 0 5,832 K w3dbsmgr.exe 1108 Services 0 43,760 K QBCFMonitorService.exe 1336 Services 0 16,408 K svchost.exe 2404 Services 0 28,240 K taskhost.exe 3020 Console 1 12,372 K dwm.exe 2280 Console 1 5,968 K explorer.exe 2964 Console 1 152,476 K WUDFHost.exe 3316 Services 0 6,740 K svchost.exe 3408 Services 0 5,556 K RAVCpl64.exe 3684 Console 1 13,864 K igfxtray.exe 3700 Console 1 7,804 K hkcmd.exe 3772 Console 1 7,868 K igfxpers.exe 3788 Console 1 10,940 K sidebar.exe 3836 Console 1 84,400 K chrome.exe 3964 Console 1 19,640 K pptd40nt.exe 4068 Console 1 5,156 K acrotray.exe 3908 Console 1 14,676 K avgtray.exe 3872 Console 1 9,508 K jusched.exe 4076 Console 1 4,412 K iTunesHelper.exe 1532 Console 1 87,308 K SearchIndexer.exe 3492 Services 0 36,948 K iPodService.exe 4136 Services 0 7,944 K BrccMCtl.exe 4276 Console 1 18,132 K splwow64.exe 4380 Console 1 32,600 K qbupdate.exe 4836 Console 1 24,236 K svchost.exe 4288 Services 0 20,700 K wmpnetwk.exe 3112 Services 0 9,516 K FNPLicensingService.exe 5248 Services 0 5,852 K QBW32.EXE 5508 Console 1 127,068 K QBDBMgrN.exe 5600 Services 0 42,252 K EXCEL.EXE 2512 Console 1 99,100 K LMS.exe 3188 Services 0 5,616 K UNS.exe 1600 Services 0 7,308 K axlbridge.exe 5260 Console 1 5,132 K chrome.exe 5888 Console 1 200,336 K chrome.exe 3536 Console 1 26,076 K chrome.exe 1952 Console 1 20,168 K chrome.exe 4596 Console 1 24,696 K chrome.exe 4292 Console 1 48,096 K chrome.exe 2796 Console 1 23,520 K Acrobat.exe 1240 Console 1 87,252 K 123w.exe 4892 Console 1 22,728 K calc.exe 1700 Console 1 12,636 K chrome.exe 1328 Console 1 28,888 K chrome.exe 3696 Console 1 47,012 K rundll32.exe 6320 Console 1 7,104 K chrome.exe 4928 Console 1 44,248 K AVGIDSAgent.exe 260 Services 0 12,940 K avgfws.exe 6052 Services 0 26,912 K avgnsa.exe 5064 Services 0 2,496 K avgrsa.exe 3088 Services 0 2,200 K avgcsrva.exe 2596 Services 0 380 K avgcsrva.exe 6948 Services 0 408 K StikyNot.exe 452 Console 1 14,772 K chrome.exe 4580 Console 1 28,200 K chrome.exe 4016 Console 1 57,756 K svchost.exe 7140 Services 0 4,500 K chrome.exe 6264 Console 1 56,824 K chrome.exe 7008 Console 1 56,896 K chrome.exe 2224 Console 1 38,032 K taskhost.exe 612 Console 1 7,228 K chrome.exe 6000 Console 1 10,928 K chrome.exe 2568 Console 1 43,052 K chrome.exe 272 Console 1 75,988 K chrome.exe 7328 Console 1 53,240 K PaprPort.exe 7976 Console 1 137,152 K pplinks.exe 7500 Console 1 14,052 K ppscanmg.exe 5744 Console 1 18,996 K taskeng.exe 7388 Console 1 6,308 K SearchProtocolHost.exe 8024 Services 0 8,804 K SearchFilterHost.exe 7232 Services 0 7,848 K chrome.exe 8016 Console 1 37,440 K cmd.exe 7692 Console 1 3,096 K conhost.exe 7516 Console 1 5,872 K tasklist.exe 8160 Console 1 5,772 K WmiPrvSE.exe 7684 Services 0 6,400 K Any help with this would be greatly appreciated, I've been beating my head against a wall over this all day. This computer serves dual purpose as the main company document server and the Owner's work computer, it's fairly important it be fully functional and I cannot figure this out.

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• VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached

  - by Rick Koshi

  I'm running a Linux 2.6.36 kernel, and I'm seeing some random errors. Things like ls: error while loading shared libraries: libpthread.so.0: cannot open shared object file: Error 23 Yes, my system can't consistently run an 'ls' command. :( I note several errors in my dmesg output: # dmesg | tail [2808967.543203] EXT4-fs (sda3): re-mounted. Opts: (null) [2837776.220605] xv[14450] general protection ip:7f20c20c6ac6 sp:7fff3641b368 error:0 in libpng14.so.14.4.0[7f20c20a9000+29000] [4931344.685302] EXT4-fs (md16): re-mounted. Opts: (null) [4982666.631444] VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached [4982666.764240] VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached [4982767.360574] VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached [4982901.904628] VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached [4982964.930556] VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached [4982966.352170] VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached [4982966.649195] top[31095]: segfault at 14 ip 00007fd6ace42700 sp 00007fff20746530 error 6 in libproc-3.2.8.so[7fd6ace3b000+e000] Obviously, the file-max errors look suspicious, being clustered together and recent. # cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max 1231582 # cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr 1231712 0 1231582 That also looks a bit odd to me, but the thing is, there's no way I have 1.2 million files open on this system. I'm the only one using it, and it's not visible to anyone outside the local network. # lsof | wc 16046 148253 1882901 # ps -ef | wc 574 6104 44260 I saw some documentation saying: file-max & file-nr: The kernel allocates file handles dynamically, but as yet it doesn't free them again. The value in file-max denotes the maximum number of file- handles that the Linux kernel will allocate. When you get lots of error messages about running out of file handles, you might want to increase this limit. Historically, the three values in file-nr denoted the number of allocated file handles, the number of allocated but unused file handles, and the maximum number of file handles. Linux 2.6 always reports 0 as the number of free file handles -- this is not an error, it just means that the number of allocated file handles exactly matches the number of used file handles. Attempts to allocate more file descriptors than file-max are reported with printk, look for "VFS: file-max limit reached". My first reading of this is that the kernel basically has a built-in file descriptor leak, but I find that very hard to believe. It would imply that any system in active use needs to be rebooted every so often to free up the file descriptors. As I said, I can't believe this would be true, since it's normal to me to have Linux systems stay up for months (even years) at a time. On the other hand, I also can't believe that my nearly-idle system is holding over a million files open. Does anyone have any ideas, either for fixes or further diagnosis? I could, of course, just reboot the system, but I don't want this to be a recurring problem every few weeks. As a stopgap measure, I've quit Firefox, which was accounting for almost 2000 lines of lsof output (!) even though I only had one window open, and now I can run 'ls' again, but I doubt that will fix the problem for long. (edit: Oops, spoke too soon. By the time I finished typing out this question, the symptom was/is back) Thanks in advance for any help. And another update: My system was basically unusable, so I decided I had no option but to reboot. But before I did, I carefully quit one process at a time, checking /proc/sys/fs/file-nr after each termination. I found that, predictably, the number of open files gradually went down as I closed things down. Unfortunately, it wasn't a large effect. Yes, I was able to clear up 5000-10000 open files, but there were still over 1.2 million left. I shut down just about everything. All interactive shells, except for the one ssh I left open to finish closing down, httpd, even nfs service. Basically everything in the process table that wasn't a kernel process, and there were still an appalling number of files apparently left open. After the reboot, I found that /proc/sys/fs/file-nr showed about 2000 files open, which is much more reasonable. Starting up 2 Xvnc sessions as usual, along with the dozen or so monitoring windows I like to keep open, brought the total up to about 4000 files. I can see nothing wrong with that, of course, but I've obviously failed to identify the root cause. I'm still looking for ideas, since I definitely expect it to happen again. And another update, the next day: I watched the system carefully, and discovered that /proc/sys/fs/file-nr showed a growth of about 900 open files per hour. I shut down the system's only NFS client for the night, and the growth stopped. Mind you, it didn't free up the resources, but it did at least stop consuming more. Is this a known bug with NFS? I'll be bringing the NFS client back online today, and I'll narrow it down further. If anyone is familiar with this behavior, feel free to jump in with "Yeah, NFS4 has this problem, go back to NFS3" or something like that.

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• SVN Server not responding

  - by Rob Forrest

  I've been bashing my head against a wall with this one all day and I would greatly appreciate a few more eyes on the problem at hand. We have an in-house SVN Server that contains all live and development code for our website. Our live server can connect to this and get updates from the repository. This was all working fine until we migrated the SVN Server from a physical machine to a vSphere VM. Now, for some reason that continues to fathom me, we can no longer connect to the SVN Server. The SVN Server runs CentOS 6.2, Apache and SVN 1.7.2. SELinux is well and trully disabled and the problem remains when iptables is stopped. Our production server does run an older version of CentOS and SVN but the same system worked previously so I don't think that this is the issue. Of note, if I have iptables enabled, using service iptables status, I can see a single packet coming in and being accepted but the production server simply hangs on any svn command. If I give up waiting and do a CTRL-C to break the process I get a "could not connect to server". To me it appears to be something to do with the SVN Server rejecting external connections but I have no idea how this would happen. Any thoughts on what I can try from here? Thanks, Rob Edit: Network topology Production server sits externally to our in-house SVN server. Our IPCop (?) firewall allows connections from it (and it alone) on port 80 and passes the connection to the SVN Server. The hardware is all pretty decent and I don't doubt that its doing its job correctly, especially as iptables is seeing the new connections. subversion.conf (in /etc/httpd/conf.d) LoadModule dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so <Location /repos> DAV svn SVNPath /var/svn/repos <LimitExcept PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT> AuthType Basic AuthName "SVN Server" AuthUserFile /var/svn/svn-auth Require valid-user </LimitExcept> </Location> ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:29:5F:C8:3A inet addr:172.16.0.14 Bcast:172.16.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::20c:29ff:fe5f:c83a/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:32317 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:632 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:2544036 (2.4 MiB) TX bytes:143207 (139.8 KiB) netstat -lntp Active Internet connections (only servers) Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:3306 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1484/mysqld tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:111 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1135/rpcbind tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1351/sshd tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:631 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1230/cupsd tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:25 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1575/master tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:58401 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1153/rpc.statd tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:5672 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1626/qpidd tcp 0 0 :::139 :::* LISTEN 1678/smbd tcp 0 0 :::111 :::* LISTEN 1135/rpcbind tcp 0 0 :::80 :::* LISTEN 1615/httpd tcp 0 0 :::22 :::* LISTEN 1351/sshd tcp 0 0 ::1:631 :::* LISTEN 1230/cupsd tcp 0 0 ::1:25 :::* LISTEN 1575/master tcp 0 0 :::445 :::* LISTEN 1678/smbd tcp 0 0 :::56799 :::* LISTEN 1153/rpc.statd iptables --list -v -n (when iptables is stopped) Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination iptables --list -v -n (when iptables is running, after one attempted svn connection) Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 68 packets, 6561 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 19 1304 ACCEPT all -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state RELATED,ESTABLISHED 0 0 ACCEPT icmp -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 0 0 ACCEPT all -- lo * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 0 0 ACCEPT tcp -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:22 1 60 ACCEPT tcp -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:80 0 0 ACCEPT tcp -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:80 0 0 ACCEPT udp -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW udp dpt:80 Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 17 packets, 1612 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination tcpdump 17:08:18.455114 IP 'production server'.43255 > 'svn server'.local.http: Flags [S], seq 3200354543, win 5840, options [mss 1380,sackOK,TS val 2011458346 ecr 0,nop,wscale 7], length 0 17:08:18.455169 IP 'svn server'.local.http > 'production server'.43255: Flags [S.], seq 629885453, ack 3200354544, win 14480, options [mss 1460,sackOK,TS val 816478 ecr 2011449346,nop,wscale 7], length 0 17:08:19.655317 IP 'svn server'.local.http > 'production server'k.43255: Flags [S.], seq 629885453, ack 3200354544, win 14480, options [mss 1460,sackOK,TS val 817679 ecr 2011449346,nop,wscale 7], length 0

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• boost fusion: strange problem depending on number of elements on a vector

  - by ChAoS

  I am trying to use Boost::Fusion (Boost v1.42.0) in a personal project. I get an interesting error with this code: #include "boost/fusion/include/sequence.hpp" #include "boost/fusion/include/make_vector.hpp" #include "boost/fusion/include/insert.hpp" #include "boost/fusion/include/invoke_procedure.hpp" #include "boost/fusion/include/make_vector.hpp" #include <iostream> class Class1 { public: typedef boost::fusion::vector<int,float,float,char,int,int> SequenceType; SequenceType s; Class1(SequenceType v):s(v){} }; class Class2 { public: Class2(){} void met(int a,float b ,float c ,char d ,int e,int f) { std::cout << a << " " << b << " " << c << " " << d << " " << e << std::endl; } }; int main(int argn, char**) { Class2 p; Class1 t(boost::fusion::make_vector(9,7.66f,8.99f,'s',7,6)); boost::fusion::begin(t.s); //OK boost::fusion::insert(t.s, boost::fusion::begin(t.s), &p); //OK boost::fusion::invoke_procedure(&Class2::met,boost::fusion::insert(t.s, boost::fusion::begin(t.s), &p)); //FAILS } It fails to compile (gcc 4.4.1): In file included from /home/thechaos/Escriptori/of_preRelease_v0061_linux_FAT/addons/ofxTableGestures/ext/boost/fusion/include/invoke_procedur e.hpp:10, from problema concepte.cpp:11: /home/thechaos/Escriptori/of_preRelease_v0061_linux_FAT/addons/ofxTableGestures/ext/boost/fusion/functional/invocation/invoke_procedure.hpp: I n function ‘void boost::fusion::invoke_procedure(Function, const Sequence&) [with Function = void (Class2::*)(int, float, float, char, int, in t), Sequence = boost::fusion::joint_view<boost::fusion::joint_view<boost::fusion::iterator_range<boost::fusion::vector_iterator<const boost::f usion::vector<int, float, float, char, int, int, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_>, 0>, boost::fusion::vector_iterator<boost::fusion::vector<int, float, float, char, int, int, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fus ion::void_, boost::fusion::void_>, 0> >, const boost::fusion::single_view<Class2*> >, boost::fusion::iterator_range<boost::fusion::vector_iter ator<boost::fusion::vector<int, float, float, char, int, int, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion: :void_>, 0>, boost::fusion::vector_iterator<const boost::fusion::vector<int, float, float, char, int, int, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion ::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_>, 6> > >]’: problema concepte.cpp:39: instantiated from here /home/thechaos/Escriptori/of_preRelease_v0061_linux_FAT/addons/ofxTableGestures/ext/boost/fusion/functional/invocation/invoke_procedure.hpp:88 : error: incomplete type ‘boost::fusion::detail::invoke_procedure_impl<void (Class2::*)(int, float, float, char, int, int), const boost::fusio n::joint_view<boost::fusion::joint_view<boost::fusion::iterator_range<boost::fusion::vector_iterator<const boost::fusion::vector<int, float, f loat, char, int, int, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_>, 0>, boost::fusion::vector_itera tor<boost::fusion::vector<int, float, float, char, int, int, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion:: void_>, 0> >, const boost::fusion::single_view<Class2*> >, boost::fusion::iterator_range<boost::fusion::vector_iterator<boost::fusion::vector< int, float, float, char, int, int, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_>, 0>, boost::fusion: :vector_iterator<const boost::fusion::vector<int, float, float, char, int, int, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::voi d_, boost::fusion::void_>, 6> > >, 7, true, false>’ used in nested name specifier However, if I change the number of arguments in the vectors and the method from 6 to 5 from int,float,float,char,int,int to int,float,float,char,int,I can compile it without problems. I suspected about the maximum number of arguments being a limitation, but I tried to change it through defining FUSION_MAX_VECTOR_SIZE without success. I am unable to see what am I doing wrong. Can you reproduce this? Can it be a boost bug (i doubt it but is not impossible)?

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• Mr Flibble: As Seen Through a Lens, Darkly

  - by Phil Factor

  One of the rewarding things about getting involved with Simple-Talk has been in meeting and working with some pretty daunting talents. I’d like to say that Dom Reed’s talents are at the end of the visible spectrum, but then there is Richard, who pops up on national radio occasionally, presenting intellectual programs, Andrew, master of the ukulele, with his pioneering local history work, and Tony with marathon running and his past as a university lecturer. However, Dom, who is Red Gate’s head of creative design and who did the preliminary design work for Simple-Talk, has taken the art photography to an extreme that was impossible before Photoshop. He’s not the first person to take a photograph of himself every day for two years, but he is definitely the first to weave the results into a frightening narrative that veers from comedy to pathos, using all the arts of Photoshop to create a fictional character, Mr Flibble.   Have a look at some of the Flickr pages. Uncle Spike The B-Men – Woolverine The 2011 BoyZ iN Sink reunion tour turned out to be their last Error 404 – Flibble not found Mr Flibble is not a normal type of alter-ego. We generally prefer to choose bronze age warriors of impossibly magnificent physique and stamina; superheroes who bestride the world, scorning the forces of evil and anarchy in a series noble and righteous quests. Not so Dom, whose Mr Flibble is vulnerable, and laid low by an addiction to toxic substances. His work has gained an international cult following and is used as course material by several courses in photography. Although his work was for a while ignored by the more conventional world of ‘art’ photography they became famous through the internet. His photos have received well over a million views on Flickr. It was definitely time to turn this work into a book, because the whole sequence of images has its maximum effect when seen in sequence. He has a Kickstarter project page, one of the first following the recent UK launch of the crowdfunding platform. The publication of the book should be a major event and the £45 I shall divvy up will be one of the securest investments I shall ever make. The local news in Cambridge picked up on the project and I can quote from the report by the excellent Cabume website , the source of Tech news from the ‘Cambridge cluster’ Put really simply Mr Flibble likes to dress up and take pictures of himself. One of the benefits of a split personality, however is that Mr Flibble is supported in his endeavour by Reed’s top notch photography skills, supreme mastery of Photoshop and unflinching dedication to the cause. The duo have collaborated to take a picture every day for the past 730-plus days. It is not a big surprise that neither Mr Flibble nor Reed watches any TV: In addition to his full-time role at Cambridge software house,Red Gate Software as head of creativity and the two to five hours a day he spends taking the Mr Flibble shots, Reed also helps organise the . And now Reed is using Kickstarter to see if the world is ready for a Mr Flibble coffee table book. Judging by the early response it is. At the time of writing, just a few days after it went live, ‘I Drink Lead Paint: An absurd photography book by Mr Flibble’ had raised £1,545 of the £10,000 target it needs to raise by the Friday 30 November deadline from 37 backers. Following the standard Kickstarter template, Reed is offering a series of rewards based on the amount pledged, ranging from a Mr Flibble desktop wallpaper for pledges of £5 or more to a signed copy of the book for pledges of £45 or more, right up to a starring role in the book for £1,500. Mr Flibble is unquestionably one of the more deranged Kickstarter hopefuls, but don’t think for a second that he doesn’t have a firm grasp on the challenges he faces on the road to immortalisation on 150 gsm stock. Under the section ‘risks and challenges’ on his Kickstarter page his statement begins: “An angry horde of telepathic iguanas discover the world’s last remaining stock of vintage lead paint and hold me to ransom. Gosh how I love to guzzle lead paint. Anyway… faced with such brazen bravado, I cower at the thought of taking on their combined might and die a sad and lonely Flibble deprived of my one and only true liquid love.” At which point, Reed manages to wrestle away the keyboard, giving him the opportunity to present slightly more cogent analysis of the obstacles the project must still overcome. We asked Reed a few questions about Mr Flibble’s Kickstarter adventure and felt that his responses were worth publishing in full: Firstly, how did you manage it – holding down a full time job and also conceiving and executing these ideas on a daily basis? I employed a small team of ferocious gerbils to feed me ideas on a daily basis. Whilst most of their ideas were incomprehensibly rubbish and usually revolved around food, just occasionally they’d give me an idea like my B-Men series. As a backup plan though, I found that the best way to generate ideas was to actually start taking photos. If I were to stand in front of the camera, pull a silly face, place a vegetable on my head or something else equally stupid, the resulting photo of that would typically spark an idea when I came to look at it. Sitting around idly trying to think of an idea was doomed to result in no ideas. I admit that I really struggled with time. I’m proud that I never missed a day, but it was definitely hard when you were late from work, tired or doing something socially on the same day. I don’t watch TV, which I guess really helps, because I’d frequently be spending 2-5 hours taking and processing the photos every day. Are there any overlaps between software development and creative thinking? Software is an inherently creative business and the speed that it moves ensures you always have to find solutions to new things. Everyone in the team needs to be a problem solver. Has it helped me specifically with my photography? Probably. Working within teams that continually need to figure out new stuff keeps the brain feisty I suppose, and I guess I’m continually exposed to a lot of possible sources of inspiration. How specifically will this Kickstarter project allow you to test the commercial appeal of your work and do you plan to get the book into shops? It’s taken a while to be confident saying it, but I know that people like the work that I do. I’ve had well over a million views of my pictures, many humbling comments and I know I’ve garnered some loyal fans out there who anticipate my next photo. For me, this Kickstarter is about seeing if there’s worth to my work beyond just making people smile. In an online world where there’s an abundance of freely available content, can you hope to receive anything from what you do, or would people just move onto the next piece of content if you happen to ask for some support? A book has been the single-most requested thing that people have asked me to produce and it’s something that I feel would showcase my work well. It’s just hard to convince people in the publishing industry just now to take any kind of risk – they’ve been hit hard. If I can show that people would like my work enough to buy a book, then it sends a pretty clear picture that publishers might hear, or it gives me the confidence enough to invest in myself a bit more – hard to do when you’re riddled with self-doubt! I’d love to see my work in the shops, yes. I could see it being the thing that someone flips through idly as they’re Christmas shopping and recognizing that it’d be just the perfect gift for their difficult to buy for friend or relative. That said, working in the software industry means I’m clearly aware of how I could use technology to distribute my work, but I can’t deny that there’s something very appealing to having a physical thing to hold in your hands. If the project is successful is there a chance that it could become a full-time job? At the moment that seems like a distant dream, as should this be successful, there are many more steps I’d need to take to reach any kind of business viability. Kickstarter seems exactly that – a way for people to help kick start me into something that could take off. If people like my work and want me to succeed with it, then taking a look at my Kickstarter page (and hopefully pledging a bit of support) would make my elbows blush considerably. So there is is. An opportunity to open the wallet just a bit to ensure that one of the more unusual talents sees the light in the format it deserves.  

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• Entity Framework v1 &ndash; tips and Tricks Part 3

  - by Rohit Gupta

  General Tips on Entity Framework v1 & Linq to Entities: ToTraceString() If you need to know the underlying SQL that the EF generates for a Linq To Entities query, then use the ToTraceString() method of the ObjectQuery class. (or use LINQPAD) Note that you need to cast the LINQToEntities query to ObjectQuery before calling TotraceString() as follows: 1: string efSQL = ((ObjectQuery)from c in ctx.Contact 2: where c.Address.Any(a => a.CountryRegion == "US") 3: select c.ContactID).ToTraceString(); ================================================================================ MARS or MultipleActiveResultSet When you create a EDM Model (EDMX file) from the database using Visual Studio, it generates a connection string with the same name as the name of the EntityContainer in CSDL. In the ConnectionString so generated it sets the MultipleActiveResultSet attribute to true by default. So if you are running the following query then it streams multiple readers over the same connection: 1: using (BAEntities context = new BAEntities()) 2: { 3: var cons = 4: from con in context.Contacts 5: where con.FirstName == "Jose" 6: select con; 7: foreach (var c in cons) 8: { 9: if (c.AddDate < new System.DateTime(2007, 1, 1)) 10: { 11: c.Addresses.Load(); 12: } 13: } 14: } ================================================================================= Explicitly opening and closing EntityConnection When you call ToList() or foreach on a LINQToEntities query the EF automatically closes the connection after all the records from the query have been consumed. Thus if you need to run many LINQToEntities queries over the same connection then explicitly open and close the connection as follows: 1: using (BAEntities context = new BAEntities()) 2: { 3: context.Connection.Open(); 4: var cons = from con in context.Contacts where con.FirstName == "Jose" 5: select con; 6: var conList = cons.ToList(); 7: var allCustomers = from con in context.Contacts.OfType<Customer>() 8: select con; 9: var allcustList = allCustomers.ToList(); 10: context.Connection.Close(); 11: } ====================================================================== Dispose ObjectContext only if required After you retrieve entities using the ObjectContext and you are not explicitly disposing the ObjectContext then insure that your code does consume all the records from the LinqToEntities query by calling .ToList() or foreach statement, otherwise the the database connection will remain open and will be closed by the garbage collector when it gets to dispose the ObjectContext. Secondly if you are making updates to the entities retrieved using LinqToEntities then insure that you dont inadverdently dispose of the ObjectContext after the entities are retrieved and before calling .SaveChanges() since you need the SAME ObjectContext to keep track of changes made to the Entities (by using ObjectStateEntry objects). So if you do need to explicitly dispose of the ObjectContext do so only after calling SaveChanges() and only if you dont need to change track the entities retrieved any further. ======================================================================= SQL InjectionAttacks under control with EFv1 LinqToEntities and LinqToSQL queries are parameterized before they are sent to the DB hence they are not vulnerable to SQL Injection attacks. EntitySQL may be slightly vulnerable to attacks since it does not use parameterized queries. However since the EntitySQL demands that the query be valid Entity SQL syntax and valid native SQL syntax at the same time. So the only way one can do a SQLInjection Attack is by knowing the SSDL of the EDM Model and be able to write the correct EntitySQL (note one cannot append regular SQL since then the query wont be a valid EntitySQL syntax) and append it to a parameter. ====================================================================== Improving Performance You can convert the EntitySets and AssociationSets in a EDM Model into precompiled Views using the edmgen utility. for e.g. the Customer Entity can be converted into a precompiled view using edmgen and all LinqToEntities query against the contaxt.Customer EntitySet will use the precompiled View instead of the EntitySet itself (the same being true for relationships (EntityReference & EntityCollections of a Entity)). The advantage being that when using precompiled views the performance will be much better. The syntax for generating precompiled views for a existing EF project is : edmgen /mode:ViewGeneration /inssdl:BAModel.ssdl /incsdl:BAModel.csdl /inmsl:BAModel.msl /p:Chap14.csproj Note that this will only generate precompiled views for EntitySets and Associations and not for existing LinqToEntities queries in the project.(for that use CompiledQuery.Compile<>) Secondly if you have a LinqToEntities query that you need to run multiple times, then one should precompile the query using CompiledQuery.Compile method. The CompiledQuery.Compile<> method accepts a lamda expression as a parameter, which denotes the LinqToEntities query  that you need to precompile. The following is a example of a lamda that we can pass into the CompiledQuery.Compile() method 1: Expression<Func<BAEntities, string, IQueryable<Customer>>> expr = (BAEntities ctx1, string loc) => 2: from c in ctx1.Contacts.OfType<Customer>() 3: where c.Reservations.Any(r => r.Trip.Destination.DestinationName == loc) 4: select c; Then we call the Compile Query as follows: 1: var query = CompiledQuery.Compile<BAEntities, string, IQueryable<Customer>>(expr); 2:  3: using (BAEntities ctx = new BAEntities()) 4: { 5: var loc = "Malta"; 6: IQueryable<Customer> custs = query.Invoke(ctx, loc); 7: var custlist = custs.ToList(); 8: foreach (var item in custlist) 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine(item.FullName); 11: } 12: } Note that if you created a ObjectQuery or a Enitity SQL query instead of the LINQToEntities query, you dont need precompilation for e.g. 1: An Example of EntitySQL query : 2: string esql = "SELECT VALUE c from Contacts AS c where c is of(BAGA.Customer) and c.LastName = 'Gupta'"; 3: ObjectQuery<Customer> custs = CreateQuery<Customer>(esql); 1: An Example of ObjectQuery built using ObjectBuilder methods: 2: from c in Contacts.OfType<Customer>().Where("it.LastName == 'Gupta'") 3: select c This is since the Query plan is cached and thus the performance improves a bit, however since the ObjectQuery or EntitySQL query still needs to materialize the results into Entities hence it will take the same amount of performance hit as with LinqToEntities. However note that not ALL EntitySQL based or QueryBuilder based ObjectQuery plans are cached. So if you are in doubt always create a LinqToEntities compiled query and use that instead ============================================================ GetObjectStateEntry Versus GetObjectByKey We can get to the Entity being referenced by the ObjectStateEntry via its Entity property and there are helper methods in the ObjectStateManager (osm.TryGetObjectStateEntry) to get the ObjectStateEntry for a entity (for which we know the EntityKey). Similarly The ObjectContext has helper methods to get an Entity i.e. TryGetObjectByKey(). TryGetObjectByKey() uses GetObjectStateEntry method under the covers to find the object, however One important difference between these 2 methods is that TryGetObjectByKey queries the database if it is unable to find the object in the context, whereas TryGetObjectStateEntry only looks in the context for existing entries. It will not make a trip to the database ============================================================= POCO objects with EFv1: To create POCO objects that can be used with EFv1. We need to implement 3 key interfaces: IEntityWithKey IEntityWithRelationships IEntityWithChangeTracker Implementing IEntityWithKey is not mandatory, but if you dont then we need to explicitly provide values for the EntityKey for various functions (for e.g. the functions needed to implement IEntityWithChangeTracker and IEntityWithRelationships). Implementation of IEntityWithKey involves exposing a property named EntityKey which returns a EntityKey object. Implementation of IEntityWithChangeTracker involves implementing a method named SetChangeTracker since there can be multiple changetrackers (Object Contexts) existing in memory at the same time. 1: public void SetChangeTracker(IEntityChangeTracker changeTracker) 2: { 3: _changeTracker = changeTracker; 4: } Additionally each property in the POCO object needs to notify the changetracker (objContext) that it is updating itself by calling the EntityMemberChanged and EntityMemberChanging methods on the changeTracker. for e.g.: 1: public EntityKey EntityKey 2: { 3: get { return _entityKey; } 4: set 5: { 6: if (_changeTracker != null) 7: { 8: _changeTracker.EntityMemberChanging("EntityKey"); 9: _entityKey = value; 10: _changeTracker.EntityMemberChanged("EntityKey"); 11: } 12: else 13: _entityKey = value; 14: } 15: } 16: ===================== Custom Property ==================================== 17:  18: [EdmScalarPropertyAttribute(IsNullable = false)] 19: public System.DateTime OrderDate 20: { 21: get { return _orderDate; } 22: set 23: { 24: if (_changeTracker != null) 25: { 26: _changeTracker.EntityMemberChanging("OrderDate"); 27: _orderDate = value; 28: _changeTracker.EntityMemberChanged("OrderDate"); 29: } 30: else 31: _orderDate = value; 32: } 33: } Finally you also need to create the EntityState property as follows: 1: public EntityState EntityState 2: { 3: get { return _changeTracker.EntityState; } 4: } The IEntityWithRelationships involves creating a property that returns RelationshipManager object: 1: public RelationshipManager RelationshipManager 2: { 3: get 4: { 5: if (_relManager == null) 6: _relManager = RelationshipManager.Create(this); 7: return _relManager; 8: } 9: } ============================================================ Tip : ProviderManifestToken – change EDMX File to use SQL 2008 instead of SQL 2005 To use with SQL Server 2008, edit the EDMX file (the raw XML) changing the ProviderManifestToken in the SSDL attributes from "2005" to "2008" ============================================================= With EFv1 we cannot use Structs to replace a anonymous Type while doing projections in a LINQ to Entities query. While the same is supported with LINQToSQL, it is not with LinqToEntities. For e.g. the following is not supported with LinqToEntities since only parameterless constructors and initializers are supported in LINQ to Entities. (the same works with LINQToSQL) 1: public struct CompanyInfo 2: { 3: public int ID { get; set; } 4: public string Name { get; set; } 5: } 6: var companies = (from c in dc.Companies 7: where c.CompanyIcon == null 8: select new CompanyInfo { Name = c.CompanyName, ID = c.CompanyId }).ToList(); ;

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• What is the reason of "Transaction context in use by another session"

  - by Shrike

  Hi, I'm looking for a description of the root of this error: "Transaction context in use by another session". I get it sometimes in one of my unittests so I can't provider repro code. But I wonder what is "by design" reason for the error. I've found this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/asiatech/archive/2009/08/10/system-transaction-may-fail-in-multiple-thread-environment.aspx and also that: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649002.aspx But I can't understand what "Multiple threads sharing the same transaction in a transaction scope will cause the following exception: 'Transaction context in use by another session.' " means. All words are understandable but not the point. I actually can share a system transaction between threads. And there is even special mechanism for this - DependentTransaction class and Transaction.DependentClone method. I'm trying to reproduce a usecase from the first post: 1. Main thread creates DTC transaction, receives DependentTransaction (created using Transaction.Current.DependentClone on the main thread 2. Child thread 1 enlists in this DTC transaction by creating a transaction scope based on the dependent transaction (passed via constructor) 3. Child thread 1 opens a connection 4. Child thread 2 enlists in DTC transaction by creating a transaction scope based on the dependent transaction (passed via constructor) 5. Child thread 2 opens a connection with such code: using System; using System.Threading; using System.Transactions; using System.Data; using System.Data.SqlClient; public class Program { private static string ConnectionString = "Initial Catalog=DB;Data Source=.;User ID=user;PWD=pwd;"; public static void Main() { int MAX = 100; for(int i =0; i< MAX;i++) { using(var ctx = new TransactionScope()) { var tx = Transaction.Current; // make the transaction distributed using (SqlConnection con1 = new SqlConnection(ConnectionString)) using (SqlConnection con2 = new SqlConnection(ConnectionString)) { con1.Open(); con2.Open(); } showSysTranStatus(); DependentTransaction dtx = Transaction.Current.DependentClone(DependentCloneOption.BlockCommitUntilComplete); Thread t1 = new Thread(o => workCallback(dtx)); Thread t2 = new Thread(o => workCallback(dtx)); t1.Start(); t2.Start(); t1.Join(); t2.Join(); ctx.Complete(); } trace("root transaction completes"); } } private static void workCallback(DependentTransaction dtx) { using(var txScope1 = new TransactionScope(dtx)) { using (SqlConnection con2 = new SqlConnection(ConnectionString)) { con2.Open(); trace("connection opened"); showDbTranStatus(con2); } txScope1.Complete(); } trace("dependant tran completes"); } private static void trace(string msg) { Console.WriteLine(Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId + " : " + msg); } private static void showSysTranStatus() { string msg; if (Transaction.Current != null) msg = Transaction.Current.TransactionInformation.DistributedIdentifier.ToString(); else msg = "no sys tran"; trace( msg ); } private static void showDbTranStatus(SqlConnection con) { var cmd = con.CreateCommand(); cmd.CommandText = "SELECT 1"; var c = cmd.ExecuteScalar(); trace("@@TRANCOUNT = " + c); } } It fails on Complete's call of root TransactionScope. But error is different: Unhandled Exception: System.Transactions.TransactionInDoubtException: The transaction is in doubt. --- pired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. To sum up: I want to understand what "Transaction context in use by another session" means and how to reproduce it.

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• Craftsmanship is ALL that Matters

  - by Wayne Molina

  Today, I'm going to talk about a touchy subject: the notion of working in a company that doesn't use the prescribed "best practices" in its software development endeavours.  Over the years I have, using a variety of pseudonyms, asked this question on popular programming forums.  Although I always add in some minor variation of the story to avoid suspicion that it's the same person posting, the crux of the tale remains the same: A Programmer’s Tale A junior software developer has just started a new job at an average company, creating average line-of-business applications for internal use (the most typical scenario programmers find themselves in).  This hypothetical newbie has spent a lot of time reading up on the "theory" of software development, devouring books, blogs and screencasts from well-known and respected software developers in the community in order to broaden his knowledge and "do what the pros do".  He begins his new job, eager to apply what he's learned on a real-world project only to discover that his new teammates doesn't use any of those concepts and techniques.  They hack their way through development, or in a best-case scenario use some homebrew, thrown-together semblance of a framework for their applications that follows not one of the best practices suggested by the “elite” in the software community - things like TDD (TDD as a "best practice" is the only subjective part of this post, but it's included here due to a very large following of respected developers who consider it one), the SOLID principles, well-known and venerable tools, even version control in a worst case and truly nightmarish scenario.  Our protagonist is frustrated that he isn't doing things the "proper" way - a way he's spent personal time digesting and learning about and, more importantly, a way that some of the top developers in the industry advocate - and turns to a forum to ask the advice of his peers. Invariably the answer I, in the guise of the concerned newbie, will receive is that A) I don't know anything and should just shut my mouth and sling code the bad way like everybody else on the team, and B) These "best practices" are fade or a joke, and the only thing that matters is shipping software to your customers. I am here today to say that anyone who says this, or anything like it, is not only full of crap but indicative of exactly the type of “developer” that has helped to give our industry a bad name.  Here is why: One Who Knows Nothing, Understands Nothing On one hand, you have the cognoscenti of the .NET development world.  Guys like James Avery, Jeremy Miller, Ayende Rahien and Rob Conery; all well-respected and noted programmers that are pretty much our version of celebrities.  These guys write blogs, books, and post videos outlining the "correct" way of writing software to make sure it not only works but is maintainable and extensible and a joy to work with.  They tout the virtues of the SOLID principles, or of using TDD/BDD, or using a mature ORM like NHibernate, Subsonic or even Entity Framework. On the other hand, you have Joe Everyman, Lead Software Developer at Initrode Corporation - in our hypothetical story Joe is the junior developer's new boss.  Joe's been with Initrode for 10 years, starting as the company’s very first programmer and over the years building up a little fiefdom of his own until at the present he’s in charge of all Initrode’s software development.  Joe writes code the same way he always has, without bothering to learn much, if anything.  He looked at NHibernate once and found it was "too hard", so he uses a primitive implementation of the TableDataGateway pattern as a wrapper around SqlClient.SqlConnection and SqlClient.SqlCommand instead of an actual ORM (or, in a better case scenario, has created his own ORM); the thought of using LINQ or Entity Framework or really anything other than his own hastily homebrew solution has never occurred to him.  He doesn't understand TDD and considers “testing” to be using the .NET debugger to step through code, or simply loading up an app and entering some values to see if it works.  He doesn't really understand SOLID, and he doesn't care to.  He's worked as a programmer for years, and that's all that counts.  Right?  WRONG. Who would you rather trust?  Someone with years of experience and who writes books, creates well-known software and is akin to a celebrity, or someone with no credibility outside their own minute environment who throws around their clout and company seniority as the "proof" of their ability?  Joe Everyman may have years of experience at Initrode as a programmer, and says to do things "his way" but someone like Jeremy Miller or Ayende Rahien have years of experience at companies just like Initrode, THEY know ten times more than Joe Everyman knows or could ever hope to know, and THEY say to do things "this way". Here's another way of thinking about it: If you wanted to get into politics and needed advice on the best way to do it, would you rather listen to the mayor of Hicktown, USA or Barack Obama?  One is a small-time nobody while the other is very well-known and, as such, would probably have much more accurate and beneficial advice. NOTE: The selection of Barack Obama as an example in no way, shape, or form suggests a political affiliation or political bent to this post or blog, and no political innuendo should be mistakenly read from it; the intent was merely to compare a small-time persona with a well-known persona in a non-software field.  Feel free to replace the name "Barack Obama" with any well-known Congressman, Senator or US President of your choice. DIY Considered Harmful I will say right now that the homebrew development environment is the WORST one for an aspiring programmer, because it relies on nothing outside it's own little box - no useful skill outside of the small pond.  If you are forced to use some half-baked, homebrew ORM created by your Director of Software, you are not learning anything valuable you can take with you in the future; now, if you plan to stay at Initrode for 10 years like Joe Everyman, this is fine and dandy.  However if, like most of us, you want to advance your career outside a very narrow space you will do more harm than good by sticking it out in an environment where you, to be frank, know better than everybody else because you are aware of alternative and, in almost most cases, better tools for the job.  A junior developer who understands why the SOLID principles are good to follow, or why TDD is beneficial, or who knows that it's better to use NHibernate/Subsonic/EF/LINQ/well-known ORM versus some in-house one knows better than a senior developer with 20 years experience who doesn't understand any of that, plain and simple.  Anyone who disagrees is either a liar, or someone who, just like Joe Everyman, Lead Developer, relies on seniority and tenure rather than adapting their knowledge as things evolve. In many cases, the Joe Everymans of the world act this way out of fear - they cannot possibly fathom that a “junior” could know more than them; after all, they’ve spent 10 or more years in the same company, doing the same job, cranking out the same shoddy software.  And here comes a newbie who hasn’t spent 10+ years doing the same things, with a fresh and often radical take on the craft, and Joe Everyman is afraid he might have to put some real effort into his career again instead of just pointing to his 10 years of service at Initrode as “proof” that he’s good, or that he might have to learn something new to improve; in most cases the problem is Joe Everyman, and by extension Initrode itself, has a mentality of just being “good enough”, and mediocrity is the rule of the day. A Thorn Bush is No Place for a Phoenix My advice is that if you work on a team where they don't use the best practices that some of the most famous developers in our field say is the "right" way to do things (and have legions of people who agree), and YOU are aware of these practices and can see why they work, then LEAVE the company.  Find a company where they DO care about quality, and craftsmanship, otherwise you will never be happy.  There is no point in "dumbing" yourself down to the level of your co-workers and slinging code without care to craftsmanship.  In 95% of these situations there will be no point in bringing it to the attention of Joe Everyman because he won't listen; he might even get upset that someone is trying to "upstage" him and fire the newbie, and replace someone with loads of untapped potential with a drone that will just nod affirmatively and grind out the tasks assigned without question. Find a company that has people smart enough to listen to the "best and brightest", and be happy.  Do not, I repeat, DO NOT waste away in a job working for ignorant people.  At the end of the day software development IS a craft, and a level of craftsmanship is REQUIRED for any serious professional.  When you have knowledgeable people with the credibility to back it up saying one thing, and small-time people who are, to put it bluntly, nobodies in the field saying and doing something totally different because they can't comprehend it, leave the nobodies to their own devices to fade into obscurity.  Work for a company that uses REAL software engineering techniques and really cares about craftsmanship.  The biggest issue affecting our career, and the reason software development has never been the respected, white-collar career it was meant to be, is because hacks and charlatans can pass themselves off as professional programmers without following a lick of good advice from programmers much better at the craft than they are.  These modern day snake-oil salesmen entrench themselves in companies by hoodwinking non-technical businesspeople and customers with their shoddy wares, end up in senior/lead/executive positions, and push their lack of knowledge on everybody unfortunate enough to work with/for/under them, crushing any dissent or voices of reason and change under their tyrannical heel and leaving behind a trail of dismayed and, often, unemployed junior developers who were made examples of to keep up the facade and avoid the shadow of doubt being cast upon them. To sum this up another way: If you surround yourself with learned people, you will learn.  Surround yourself with ignorant people who can't, as the saying goes, see the forest through the trees, and you'll learn nothing of any real value.  There is more to software development than just writing code, and the end goal should not be just "shipping software", it should be shipping software that is extensible, maintainable, and above all else software whose creation has broadened your knowledge in some capacity, even if a minor one.  An eager newbie who knows theory and thirsts for knowledge can easily be moulded and taught the advanced topics, but the same can't be said of someone who only cares about the finish line.  This industry needs more people espousing the benefits of software craftsmanship and proper software engineering techniques, and less Joe Everymans who are unwilling to adapt or foster new ways of thinking. Conclusion - I Cast “Protection from Fire” I am fairly certain this post will spark some controversy and might even invite the flames.  Please keep in mind these are opinions and nothing more.  A little healthy rant and subsequent flamewar can be good for the soul once in a while.  To paraphrase The Godfather: It helps to get rid of the bad blood.

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• VSNewFile: A Visual Studio Addin to More Easily Add New Items to a Project

  - by InfinitiesLoop

  My first Visual Studio Add-in! Creating add-ins is pretty simple, once you get used to the CommandBar model it is using, which is apparently a general Office suite extensibility mechanism. Anyway, let me first explain my motivation for this. It started out as an academic exercise, as I have always wanted to dip my feet in a little VS extensibility. But I thought of a legitimate need for an add-in, at least in my personal experience, so it took on new life. But I figured I can’t be the only one who has felt this way, so I decided to publish the add-in, and host it on GitHub (VSNewFile on GitHub) hoping to spur contributions. Adding Files the Built-in Way Here’s the problem I wanted to solve. You’re working on a project, and it’s time to add a new file to the project. Whatever it is – a class, script, html page, aspx page, or what-have-you, you go through a menu or keyboard shortcut to get to the “Add New Item” dialog. Typically, you do it by right-clicking the location where you want the file (the project or a folder of it): This brings up a dialog the contains, well, every conceivable type of item you might want to add. It’s all the available item templates, which can result in anywhere from a ton to a veritable sea of choices. To be fair, this dialog has been revamped in Visual Studio 2010, which organizes it a little better than Visual Studio 2008, and adds a search box. It also loads noticeably faster.   To me, this dialog is just getting in my way. If I want to add a JavaScript script to my project, I don’t want to have to hunt for the script template item in this dialog. Yes, it is categorized, and yes, it now has a search box. But still, all this UI to swim through when all I need is a new file in the project. I will name it. I will provide the content, I don’t even need a ‘template’. VS kind of realizes this. In the add menu in a class library project, for example, there is a “Add Class…” choice. But all this really does is select that project item from the dialog by default. You still must wait for the dialog, see it, and type in a name for the file. How is that really any different than hitting F2 on an existing item? It isn’t. Adding Files the Hack Way What I often find myself doing, just to avoid going through this dialog, is to copy and paste an existing file, rename it, then “CTRL-A, DEL” the content. In a few short keystrokes I’ve got my new file. Even if the original file wasn’t the right type, it doesn’t matter – I will rename it anyway, including the extension. It works well enough if the place I am adding the file to doesn’t have much in it already. But if there are a lot of files at that level, it sucks, because the new file will have the name “Copy of xyz”, causing it to be moved into the ‘C’ section of the alphabetically sorted items, which might be far, far away from the original file (and so I tend to try and copy a file that starts with ‘C’ *evil grin*). Using ‘Export Template’ To be completely fair I should at least mention this feature. I’m not even sure if this is new in VS 2010 or not (I think so). But it allows you to export a project item or items, including potential project references required by it. Then it becomes a new item in the available ‘installed templates’. No doubt this is useful to help bootstrap new projects. But that still requires you to go through the ‘New Item’ dialog. Adding Files with VSNewFile So hopefully I have sufficiently defined the problem and got a few of you to think, “Yeah, me too!”… What VSNewFile does is let you skip the dialog entirely by adding project items directly to the context menu. But it does a bit more than that, so do read on. For example, to add a new class, you can right-click the location and pick that option. A new .cs file is instantly added to the project, and the new item is selected and put into the ‘rename’ mode immediately. The default items available are shown here. But you can customize them. You can also customize the content of each template. To do so, you create a directory in your documents folder, ‘VSNewFile Templates’. In there, you drop the templates you want to use, but you name them in a particular way. For example, here’s a template that will add a new item named “Add TITLE”. It will add a project item named “SOMEFILE.foo” (or ‘SOMEFILE1.foo’ if that exists, etc). The format of the file name is: <ORDER>_<KEY>_<BASE FILENAME>_<ICON ID>_<TITLE>.<EXTENTION> Where: <ORDER> is a number that lets you determine the order of the items in the menu (relative to each other). <KEY> is a case sensitive identifier different for each template item. More on that later. <BASE FILENAME> is the default name of the file, which doesn’t matter that much, since they will be renaming it anyway. <ICON ID> is a number the dictates the icon used for the menu item. There are a huge number of built-in choices. More on that later. <TITLE> is the string that will appear in the menu. And, the contents of the file are the default content for the item (the ‘template’). The content of the file can contain anything you want, of course. But it also supports two tokens: %NAMESPACE% and %FILENAME%, which will be replaced with the corresponding values. Here is the content of this sample: testing Namespace = %NAMESPACE% Filename = %FILENAME% I kind went back and forth on this. I could have made it so there’d be an XML or JSON file that defines the templates, instead of cramming all this data into the filename itself. I like the simplicity of this better. It makes it easy to customize since you can literally just throw these files around, copy them from someone else, etc, without worrying about merge data into a central description file, in whatever format. Here’s our new item showing up: Practical Use One immediate thing I am using this for is to make it easier to add very commonly used scripts to my web projects. For example, uh, say, jQuery? :) All I need to do is drop jQuery-1.4.2.js and jQuery-1.4.2.min.js into the templates folder, provide the order, title, etc, and then instantly, I can now add jQuery to any project I have without even thinking about “where is jQuery? Can I copy it from that other project?”   Using the KEY There are two reasons for the ‘key’ portion of the item. First, it allows you to turn off the built-in, default templates, which are: FILE = Add File (generic, empty file) VB = Add VB Class CS = Add C# Class (includes some basic usings) HTML = Add HTML page (includes basic structure, doctype, etc) JS = Add Script (includes an immediately-invoking function closure) To turn one off, just include a file with the name “_<KEY>”. For example, to turn off all the items except our custom one, you do this: The other reason for the key is that there are new Visual Studio Commands created for each one. This makes it possible to bind a keyboard shortcut to one of them. So you could, for example, have a keyboard combination that adds a new web page to your website, or a new CS class to your class library, etc. Here is our sample item showing up in the keyboard bindings option. Even though the contents of the template directory may change from one launch of Visual Studio to the next, the bindings will remain attached to any item with a particular key, thanks to it taking care not to lose keyboard bindings even though the commands are completely recreated each time. The Icon Face ID Visual Studio uses a Microsoft Office style add-in mechanism, I gather. There are a predetermined set of built-in icons available. You can use your own icons when developing add-ins, of course, but I’m no designer. I just wanted to find appropriate-ish icons for the built-in templates, and allow you to choose from an existing built-in icon for your own. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot out there on the interwebs that helps you figure out what the built-in types are. There’s an MSDN article that describes at length a way to create a program that lists all the icons. But I don’t want to write a program to figure them out! Just show them to me! Sheesh :) Thankfully, someone out there felt the same way, and uses a novel hack to get the icons to show up in an outlook toolbar. He then painstakingly took screenshots of them, one group at a time. It isn’t complete though – there are tens of thousands of icons. But it’s good enough. If anyone has an exhaustive list, please let me, and the rest of the add-in community know. Icon Face ID Reference Installing the Add-in It will work with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010. Just unzip the release into your Documents\Visual Studio 20xx\Addins folder. It contains the binary and the Visual Studio “.addin” file. For example, the path to mine is: C:\Users\InfinitiesLoop\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Addins Conclusion So that’s it! I hope you find it as useful as I have. It’s on GitHub, so if you’re into this kind of thing, please do fork it and improve it! Reference: VSNewFile on GitHub VSNewFile release on GitHub Icon Face ID Reference

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• AppDomain dependencies across directories

  - by strager

  I am creating a plugin system and I am creating one AppDomain per plugin. Each plugin has its own directory with its main assemblies and references. The main assemblies will be loaded by my plugin loader, in addition to my interface assemblies (so the plugin can interact with the application). Creating the AppDomain: this.appDomain = AppDomain.CreateDomain("AppDomain", null, new AppDomainSetup { ApplicationBase = pluginPath, PrivateBinPath = pluginPath, }); Loading the assemblies: this.appDomain.Load(myInterfaceAssembly.GetName(true)); var assemblies = new List<Assembly>(); foreach (var assemblyName in this.assemblyNames) { assemblies.Add(this.appDomain.Load(assemblyName)); } The format of assemblyName is the assembly's filename without ".dll". The problem is that AppDomain.Load(assemblyName) throws an exception: Could not load file or assembly '[[assemblyName]], Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. All of the dependencies of [[assemblyName]] are: Inside the directory pluginPath, The myInterfaceAssembly which is already loaded, or In the GAC (e.g. mscorelib). Clearly I'm not doing something right. I have tried: Creating an object using this.appDomain.CreateInstanceAndUnwrap inheriting from MarshalByRefObject with a LoadAssembly method to load the assembly. I get an exception saying that the current assembly (containing the proxy class) could not be loaded (file not found, as above), even if I manually call this.appDomain.Load(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName(true)). Attaching an AssemblyResolve handler to this.appDomain. I'm met with the same exception as in (1), and manually loading doesn't help. Recursively loading assemblies by loading their dependencies into this.appDomain first. This doesn't work, but I doubt my code is correct: private static void LoadAssemblyInto(AssemblyName assemblyName, AppDomain appDomain) { var assembly = Assembly.Load(assemblyName); foreach (var referenceName in assembly.GetReferencedAssemblies()) { if (!referenceName.FullName.StartsWith("MyProject")) { continue; } var loadedAssemblies = appDomain.GetAssemblies(); if (loadedAssemblies.Any((asm) => asm.FullName == referenceName.FullName)) { continue; } LoadAssemblyInto(referenceName, appDomain); } appDomain.Load(assembly.GetName(true)); } How can I load my plugin assembly with its dependencies in that plugin's directory while also loading some assemblies in the current directory? Note: The assemblies a plugin may (probably will) reference are already loaded in the current domain. This can be shared across domains (performance benefit? simplicity?) if required. Fusion log: *** Assembly Binder Log Entry (12/24/2010 @ 10:46:40 AM) *** The operation failed. Bind result: hr = 0x80070002. The system cannot find the file specified. Assembly manager loaded from: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\clr.dll Running under executable C:\MyProject\bin\Debug\MyProject.vshost.exe --- A detailed error log follows. LOG: Start binding of native image vshost32, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a, processorArchitecture=x86. WRN: No matching native image found. LOG: Bind to native image assembly did not succeed. Use IL image. LOG: IL assembly loaded from C:\MyProject\bin\Debug\MyProject.vshost.exe

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• Bookmarking n Joomla

  - by Aruna

  Hi, i am using the Plugin Content Bookmarker downloaded from http://dev.aarthikaindia.com/downloads/category/3-plugins.html for my site. Some of the Articles are able to Bookmark like if i click on the Bookmark (twitter) , it directly bookmarks in Twitter with Some description of the Article where some of the Articles are not bookmarked instead it just links to http://www.twitter.com.. Code : <?php // no direct access defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted access' ); $mainframe->registerEvent( 'onAfterDisplayContent', 'plgContentBookmarker' ); function plgContentBookmarker( &$row, &$params, $page=0 ) { $plugin = & JPluginHelper::getPlugin('content', 'bookmarker'); // Load plugin params info $pluginParams = new JParameter($plugin->params); $id = $row-id; $desc_tags = addslashes(str_replace("\n","", $row->title )); $desc_tags = trim($desc_tags); $desc_tags_space= str_replace(',', ' ', @$desc_tags_space); $desc_tags_semi = str_replace(',', ';', @$desc_tags_semi); $desc_tags_space = str_replace(' ', ' ', @$desc_tags_space); $description1 = strip_tags( $row->introtext ); $description2 = str_replace("'", '', strip_tags($description1)); $description = str_replace('"', '', strip_tags($description2)); $markme_title = $desc_tags; $markme_ddesc = substr($description,0,400).'...'; $baseurl = JURI::base(); $title = $pluginParams->def('title', 'Book Mark this Article'); $facebook = $pluginParams->def('facebook', '1'); $twitter = $pluginParams->def('twitter', '1'); $html.= '<div onmouseover="javascript:if(document.getElementById(\'divShowAddBookmarker'.$id.'\').style.display ==\'none\'){document.getElementById(\'divShowAddBookmarker'.$id.'\').style.display =\'block\';}" onmouseout="javascript:if(document.getElementById(\'divShowAddBookmarker'.$id.'\').style.display ==\'block\'){document.getElementById(\'divShowAddBookmarker'.$id.'\').style.display =\'none\';}" id="divShowAddBookmarker'.$id.'" style="display:none;position:absolute; background-color:#F4F4F4;width:240px;padding:3px;border:2px solid #999999;z-index:999"> <div style="padding:2px;">'; if( $facebook == 1 ) { $html.= '<div style="width:115px;float:left"> <a style="text-decoration:none;" href="http://www.facebook.com/" onclick="window.open(\'http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=\'+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+\'&amp;t='.$markme_title.'&amp;d='.$markme_ddesc.'\');return false;"> <img style="vertical-align:bottom;padding:1px;" src="'.$baseurl."plugins/content/smart_bookmarker/facebook.gif".'" title="Facebook" name="facebook" border="0" id="facebook" alt="" /> '.JText::_( 'Facebook' ).' </a> </div>'; } if( $twitter == 1 ) { $html.= '<div style="width:115px;float:left"> <a style="text-decoration:none;" href="http://www.twitter.com/" onclick="window.open(\'http://twitter.com/home/?status=\'+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+\'-'.$markme_ddesc.'\');return false;"> <img style="vertical-align:bottom;padding:1px;" src="'.$baseurl."plugins/content/smart_bookmarker/twitter.gif".'" title="twitter" name="twitter" border="0" id="twitter" alt="" /> '.JText::_( 'Twitter' ).' </a> </div>'; } $html.= '<div style="clear:both"></div> </div> </div>'; return $html; } ? In the CODE $markme_ddesc is used to give the status message which is the actual portion of the content which is tweeted .. I had a doubt whether this $markme_ddesc is used to make the issue.. Is it so.. Please suggest me..

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• Surface RT: To Be Or Not To Be (Part 1)

  - by smehaffie

  So the Surface RT has been out for 9 months and Microsoft just declared a $900 million dollar write-down. So how did this happen and what does it mean for Microsoft’s efforts to break into the tablet market? I have been thinking a lot about most of the information below since the Surface product line was released. If you are looking for a “Microsoft Is Dead” story, then don’t read any further. But if you want an honest look at what I think led Microsoft to this point and what I think can be done to make Surface RT devices better, then please continue reading. What Led Microsoft To The $900 Million Write-Down Surface Unveiling:Microsoft totally missed the boat when they unveiled the Surface product line on June 18th, 2012. Microsoft should’ve been ready to post the specifications of both devices that night. Microsoft should’ve had a site up and running right after the event so people could pre-order the devices. This would have given them a good idea what the interest was in each device.  They could also have used this data to make a better estimate for the number of units to to have available for the launch and beyond.  They also lost out on taking advantage of the excitement generated by the Surface RT and Surface Pro announcement. They could have thrown in a free touch keyboard to anyone who pre-ordered. The advertising should have started right after the announcement and gotten bigger as launch day approached. Push for as many pre-order as possible and build excitement for the launch. Actual Launch (Surface RT): By this time all excitement was gone from the initial announcement, except for the Micorsoft faithful. Microsoft should have been ready to sell the Surface in as many markets as possible at launch. The limited market release was a real letdown for a lot of people.  A limited release right after the initial announce is understandable, but not at the official launch of the product. Microsoft overpriced the device and now they are lowering it to what it should have been to start with. The $349 price is within the range I suggested it should be at before pricing was announced. (Surface Tablets: The Price Must Be Right). Limited ordering options online was also a killer. User should have been able to buy the base unit of each device and then add on whatever keyboard they wanted to (this applies more to the Surface Pro).  There should have also been a place where users could order any additional add-ins that they wanted to buy (covers, extra power supplies, etc.) Marketing was better and the dancing “Click In” commercial was cool, but the ads comparing the iPad with Siri should have been on the air from day one of the announcement (or at least the launch).  Consumers want to know why you tablet is better, not just that is has a clickable keyboard and built-in kickstand. They could have also compared it to some of the other mid-range tablets if they had not overprices it to begin with. Stock Applications (Mail, People, Calendar, Music, Video, Reader and IE): This is where Microsoft really blew it. They had all the time in the world to make these applications the best of breed and instead we got applications that seemed thrown together.  Some updates have made these application better, but they are all still lacking in features that should have been there from day one. This did not help to enhance a new users experience any. ** I will admit that the applications that were data driven were first class citizen’s and that makes it even more perplexing why MS could knock it out of the park with the Weather, Travel, Finance, Bing, etc.) and fail so miserably on the core applications users would use the most on a tablet. Desktop on Tablet: The desktop just is so out of place on the tablet  I understand it was needed for Office but think it would have been better to not have the desktop in Windows RT, but instead open up the Office applications in full screen mode, in a desktop shell (same goes for  IE11).That way the user wouldn’t realize they are leaving Metro and going to the desktop. The other option would have been to just not include Office on Windows RT devices. Instead they could have made awesome Widows Store Apps for Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint. In addition, they could have made the stock Mail, People, and Calendar applications contain all the functions that Outlook gives desktop users. Having some of the settings in desktop mode and others under “Change PC Settings” made Windows RT seemed unfinished and rushed to market. What Can Be Done To Make Windows RT Based Tablets Better (At least in my opinion) Either eliminate the desktop all together from Windows RT or at least make the user experience better by hiding the fact the user is running Office/IE in the desktop. Personally I ‘d like them to totally get rid of it and just make awesome Windows Store Application version of Word, Excel PowerPoint & OneNote.  This might also make the OS smaller and give the user more available disk space. I doubt there will ever be a Windows Store App versions of Office, but I still think it is a good idea. Make is so users can easily direct their documents, picture, videos and music to their extra storage and can access these files from the standard libraries.  A user should not have to create a VM on their microSD card or create symbolic links to get this to work properly. Most consumers would not be able to do this. Then users get frustrated when they run out or room on their main storage because nothing is automatically save to their microSD card when saved to libraries.  This is a major bug that needs to be fixed, otherwise Microsoft’s selling point of having a microSD slot is worthless. Allows users to uninstall and re-install any of the Office product that come with the Surface. That way people can free up storage space by uninstalling the Office applications they do not need. Everyone’s needs are different, so make the options flexible. Don’t take up storage space for applications the user will not use. Make the Core applications the “Cream of the Crop” Windows App Store applications. The should set the bar for all other Store applications. Improve performance as much as possible, if it seems to be sluggish on a tablet consumer will not buy it. They need to price the next line of Surface product very aggressive to undercut not only iPad but also Android low end tablets (Nook, Kindle Fire, and Nexus, etc.) Give developers incentives to write quality applications for the devices. Don’t reward developers for cranking out cookie cutter, low quality applications. I’d even suggest Microsoft consider implementing some new store certification guideline to stop these type of applications being published. Allow users to easily move the recover disk “partition between their microSD card and main storage. My Predictions for the Surface RT and Windows RT I honestly think even with all the missteps MS has made since the announcement  about the Surface product line, that they are on the right path. I was excited the Surface tablets when they were announced, and I still am. The truth be told, Windows 8 on a tablet (aka: Windows RT) is better than both iOS and Android. My nephew who is an Apple fan boy told me after he saw and used Windows 8 (he got the beta running on his iPad), that Windows 8 kicked Apples butt as a tablet OS. So there is hope for all Windows RT based tablets. I agree with my nephew and that is why whenever anyone asks me about my Surface, I love showing it off and recommend it. The 6 keys to gaining market share in the tablet market are; Aggressive pricing by both Microsoft and their OEM’s Good quality devices put out by Microsoft and their OEM’s (there are some out there, but not enough) Marketing, Marketing, Marketing from both Microsoft and their OEM’s (Need more ads showing why windows based tablets are better than iPads and Android tablets) Getting Widows tablets in retails stores all over, and giving sales people incentive to sell them. Consumers like to try electronics out before they buy them, and most will listen to what the sales person suggest. Microsoft needs sales people in retail stores directing people to buy windows based tablets over iPads and Android tablets. I think the Microsoft Stores within Best Buy is a good start, but they also need to get prominent displays in Walmart, Target, etc.. Release a smaller form factor Surface, Hopefully the 8”-10” next generation Surface is not a rumor. Make “Surface” the brand name for all Microsoft tablets and hybrid devices that they come out with. They cannot change the name with each new release.  Make Surface synonymous with quality, the same way that iPad  is for Apple. Well, that is my 2 cents on the subject. Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment below. Soon to follow will be my thought on the Surface Pro, so keep an eye out for it. var addthis_pub="smehaffie"; var addthis_options="email, print, digg, slashdot, delicious, twitter, live, myspace, facebook, google, stumbleupon, newsvine";

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• I'm trying to run some PHP scripts as CLI instead of over HTTP. How do I make them play nice?

  - by gnfti

  Hi everyone. I'm using some PHP scripts from FeedForAll to join together RSS feeds (RSSmesh) and display them as HTML (RSS2HTML). Because I intend to run these scripts fairly intensively and don't want the resulting HTTP requests and bandwidth to count towards my hosting quota, I am in the process of moving to running them on the web host's server in an umbrella PHP "batch" script, and call this script via cron (this is a Linux server, by the way). Here's a (working) sample request over HTTP: http://www.mydomain.com/a/rss2htmlcore/rss2html2.php?XMLFILE=http://www.mydomain.com/a/myapp/xmlcache/feed.xml&TEMPLATE=template.html This will produce the desired HTML output. An example of how I want this to work on the command line: /srv/customers/mycustomer#/mydomain.com/www/a/rss2htmlcore/rss2html2-cli.php /srv/customers/mycustomer#/mydomain.com/www/a/myapp/xmlcache/feed.xml /srv/customers/mycustomer#/mydomain.com/www/a/template.html This is with the correct shebang line added to "rss2html2-cli.php". I could just as well specify the executable ("/usr/local/bin/php") in the request, I doubt it makes a difference because I am able to run another script (that I wrote myself) either way without problems. Now, RSS2HTML and RSSmesh are different in that, for starters, they include secondary files -- for example, both include an XML parser script -- and I suspect that this is where I am getting a bit in over my head. Right now I'm calling exec() from the "umbrella" batch script, like so: exec("/srv/customers/mycustomer#/mydomain.com/www/a/rss2htmlcore/rss2html2-cli.php /srv/customers/mycustomer#/mydomain.com/www/a/myapp/xmlcache/feed.xml /srv/customers/mycustomer#/mydomain.com/www/a/template.html", $output) But no output is being produced. What's the best way to go about this and what "gotchas" should I keep in mind? Is exec() the right way to approach this? It works fine for the other (simple) script but that writes its own output. For this I want to get the output and write it to a file from within the umbrella script if possible. I've also tried output buffering but to no avail. Do I need to pay attention to anything specific with regard to the includes? Right now they're specified in the scripts as include_once("FeedForAll_XMLParser.inc.php"); and the specified files are indeed in the same folder. Further info: -This is a Linux server. -I have no direct access to the shell, so I can't test things directly on a command line, everything is via crontab. -I will admit that support for the FeedForAll scripts leaves a lot to be desired, but I'd like to keep using their scripts if at all possible, if only because I know them and have been using them for a while. I have looked into Simplepie, but the FFA scripts do some things that I've seen no obvious solutions for with Simplepie, like limiting the number of items per individual feed (RSSmesh) or limiting the description length (RSS2HTML). -Yahoo! Pipes is out, they cache their data for too long for my application. Should you want to take a look at the code, here are the scripts as txt files. RSS2HTML2 and RSSmesh are the FeedForAll scripts, FeedForAll_XMLParser... is the included parser. Note that I have not yet amended these to handle $argv etc. I have however in "scraper-universal-rss-cli", which works fine with CLI. If anyone has any thoughts to share on this it would be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance.

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• What is good practice in .NET system architecture design concerning multiple models and aggregates

  - by BuzzBubba

  I'm designing a larger enterprise architecture and I'm in a doubt about how to separate the models and design those. There are several points I'd like suggestions for: - models to define - way to define models Currently my idea is to define: Core (domain) model Repositories to get data to that domain model from a database or other store Business logic model that would contain business logic, validation logic and more specific versions of forms of data retrieval methods View models prepared for specifically formated data output that would be parsed by views of different kind (web, silverlight, etc). For the first model I'm puzzled at what to use and how to define the mode. Should this model entities contain collections and in what form? IList, IEnumerable or IQueryable collections? - I'm thinking of immutable collections which IEnumerable is, but I'd like to avoid huge data collections and to offer my Business logic layer access with LINQ expressions so that query trees get executed at Data level and retrieve only really required data for situations like the one when I'm retrieving a very specific subset of elements amongst thousands or hundreds of thousands. What if I have an item with several thousands of bids? I can't just make an IEnumerable collection of those on the model and then retrieve an item list in some Repository method or even Business model method. Should it be IQueryable so that I actually pass my queries to Repository all the way from the Business logic model layer? Should I just avoid collections in my domain model? Should I void only some collections? Should I separate Domain model and BusinessLogic model or integrate those? Data would be dealt trough repositories which would use Domain model classes. Should repositories be used directly using only classes from domain model like data containers? This is an example of what I had in mind: So, my Domain objects would look like (e.g.) public class Item { public string ItemName { get; set; } public int Price { get; set; } public bool Available { get; set; } private IList<Bid> _bids; public IQueryable<Bid> Bids { get { return _bids.AsQueryable(); } private set { _bids = value; } } public AddNewBid(Bid newBid) { _bids.Add(new Bid {.... } } Where Bid would be defined as a normal class. Repositories would be defined as data retrieval factories and used to get data into another (Business logic) model which would again be used to get data to ViewModels which would then be rendered by different consumers. I would define IQueryable interfaces for all aggregating collections to get flexibility and minimize data retrieved from real data store. Or should I make Domain Model "anemic" with pure data store entities and all collections define for business logic model? One of the most important questions is, where to have IQueryable typed collections? - All the way from Repositories to Business model or not at all and expose only solid IList and IEnumerable from Repositories and deal with more specific queries inside Business model, but have more finer grained methods for data retrieval within Repositories. So, what do you think? Have any suggestions?

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• zLib on iPhone, stop at first BLOCK

  - by cedric

  I am trying to call iPhone zLib to decompress the zlib stream from our HTTP based server, but the code always stop after finishing the first zlib block. Obviously, iPhone SDK is using the standard open Zlib. My doubt is that the parameter for inflateInit2 is not appropriate here. I spent lots of time reading the zlib manual, but it isn't that helpful. Here is the details, your help is appreciated. (1) the HTTP request: NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://192.168.0.98:82/WIC?query=getcontacts&PIN=12345678&compression=Y"]; (2) The data I get from server is something like this (if decompressed). The stream was compressed by C# zlib class DeflateStream: $REC_TYPE=SYS Status=OK Message=OK SetID= IsLast=Y StartIndex=0 LastIndex=6 EOR ...... $REC_TYPE=CONTACTSDISTLIST ID=2 Name=CTU+L%2EA%2E OnCallEnabled=Y OnCallMinUsers=1 OnCallEditRight= OnCallEditDLRight=D Fields= CL= OnCallStatus= EOR (3) However, I will only get the first Block. The code for decompression on iPhone (copied from a code piece from somewhere here) is as follow. The loop between Line 23~38 always break the second time execution. + (NSData *) uncompress: (NSData*) data { 1 if ([data length] == 0) return nil; 2 NSInteger length = [data length]; 3 unsigned full_length = length; 4 unsigned half_length =length/ 2; 5 NSMutableData *decompressed = [NSMutableData dataWithLength: 5*full_length + half_length]; 6 BOOL done = NO; 7 int status; 8 z_stream strm; 9 length=length-4; 10 void* bytes= malloc(length); 11 NSRange range; 12 range.location=4; 13 range.length=length; 14 [data getBytes: bytes range: range]; 15 strm.next_in = bytes; 16 strm.avail_in = length; 17 strm.total_out = 0; 18 strm.zalloc = Z_NULL; 19 strm.zfree = Z_NULL; 20 strm.data_type= Z_BINARY; 21 // if (inflateInit(&strm) != Z_OK) return nil; 22 if (inflateInit2(&strm, (-15)) != Z_OK) return nil; //It won't work if change -15 to positive numbers. 23 while (!done) 24 { 25 // Make sure we have enough room and reset the lengths. 26 if (strm.total_out >= [decompressed length]) 27 [decompressed increaseLengthBy: half_length]; 28 strm.next_out = [decompressed mutableBytes] + strm.total_out; 29 strm.avail_out = [decompressed length] - strm.total_out; 30 31 // Inflate another chunk. 32 status = inflate (&strm, Z_SYNC_FLUSH); //Z_SYNC_FLUSH-->Z_BLOCK, won't work either 33 if (status == Z_STREAM_END){ 34 35 done = YES; 36 } 37 else if (status != Z_OK) break; 38 } 39 if (inflateEnd (&strm) != Z_OK) return nil; 40 // Set real length. 41 if (done) 42 { 43 [decompressed setLength: strm.total_out]; 44 return [NSData dataWithData: decompressed]; 45 } 46 else return nil; 47 }

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• Finding the Right Solution to Source and Manage Your Contractors

  - by mark.rosenberg(at)oracle.com

  Many of our PeopleSoft Enterprise applications customers operate in service-based industries, and all of our customers have at least some internal service units, such as IT, marketing, and facilities. Employing the services of contractors, often referred to as "contingent labor," to deliver either or both internal and external services is common practice. As we've transitioned from an industrial age to a knowledge age, talent has become a primary competitive advantage for most organizations. Contingent labor offers talent on flexible terms; it offers the ability to scale up operations, close skill gaps, and manage risk in the process of delivering services. Talent comes from many sources and the rise in the contingent worker (contractor, consultant, temporary, part time) has increased significantly in the past decade and is expected to reach 40 percent in the next decade. Managing the total pool of talent in a seamless integrated fashion not only saves organizations money and increases efficiency, but creates a better place for workers of all kinds to work. Although the term "contingent labor" is frequently used to describe both contractors and employees who have flexible schedules and relationships with an organization, the remainder of this discussion focuses on contractors. The term "contingent labor" is used interchangeably with "contractor." Recognizing the importance of contingent labor, our PeopleSoft customers often ask our team, "What Oracle vendor management system (VMS) applications should I evaluate for managing contractors?" In response, I thought it would be useful to describe and compare the three most common Oracle-based options available to our customers. They are:   The enterprise licensed software model in which you implement and utilize the PeopleSoft Services Procurement (sPro) application and potentially other PeopleSoft applications;  The software-as-a-service model in which you gain access to a derivative of PeopleSoft sPro from an Oracle Business Process Outsourcing Partner; and  The managed service provider (MSP) model in which staffing industry professionals utilize either your enterprise licensed software or the software-as-a-service application to administer your contingent labor program. At this point, you may be asking yourself, "Why three options?" The answer is that since there is no "one size fits all" in terms of talent, there is also no "one size fits all" for effectively sourcing and managing contingent workers. Various factors influence how an organization thinks about and relates to its contractors, and each of the three Oracle-based options addresses an organization's needs and preferences differently. For the purposes of this discussion, I will describe the options with respect to (A) pricing and software provisioning models; (B) control and flexibility; (C) level of engagement with contractors; and (D) approach to sourcing, employment law, and financial settlement. Option 1:  Enterprise Licensed Software In this model, you purchase from Oracle the license and support for the applications you need. Typically, you license PeopleSoft sPro as your VMS tool for sourcing, monitoring, and paying your contract labor. In conjunction with sPro, you can also utilize PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) applications (if you do not already) to configure more advanced business processes for recruiting, training, and tracking your contractors. Many customers choose this enterprise license software model because of the functionality and natural integration of the PeopleSoft applications and because the cost for the PeopleSoft software is explicit. There is no fee per transaction to source each contractor under this model. Our customers that employ contractors to augment their permanent staff on billable client engagements often find this model appealing because there are no fees to affect their profit margins. With this model, you decide whether to have your own IT organization run the software or have the software hosted and managed by either Oracle or another application services provider. Your organization, perhaps with the assistance of consultants, configures, deploys, and operates the software for managing your contingent workforce. This model offers you the highest level of control and flexibility since your organization can configure the contractor process flow exactly to your business and security requirements and can extend the functionality with PeopleTools. This option has proven very valuable and applicable to our customers engaged in government contracting because their contingent labor management practices are subject to complex standards and regulations. Customers find a great deal of value in the application functionality and configurability the enterprise licensed software offers for managing contingent labor. Some examples of that functionality are... The ability to create a tiered network of preferred suppliers including competencies, pricing agreements, and elaborate candidate management capabilities. Configurable alerts and online collaboration for bid, resource requisition, timesheet, and deliverable entry, routing, and approval for both resource and deliverable-based services. The ability to manage contractors with the same PeopleSoft HCM and Projects applications that are used to manage the permanent workforce. Because it allows you to utilize much of the same PeopleSoft HCM and Projects application functionality for contractors that you use for permanent employees, the enterprise licensed software model supports the deepest level of engagement with the contingent workforce. For example, you can: fill job openings with contingent labor; guide contingent workers through essential safety and compliance training with PeopleSoft Enterprise Learning Management; and source contingent workers directly to project-based assignments in PeopleSoft Resource Management and PeopleSoft Program Management. This option enables contingent workers to collaborate closely with your permanent staff on complex, knowledge-based efforts - R&D projects, billable client contracts, architecture and engineering projects spanning multiple years, and so on. With the enterprise licensed software model, your organization maintains responsibility for the sourcing, onboarding (including adherence to employment laws), and financial settlement processes. This means your organization maintains on staff or hires the expertise in these domains to utilize the software and interact with suppliers and contractors. Option 2:  Software as a Service (SaaS) The effort involved in setting up and operating VMS software to handle a contingent workforce leads many organizations to seek a system that can be activated and configured within a few days and for which they can pay based on usage. Oracle's Business Process Outsourcing partner, Provade, Inc., provides exactly this option to our customers. Provade offers its vendor management software as a service over the Internet and usually charges your organization a fee that is a percentage of your total contingent labor spending processed through the Provade software. (Percentage of spend is the predominant fee model, although not the only one.) In addition to lower implementation costs, the effort of configuring and maintaining the software is largely upon Provade, not your organization. This can be very appealing to IT organizations that are thinly stretched supporting other important information technology initiatives. Built upon PeopleSoft sPro, the Provade solution is tailored for simple and quick deployment and administration. Provade has added capabilities to clone users rapidly and has simplified business documents, like work orders and change orders, to facilitate enterprise-wide, self-service adoption with little to no training. Provade also leverages Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) to provide integrated spend analytics and dashboards. Although pure customization is more limited than with the enterprise licensed software model, Provade offers a very effective option for organizations that are regularly on-boarding and off-boarding high volumes of contingent staff hired to perform discrete support tasks (for example, order fulfillment during the holiday season, hourly clerical work, desktop technology repairs, and so on) or project tasks. The software is very configurable and at the same time very intuitive to even the most computer-phobic users. The level of contingent worker engagement your organization can achieve with the Provade option is generally the same as with the enterprise licensed software model since Provade can automatically establish contingent labor resources in your PeopleSoft applications. Provade has pre-built integrations to Oracle's PeopleSoft and the Oracle E-Business Suite procurement, projects, payables, and HCM applications, so that you can evaluate, train, assign, and track contingent workers like your permanent employees. Similar to the enterprise licensed software model, your organization is responsible for the contingent worker sourcing, administration, and financial settlement processes. This means your organization needs to maintain the staff expertise in these domains. Option 3:  Managed Services Provider (MSP) Whether you are using the enterprise licensed model or the SaaS model, you may want to engage the services of sourcing, employment, payroll, and financial settlement professionals to administer your contingent workforce program. Firms that offer this expertise are often referred to as "MSPs," and they are typically staffing companies that also offer permanent and temporary hiring services. (In fact, many of the major MSPs are Oracle applications customers themselves, and they utilize the PeopleSoft Solution for the Staffing Industry to run their own business operations.) Usually, MSPs place their staff on-site at your facilities, and they can utilize either your enterprise licensed PeopleSoft sPro application or the Provade VMS SaaS software to administer the network of suppliers providing contingent workers. When you utilize an MSP, there is a separate fee for the MSP's service that is typically funded by the participating suppliers of the contingent labor. Also in this model, the suppliers of the contingent labor (not the MSP) usually pay the contingent labor force. With an MSP, you are intentionally turning over business process control for the advantages associated with having someone else manage the processes. The software option you choose will to a certain extent affect your process flexibility; however, the MSPs are often able to adapt their processes to the unique demands of your business. When you engage an MSP, you will want to give some thought to the level of engagement and "partnering" you need with your contingent workforce. Because the MSP acts as an intermediary, it can be very valuable in handling high volume, routine contracting for which there is a relatively low need for "partnering" with the contingent workforce. However, if your organization (or part of your organization) engages contingent workers for high-profile client projects that require diplomacy, intensive amounts of interaction, and personal trust, introducing an MSP into the process may prove less effective than handling the process with your own staff. In fact, in many organizations, it is common to enlist an MSP to handle contractors working on internal projects and to have permanent employees handle the contractor relationships that affect the portion of the services portfolio focused on customer-facing, billable projects. One of the key advantages of enlisting an MSP is that you do not have to maintain the expertise required for orchestrating the sourcing, hiring, and paying of contingent workers.  These are the domain of the MSPs. If your own staff members are not prepared to manage the essential "overhead" processes associated with contingent labor, working with an MSP can make solid business sense. Proper administration of a contingent workforce can make the difference between project success and failure, operating profit and loss, and legal compliance and fines. Concluding Thoughts There is little doubt that thoughtfully and purposefully constructing a service delivery strategy that leverages the strengths of contingent workers can lead to better projects, deliverables, and business results. What requires a bit more thinking is determining the platform (or platforms) that will enable each part of your organization to best deliver on its mission.

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• Qt, MSVC, and /Zc:wchar_t- == I want to blow up the world

  - by Noah Roberts

  So Qt is compiled with /Zc:wchar_t- on windows. What this means is that instead of wchar_t being a typedef for some internal type (__wchar_t I think) it becomes a typedef for unsigned short. The really cool thing about this is that the default for MSVC is the opposite, which of course means that the libraries you're using are likely compiled with wchar_t being a different type than Qt's wchar_t. This doesn't become an issue of course until you try to use something like std::wstring in your code; especially when one or more libraries have functions that accept it as parameters. What effectively happens is that your code happily compiles but then fails to link because it's looking for definitions using std::wstring<unsigned short...> but they only contain definitions expecting std::wstring<__wchar_t...> (or whatever). So I did some web searching and ran into this link: http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-6345 Based on the statement by Thiago Macieira, "Sorry, we will not support building Qt like this," I've been worried that fixing Qt to work like everything else might cause some problem and have been trying to avoid it. We recompiled all of our support libraries with the /Zc:wchar_t- flag and have been fairly content with that until a couple days ago when we started trying to port over (we're in the process of switching from Wx to Qt) some serialization code. Because of how win32 works, and because Wx just wraps win32, we've been using std::wstring to represent string data with the intent of making our product as i18n ready as possible. We did some testing and Wx did not work with multibyte characters when trying to print special stuff (even not so special stuff like the degree symbol was an issue). I'm not so sure that Qt has this problem since QString isn't just a wrapper to the underlying _TCHAR type but is a Unicode monster of some sort. At any rate, the serialization library in boost has compiled parts. We've attempted to recompile boost with /Zc:wchar_t- but so far our attempts to tell bjam to do this have gone unheeded. We're at an impasse. From where I'm sitting I have three options: Recompile Qt and hope it works with /Zc:wchar_t. There's some evidence around the web that others have done this but I have no way of predicting what will happen. All attempts to ask Qt people on forums and such have gone unanswered. Hell, even in that very bug report someone asks why and it just sat there for a year. Keep fighting with bjam until it listens. Right now I've got someone under me doing that and I have more experience fighting with things to get what I want but I do have to admit to getting rather tired of it. I'm also concerned that I'll KEEP running into this issue just because Qt wants to be a c**t. Stop using wchar_t for anything. Unfortunately my i18n experience is pretty much 0 but it seems to me that I just need to find the right to/from function in QString (it has a BUNCH) to encode the Unicode into 8-bytes and visa-versa. UTF8 functions look promising but I really want to be sure that no data will be lost if someone from Zimbabfuckegypt starts writing in their own language and the documentation in QString frightens me a little into thinking that could happen. Of course, I could always run into some library that insists I use wchar_t and then I'm back to 1 or 2 but I rather doubt that would happen. So, what's my question... Which of these options is my best bet? Is Qt going to eventually cause me to gouge out my own eyes because I decided to compile it with /Zc:wchar_t anyway? What's the magic incantation to get boost to build with /Zc:wchar_t- and will THAT cause permanent mental damage? Can I get away with just using the standard 8-bit (well, 'common' anyway) character classes and be i18n compliant/ready? How do other Qt developers deal with this mess?

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