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• missing files after reassemble of RAID-5

  - by Kris_R

  I had to open my file-server's housing on Sunday to replace a faulty fan. What I didn't see was that one of the sata-cables was not properly connected. The 1st thing I did after a reboot was a check of the RAID status and it showed immediately that one drive is missing. Till this moment the device was not used (however it was mounted, so I'm not 100% sure that system did nothing). I stopped md0 and re-plugged the cable: mdadm --stop /dev/md0 poweroff After another reboot I checked the removed drive: mdadm --examine /dev/sdd1 ... Checksum : 3276bc1d - correct Events : 315782 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 32K Number Major Minor RaidDevice State this 0 8 49 0 active sync /dev/sdd1 0 0 8 49 0 active sync /dev/sdd1 1 1 8 65 1 active sync /dev/sde1 2 2 8 33 2 active sync /dev/sdc1 3 3 8 17 3 active sync /dev/sdb1 I was a bit surprised that it was shown as active (even if earlier mdadm said, that this device was removed from array) and its checksum was OK. I recreated RAID with: mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 --scan The command mdadm --detail /dev/md0 showed that all drives were running and system was in "clean" state. I mounted the device md0 and then came hic-cup. I wanted to work on one of the last files that I had been using before all the situation and it was not there. In another place I missed actually all files from the directory where I was working. As far as I can see most of the files that are older than a few days are intact but some newer ones are missing. Now the big question: what would be your advice? Is there a way to get these data? I thought about removing the drive that was earlier labeled by mdadm and rebuild array with another empty HDD. I've found that after re-assemble the "broken" drive has another label (changed from sdd to sdb). Can this have influence on rebuilt process? If yes, how to reassemble the array properly? I'm sure the SATA-cables are connected still in the same order to the controller. p.s. Please no advises like "restore from backup". I'm doing back-ups on Sunday's night and this happened in the late afternoon, so backup is not really options for me. p.s.s. I asked this question on Unix&Linux but no answer came up during last two days. I'm getting quite anxious. Sorry for duplicating if any of you reading the other forum.

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• Automatically Applying Security Updates for AWS Elastic Beanstalk

  - by Eric Anderson

  I've been a fan of Heroku since it's earliest days. But I like the fact that AWS Elastic Beanstalk gives you more control over the characteristics of the instances. One thing I love about Heroku is the fact that I can deploy an app and not worry about managing it. I am assuming Heroku is ensuring all OS security updates are timely applied. I just need to make sure my app is secure. My initial research on Beanstalk shows that although it builds and configures the instances for you, after that it moves to a more manual management process. Security updates won't automatically be applied to the instances. It seems there are two areas of concerns: New AMI releases - As new AMI releases hit it seems we would want to run the latest (presumably most secure). But my research seems to indicate you need to manually launch a new setup to see the latest AMI version and then create a new environment to use that new version. Is there a better automated way of rotating your instances into new AMI releases? In between releases there will be security updates released for packages. Seems we want to upgrade those as well. My research seems to indicate people install commands to occasionally run a yum update. But since new instances are created/destroyed based on usage it seems that the new instances would not always have the updates (i.e. the time between the instance creation and the first yum update). So occasionally you will have instances that aren't patched. And you are also going to have instances constantly patching themselves until the new AMI release is applied. My other concern is that perhaps these security updates haven't gone through Amazon's own review (like the AMI releases do) and it might break my app to automatically update them. I know Dreamhost once had a 12 hour outage because they were applying debian updates completely automatically without any review. I want to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to me. So my question is does Amazon provide a way to offer fully managed PaaS like Heroku? Or is AWS Elastic Beanstalk really more of just a install script and after that you are on your own (other than the monitoring and deployment tools they provide)?

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• Transferring a Windows 8 license and proper un- and reinstallation

  - by Kiwi

  Long story short I have two computers: a laptop and a desktop computer. Both have Windows 7 on them. I buy the Windows 8 Pro upgrade. To see if it screws up anything, I install it on my laptop as a guinea pig. I intend to use Windows 8 for my main computer, my desktop, but I want to test it on the laptop, so I know I don’t risk losing access to my desktop and the data on it. I never use my laptop, and only used it, because it already has a Windows 7 installation on it. The problem At some point, I must have entered the license key on my laptop, because when I go to the activation screen on my desktop, I get this: Uh-oh. I can’t use the key on my desktop. Now how the hell do I transfer the key from my laptop to my desktop computer? Answers and suggestions so far Let’s just say that I tried everything possible to get some answers on this matter. The best response I got from Microsoft is this: To install Windows 8 on your desktop, do the following: Uninstall Windows 8 on your laptop Afterwards, install Windows 8 on your desktop If it won’t activate, call product activation at (...) I am not a fan of that last point. The error message does allude to such a solution, however: If you’ve reinstalled Windows or made changes to your hardware recently, you may be able to use your current key. The question My main question is this: has anyone been in a similar situation, and if so, what did you do to resolve this? Failing that, what is the proper way to uninstall the Windows 8 installation on my laptop, and reinstall the Windows 8 installation on my desktop? Ad 1 I have already tried using the “reset” feature on my laptop, but that only resulted in a new Windows 8 installation that was already activated. But which is the right way to uninstall the installation in a way that allows me to use the license key on the desktop computer? Ad 2 Which is the proper way to reinstall the Windows 8 installation on my desktop computer? Why do I even have to reinstall it in the first place? I won’t get around to do this, until my USB key with 3.0 support arrives in the mail, but it is going to be a while, until I find a assuaging response to the best way to go about this anyway.

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• T60 Screen/LCD gets black after some minutes with a highpitched sound rising and fading

  - by Edward De Leau

  Just now my T60 screen got "black" (so no display). On my second monitor: no problems so the vga output works. symptom: Screen blanks / no display but works on second monitor steps to reproduce: - boot - wait (it does not matter what you do you do not have to login or anything) - (now the monitor of the laptop slowly begins to make a ssssssssHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHWOEOEssssssss noice of about 10 seconds) - right after the sounds ends the monitor gets black times seem to be the same each time. software: installed no new software before/after, running zone alarm and antivirus. other: it does not feel hot in any place, there dont seem to be running processes with strange behaviour. warranty: out of warranty what was i doing: typing text on a website and doing some php coding in a text editor. Anyone any idea what I can do here other than buy a new laptop? / does it sound familiar to known cases? update: * exactly the same problem: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/T60-Screen-Blackout/m-p/288772 and the second poster (garyj) here: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/Black-Screen-on-T60/m-p/235053#M48627 and here: "i have that same problem. i replaced the CCRL on mine and it works fine when the screen is not screwed in. once the frame of the LCD screen (metal portion) touches the metal on the laptop which holds the screen the screen goes black. If the metal is touching the screen when you boot up it boots up with it being very dimmly lit. " from http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/T60-screen-problems/m-p/205047#M44995 (it seems replacing the lcd is no use, he tried it 3 times). same problem: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/T60-black-screen/m-p/80604#M25914 Hmmm... not handy 3 or 4 months ago I ordered and installed a new fan. Now the LCD. Which does not seem the core isse but some electric issue so it seems replacing the LCD is not the thing todo here. I have the following question: If it is not the LCD that needs to be replaced (see other threads) which parts can I order to fix this? Has anyone got any information which could lead me to identify the issue? I have read replacing the "inverter" AND the "backlightning" would that make sense?

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• Crashes and freezes after fixing "BOOTMGR is missing" error

  - by Greg-J

  I came back from a 3-day weekend to a computer that was off. I leave my PC on 24/7, so this was odd. Turn it on to get the dreaded "BOOTMGR is missing" screen. Two attempts at Windows Recovery and it booted into Windows fine. After an hour or so, I get a frozen Chrome and my start bar disappears. Ctrl+Alt+Del brings up an error box telling me that Ctrl+Alt+Del failed to work properly. Clicking on any open application triggers an error (I can't recall the error now, but it essentially just said that the application couldn't be found running or something along those lines). I restart, and again, the same thing happens after a while of use. I turn it on, install the 47 updates I have or so, and then restart it. After a while of use (under an hour), it just freezes completely. My thoughts are: SSDs, RAM or PS. My system specs below: (RAID0) 2 x Crucial M4 CT128M4SSD2 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CML16GX3M4A1600C9 CORSAIR HX Series HX750 750W ATX12V 2.3 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active 1 x ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z/GEN3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard 1 x Hitachi GST Deskstar 7K1000.C 0F10383 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive 1 x Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 1 x SAPPHIRE 21197-00-40G Radeon HD 7970 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card 1 x Noctua NH-D14 120mm & 140mm SSO CPU Cooler This is all crammed in a pretty small case (NZXT Vulcan) and has been running perfectly problem-free since January. The only thing out of the ordinary is that there is a fan in the case that is now making noise whereas the case has previously been completely silent. I have no reason to believe this is anything more then correlation, but felt it is worth mentioning. I believe it MAY be the SSDs simply because of the BOOTMGR error, but not sure how to test that theory. My belief that it may be the RAM is simply from experience with frozen machines. I haven't had the time to memtest it, but will. The PS being the culprit is something I've picked up by reading similar threads on various forums, and it seems plausible. I am unsure how to test this though. ANY insight whatsover would be greatly appreciated!

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• Custom built machine has much higher power consumption than expected

  - by foraidt

  I built a machine according to the specs of a computer magazine (c't, Germany). According to the magazine, the power consumption should be at around 10W. I don't want to go into the specifics of the hardware but rather ask for general advice on where to look: I updated the BIOS/UEFI version to the latest version, installed all the recommended drivers and unplugged all hardware that's not necessary to boot into Windows. All that was left is the power supply, mainboard, cpu, cpu cooler and one SSD drive. But still I measured a power consumption of 50W, which is 40W more than it should be. I tried booting Linux Mint from a USB stick, so I don't think it's some Windows-related problem.. Where else could I look? Update 1 I dind't want the question to get closed for being too localized but if more details are necessary, here they are: The system is a desktop PC. The power consumption is measured using a Brennenstuhl PM 231 device, which was tested also by c't and they found it quite accurate. The PSU is an Enermax ETL300AWT, the mainboard Intel DH87RL (Socket 1150) and the CPU Intel G3220 (Haswell). Update 2 There is no online version of the article*. The most details I found can be read on its project page (in German, though...) (*)You can pay for downloadable PDFs, however. English translation of that project page Update 3 Regarding the sceptics: It may sound ridiculous but apparently 10W idle consumption is possible with Intel's Haswell architecture. As a kind of proof, there's an additional Blog article explicitly listing the steps needed to reduce the idle consumption to 10W. Additional hardware: I measured the consumption without the HDD, and as expected the usage dropped by around 10W. I have no chassis fans and the CPU fan is a "Scythe Mugen 4" model. It runs at around 600rpm so I think it won't draw much. When stripping off all my extra components I should be at 10W. But I'm not getting anywhere near that. I would be happy to see "just" 15W in the stripped down version but currently I'm not getting below 50W no matter which component I remove. As I see it this cannot be explained by the PSU being less efficient at lower consumption. I also waited half an hour or so (also checked that no Windows updates were running in the background) and the consumption dind't drop by more than a few watts.

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• Thinkpad speaker turns mute - Linux Codec issue?

  - by Curlew

  At some point a few days ago the speakers on my Lenovo Thinkpad T410 (Model number: 2537A11) suddenly stopped working randomly. This error happens every time I watch a video or listen to a music file. The sound just abruptly stops. At the moment, I can't produce a single sound no matter what I do. I am using Debian GNU/Linux on this laptop and there doesn't appear to be anything else wrong (the fan is working, no abnormal heat (staying around ~40°C), no other obvious errors or problems). Here is the output of a nice program someone pointed me to: martin@martin:~/Downloads$ sudo python run.py --monitor Using temporary directory: /dev/shm/hda-analyzer You may remove this directory when finished or if you like to download the most recent copy of hda-analyzer tool. Downloading file hda_analyzer.py Downloading file hda_guilib.py Downloading file hda_codec.py Downloading file hda_proc.py Downloading file hda_graph.py Downloading file hda_mixer.py Downloaded all files, executing hda_analyzer.py Watching 1 cards ====================================== Sound is working normally and then it stops and the following lines appear: Diff for codec 0/0 (0x14f15069): --- +++ @@ -164,17 +164,17 @@ Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x1f [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400501: Stereo Pincap 0x00000010: OUT Pin Default 0x901701f0: [Fixed] Speaker at Int N/A Conn = Analog, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x40: OUT - Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 + Power: setting=D3, actual=D3 Connection: 2 0x10* 0x11 Node 0x20 [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400781: Stereo Digital Pincap 0x00000010: OUT Pin Default 0x40f001f0: [N/A] Other at Ext N/A Conn = Unknown, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE And now there is also an error in the dmesg output hda-intel: IRQ timing workaround is activated for card #0. Suggest a bigger bdl_pos_adj. I changed the bdl_pos_adj to various numbers (-1, 0, 64, 1024) and either there is no change at all or dmesg reports that the adjustment is too big. I wonder if this bdl_pos_adj is the real reason for the error. Here is my hardware information provided by alsa-info.sh website. Okay, i did some serious testing and even installed Windows and now i officially conclude that this is a hard-ware related issue with my Laptop speakers. Reason: The error occurs in my installed Debian Linux, an Ubuntu Live distribution and Windows XP No error-message appears in all of the OS. The sound just keeps running and i can't hear a thing. I tested different setups, including OSS, ALSA and the pulseaudio server on top If i use my new usb-headphones i can hear sound all the time without any sudden silences. So obviously, although hard to believe, my laptop speakers are not okay (never heard of similar cases). I'll award the bounty to anyone who can point me to good tutorials or the procedure how to exchange my T410 speakers (i still have warranty. The laptop was bought in Germany, but now i am in Denmark). Or to someone who can explain me the output from hda-analyzer (big log above).

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• Any way to recover ext4 filesystems from a deleted LVM logical volume?

  - by Vegar Nilsen

  The other day I had a proper brain fart moment while expanding a disk on a Linux guest under Vmware. I stretched the Vmware disk file to the desired size and then I did what I usually do on Linux guests without LVM: I deleted the LVM partition and recreated it, starting in the same spot as the old one, but extended to the new size of the disk. (Which will be followed by fsck and resize2fs.) And then I realized that LVM doesn't behave the same way as ext2/3/4 on raw partitions... After restoring the Linux guest from the most recent backup (taken only five hours earlier, luckily) I'm now curious on how I could have recovered from the following scenario. It's after all virtually guaranteed that I'll be a dumb ass in the future as well. Virtual Linux guest with one disk, partitioned into one /boot (primary) partition (/dev/sda1) of 256MB, and the rest in a logical, extended partition (/dev/sda5). /dev/sda5 is then setup as a physical volume with pvcreate, and one volume group (vgroup00) created on top of it with the usual vgcreate command. vgroup00 is then split into two logical volumes root and swap, which are used for / and swap, logically. / is an ext4 file system. Since I had backups of the broken guest I was able to recreate the volume group with vgcfgrestore from the backup LVM setup found under /etc/lvm/backup, with the same UUID for the physical volume and all that. After running this I had two logical volumes with the same size as earlier, with 4GB free space where I had stretched the disk. However, when I tried to run "fsck /dev/mapper/vgroup00-root" it complained about a broken superblock. I tried to locate backup superblocks by running "mke2fs -n /dev/mapper/vgroup00-root" but none of those worked either. Then I tried to run TestDisk but when I asked it to find superblocks it only gave an error about not being able to open the file system due to a broken file system. So, with the default allocation policy for LVM2 in Ubuntu Server 10.04 64-bit, is it possible that the logical volumes are allocated from the end of the volume group? That would definitely explain why the restored logical volumes didn't contain the expected data. Could I have recovered by recreating /dev/sda5 with exactly the same size and disk position as earlier? Are there any other tools I could have used to find and recover the file system? (And clearly, the question is not whether or not I should have done this in a different way from the start, I know that. This is a question about what to do when shit has already hit the fan.)

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• Triple (3) Monitors under Linux

  - by widgisoft

  I have a 3 monitor setup (each 1680x1050) via an Nvidia NVS440 (2 GPUs, 2 outputs per GPU totalling 4 outputs); this works fine under Windows XP,7 but caused considerable headaches under Linux (Ubuntu 9.04). I had previously used an XFX 9600GT and the onboard XFX 9300GS to produce the same result but the card was noisy and power hungry and I was hoping that there was some magical switch in the NVS4400 that got rid of this annoying problem - turns out the NVS440 is just 2 cards on one physical PCB :-p (I searched the net high and low for people using this card under Linux but found nothing, if anything the card uses less power and is fan less so I was to benefit from it either way) Anyway, using either set up there were 5 solutions available: Have 3 separate X instances, all un joined Have 3 separate X instances, adjoined by Xinerama Have 2 separate X instances - One using twin-view, both adjoined by Xinerama Have 2 separate X instances - One using twin-view but no Xinerama Have a single Twin-view setup and leave the 3rd screen unplugged :-p The 4rd option, using 2 separate X instances and twinview (but no xinerama) was the best balance in terms of performance and usability but caused 2 really annoying issues You couldn't control (without altering the shortcuts) which screen an application opened onto - and once it was opened you couldn't move it to another screen without opening up terminal and forcing it to move Nvidia's overriding or falsifying of Xinerama breaks and the 2 screens joined by Twin view behave like a single huge screen causing popups to open in the middle of both screens and maximising of windows stretches to the width of the first 2 screens Firefox can only run one instance as the same user so having multiple firefox windows requires at least 2 users The second option "feels" like the right option, but OpenGL is basically disabled and playing any sort of game or even running anything graphical causes a huge performance drop and instability - even trying to run a basic emulator for gba or gens just causes the system to fall over. It works just enough to stare at your desktop and do nothing but as soon as you start doing some work - opening windows, dragging things around - running multiple copies of firefox it just really feels slow. The last open, only going dual screen works perfectly and everything performs as required, full GPU acceleration - two logical screen spaces - perfect, just make it work across GPUs like windows! :-p Anyway, I know RandR was supposed to pick up the slack when it would introduced GPU objects of sorts to allow multiple GPUs to be stitched together to create one huge desktop at a much deeper layer than Xinerama. I was wondering if this has now been fixed (I noticed X server 1.7 is out) and whether anyone has got it running successfully? Again, my requirements are: One huge desktop to drag any window across Maximising of windows to each screen (as XP does) Running fullscreen apps on the primary screen and disabling the mouse from moving onto the others or on all 3 stretched Finally as a side note; I am aware of the Matrox triple (and dual) head splitter but even the price they go for on eBay is more than I can afford atm, my argument: I shouldn't have to buy extra hardware to get something to work on Linux when it's something that's existed in the windows world for a long time (can you tell I don't get on with X :-p); If I had the cash I'd have bought the latest version of this box already (the new version finally supports large resolutions as the displays I have 1680x1050 each).

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• Well....a ghost lives in my server...

  - by tsgiannis

  Hello to every body and greetings from Greece I have a rather unusual situation and i am running out of ideas. I have this old server (IBM x205 - P4 2.4Ghz,3xSCSI 36gb) and i was about a year ago i decided to use it as an additional domain controller,fax & file server...for this task i had a Delock 70154 SATA card along with 2x320 SATA II HDDs Everything was going super smoothly until about 3 weeks ago. I was on a trip and i was informermed when i got back that the server was found frozen...well i considered it was a glitch since a simple powerdown power up fixed everything.Again 2 weeks ago another freeze situation....it got suspicious but again power down power up everything was running.... Last again it frozen and when i power it up it came with a message that the Domain services could not start due to NTDS corruption....booting in safe mode revealed that there was an issue with the SATA Raid (degraded). After a lot of searching i degraded the server...cleaned Active Directory and pulled both HDDs out (one of these was really BAD ) and recovered my files (i had some problems with ho Delock handles the redudant HDD). Right now my server is vanilla simple...with only what the factory installed and here is where the fun begins. Everyday when i arrive at the office i find this particular machine dead..and i mean total dead...just a black screen and nothing else...the cpu fan is working ,the psu is working .keyboard and mouse are dead(they also lock my kvm) ...network is dead.... the machine is DEAD. I power it down forcilly ...i power it up and for the 8 hours i am in the office it works,either idling or running some kind of diagnostic...when i leave the office after some time..it maybe half an hour ...it maybe 4 hours the machine dies...at least this is the information the event log shows (" the previous shutdown at xx:xx:xx was unexpected) Well i must admit i am runnig out of ideas.... I have tried Memtest....nothing Passmark burn in test.....nothing Carefull study of the event log.....nothing Set Instead of restart..BSOD....nothing Power sceheme to sleep...all set to never. i know there are a lot of other tools that heavily stress a machine like occt but .... the machine is old...today i will give them a try nevertheless ..... One idea is to reformat it...but ... i really like to find what is causing this because i could get to a situation that everything is working for a while and kaboom...one day again is dying.. I really need a helping hand and every opinion / idea is well welcomed.... iknow the obvious solution is to never leave the office but....i have a life...sory server...:) P.S this situation with the machine dying some time after is going on for about one week...everyday i would set either the RAID to rebuild....or to copy/recover files and while everythig was working

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• Subdomains, folders, internationalization, and hosting solutions

  - by justinbach

  I'm a web developer and I recently landed a gig to develop the US / international version of a site for a company that's big in Europe but hasn't done much expansion into the US yet. They've got an existing site at company.com, which should remain visible to European customers after the new site goes up, and an existing (not great) site at company.us, which I'm going to be redeveloping (the .us site will be taken down when my version goes up--keep reading for details). My solution needs to take into account the fact that there are going to be new, localized versions of the site in the fairly near future, so the framework I'm writing needs to be able to handle localizations fairly easily (dynamically load language packs, etc). The tricky thing is the European branch of the company manages the .com site hosting (IIS-based) and the DNS, while I'll be managing the US hosting (and future localizations), which will likely be apache-based. I've never been a big fan of the ".us" TLD--I think most US users are accustomed to visiting the .com--so the thought is that the European branch will detect the IP of inbound traffic and redirect all US-based addresses to us.example.com (or whatever the appropriate localized subdomain might be), which would point to the IP address of my host. I'd then serve the appropriate locale-specific content by pulling the subdomain from the $_SERVER superglobal (assuming PHP). I couldn't find any examples of international organizations that take a subdomain-based approach for localization, but I'm not sure I have any other options as a result of the unique hosting structure here (in that there's not a unified hosting solution for the European and US sites). In my experience, the US version of an international site would live at domain.com/us, not at us.domain.com, and I'd imagine that this has to do with SEO (subdomains are treated as separate sites, so improved rankings for the US site wouldn't help the Canadian version if subdomains are used to differentiate between them). My question is: is there a better approach to solving this problem than the one I'm taking? Ideally, I'd like to use a folder-based approach (see adidas.com as an example of what I'm talking about), but I'm not sure that's a possibility given that the US site (and other localizations) will not be hosted on the same server as the rest of the .com. Can you, in IIS, map a folder (e.g. domain.com/us) to a different IP address? What would you recommend? Thanks for your consideration.

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• Choosing parts for a high-spec custom PC - feedback required [closed]

  - by James

  I'm looking to build a high-spec PC costing under ~£800 (bearing in mind I can get the CPU half price). This is my first time doing this so I have plenty of questions! I have been doing lots of research and this is what I have come up with: http://pcpartpicker.com/uk/p/j4lE Usage: I will be using it for Adobe CS6, rendering in 3DS Max, particle simulations in Realflow and for playing games like GTA IV (and V when it comes out), Crysis 1/2, Saints Row The Third, Deus Ex HR, etc. Questions: Can you see any obvious problem areas with the current setup? Will it be sufficient for the above usage? I won't be doing any overclocking initially. Is it worth buying the H60 liquid cooler, or will the fan that comes with the CPU be sufficient? Is water cooling generally quieter? Is the chosen motherboard good for the current components? And is it future-proof? I read that the HDD is often the bottleneck when it comes to gaming. I presume this is true to other high-end applications? If so, is my selection good? I keep changing my mind about the GPU; first the 560, now the 660. Can anyone shed some light on how to choose? I read mixed opinions about matching the GPU to the CPU. Will the 560 or the 660 be sufficient for my required usage? Atm I'm basing my choice on the PassMark benchmarks and how much they cost. The specs on the GeForce website state that the 560 and the 660 both require 450W. Is this a good figure to base the wattage of my PSU on? If so, how do you decide? Do I really need 750W? The latest GTX 690 requires 650W. Is it a good idea to buy a 750W PSU now to future-proof myself?

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• Cannot access boot menu with compaq 8510p

  - by pinouchon

  I have a problem with my HP compaq 8510p laptop: when I start it, the fan starts and the power light is on, but the screen displays nothing. When I insert a bootable hard drive, it activates the hard drive light (meaning that the CD is recognized) but it stops after a few seconds. Same thing with any hard drive: the drive is recognized but does not boot. What I've tried so far: Changing the hard drive or booting with no hard drive (same problem) Plugging anoher display via VGA : no display on the other screen Inserting a windows-7 CD (same problem) Booting only on battery, with battery and power cable, only with power cable (same problem) So it looks like something is preventing the laptop from booting and displaying the boot menu. Do you have experienced something similar with a laptop ? What could be wrong ? The laptop is out of warranty. The system used to be windows-7 x64. Edit: I went to the help desk of my university. A guy took a look (he also tried to plug an external screen) and said that the computer is dead: on the HP laptops eventually the GPU card dies and so does the motherboard because they are linked. He saw this many times, and even if I can fix the problem, the laptop would crash again after a while. Do you have similar experience with HP laptops ? (mine is 4 years old) Edit 2: Believe it or not, my laptop is magically working again. I have no clue about what is going on. Now it is like starting and old car: when you turn it on you secretly hope it will actually start... With that said, I expect my laptop to break again in the near future (its an HP after all) and I will accept an answer or add my own accordingly. Edit 3: As expected, the laptop is down again. This time, sometimes when I power it up, it shuts down automatically after 3 seconds, sometimes not at all. In addition, when it does not shut down on its own, the power button does not work : the only way to shut it down is by unplugging the battery. As before, the screen is black, and only the power and battery lights are on. (the other ones: hard drive and wifi are off). I have tried to plug in another power plug, removing the battery and removing the hard drive without success. I might buy another laptop. I've brought the laptop to a repair shop. The problem is indeed that the graphic card is down. It will be replaced by a new one.

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• Looking For iPhone 4S Alternatives? Here Are 3 Smartphones You Should Consider

  - by Gopinath

  If you going to buy iPhone 4S on a two year contract in USA, Europe or Australia you may not find it expensive. But if you are planning to buy it in any other parts of the world, you will definitely feel the heat of ridiculous iPhone 4S price. In India iPhone 4S costs approximately costs $1000 which is 30% more than the price tag of an unlocked iPhone sold in USA. Personally I love iPhones as there is no match for the user experience provided by Apple as well as the wide range of really meaning applications available for iPhone. But it breaks heart to spend $1000 for a phone and I’m forced to look at alternates available in the market. Here are the four iPhone 4S alternates available in almost all the countries where we can buy iPhone 4S Google Galaxy Nexus The Galaxy Nexus is Google’s own Android smartphone manufactured by Samsung and sold under the brand name of Google Nexus. Galaxy Nexus is the pure Android phone available in the market without any bloat software or custom user interfaces like other Androids available in the market. Galaxy Nexus is also the first Android phone to be shipped with the latest version of Android OS, Ice Cream Sandwich. This phone is the benchmark for the rest of Android phones that are going to enter the market soon. In the words of Google this smartphone is called as “Galaxy Nexus: Simple. Beautiful. Beyond Smart.”.  BGR review summarizes the phone as This is almost comical at this point, but the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is my favourite Android device in the world. Easily replacing the HTC Rezound, the Motorola DROID RAZR, and Samsung Galaxy S II, the Galaxy Nexus champions in a brand new version of Android that pushes itself further than almost any other mobile OS in the industry. Samsung Galaxy S II The one single company that is able to sell more smartphones than Apple is Samsung. Samsung recently displaced Apple from the top smartphone seller spot and occupied it with loads of pride. Samsung’s Galaxy S II fits as one the best alternatives to Apple’s iPhone 4S with it’s beautiful design and remarkable performance. Engadget summarizes Samsung Galaxy S2 review as It’s the best Android smartphone yet, but more importantly, it might well be the best smartphone, period. Of course, a 4.3-inch screen size won’t suit everyone, no matter how stupendously thin the device that carries it may be, and we also can’t say for sure that the Galaxy S II would justify a long-term iOS user foresaking his investment into one ecosystem and making the leap to another. Nonetheless, if you’re asking us what smartphone to buy today, unconstrained by such externalities, the Galaxy S II would be the clear choice. Sometimes it’s just as simple as that. Nokia Lumia 800 Here comes unexpected Windows Phone in to the boxing ring. May be they are not as great as Androids available in the market today, but they are picking up very quickly. Especially the Nokia Lumia 800 seems to be first ever Windows Phone 7 aimed at competing serious with Androids and iPhones available in the market. There are reports that Nokia Lumia 800 is outselling all Androids in UK and few high profile tech blogs are calling it as the king of Windows Phone. Considering this phone while evaluating the alternative of iPhone 4S will not disappoint you. We assure. Droid RAZR Remember the Motorola Driod that swept entire Android market share couple of years ago? The first two version of Motorola Droids were the best in the market and they out performed almost every other Android phone those days. The invasion of Samsung Androids, Motorola lost it charm. With the recent release of Droid RAZR, Motorola seems to be in the right direction to reclaiming the prestige. Droid RAZR is the thinnest smartphone available in the market and it’s beauty is not just skin deep. Here is a review of the phone from Engadget blog the RAZR’s beauty is not only skin deep. The LTE radio, 1.2GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM make sure this sleek number is ready to run with the big boys. It kept pace with, and in some cases clearly outclassed its high-end competition. Despite its deficiencies in the display department and underwhelming battery life, the RAZR looks to be a perfectly viable alternative when considering the similarly-pricey Rezound and Galaxy Nexus Further Reading So we have seen the four alternates of iPhone 4S available in the market and I personally love to buy a Samsung smartphone if I’m don’t have money to afford an iPhone 4S. If you are interested in deep diving into the alternates, here few links that help you do more research Apple iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy Nexus vs. Motorola Droid RAZR: How Their Specs Compare by Huffington Post Nokia Lumia 800 vs. iPhone 4S vs. Nexus Galaxy: Spec Smackdown by PC World Browser Speed Test: Nokia Lumia 800 vs. iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy S II – by Gizmodo iPhone 4S vs Samsung Galaxy S II by pocket lint Apple iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy S II by techie buzz This article titled,Looking For iPhone 4S Alternatives? Here Are 3 Smartphones You Should Consider, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Top 20 Daily Deal Sites In India

  - by Damodhar

  If you have never heard of Groupon recently, you probably are not working in the tech industry because it is all over the blogosphere. After all, growing from zero to US$1.35 billion valuation in 18 months is pretty AMAZING. Inspired by this, the following bunch of Groupon clone’s are already rising in India. Definitely this business model is emerging and changes the way online shopping happens in India. SnapDeal SnapDeal features a Best deals Coupons at an unbeatable price on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in our city. It provides vouchers and discounts in all the major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. KhojGuru Exclusive Discount coupons from hundreds of brands and retailers. These discounts can be easily downloaded as an SMS on to the mobile phone or their print out can be taken. MyDala A platform which gets us great deals in our city.Leveraging the “power of group buying”. Group buying happens when like minded people come together to get deals that we can never get on our own as individuals. SoSasta Great place which would not only tell us about the hidden treasures of our city — but also made them affordable to us at the end of the month. DealsAndYou Deals and You is a group buying portal that features a daily deal on the best stuff in some of India’s leading cities. AajKaCatch Its concept is to provide you the most unique, useful and qualitative product at a very low price. So you can now shop without the hassles of clustered products. BindassBargain Bindaas Bargain offers a new deal every day! Great stuff ranging from cool gadgets, home theatres, luxury watches, smash games. MasthiDeals It get you a great deal on a great stuff to do, eat, buy or see in your city. They have a team of about 25 wonderful people working in Chennai office working side by side with folks in MasthiDeal’s other cities. Koovs Founded by a team of IIT alumni who have brought in their expertise from the internet industry. Koovs is a Bangalore based start up and one point solution for all your desires. Taggle It brings you a variety of offers from some of the most respected brands in the country.This website uses collective buying to create a win-win for local businesses and their customers. BuzzInTown Buzzintown.com is a portal owned by Wortal Inc. There are a US headquartered company, with a presence pan-India through their India subsidiary, managed by a vastly experienced set of global leaders from the media, entertainment and technology industries. BuyThePrice It lines up the best win – win deals for both consumers and vendors and also ensures that each of the orders are dispatched in the shortest time possible. 24HoursLoot 24hoursLoot is an online store for selling a new t-shirt (sometime other products) everyday at deep discounted price in limited quantity/stock. DealMagic Customers get exposure to the best their city has to offer, at unbeatable prices (50-90% off).  We never feature more than one business on our website on any given day, so we have to be very very selective on who gets featured. Dealivore ICUMI Technologies Pvt Ltd is the company operating the Dealivore service. Founded in December 2009, ICUMI is privately owned and funded. LootMore An online store that exclusively focuses on selling cool quality stuff at cheap prices. Here you’ll always find the latest and greatest brands at prices you can afford. Foodome The deals features the best coupons at an unbeatable price on restaurants, fine dining on where to spend your birthday party.They provide coupon only in Chennai as of now. Top Online Shopping Sites- Nation Wide ebay.in eBay is The World’s Online Marketplace, enabling trade on a local, national and international basis. With a diverse and passionate community of individuals and small businesses, eBay offers an online platform where millions of items are traded each day. FutureBazzar Future Group, led by its founder and Group CEO, Mr. Kishore Biyani, is one of India’s leading business houses with multiple businesses spanning across the consumption space. TradeUs Launched in July 2009 and in a short span of time it has turned into one of India’s foremost shopping portals setting the Indian e-commerce abode aflame. BigShoeBazzar (BSB) is the largest online authorized shoe store in South Asia. Croma Promoted by Infiniti Retail Ltd, a 100% subsidiary of Tata Sons.One of the world’s leading retailers, ensuring that you buy nothing but the best. This article titled,Top 20 Daily Deal Sites In India, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• 6 Interesting Facts About NASA’s Mars Rover ‘Curiosity’

  - by Gopinath

  Humans quest for exploring the surrounding planets to see whether we can live there or not is taking new shape today. NASA’s Mars probing robot, Curiosity, blasted off today on its 9 months journey to reach Mars and explore it for the possibilities of life there. Scientist says that Curiosity is one most advanced rover ever launched to probe life on other planets. Here is the launch video and some analysis by a news reporter Lets look at the 6 interesting facts about the mission 1. It’s as big as a car Curiosity is the biggest ever rover ever launched by NASA to probe life on outer planets. It’s as big as a car and almost double the size of its predecessor rover Spirit. The length of Curiosity is around 9 feet 10 inches(3 meters), width is 9 feet 1 inch (2.8 meters) and height is 7 feet (2.1 meters). 2. Powered by Plutonium – Lasts 24×7 for 23 months The earlier missions of NASA to explore Mars are powered by Solar power and that hindered capabilities of the rovers to move around when the Sun is hiding. Due to dependency of Sun the earlier rovers were not able to traverse the places where there is no Sun light. Curiosity on the other hand is equipped with a radioisotope power system that generates electricity from the heat emitted by plutonium’s radioactive decay. The plutonium weighs around 10 pounds and can generate power required for operating the rover close to 23 weeks. The best part of the new power system is, Curiosity can roam around in darkness, light and all year around. 3. Rocket powered backpack for a science fiction style landing The Curiosity is so heavy that NASA could not use parachute and balloons to air-drop the rover on the surface of Mars like it’s previous missions. They are trying out a new science fiction style air-dropping mechanism that is similar to sky crane heavy-lift helicopter. The landing of the rover begins first with entry into the Mars atmosphere protected by a heat shield. At about 6 miles to the surface, the heat shield is jettisoned and a parachute is deployed to glide the rover smoothly. When the rover touches 3 miles above the surface, the parachute is jettisoned and the eight motors rocket backpack is used for a smooth and impact free landing as shown in the image. Here is an animation created by NASA on the landing sequence. If you are interested in getting more detailed information about the landing process check this landing sequence picture available on NASA website 4. Equipped with Star Wars style laser gun Hollywood movie directors and novelist always imagined aliens coming to earth with spaceships full of laser guns and blasting the objects which comes on their way. With Curiosity the equations are going to change. It has a powerful laser gun equipped in one of it’s arms to beam laser on rocks to vaporize them. This is not part of any assault mission Curiosity is expected to carry out, the laser gun is will be used to carry out experiments to detect life and understand nature. 5. Most sophisticated laboratory powered by 10 instruments Around 10 state of art instruments are part of Curiosity rover and the these 10 instruments form a most advanced rover based lab ever built by NASA. There are instruments to cut through rocks to examine them and other instruments will search for organic compounds. Mounted cameras can study targets from a distance, arm mounted instruments can study the targets they touch. Microscopic lens attached to the arm can see and magnify tiny objects as tiny as 12.5 micro meters. 6. Rover Carrying 1.24 million names etched on silicon Early June 2009 NASA launched a campaign called “Send Your Name to Mars” and around 1.24 million people registered their names through NASA’s website. All those 1.24 million names are etched on Silicon chips mounted onto Curiosity’s deck. If you had registered your name in the campaign may be your name is going to reach Mars soon. Curiosity On Web If you wish to follow the mission here are few links to help you NASA’s Curiosity Web Page Follow Curiosity on Facebook Follow @MarsCuriosity on Twitter Artistic Gallery Image of Mars Rover Curiosity A printable sheet of Curiosity Mission [pdf] Images credit: NASA This article titled,6 Interesting Facts About NASA’s Mars Rover ‘Curiosity’, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Social Network Updates: While You Were Busy Marketing 2

  - by Mike Stiles

  Since social moves at the speed of data, it’s already time for another update, as we did back in April, on the changes the various social networks have made or gone through while you were busy marketing. Facebook There’s a lot of talk Facebook’s developing a mobile product to act like Flipboard and surface news, from both users and media outlets. The biggest news was Facebook/Instagram’s introduction of 15-second videos, enhanced with with filters, to take some of Vine’s candy. You can also delete parts of videos and rerecord them, and there’s image stabilization. Facebook’s ad revenue is coming along just fine, thank you very much. 35% quarter-to-quarter growth in Q2. And it looks like new formats like Mobile App Install Ads and Unpublished Page Posts are adding to the mix. If you don’t already, you’ll soon see a little camera in comment boxes letting you insert photos right into the comments you make. The drive toward “more visual” continues. The other big news is Facebook’s adoption of our Twitter friend, the hashtag. Adding # sets apart the post topic so it can be easily found or discovered. It’s also being added to Google Plus, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Twitter Want to send someone a promoted tweet when they’re in range of your store? That could be happening by the end of this year. Some users have been seeing automatic in-stream previews of images on Twitter.com. Right now it’s images in your own tweets, but we can assume all tweets are next. Get your followers organized! Twitter raised the limit on the number of lists you can create from 20 to 1,000. They also raised the number of accounts you can have in a list from 500 to 5,000. Twitter started notifying you when someone favorites a tweet you’re mentioned in or re-tweets a tweet you re-tweeted. Anyway, it’s the first time Twitter’s notified you about indirect interactions like that. Who’s afraid of Instagram? A study shows 6-second Vine videos are being posted to Twitter at the rate of 9/second, up from 5/second 2 months ago. Vine has over 13 million users and branded Vines are 4x more likely to be shared than video ads. Google Plus Now featuring a 3-column redesigned stream, and images that take up a whole column. And photo filters Auto Highlight and Auto Awesome work to turn your photos into a real show. Google Hangouts is the workhorse for all Google messaging now, it’s not just an online chat with 9 people anymore. Google Plus Dashboard improves the connection between your company’s Google Plus business page and your Google Plus Local. Updates go out across all Google properties and you can do your managing from the dashboard. With Google Plus’ authorship system, you can build “Author Rank” based on what you write and put on the web. If your stuff is +1’ed and shared a lot, you’re the real deal and there are search result benefits. LinkedIn "Who's Viewed Your Updates" shows you what you’ve shared recently, who saw it and what they did about it in real-time. “Influencers” is, well, influential. Traffic to all LI news products has gone up 8x since it was introduced. LinkedIn is quickly figuring out how to get users to stick around awhile. You and your brand can post images and documents in status updates now. In fact, that whole “document posting” thing is making some analysts wonder if LinkedIn will drift on over to the Dropboxes and YouSendIts of the world. C’mon, admit it. Your favorite part of LinkedIn is being able to see who’s viewed your profile. Now you’ve got even more info and can see what/who you have in common. Premium users get even deeper insights about how people are finding them. If you’re a big fan of security, you’ll love that LinkedIn started offering two-factor authentication (2FA). It’s optional, but step 2 is a one-time code texted to your registered mobile. Pinterest A study showed pins have a looong shelf life compared to other social net posts. “Clicks kept coming for 30 days and beyond.” Most pins are timeless, and the infinite scroll causes people to see older pins. Is it a keeper? Pinterest jumped 82% to 54 million users in the past year. It’s valued at $2.5 billion and is one of the biggest sources of referral traffic there is. That said, CEO Ben Silbermann adds, "Right now, we don't make money." A new search feature stops you from having to endlessly scroll through your own pins looking for that waterfall picture you posted. Simply select “just my pins” in the search bar. New "Rich Pins" lets brands add info like price and availability to pins that can be updated daily via a data feed from your merchant site. Not so fast, you have to apply to Pinterest for it first. Like other social nets, Pinterest does not allow sexual content, nudity, or even partial nudity. However…some art contains nudity, and Pinterest wants to allow art. What constitutes “art” will be judged by…what we have to assume are Pinterest employees who love their job. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng, Tim Marmon

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• ICC Cricket World Cup 2011- Free Online Live Streaming, Mobile Apps, TV and Radio Guide

  - by Kavitha

  The ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 will be hosted jointly by Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. This 10th edition of World Cup is held between 19 February-2 April 2011. The World Cup drive will be starting in Dhaka on 19 February with the inaugural match between India and Bangladesh. The 43 days long ICC World Cup Cricket 2011 event will host 49 matches, day matches starting as early as 9.30am IST and day-night matches starting at 2.30pm IST. Here is our guide to follow 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup live on your computers, televisions,mobiles and radios Free Live Streaming On The Web (Official & Unofficial) http://espnstar.com will live stream all the matches of World Cup 2011 and they will be available in HD quality as they are the official broadcasters of World Cup 2011 cricket event. This is the first time ever a world cup cricket event is streamed online officially. If you are not able to access the official live streaming of Cricket World Cup due to regional restrictions, point your browser to any of the following unofficial live streams on the web. NOTE: MAKE SURE THAT YOUR ANTIVIRUS and ANTIMALWARE software are up and running before opening any of these sites. crictime.com - this site offers 6 live streaming servers that offer World Cup 2011 Cricket matches streams. Don’t mind the ads that are displayed left,right and center and just enjoy the cricket. Web pages dedicated for the world cup streaming are already live and you can bookmark them for your reference. cricfire.com/live-cricket: cricfire   gathers cricket live streams available around the web and provides them for easy access. Also they provide links for watching highlights and other post match analysis shows. Other sites that provide live streaming videos extracover.net webcric.com Searching for Unofficial Streams On Live Video Streaming Sites One of the best ways to find the unofficial streams is look for live streaming feeds on popular video streaming websites. We can be assured that these sites does not spread malware and spammy ads as they are well established. Here are the queries that you can use to search the popular sites FreedoCast  http://freedocast.com/search.aspx?go=cricket%20world%20cup Justin.tv      http://www.justin.tv/search?q=cricket+world+cup Ustream.tv  http://www.ustream.tv/discovery/live/all?q=cricket%20world%20cup TV Channels That Telecast Cricket World Cup Live Even though web is the place where we spend most of our time for entertainment, TVs are still popular for watching sports events. Mostly 90% of us are going to follow this cricket world cup matches on television sets. Here is the list of TV channels that paid whooping amounts of money for broadcasting rights and going to telecast live cricket Afghanistan – Ariana Television Network: Lemar TV Australia – Nine Network, Fox Sports Bangladesh – Bangladesh Television Canada – Asian Television Network China – ESPN Star Sports Europe (Except UK & Ireland) – Eurosport2 Fiji – Fiji TV India – ESPN Star Sports, Star Cricket, DD National (mostly India matches alone) Ireland – Zee Cafe Jamaica – Television Jamaica Middle East – Arab Radio and Television Network Nepal – ESPN Star Sports New Zealand – Sky Sport Pacific Islands – Sky Pacific Pakistan – GEO Super, Pakistan Television Corporation Pan-Africa – South African Broadcasting Corporation Singapore – Star Cricket South Africa – Supersport, Sabc3 Sport Sri Lanka – Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation United Kingdom – Sky Sports HD USA – Willow Cricket, DirecTV, Dish Network West Indies – Caribbean Media Corporation Radio Stations That Provide Live Commentary Don’t we listen to radio? Yes we still listen to radios, especially when we are on the go. Radios are part of our mobiles as well as music players like iPods. Here are the stations that you can tune into for catching live cricket commentary Australia – ABC Local Radio Bangladesh – Bangladesh Betar Canada , Central America – EchoStar India – All India Radio Pakistan, United Arab Emirates – Hum FM Sri Lanka – FM Derana United Kingdom, Ireland – BBC Radio West Indies – Caribbean Media Corporation Watch World Cup Cricket On Your Mobile This section is for Indian users. 3G rollout is happening at very high pace in all part of the India and most of the metros and towns are able to access 3G services. With 3G on your mobile you will be able to watch live ICC world cricket on your Reliance Mobiles and you can read more about it here. Top 10 Cricket Websites Check out our earlier post on top 10 cricket web sites for information. This article titled,ICC Cricket World Cup 2011- Free Online Live Streaming, Mobile Apps, TV and Radio Guide, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Big Data – Buzz Words: Importance of Relational Database in Big Data World – Day 9 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned what is HDFS. In this article we will take a quick look at the importance of the Relational Database in Big Data world. A Big Question? Here are a few questions I often received since the beginning of the Big Data Series - Does the relational database have no space in the story of the Big Data? Does relational database is no longer relevant as Big Data is evolving? Is relational database not capable to handle Big Data? Is it true that one no longer has to learn about relational data if Big Data is the final destination? Well, every single time when I hear that one person wants to learn about Big Data and is no longer interested in learning about relational database, I find it as a bit far stretched. I am not here to give ambiguous answers of It Depends. I am personally very clear that one who is aspiring to become Big Data Scientist or Big Data Expert they should learn about relational database. NoSQL Movement The reason for the NoSQL Movement in recent time was because of the two important advantages of the NoSQL databases. Performance Flexible Schema In personal experience I have found that when I use NoSQL I have found both of the above listed advantages when I use NoSQL database. There are instances when I found relational database too much restrictive when my data is unstructured as well as they have in the datatype which my Relational Database does not support. It is the same case when I have found that NoSQL solution performing much better than relational databases. I must say that I am a big fan of NoSQL solutions in the recent times but I have also seen occasions and situations where relational database is still perfect fit even though the database is growing increasingly as well have all the symptoms of the big data. Situations in Relational Database Outperforms Adhoc reporting is the one of the most common scenarios where NoSQL is does not have optimal solution. For example reporting queries often needs to aggregate based on the columns which are not indexed as well are built while the report is running, in this kind of scenario NoSQL databases (document database stores, distributed key value stores) database often does not perform well. In the case of the ad-hoc reporting I have often found it is much easier to work with relational databases. SQL is the most popular computer language of all the time. I have been using it for almost over 10 years and I feel that I will be using it for a long time in future. There are plenty of the tools, connectors and awareness of the SQL language in the industry. Pretty much every programming language has a written drivers for the SQL language and most of the developers have learned this language during their school/college time. In many cases, writing query based on SQL is much easier than writing queries in NoSQL supported languages. I believe this is the current situation but in the future this situation can reverse when No SQL query languages are equally popular. ACID (Atomicity Consistency Isolation Durability) – Not all the NoSQL solutions offers ACID compliant language. There are always situations (for example banking transactions, eCommerce shopping carts etc.) where if there is no ACID the operations can be invalid as well database integrity can be at risk. Even though the data volume indeed qualify as a Big Data there are always operations in the application which absolutely needs ACID compliance matured language. The Mixed Bag I have often heard argument that all the big social media sites now a days have moved away from Relational Database. Actually this is not entirely true. While researching about Big Data and Relational Database, I have found that many of the popular social media sites uses Big Data solutions along with Relational Database. Many are using relational databases to deliver the results to end user on the run time and many still uses a relational database as their major backbone. Here are a few examples: Facebook uses MySQL to display the timeline. (Reference Link) Twitter uses MySQL. (Reference Link) Tumblr uses Sharded MySQL (Reference Link) Wikipedia uses MySQL for data storage. (Reference Link) There are many for prominent organizations which are running large scale applications uses relational database along with various Big Data frameworks to satisfy their various business needs. Summary I believe that RDBMS is like a vanilla ice cream. Everybody loves it and everybody has it. NoSQL and other solutions are like chocolate ice cream or custom ice cream – there is a huge base which loves them and wants them but not every ice cream maker can make it just right  for everyone’s taste. No matter how fancy an ice cream store is there is always plain vanilla ice cream available there. Just like the same, there are always cases and situations in the Big Data’s story where traditional relational database is the part of the whole story. In the real world scenarios there will be always the case when there will be need of the relational database concepts and its ideology. It is extremely important to accept relational database as one of the key components of the Big Data instead of treating it as a substandard technology. Ray of Hope – NewSQL In this module we discussed that there are places where we need ACID compliance from our Big Data application and NoSQL will not support that out of box. There is a new termed coined for the application/tool which supports most of the properties of the traditional RDBMS and supports Big Data infrastructure – NewSQL. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about NewSQL. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• jQuery Datatable in MVC &hellip; extended.

  - by Steve Clements

  There are a million plugins for jQuery and when a web forms developer like myself works in MVC making use of them is par-for-the-course!  MVC is the way now, web forms are but a memory!! Grids / tables are my focus at the moment.  I don’t want to get in to righting reems of css and html, but it’s not acceptable to simply dump a table on the screen, functionality like sorting, paging, fixed header and perhaps filtering are expected behaviour.  What isn’t always required though is the massive functionality like editing etc you get with many grid plugins out there. You potentially spend a long time getting everything hooked together when you just don’t need it. That is where the jQuery DataTable plugin comes in.  It doesn’t have editing “out of the box” (you can add other plugins as you require to achieve such functionality). What it does though is very nicely format a table (and integrate with jQuery UI) without needing to hook up and Async actions etc.  Take a look here… http://www.datatables.net I did in the first instance start looking at the Telerik MVC grid control – I’m a fan of Telerik controls and if you are developing an in-house of open source app you get the MVC stuff for free…nice!  Their grid however is far more than I require.  Note: Using Telerik MVC controls with your own jQuery and jQuery UI does come with some hurdles, mainly to do with the order in which all your jQuery is executing – I won’t cover that here though – mainly because I don’t have a clear answer on the best way to solve it! One nice thing about the dataTable above is how easy it is to extend http://www.datatables.net/examples/plug-ins/plugin_api.html and there are some nifty examples on the site already… I however have a requirement that wasn’t on the site … I need a grid at the bottom of the page that will size automatically to the bottom of the page and be scrollable if required within its own space i.e. everything above the grid didn’t scroll as well.  Now a CSS master may have a great solution to this … I’m not that master and so didn’t! The content above the grid can vary so any kind of fixed positioning is out. So I wrote a little extension for the DataTable, hooked that up to the document.ready event and window.resize event. Initialising my dataTable ( s )… $(document).ready(function () {   var dTable = $(".tdata").dataTable({ "bPaginate": false, "bLengthChange": false, "bFilter": true, "bSort": true, "bInfo": false, "bAutoWidth": true, "sScrollY": "400px" });   My extension to the API to give me the resizing….   // ********************************************************************** // jQuery dataTable API extension to resize grid and adjust column sizes // $.fn.dataTableExt.oApi.fnSetHeightToBottom = function (oSettings) { var id = oSettings.nTable.id; var dt = $("#" + id); var top = dt.position().top; var winHeight = $(document).height(); var remain = (winHeight - top) - 83; dt.parent().attr("style", "overflow-x: auto; overflow-y: auto; height: " + remain + "px;"); this.fnAdjustColumnSizing(); } This is very much is debug mode, so pretty verbose at the moment – I’ll tidy that up later! You can see the last call is a call to an existing method, as the columns are fixed and that normally involves so CSS voodoo, a call to adjust those sizes is required. Just above is the style that the dataTable gives the grid wrapper div, I got that from some firebug action and stick in my new height. The –83 is to give me the space at the bottom i require for fixed footer!   Finally I hook that up to the load and window resize.  I’m actually using jQuery UI tabs as well, so I’ve got that in the open event of the tabs.   $(document).ready(function () { var oTable; $("#tabs").tabs({ "show": function (event, ui) { oTable = $('div.dataTables_scrollBody>table.tdata', ui.panel).dataTable(); if (oTable.length > 0) { oTable.fnSetHeightToBottom(); } } }); $(window).bind("resize", function () { oTable.fnSetHeightToBottom(); }); }); And that all there is too it.  Testament to the wonders of jQuery and the immense community surrounding it – to which I am extremely grateful. I’ve also hooked up some custom column filtering on the grid – pretty normal stuff though – you can get what you need for that from their website.  I do hide the out of the box filter input as I wanted column specific, you need filtering turned on when initialising to get it to work and that input come with it!  Tip: fnFilter is the method you want.  With column index as a param – I used data tags to simply that one.

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• Download Microsoft MSDN Magazine PDF Issues For Offline Reading

  - by Kavitha

  MSDN Magazine is a must read for every Microsoft developer. It provides in-depth analysis and excellent guides on all the latest Microsoft development tools and technologies. Every month one can grab this magazine on the stands or read it online for free. What if you want to read the magazine offline on your PC or mobile devices? Just grab a PDF version of the magazine and read it whenever you want. The PDF version of MSDN magazines are very handy for travellers who don’t get access to internet always. In this post we are going to provide you links to download PDF version, source code and online version of every month MSDN Magazine issue starting from 2010. Bookmark this post and keep checking it monthly to get access to MSDN Magazine links. December 2010 Issue    Download PDF(not yet available)    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online        November 2010 Issue    Download PDF (not yet available)    Read Magazine Online    Download Source Code       October 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online        September 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       August 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       July 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       June 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       May 2010 Issue      Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       April 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Read Magazine Online    Download Source Code       March 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       February 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online       January 2010 Issue    Download PDF    Download Source Code    Read Magazine Online This article titled,Download Microsoft MSDN Magazine PDF Issues For Offline Reading, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• 10 Great Free Icon Packs To Theme Your Android Phone

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Android allows you to customize your home screen, adding widgets, arranging shortcuts and folders, choosing a background, and even replacing the included launcher entirely. You can install icon packs to theme your app icons, too. Third-party launchers use standard app icons by default, but they don’t have to. You can install icon packs that third-party launchers will use in place of standard app icons. How to Use Icon Packs To use icon packs, you’ll need to use a third-party launcher that supports them, such as Nova, Apex, ADW, Go Launcher, Holo Launcher, or Action Launcher Pro. Once you’re using a third-party launcher, you can install an icon pack and go into your launcher’s settings. You’ll find an option that allows you to choose between the icon packs you’ve installed. Many of these icon packs also include wallpapers, which you can set in the normal way. MIUI 5 Icons This icon pack offers over 1900 free icons that are similar to the icons used by the MIUi ROM developed by China’s Xiaomi Tech. The large list of icons is a big plus — this pack will give the majority of your app icons a very slick, consistent look. DCikonZ Theme DCikonZ is a free icon theme that includes a whopping 4000+ icons with a consistent look. This icon theme stands out not just because it’s huge, but also for offering for going in its own direction and avoiding the super-simple, flat look many icon packs use. Holo Icons Holo Icons replaces many app icons with simple, consistent-looking that match Google’s Holo style. If you’re a fan of Android’s Holo look, give it a try. It even tweaks many of the icons from Google’s own apps to make them look more consistent. Square Icon Pack Square Icon Pack turns your icons into simple squares. Even Google Chrome becomes an orb instead of a square. This makes every icon a consistent size and offers a unique look. The icons here almost look a bit like the small-size tiles available on Windows Phone and Windows 8.1. The free version doesn’t offer as many icons as the paid version, but it does offer icons for many popular apps. Rounded Want rounded icons instead? Try the Rounded icon theme, which offers simple rounded icons. The developer says they’re inspired by the consistently round icons used on Mozilla’s Firefox OS. Crumbled Icon Pack Crumbled Icon Pack applies an effect that makes icons look as if they’r crumbling. Rather than theming individual icons, Crumbled Icon Pack adds an effect to every app icon on your device. This means that all your app icons will be themed and consistent. Dainty Icon Pack Is your Android home screen too colorful? Dainty Icon Pack offers simple, gray-on-white icons for over 1200 apps. It’d be ideal over a simple background. The contrast may be a bit low here with the gray-on-white, but it’s otherwise very slick. Simplex Icons Simplex Icons offers more contrast, with black-on-gray icons. This icon pack could simplify busy home screens, allowing photographic wallpapers to come through. Min Icon Set Min attempts to go as minimal as possible, offering simple white icons for over 570 apps. It would be ideal over a simple wallpaper with app names hidden in your launcher, offering a calming, minimal home screen. For apps it doesn’t recognize, it will enclose part of the app’s icon in a white circle. Elegance Elegance goes in another direction entirely, offering icons that incorporate more details and gradients rather than going for minimalism. Its over 1200 icons offer another good option for people who aren’t into the minimal, flat look. Icon pack designers generally have to create and include their own icons to replace icons associated with specific apps, so you’ll probably find a few of your app icons aren’t replaced with most of these themes. Of course, a standard Android phone without an icon pack doesn’t have consistent icons, either. Even if all the icons in your app drawer aren’t themed, the few app icons you have on your home screen will be if you use widely used apps.     

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• My History with Agile

  - by Robert May

  I’m going to write my history with Agile here.  That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read.  Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews.  I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early in my career, starting with the first job that I ever had.  I actually do NOT have a CS or similar degree.  I have a Bachelor’s of Business Administration with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems. My first management gigs were around call center work and were very schedule oriented.  I didn’t understand the true value of teams, and I’m ashamed to admit, I actually installed a fingerprint scanner as a time clock in this job.  I shudder to think of the impact that I had on the team spirit.  I didn’t even trust them enough to fill out their time cards correctly.  How sad. I was managing nearly 100 people in this position, with the help of a great set of subordinates. I did try to come up with reward programs for the team, but again, didn’t understand the concept of team, so instead of letting the team determine how the rewards should work, I mandated from on high, which isn’t a good thing. I was told that I wasn’t the type that would be a good manager by people whom I respected a lot.  They said it because I was a computer geek, since they don’t understand good management either, but in retrospect, they were right about me then.  I was too green. After my first job, I went on to other jobs and with the exception of one job, I’ve managed people at them all.  The rest of the management story is important for understanding agile, so I’ll save it for my next post. Technical History I’ve been in software development for many, many years.  I technically started programming on a commodore 64 in basic.  I didn’t know that I was programming, but I was sure having fun.  That was followed by batch files, Gorilla hacking (I always had to win), WordPerfect Macro programming and other things that taught me the basics. My first “real” job was with a telephone company, and that’s where I made my first database application in DataEase, wrote my first VBA app and started using real programming tools, like turbo pascal, vb3-vb5, and semi-real tools like RPG and VisualRPG.  I wrote my first web page in 1994, and built my first data driven web page in 1995 using perlDB.  You really can do anything with Perl.  At this time, I also started a Linux based internet service provider that is still in operation today.  One of the people I worked with is now a Microsoft employee building and designing frameworks you probably know well.  Smart guy.  I also built my first ASP applications connecting to Sql Server 6.5, setup Exchange 5.5 for the company, and many other system administration stuff.  I’m a programmer by choice, mostly because I don’t really like PC support. From there, I went on to a large state agency.  I got to see and maintain true waterfall projects.  5 years of maintaining the 200 VB COM+ (MTS, actually) dlls that were used to calculate a single number is a long time.  That was all Microsoft DNS technologies.  SQL Server and VB6 were the tools of choice, although .net started to be a factor near the end of employment.  I did some heavy XML work at this job and even wrote an XSD parser and validator in VB6 that was a shim until MSXML 3.0 came out.  Prior to 3.0, XSD’s weren’t supported, and I didn’t want to write DTDs. Ironically, jobs after this were more generic.  I pretty much settled in on the .net framework and revisions of it.  Lots of WPF, some silverlight, lots of ASP.NET, some SQL Azure, lots of SQL Server, some Oracle, but I don’t think that I was as passionate about development and technologies.  I was more into the management of development.  I like people. Technorati Tags: Agile,history

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• An MCM exam, Rob? Really?

  - by Rob Farley

  I took the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam while in Seattle for the PASS Summit ten days ago. I wasn’t planning to do it, but I got persuaded to try. I was meaning to write this post to explain myself before the result came out, but it seems I didn’t get typing quickly enough. Those of you who know me will know I’m a big fan of certification, to a point. I’ve been involved with Microsoft Learning to help create exams. I’ve kept my certifications current since I first took an exam back in 1998, sitting many in beta, across quite a variety of topics. I’ve probably become quite good at them – I know I’ve definitely passed some that I really should’ve failed. I’ve also written that I don’t think exams are worth studying for. (That’s probably not entirely true, but it depends on your motivation. If you’re doing learning, I would encourage you to focus on what you need to know to do your job better. That will help you pass an exam – but the two skills are very different. I can coach someone on how to pass an exam, but that’s a different kind of teaching when compared to coaching someone about how to do a job. For example, the real world includes a lot of “it depends”, where you develop a feel for what the influencing factors might be. In an exam, its better to be able to know some of the “Don’t use this technology if XYZ is true” concepts better.) As for the Microsoft Certified Master certification… I’m not opposed to the idea of having the MCM (or in the future, MCSM) cert. But the barrier to entry feels quite high for me. When it was first introduced, the nearest testing centres to me were in Kuala Lumpur and Manila. Now there’s one in Perth, but that’s still a big effort. I know there are options in the US – such as one about an hour’s drive away from downtown Seattle, but it all just seems too hard. Plus, these exams are more expensive, and all up – I wasn’t sure I wanted to try them, particularly with the fact that I don’t like to study. I used to study for exams. It would drive my wife crazy. I’d have some exam scheduled for some time in the future (like the time I had two booked for two consecutive days at TechEd Australia 2005), and I’d make sure I was ready. Every waking moment would be spent pouring over exam material, and it wasn’t healthy. I got shaken out of that, though, when I ended up taking four exams in those two days in 2005 and passed them all. I also worked out that if I had a Second Shot available, then failing wasn’t a bad thing at all. Even without Second Shot, I’m much more okay about failing. But even just trying an MCM exam is a big effort. I wouldn’t want to fail one of them. Plus there’s the illusion to maintain. People have told me for a long time that I should just take the MCM exams – that I’d pass no problem. I’ve never been so sure. It was almost becoming a pride-point. Perhaps I should fail just to demonstrate that I can fail these things. Anyway – boB Taylor (@sqlboBT) persuaded me to try the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam at the PASS Summit. They set up a testing centre in one of the room there, so it wasn’t out of my way at all. I had to squeeze it in between other commitments, and I certainly didn’t have time to even see what was on the syllabus, let alone study. In fact, I was so exhausted from the week that I fell asleep at least once (just for a moment though) during the actual exam. Perhaps the questions need more jokes, I’m not sure. I knew if I failed, then I might disappoint some people, but that I wouldn’t’ve spent a great deal of effort in trying to pass. On the other hand, if I did pass I’d then be under pressure to investigate the MCM Lab exam, which can be taken remotely (therefore, a much smaller amount of effort to make happen). In some ways, passing could end up just putting a bunch more pressure on me. Oh, and I did.

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• An MCM exam, Rob? Really?

  - by Rob Farley

  I took the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam while in Seattle for the PASS Summit ten days ago. I wasn’t planning to do it, but I got persuaded to try. I was meaning to write this post to explain myself before the result came out, but it seems I didn’t get typing quickly enough. Those of you who know me will know I’m a big fan of certification, to a point. I’ve been involved with Microsoft Learning to help create exams. I’ve kept my certifications current since I first took an exam back in 1998, sitting many in beta, across quite a variety of topics. I’ve probably become quite good at them – I know I’ve definitely passed some that I really should’ve failed. I’ve also written that I don’t think exams are worth studying for. (That’s probably not entirely true, but it depends on your motivation. If you’re doing learning, I would encourage you to focus on what you need to know to do your job better. That will help you pass an exam – but the two skills are very different. I can coach someone on how to pass an exam, but that’s a different kind of teaching when compared to coaching someone about how to do a job. For example, the real world includes a lot of “it depends”, where you develop a feel for what the influencing factors might be. In an exam, its better to be able to know some of the “Don’t use this technology if XYZ is true” concepts better.) As for the Microsoft Certified Master certification… I’m not opposed to the idea of having the MCM (or in the future, MCSM) cert. But the barrier to entry feels quite high for me. When it was first introduced, the nearest testing centres to me were in Kuala Lumpur and Manila. Now there’s one in Perth, but that’s still a big effort. I know there are options in the US – such as one about an hour’s drive away from downtown Seattle, but it all just seems too hard. Plus, these exams are more expensive, and all up – I wasn’t sure I wanted to try them, particularly with the fact that I don’t like to study. I used to study for exams. It would drive my wife crazy. I’d have some exam scheduled for some time in the future (like the time I had two booked for two consecutive days at TechEd Australia 2005), and I’d make sure I was ready. Every waking moment would be spent pouring over exam material, and it wasn’t healthy. I got shaken out of that, though, when I ended up taking four exams in those two days in 2005 and passed them all. I also worked out that if I had a Second Shot available, then failing wasn’t a bad thing at all. Even without Second Shot, I’m much more okay about failing. But even just trying an MCM exam is a big effort. I wouldn’t want to fail one of them. Plus there’s the illusion to maintain. People have told me for a long time that I should just take the MCM exams – that I’d pass no problem. I’ve never been so sure. It was almost becoming a pride-point. Perhaps I should fail just to demonstrate that I can fail these things. Anyway – boB Taylor (@sqlboBT) persuaded me to try the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam at the PASS Summit. They set up a testing centre in one of the room there, so it wasn’t out of my way at all. I had to squeeze it in between other commitments, and I certainly didn’t have time to even see what was on the syllabus, let alone study. In fact, I was so exhausted from the week that I fell asleep at least once (just for a moment though) during the actual exam. Perhaps the questions need more jokes, I’m not sure. I knew if I failed, then I might disappoint some people, but that I wouldn’t’ve spent a great deal of effort in trying to pass. On the other hand, if I did pass I’d then be under pressure to investigate the MCM Lab exam, which can be taken remotely (therefore, a much smaller amount of effort to make happen). In some ways, passing could end up just putting a bunch more pressure on me. Oh, and I did.

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