Search Results

Search found 6847 results on 274 pages for 'short movies'.

Page 53/274 | < Previous Page | 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60  | Next Page >

• Does anyone know the touchpad disabling driver for Dell xps 14?

  - by rkar

  I accidentally deleted my Dell xps 14 touch pad disabling driver and I don't know where to find it and reinstall it. I have already tried Dell support and without luck (I don't want to install something that I don't know). Would anyone please send me the link to that driver To clarify: There is this Fn shortcut key used to disable/enable touch pad in Dell xps14 and when press it orange light on touch pad will lit and touch pad will stop working. But after deleting the driver that responsible for that function,it stopped working. My service center is almost 600 miles away and he said that he forgot to add it last time he fix my laptop. Since the internet connection at his place is slow,he can't send me from mail either.So can anyone send me the link for that driver. Since I don't really know about drivers it would be really nice if some one show me the driver name or link. Sorry,here is my laptop service tag "C37KWL1".I don't know how to find the specific driver for that function key.My dell has a short cut for disabling touchpad with picture on it along with the other multimedia short cut key with picture. since xps 15 and 17 have seperated touch key instead of on function keys mine have to choose function key or multimedia key through setting.To be honest my service center tech guy forgot to install it when he repair it and can't send me the file(which is about over 20mb or something according to him)for some reason.All i need is that particular file.

  Read the article

• Espeak SAPI/dll usage on Windows ?

  - by Quandary

  Question: I am trying to use the espeak text-to-speech engine. So for I got it working wounderfully on linux (code below). Now I wanted to port this basic program to windows, too, but it's nearly impossible... Part of the problem is that the windows dll only allows for AUDIO_OUTPUT_SYNCHRONOUS, which means it requires a callback, but I can't figure out how to play the audio from the callback... First it crashed, then I realized, I need a callback function, now I get the data in the callback function, but I don't know how to play it... as it is neither a wav file nor plays automatically as on Linux. The sourceforge site is rather useless, because it basically says use the SAPI version, but then there is no example on how to use the sapi espeak dll... Anyway, here's my code, can anybody help? #ifdef __cplusplus #include <cstdio> #include <cstdlib> #include <cstring> else #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> endif include include //#include "speak_lib.h" include "espeak/speak_lib.h" // libespeak-dev: /usr/include/espeak/speak_lib.h // apt-get install libespeak-dev // apt-get install libportaudio-dev // g++ -o mine mine.cpp -lespeak // g++ -o mine mine.cpp -I/usr/include/espeak/ -lespeak // gcc -o mine mine.cpp -I/usr/include/espeak/ -lespeak char voicename[40]; int samplerate; int quiet = 0; static char genders[4] = {' ','M','F',' '}; //const char *data_path = "/usr/share/"; // /usr/share/espeak-data/ const char *data_path = NULL; // use default path for espeak-data int strrcmp(const char *s, const char *sub) { int slen = strlen(s); int sublen = strlen(sub); return memcmp(s + slen - sublen, sub, sublen); } char * strrcpy(char *dest, const char *source) { // Pre assertions assert(dest != NULL); assert(source != NULL); assert(dest != source); // tk: parentheses while((*dest++ = *source++)) ; return(--dest); } const char* GetLanguageVoiceName(const char* pszShortSign) { #define LANGUAGE_LENGTH 30 static char szReturnValue[LANGUAGE_LENGTH] ; memset(szReturnValue, 0, LANGUAGE_LENGTH); for (int i = 0; pszShortSign[i] != '\0'; ++i) szReturnValue[i] = (char) tolower(pszShortSign[i]); const espeak_VOICE **voices; espeak_VOICE voice_select; voices = espeak_ListVoices(NULL); const espeak_VOICE *v; for(int ix=0; (v = voices[ix]) != NULL; ix++) { if( !strrcmp( v->languages, szReturnValue) ) { strcpy(szReturnValue, v->name); return szReturnValue; } } // End for strcpy(szReturnValue, "default"); return szReturnValue; } // End function getvoicename void ListVoices() { const espeak_VOICE **voices; espeak_VOICE voice_select; voices = espeak_ListVoices(NULL); const espeak_VOICE *v; for(int ix=0; (v = voices[ix]) != NULL; ix++) { printf("Shortsign: %s\n", v->languages); printf("age: %d\n", v->age); printf("gender: %c\n", genders[v->gender]); printf("name: %s\n", v->name); printf("\n\n"); } // End for } // End function getvoicename int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); const char* szVersionInfo = espeak_Info(NULL); printf("Espeak version: %s\n", szVersionInfo); samplerate = espeak_Initialize(AUDIO_OUTPUT_PLAYBACK,0,data_path,0); strcpy(voicename, "default"); // espeak --voices strcpy(voicename, "german"); strcpy(voicename, GetLanguageVoiceName("DE")); if(espeak_SetVoiceByName(voicename) != EE_OK) { printf("Espeak setvoice error...\n"); } static char word[200] = "Hello World" ; strcpy(word, "TV-fäns aufgepasst, es ist 20 Uhr 15. Zeit für Rambo 3"); strcpy(word, "Unnamed Player wurde zum Opfer von GSG9"); int speed = 220; int volume = 500; // volume in range 0-100 0=silence int pitch = 50; // base pitch, range 0-100. 50=normal // espeak.cpp 625 espeak_SetParameter(espeakRATE, speed, 0); espeak_SetParameter(espeakVOLUME,volume,0); espeak_SetParameter(espeakPITCH,pitch,0); // espeakRANGE: pitch range, range 0-100. 0-monotone, 50=normal // espeakPUNCTUATION: which punctuation characters to announce: // value in espeak_PUNCT_TYPE (none, all, some), espeak_VOICE *voice_spec = espeak_GetCurrentVoice(); voice_spec->gender=2; // 0=none 1=male, 2=female, //voice_spec->age = age; espeak_SetVoiceByProperties(voice_spec); espeak_Synth( (char*) word, strlen(word)+1, 0, POS_CHARACTER, 0, espeakCHARS_AUTO, NULL, NULL); espeak_Synchronize(); strcpy(voicename, GetLanguageVoiceName("EN")); espeak_SetVoiceByName(voicename); strcpy(word, "Geany was fragged by GSG9 Googlebot"); strcpy(word, "Googlebot"); espeak_Synth( (char*) word, strlen(word)+1, 0, POS_CHARACTER, 0, espeakCHARS_AUTO, NULL, NULL); espeak_Synchronize(); espeak_Terminate(); printf("Espeak terminated\n"); return EXIT_SUCCESS; } /* if(espeak_SetVoiceByName(voicename) != EE_OK) { memset(&voice_select,0,sizeof(voice_select)); voice_select.languages = voicename; if(espeak_SetVoiceByProperties(&voice_select) != EE_OK) { fprintf(stderr,"%svoice '%s'\n",err_load,voicename); exit(2); } } */ The above code is for Linux. The below code is about as far as I got on Vista x64 (32 bit emu): #ifdef __cplusplus #include <cstdio> #include <cstdlib> #include <cstring> else #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> endif include include include "speak_lib.h" //#include "espeak/speak_lib.h" // libespeak-dev: /usr/include/espeak/speak_lib.h // apt-get install libespeak-dev // apt-get install libportaudio-dev // g++ -o mine mine.cpp -lespeak // g++ -o mine mine.cpp -I/usr/include/espeak/ -lespeak // gcc -o mine mine.cpp -I/usr/include/espeak/ -lespeak char voicename[40]; int iSampleRate; int quiet = 0; static char genders[4] = {' ','M','F',' '}; //const char *data_path = "/usr/share/"; // /usr/share/espeak-data/ //const char *data_path = NULL; // use default path for espeak-data const char *data_path = "C:\Users\Username\Desktop\espeak-1.43-source\espeak-1.43-source\"; int strrcmp(const char *s, const char *sub) { int slen = strlen(s); int sublen = strlen(sub); return memcmp(s + slen - sublen, sub, sublen); } char * strrcpy(char *dest, const char *source) { // Pre assertions assert(dest != NULL); assert(source != NULL); assert(dest != source); // tk: parentheses while((*dest++ = *source++)) ; return(--dest); } const char* GetLanguageVoiceName(const char* pszShortSign) { #define LANGUAGE_LENGTH 30 static char szReturnValue[LANGUAGE_LENGTH] ; memset(szReturnValue, 0, LANGUAGE_LENGTH); for (int i = 0; pszShortSign[i] != '\0'; ++i) szReturnValue[i] = (char) tolower(pszShortSign[i]); const espeak_VOICE **voices; espeak_VOICE voice_select; voices = espeak_ListVoices(NULL); const espeak_VOICE *v; for(int ix=0; (v = voices[ix]) != NULL; ix++) { if( !strrcmp( v->languages, szReturnValue) ) { strcpy(szReturnValue, v->name); return szReturnValue; } } // End for strcpy(szReturnValue, "default"); return szReturnValue; } // End function getvoicename void ListVoices() { const espeak_VOICE **voices; espeak_VOICE voice_select; voices = espeak_ListVoices(NULL); const espeak_VOICE *v; for(int ix=0; (v = voices[ix]) != NULL; ix++) { printf("Shortsign: %s\n", v->languages); printf("age: %d\n", v->age); printf("gender: %c\n", genders[v->gender]); printf("name: %s\n", v->name); printf("\n\n"); } // End for } // End function getvoicename /* Callback from espeak. Directly speaks using AudioTrack. */ define LOGI(x) printf("%s\n", x) static int AndroidEspeakDirectSpeechCallback(short *wav, int numsamples, espeak_EVENT *events) { char buf[100]; sprintf(buf, "AndroidEspeakDirectSpeechCallback: %d samples", numsamples); LOGI(buf); if (wav == NULL) { LOGI("Null: speech has completed"); } if (numsamples > 0) { //audout->write(wav, sizeof(short) * numsamples); sprintf(buf, "AudioTrack wrote: %d bytes", sizeof(short) * numsamples); LOGI(buf); } return 0; // continue synthesis (1 is to abort) } static int AndroidEspeakSynthToFileCallback(short *wav, int numsamples,espeak_EVENT *events) { char buf[100]; sprintf(buf, "AndroidEspeakSynthToFileCallback: %d samples", numsamples); LOGI(buf); if (wav == NULL) { LOGI("Null: speech has completed"); } // The user data should contain the file pointer of the file to write to //void* user_data = events->user_data; FILE* user_data = fopen ( "myfile1.wav" , "ab" ); FILE* fp = static_cast<FILE *>(user_data); // Write all of the samples fwrite(wav, sizeof(short), numsamples, fp); return 0; // continue synthesis (1 is to abort) } int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); const char* szVersionInfo = espeak_Info(NULL); printf("Espeak version: %s\n", szVersionInfo); iSampleRate = espeak_Initialize(AUDIO_OUTPUT_SYNCHRONOUS, 4096, data_path, 0); if (iSampleRate <= 0) { printf("Unable to initialize espeak"); return EXIT_FAILURE; } //samplerate = espeak_Initialize(AUDIO_OUTPUT_PLAYBACK,0,data_path,0); //ListVoices(); strcpy(voicename, "default"); // espeak --voices //strcpy(voicename, "german"); //strcpy(voicename, GetLanguageVoiceName("DE")); if(espeak_SetVoiceByName(voicename) != EE_OK) { printf("Espeak setvoice error...\n"); } static char word[200] = "Hello World" ; strcpy(word, "TV-fäns aufgepasst, es ist 20 Uhr 15. Zeit für Rambo 3"); strcpy(word, "Unnamed Player wurde zum Opfer von GSG9"); int speed = 220; int volume = 500; // volume in range 0-100 0=silence int pitch = 50; // base pitch, range 0-100. 50=normal // espeak.cpp 625 espeak_SetParameter(espeakRATE, speed, 0); espeak_SetParameter(espeakVOLUME,volume,0); espeak_SetParameter(espeakPITCH,pitch,0); // espeakRANGE: pitch range, range 0-100. 0-monotone, 50=normal // espeakPUNCTUATION: which punctuation characters to announce: // value in espeak_PUNCT_TYPE (none, all, some), //espeak_VOICE *voice_spec = espeak_GetCurrentVoice(); //voice_spec->gender=2; // 0=none 1=male, 2=female, //voice_spec->age = age; //espeak_SetVoiceByProperties(voice_spec); //espeak_SetSynthCallback(AndroidEspeakDirectSpeechCallback); espeak_SetSynthCallback(AndroidEspeakSynthToFileCallback); unsigned int unique_identifier; espeak_ERROR err = espeak_Synth( (char*) word, strlen(word)+1, 0, POS_CHARACTER, 0, espeakCHARS_AUTO, &unique_identifier, NULL); err = espeak_Synchronize(); /* strcpy(voicename, GetLanguageVoiceName("EN")); espeak_SetVoiceByName(voicename); strcpy(word, "Geany was fragged by GSG9 Googlebot"); strcpy(word, "Googlebot"); espeak_Synth( (char*) word, strlen(word)+1, 0, POS_CHARACTER, 0, espeakCHARS_AUTO, NULL, NULL); espeak_Synchronize(); */ // espeak_Cancel(); espeak_Terminate(); printf("Espeak terminated\n"); system("pause"); return EXIT_SUCCESS; }

  Read the article

• Linux (NAS) Permissions problem (Permission Denied)

  - by calumbrodie

  This is probably easier to show than to explain... -bash-3.2$ id uid=501(admin) gid=503(admin) groups=100(users),501(admins),503(admin) -bash-3.2$ groups admin users admins -bash-3.2$ ls -l total 8 drwxrwxrwx 78 admin www 4096 Dec 9 09:02 Inbox drwxrwxrwx 21 admin www 4096 Dec 8 21:45 Movies drwxrwx--- 3 admin www 52 Dec 9 07:57 TV -bash-3.2$ cd Movies -bash-3.2$ ls -l total 20 drwxrwx--- 7 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:04 Action drwxrwx--- 6 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:05 Animation drwxrwx--- 4 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:17 Comedy drwxrwx--- 4 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:14 Drama drwxrwx--- 4 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:14 Family drwxrwx--- 6 admin www 58 Dec 6 19:10 Foreign Language drwxrwx--- 2 admin www 31 Dec 7 23:58 Horror drwxrwx--- 3 admin www 50 Dec 8 00:15 Science Fiction drwxrwx--- 2 admin www 6 Dec 8 00:16 Thriller -bash-3.2$ cd ../Inbox -bash: cd: ../Inbox: Permission denied Filesystem is XFS. Are there permissions on the directories that ls -l wouldn't show? I'm the owner of all directories and files inside them. I can sudo to modify the file permissions or view the contents of the folders but I need them to be accessible by 'admin'. Any ideas? I'll be checking the question regularly so let me know if I need to update this with more information. Thanks Edit : Added strace execve("/bin/ls", ["ls", "Inbox"], [/* 21 vars */]) = 0 brk(0) = 0x26000 uname({sys="Linux", node="axentraserver.the-brodie-stora.mystora.com", ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001c000 access("/etc/ld.so.preload", R_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=17972, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 17972, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x4001d000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/librt.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0P\25\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=39776, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 57816, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40025000 mprotect(0x4002b000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40032000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x5) = 0x40032000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libacl.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\0\24\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=134375, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 54368, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40034000 mprotect(0x4003a000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40041000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x5) = 0x40041000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libselinux.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\2147\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=297439, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 117504, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40042000 mprotect(0x40056000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x4005d000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x13) = 0x4005d000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libgcc_s.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\10\"\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=43164, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x40022000 mmap2(NULL, 74572, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x4005f000 mprotect(0x4006a000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40071000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0xa) = 0x40071000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0XI\1\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=1517948, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 1245628, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40072000 mprotect(0x40195000, 32768, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x4019d000, 12288, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x123) = 0x4019d000 mmap2(0x401a0000, 8636, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x401a0000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libpthread.so.0", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\230A\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=121044, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 115184, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x401a3000 mprotect(0x401b5000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x401bc000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x11) = 0x401bc000 mmap2(0x401be000, 4592, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x401be000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libattr.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\364\f\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=40571, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 45512, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x401c0000 mprotect(0x401c3000, 32768, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x401cb000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x3) = 0x401cb000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libdl.so.2", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\254\10\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=15344, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 41116, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x401cc000 mprotect(0x401ce000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x401d5000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x1) = 0x401d5000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libsepol.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\330/\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=228044, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 301748, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x401d7000 mprotect(0x4020f000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40216000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x37) = 0x40216000 mmap2(0x40217000, 39604, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x40217000 close(3) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x40221000 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x40222000 set_tls(0x40221d00, 0x40221d00, 0x40024000, 0x402223e8, 0x41) = 0 mprotect(0x401d5000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x401bc000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x4019d000, 8192, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x4005d000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x40032000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x40023000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 17972) = 0 set_tid_address(0x402218a8) = 9539 set_robust_list(0x402218b0, 0xc) = 0 rt_sigaction(SIGRTMIN, {0x401a6d90, [], SA_SIGINFO|0x4000000}, NULL, 8) = 0 rt_sigaction(SIGRT_1, {0x401a6c64, [], SA_RESTART|SA_SIGINFO|0x4000000}, NULL, 8) = 0 rt_sigprocmask(SIG_UNBLOCK, [RTMIN RT_1], NULL, 8) = 0 getrlimit(RLIMIT_STACK, {rlim_cur=8192*1024, rlim_max=RLIM_INFINITY}) = 0 brk(0) = 0x26000 brk(0x47000) = 0x47000 open("/proc/mounts", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0444, st_size=0, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001d000 read(3, "rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0\nubi0:root"..., 1024) = 1024 read(3, "fs.xino,noplink,create=mfs,sum,b"..., 1024) = 428 read(3, "", 1024) = 0 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 4096) = 0 access("/etc/selinux/", F_OK) = 0 open("/etc/selinux/config", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) ioctl(1, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, {B38400 opost isig icanon echo ...}) = 0 ioctl(1, TIOCGWINSZ, {ws_row=52, ws_col=153, ws_xpixel=918, ws_ypixel=728}) = 0 stat64("Inbox", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0777, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl64(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl64(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 open("/etc/nsswitch.conf", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1696, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001d000 read(3, "#\n# /etc/nsswitch.conf\n#\n# An ex"..., 4096) = 1696 read(3, "", 4096) = 0 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 4096) = 0 open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=17972, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 17972, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x4001d000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libnss_files.so.2", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\304\27\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=49256, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 70316, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40223000 mprotect(0x4022c000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40233000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x8) = 0x40233000 close(3) = 0 mprotect(0x40233000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 17972) = 0 open("/etc/passwd", O_RDONLY) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl64(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1661, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001d000 read(3, "root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash\n"..., 4096) = 1661 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 4096) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl64(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl64(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 open("/etc/group", O_RDONLY) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl64(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=700, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001d000 read(3, "root:x:0:root\nbin:x:1:root,bin,d"..., 4096) = 700 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 4096) = 0 open("Inbox", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied) write(2, "ls: ", 4ls: ) = 4 write(2, "Inbox", 5Inbox) = 5 write(2, ": Permission denied", 19: Permission denied) = 19 write(2, "\n", 1 ) = 1 close(1) = 0 exit_group(2) = ? 2nd edit: Elaboration for Mike. The Inbox sits at the following location /home/admin/MyLibrary/MyVideos/Inbox /home/admin/MyLibrary/MyVideos/Movies The system is a Netgear Stora NAS box that I have root access to. The /home/ folder is mounted as an smb share on various computers around the house. The folder /Inbox cannot be opened on any of those machines (they all connect as 'admin'). When I ssh into the box using the 'admin' credentials I am also unable to access the folder. The folder was created via a Web Admin page hosted on the NAS. The user/group for the Inbox folder was previously apache:www (expected as this folder was created by the web application), but I chmod/chowned the folder as the root user in an attempt to grant the admin user (therefore the rest of the connected machines) access to the files. Sorry for not including this earlier, I wasn't sure if it was relevant and didn't want to confuse the situation. -Thanks 3rd Edit Sorry again - It looks like this NAS is running some custom version of Red Hat, not Debian as previously stated - I'm not sure if this makes a difference

  Read the article

• Would anyone tell me how to fetch the media:thumb element's attribute from a json feed?

  - by ash

  I made a yahoo pipe that pulls up the atoms as json format; however, I can fetch and display all the elements in my html page except for the element's attribute. Would anyone tell me how to fetch the media:thumb element's attribute from a json feed? I am pasting the html page's code with javascript. If you save the html page and then view it in browser, you will see that all the necessary elements get output at html page except for the media:thumb as I cannot display the attribute of media:thumb when the feed is formatted as json. I am also pasting the some portion of the json feed so that you can have an idea what i am talking about. Please tell me how to retrieve attribute from media:thumb element of a json feed by using plain javascript but no server side code or javascript library. Thank you. function getFeed(feed){ var newScript = document.createElement('script'); newScript.type = 'text/javascript'; newScript.src = 'http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=40616620df99780bceb3fe923cecd216&_render=json&_callback=piper'; document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newScript); } function piper(feed){ var tmp=''; for (var i=0; i'; tmp+=feed.value.items[i].title+''; tmp+=feed.value.items[i].author.name+''; tmp+=feed.value.items[i].published+''; if (feed.value.items[i].description) { tmp+=feed.value.items[i].description+''; } tmp+='<hr>'; } document.getElementById('rssLayer').innerHTML=tmp; } </script> bchnbc .............................................................. Some portion of the json feed that gets generated by yahoo pipe .............................................................. piper({"count":2,"value":{"title":"myPipe","description":"Pipes Output","link":"http:\/\/pipes.yahoo.com\/pipes\/pipe.info?_id=f7f4175d493cf1171aecbd3268fea5ee","pubDate":"Fri, 02 Apr 2010 17:59:22 -0700","generator":"http:\/\/pipes.yahoo.com\/pipes\/","callback":"piper", "items": [{ "rights":"Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works", "link":"http:\/\/vodo.net\/mixtape1", "y:id":{"value":null,"permalink":"true"}, "content":{"content":"We're proud to be releasing this first VODO MIXTAPE. Actual tape might be a thing of the past, but before P2P, mixtapes were the most popular way of sharing popular culture the world had known -- and once called the 'most widely practiced American art form'. We want to resuscitate the spirit of the mixtape for this VODO MIXTAPE series: compilations of our favourite shorts, the weird, the wild and the wonky, all brought together in a temporary and uncomfortable company.","type":"text"}, "author": {"name":"Various"}, "description":"We're proud to be releasing this first VODO MIXTAPE. Actual tape might be a thing of the past, but before P2P, mixtapes were the most popular way of sharing popular culture the world had known -- and once called the 'most widely practiced American art form'. We want to resuscitate the spirit of the mixtape for this VODO MIXTAPE series: compilations of our favourite shorts, the weird, the wild and the wonky, all brought together in a temporary and uncomfortable company.", "media:thumbnail": { "url":"http:\/\/vodo.net\/\/thumbnails\/Mixtape1.jpg" }, "published":"2010-03-08-09:20:20 PM", "format": { "audio_bitrate":null, "width":"608", "xmlns":"http:\/\/xmlns.transmission.cc\/FileFormat", "channels":"2", "samplerate":"44100.0", "duration":"3092.36", "height":"352", "size":"733925376.0", "framerate":"25.0", "audio_codec":"mp3", "video_bitrate":"1898.0", "video_codec":"XVID", "pixel_aspect_ratio":"16:9" }, "y:title":"Mixtape #1: VODO's favourite short films", "title":"Mixtape #1: VODO's favourite short films", "id":null, "pubDate":"2010-03-08-09:20:20 PM", "y:published":{"hour":"3","timezone":"UTC","second":"0","month":"4","minute":"10","utime":"1270264200","day":"3","day_of_week":"6","year":"2010" }}, {"rights":"Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works","link":"http:\/\/vodo.net\/gilbert","y:id":{"value":"cd6584e06ea4ce7fcd34172f4bbd919e295f8680","permalink":"true"},"content":{"content":"A documentary short about Gilbert, the Beacon Hill \"town crier.\" For the last 9 years, since losing his job and becoming homeless, Gilbert has delivered the weather, sports, and breaking headlines from his spot on the Boston Common. Music (used with permission) in this piece is called \"Blue Bicycle\" by Dusseldorf-based pianist \/ composer Volker Bertelmann also known as Hauschka. Artistic Statement: This is the first in a series of profiles of people who I think are interesting, and who I see on almost a daily basis. I don't want to limit the series to people who live \"on the fringe,\" but it would be appropriate to say that most of the people I interview are eclectic, eccentric, and just a little bit unique. The art is in the viewing - but I hope to turn my lens on individuals that don't always color in the lines, whether they can help it or not.","type":"text"},"author":{"name":"Nathaniel Hansen"},"description":"A documentary short about Gilbert, the Beacon Hill \"town crier.\" For the last 9 years, since losing his job and becoming homeless, Gilbert has delivered the weather, sports, and breaking headlines from his spot on the Boston Common. Music (used with permission) in this piece is called \"Blue Bicycle\" by Dusseldorf-based pianist \/ composer Volker Bertelmann also known as Hauschka. Artistic Statement: This is the first in a series of profiles of people who I think are interesting, and who I see on almost a daily basis. I don't want to limit the series to people who live \"on the fringe,\" but it would be appropriate to say that most of the people I interview are eclectic, eccentric, and just a little bit unique. The art is in the viewing - but I hope to turn my lens on individuals that don't always color in the lines, whether they can help it or not.","media:thumbnail":{"url":"http:\/\/vodo.net\/\/thumbnails\/gilbert.jpeg"},"published":"2010-03-03-10:37:05 AM","format":{"audio_bitrate":null,"width":"624","xmlns":"http:\/\/xmlns.transmission.cc\/FileFormat","channels":"2","samplerate":null,"duration":"373.673","height":"352","size":"123321266.0","framerate":null,"audio_codec":"mp3","video_bitrate":null,"video_codec":"XVID","pixel_aspect_ratio":"16:9"},"y:title":"Gilbert","title":"Gilbert","id":"cd6584e06ea4ce7fcd34172f4bbd919e295f8680","pubDate":"2010-03-03-10:37:05 AM","y:published":{"hour":"3","timezone":"UTC","second":"0","month":"4","minute":"10","utime":"1270264200","day":"3","day_of_week":"6","year":"2010" }} ] }})

  Read the article

• What is correct HTTP status code when redirecting to a login page?

  - by PHP_Jedi

  When a user is not logged in and tries to access an page that requires login, what is the correct HTTP status code for a redirect to the login page? I don't feel that any of the 3xx fit that description. 10.3.1 300 Multiple Choices The requested resource corresponds to any one of a set of representations, each with its own specific location, and agent- driven negotiation information (section 12) is being provided so that the user (or user agent) can select a preferred representation and redirect its request to that location. Unless it was a HEAD request, the response SHOULD include an entity containing a list of resource characteristics and location(s) from which the user or user agent can choose the one most appropriate. The entity format is specified by the media type given in the Content- Type header field. Depending upon the format and the capabilities of the user agent, selection of the most appropriate choice MAY be performed automatically. However, this specification does not define any standard for such automatic selection. If the server has a preferred choice of representation, it SHOULD include the specific URI for that representation in the Location field; user agents MAY use the Location field value for automatic redirection. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise. 10.3.2 301 Moved Permanently The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link references to the Request-URI to one or more of the new references returned by the server, where possible. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise. The new permanent URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s). If the 301 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued. Note: When automatically redirecting a POST request after receiving a 301 status code, some existing HTTP/1.0 user agents will erroneously change it into a GET request. 10.3.3 302 Found The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field. The temporary URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s). If the 302 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued. Note: RFC 1945 and RFC 2068 specify that the client is not allowed to change the method on the redirected request. However, most existing user agent implementations treat 302 as if it were a 303 response, performing a GET on the Location field-value regardless of the original request method. The status codes 303 and 307 have been added for servers that wish to make unambiguously clear which kind of reaction is expected of the client. 10.3.4 303 See Other The response to the request can be found under a different URI and SHOULD be retrieved using a GET method on that resource. This method exists primarily to allow the output of a POST-activated script to redirect the user agent to a selected resource. The new URI is not a substitute reference for the originally requested resource. The 303 response MUST NOT be cached, but the response to the second (redirected) request might be cacheable. The different URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s). Note: Many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 303 status. When interoperability with such clients is a concern, the 302 status code may be used instead, since most user agents react to a 302 response as described here for 303. 10.3.5 304 Not Modified If the client has performed a conditional GET request and access is allowed, but the document has not been modified, the server SHOULD respond with this status code. The 304 response MUST NOT contain a message-body, and thus is always terminated by the first empty line after the header fields. The response MUST include the following header fields: - Date, unless its omission is required by section 14.18.1 If a clockless origin server obeys these rules, and proxies and clients add their own Date to any response received without one (as already specified by [RFC 2068], section 14.19), caches will operate correctly. - ETag and/or Content-Location, if the header would have been sent in a 200 response to the same request - Expires, Cache-Control, and/or Vary, if the field-value might differ from that sent in any previous response for the same variant If the conditional GET used a strong cache validator (see section 13.3.3), the response SHOULD NOT include other entity-headers. Otherwise (i.e., the conditional GET used a weak validator), the response MUST NOT include other entity-headers; this prevents inconsistencies between cached entity-bodies and updated headers. If a 304 response indicates an entity not currently cached, then the cache MUST disregard the response and repeat the request without the conditional. If a cache uses a received 304 response to update a cache entry, the cache MUST update the entry to reflect any new field values given in the response. 10.3.6 305 Use Proxy The requested resource MUST be accessed through the proxy given by the Location field. The Location field gives the URI of the proxy. The recipient is expected to repeat this single request via the proxy. 305 responses MUST only be generated by origin servers. Note: RFC 2068 was not clear that 305 was intended to redirect a single request, and to be generated by origin servers only. Not observing these limitations has significant security consequences. 10.3.7 306 (Unused) The 306 status code was used in a previous version of the specification, is no longer used, and the code is reserved. 10.3.8 307 Temporary Redirect The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection MAY be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field. The temporary URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s) , since many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 307 status. Therefore, the note SHOULD contain the information necessary for a user to repeat the original request on the new URI. If the 307 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued. I'm using 302 for now, until I find THE correct answer.

  Read the article

• How Should I Generate Trade Statistics For CouchDB/Rails3 Application?

  - by James

  My Problem: I am trying to developing a web application for currency traders. The application allows traders to enter or upload information about their trades and I want to calculate a wide variety of statistics based on what the user entered. Now, normally I would use a relational database for this, but I have two requirements that don't fit well with a relational database so I am attempting to use couchdb. Those two problems are: 1) Primarily, I have a companion desktop application that users will be able to work with and replicate to the site using couchdb's awesome replication feature and 2) I would like to allow users to be able to define their own custom things to track about trades and generate results based off of what they enter. The schema less nature of couch seems perfect here, but it may end up being harder than it sounds. (I already know couch requires you to define views in advance and such so I was just planning on sticking all the custom attributes in an array and then emitting the array in the view and further processing from there.) What I Am Doing: Right now I am just emitting each trade in couch keyed by each user's system and querying with the key of the system to get an array of trades per system. Simple. I am not using a reduce function currently to calculate any stats because I couldn't figure out how to get everything I need without getting a reduce overflow error. Here is an example of rows that are getting emitted from couch: {"total_rows":134,"offset":0,"rows":[ {"id":"5b1dcd47221e160d8721feee4ccc64be", "key":["80e40ba2fa43589d57ec3f1d19db41e6","2010/05/14 04:32:37 +0000"], null, "doc":{ "_id":"5b1dcd47221e160d8721feee4ccc64be", "_rev":"1-bc9fe763e2637694df47d6f5efb58e5b", "couchrest-type":"Trade", "system":"80e40ba2fa43589d57ec3f1d19db41e6", "pair":"EUR/USD", "direction":"Buy", "entry":12600, "exit":12700, "stop_loss":12500, "profit_target":12700, "status":"Closed", "slug":"101332132375", "custom_tracking": [{"name":"signal", "value":"Pin Bar"}] "updated_at":"2010/05/14 04:32:37 +0000", "created_at":"2010/05/14 04:32:37 +0000", "result":100}} ]} In my rails 3 controller I am basically just populating an array of trades such as the one above and then extracting out the relevant data into smaller arrays that I can compute my statistics on. Here is my show action for the page that I want to display the stats and all the trades: def show @trades = Trade.by_system(:startkey => [@system.id], :endkey => [@system.id, Time.now ]) @trades.each do |trade| if trade.result > 0 @winning_trades << trade.result elsif trade.result < 0 @losing_trades << trade.result else @breakeven_trades << trade.result end if trade.direction == "Buy" @long_trades << trade.result else @short_trades << trade.result end if trade["custom_tracking"] != nil @custom_tracking << {"result" => trade.result, "variables" => trade["custom_tracking"]} end end end I am omitting some other stuff that is going on, but that is the gist of what I am doing. Then I am calculating stuff in the view layer to produce some results: <% winning_long_trades = @long_trades.reject {|trade| trade <= 0 } %> <% winning_short_trades = @short_trades.reject {|trade| trade <= 0 } %> <ul> <li>Total Trades: <%= @trades.count %></li> <li>Winners: <%= @winning_trades.size %></li> <li>Biggest Winner (Pips): <%= @winning_trades.max %></li> <li>Average Win(Pips): <%= @winning_trades.sum/@winning_trades.size %></li> <li>Losers: <%= @losing_trades.size %></li> <li>Biggest Loser (Pips): <%= @losing_trades.min %></li> <li>Average Loss(Pips): <%= @losing_trades.sum/@losing_trades.size %></li> <li>Breakeven Trades: <%= @breakeven_trades.size %></li> <li>Long Trades: <%= @long_trades.size %></li> <li>Winning Long Trades: <%= winning_long_trades.size %></li> <li>Short Trades: <%= @short_trades.size %></li> <li>Winning Short Trades: <%= winning_short_trades.size %></li> <li>Total Pips: <%= @winning_trades.sum + @losing_trades.sum %></li> <li>Win Rate (%): <%= @winning_trades.size/@trades.count.to_f * 100 %></li> </ul> This produces the following results, which aside from a few things is exactly what I want: Total Trades: 134 Winners: 70 Biggest Winner (Pips): 1488 Average Win(Pips): 440 Losers: 58 Biggest Loser (Pips): -516 Average Loss(Pips): -225 Breakeven Trades: 6 Long Trades: 125 Winning Long Trades: 67 Short Trades: 9 Winning Short Trades: 3 Total Pips: 17819 Win Rate (%): 52.23880597014925 What I Am Wondering- Finally The Actual Questions: I am starting to get really skeptical of how well this method will work when a user has 5,000 trades instead of just 134 like in this example. I anticipate most users will only have somewhere under 200 per year, but some users may have a couple thousand trades per year. Probably no more than 5,000 per year. It seems to work ok now, but the page load times are already getting a tad high for my tastes. (About 800ms to generate the page according to rails logs with about a 250ms of that spent in the view layer.) I will end up caching this page I am sure, but I still need the regenerate the page each time a trade is updated and I can't afford to have this be too slow. Sooo..... Is doing something similar here possible with a straight couchdb reduce function? I am assuming handing this off to couch would possibly help with larger data sets. I couldn't figure out how, but I suppose that doesn't mean it isn't possible. If possible, any hints will be helpful. Could I use a list function if a reduce was not available due to reduce constraints? Are couchdb list functions suitable for this type of calculations? Anyone have any idea of whether or not list functions perform well? Any hints what one would look like for the type of calculations I am trying to achieve? I thought about other options such as running the calculations at the time each trade was saved or nightly if I had to and saving the results to a statistics doc that I could then query so that all the processing was done ahead of time. I would like this to be the last resort because then I can't really filter out trades by time periods dynamically like I would really like to. (I want to have a slider that a user can slide to only show trades from that time period using the startkey and endkey in couchdb if I can.) If I should continue running the calculations inside the rails app at the time of the page view, what can I do to improve my current implementation. I am new to rails, couch and programming in general. I am sure that I could be doing something better here. Do I need to create an array for each stat or is there a better way to do that. I guess I just would really like some advice on how to tackle this problem. I want to keep the page generation time minimal since I anticipate these being some of the highest trafficked pages. My gut is that I will need to offload the statistics calculation to either couch or run the stats in advance of when they are called, but I am not sure. Lastly: Like I mentioned above, one of the primary reasons for using couch is to allow users to define their own things to track per trade. Getting the data into couch is no problem, but how would I be able to take the custom_tracking array and find how many winning trades for each named tracking attribute. If anyone can give me any hints to the possibility of doing this that would be great. Thanks a bunch. Would really appreciate any help. Willing to fork out some $$$ if someone wants to take on the problem for me. (Don't know if that is allowed on stack overflow or not.)

  Read the article

• What&rsquo;s New in ASP.NET 4.0 Part Two: WebForms and Visual Studio Enhancements

  - by Rick Strahl

  In the last installment I talked about the core changes in the ASP.NET runtime that I’ve been taking advantage of. In this column, I’ll cover the changes to the Web Forms engine and some of the cool improvements in Visual Studio that make Web and general development easier. WebForms The WebForms engine is the area that has received most significant changes in ASP.NET 4.0. Probably the most widely anticipated features are related to managing page client ids and of ViewState on WebForm pages. Take Control of Your ClientIDs Unique ClientID generation in ASP.NET has been one of the most complained about “features” in ASP.NET. Although there’s a very good technical reason for these unique generated ids - they guarantee unique ids for each and every server control on a page - these unique and generated ids often get in the way of client-side JavaScript development and CSS styling as it’s often inconvenient and fragile to work with the long, generated ClientIDs. In ASP.NET 4.0 you can now specify an explicit client id mode on each control or each naming container parent control to control how client ids are generated. By default, ASP.NET generates mangled client ids for any control contained in a naming container (like a Master Page, or a User Control for example). The key to ClientID management in ASP.NET 4.0 are the new ClientIDMode and ClientIDRowSuffix properties. ClientIDMode supports four different ClientID generation settings shown below. For the following examples, imagine that you have a Textbox control named txtName inside of a master page control container on a WebForms page. <%@Page Language="C#"      MasterPageFile="~/Site.Master"     CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs"     Inherits="WebApplication1.WebForm2"  %> <asp:Content ID="content"  ContentPlaceHolderID="content"               runat="server"               ClientIDMode="Static" >       <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtName" /> </asp:Content> The four available ClientIDMode values are: AutoID This is the existing behavior in ASP.NET 1.x-3.x where full naming container munging takes place. <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text"        id="ctl00_content_txtName" /> This should be familiar to any ASP.NET developer and results in fairly unpredictable client ids that can easily change if the containership hierarchy changes. For example, removing the master page changes the name in this case, so if you were to move a block of script code that works against the control to a non-Master page, the script code immediately breaks. Static This option is the most deterministic setting that forces the control’s ClientID to use its ID value directly. No naming container naming at all is applied and you end up with clean client ids: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName"         type="text" id="txtName" /> Note that the name property which is used for postback variables to the server still is munged, but the ClientID property is displayed simply as the ID value that you have assigned to the control. This option is what most of us want to use, but you have to be clear on that because it can potentially cause conflicts with other controls on the page. If there are several instances of the same naming container (several instances of the same user control for example) there can easily be a client id naming conflict. Note that if you assign Static to a data-bound control, like a list child control in templates, you do not get unique ids either, so for list controls where you rely on unique id for child controls, you’ll probably want to use Predictable rather than Static. I’ll write more on this a little later when I discuss ClientIDRowSuffix. Predictable The previous two values are pretty self-explanatory. Predictable however, requires some explanation. To me at least it’s not in the least bit predictable. MSDN defines this value as follows: This algorithm is used for controls that are in data-bound controls. The ClientID value is generated by concatenating the ClientID value of the parent naming container with the ID value of the control. If the control is a data-bound control that generates multiple rows, the value of the data field specified in the ClientIDRowSuffix property is added at the end. For the GridView control, multiple data fields can be specified. If the ClientIDRowSuffix property is blank, a sequential number is added at the end instead of a data-field value. Each segment is separated by an underscore character (_). The key that makes this value a bit confusing is that it relies on the parent NamingContainer’s ClientID to build its own ClientID value. This effectively means that the value is not predictable at all but rather very tightly coupled to the parent naming container’s ClientIDMode setting. For my simple textbox example, if the ClientIDMode property of the parent naming container (Page in this case) is set to “Predictable” you’ll get this: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text"         id="content_txtName" /> which gives an id that based on walking up to the currently active naming container (the MasterPage content container) and starting the id formatting from there downward. Think of this as a semi unique name that’s guaranteed unique only for the naming container. If, on the other hand, the Page is set to “AutoID” you get the following with Predictable on txtName: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text"         id="ctl00_content_txtName" /> The latter is effectively the same as if you specified AutoID because it inherits the AutoID naming from the Page and Content Master Page control of the page. But again - predictable behavior always depends on the parent naming container and how it generates its id, so the id may not always be exactly the same as the AutoID generated value because somewhere in the NamingContainer chain the ClientIDMode setting may be set to a different value. For example, if you had another naming container in the middle that was set to Static you’d end up effectively with an id that starts with the NamingContainers id rather than the whole ctl000_content munging. The most common use for Predictable is likely to be for data-bound controls, which results in each data bound item getting a unique ClientID. Unfortunately, even here the behavior can be very unpredictable depending on which data-bound control you use - I found significant differences in how template controls in a GridView behave from those that are used in a ListView control. For example, GridView creates clean child ClientIDs, while ListView still has a naming container in the ClientID, presumably because of the template container on which you can’t set ClientIDMode. Predictable is useful, but only if all naming containers down the chain use this setting. Otherwise you’re right back to the munged ids that are pretty unpredictable. Another property, ClientIDRowSuffix, can be used in combination with ClientIDMode of Predictable to force a suffix onto list client controls. For example: <asp:GridView runat="server" ID="gvItems"              AutoGenerateColumns="false"             ClientIDMode="Static"              ClientIDRowSuffix="Id">     <Columns>     <asp:TemplateField>         <ItemTemplate>             <asp:Label runat="server" id="txtName"                        Text='<%# Eval("Name") %>'                   ClientIDMode="Predictable"/>         </ItemTemplate>     </asp:TemplateField>     <asp:TemplateField>         <ItemTemplate>         <asp:Label runat="server" id="txtId"                     Text='<%# Eval("Id") %>'                     ClientIDMode="Predictable" />         </ItemTemplate>     </asp:TemplateField>     </Columns>  </asp:GridView> generates client Ids inside of a column in the master page described earlier: <td>     <span id="txtName_0">Rick</span> </td> where the value after the underscore is the ClientIDRowSuffix field - in this case “Id” of the item data bound to the control. Note that all of the child controls require ClientIDMode=”Predictable” in order for the ClientIDRowSuffix to be applied, and the parent GridView controls need to be set to Static either explicitly or via Naming Container inheritance to give these simple names. It’s a bummer that ClientIDRowSuffix doesn’t work with Static to produce this automatically. Another real problem is that other controls process the ClientIDMode differently. For example, a ListView control processes the Predictable ClientIDMode differently and produces the following with the Static ListView and Predictable child controls: <span id="ctrl0_txtName_0">Rick</span> I couldn’t even figure out a way using ClientIDMode to get a simple ID that also uses a suffix short of falling back to manually generated ids using <%= %> expressions instead. Given the inconsistencies inside of list controls using <%= %>, ids for the ListView might not be a bad idea anyway. Inherit The final setting is Inherit, which is the default for all controls except Page. This means that controls by default inherit the parent naming container’s ClientIDMode setting. For more detailed information on ClientID behavior and different scenarios you can check out a blog post of mine on this subject: http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/54760.aspx. ClientID Enhancements Summary The ClientIDMode property is a welcome addition to ASP.NET 4.0. To me this is probably the most useful WebForms feature as it allows me to generate clean IDs simply by setting ClientIDMode="Static" on either the page or inside of Web.config (in the Pages section) which applies the setting down to the entire page which is my 95% scenario. For the few cases when it matters - for list controls and inside of multi-use user controls or custom server controls) - I can use Predictable or even AutoID to force controls to unique names. For application-level page development, this is easy to accomplish and provides maximum usability for working with client script code against page controls. ViewStateMode Another area of large criticism for WebForms is ViewState. ViewState is used internally by ASP.NET to persist page-level changes to non-postback properties on controls as pages post back to the server. It’s a useful mechanism that works great for the overall mechanics of WebForms, but it can also cause all sorts of overhead for page operation as ViewState can very quickly get out of control and consume huge amounts of bandwidth in your page content. ViewState can also wreak havoc with client-side scripting applications that modify control properties that are tracked by ViewState, which can produce very unpredictable results on a Postback after client-side updates. Over the years in my own development, I’ve often turned off ViewState on pages to reduce overhead. Yes, you lose some functionality, but you can easily implement most of the common functionality in non-ViewState workarounds. Relying less on heavy ViewState controls and sticking with simpler controls or raw HTML constructs avoids getting around ViewState problems. In ASP.NET 3.x and prior, it wasn’t easy to control ViewState - you could turn it on or off and if you turned it off at the page or web.config level, you couldn’t turn it back on for specific controls. In short, it was an all or nothing approach. With ASP.NET 4.0, the new ViewStateMode property gives you more control. It allows you to disable ViewState globally either on the page or web.config level and then turn it back on for specific controls that might need it. ViewStateMode only works when EnableViewState="true" on the page or web.config level (which is the default). You can then use ViewStateMode of Disabled, Enabled or Inherit to control the ViewState settings on the page. If you’re shooting for minimal ViewState usage, the ideal situation is to set ViewStateMode to disabled on the Page or web.config level and only turn it back on particular controls: <%@Page Language="C#"      CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs"     Inherits="Westwind.WebStore.WebForm2"        ClientIDMode="Static"                ViewStateMode="Disabled"     EnableViewState="true"  %> <!-- this control has viewstate  --> <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtName"  ViewStateMode="Enabled" />       <!-- this control has no viewstate - it inherits  from parent container --> <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtAddress" /> Note that the EnableViewState="true" at the Page level isn’t required since it’s the default, but it’s important that the value is true. ViewStateMode has no effect if EnableViewState="false" at the page level. The main benefit of ViewStateMode is that it allows you to more easily turn off ViewState for most of the page and enable only a few key controls that might need it. For me personally, this is a perfect combination as most of my WebForm apps can get away without any ViewState at all. But some controls - especially third party controls - often don’t work well without ViewState enabled, and now it’s much easier to selectively enable controls rather than the old way, which required you to pretty much turn off ViewState for all controls that you didn’t want ViewState on. Inline HTML Encoding HTML encoding is an important feature to prevent cross-site scripting attacks in data entered by users on your site. In order to make it easier to create HTML encoded content, ASP.NET 4.0 introduces a new Expression syntax using <%: %> to encode string values. The encoding expression syntax looks like this: <%: "<script type='text/javascript'>" +     "alert('Really?');</script>" %> which produces properly encoded HTML: &lt;script type=&#39;text/javascript&#39; &gt;alert(&#39;Really?&#39;);&lt;/script&gt; Effectively this is a shortcut to: <%= HttpUtility.HtmlEncode( "<script type='text/javascript'>" + "alert('Really?');</script>") %> Of course the <%: %> syntax can also evaluate expressions just like <%= %> so the more common scenario applies this expression syntax against data your application is displaying. Here’s an example displaying some data model values: <%: Model.Address.Street %> This snippet shows displaying data from your application’s data store or more importantly, from data entered by users. Anything that makes it easier and less verbose to HtmlEncode text is a welcome addition to avoid potential cross-site scripting attacks. Although I listed Inline HTML Encoding here under WebForms, anything that uses the WebForms rendering engine including ASP.NET MVC, benefits from this feature. ScriptManager Enhancements The ASP.NET ScriptManager control in the past has introduced some nice ways to take programmatic and markup control over script loading, but there were a number of shortcomings in this control. The ASP.NET 4.0 ScriptManager has a number of improvements that make it easier to control script loading and addresses a few of the shortcomings that have often kept me from using the control in favor of manual script loading. The first is the AjaxFrameworkMode property which finally lets you suppress loading the ASP.NET AJAX runtime. Disabled doesn’t load any ASP.NET AJAX libraries, but there’s also an Explicit mode that lets you pick and choose the library pieces individually and reduce the footprint of ASP.NET AJAX script included if you are using the library. There’s also a new EnableCdn property that forces any script that has a new WebResource attribute CdnPath property set to a CDN supplied URL. If the script has this Attribute property set to a non-null/empty value and EnableCdn is enabled on the ScriptManager, that script will be served from the specified CdnPath. [assembly: WebResource(    "Westwind.Web.Resources.ww.jquery.js",    "application/x-javascript",    CdnPath =  "http://mysite.com/scripts/ww.jquery.min.js")] Cool, but a little too static for my taste since this value can’t be changed at runtime to point at a debug script as needed, for example. Assembly names for loading scripts from resources can now be simple names rather than fully qualified assembly names, which make it less verbose to reference scripts from assemblies loaded from your bin folder or the assembly reference area in web.config: <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" id="Id"          EnableCdn="true"         AjaxFrameworkMode="disabled">     <Scripts>         <asp:ScriptReference          Name="Westwind.Web.Resources.ww.jquery.js"         Assembly="Westwind.Web" />     </Scripts>        </asp:ScriptManager> The ScriptManager in 4.0 also supports script combining via the CompositeScript tag, which allows you to very easily combine scripts into a single script resource served via ASP.NET. Even nicer: You can specify the URL that the combined script is served with. Check out the following script manager markup that combines several static file scripts and a script resource into a single ASP.NET served resource from a static URL (allscripts.js): <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" id="Id"          EnableCdn="true"         AjaxFrameworkMode="disabled">     <CompositeScript          Path="~/scripts/allscripts.js">         <Scripts>             <asp:ScriptReference                    Path="~/scripts/jquery.js" />             <asp:ScriptReference                    Path="~/scripts/ww.jquery.js" />             <asp:ScriptReference            Name="Westwind.Web.Resources.editors.js"                 Assembly="Westwind.Web" />         </Scripts>     </CompositeScript> </asp:ScriptManager> When you render this into HTML, you’ll see a single script reference in the page: <script src="scripts/allscripts.debug.js"          type="text/javascript"></script> All you need to do to make this work is ensure that allscripts.js and allscripts.debug.js exist in the scripts folder of your application - they can be empty but the file has to be there. This is pretty cool, but you want to be real careful that you use unique URLs for each combination of scripts you combine or else browser and server caching will easily screw you up royally. The script manager also allows you to override native ASP.NET AJAX scripts now as any script references defined in the Scripts section of the ScriptManager trump internal references. So if you want custom behavior or you want to fix a possible bug in the core libraries that normally are loaded from resources, you can now do this simply by referencing the script resource name in the Name property and pointing at System.Web for the assembly. Not a common scenario, but when you need it, it can come in real handy. Still, there are a number of shortcomings in this control. For one, the ScriptManager and ClientScript APIs still have no common entry point so control developers are still faced with having to check and support both APIs to load scripts so that controls can work on pages that do or don’t have a ScriptManager on the page. The CdnUrl is static and compiled in, which is very restrictive. And finally, there’s still no control over where scripts get loaded on the page - ScriptManager still injects scripts into the middle of the HTML markup rather than in the header or optionally the footer. This, in turn, means there is little control over script loading order, which can be problematic for control developers. MetaDescription, MetaKeywords Page Properties There are also a number of additional Page properties that correspond to some of the other features discussed in this column: ClientIDMode, ClientTarget and ViewStateMode. Another minor but useful feature is that you can now directly access the MetaDescription and MetaKeywords properties on the Page object to set the corresponding meta tags programmatically. Updating these values programmatically previously required either <%= %> expressions in the page markup or dynamic insertion of literal controls into the page. You can now just set these properties programmatically on the Page object in any Control derived class on the page or the Page itself: Page.MetaKeywords = "ASP.NET,4.0,New Features"; Page.MetaDescription = "This article discusses the new features in ASP.NET 4.0"; Note, that there’s no corresponding ASP.NET tag for the HTML Meta element, so the only way to specify these values in markup and access them is via the @Page tag: <%@Page Language="C#"      CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs"     Inherits="Westwind.WebStore.WebForm2"      ClientIDMode="Static"                MetaDescription="Article that discusses what's                      new in ASP.NET 4.0"     MetaKeywords="ASP.NET,4.0,New Features" %> Nothing earth shattering but quite convenient. Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements for Web Development For Web development there are also a host of editor enhancements in Visual Studio 2010. Some of these are not Web specific but they are useful for Web developers in general. Text Editors Throughout Visual Studio 2010, the text editors have all been updated to a new core engine based on WPF which provides some interesting new features for various code editors including the nice ability to zoom in and out with Ctrl-MouseWheel to quickly change the size of text. There are many more API options to control the editor and although Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t yet use many of these features, we can look forward to enhancements in add-ins and future editor updates from the various language teams that take advantage of the visual richness that WPF provides to editing. On the negative side, I’ve noticed that occasionally the code editor and especially the HTML and JavaScript editors will lose the ability to use various navigation keys like arrows, back and delete keys, which requires closing and reopening the documents at times. This issue seems to be well documented so I suspect this will be addressed soon with a hotfix or within the first service pack. Overall though, the code editors work very well, especially given that they were re-written completely using WPF, which was one of my big worries when I first heard about the complete redesign of the editors. Multi-Targeting Visual Studio now targets all versions of the .NET framework from 2.0 forward. You can use Visual Studio 2010 to work on your ASP.NET 2, 3.0 and 3.5 applications which is a nice way to get your feet wet with the new development environment without having to make changes to existing applications. It’s nice to have one tool to work in for all the different versions. Multi-Monitor Support One cool feature of Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to drag windows out of the Visual Studio environment and out onto the desktop including onto another monitor easily. Since Web development often involves working with a host of designers at the same time - visual designer, HTML markup window, code behind and JavaScript editor - it’s really nice to be able to have a little more screen real estate to work on each of these editors. Microsoft made a welcome change in the environment. IntelliSense Snippets for HTML and JavaScript Editors The HTML and JavaScript editors now finally support IntelliSense scripts to create macro-based template expansions that have been in the core C# and Visual Basic code editors since Visual Studio 2005. Snippets allow you to create short XML-based template definitions that can act as static macros or real templates that can have replaceable values that can be embedded into the expanded text. The XML syntax for these snippets is straight forward and it’s pretty easy to create custom snippets manually. You can easily create snippets using XML and store them in your custom snippets folder (C:\Users\rstrahl\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Code Snippets\Visual Web Developer\My HTML Snippets and My JScript Snippets), but it helps to use one of the third-party tools that exist to simplify the process for you. I use SnippetEditor, by Bill McCarthy, which makes short work of creating snippets interactively (http://snippeteditor.codeplex.com/). Note: You may have to manually add the Visual Studio 2010 User specific Snippet folders to this tool to see existing ones you’ve created. Code snippets are some of the biggest time savers and HTML editing more than anything deals with lots of repetitive tasks that lend themselves to text expansion. Visual Studio 2010 includes a slew of built-in snippets (that you can also customize!) and you can create your own very easily. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to spend a little time examining your coding patterns and find the repetitive code that you write and convert it into snippets. I’ve been using CodeRush for this for years, but now you can do much of the basic expansion natively for HTML and JavaScript snippets. jQuery Integration Is Now Native jQuery is a popular JavaScript library and recently Microsoft has recently stated that it will become the primary client-side scripting technology to drive higher level script functionality in various ASP.NET Web projects that Microsoft provides. In Visual Studio 2010, the default full project template includes jQuery as part of a new project including the support files that provide IntelliSense (-vsdoc files). IntelliSense support for jQuery is now also baked into Visual Studio 2010, so unlike Visual Studio 2008 which required a separate download, no further installs are required for a rich IntelliSense experience with jQuery. Summary ASP.NET 4.0 brings many useful improvements to the platform, but thankfully most of the changes are incremental changes that don’t compromise backwards compatibility and they allow developers to ease into the new features one feature at a time. None of the changes in ASP.NET 4.0 or Visual Studio 2010 are monumental or game changers. The bigger features are language and .NET Framework changes that are also optional. This ASP.NET and tools release feels more like fine tuning and getting some long-standing kinks worked out of the platform. It shows that the ASP.NET team is dedicated to paying attention to community feedback and responding with changes to the platform and development environment based on this feedback. If you haven’t gotten your feet wet with ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010, there’s no reason not to give it a shot now - the ASP.NET 4.0 platform is solid and Visual Studio 2010 works very well for a brand new release. Check it out. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

  Read the article

• 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

  - by Alan Smith

  For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour.  This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue   static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005>     define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2  diffuse 0.7  specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1  lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7  } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } }   viewpoint {     from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60     resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 }       light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20>   object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden }   object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome }   After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue }   In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000   As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72   Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: ·         On-Premise o   Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o   Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o   Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o   Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. ·         Windows Azure o   Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment.   The architecture of each worker role is shown below.   The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" >   <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small">     <Imports>     </Imports>     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString" />     </ConfigurationSettings>     <LocalResources>       <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" />     </LocalResources>   </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition>     The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1.       The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2.       PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3.       DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4.       The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5.       A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6.       The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7.       The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() {     // Set environment variables     string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation);     string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation);       LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder");     string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath;       JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs");     JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs");     CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes");     CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images");     RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource();       Frames = 0;       while (true)     {         // Get the render job from the queue         CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get();           if (jobMsg != null)         {             // Get the file details             string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString;             string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga");             string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg");               string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile);             string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile);             string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile);               // Copy the scene file to local storage             sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath);               // Run the ray tracer.             string polyrayArguments =                 string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath);             Process polyRayProcess = new Process();             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath);             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments;             polyRayProcess.Start();             polyRayProcess.WaitForExit();               // Convert the image             string dtaArguments =                 string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath));             Process dtaProcess = new Process();             dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath);             dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments;             dtaProcess.Start();             dtaProcess.WaitForExit();               // Upload the image to blob storage             imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath);               // Add a download job.             downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile);               // Delete the render job message             jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg);               Frames++;         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }           // Log the worker role activity.         roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive             ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames);     } }     Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage.   public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity {     public string ServerName { get; set; }     public string Status { get; set; }     public DateTime StartTime { get; set; }     public DateTime EndTime { get; set; }     public long SecondsRunning { get; set; }     public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; }     public int Frames { get; set; }     public string Comment { get; set; }       public RoleLifecycle()     {     }       public RoleLifecycle(string roleName)     {         PartitionKey = roleName;         RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey();         Status = "Started";         StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow;         LastActiveTime = StartTime;         EndTime = StartTime;         SecondsRunning = 0;         Frames = 0;     } }     A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="16" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames.   Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation.   With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes.     At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances.   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="256" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames.   Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds.   We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes.   The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each.   Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles   The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. ·         Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. ·         The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. ·         Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. ·         No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. ·         Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. ·         Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. ·         Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. ·         Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. ·         If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. ·         Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. ·         Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

  Read the article

• Red5 vs BlazeDS

  - by dvm

  What technology are better (robust, stable, speed) for rich web app with flash movies, chat, etc. Somebody said that Red5 will drop down if more that 50 users try to suck video stream from it. Is there people who use Java on server side and Flash for client side?

  Read the article

• Error in python - don't understand

  - by Jasper

  Hi, I'm creating a game, and am quite new to Python generally. I created a function 'descriptionGenerator()' which generates a description for characters and objects either randomly or using variables passed to it. It seemed to be working, but every now and then it wouldn't work correctly. So i placed it in a loop, and it never seems to be able to complete the loop without one of the iterations having this problem. The code is as follows: #+------------------------------------------+ #| Name: bitsandpieces.py | #| A module for the 'Europa I' game | #| created for the Game Making Competition | #| | #| Date Created/Modified: | #| 3/4/10 | 3/4/10 | #+------------------------------------------+ # Import the required modules # Import system modules: import time import random # Import 3rd party modules: # Import game modules: # Define the 'descriptionGenerator()' function def descriptionGenerator(descriptionVariables): descriptionVariableSize = len(descriptionVariables) if descriptionVariables[0] == 'char': # If there is only one variable ('char'), create a random description if descriptionVariableSize == 1: # Define choices for descriptionVariables to be generated from gender_choices = ['male', 'female'] hair_choices = ['black', 'red', 'blonde', 'grey', 'brown', 'blue'] hair_choices2 = ['long', 'short', 'cropped', 'curly'] size_choices = ['tubby', 'thin', 'fat', 'almost twig-like'] demeanour_choices = ['glowering', 'bright', 'smiling', 'sombre', 'intelligent'] impression_choices = ['likeable', 'unlikeable', 'dangerous', 'annoying', 'afraid'] # Define description variables gender = random.choice(gender_choices) height = str(float('0.' + str(random.randint(1, 9))) + float(random.randint(1, 2))) if float(height) > 1.8: height_string = 'tall' if float(height) > 2: height_string = 'very tall' elif float(height) < 1.8 and float(height) > 1.5: height_string = 'average' elif float(height) < 1.5: height_string = 'short' if float(height) < 1.3: height_string = 'very short' hair = random.choice(hair_choices2) + ' ' + random.choice(hair_choices) size = random.choice(size_choices) demeanour = random.choice(demeanour_choices) impression = random.choice(impression_choices) # Collect description variables in list 'randomDescriptionVariables' randomDescriptionVariables = ['char', gender, height, height_string, hair, size, demeanour, impression] # Generate description using the 'descriptionGenerator' function descriptionGenerator(randomDescriptionVariables) # Generate the description of a character using the variables passed to the function elif descriptionVariableSize == 8: if descriptionVariables[1] == 'male': if descriptionVariables[7] != 'afraid': print """A %s man, about %s m tall. He has %s hair and is %s. He is %s and you get the impression that he is %s.""" %(descriptionVariables[3], descriptionVariables[2], descriptionVariables[4], descriptionVariables[5], descriptionVariables[6], descriptionVariables[7]) elif descriptionVariables[7] == 'afraid': print """A %s man, about %s m tall. He has %s hair and is %s. He is %s.\nYou feel that you should be %s of him.""" %(descriptionVariables[3], descriptionVariables[2], descriptionVariables[4], descriptionVariables[5], descriptionVariables[6], descriptionVariables[7]) elif descriptionVariables[1] == 'female': if descriptionVariables[7] != 'afraid': print """A %s woman, about %s m tall. She has %s hair and is %s. She is %s and you get the impression that she is %s.""" %(descriptionVariables[3], descriptionVariables[2], descriptionVariables[4], descriptionVariables[5], descriptionVariables[6], descriptionVariables[7]) elif descriptionVariables[7] == 'afraid': print """A %s woman, about %s m tall. She has %s hair and is %s. She is %s.\nYou feel that you should be %s of her.""" %(descriptionVariables[3], descriptionVariables[2], descriptionVariables[4], descriptionVariables[5], descriptionVariables[6], descriptionVariables[7]) else: pass elif descriptionVariables[0] == 'obj': # Insert code here 2 deal with object stuff pass print print myDescriptionVariables = ['char'] i = 0 while i < 30: print print print descriptionGenerator(myDescriptionVariables) i = i + 1 time.sleep(10) When it fails to properly execute it says this: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Users/Jasper/Development/Programming/MyProjects/Game Making Challenge/Europa I/Code/Code 2.0/bitsandpieces.py", line 79, in <module> descriptionGenerator(myDescriptionVariables) File "/Users/Jasper/Development/Programming/MyProjects/Game Making Challenge/Europa I/Code/Code 2.0/bitsandpieces.py", line 50, in descriptionGenerator randomDescriptionVariables = ['char', gender, height, height_string, hair, size, demeanour, impression] UnboundLocalError: local variable 'height_string' referenced before assignment Thanks for any help with this

  Read the article

• quicktime movie layering issues

  - by DanC

  I have a site (link below) where the clients work displays on a long horizontal page. The menu is fixed on the left hand side and the images disappear under the menu when scrolling across. The client has now uploaded quicktime movies which do not go under the menu like the images but scroll over the menu. http://www.calebchurchill.com/projects/horny_dog/ I have tried to sort this using z-index but am so far been unsuccessful. Any ideas?

  Read the article

• How to elegantly create a datatable with Django ?

  - by Inshim

  Here's a common situation that I have and wish to avoid creating tedious loops and fiddling with html tables: I have a model Movie, which is has fkeys to Director and to Genre. How can I elegantly render a simple data table that has on one axis the different Directors, on another axis the different Genres, and inside each cell the count of the movies filtered by the respective Director and Genre? Thanks!

  Read the article

• LibreOffice UNO Java API: how to open a document, execute a macro and close it?

  - by MarcoS

  I'm working on LibreOffice server-side: on the server I run soffice --accept=... Then I use Java LibreOffice client API's to apply a macro on a document (calc or writer). The java execution does not give any error, but I do not get the job done (macro code is executed, but it's effects are not in the output file). More, after macro script is invoked, the Basic debugger window appears, apparently stopped on the first line of my macro; F5 does not restart it... This is the relevant code I'm using: try { XComponentContext xLocalContext = Bootstrap.createInitialComponentContext(null); System.out.println("xLocalContext"); XMultiComponentFactory xLocalServiceManager = xLocalContext.getServiceManager(); System.out.println("xLocalServiceManager"); Object urlResolver = xLocalServiceManager.createInstanceWithContext( "com.sun.star.bridge.UnoUrlResolver", xLocalContext); System.out.println("urlResolver"); XUnoUrlResolver xUrlResolver = (XUnoUrlResolver) UnoRuntime.queryInterface(XUnoUrlResolver.class, urlResolver); System.out.println("xUrlResolve"); try { String uno = "uno:" + unoMode + ",host=" + unoHost + ",port=" + unoPort + ";" + unoProtocol + ";" + unoObjectName; Object rInitialObject = xUrlResolver.resolve(uno); System.out.println("rInitialObject"); if (null != rInitialObject) { XMultiComponentFactory xOfficeFactory = (XMultiComponentFactory) UnoRuntime.queryInterface( XMultiComponentFactory.class, rInitialObject); System.out.println("xOfficeFactory"); Object desktop = xOfficeFactory.createInstanceWithContext("com.sun.star.frame.Desktop", xLocalContext); System.out.println("desktop"); XComponentLoader xComponentLoader = (XComponentLoader)UnoRuntime.queryInterface( XComponentLoader.class, desktop); System.out.println("xComponentLoader"); PropertyValue[] loadProps = new PropertyValue[3]; loadProps[0] = new PropertyValue(); loadProps[0].Name = "Hidden"; loadProps[0].Value = Boolean.TRUE; loadProps[1] = new PropertyValue(); loadProps[1].Name = "ReadOnly"; loadProps[1].Value = Boolean.FALSE; loadProps[2] = new PropertyValue(); loadProps[2].Name = "MacroExecutionMode"; loadProps[2].Value = new Short(com.sun.star.document.MacroExecMode.ALWAYS_EXECUTE_NO_WARN); try { XComponent xComponent = xComponentLoader.loadComponentFromURL("file:///" + inputFile, "_blank", 0, loadProps); System.out.println("xComponent from " + inputFile); String macroName = "Standard.Module1.MYMACRONAME?language=Basic&location=application"; Object[] aParams = null; XScriptProviderSupplier xScriptPS = (XScriptProviderSupplier) UnoRuntime.queryInterface(XScriptProviderSupplier.class, xComponent); XScriptProvider xScriptProvider = xScriptPS.getScriptProvider(); XScript xScript = xScriptProvider.getScript("vnd.sun.star.script:"+macroName); short[][] aOutParamIndex = new short[1][1]; Object[][] aOutParam = new Object[1][1]; @SuppressWarnings("unused") Object result = xScript.invoke(aParams, aOutParamIndex, aOutParam); System.out.println("xScript invoke macro" + macroName); XStorable xStore = (XStorable)UnoRuntime.queryInterface(XStorable.class, xComponent); System.out.println("xStore"); if (outputFileType.equalsIgnoreCase("pdf")) { System.out.println("writer_pdf_Export"); loadProps[0].Name = "FilterName"; loadProps[0].Value = "writer_pdf_Export"; } xStore.storeToURL("file:///" + outputFile, loadProps); System.out.println("storeToURL to file " + outputFile); xComponent.dispose(); xComponentLoader = null; rInitialObject = null; System.out.println("done."); System.exit(0); } catch(IllegalArgumentException e) { System.err.println("Error: Can't load component from url " + inputFile); } } else { System.err.println("Error: Unknown initial object name at server side"); } } catch(NoConnectException e) { System.err.println("Error: Server Connection refused: check server is listening..."); } } catch(java.lang.Exception e) { System.err.println("Error: Java exception:"); e.printStackTrace(); }

  Read the article

• how do sites like toufee or mouvee work ?

  - by Code freak

  Hi, Was just wondering how do these sites (and many other softwares that generate flash movies from audio clips,images , docs) work ? how do they compile the media files(audio/image/vid) into a flv movie on the server ? Can the same be done using some open source tech. Any info or hint or some direction where i'd get more info regarding this would be very helpful. Thanks

  Read the article

• Flash ActiveX: How to Load Movie from memory or resource or stream?

  - by yuku

  I'm embedding a Flash ActiveX control in my C++ app (Flash.ocx, Flash10a.ocx, etc depending on your Flash version). I can load an SWF file by calling LoadMovie(0, filename), but the file needs to physically reside in the disk. How to load the SWF from memory (or resource, or stream)? I'm sure there must be a way, because commercial solutions like f-in-box's feature Load flash movies from memory directly also uses Flash ActiveX control.

  Read the article

• EF4 Import/Lookup thousands of records - my performance stinks!

  - by Dennis Ward

  I'm trying to setup something for a movie store website (using ASP.NET, EF4, SQL Server 2008), and in my scenario, I want to allow a "Member" store to import their catalog of movies stored in a text file containing ActorName, MovieTitle, and CatalogNumber as follows: Actor, Movie, CatalogNumber John Wayne, True Grit, 4577-12 (repeated for each record) This data will be used to lookup an actor and movie, and create a "MemberMovie" record, and my import speed is terrible if I import more than 100 or so records using these tables: Actor Table: Fields = {ID, Name, etc.} Movie Table: Fields = {ID, Title, ActorID, etc.} MemberMovie Table: Fields = {ID, CatalogNumber, MovieID, etc.} My methodology to import data into the MemberMovie table from a text file is as follows (after the file has been uploaded successfully): Create a context. For each line in the file, lookup the artist in the Actor table. For each Movie in the Artist table, lookup the matching title. If a matching Movie is found, add a new MemberMovie record to the context and call ctx.SaveChanges(). The performance of my implementation is terrible. My expectation is that this can be done with thousands of records in a few seconds (after the file has been uploaded), and I've got something that times out the browser. My question is this: What is the best approach for performing bulk lookups/inserts like this? Should I call SaveChanges only once rather than for each newly created MemberMovie? Would it be better to implement this using something like a stored procedure? A snippet of my loop is roughly this (edited for brevity): while ((fline = file.ReadLine()) != null) { string [] token = fline.Split(separator); string Actor = token[0]; string Movie = token[1]; string CatNumber = token[2]; Actor found_actor = ctx.Actors.Where(a => a.Name.Equals(actor)).FirstOrDefault(); if (found_actor == null) continue; Movie found_movie = found_actor.Movies.Where( s => s.Title.Equals(title, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase)).FirstOrDefault(); if (found_movie == null) continue; ctx.MemberMovies.AddObject(new MemberMovie() { MemberProfileID = profile_id, CatalogNumber = CatNumber, Movie = found_movie }); try { ctx.SaveChanges(); } catch { } } Any help is appreciated! Thanks, Dennis

  Read the article

• Open source tool to extract ActionScript from FlashMovies

  - by Dinis Cruz

  Is there an Open source tool to extract ActionScript from Flash movies, ideally written in (or consumed by) C# I just did a search and found http://www.nowrap.de/flare.html, but the source code is not available. I need this so that I can allow the security review of Flash & ActionScript using the OWASP O2 Platform

  Read the article

• media center extended

  - by Gil Montag

  Hi, Where can I find resources related to writing your own media center extender client - i.e. an application that will run on another machine at home and remotely render vista's media center on it, allowing to stream movies, live tv etc Thanks, Gil

  Read the article

• Lxml or Xpath content print

  - by Angelo

  function= def parseTitle(self, post): """ Returns title string with spaces replaced by dots "" return post.xpath('h2')[0].text.replace('.', ' ') i would to see the content of post. Tried all . How can i properly debug the content. ir is an webstite of movies where i rip links and tittle. So this one should parse the title.and i am sure H@ is not existing , how to print/debug it?

  Read the article

• Custom YouTube Player

  - by Tony

  Hi, Is it possible to hide the video content of the YouTube player (only statusbar (where is play button etc.) is visible) ? Or maybe do you know other (flash) players that have the ability to stream the YouTube movies ?

  Read the article

• Is there any online free movie information api's?

  - by Gary Willoughby

  For music there is the Gracenote CDDB SDK, etc. but does an online service exist for getting information about movies? The only solution i can see at the minute is querying IMDB and scraping the page. The problem i have is that i have a list of film titles and i want to retrieve stuff like the plot, director, cast, when released, get dvd cover art, etc..

  Read the article

• Jaxb unmarshalls fixml object but all fields are null

  - by DUFF

  I have a small XML document in the FIXML format. I'm unmarshalling them using jaxb. The problem The process complete without errors but the objects which are created are completely null. Every field is empty. The fields which are lists (like the Qty) have the right number of object in them. But the fields of those objects are also null. Setup I've downloaded the FIXML schema from here and I've created the classes with xjc and the maven plugin. They are all in the package org.fixprotocol.fixml_5_0_sp2. I've got the sample xml in a file FIXML.XML <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <FIXML> <Batch> <PosRpt> <Pty ID="GS" R="22"/> <Pty ID="01" R="5"/> <Pty ID="6U8" R="28"> <Sub ID="2" Typ="21"/> </Pty> <Pty ID="GS" R="22"/> <Pty ID="6U2" R="2"/> <Instrmt ID="GHPKRW" SecTyp="FWD" MMY="20121018" MatDt="2012-10-18" Mult="1" Exch="GS" PxQteCcy="KJS" FnlSettlCcy="GBP" Fctr="0.192233298" SettlMeth="G" ValMeth="FWDC2" UOM="Ccy" UOMCCy="USD"> <Evnt EventTyp="121" Dt="2013-10-17"/> <Evnt EventTyp="13" Dt="2013-10-17"/> </Instrmt> <Qty Long="0.000" Short="22000000.000" Typ="PNTN"/> <Qty Long="0.000" Short="22000000.000" Typ="FIN"/> <Qty Typ="DLV" Long="0.00" Short="0.00" Net="0.0"/> <Amt Typ="FMTM" Amt="32.332" Ccy="USD"/> <Amt Typ="CASH" Amt="1" Rsn="3" Ccy="USD"/> <Amt Typ="IMTM" Amt="329.19" Ccy="USD"/> <Amt Typ="DLV" Amt="0.00" Ccy="USD"/> <Amt Typ="BANK" Amt="432.23" Ccy="USD"/> </PosRpt> Then I'm calling the unmarshaller with custom event handler which just throws an exception on a parse error. The parsing complete so I know there are no errors being generated. I'm also handling the namespace as suggested here // sort out the file String xmlFile = "C:\\FIXML.XML.xml"; System.out.println("Loading XML File..." + xmlFile); InputStream input = new FileInputStream(xmlFile); InputSource is = new InputSource(input); // create jaxb context JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance("org.fixprotocol.fixml_5_0_sp2"); Unmarshaller unmarshaller = jc.createUnmarshaller(); // add event handler so jacB will fail on an error CustomEventHandler validationEventHandler = new CustomEventHandler(); unmarshaller.setEventHandler(validationEventHandler); // set the namespace NamespaceFilter inFilter = new NamespaceFilter("http://www.fixprotocol.org/FIXML-5-0-SP2", true); inFilter.setParent(SAXParserFactory.newInstance().newSAXParser().getXMLReader()); SAXSource source = new SAXSource(inFilter, is); // GO! JAXBElement<FIXML> fixml = unmarshaller.unmarshal(source, FIXML.class); The fixml object is created. In the above sample the Amt array will have five element which matches the number of amts in the file. But all the fields like ccy are null. I've put breakpoints in the classes created by xjc and none of the setters are ever called. So it appears that jaxb is unmarshalling and creating all the correct objects, but it's never calling the setters?? I'm completely stumped on this. I've seen a few posts that suggrest making sure the package.info file that was generated by xjc is in the packags and I've made sure that it's there. There are no working in the IDE about the generated code. Any help much appreciated.

  Read the article

• Difference between Facebook query from iphone and from web

  - by Aashutosh

  Hi, I am creating a iphone application for the existing web application. The fql which is happening at the web is giving me right results but the fql happening at the iphone is not giving all the results. select name, pic_square, pic_big, uid, sex, birthday, relationship_status , current_location, meeting_sex, interests, music, tv, movies, books, quotes, education_history, work_history from user where uid = XXXXXXX is giving me different result in web when compared to the iphone. Thanks, Aashutosh

  Read the article

• Using web.config directory security and extensionless urls

  - by Matt Brailsford

  Hi Guys, I'd like to use the built in directory security features built into the web.config to restrict access to child pages of a parent page. My structure is as follows: Members Members/News Members/Press Members/Movies Users should be able to have access to the members parent page, but not child pages. My problem is, because I am using extensionless URLs, the web.config thinks this is a directory and so access is blocked. Is there a way to say only restrict access for sub pages?

  Read the article

• compiling OpenCV on Mac OS X Snow Leopard gets error: ‘Movie’ does not name a type

  - by moldov

  When I'm trying to compile OpenCV on Mac OS X Snow Leopard I recieve an error highgui/cvcap_qt.cpp:76: error: ‘Movie’ does not name a type There is a structure /// Movie state structure for QuickTime movies typedef struct CvCapture_QT_Movie { Movie myMovie; // movie handle GWorldPtr myGWorld; // we render into an offscreen GWorld But I don't know this type is described. I think in Quicktime but Quicktime is included // Mac OS includes include include include So I cannot build it.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60  | Next Page >