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  • Process Centric Banking: Loan Origination Solution

    - by Manish Palaparthy
    There is an old proverb that goes, "The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory". So, we keep doing numerous "Proof of Concepts" with our own products on various business cases to analyze them deeply, understand and explain to our customers. We then present our learnings as they happened. The awareness of each PoC should help readers increase the trustworthiness of the results coming out of these PoCs. I present one such PoC where we invested a lot of time&effort.  Process Centric Banking : Loan Origination Solution Loan Origination is a process by which a borrower applies for a new loan and the lender processes that application. Loan origination includes the series of steps taken by the bank from the point the customer shows interest in a loan product all the way to disbursal of funds. The Loan Origination process is relevant for many kind of lenders in Financial services: Banks, Credit Unions, NBFCs(Non Banking Financial Companies) and so on. For simplicity sake, I will use "Bank" as the lending institution in the rest of my article.  Loan Origination is one of the core processes for Banks as it is the process by which the it creates assets against which the Institution earns most of its profits from. A well tuned loan origination process can affect the Bank in many positive ways. Banks have always shown great interest in automating the loan origination process for the above reason. However, due the constant changes in customer environment, market dynamics, prevailing economic conditions, cost pressures & regulatory environment they run into lot of challenges. Let me categorize some of these challenges for you Customer Environment Multiple Channels: Customer can use any of the available channels (Internet Banking, Email, Fax, Branch, Phone Banking, ATM, Broker, Mobile, Snail Mail) to perform all or some of the activities related to her Visibility into the origination process: Expect immediate update on the status of loan processing & alert messages Reduced Turn Around Time: Expect loans to be processed with least turn around time Reduced loan processing fees: Partly due to market dynamics the customer expects the loan processing fee to be negligible Market Dynamics Competitive environment:  The competition keeps creating many variants of loan products to attract customers, the bank needs to create similar product variants with better offers to attract customers or keep existing ones Ability to migrate loans from one vendor to another: It has become really easy for retail customers to move from one bank to the other given the low fee of loan processing and highly attractive offers. How does the bank protect it's customer base while actively engaging with potential customers banking with competitor banks Flexibility to react to market developments: Market development greatly influence loan processing, underwriting, asset valuation, risk mitigation rules. Can the bank modify rules and policies, the idea is not just to react to market developments but to pro-actively manage new developments Economic conditions Constant change in various rates and their implications on the rates and rules applied when on-boarding a loan: How quickly can the bank apply changes to rates offered to customers when the central bank changes various rates Requirements of Audit by the central banker: Tough economic conditions have demanded much more stringent audit rules and tests. The banks needs to produce ready reports(historic & operational) for audit compliance Risk Mitigation: While risk mitigation has always been a key concern for the bank, this is the area where the bank's underwriters & risk analysts spend the maximum time when processing a loan application. In order to reduce TAT the bank cannot compromise on its risk mitigation strategies Cost pressures Reduce Cost of processing per application: To deliver a reduced loan processing fee to the customer, the bank needs to keep its cost per processing loan application low. Meet customer TAT expectations while reducing the queues and the systems being used to process the loan application: The loan application could potentially be spending a lot of time waiting in the queue for further processing. Different volumes & patterns of applications demand different queuing algorithms. The bank needs to have real-time visibility into these queues and have the flexibility to change queuing algorithms at runtime  Increase the use of electronic communication and reduce the branch channel usage: Lesser automation leads not only leads to Increased turn around time, it also impacts more costs to reach out to customers The objective of our PoC was to implement a Loan Origination Solution whose ownership lies with the bank and effectively meet the challenges listed above. We built a simple story board for the solution We then went about implementing our storyboard using Oracle BPM Suite, Webcenter Content : Imaging. The web UI has been built on ADF technolgies, while the integration with core-services has been implemented using the underlying SOA infrastructure. The BPM process model is quite exhaustive can meet all the challenges listed above to reasonable degree. A bank intending to implement an end-to-end Loan Origination Solution has multiple options at it's disposal. It can Develop a customer Loan Origination Application from scratch: Gives maximum opportunity to build what you want but inflexible to upgrade and maintain. Higher TCO in long term Buy a Packaged application & customize it: Customizing a generic loan application can be tedious and prove as difficult as above. Build it using many disparate & un-integrated tools: Initially seems easier than developing from scratch. But, without integrated tool sets this is not a viable approach either or A solution based on a Framework: Independent Services and Business Process Modeling provide decoupled architecture that is flexible. We built this framework end-to-end with processes the core process of loan origination & several sub-processes such as Analyse and define customer needs, customer credit verification, identity check processes, legal review process, New customer registration & risk assessment.

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  • Thought Oracle Usability Advisory Board Was Stuffy? Wrong. Justification for Attending OUAB: ROI

    - by ultan o'broin
    Looking for reasons tell your boss why your organization needs to join the Oracle Usability Advisory Board or why you need approval to attend one of its meetings (see the requirements)? Try phrases such as "Continued Return on Investment (ROI)", "Increased Productivity" or "Happy Workers". With OUAB your participation is about realizing and sustaining ROI across the entire applications life-cycle from input to designs to implementation choices and integration, usage and performance and on measuring and improving the onboarding and support experience. If you think this is a boring meeting of middle-aged people sitting around moaning about customizing desktop forms and why the BlackBerry is here to stay, think again! How about this for a rich agenda, all designed to engage the audience in a thought-provoking and feedback-illiciting day of swirling interactions, contextual usage, global delivery, mobility, consumerizationm, gamification and tailoring your implementation to reflect real users doing real work in real environments.  Foldable, rollable ereader devices provide a newspaper-like UK for electronic news. Or a way to wrap silicon chips, perhaps. Explored at the OUAB Europe Meeting (photograph from Terrace Restaurant in TVP. Nom.) At the 7 December 2012 OUAB Europe meeting in Oracle Thames Valley Park, UK, Oracle partners and customers stepped up to the mic and PPT decks with a range of facts and examples to astound any UX conference C-level sceptic. Over the course of the day we covered much ground, but it was all related in a contextual, flexibile, simplication, engagement way aout delivering results for business: that means solving problems. This means being about the user and their tasks and how to make design and technology transforms work into a productive activity that users and bean counters will be excited by. The sessions really gelled for me: 1. Mobile design patterns and the powerful propositions for customers and partners offered by using the design guidance with Oracle ADF Mobile. Customers' and partners' developers existing ADF developers are now productive, efficient ADF Mobile developers applying proven UX guidance using ADF Mobile components and other Oracle Fusion Middleware in the development toolkit. You can find the Mobile UX Design Patterns and Guidance on Building Mobile Apps on OTN. 2. Oracle Voice and Apps. How this medium offers so much potentual in the enterprise and offers a window in Fusion Apps cloud webservices, Oracle RightNow NLP and Nuance technology. Exciting stuff, demoed live on a mobile phone. Stay tuned for more features and modalities and how you can tailor your own apps experience.  3. Oracle RightNow Natural Language Processing (NLP) Virtual Assistant technology (Ella): how contextual intervention and learning from users sessions delivers a great personalized UX for users interacting with Ella, a fifth generation VA to solve problems and seek knowledge. 4. BYOD Keynote: A balanced keynote address contrasting Fujitsu's explaining of the conceprt, challenges, and trends and setting the expectation that BYOD must be embraced in a flexible way,  with the resolute, crafted high security enterprise requirements that nuancing the BYOD concept and proposals with the realities of their world of water tight information and device sharing policies. Fascinating stuff, as well providing anecdotes to make us thing about out own DYOD Deployments. One size does not fit all. 5. Icon Cultural Surveys Results and Insights Arising: Ever wondered about the cultural appropriateness of icons used in software UIs and how these icons assessed for global use? Or considered that social media "Like" icons might be  unacceptable hand gestures in culture or enterprise? Or do the old world icons like Save floppy disk icons still find acceptable? Well the survey results told you. Challenges must be tested, over time, and context of use is critical now, including external factors such as the internet and social media adoption. Indeed the fears about global rejection of the face and hand icons was not borne out, and some of the more anachronistic icons (checkbooks, microphones, real-to-real tape decks, 3.5" floppies for "save") have become accepted metaphors for current actions. More importantly the findings brought into focus the reason for OUAB - engage with and illicit feedback though working groups before we build anything. 6. EReaders and Oracle iBook: What is the uptake and trends of ereaders? And how about a demo of an iBook with enterprise apps content?  Well received by the audience, the session included a live running poll of ereader usage. 7. Gamification Design Jam: Fun, hands on event for teams of Oracle staff, partners and customers, actually building gamified flows, a practice that can be applied right away by customers and partners.  8. UX Direct: A new offering of usability best practices, coming to an external website for you in 2013. FInd a real user, observe their tasks, design and approve, build and measure. Simple stuff to improve apps implications no end. 9. FUSE (an internal term only, basically Fusion Simplified Experience): demo of the new Face of Fusion Applications: inherently mobile, simple to use, social, personalizable and FAST, three great demos from the HCM, CRM and ICT world on how these UX designs can be used in different ways. So, a powerful breadth and depth of UX solutions and opporunities for customers and partners to engage with and explore how they can make their users happy and benefit their business reaping continued ROI from those apps investments. Find out more about the OUAB and how to get involved here ... 

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  • Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, Increases Transparency and Improves Customer Loyalty with Web Portal Solution

    - by Kellsey Ruppel
    Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, Increases Transparency and Improves Customer Loyalty with Web Portal Solution CUSTOMER AND PARTNER INFORMATION Customer Name – Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare Customer Revenue – 73,515 Billion Euro (2011, Siemens AG total) Customer Quote – “The realization of our complex requirements within a very short amount of time was enabled through the competent implementation partner Sapient, who fully used the  very broad scope of standard functionality provided in the Oracle WebCenter Portal, and the management of customer services, who continuously supported the project setup. ” – Joerg Modlmayr, Project Manager, Healthcare Customer Service Portal, Siemens AG The Siemens Healthcare Sector is one of the world's largest suppliers to the healthcare industry and a trendsetter in medical imaging, laboratory diagnostics, medical information technology and hearing aids. Siemens offers its customers products and solutions for the entire range of patient care from a single source – from prevention and early detection to diagnosis, and on to treatment and aftercare. By optimizing clinical workflows for the most common diseases, Siemens also makes healthcare faster, better and more cost-effective. To ensure greater transparency, increased efficiency, higher user acceptance, and additional services, Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, replaced several existing legacy portal solutions that could not meet the company’s future needs with Oracle WebCenter Portal. Various existing portal solutions that cannot meet future demands will be successively replaced by the new central service portal, which will also allow for the efficient and intuitive implementation of new service concepts.  With Oracle, doctors and hospitals using Siemens medical solutions now have access to a central information portal that provides important information and services at just the push of a button.  Customer Name – Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare Customer URL – www.siemens.com Customer Headquarters – Erlangen, Germany Industry – Industrial Manufacturing Employees – 360,000  Challenges – Replace disparate medical service portals to meet future demands and eliminate an  unnecessarily high level of administrative work caused by heterogeneous installations Ensure portals meet current user demands to improve user-acceptance rates and increase number of total users Enable changes and expansion through standard functionality to eliminate the need for reliance on IT and reduce administrative efforts and associated high costs Ensure efficient and intuitive implementation of new service concepts for all devices and systems Ensure hospitals and clinics to transparently monitor and measure services rendered for the various medical devices and systems  Increase electronic interaction and expand services to achieve a higher level of customer loyalty Solution –  Deployed Oracle WebCenter Portal to ensure greater transparency, and as a result, a higher level of customer loyalty  Provided a centralized platform for doctors and hospitals using Siemens’ medical technology solutions that provides important information and services at the push of a button Reduced significantly the administrative workload by centralizing the solution in the new customer service portal Secured positive feedback from customers involved in the pilot program developed by design experts from Oracle partner Sapient. The interfaces were created with customer needs in mind. The first survey taken shortly after implementation came back with 2.4 points on a scale of 0-3 in the category “customer service portal intuitiveness level” Met all requirements including alignment with the Siemens Style Guide without extensive programming Implemented additional services via the portal such as benchmarking options to ensure the optimal use of the Customer Device Park Provided option for documentation of all services rendered in conjunction with the medical technology systems to ensure that the value of the services are transparent for the decision makers in the hospitals  Saved and stored all machine data from approximately 100,000 remote systems in the central service and information platform Provided the option to register errors online and follow the call status in real-time on the portal Made  available at the push of a button all information on the medical technology devices used in hospitals or clinics—from security checks and maintenance activities to current device statuses Provided PDF format Service Performance Reports that summarize information from periods of time ranging from previous weeks up to one year, meeting medical product law requirements  Why Oracle – Siemens AG favored Oracle for many reasons, however, the company ultimately decided to go with Oracle due to the enormous range of functionality the solutions offered for the healthcare sector.“We are not programmers; we are service providers in the medical technology segment and focus on the contents of the portal. All the functionality necessary for internet-based customer interaction is already standard in Oracle WebCenter Portal, which is a huge plus for us. Having Oracle as our technology partner ensures that the product will continually evolve, providing a strong technology platform for our customer service portal well into the future,” said Joerg Modlmayr project manager, Healthcare Customer Service Portal, Siemens AG. Partner Involvement – Siemens AG selected Oracle Partner Sapient because the company offered a service portfolio that perfectly met Siemens’ requirements and had a wealth of experience implementing Oracle WebCenter Portal. Additionally, Sapient had designers with a very high level of expertise in usability—an aspect that Siemens considered to be of vast importance for the project.  “The Sapient team completely met all our expectations. Our tightly timed project was completed on schedule, and the positive feedback from our users proves that we set the right measures in terms of usability—all thanks to the folks at Sapient,” Modlmayr said.  Partner Name – Sapient GmbH Deutschland Partner URL – www.sapient.com

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  • Silverlight Cream Monday WP7 App Review # 2

    - by Dave Campbell
    Today's Review (alphabetic order): GooNews, Grocery Shopping List, Need for Speed, SurfCube, and United Nations News. I'm a day late if these are going to be 'Monday' posts, but there are lots of apps, lots of goodness, and lots of email, so I might try to do 2 a week, we'll see. So once again I've got a small review of 5 apps that are either on my phone or have been. Disclaimers at the end. In this Issue:   GooNews is a very cool app from Shawn Wildermuth (AgiliTrain). I don't know if he uses this as a demo during his instruction, but it definitely serves a purpose... wanna pick up the top news items from Google on a never-ending basis? ... this is it. You can add your own keyword searches, and send stories to InstaPaper or share via email. I like this because it brings me the news quickly and updated, and works great. GooNews is by AgiliTrain and is Free This was a request by the author, and actually surprised me. I'm a big one for lists, but I would have just done a OneNote list to SkyDrive and to my phone. This app is a lot more than that, but will take you some setup to make it be 'yours'. For obvious reasons, there are no unit prices on things, so you have to set that up to get some idea of the cost of what you're shopping for. But if you do that, you'll get a nice total. Lots of thought went into the various categories and you can add your own. There's a bit of animation on the category selection that's nice. He seems to have covered all the bases necessary to use this, even shopping 'plans' that can be saved, and emailing of lists. As I said, I'm more of a raw list person, but if you take the time to set this up, it should work very nicely for you. Grocery Shopping List is by Grocery Shopper and is $0.99 ($1.99 after Feb 1) with a free trial. This was my 2nd commercial game I bought, and the one I've played the most. I ran the trial, thought it worked great, and bought it. I've had a lot of fun with this... there's no gas pedal.. your foot is in the carbeurator from the GO!, and unless you wanna tap the screen and brake like a little girl, just hang onto the steering wheel (the phone), and guide your way through. Hours of fun and challenges here. I like this because it's got some challenge to it, and the cars seem to be very realistic in their reactions. Need for Speed Undercover is by Electronic Arts is $4.99 and has a free trial. SurfCube Browser is another app by the folks that did the GuitarTuner I reviewed on Monday. You have to see SurfCube to believe it. You've probably seen the YouTube video, if not check SilverlightCream number 1017. The app works very solid, and just as the video demonstrates. I downloaded and tried this, and it immediately did 2 things: bought it, and pinned it to my start page. I like this because it's fun to work with, and it works great as a browser. I'm about *this* close to replacing the IE tile on my front page with SurfCube. SurfCube Browser is by Kinabalu Innovation Limited and is $1.99 and has a free trial. Coming in with another News app is United Nations News by Justin Angel. This is definitely a news aggregator for 'grown ups'... news, photos, videos, and radio broadcsts from the international community all in one very slick app. This is an amazingly well thought-out and complete app. Even better yet, Justin has the code on CodePlex. A very well-done International news aggregator. United Nations News is by Justin Angel and is Free. A few disclaimers: Feel free to write me about your app and tell me about it. While it would be very cool to receive a whole bunch of xap files to review, at this point, for technical reasons, I'm unable to side-load my device. Since I plan on only doing this one day a week (twice if I find time), and only 5, I may never get caught up, so if you send me some info, be patient. Re: games ... remember I'm old... I'm from the era of Colossal Cave and Zork. Duke-Nukem 2D and Captain Comic were awesome. I don't own an XBOX or any other game system, so take game reviews from my perspective -- who knows, it may be refreshing :) I won't pay for an app or game just to try it. If you expect me to test-drive your app, it's going to have to have a Free Trial. I'm still playing with the format, comments are welcome. I decided I should alphabetize the list today... so there's no order implied Let me know what you think of the idea of doing reviews, or the layout/whatever, and Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Agile Testing Days 2012 – My First Conference!

    - by Chris George
    I’d like to give you a bit of background first… so please bear with me! In 1996, whilst studying for my final year of my degree, I applied for a job as a C++ Developer at a small software house in Hertfordshire  After bodging up the technical part of the interview I didn’t get the job, but was offered a position as a QA Engineer instead. The role sounded intriguing and the pay was pretty good so in the absence of anything else I took it. Here began my career in the world of software testing! Back then, testing/QA was often an afterthought, something that was bolted on to the development process and very much a second class citizen. Test automation was rare, and tools were basic or non-existent! The internet was just starting to take off, and whilst there might have been testing communities and resources, we were certainly not exposed to any of them. After 8 years I moved to another small company, and again didn’t find myself exposed to any of the changes that were happening in the industry. It wasn’t until I joined Red Gate in 2008 that my view of testing and software development as a whole started to expand. But it took a further 4 years for my view of testing to be totally blown open, and so the story really begins… In May 2012 I was fortunate to land the role of Head of Test Engineering. Soon after, I received an email with details for the “Agile Testi However, in my new role, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and at least go to one conference. Perhaps I could get some new ideas to supplement and support some of the ideas I already had.ng Days” conference in Potsdam, Germany. I looked over the suggested programme and some of the talks peeked my interest. For numerous reasons I’d shied away from attending conferences in the past, one of the main ones being that I didn’t see much benefit in attending loads of talks when I could just read about stuff like that on the internet. So, on the 18th November 2012, myself and three other Red Gaters boarded a plane at Heathrow bound for Potsdam, Germany to attend Agile Testing Days 2012. Tutorial Day – “Software Testing Reloaded” We chose to do the tutorials on the 19th, I chose the one titled “Software Testing Reloaded – So you wanna actually DO something? We’ve got just the workshop for you. Now with even less powerpoint!”. With such a concise and serious title I just had to see what it was about! I nervously entered the room to be greeted by tables, chairs etc all over the place, not set out and frankly in one hell of a mess! There were a few people in there playing a game with dice. Okaaaay… this is going to be a long day! Actually the dice game was an exercise in deduction and simplification… I found it very interesting and is certainly something I’ll be using at work as a training exercise! (I won’t explain the game here cause I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag…) The tutorial consisted of several games, exploring different aspects of testing. They were all practical yet required a fair amount of thin king. Matt Heusser and Pete Walen were running the tutorial, and presented it in a very relaxed and light-hearted manner. It was really my first experience of working in small teams with testers from very different backgrounds, and it was really enjoyable. Matt & Pete were very approachable and offered advice where required whilst still making you work for the answers! One of the tasks was to devise several strategies for testing some electronic dice. The premise was that a Vegas casino wanted to use the dice to appeal to the twenty-somethings interested in tech, but needed assurance that they were as reliable and random as traditional dice. This was a very interesting and challenging exercise that forced us to challenge various assumptions, determine/clarify requirements but most of all it was frustrating because the dice made a very very irritating beeping noise. Multiple that by at least 12 dice and I was dreaming about them all that night!! Some of the main takeaways that were brilliantly demonstrated through the games were not to make assumptions, challenge requirements, and have fun testing! The tutorial lasted the whole day, but to be honest the day went very quickly! My introduction into the conference experience started very well indeed, and I would talk to both Matt and Pete several times during the 4 days. Days 1,2 & 3 will be coming soon…  

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  • A Knights Tale

    - by Phil Factor
    There are so many lessons to be learned from the story of Knight Capital losing nearly half a billion dollars as a result of a deployment gone wrong. The Knight Capital Group (KCG N) was an American global financial services firm engaging in market making, electronic execution, and institutional sales and trading. According to the recent order (File No.3.15570) against Knight Capital by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission?, Knight had, for many years used some software which broke up incoming “parent” orders into smaller “child” orders that were then transmitted to various exchanges or trading venues for execution. A tracking ‘cumulative quantity’ function counted the number of ‘child’ orders and stopped the process once the total of child orders matched the ‘parent’ and so the parent order had been completed. Back in the mists of time, some code had been added to it  which was excuted if a particular flag was set. It was called ‘power peg’ and seems to have had a similar design and purpose, but, one guesses, would have shared the same tracking function. This code had been abandoned in 2003, but never deleted. In 2005, The tracking function was moved to an earlier point in the main process. It would seem from the account that, from that point, had that flag ever been set, the old ‘Power Peg’ would have been executed like Godzilla bursting from the ice, making child orders without limit without any tracking function. It wasn’t, presumably because the software that set the flag was removed. In 2012, nearly a decade after ‘Power Peg’ was abandoned, Knight prepared a new module to their software to cope with the imminent Retail Liquidity Program (RLP) for the New York Stock Exchange. By this time, the flag had remained unused and someone made the fateful decision to reuse it, and replace the old ‘power peg’ code with this new RLP code. Had the two actions been done together in a single automated deployment, and the new deployment tested, all would have been well. It wasn’t. To quote… “Beginning on July 27, 2012, Knight deployed the new RLP code in SMARS in stages by placing it on a limited number of servers in SMARS on successive days. During the deployment of the new code, however, one of Knight’s technicians did not copy the new code to one of the eight SMARS computer servers. Knight did not have a second technician review this deployment and no one at Knight realized that the Power Peg code had not been removed from the eighth server, nor the new RLP code added. Knight had no written procedures that required such a review.” (para 15) “On August 1, Knight received orders from broker-dealers whose customers were eligible to participate in the RLP. The seven servers that received the new code processed these orders correctly. However, orders sent with the repurposed flag to the eighth server triggered the defective Power Peg code still present on that server. As a result, this server began sending child orders to certain trading centers for execution. Because the cumulative quantity function had been moved, this server continuously sent child orders, in rapid sequence, for each incoming parent order without regard to the number of share executions Knight had already received from trading centers. Although one part of Knight’s order handling system recognized that the parent orders had been filled, this information was not communicated to SMARS.” (para 16) SMARS routed millions of orders into the market over a 45-minute period, and obtained over 4 million executions in 154 stocks for more than 397 million shares. By the time that Knight stopped sending the orders, Knight had assumed a net long position in 80 stocks of approximately $3.5 billion and a net short position in 74 stocks of approximately $3.15 billion. Knight’s shares dropped more than 20% after traders saw extreme volume spikes in a number of stocks, including preferred shares of Wells Fargo (JWF) and semiconductor company Spansion (CODE). Both stocks, which see roughly 100,000 trade per day, had changed hands more than 4 million times by late morning. Ultimately, Knight lost over $460 million from this wild 45 minutes of trading. Obviously, I’m interested in all this because, at one time, I used to write trading systems for the City of London. Obviously, the US SEC is in a far better position than any of us to work out the failings of Knight’s IT department, and the report makes for painful reading. I can’t help observing, though, that even with the breathtaking mistakes all along the way, that a robust automated deployment process that was ‘all-or-nothing’, and tested from soup to nuts would have prevented the disaster. The report reads like a Greek Tragedy. All the way along one wants to shout ‘No! not that way!’ and ‘Aargh! Don’t do it!’. As the tragedy unfolds, the audience weeps for the players, trapped by a cruel fate. All application development and deployment requires defense in depth. All IT goes wrong occasionally, but if there is a culture of defensive programming throughout, the consequences are usually containable. For financial systems, these defenses are required by statute, and ignored only by the foolish. Knight’s mistakes weren’t made by just one hapless sysadmin, but were progressive errors by an  IT culture spanning at least ten years.  One can spell these out, but I think they’re obvious. One can only hope that the industry studies what happened in detail, learns from the mistakes, and draws the right conclusions.

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  • Nginx and client certificates from hierarchical OpenSSL-based certification authorities

    - by Fmy Oen
    I'm trying to set up root certification authority, subordinate certification authority and to generate the client certificates signed by any of this CA that nginx 0.7.67 on Debian Squeeze will accept. My problem is that root CA signed client certificate works fine while subordinate CA signed one results in "400 Bad Request. The SSL certificate error". Step 1: nginx virtual host configuration: server { server_name test.local; access_log /var/log/nginx/test.access.log; listen 443 default ssl; keepalive_timeout 70; ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1; ssl_ciphers AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:RC4-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA:RC4-MD5; ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/server.crt; ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/server.key; ssl_client_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/client.pem; ssl_verify_client on; ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m; ssl_session_timeout 5m; location / { proxy_pass http://testsite.local/; } } Step 2: PKI infrastructure organization for both root and subordinate CA (based on this article): # mkdir ~/pki && cd ~/pki # mkdir rootCA subCA # cp -v /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf rootCA/ # cd rootCA/ # mkdir certs private crl newcerts; touch serial; echo 01 > serial; touch index.txt; touch crlnumber; echo 01 > crlnumber # cp -Rvp * ../subCA/ Almost no changes was made to rootCA/openssl.cnf: [ CA_default ] dir = . # Where everything is kept ... certificate = $dir/certs/rootca.crt # The CA certificate ... private_key = $dir/private/rootca.key # The private key and to subCA/openssl.cnf: [ CA_default ] dir = . # Where everything is kept ... certificate = $dir/certs/subca.crt # The CA certificate ... private_key = $dir/private/subca.key # The private key Step 3: Self-signed root CA certificate generation: # openssl genrsa -out ./private/rootca.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -x509 -new -key ./private/rootca.key -out certs/rootca.crt -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/rootca.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:rootca Email Address []: Step 4: Subordinate CA certificate generation: # cd ../subCA # openssl genrsa -out ./private/subca.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -new -key ./private/subca.key -out subca.csr -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/subca.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:subca Email Address []: Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []: An optional company name []: Step 5: Subordinate CA certificate signing by root CA certificate: # cd ../rootCA/ # openssl ca -in ../subCA/subca.csr -extensions v3_ca -config openssl.cnf Using configuration from openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/rootca.key: Check that the request matches the signature Signature ok Certificate Details: Serial Number: 1 (0x1) Validity Not Before: Feb 4 10:49:43 2013 GMT Not After : Feb 4 10:49:43 2014 GMT Subject: countryName = AU stateOrProvinceName = Some-State organizationName = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd commonName = subca X509v3 extensions: X509v3 Subject Key Identifier: C9:E2:AC:31:53:81:86:3F:CD:F8:3D:47:10:FC:E5:8E:C2:DA:A9:20 X509v3 Authority Key Identifier: keyid:E9:50:E6:BF:57:03:EA:6E:8F:21:23:86:BB:44:3D:9F:8F:4A:8B:F2 DirName:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca serial:9F:FB:56:66:8D:D3:8F:11 X509v3 Basic Constraints: CA:TRUE Certificate is to be certified until Feb 4 10:49:43 2014 GMT (365 days) Sign the certificate? [y/n]:y 1 out of 1 certificate requests certified, commit? [y/n]y ... # cd ../subCA/ # cp -v ../rootCA/newcerts/01.pem certs/subca.crt Step 6: Server certificate generation and signing by root CA (for nginx virtual host): # cd ../rootCA # openssl genrsa -out ./private/server.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -new -key ./private/server.key -out server.csr -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/server.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:test.local Email Address []: Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []: An optional company name []: # openssl ca -in server.csr -out certs/server.crt -config openssl.cnf Step 7: Client #1 certificate generation and signing by root CA: # openssl genrsa -out ./private/client1.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -new -key ./private/client1.key -out client1.csr -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/client1.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:Client #1 Email Address []: Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []: An optional company name []: # openssl ca -in client1.csr -out certs/client1.crt -config openssl.cnf Step 8: Client #1 certificate converting to PKCS12 format: # openssl pkcs12 -export -out certs/client1.p12 -inkey private/client1.key -in certs/client1.crt -certfile certs/rootca.crt Step 9: Client #2 certificate generation and signing by subordinate CA: # cd ../subCA/ # openssl genrsa -out ./private/client2.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -new -key ./private/client2.key -out client2.csr -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/client2.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:Client #2 Email Address []: Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []: An optional company name []: # openssl ca -in client2.csr -out certs/client2.crt -config openssl.cnf Step 10: Client #2 certificate converting to PKCS12 format: # openssl pkcs12 -export -out certs/client2.p12 -inkey private/client2.key -in certs/client2.crt -certfile certs/subca.crt Step 11: Passing server certificate and private key to nginx (performed with OS superuser privileges): # cd ../rootCA/ # cp -v certs/server.crt /etc/nginx/ssl/ # cp -v private/server.key /etc/nginx/ssl/ Step 12: Passing root and subordinate CA certificates to nginx (performed with OS superuser privileges): # cat certs/rootca.crt > /etc/nginx/ssl/client.pem # cat ../subCA/certs/subca.crt >> /etc/nginx/ssl/client.pem client.pem file look like this: # cat /etc/nginx/ssl/client.pem -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIID6TCCAtGgAwIBAgIJAJ/7VmaN048RMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAMFYxCzAJBgNV BAYTAkFVMRMwEQYDVQQIEwpTb21lLVN0YXRlMSEwHwYDVQQKExhJbnRlcm5ldCBX aWRnaXRzIFB0eSBMdGQxDzANBgNVBAMTBnJvb3RjYTAeFw0xMzAyMDQxMDM1NTda ... -----END CERTIFICATE----- Certificate: Data: Version: 3 (0x2) Serial Number: 1 (0x1) ... -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIID4DCCAsigAwIBAgIBATANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADBWMQswCQYDVQQGEwJBVTET MBEGA1UECBMKU29tZS1TdGF0ZTEhMB8GA1UEChMYSW50ZXJuZXQgV2lkZ2l0cyBQ dHkgTHRkMQ8wDQYDVQQDEwZyb290Y2EwHhcNMTMwMjA0MTA0OTQzWhcNMTQwMjA0 ... -----END CERTIFICATE----- It looks like everything is working fine: # service nginx reload # Reloading nginx configuration: Enter PEM pass phrase: # nginx. # Step 13: Installing *.p12 certificates in browser (Firefox in my case) gives the problem I've mentioned above. Client #1 = 200 OK, Client #2 = 400 Bad request/The SSL certificate error. Any ideas what should I do? Update 1: Results of SSL connection test attempts: # openssl s_client -connect test.local:443 -CAfile ~/pki/rootCA/certs/rootca.crt -cert ~/pki/rootCA/certs/client1.crt -key ~/pki/rootCA/private/client1.key -showcerts Enter pass phrase for tmp/testcert/client1.key: CONNECTED(00000003) depth=1 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = rootca verify return:1 depth=0 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = test.local verify return:1 --- Certificate chain 0 s:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=test.local i:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIIDpjCCAo6gAwIBAgIBAjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADBWMQswCQYDVQQGEwJBVTET MBEGA1UECBMKU29tZS1TdGF0ZTEhMB8GA1UEChMYSW50ZXJuZXQgV2lkZ2l0cyBQ dHkgTHRkMQ8wDQYDVQQDEwZyb290Y2EwHhcNMTMwMjA0MTEwNjAzWhcNMTQwMjA0 ... -----END CERTIFICATE----- 1 s:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca i:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIID6TCCAtGgAwIBAgIJAJ/7VmaN048RMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAMFYxCzAJBgNV BAYTAkFVMRMwEQYDVQQIEwpTb21lLVN0YXRlMSEwHwYDVQQKExhJbnRlcm5ldCBX aWRnaXRzIFB0eSBMdGQxDzANBgNVBAMTBnJvb3RjYTAeFw0xMzAyMDQxMDM1NTda ... -----END CERTIFICATE----- --- Server certificate subject=/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=test.local issuer=/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca --- Acceptable client certificate CA names /C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca /C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=subca --- SSL handshake has read 3395 bytes and written 2779 bytes --- New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is AES256-SHA Server public key is 2048 bit Secure Renegotiation IS supported Compression: zlib compression Expansion: zlib compression SSL-Session: Protocol : TLSv1 Cipher : AES256-SHA Session-ID: 15BFC2029691262542FAE95A48078305E76EEE7D586400F8C4F7C516B0F9D967 Session-ID-ctx: Master-Key: 23246CF166E8F3900793F0A2561879E5DB07291F32E99591BA1CF53E6229491FEAE6858BFC9AACAF271D9C3706F139C7 Key-Arg : None PSK identity: None PSK identity hint: None SRP username: None TLS session ticket: 0000 - c2 5e 1d d2 b5 6d 40 23-b2 40 89 e4 35 75 70 07 .^...m@#[email protected]. 0010 - 1b bb 2b e6 e0 b5 ab 10-10 bf 46 6e aa 67 7f 58 ..+.......Fn.g.X 0020 - cf 0e 65 a4 67 5a 15 ba-aa 93 4e dd 3d 6e 73 4c ..e.gZ....N.=nsL 0030 - c5 56 f6 06 24 0f 48 e6-38 36 de f1 b5 31 c5 86 .V..$.H.86...1.. ... 0440 - 4c 53 39 e3 92 84 d2 d0-e5 e2 f5 8a 6a a8 86 b1 LS9.........j... Compression: 1 (zlib compression) Start Time: 1359989684 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 0 (ok) --- Everything seems fine with Client #2 and root CA certificate but request returns 400 Bad Request error: # openssl s_client -connect test.local:443 -CAfile ~/pki/rootCA/certs/rootca.crt -cert ~/pki/subCA/certs/client2.crt -key ~/pki/subCA/private/client2.key -showcerts Enter pass phrase for tmp/testcert/client2.key: CONNECTED(00000003) depth=1 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = rootca verify return:1 depth=0 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = test.local verify return:1 ... Compression: 1 (zlib compression) Start Time: 1359989989 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 0 (ok) --- GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request Server: nginx/0.7.67 Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:00:43 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 231 Connection: close <html> <head><title>400 The SSL certificate error</title></head> <body bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center> <center>The SSL certificate error</center> <hr><center>nginx/0.7.67</center> </body> </html> closed Verification fails with Client #2 certificate and subordinate CA certificate: # openssl s_client -connect test.local:443 -CAfile ~/pki/subCA/certs/subca.crt -cert ~/pki/subCA/certs/client2.crt -key ~/pki/subCA/private/client2.key -showcerts Enter pass phrase for tmp/testcert/client2.key: CONNECTED(00000003) depth=1 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = rootca verify error:num=19:self signed certificate in certificate chain verify return:0 ... Compression: 1 (zlib compression) Start Time: 1359990354 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 19 (self signed certificate in certificate chain) --- GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request ... Still getting 400 Bad Request error with concatenated CA certificates and Client #2 (but still everything ok with Client #1): # cat certs/rootca.crt ../subCA/certs/subca.crt > certs/concatenatedca.crt # openssl s_client -connect test.local:443 -CAfile ~/pki/rootCA/certs/concatenatedca.crt -cert ~/pki/subCA/certs/client2.crt -key ~/pki/subCA/private/client2.key -showcerts Enter pass phrase for tmp/testcert/client2.key: CONNECTED(00000003) depth=1 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = rootca verify return:1 depth=0 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = test.local verify return:1 --- ... Compression: 1 (zlib compression) Start Time: 1359990772 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 0 (ok) --- GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request ... Update 2: I've managed to recompile nginx with enabled debug. Here is the part of successfull conection by Client #1 track: 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 accept: <MY IP ADDRESS> fd:3 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 event timer add: 3: 60000:2856497512 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 kevent set event: 3: ft:-1 fl:0025 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 malloc: 28805200:660 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 malloc: 28834400:1024 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 posix_memalign: 28860000:4096 @16 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 http check ssl handshake 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 https ssl handshake: 0x16 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL server name: "test.local" 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_do_handshake: -1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL handshake handler: 0 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 verify:1, error:0, depth:1, subject:"/C=AU /ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca" 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 verify:1, error:0, depth:0, subject:"/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=Client #1",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca" 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_do_handshake: 1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL: TLSv1, cipher: "AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1" 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 http process request line 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_read: -1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 http process request line 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_read: 1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_read: 524 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_read: -1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 http request line: "GET / HTTP/1.1" And here is the part of unsuccessfull conection by Client #2 track: 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 accept: <MY_IP_ADDRESS> fd:3 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 event timer add: 3: 60000:2855488975 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 kevent set event: 3: ft:-1 fl:0025 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 malloc: 28805200:660 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 malloc: 28834400:1024 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 posix_memalign: 28860000:4096 @16 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 http check ssl handshake 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 https ssl handshake: 0x16 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL server name: "test.local" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_do_handshake: -1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL handshake handler: 0 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_do_handshake: -1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL handshake handler: 0 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 verify:0, error:20, depth:1, subject:"/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=subca",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 verify:0, error:27, depth:1, subject:"/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=subca",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 verify:1, error:27, depth:0, subject:"/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=Client #2",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=subca" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_do_handshake: 1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL: TLSv1, cipher: "AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 http process request line 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_read: 1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_read: 524 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_read: -1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 http request line: "GET / HTTP/1.1" So I'm getting OpenSSL error #20 and then #27. According to verify documentation: 20 X509_V_ERR_UNABLE_TO_GET_ISSUER_CERT_LOCALLY: unable to get local issuer certificate the issuer certificate could not be found: this occurs if the issuer certificate of an untrusted certificate cannot be found. 27 X509_V_ERR_CERT_UNTRUSTED: certificate not trusted the root CA is not marked as trusted for the specified purpose.

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  • PC hangs and reboots from time to time

    - by Bevor
    Hello, I have a very strange problem: Since I have my new PC, I have always had problems with it. From time to time the computer freezes for some seconds and suddendly reboots by itself. I've had this problem since Ubuntu 9.10. The same with 10.04 and 10.10. That's why I don't think it's a software failure because the problem persist too long. It doesn't have anything to do with what I'm doing at this time. Sometimes I listen to music, sometimes I only use Firefox, sometimes I'm running 2 or 3 VMs, sometimes I watch DVD. So it's not isolatable. I could freeze once a day or once a week. I put the PC to the vendor twice(!). The first time they changed my power supply but the problem persisted. The second time they told me that they made some heavy performance tests 50 hours long but they didn't find anything. (How can that be that I have daily freezes with normal usage). The vendor didn't check the hard discs because they used their own disc with Windows. (So they never checked the Linux installation). Yesterday I made some intensive hard disc scans with "SMART" but no errors were found. I ran memtest for 3 times but no errors found. I already had this problem in my old flat, so I doubt that I has something to do with current fluctuation. I already tried another electrical socket and changed to connector strip but the problem persists. At the moment I removed 2 of the RAMs (2x 2GB). In all I have 6GB, 2x2GB and 2x1GB. Could this difference maybe be a problem? Here is a list of my components. I hope that anybody find something I didn't think about yet. And here a list of my components: 1x AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, 3,4Ghz, Quad Core, S-AM3, Boxed 2x DDR3-RAM 2048MB, PC3-1333 Mhz, CL9, Kingston ValueRAM 2x DDR3-RAM 1024MB, PC3-1333 Mhz, CL9, Kingston ValueRAM 2x SATA II Seagate Barracuda 7200.12, 1TB 32MB Cache = RAID 1 1x DVD ROM SATA LG DH16NSR, 16x/52x 1x DVD-+R/-+RW SATA LG GH-22NS50 1x Cardreader 18in1 1x PCI-E 2.0 GeForce GTS 250, Retail, 1024MB 1x Power Supply ATX 400 Watt, CHIEFTEC APS-400S, 80 Plus 1x Network card PCI Intel PRO/1000GT 10/100/1000 MBit 1x Mainboard Socket-AM3 ASUS M4A79XTD EVO, ATX lshw: description: Desktop Computer product: System Product Name vendor: System manufacturer version: System Version serial: System Serial Number width: 64 bits capabilities: smbios-2.5 dmi-2.5 vsyscall64 vsyscall32 configuration: boot=normal chassis=desktop uuid=80E4001E-8C00-002C-AA59-E0CB4EBAC29A *-core description: Motherboard product: M4A79XTD EVO vendor: ASUSTeK Computer INC. physical id: 0 version: Rev X.0X serial: MT709CK11101196 slot: To Be Filled By O.E.M. *-firmware description: BIOS vendor: American Megatrends Inc. physical id: 0 version: 0704 (11/25/2009) size: 64KiB capacity: 960KiB capabilities: isa pci pnp apm upgrade shadowing escd cdboot bootselect socketedrom edd int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int13floppy2880 int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer int10video acpi usb ls120boot zipboot biosbootspecification *-cpu description: CPU product: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 965 Processor vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] physical id: 4 bus info: cpu@0 version: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 965 Processor serial: To Be Filled By O.E.M. slot: AM3 size: 800MHz capacity: 3400MHz width: 64 bits clock: 200MHz capabilities: fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp x86-64 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc rep_good nonstop_tsc extd_apicid pni monitor cx16 popcnt lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch osvw ibs skinit wdt npt lbrv svm_lock nrip_save cpufreq *-cache:0 description: L1 cache physical id: 5 slot: L1-Cache size: 512KiB capacity: 512KiB capabilities: pipeline-burst internal varies data *-cache:1 description: L2 cache physical id: 6 slot: L2-Cache size: 2MiB capacity: 2MiB capabilities: pipeline-burst internal varies unified *-cache:2 description: L3 cache physical id: 7 slot: L3-Cache size: 6MiB capacity: 6MiB capabilities: pipeline-burst internal varies unified *-memory description: System Memory physical id: 36 slot: System board or motherboard size: 2GiB *-bank:0 description: DIMM Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: ModulePartNumber00 vendor: Manufacturer00 physical id: 0 serial: SerNum00 slot: DIMM0 size: 1GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:1 description: DIMM Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: ModulePartNumber01 vendor: Manufacturer01 physical id: 1 serial: SerNum01 slot: DIMM1 size: 1GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:2 description: DIMM [empty] product: ModulePartNumber02 vendor: Manufacturer02 physical id: 2 serial: SerNum02 slot: DIMM2 *-bank:3 description: DIMM [empty] product: ModulePartNumber03 vendor: Manufacturer03 physical id: 3 serial: SerNum03 slot: DIMM3 *-pci:0 description: Host bridge product: RD780 Northbridge only dual slot PCI-e_GFX and HT1 K8 part vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 100 bus info: pci@0000:00:00.0 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz *-pci:0 description: PCI bridge product: RD790 PCI to PCI bridge (external gfx0 port A) vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 2 bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pm pciexpress msi ht normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:40 ioport:a000(size=4096) memory:f8000000-fbbfffff ioport:d0000000(size=268435456) *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: G92 [GeForce GTS 250] vendor: nVidia Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: a2 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0 resources: irq:18 memory:fa000000-faffffff memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:f8000000-f9ffffff ioport:ac00(size=128) memory:fbbe0000-fbbfffff *-pci:1 description: PCI bridge product: RD790 PCI to PCI bridge (PCI express gpp port C) vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 6 bus info: pci@0000:00:06.0 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pm pciexpress msi ht normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:41 ioport:b000(size=4096) memory:fbc00000-fbcfffff ioport:f6f00000(size=1048576) *-network description: Ethernet interface product: RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 03 serial: e0:cb:4e:ba:c2:9a size: 10MB/s capacity: 1GB/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=half latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=MII speed=10MB/s resources: irq:45 ioport:b800(size=256) memory:f6fff000-f6ffffff memory:f6ff8000-f6ffbfff memory:fbcf0000-fbcfffff *-pci:2 description: PCI bridge product: RD790 PCI to PCI bridge (PCI express gpp port D) vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 7 bus info: pci@0000:00:07.0 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pm pciexpress msi ht normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:42 ioport:c000(size=4096) memory:fbd00000-fbdfffff *-firewire description: FireWire (IEEE 1394) product: VT6315 Series Firewire Controller vendor: VIA Technologies, Inc. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress ohci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=firewire_ohci latency=0 resources: irq:19 memory:fbdff800-fbdfffff ioport:c800(size=256) *-pci:3 description: PCI bridge product: RD790 PCI to PCI bridge (PCI express gpp port E) vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 9 bus info: pci@0000:00:09.0 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pm pciexpress msi ht normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:43 ioport:d000(size=4096) memory:fbe00000-fbefffff *-ide description: IDE interface product: 88SE6121 SATA II Controller vendor: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:04:00.0 version: b2 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: ide pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pata_marvell latency=0 resources: irq:17 ioport:dc00(size=8) ioport:d880(size=4) ioport:d800(size=8) ioport:d480(size=4) ioport:d400(size=16) memory:fbeffc00-fbefffff *-storage description: SATA controller product: SB700/SB800 SATA Controller [IDE mode] vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 11 bus info: pci@0000:00:11.0 logical name: scsi0 logical name: scsi2 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: storage msi ahci_1.0 bus_master cap_list emulated configuration: driver=ahci latency=64 resources: irq:44 ioport:9000(size=8) ioport:8000(size=4) ioport:7000(size=8) ioport:6000(size=4) ioport:5000(size=16) memory:f7fffc00-f7ffffff *-disk:0 description: ATA Disk product: ST31000528AS vendor: Seagate physical id: 0 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: CC38 serial: 9VP3WD9Z size: 931GiB (1TB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=000ad206 *-volume:0 UNCLAIMED description: Linux filesystem partition vendor: Linux physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1 version: 1.0 serial: 81839235-21ea-4853-90a4-814779f49000 size: 972MiB capacity: 972MiB capabilities: primary ext2 initialized configuration: filesystem=ext2 modified=2010-12-06 18:32:58 mounted=2010-11-01 07:05:10 state=unknown *-volume:1 UNCLAIMED description: Linux swap volume physical id: 2 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,2 version: 1 serial: 22b881d5-6f5c-484d-94e8-e231896fa91b size: 486MiB capacity: 486MiB capabilities: primary nofs swap initialized configuration: filesystem=swap pagesize=4096 *-volume:2 UNCLAIMED description: EXT3 volume vendor: Linux physical id: 3 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,3 version: 1.0 serial: ad5b0daf-11e8-4f8f-8598-4e89da9c0d84 size: 47GiB capacity: 47GiB capabilities: primary journaled extended_attributes large_files recover ext3 ext2 initialized configuration: created=2010-02-16 20:42:29 filesystem=ext3 modified=2010-11-29 17:02:34 mounted=2010-12-06 18:32:50 state=clean *-volume:3 UNCLAIMED description: Extended partition physical id: 4 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,4 size: 882GiB capacity: 882GiB capabilities: primary extended partitioned partitioned:extended *-logicalvolume UNCLAIMED description: Linux filesystem partition physical id: 5 capacity: 882GiB *-disk:1 description: ATA Disk product: ST31000528AS vendor: Seagate physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@2:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdb version: CC38 serial: 9VP3SCPF size: 931GiB (1TB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=000ad206 *-volume:0 UNCLAIMED description: Linux filesystem partition vendor: Linux physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@2:0.0.0,1 version: 1.0 serial: 81839235-21ea-4853-90a4-814779f49000 size: 972MiB capacity: 972MiB capabilities: primary ext2 initialized configuration: filesystem=ext2 modified=2010-12-06 18:32:58 mounted=2010-11-01 07:05:10 state=unknown *-volume:1 UNCLAIMED description: Linux swap volume physical id: 2 bus info: scsi@2:0.0.0,2 version: 1 serial: 22b881d5-6f5c-484d-94e8-e231896fa91b size: 486MiB capacity: 486MiB capabilities: primary nofs swap initialized configuration: filesystem=swap pagesize=4096 *-volume:2 UNCLAIMED description: EXT3 volume vendor: Linux physical id: 3 bus info: scsi@2:0.0.0,3 version: 1.0 serial: ad5b0daf-11e8-4f8f-8598-4e89da9c0d84 size: 47GiB capacity: 47GiB capabilities: primary journaled extended_attributes large_files recover ext3 ext2 initialized configuration: created=2010-02-16 20:42:29 filesystem=ext3 modified=2010-11-29 17:02:34 mounted=2010-12-06 18:32:50 state=clean *-volume:3 UNCLAIMED description: Extended partition physical id: 4 bus info: scsi@2:0.0.0,4 size: 882GiB capacity: 882GiB capabilities: primary extended partitioned partitioned:extended *-logicalvolume UNCLAIMED description: Linux filesystem partition physical id: 5 capacity: 882GiB *-usb:0 description: USB Controller product: SB700/SB800 USB OHCI0 Controller vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 12 bus info: pci@0000:00:12.0 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: ohci bus_master configuration: driver=ohci_hcd latency=64 resources: irq:16 memory:f7ffd000-f7ffdfff *-usb:1 description: USB Controller product: SB700 USB OHCI1 Controller vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 12.1 bus info: pci@0000:00:12.1 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: ohci bus_master configuration: driver=ohci_hcd latency=64 resources: irq:16 memory:f7ffe000-f7ffefff *-usb:2 description: USB Controller product: SB700/SB800 USB EHCI Controller vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 12.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:12.2 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci_hcd latency=64 resources: irq:17 memory:f7fff800-f7fff8ff *-usb:3 description: USB Controller product: SB700/SB800 USB OHCI0 Controller vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 13 bus info: pci@0000:00:13.0 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: ohci bus_master configuration: driver=ohci_hcd latency=64 resources: irq:18 memory:f7ffb000-f7ffbfff *-usb:4 description: USB Controller product: SB700 USB OHCI1 Controller vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 13.1 bus info: pci@0000:00:13.1 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: ohci bus_master configuration: driver=ohci_hcd latency=64 resources: irq:18 memory:f7ffc000-f7ffcfff *-usb:5 description: USB Controller product: SB700/SB800 USB EHCI Controller vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 13.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:13.2 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci_hcd latency=64 resources: irq:19 memory:f7fff400-f7fff4ff *-serial UNCLAIMED description: SMBus product: SBx00 SMBus Controller vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 14 bus info: pci@0000:00:14.0 version: 3c width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: ht cap_list configuration: latency=0 *-ide description: IDE interface product: SB700/SB800 IDE Controller vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 14.1 bus info: pci@0000:00:14.1 logical name: scsi5 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: ide msi bus_master cap_list emulated configuration: driver=pata_atiixp latency=64 resources: irq:16 ioport:1f0(size=8) ioport:3f6 ioport:170(size=8) ioport:376 ioport:ff00(size=16) *-cdrom:0 description: DVD reader product: DVDROM DH16NS30 vendor: HL-DT-ST physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@5:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/cdrom1 logical name: /dev/dvd1 logical name: /dev/scd0 logical name: /dev/sr0 version: 1.00 capabilities: removable audio dvd configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc *-cdrom:1 description: DVD-RAM writer product: DVDRAM GH22NS50 vendor: HL-DT-ST physical id: 0.1.0 bus info: scsi@5:0.1.0 logical name: /dev/cdrom logical name: /dev/cdrw logical name: /dev/dvd logical name: /dev/dvdrw logical name: /dev/scd1 logical name: /dev/sr1 version: TN02 capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc *-multimedia description: Audio device product: SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 14.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:14.2 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=HDA Intel latency=64 resources: irq:16 memory:f7ff4000-f7ff7fff *-isa description: ISA bridge product: SB700/SB800 LPC host controller vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 14.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:14.3 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: isa bus_master configuration: latency=0 *-pci:4 description: PCI bridge product: SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 14.4 bus info: pci@0000:00:14.4 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: pci subtractive_decode bus_master resources: ioport:e000(size=4096) memory:fbf00000-fbffffff *-network description: Ethernet interface product: 82541PI Gigabit Ethernet Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 5 bus info: pci@0000:05:05.0 logical name: eth1 version: 05 serial: 00:1b:21:56:f3:60 size: 100MB/s capacity: 1GB/s width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: pm pcix bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=e1000 driverversion=7.3.21-k6-NAPI duplex=full firmware=N/A ip=192.168.1.2 latency=64 link=yes mingnt=255 multicast=yes port=twisted pair speed=100MB/s resources: irq:20 memory:fbfe0000-fbffffff memory:fbfc0000-fbfdffff ioport:ec00(size=64) memory:fbfa0000-fbfbffff *-usb:6 description: USB Controller product: SB700/SB800 USB OHCI2 Controller vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 14.5 bus info: pci@0000:00:14.5 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: ohci bus_master configuration: driver=ohci_hcd latency=64 resources: irq:18 memory:f7ffa000-f7ffafff *-pci:1 description: Host bridge product: Family 10h Processor HyperTransport Configuration vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] physical id: 101 bus info: pci@0000:00:18.0 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:2 description: Host bridge product: Family 10h Processor Address Map vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] physical id: 102 bus info: pci@0000:00:18.1 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:3 description: Host bridge product: Family 10h Processor DRAM Controller vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] physical id: 103 bus info: pci@0000:00:18.2 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:4 description: Host bridge product: Family 10h Processor Miscellaneous Control vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] physical id: 104 bus info: pci@0000:00:18.3 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: driver=k10temp resources: irq:0 *-pci:5 description: Host bridge product: Family 10h Processor Link Control vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] physical id: 105 bus info: pci@0000:00:18.4 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-scsi physical id: 1 bus info: usb@2:3 logical name: scsi8 capabilities: emulated scsi-host configuration: driver=usb-storage *-disk:0 description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@8:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdc *-disk:1 description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.1 bus info: scsi@8:0.0.1 logical name: /dev/sdd *-disk:2 description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.2 bus info: scsi@8:0.0.2 logical name: /dev/sde *-disk:3 description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.3 bus info: scsi@8:0.0.3 logical name: /dev/sdf *-network DISABLED description: Ethernet interface physical id: 1 logical name: vboxnet0 serial: 0a:00:27:00:00:00 capabilities: ethernet physical configuration: broadcast=yes multicast=yes

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  • Computer science undergraduate project ideas

    - by Mehrdad Afshari
    Hopefully, I'm going to finish my undergraduate studies next semester and I'm thinking about the topic of my final project. And yes, I've read the questions with duplicate title. I'm asking this from a bit different viewpoint, so it's not an exact dupe. I've spent at least half of my life coding stuff in different languages and frameworks so I'm not looking at this project as a way to learn much about coding and preparing for real world apps or such. I've done lots of those already. But since I have to do it to complete my degree, I felt I should spend my time doing something useful instead of throwing the whole thing out. I'm planning to make it an open source project or a hosted Web app (depending on the type) if I can make a high quality thing out of it, so I decided to ask StackOverflow what could make a useful project. Situation I've plenty of freedom about the topic. They also require 30-40 pages of text describing the project. I have the following points in mind (the more satisfied, the better): Something useful for software development Something that benefits the community Having academic value is great Shouldn't take more than a month of development (I know I'm lazy). Shouldn't be related to advanced theoretical stuff (soft computing, fuzzy logic, neural networks, ...). I've been a business-oriented software developer. It should be software oriented. While I love hacking microcontrollers and other fun embedded electronic things, I'm not really good at soldering and things like that. I'm leaning toward a Web application (think StackOverflow, PasteBin, NerdDinner, things like those). Technology It's probably going to be done in .NET (C#, F#) and Windows platform. If I really like the project (cool low level hacking), I might actually slip to C/C++. But really, C# is what I'm efficient at. Ideas Programming language, parsing and compiler related stuff: Designing a domain specific programming language and compiler Templating language compiled to C# or IL Database tools and related code generation stuff Web related technologies: ASP.NET MVC View engine doing something cool (don't know what exactly...) Specific-purpose, small, fast ASP.NET-based Web framework Applications: Visual Studio plugin to integrate with Bazaar (it's too much work, I think). ASP.NET based, jQuery-powered issue tracker (and possibly, project lifecycle management as a whole - poor man's TFS) Others: Something related to GPGPU Looking forward for great ideas! Unfortunately, I can't help on a currently existing project. I need to start my own to prevent further problems (as it's an undergrad project, nevertheless).

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  • Using 32bit COM object from C# or VBS on Vista 64bit and getting error 80004005

    - by alexandroid
    I need some mind reading here, since I am trying to do what I do not completely understand. There is a 32-bit application (electronic trading application called CQG) which provides a COM API for external access. I have sample programs and scripts which access this API from Excel, .NET (C++, VB and C#) and shell VBScript. I have these .NET applications as source code and as compiled executables (32-bit, compiled on Windows XP). Now I have Windows Vista Home 64-bit which makes my head to spin. Excel examples work just fine (in Excel 2003). Compiled .NET sample executables work as well. But when I am trying to run .NET C# sample converted to and compiled by Visual Studio C# Expression, or run the VBScript script, I am getting error 80004005 when trying to create an object. Initially the .NET application also gave me 80040154 but then I figured how to make it produce 32-bit code and not 64-bit, so now the errors in C# and VBScript applications are the same. That's all the progress I got for now. And yes, I tried running 32-bit versions of cscript.exe/WScript from SysWOW64 folder on my VBS, but still the result is the same (80004005). How to solve this problem? I am almost ready to believe it is practically impossible, but the fact that Excel VBA works and .NET executables compiled on Windows XP run just fine just makes me angry. There should be a way to beat this thing (some secret which probably only Windows Vista developers know)! I will appreciate any help! PS: I believe code samples do not make much sense here, but this is the line of VBScript which fails: Set CEL = WScript.CreateObject("CQG.CQGCEL.4.0", "CEL_") And this is C#: CQGCEL CEL = new CQGCEL(); Update: Forgot to say UAC is off, of course. And I am working from account with administrator priviledges. I also tried watching which registry keys are read using Process Monitor but everything looks OK for GUIDs of this object. I could not recognize some other GUIDs so I am not sure whether they were critical or not. Is there a chance that this COM object uses Internet Explorer and gets the wrong one (like Internet Explorer 7 instead of Internet Explorer 6 engine or something)?

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  • Multiple layouts in rails [Newbie Q]

    - by BriteLite
    Hi. As a newb, I decided to build a "home inventory" application. I am now stuck on how to programmatically select a layout based on what type of item it is when viewing it in a browser. According to my planning, so far I should have created a few models to represent types of items I can find in my home: Furniture, Electronics and Books. class Book < ActiveRecord::Base end class Furniture < ActiveRecord::Base end class Electronic < ActiveRecord::Base end Now the Books model has things like isbn, pages, address, and category. Furniture model has things like color, price, address, and category. Electronics has things like name, voltage, address, and category. Here is where I got confused. I know the property address is going to be the same for all of them. I also know that, I will need to create multiple "layouts" for 3 different types of items to show the different properties of said items with appropriate graphics and stylesheets. But how will I go about deciding which category the item is so I can determine which layout to render. According to me, this is how I will do it: class DisplayController < ApplicationController def display @item = Params[:item] if @item.category = "electronics" render :layout => 'electronics' end end In my routes.rb map.display ':item', :controller => 'display', :action => 'display' I only seem to have one concern with this, I probably will add a lot of categories later on and think there should be a more DRY-esque way of dealing, rather than hardcoding them. I understand that I need to add into my layout html tags to display relevant information for that particular category. ----Questions---- Is this the right way to approach this type of problem. Will this approach be compatible when I decide to add a gem like *thinking_sphinx* to run search. What issues do you see with my approach and how can I make it better. I was reading something about "Polymorphic Assoc", does that apply in this case, since category exist for all items? Also, I was trying to get a routes to render a URL like "http://localhost/living-room-tv"

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  • How to implement multi-source XSLT mapping in 11g BPEL

    - by [email protected]
    In SOA 11g, you can create a XSLT mapper that uses multiple sources as the input. To implement a multi-source mapper, just follow the instructions below, Drag and drop a Transform Activity to a BPEL process Double-click on the Transform Activity, the Transform dialog window appears. Add source variables by clicking the Add icon and selecting the variable and part of the variable as needed. You can select multiple input variables. The first variable represents the main XML input to the XSL mapping, while additional variables that are added here are defined in the XSL mapping as input parameters. Select the target variable and its part if available. Specify the mapper file name, the default file name is xsl/Transformation_%SEQ%.xsl, where %SEQ% represents the sequence number of the mapper. Click OK, the xls file will be opened in the graphical mode. You can map the sources to the target as usual. Open the mapper source code, you will notice the variable representing the additional source payload, is defined as the input parameter in the map source spec and body<mapSources>    <source type="XSD">      <schema location="../xsd/po.xsd"/>      <rootElement name="PurchaseOrder" namespace="http://www.oracle.com/pcbpel/po"/>    </source>    <source type="XSD">      <schema location="../xsd/customer.xsd"/>      <rootElement name="Customer" namespace="http://www.oracle.com/pcbpel/Customer"/>      <param name="v_customer" />    </source>  </mapSources>...<xsl:param name="v_customer"/> Let's take a look at the BPEL source code used to execute xslt mapper. <assign name="Transform_1">            <bpelx:annotation>                <bpelx:pattern>transformation</bpelx:pattern>            </bpelx:annotation>            <copy>                <from expression="ora:doXSLTransformForDoc('xsl/Transformation_1.xsl',bpws:getVariableData('v_po'),'v_customer',bpws:getVariableData('v_customer'))"/>                <to variable="v_invoice"/>            </copy>        </assign> You will see BPEL uses ora:doXSLTransformForDoc XPath function to execute the XSLT mapper.This function returns the result of  XSLT transformation when the xslt template matching the document. The signature of this function is  ora:doXSLTransformForDoc(template,input, [paramQName, paramValue]*).Wheretemplate is the XSLT mapper nameinput is the string representation of xml input, paramQName is the parameter defined in the xslt mapper as the additional sourceparameterValue is the additional source payload. You can add more sources to the mapper at the later stage, but you have to modify the ora:doXSLTransformForDoc in the BPEL source code and make sure it passes correct parameter and its value pair that reflects the changes in the XSLT mapper.So the best practices are : create the variables before creating the mapping file, therefore you can add multiple sources when you define the transformation in the first place, which is more straightforward than adding them later on. Review ora:doXSLTransformForDoc code in the BPEL source and make sure it passes the correct parameters to the mapper.

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  • CascadingDropDown jQuery Plugin for ASP.NET MVC

    - by rajbk
    CascadingDropDown is a jQuery plugin that can be used by a select list to get automatic population using AJAX. A sample ASP.NET MVC project is attached at the bottom of this post.   Usage The code below shows two select lists : <select id="customerID" name="customerID"> <option value="ALFKI">Maria Anders</option> <option value="ANATR">Ana Trujillo</option> <option value="ANTON">Antonio Moreno</option> </select>   <select id="orderID" name="orderID"> </select> When a customer is selected in the first select list, the second list will auto populate itself with the following code: $("#orderID").CascadingDropDown("#customerID", '/Sales/AsyncOrders'); Internally, an AJAX post is made to ‘/Sales/AsyncOrders’ with the post body containing  customerID=[selectedCustomerID]. This executes the action AsyncOrders on the SalesController with signature AsyncOrders(string customerID).  The AsyncOrders method returns JSON which is then used to populate the select list. The JSON format expected is shown below : [{ "Text": "John", "Value": "10326" }, { "Text": "Jane", "Value": "10801" }] Details $(targetID).CascadingDropDown(sourceID, url, settings) targetID The ID of the select list that will auto populate.  sourceID The ID of the select list, which, on change, causes the targetID to auto populate. url The url to post to Options promptText Text for the first item in the select list Default : -- Select -- loadingText Optional text to display in the select list while it is being loaded. Default : Loading.. errorText Optional text to display if an error occurs while populating the list Default: Error loading data. postData Data you want posted to the url in place of the default Example : { postData : { customerID : $(‘#custID’), orderID : $(‘#orderID’) }} will cause customerID=ALFKI&orderID=2343 to be sent as the POST body. Default: A text string obtained by calling serialize on the sourceID onLoading (event) Raised before the list is populated. onLoaded (event) Raised after the list is populated, The code below shows how to “animate” the  select list after load. Example using custom options: $("#orderID").CascadingDropDown("#customerID", '/Sales/AsyncOrders', { promptText: '-- Pick an Order--', onLoading: function () { $(this).css("background-color", "#ff3"); }, onLoaded: function () { $(this).animate({ backgroundColor: '#ffffff' }, 300); } }); To return JSON from our action method, we use the Json ActionResult passing in an IEnumerable<SelectListItem>. public ActionResult AsyncOrders(string customerID) { var orders = repository.GetOrders(customerID).ToList().Select(a => new SelectListItem() { Text = a.OrderDate.HasValue ? a.OrderDate.Value.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy") : "[ No Date ]", Value = a.OrderID.ToString(), }); return Json(orders); } Sample Project using VS 2010 RTM NorthwindCascading.zip

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  • Updated Security Baseline (7u45) impacts Java 7u40 and before with High Security settings

    - by costlow
    The Java Security Baseline has been increased from 7u25 to 7u45.  For versions of Java below 7u45, this means unsigned Java applets or Java applets that depend on Javascript LiveConnect calls will be blocked when using the High Security setting in the Java Control Panel. This issue only affects Applets and Web Start applications. It does not affect other types of Java applications. The Short Answer Users upgrading to Java 7 update 45 will automatically fix this and is strongly recommended. The More Detailed Answer There are two items involved as described on the deployment flowchart: The Security Baseline – a dynamically updated attribute that checks to see which Java version contains the most recent security patches. The Security Slider – the user-controlled setting of when to prompt/run/block applets. The Security Baseline Java clients periodically check in to understand what version contains the most recent security patches. Versions are released in-between that contain bug fixes. For example: 7u25 (July 2013) was the previous secure baseline. 7u40 contained bug fixes. Because this did not contain security patches, users were not required to upgrade and were welcome to remain on 7u25. When 7u45 was released (October, 2013), this critical patch update contained security patches and raised the secure baseline. Users are required to upgrade from earlier versions. For users that are not regularly connected to the internet, there is a built in Expiration Date. Because of the pre-established quarterly critical patch updates, we are able to determine an approximate date of the next version. A critical patch released in July will have its successor released, at latest, in July + 3 months: October. The Security Slider The security slider is located within the Java control panel and determines which Applets & Web Start applications will prompt, which will run, and which will be blocked. One of the questions used to determine prompt/run/block is, “At or Above the Security Baseline.” The Combination JavaScript calls made from LiveConnect do not reside within signed JAR files, so they are considered to be unsigned code. This is correct within networked systems even if the domain uses HTTPS because signed JAR files represent signed "data at rest" whereas TLS (often called SSL) literally stands for "Transport Level Security" and secures the communication channel, not the contents/code within the channel. The resulting flow of users who click "update later" is: Is the browser plug-in registered and allowed to run? Yes. Does a rule exist for this RIA? No rules apply. Does the RIA have a valid signature? Yes and not revoked. Which security prompt is needed? JRE is below the baseline. This is because 7u45 is the baseline and the user, clicked "upgrade later." Under the default High setting, Unsigned code is set to "Don’t Run" so users see: Additional Notes End Users can control their own security slider within the control panel. System Administrators can customize the security slider during automated installations. As a reminder, in the future, Java 7u51 (January 2014) will block unsigned and self-signed Applets & Web Start applications by default.

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  • Using Lambdas for return values in Rhino.Mocks

    - by PSteele
    In a recent StackOverflow question, someone showed some sample code they’d like to be able to use.  The particular syntax they used isn’t supported by Rhino.Mocks, but it was an interesting idea that I thought could be easily implemented with an extension method. Background When stubbing a method return value, Rhino.Mocks supports the following syntax: dependency.Stub(s => s.GetSomething()).Return(new Order()); The method signature is generic and therefore you get compile-time type checking that the object you’re returning matches the return value defined by the “GetSomething” method. You could also have Rhino.Mocks execute arbitrary code using the “Do” method: dependency.Stub(s => s.GetSomething()).Do((Func<Order>) (() => new Order())); This requires the cast though.  It works, but isn’t as clean as the original poster wanted.  They showed a simple example of something they’d like to see: dependency.Stub(s => s.GetSomething()).Return(() => new Order()); Very clean, simple and no casting required.  While Rhino.Mocks doesn’t support this syntax, it’s easy to add it via an extension method. The Rhino.Mocks “Stub” method returns an IMethodOptions<T>.  We just need to accept a Func<T> and use that as the return value.  At first, this would seem straightforward: public static IMethodOptions<T> Return<T>(this IMethodOptions<T> opts, Func<T> factory) { opts.Return(factory()); return opts; } And this would work and would provide the syntax the user was looking for.  But the problem with this is that you loose the late-bound semantics of a lambda.  The Func<T> is executed immediately and stored as the return value.  At the point you’re setting up your mocks and stubs (the “Arrange” part of “Arrange, Act, Assert”), you may not want the lambda executing – you probably want it delayed until the method is actually executed and Rhino.Mocks plugs in your return value. So let’s make a few small tweaks: public static IMethodOptions<T> Return<T>(this IMethodOptions<T> opts, Func<T> factory) { opts.Return(default(T)); // required for Rhino.Mocks on non-void methods opts.WhenCalled(mi => mi.ReturnValue = factory()); return opts; } As you can see, we still need to set up some kind of return value or Rhino.Mocks will complain as soon as it intercepts a call to our stubbed method.  We use the “WhenCalled” method to set the return value equal to the execution of our lambda.  This gives us the delayed execution we’re looking for and a nice syntax for lambda-based return values in Rhino.Mocks. Technorati Tags: .NET,Rhino.Mocks,Mocking,Extension Methods

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  • Odd MVC 4 Beta Razor Designer Issue

    - by Rick Strahl
    This post is a small cry for help along with an explanation of a problem that is hard to describe on twitter or even a connect bug and written in hopes somebody has seen this before and any ideas on what might cause this. Lots of helpful people had comments on Twitter for me, but they all assumed that the code doesn't run, which is not the case - it's a designer issue. A few days ago I started getting some odd problems in my MVC 4 designer for an app I've been working on for the past 2 weeks. Basically the MVC 4 Razor designer keeps popping me errors, about the call signature to various Html Helper methods being incorrect. It also complains about the ViewBag object and not supporting dynamic requesting to load assemblies into the project. Here's what the designer errors look like: You can see the red error underlines under the ViewBag and an Html Helper I plopped in at the top to demonstrate the behavior. Basically any HtmlHelper I'm accessing is showing the same errors. Note that the code *runs just fine* - it's just the designer that is complaining with Errors. What's odd about this is that *I think* this started only a few days ago and nothing consequential that I can think of has happened to the project or overall installations. These errors aren't critical since the code runs but pretty annoying especially if you're building and have .csHtml files open in Visual Studio mixing these fake errors with real compiler errors. What I've checked Looking at the errors it indeed looks like certain references are missing. I can't make sense of the Html Helpers error, but certainly the ViewBag dynamic error looks like System.Core or Microsoft.CSharp assemblies are missing. Rest assured they are there and the code DOES run just fine at runtime. This is a designer issue only. I went ahead and checked the namespaces that MVC has access to in Razor which lives in the Views folder's web.config file: /Views/web.config For good measure I added <system.web.webPages.razor> <host factoryType="System.Web.Mvc.MvcWebRazorHostFactory, System.Web.Mvc, <split for layout> Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <pages pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage"> <namespaces> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Routing" /> <add namespace="System.Linq" /> <add namespace="System.Linq.Expressions" /> <add namespace="ClassifiedsBusiness" /> <add namespace="ClassifiedsWeb"/> <add namespace="Westwind.Utilities" /> <add namespace="Westwind.Web" /> <add namespace="Westwind.Web.Mvc" /> </namespaces> </pages> </system.web.webPages.razor> For good measure I added System.Linq and System.Linq.Expression on which some of the Html.xxxxFor() methods rely, but no luck. So, has anybody seen this before? Any ideas on what might be causing these issues only at design time rather, when the final compiled code runs just fine?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Razor  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • SQL 2005 Transaction Rollback Hung–unresolved deadlock

    - by steveh99999
    Encountered an interesting issue recently with a SQL 2005 sp3 Enterprise Edition system. Every weekend, a full database reindex was being run on this system – normally this took around one and a half hours. Then, one weekend, the job ran for over 17 hours  - and had yet to complete... At this point, DBA cancelled the job. Job status is now cancelled – issue over…   However, cancelling the job had not killed the reindex transaction – DBCC OPENTRAN was still showing the transaction being open. The oldest open transaction in the database was now over 17 hours old.  Consequently, transaction log % used growing dramatically and locks still being held in the database... Further attempts to kill the transaction did nothing. ie we had a transaction which could not be killed. In sysprocesses, it was apparent the SPID was in rollback status, but the spid was not accumulating CPU or IO. Was the SPID stuck ? On examination of the SQL errorlog – shortly after the reindex had started, a whole bunch of deadlock output had been produced by trace flag 1222. Then this :- spid5s      ***Stack Dump being sent to   xxxxxxx\SQLDump0042.txt spid5s      * ******************************************************************************* spid5s      * spid5s      * BEGIN STACK DUMP: spid5s      *   12/05/10 01:04:47 spid 5 spid5s      * spid5s      * Unresolved deadlock spid5s      * spid5s      *   spid5s      * ******************************************************************************* spid5s      * ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- spid5s      * Short Stack Dump spid5s      Stack Signature for the dump is 0x000001D7 spid5s      External dump process return code 0x20000001. Unresolved deadlock – don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these before…. A quick call to Microsoft support confirmed the following bug had been hit :- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961479 So, only option to get rid of the hung spid – to restart SQL Server… Fortunately SQL Server restarted without any issues. I was pleasantly surprised to see that recovery on this particular database was fast. However, restarting SQL Server to fix an issue is not something I would normally rush to do... Short term fix – the reindex was changed to use MAXDOP of 1. Longer term fix will be to apply the correct CU, or wait for SQL 2005 sp 4 ?? This should be released any day soon I hope..

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  • Thinktecture.IdentityModel: Comparing Strings without leaking Timinig Information

    - by Your DisplayName here!
    Paul Hill commented on a recent post where I was comparing HMACSHA256 signatures. In a nutshell his complaint was that I am leaking timing information while doing so – or in other words, my code returned faster with wrong (or partially wrong) signatures than with the correct signature. This can be potentially used for timing attacks like this one. I think he got a point here, especially in the era of cloud computing where you can potentially run attack code on the same physical machine as your target to do high resolution timing analysis (see here for an example). It turns out that it is not that easy to write a time-constant string comparer due to all sort of (unexpected) clever optimization mechanisms in the CLR. With the help and feedback of Paul and Shawn I came up with this: Structure the code in a way that the CLR will not try to optimize it In addition turn off optimization (just in case a future version will come up with new optimization methods) Add a random sleep when the comparison fails (using Shawn’s and Stephen’s nice Random wrapper for RNGCryptoServiceProvider). You can find the full code in the Thinktecture.IdentityModel download. [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoOptimization)] public static bool IsEqual(string s1, string s2) {     if (s1 == null && s2 == null)     {         return true;     }       if (s1 == null || s2 == null)     {         return false;     }       if (s1.Length != s2.Length)     {         return false;     }       var s1chars = s1.ToCharArray();     var s2chars = s2.ToCharArray();       int hits = 0;     for (int i = 0; i < s1.Length; i++)     {         if (s1chars[i].Equals(s2chars[i]))         {             hits += 2;         }         else         {             hits += 1;         }     }       bool same = (hits == s1.Length * 2);       if (!same)     {         var rnd = new CryptoRandom();         Thread.Sleep(rnd.Next(0, 10));     }       return same; }

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  • Direct3D11 and SharpDX - How to pass a model instance's world matrix as an input to a vertex shader

    - by Nathan Ridley
    Using Direct3D11, I'm trying to pass a matrix into my vertex shader from the instance buffer that is associated with a given model's vertices and I can't seem to construct my InputLayout without throwing an exception. The shader looks like this: cbuffer ConstantBuffer : register(b0) { matrix World; matrix View; matrix Projection; } struct VIn { float4 position: POSITION; matrix instance: INSTANCE; float4 color: COLOR; }; struct VOut { float4 position : SV_POSITION; float4 color : COLOR; }; VOut VShader(VIn input) { VOut output; output.position = mul(input.position, input.instance); output.position = mul(output.position, View); output.position = mul(output.position, Projection); output.color = input.color; return output; } The input layout looks like this: var elements = new[] { new InputElement("POSITION", 0, Format.R32G32B32_Float, 0, 0, InputClassification.PerVertexData, 0), new InputElement("INSTANCE", 0, Format.R32G32B32A32_Float, 0, 0, InputClassification.PerInstanceData, 1), new InputElement("COLOR", 0, Format.R32G32B32A32_Float, 12, 0) }; InputLayout = new InputLayout(device, signature, elements); The buffer initialization looks like this: public ModelDeviceData(Model model, Device device) { Model = model; var vertices = Helpers.CreateBuffer(device, BindFlags.VertexBuffer, model.Vertices); var instances = Helpers.CreateBuffer(device, BindFlags.VertexBuffer, Model.Instances.Select(m => m.WorldMatrix).ToArray()); VerticesBufferBinding = new VertexBufferBinding(vertices, Utilities.SizeOf<ColoredVertex>(), 0); InstancesBufferBinding = new VertexBufferBinding(instances, Utilities.SizeOf<Matrix>(), 0); IndicesBuffer = Helpers.CreateBuffer(device, BindFlags.IndexBuffer, model.Triangles); } The buffer creation helper method looks like this: public static Buffer CreateBuffer<T>(Device device, BindFlags bindFlags, params T[] items) where T : struct { var len = Utilities.SizeOf(items); var stream = new DataStream(len, true, true); foreach (var item in items) stream.Write(item); stream.Position = 0; var buffer = new Buffer(device, stream, len, ResourceUsage.Default, bindFlags, CpuAccessFlags.None, ResourceOptionFlags.None, 0); return buffer; } The line that instantiates the InputLayout object throws this exception: *HRESULT: [0x80070057], Module: [General], ApiCode: [E_INVALIDARG/Invalid Arguments], Message: The parameter is incorrect.* Note that the data for each model instance is simply an instance of SharpDX.Matrix. EDIT Based on Tordin's answer, it sems like I have to modify my code like so: var elements = new[] { new InputElement("POSITION", 0, Format.R32G32B32_Float, 0, 0, InputClassification.PerVertexData, 0), new InputElement("INSTANCE0", 0, Format.R32G32B32A32_Float, 0, 0, InputClassification.PerInstanceData, 1), new InputElement("INSTANCE1", 1, Format.R32G32B32A32_Float, 0, 0, InputClassification.PerInstanceData, 1), new InputElement("INSTANCE2", 2, Format.R32G32B32A32_Float, 0, 0, InputClassification.PerInstanceData, 1), new InputElement("INSTANCE3", 3, Format.R32G32B32A32_Float, 0, 0, InputClassification.PerInstanceData, 1), new InputElement("COLOR", 0, Format.R32G32B32A32_Float, 12, 0) }; and in the shader: struct VIn { float4 position: POSITION; float4 instance0: INSTANCE0; float4 instance1: INSTANCE1; float4 instance2: INSTANCE2; float4 instance3: INSTANCE3; float4 color: COLOR; }; VOut VShader(VIn input) { VOut output; matrix world = { input.instance0, input.instance1, input.instance2, input.instance3 }; output.position = mul(input.position, world); output.position = mul(output.position, View); output.position = mul(output.position, Projection); output.color = input.color; return output; } However I still get an exception.

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  • How do I fix a corrupted harddrive after failed upgrade?

    - by Nil
    The problem originated when I was trying to fix this problem. Things went horribly, horribly wrong and I ended up with a new problem altogether. The last thing I did was run sudo apt-get install and that caused my system to freeze. I restarted my computer and it would not boot from the harddrive. I ran a copy of Ubuntu 12.10 from a flashdrive that I had and ran gparted to see if my partitions were all there. It returned this message: Invalid partition table on /dev/sda -- wrong signature 5208. The drive appeared as a 2TiB unallocated drive with an error. The drive had 4 partitions before (plus random unallocated space). There was a fat32 partition, an ext4 partition which contained ubuntu 13.04/13.10 (I don't even know which one at this point), an extended partition which contained a swap partition for my ubuntu partition (I was meaning to move that ubuntu partition into the extended partition, never got around to it), and another partition (I don't remember how I formatted it). I should also mention this is a 1TB harddrive. So in short, I have a corrupted partition table on my primary harddrive from which I boot from, how can I fix this? I tried mounting the drive with sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/ubuntu then I changed my directory to said folder and tried to list files and this monstrosity happened: $ ls ls: cannot access ??w?j^?.: Input/output error ls: cannot access ??(? ?x?.|: Input/output error ls: cannot access 6W_@?)?._??: Input/output error ls: cannot access HB0v???.A}?: Input/output error ls: cannot access ???.?X: Input/output error ls: cannot access t)?.+?l: Input/output error ls: cannot access ?h@ ?.@ : Input/output error ls: cannot access >? @??.???: Input/output error ls: cannot access m???.??: Input/output error ls: cannot access @ if??a?: Input/output error ls: cannot access ?M!vN$?.??n: Input/output error ls: cannot access ?o? ??.Bm`: Input/output error ls: cannot access ?:I??? M. : Input/output error ls: cannot access W??.??: Input/output error ls: cannot access ?: Input/output error ls: cannot access ?W?s??: Input/output error ls: cannot access ?v?k?.???: Input/output error ls: cannot access 5?$<N??: Input/output error .x????.??i: Input/output error ls: cannot access je????.j?1: Input/output error XjD?.???: Input/output error ls: cannot access W??n???.?: Input/output error ls: cannot access ?^x.$"?: Input/output error ls: cannot access !??*!??j.??: Input/output error ls: cannot access '-??k?^?.???: Input/output error ls: cannot access b?w?w?b.\??: Input/output error ls: cannot access o????"z.??B: Input/output error ls: cannot access ??b?h.?3-: Input/output error ls: cannot access ??.$7: Input/output error ls: cannot access )??K.bk: Input/output error ls: cannot access s??z?.?(?: Input/output error ls: cannot access ?F@?0?.@?: Input/output error .?D: Input/output error .??: Input/output error ls: cannot access?????. @: Input/output error ls: cannot access ?/?? ?.??: No such file or directory ls: cannot access rk?p4q(?.?k: Input/output error This looks promising. This is the output of fdisk -l $ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 5 Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 5 Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 5 Warning: invalid flag 0x5208 of partition table 5 will be corrected by w(rite) Disk /dev/sda: 2199.0 GB, 2199023132672 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 267349 cylinders, total 4294967056 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x44fdfe06 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 113305600 894715903 390705152 c W95 FAT32 (LBA) /dev/sda2 894715904 1489307647 297295872 83 Linux /dev/sda3 1489309694 1497307135 3998721 5 Extended /dev/sda4 1497309184 1953523711 228107264 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda5 ? 3013257822 3688738171 337740175 aa Unknown

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  • Page output caching for dynamic web applications

    - by Mike Ellis
    I am currently working on a web application where the user steps (forward or back) through a series of pages with "Next" and "Previous" buttons, entering data until they reach a page with the "Finish" button. Until finished, all data is stored in Session state, then sent to the mainframe database via web services at the end of the process. Some of the pages display data from previous pages in order to collect additional information. These pages can never be cached because they are different for every user. For pages that don't display this dynamic data, they can be cached, but only the first time they load. After that, the data that was previously entered needs to be displayed. This requires Page_Load to fire, which means the page can't be cached at that point. A couple of weeks ago, I knew almost nothing about implementing page caching. Now I still don't know much, but I know a little bit, and here is the solution that I developed with the help of others on my team and a lot of reading and trial-and-error. We have a base page class defined from which all pages inherit. In this class I have defined a method that sets the caching settings programmatically. For pages that can be cached, they call this base page method in their Page_Load event within a if(!IsPostBack) block, which ensures that only the page itself gets cached, not the data on the page. if(!IsPostBack) {     ...     SetCacheSettings();     ... } protected void SetCacheSettings() {     Response.Cache.AddValidationCallback(new HttpCacheValidateHandler(Validate), null);     Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.Now.AddHours(1));     Response.Cache.SetSlidingExpiration(true);     Response.Cache.SetValidUntilExpires(true);     Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.ServerAndNoCache); } The AddValidationCallback sets up an HttpCacheValidateHandler method called Validate which runs logic when a cached page is requested. The Validate method signature is standard for this method type. public static void Validate(HttpContext context, Object data, ref HttpValidationStatus status) {     string visited = context.Request.QueryString["v"];     if (visited != null && "1".Equals(visited))     {         status = HttpValidationStatus.IgnoreThisRequest; //force a page load     }     else     {         status = HttpValidationStatus.Valid; //load from cache     } } I am using the HttpValidationStatus values IgnoreThisRequest or Valid which forces the Page_Load event method to run or allows the page to load from cache, respectively. Which one is set depends on the value in the querystring. The value in the querystring is set up on each page in the "Next" and "Previous" button click event methods based on whether the page that the button click is taking the user to has any data on it or not. bool hasData = HasPageBeenVisited(url); if (hasData) {     url += VISITED; } Response.Redirect(url); The HasPageBeenVisited method determines whether the destination page has any data on it by checking one of its required data fields. (I won't include it here because it is very system-dependent.) VISITED is a string constant containing "?v=1" and gets appended to the url if the destination page has been visited. The reason this logic is within the "Next" and "Previous" button click event methods is because 1) the Validate method is static which doesn't allow it to access non-static data such as the data fields for a particular page, and 2) at the time at which the Validate method runs, either the data has not yet been deserialized from Session state or is not available (different AppDomain?) because anytime I accessed the Session state information from the Validate method, it was always empty.

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  • Performing mechanical movements using computer

    - by Vi
    How to make a computer (in particular, my laptop) to perform some mechanical movements without buying anything $5, soldering things inside computer or creating big sophisticated circuits? Traditionally CD-ROM tray is used to make computer do some movement IRL by, for example, SSH command, but in laptop tray is one-shot (unless manually reloaded) and also not very comfortable [mis]usage. Some assistance circuits can be in use too, but not complex. For example, there is a little motor that can work on USB power. Devices in my computer: DVD-ROM tray: one-time push. USB power: continuous power to the motor or LEDS or relay that turns on something powerful. Audio card. 3 outputs (modprobe alsa model=test can set Mic and Line-in as additional output). One controllable DC output (microphone) that can power up LED and some electronic (may be even mechanic?) relay. Also with sophisticated additional circuiting can control a lot of devices with a good precision. Both input and output support. Probably the most useful object in computer for radio ham. Modem. Don't know about this much, it doesn't work because of hsfmodem crashes kernel if memory is = 1GB. May be it's "pick up" and "hang up" can turn on and off power taken from USB port? Video card. VGA port? S-Video port? Will them be useful? Backlight. Tunable, but probably unuseful. CardBus (or some) slot. Nothing interesting for the task probably (is it?). AC adapter and battery. Probably nothing programmable here. /* My AC adapter already have additional jacks to connect extra devics */ Keyboard. No use. Touchpad. Good sensor (synclient -m 1), but no output. Various LEDs inside laptop. Probably too weak and requires soldering. Fans inside laptop. Poor control over them, requires soldering and dangerous to tinker. HDD (internal and external) that can be spin down and up (hdparm -Y, cat /dev/ubb). But connecting anything serially with it's power line makes HDD underpowered... And too complex. Is something are missed? Any ideas how to use described components? Any other ideas? May be there are easily available /* in developing countries */ cheap devices like "enhanced multimeters" that are controllable from computer and can provide configurable output and measure current and other things? Things to aid pushing many physical buttons with computer. Isn't this a simple idea and implementation and a lot of use in good hands?

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  • What would make a noise in a PC on graphics operations on a passively-cooled system?

    - by T.J. Crowder
    I have this system based on the Intel D510MO motherboard, which is basically an Atom D510 (dual-core HT Atom w/built-in GPU), an Intel NM10 chipset, and a Realtek Gigabit LAN controller. It's entirely passively cooled. I noticed almost immediately that there was a kind of very, very soft noise that corresponded with graphics operations, sort of the noise you'd get if you had a sheet of flat paper and slid something really light across it — but more electronic than that. I wrote it off as observation error and/or disk activity triggered by the graphics operation (although the latter seemed like a lot of unnecessary disk activity). It isn't. I got curious enough that I finally did a few controlled experiments, and here's what I've determined: It isn't the HDD. For one thing, the sounds the HDD makes (when seeking, when reading or writing, when just sitting there spinning) is different. For another, I used sudo hdparm -y /dev/sda (I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) to temporarily put the disk on standby while making sure that non-disk graphics op was happening in a loop. The disk spun down, but the other sound continued, corresponding perfectly with the timing of the graphics op. (Then the disk spun up again, but it takes long enough that I could rule out the HDD.) It isn't the monitor; I ensured the two were well physically-separated and the sound was definitely coming from the main box. It isn't something else in the room; the sound is coming from the box. It isn't cross-talk to an audio circuit coming out the speakers. (It doesn't have any speakers.) It isn't my mouse (e.g., when I'm trying to make graphics ops happen); the sound happens if I set up a recurring operation and don't use the mouse at all, or if I lift the mouse off the table slightly (but enough that the laser still registers movement). It isn't the voices in my head; they never whisper like that. Other observations: It doesn't seem to matter what the graphics operation is; anything that changes what's on the screen seems to do it. I get the sound when moving the mouse over the Chromium tab bar (which makes the tab backgrounds change); I get it when a web page has a counter on it that changes the text on the page: I get it when dragging window contents around. The sound is very, very slightly louder if the graphics op is larger, like scrolling a text area when writing a question on superuser.com, than for smaller operations like the tick counter on the web page. But it's very slight. It's fairly loud (and of good duration) when the op involves color changes to substantial surface areas. For instance, when asking a question here on superuser and you move the cursor between the question box and the tag box, and the help to the right fades out, changes, and fades back in. (Yet another example related to the web browser, so let me say: I hear it when operations completely unrelated to the web browser as well.) It doesn't sound like arcing or anything like that (I'd've shut off the machine Right Quick Like if it did). Moving windows does it. Scrolling windows (by and large) doesn't. I have the feeling I've heard this sort of thing before, when all system fans were on low and such, with other systems — but (again) written it off as observational error. For all the world it's like I'm hearing the CPU working (as opposed to the GPU; note the window scroll thing above) or data being transferred somewhere, but that just seems...unlikely. So what am I hearing? This may seem like a very localized question, but perhaps other silent PC enthusiasts may be interested as well...

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  • Dissing Architects, or "What's wrong with the coffee?"

    - by Bob Rhubart
    In my conversations with people in architect roles, tales of animosity, disrespect, and outright hostility aren't uncommon. And it's clear that in more than a few organizations architects regularly face a tough uphill climb. For architects with the requisite combination of technical, organizational, and people skills, that rough treatment is grossly undeserved. But tales of unqualified people in positions up and down the IT food chain are also easy to come by. So what's the other side of the architect story? Are some architects tarnishing the role and making life miserable for their more qualified colleagues? The various quotes included below were culled from a variety of sources. The criticism is harsh, and the people behind these quotes clearly have issues with architects. Still, whether based on mere opinion or actual experience, the comments shed some light on behaviors that should raise red flags for anyone pursuing a career as an architect. If you're an architect, and you've ever noticed that your coffee tastes like window cleaner, or your car is repeatedly keyed, or no one ever holds the elevator for you, maybe you need to do a little soul searching... Those Who Can, Code; Those Who Can't, Architect | Joe Winchester [May 18, 2007] "At the moment there seems to be an extremely unhealthy obsession in software with the concept of architecture. A colleague of mine, a recent graduate, told me he wished to become a software architect. He was drawn to the glamour of being able to come up with grandiose ideas - sweeping generalized designs, creating presentations to audiences of acronym addicts, writing esoteric academic papers, speaking at conferences attended by headless engineers on company expense accounts hungrily seeking out this year's grail, and creating e-mails with huge cc lists from people whose signature footer is more interesting than the content. I tried to re-orient him into actually doing some coding, to join a team that has a good product and keen users both of whom are pushing requirements forward, to no avail. Somehow the lure of being an architecture astronaut was too strong and I lost him to the dark side." Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You | Joel Spolsky [April 21, 2001] "It's very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they won't stop thinking about Architecture. They're astronauts because they are above the oxygen level, I don't know how they're breathing. They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don't contribute to the bottom line. Remember that the architecture people are solving problems that they think they can solve, not problems which are useful to solve." Non Coding Architects Suck | Richard Henderson [May 24, 2010] "If a guy with a badge saying 'system architect' looks blank on low-level issues then he is not an architect, he is a business-analyst who went on a course. He will probably wax lyrical on all things high-level and 'important.' He will produce lovely object hierarchies without a clue to implementation. He will have a moustache and play golf." Architects Play Golf | Sunir Shah [August 15, 2012] "Often arrogant architects are difficult to get a hold of during the implementation phase because they no longer feel the need to stick around. Especially around midnight when most of the poor sob [sic] developers are still banging away. After all, they've already solved the problem--the rest is just an implementation exercise." Engineer vs Architect(Part of a discussion on the IT Architect Network Group on LinkedIn) "[An] architect spends his time producing white papers full of acronyms he does not understand but that impress his boss [while the] engineer keeps his head down and does the actual job." Architects Don't Code | [Author Unknown] "Faulty belief: System Architects don't need to code anymore. They know what they are talking about by virtue of the fact that they are System Architects."

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  • Why you shouldn't add methods to interfaces in APIs

    - by Simon Cooper
    It is an oft-repeated maxim that you shouldn't add methods to a publically-released interface in an API. Recently, I was hit hard when this wasn't followed. As part of the work on ApplicationMetrics, I've been implementing auto-reporting of MVC action methods; whenever an action was called on a controller, ApplicationMetrics would automatically report it without the developer needing to add manual ReportEvent calls. Fortunately, MVC provides easy hook when a controller is created, letting me log when it happens - the IControllerFactory interface. Now, the dll we provide to instrument an MVC webapp has to be compiled against .NET 3.5 and MVC 1, as the lowest common denominator. This MVC 1 dll will still work when used in an MVC 2, 3 or 4 webapp because all MVC 2+ webapps have a binding redirect redirecting all references to previous versions of System.Web.Mvc to the correct version, and type forwards taking care of any moved types in the new assemblies. Or at least, it should. IControllerFactory In MVC 1 and 2, IControllerFactory was defined as follows: public interface IControllerFactory { IController CreateController(RequestContext requestContext, string controllerName); void ReleaseController(IController controller); } So, to implement the logging controller factory, we simply wrap the existing controller factory: internal sealed class LoggingControllerFactory : IControllerFactory { private readonly IControllerFactory m_CurrentController; public LoggingControllerFactory(IControllerFactory currentController) { m_CurrentController = currentController; } public IController CreateController( RequestContext requestContext, string controllerName) { // log the controller being used FeatureSessionData.ReportEvent("Controller used:", controllerName); return m_CurrentController.CreateController(requestContext, controllerName); } public void ReleaseController(IController controller) { m_CurrentController.ReleaseController(controller); } } Easy. This works as expected in MVC 1 and 2. However, in MVC 3 this type was throwing a TypeLoadException, saying a method wasn't implemented. It turns out that, in MVC 3, the definition of IControllerFactory was changed to this: public interface IControllerFactory { IController CreateController(RequestContext requestContext, string controllerName); SessionStateBehavior GetControllerSessionBehavior( RequestContext requestContext, string controllerName); void ReleaseController(IController controller); } There's a new method in the interface. So when our MVC 1 dll was redirected to reference System.Web.Mvc v3, LoggingControllerFactory tried to implement version 3 of IControllerFactory, was missing the GetControllerSessionBehaviour method, and so couldn't be loaded by the CLR. Implementing the new method Fortunately, there was a workaround. Because interface methods are normally implemented implicitly in the CLR, if we simply declare a virtual method matching the signature of the new method in MVC 3, then it will be ignored in MVC 1 and 2 and implement the extra method in MVC 3: internal sealed class LoggingControllerFactory : IControllerFactory { ... public virtual SessionStateBehaviour GetControllerSessionBehaviour( RequestContext requestContext, string controllerName) {} ... } However, this also has problems - the SessionStateBehaviour type only exists in .NET 4, and we're limited to .NET 3.5 by support for MVC 1 and 2. This means that the only solutions to support all MVC versions are: Construct the LoggingControllerFactory type at runtime using reflection Produce entirely separate dlls for MVC 1&2 and MVC 3. Ugh. And all because of that blasted extra method! Another solution? Fortunately, in this case, there is a third option - System.Web.Mvc also provides a DefaultControllerFactory type that can provide the implementation of GetControllerSessionBehaviour for us in MVC 3, while still allowing us to override CreateController and ReleaseController. However, this does mean that LoggingControllerFactory won't be able to wrap any calls to GetControllerSessionBehaviour. This is an acceptable bug, given the other options, as very few developers will be overriding GetControllerSessionBehaviour in their own custom controller factory. So, if you're providing an interface as part of an API, then please please please don't add methods to it. Especially if you don't provide a 'default' implementing type. Any code compiled against the previous version that can't be updated will have some very tough decisions to make to support both versions.

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