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  • How to move a sprite automatically using a physicsHandler in Andengine?

    - by shailenTJ
    I use a DigitalOnScreenControl (knob with a four-directional arrow control) to move the entity and the entity which is bound to a physicsHandler. physicsHandler.setEntity(sprite); sprite.registerUpdateHandler(physicsHandler); From the DigitalOnScreenControl, I know which direction I want my sprite to move. Inside its overridden onControlChange function, I call a function animateSprite that checks which direction I chose. Based on the direction, I animate my sprite differently. PROBLEM: I want to automatically move the sprite to a specific location on the scene, say at coordinates (207, 305). My sprite is at (100, 305, which means it has to move down by 107 pixels. How do I tell the physicsHandler to move the sprite down by 107 pixels? My animateSprite method will take care of animating the sprite's downward motion. Thank you for your input!

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  • Life Technologies: Making Life Easier to Manage

    - by Michael Snow
    12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} When we’re thinking about customer engagement, we’re acutely aware of all the forces at play competing for our customer’s attention. Solutions that make life easier for our customers draw attention to themselves. We tend to engage more when there is a distinct benefit and we can take a deep breath and accept that there is hope in the world and everything isn’t designed to frustrate us and make our lives miserable. (sigh…) When products are designed to automate processes that were consuming hours of our time with no relief in sight, they deserve to be recognized. One of our recent Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award Winners in the WebCenter category, Life Technologies, has recently posted a video promoting their “award winning” solution. The Oracle Innovation Awards are part of the overall Oracle Excellence awards given to customers for innovation with Oracle products. More info here. Their award nomination included this description: Life Technologies delivered the My Life Service Portal as part of a larger Digital Hub strategy. This Portal is the first of its kind in the biotechnology service providing industry. The Portal provides access to Life Technologies cloud based service monitoring system where all customer deployed instruments can be remotely monitored and proactively repaired. The portal provides alerts from these cloud based monitoring services directly to the customer and to Life Technologies Field Engineers. The Portal provides insight into the instruments and services customers purchased for the purpose of analyzing and anticipating future customer needs and creating targeted sales and service programs. This portal not only provides benefits for Life Technologies internal sales and service teams but provides customers a central place to track all pertinent instrument information including: instrument service history instrument status and previous activities instrument performance analytics planned service visits warranty/contract information discussion forums social networks for lab management and collaboration alerts and notifications on all of the above team scheduling for instrument usage promote optional reagents required to keep instruments performing From their website The Life Technologies Instruments & Services Portal Helps You Save Time and Gain Peace of Mind Introducing the new, award-winning, free online tool that enables easier management of your instrument use and care, faster response to requests for service or service quotes, and instant sharing of key instrument and service information with your colleagues. Now – this unto itself is obviously beneficial for their customers who were previously burdened with having to do all of these tasks separately, manually and inconsistently by nature. Now – all in one place and free to their customers – a portal that ties it all together. They now have built the platform to give their customers yet another reason to do business with them – Their headline on their product page says it all: “Life is now easier to manage - All your instrument use and care in one place – the no-cost, no-hassle Instruments and Services Portal.” Of course – it’s very convenient that the company name includes “Life” and now can also promote to their clients and prospects that doing business with them is easy and their sophisticated lab equipment is easy to manage. In an industry full of PhD’s – “Easy” isn’t usually the first word that comes to mind, but Life Technologies has now tied the word to their brand in a very eloquent way. Between our work lives and family or personal lives, getting any mono-focused minutes of dedicated attention has become such a rare occurrence in our current era of multi-tasking that those moments of focus are highly prized. So – when something is done really well – so well that it becomes captivating and urges sharing impulses – I take notice and dig deeper and most of the time I discover other gems not so hidden below the surface. And then I share with those I know would enjoy and understand. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit here that the first person I shared the videos below with was my daughter. She’s in her senior year of high school in the midst of her college search. She’s passionate about her academics and has already decided that she wants to study Neuroscience in college and like her mother will be in for the long haul to a PhD eventually. In a summer science program at Smith College 2 summers ago – she sent the family famous text to me – “I just dissected a sheep’s brain – wicked cool!” – This was followed by an equally memorable text this past summer in a research mentorship in Neuroscience at UConn – “Just sliced up some rat brain. Reminded me of a deli slicer at the supermarket… sorry I forgot to call last night…” So… needless to say – I knew I had an audience that would enjoy and understand these videos below and are now being shared among her science classmates and faculty. And evidently - so does Life Technologies! They’ve done a great job on these making them fun and something that will easily be shared among their customers social networks. They’ve created a neuro-archetypal character, “Ph.Diddy” and know that their world of clients in academics, research, and other institutions would understand and enjoy the “edutainment” value in this series of videos on their YouTube channel that pokes fun at the stereotypes while also promoting their products at the same time. They use their Facebook page for additional engagement with their clients and as another venue to promote these videos. Enjoy this one as well! More to be found here: http://www.youtube.com/lifetechnologies Stay tuned to this Oracle WebCenter blog channel. Tomorrow we'll be taking a look at another winner of the Innovation Awards, LADWP - helping to keep the citizens of Los Angeles engaged with their Water and Power provider.

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  • Exadata Storage Server software upgrade is a new era in Patching

    - by Luis Moreno Campos
    Since it was first released, Exadata Storage Server software has been releasing patch releases like every software on the planet. Storage administrators would have to do this, but by some weird tradition, no matter what level of technology, if it says "Oracle" in it, IT Managers will immediately associate this with a task for the DBA. Not the case, but if it falls onto a DBA lap, fear no evil.The last patch released for Exadata Cells, is a true master piece in patching technology. This sentence is not mine, it's from both the customer and the partner that witnessed how 3 Exadata Cells where patch in less than 4 hours, after 12 months of without a single upgrade.The patch manager that takes care of everything will patch not only the software but also the firmware and the operating system. And you know it will all work out because back in the lab everything was already tested.All you have to do is stare at the 3 Sun ILOM Windows from the 3 cells and watch as they boot and reboot, patch and fix to the latest versions all layers of the storage machines. It's a new era in Patching technology!LMC

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  • make qt programs look good under XFCE?

    - by Andre
    I use xfce. My problem is - some programs look nice and some sort of ugly. AFAIK this is because XFCE is gtk and most programs use gtk theme, but some programs use qt and thus don't use gtk themes (rocket science right there). So - my question is - how can I apply some theme to these qt programs? Can I download some qt theme and drop into ~/.themes? would that work? Qt programs don't have to look absolutely the same as gtk ones - I don't care about that. But I want them at least not to look so dam ugly.:) thanks !

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  • What "bad practice" do you do, and why?

    - by coppro
    Well, "good practice" and "bad practice" are tossed around a lot these days - "Disable assertions in release builds", "Don't disable assertions in release builds", "Don't use goto.", we've got all sorts of guidelines above and beyond simply making your program work. So I ask of you, what coding practices do you violate all the time, and more importantly, why? Do you disagree with the establishment? Do you just not care? Why should everyone else do the same? cross links: What's your favorite abandoned rule? Rule you know you should follow but don't

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  • The joomla 'create a template' tutorial

    - by ryan
    Hello all, Ive recently downloaded joomla using an instant download option, and now im looking to create my own templates, so i went to http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/joomla15/joomla_create_template.htm and Im trying to follow the tuturial but ive failed at the first hurdle... where it says "First, open the "templates" directory in your Joomla installation. Then create a subfolder in it named "tutorial_template". All the files of your template will reside in it." The problem is I have no clue how to do this, where is the directory to start with?? the only thing I know how to get up is the administrators screen, in which I have to choose one of the stock templates, which would be great if I didnt care about my own designs...but obviously im looking to have my own html and css coding used instead. How do I find where the folders are and how do I open them? Im sorry if its a bit of a dumb question but im so confused..so early on. Thanks in advance. Ryan

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  • Screen magnifier wrecks login screen — how to get rid of it?

    - by Jonik
    In the Ubuntu / GNOME login screen, I tried some of the different accessibility settings out of curiosity. Big mistake! Enabling the "use screen magnifier" (or whatever) option breaks down the view horribly, and makes it impossible to even access the settings again: (Right click & View Image for full size) Yes, I tried to access every corner of the screen using the mouse, but there's just chaos everywhere. Fortunately, I can still log in (pressing "Esc" makes the normal login dialog appear on the left-hand monitor). My question is, how to disable the "magnifier" option outside of the login screen itself? (By editing some config file perhaps?) I don't care about getting the magnifier mode to work properly - just make it go away altogether, please.

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  • gpgpu vs. physX for physics simulation

    - by notabene
    Hello First theoretical question. What is better (faster)? Develop your own gpgpu techniques for physics simulation (cloth, fluids, colisions...) or to use PhysX? (If i say develop i mean implement existing algorithms like navier-strokes...) I don't care about what will take more time to develop. What will be faster for end user? As i understand that physx are accelerated through PPU units in gpu, does it mean that physical simulation can run in paralel with rastarization? Are PPUs different units than unified shader units used as vertex/geometry/pixel/gpgpu shader units? And little non-theoretical question: Is physx able to do sofisticated simulation equal to lets say Autodesk's Maya fluid solver? Are there any c++ gpu accelerated physics frameworks to try? (I am interested in both physx and gpgpu, commercial engines are ok too).

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  • European Interoperability Framework - a new beginning?

    - by trond-arne.undheim
    The most controversial document in the history of the European Commission's IT policy is out. EIF is here, wrapped in the Communication "Towards interoperability for European public services", and including the new feature European Interoperability Strategy (EIS), arguably a higher strategic take on the same topic. Leaving EIS aside for a moment, the EIF controversy has been around IPR, defining open standards and about the proper terminology around standardization deliverables. Today, as the document finally emerges, what is the verdict? First of all, to be fair to those among you who do not spend your lives in the intricate labyrinths of Commission IT policy documents on interoperability, let's define what we are talking about. According to the Communication: "An interoperability framework is an agreed approach to interoperability for organisations that want to collaborate to provide joint delivery of public services. Within its scope of applicability, it specifies common elements such as vocabulary, concepts, principles, policies, guidelines, recommendations, standards, specifications and practices." The Good - EIF reconfirms that "The Digital Agenda can only take off if interoperability based on standards and open platforms is ensured" and also confirms that "The positive effect of open specifications is also demonstrated by the Internet ecosystem." - EIF takes a productive and pragmatic stance on openness: "In the context of the EIF, openness is the willingness of persons, organisations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and stimulate debate within that community, the ultimate goal being to advance knowledge and the use of this knowledge to solve problems" (p.11). "If the openness principle is applied in full: - All stakeholders have the same possibility of contributing to the development of the specification and public review is part of the decision-making process; - The specification is available for everybody to study; - Intellectual property rights related to the specification are licensed on FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software" (p. 26). - EIF is a formal Commission document. The former EIF 1.0 was a semi-formal deliverable from the PEGSCO, a working group of Member State representatives. - EIF tackles interoperability head-on and takes a clear stance: "Recommendation 22. When establishing European public services, public administrations should prefer open specifications, taking due account of the coverage of functional needs, maturity and market support." - The Commission will continue to support the National Interoperability Framework Observatory (NIFO), reconfirming the importance of coordinating such approaches across borders. - The Commission will align its internal interoperability strategy with the EIS through the eCommission initiative. - One cannot stress the importance of using open standards enough, whether in the context of open source or non-open source software. The EIF seems to have picked up on this fact: What does the EIF says about the relation between open specifications and open source software? The EIF introduces, as one of the characteristics of an open specification, the requirement that IPRs related to the specification have to be licensed on FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software. In this way, companies working under various business models can compete on an equal footing when providing solutions to public administrations while administrations that implement the standard in their own software (software that they own) can share such software with others under an open source licence if they so decide. - EIF is now among the center pieces of the Digital Agenda (even though this demands extensive inter-agency coordination in the Commission): "The EIS and the EIF will be maintained under the ISA Programme and kept in line with the results of other relevant Digital Agenda actions on interoperability and standards such as the ones on the reform of rules on implementation of ICT standards in Europe to allow use of certain ICT fora and consortia standards, on issuing guidelines on essential intellectual property rights and licensing conditions in standard-setting, including for ex-ante disclosure, and on providing guidance on the link between ICT standardisation and public procurement to help public authorities to use standards to promote efficiency and reduce lock-in.(Communication, p.7)" All in all, quite a few good things have happened to the document in the two years it has been on the shelf or was being re-written, depending on your perspective, in any case, awaiting the storms to calm. The Bad - While a certain pragmatism is required, and governments cannot migrate to full openness overnight, EIF gives a bit too much room for governments not to apply the openness principle in full. Plenty of reasons are given, which should maybe have been put as challenges to be overcome: "However, public administrations may decide to use less open specifications, if open specifications do not exist or do not meet functional interoperability needs. In all cases, specifications should be mature and sufficiently supported by the market, except if used in the context of creating innovative solutions". - EIF does not use the internationally established terminology: open standards. Rather, the EIF introduces the notion of "formalised specification". How do "formalised specifications" relate to "standards"? According to the FAQ provided: The word "standard" has a specific meaning in Europe as defined by Directive 98/34/EC. Only technical specifications approved by a recognised standardisation body can be called a standard. Many ICT systems rely on the use of specifications developed by other organisations such as a forum or consortium. The EIF introduces the notion of "formalised specification", which is either a standard pursuant to Directive 98/34/EC or a specification established by ICT fora and consortia. The term "open specification" used in the EIF, on the one hand, avoids terminological confusion with the Directive and, on the other, states the main features that comply with the basic principle of openness laid down in the EIF for European Public Services. Well, this may be somewhat true, but in reality, Europe is 30 year behind in terminology. Unless the European Standardization Reform gets completed in the next few months, most Member States will likely conclude that they will go on referencing and using standards beyond those created by the three European endorsed monopolists of standardization, CEN, CENELEC and ETSI. Who can afford to begin following the strict Brussels rules for what they can call open standards when, in reality, standards stemming from global standardization organizations, so-called fora/consortia, dominate in the IT industry. What exactly is EIF saying? Does it encourage Member States to go on using non-ESO standards as long as they call it something else? I guess I am all for it, although it is a bit cumbersome, no? Why was there so much interest around the EIF? The FAQ attempts to explain: Some Member States have begun to adopt policies to achieve interoperability for their public services. These actions have had a significant impact on the ecosystem built around the provision of such services, e.g. providers of ICT goods and services, standardisation bodies, industry fora and consortia, etc... The Commission identified a clear need for action at European level to ensure that actions by individual Member States would not create new electronic barriers that would hinder the development of interoperable European public services. As a result, all stakeholders involved in the delivery of electronic public services in Europe have expressed their opinions on how to increase interoperability for public services provided by the different public administrations in Europe. Well, it does not take two years to read 50 consultation documents, and the EU Standardization Reform is not yet completed, so, more pragmatically, you finally had to release the document. Ok, let's leave some of that aside because the document is out and some people are happy (and others definitely not). The Verdict Considering the controversy, the delays, the lobbying, and the interests at stake both in the EU, in Member States and among vendors large and small, this document is pretty impressive. As with a good wine that has not yet come to full maturity, let's say that it seems to be coming in in the 85-88/100 range, but only a more fine-grained analysis, enjoyment in good company, and ultimately, implementation, will tell. The European Commission has today adopted a significant interoperability initiative to encourage public administrations across the EU to maximise the social and economic potential of information and communication technologies. Today, we should rally around this achievement. Tomorrow, let's sit down and figure out what it means for the future.

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  • No VB6 to VS2010 direct upgrade path

    - by Chris Williams
    From the "is this really news?" department... From looking at the currently available versions of 2010, there is no direct upgrade path from VB6 to VS2010. Anyone still using VB6 and wishing to upgrade to VS2010 has two options:  Use the upgrade tool from an earlier version of VS (like 2005 or 2008) and then run the upgrade in VS2010 to get the rest of the way... or rewrite your code. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader which is the better option. I'd like to take a moment to point out the obvious: A) If you're still using VB6 at this point, you probably don't care about VS2010 compatibility. B) Running your code through 2 upgrade wizards isn't going to result in anything resembling best practices. C) Bemoaning the lack of support in 2010 for a 12 year old version of an extinct programming language helps nobody. This public service announcement is brought to you by the letter C. Thank you.

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  • How to grant write permissions in Samba?

    - by Eric Fossum
    I'm having trouble with read/write permissions on my Samba server, how do I fix my smb.conf and file permissions to have a more unified access? smb.conf [global] workgroup = workgroup netbios name = LnxNAS server string = %h wins support = no dns proxy = no security = user encrypt passwords = yes panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d [homes] comment = Home Directories [Video] path = /data/eric/Videos [Music] path = /data/eric/Music [Pictures] path = /data/eric/Pictures [data] path = /data my ls -l of /data/eric/Pictures drwxrwxrwx 2 ericfoss root 4096 2011-03-13 22:09 Android Projs drwxrwxrwx 3 ericfoss root 4096 2011-03-13 22:09 Automotive -rwxrwxrwx 1 ericfoss root 2439 2010-12-17 17:03 BDD reduction.png -rwxrwxrwx 1 ericfoss root 2722 2010-12-17 16:55 BDD Tree.png -rwxrwxrwx 1 ericfoss root 7341 2010-12-17 16:46 BDD Tree.xcf -rwxrwxrwx 1 ericfoss root 72421 2007-11-22 22:59 Bum Ninja.jpg -rwxrwxrwx 1 ericfoss root 32152 2010-12-17 21:25 cell transition.png -rwxrwxrwx 1 ericfoss root 40212 2010-12-17 17:55 control graph.png drwxrwxrwx 2 ericfoss root 4096 2011-03-13 22:09 Crap -rwxrwxrwx 1 ericfoss root 82 2010-09-20 17:18 desktop.ini ericfoss@SERVER:~$ If I try to delete \Server\Pictures\Crap it says permission denied, but \Server\data\eric\Pictures\crap can be deleted... I thought security = user took care of this?

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  • Big label generator

    - by jamiet
    Sometimes I write blog posts mainly so that I can find stuff when I need it later. This is such a blog post. Of late I have been writing lots of deployment scripts and I am fan of putting big labels into deployment scripts (which, these days, reside in SSDT) so one can easily see what’s going on as they execute. Here’s such an example from my current project: which results in this being displayed when the script is run: In case you care….PM_EDW is the name of one of our databases. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I spent about half an hour crafting that and a few others for my current project because a colleague has just alerted me to a website that would have done it for me, and given me lots of options for how to present it too: http://www.patorjk.com/software/taag/#p=testall&f=Banner3&t=PM__EDW Very useful indeed. Nice one! And yes, I’m sure there are a myriad of sites that do the same thing - I’m a latecomer, ok? @Jamiet

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  • Supporting users if they're not on your site

    - by Roger Hart
    Have a look at this Read Write Web article, specifically the paragraph in bold and the comments. Have a wry chuckle, or maybe weep for the future of humanity - your call. Then pause, and worry about information architecture. The short story: Read Write Web bumps up the Google rankings for "Facebook login" at the same time as Facebook makes UI changes, and a few hundred users get confused and leave comments on Read Write Web complaining about not being able to log in to their Facebook accounts.* Blindly clicking the first Google result is not a navigation behaviour I'd anticipated for folks visiting big names sites like Facebook. But then, I use Launchy and don't know where any of my files are, depend on Firefox auto-complete, view Facebook through my IM client, and don't need a map to find my backside with both hands. Not all our users behave in the same way, which means not all of our architecture is within our control, and people can get to your content in all sorts of ways. Even if the Read Write Web episode is a prank of some kind (there are, after all, plenty of folks who enjoy orchestrated trolling) it's still a useful reminder. Your users may take paths through and to your content you cannot control, and they are unlikely to deconstruct their assumptions along the way. I guess the meaningful question is: can you still support those users? If they get to you from Google instead of your front door, does what they find still make sense? Does your information architecture still work if your guests come in through the bathroom window? Ok, so here they broke into the house next door - you can't be expected to deal with that. But the rest is well worth thinking about. Other off-site interaction It's rarely going to be as funny as the comments at Read Write Web, but your users are going to do, say, and read things they think of as being about you and your products, in places you don't control. That's good. If you pay attention to it, you get data. Your users get a better experience. There are easy wins, too. Blogs, forums, social media &c. People may look for and find help with your product on blogs and forums, on Twitter, and what have you. They may learn about your brand in the same way. That's fine, it's an interaction you can be part of. It's time-consuming, certainly, but you have the option. You won't get a blogger to incorporate your site navigation just in case your users end up there, but you can be there when they do. Again, Anne Gentle, Gordon McLean and others have covered this in more depth than I could. Direct contact Sales people, customer care, support, they all talk to people. Are they sending links to your content? if so, which bits? Do they know about all of it? Do they have the content they need to support them - messaging that funnels sales, FAQ that are realistically frequent, detailed examples of things people want to do, that kind of thing. Are they sending links because users can't find the good stuff? Are they sending précis of your content, or re-writes, or brand new stuff? If so, does that mean your content isn't up to scratch, or that you've got content missing? Direct sales/care/support interactions are enormously valuable, and can help you know what content your users find useful. You can't have a table of contents or a "See also" in a phonecall, but your content strategy can support more interactions than browsing. *Passing observation about Facebook. For plenty if folks, it is  the internet. Its services are simple versions of what a lot of people use the internet for, and they're aggregated into one stop. Flickr, Vimeo, Wordpress, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all sorts of games, have Facebook doppelgangers that are not only friendlier to entry-level users, they're right there, behind only one layer of authentication. As such, it could own a lot of interaction convention. Heavy users may well not be tech-savvy, and be quite change averse. That doesn't make this episode not dumb, but I'm happy to go easy on 'em.

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  • 301 redirect, keyword being in bold

    - by seo-man
    Regarding 301; If I redirect nonwww to www domain with 301 redirect, do I still have to determinate inside google webmaster tools which version (www or nonwww) is prefered? Or is setting up redirect enough so therefore I don't need to determinate that inside GWT? Regarding keyword being in bold: Usually keywords are supposted to be in bold font and it is irrelevant if they are links or not. But in heading (h1, h2); does there keyword also need to be in bold or is it enough if I care to put it to the beginning of heading? So elsehow asked; Does the keyword in heading need to be in bold font also?

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  • JavaScript JSON Error While Tabbing in ASP.NET MVC

    - by MightyZot
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/MightyZot/archive/2013/11/11/javascript-json-error-while-tabbing-in-asp.net-mvc.aspxI sometimes don’t care about validation for a specific control. The RememberMe control in the login form, for example, really doesn’t need validation, so I forget to include the Html.ValidationMessageFor helper line for that control in particular. As a result, when I’m debugging using IE, I get a silly JSON parsing exception when changing focus from one field to another. The exception doesn’t hurt anything, as far as I know, but it’s just plain annoying. If you’re getting this error, and you don’t want validation messages showing up for controls on a form, you can put them in div tags and set the display style on the divs to none. When I have a handful of controls that I don’t want the validation messages for, I just throw them all in the same div and hide it.

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  • Underwriting in a New Frontier: Spurring Innovation

    - by [email protected]
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Susan Keuer, product strategy manager for Oracle Insurance, shares her experiences and insight from the 2010 Association of Home Office Underwriters (AHOU) Annual Conference, April 11-14, in San Antonio, Texas    How can I be more innovative in underwriting?  It's a common question I hear from insurance carriers, producers and others, so it was no surprise that it was the key theme at the recent 2010 AHOU Annual Conference.  This year's event drew more than 900 insurance professionals involved in the underwriting process across life and annuities, property and casualty and reinsurance from around the globe, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, Bahamas, and more, to San Antonio - a Texas city where innovation transformed a series of downtown drainage canals into its premiere River Walk tourist destination.   CNN's Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta kicked off the conference with a phenomenal opening session that drove home the theme of the conference, "Underwriting in a New Frontier:  Spurring Innovation."   Drawing from his own experience as a neurosurgeon treating critically injured medical patients in the field in Iraq, Gupta inspired audience members to think outside the box during the underwriting process. He shared a compelling story of operating on a soldier who had suffered a head-related trauma in a field hospital.  With minimal supplies available Gupta used a Black and Decker saw to operate on the soldier's head and reduce pressure on his swelling brain. Drawing from this example, Gupta encouraged underwriters to think creatively, be innovative, and consider new tools and sources of information, such as social networking sites, during the underwriting process. So as you are looking at risk take into consideration all resources you have available.    Gupta also stressed the concept of IKIGAI - noting that individuals who believe that their life is worth living are less likely to die than are their counterparts without this belief.  How does one quantify this approach to life or thought process when evaluating risk?  Could this be something to consider as a "category" in the near future? How can this same belief in your own work spur innovation?   The role of technology was a hot topic of discussion throughout the conference.  Sessions delved into the latest in underwriting software to the rise of social media and how it is being increasingly integrated into underwriting process and solutions.  In one session a trio of panelists representing the carrier, producer and vendor communities stressed the importance to underwriters of leveraging new technology and the plethora of online information sources, which all could be used to accurately, honestly and consistently evaluate the risk throughout the underwriting process.   Another focused on the explosion of social media noting:  1.    Social media is growing exponentially - About eight percent of Americans used social media five years ago. Today about 46 percent of Americans do so, with 85 percent of financial services professionals using social media in their work.  2.    It will impact your business - Underwriters reconfirmed over and over that they are increasingly using "free" tools that are available in cyberspace in lieu of more costly solutions, such as inspection reports conducted by individuals in the field.  3.    Information is instantly available on the Web, anytime, anywhere - LinkedIn was mentioned as a way to connect to peers in the underwriting community and producers alike.  Many carriers and agents also are using Facebook to promote their company to customers - and as a point-of-entry to allow them to perform some functionality - such as accessing product marketing information versus directing users to go to the carrier's own proprietary website.  Other carriers have released their tight brand marketing to allow their producers to drive more business to their personal Facebook site where they offer innovative tools such as Application Capture or asking medical information in a more relaxed fashion.     Other key topics at the conference included the economy, ongoing industry consolidation, real-estate valuations as an asset and input into the underwriting process, and producer trends.  All stressed a "back to basics" approach for low cost, term products.   Finally, Connie Merritt, RN, PHN, entertained the large group of atttendees with audience-engaging insight on how to "Tame the Lions in Your Life - Dealing with Complainers, Bullies, Grump and Curmudgeon." Merritt noted "we are too busy for our own good." She shared how her overachieving personality had impacted her life.  Audience members then were asked to pick red, yellow, blue, or green shapes, without knowing that each one represented a specific personality trait.  For example, those who picked blue were the peacemakers. Those who choose yellow were social - the hint was to "Be Quiet Longer."  She then offered these "lion taming" steps:   1.    Admit It 2.    Accept It 3.    Let Go 4.    Be Present (which paralleled Gupta's IKIGAI concept)   When thinking about underwriting I encourage you to be present in the moment and think creatively, but don't be afraid to look ahead to the future and be an innovator.  I hope to see you at next year's AHOU Annual Conference, May 1-4, 2011 at The Mirage in Las Vegas, Nev.     Susan Keuer is the product strategy manager for new business underwriting.  She brings more than 20 years of insurance industry experience working with leading insurance carriers and technology companies to her role on the product strategy team for life/annuities solutions within the Oracle Insurance Global Business Unit  

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  • Scripting out Contained Database Users

    - by Argenis
      Today’s blog post comes from a Twitter thread on which @SQLSoldier, @sqlstudent144 and @SQLTaiob were discussing the internals of contained database users. Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ve heard about the concept of contained users within a SQL Server database (hit the link if you have not). In this article I’d like to show you that you can, indeed, script out contained database users and recreate them on another database, as either contained users or as good old fashioned logins/server principals as well. Why would this be useful? Well, because you would not need to know the password for the user in order to recreate it on another instance. I know there is a limited number of scenarios where this would be necessary, but nonetheless I figured I’d throw this blog post to show how it can be done. A more obscure use case: with the password hash (which I’m about to show you how to obtain) you could also crack the password using a utility like hashcat, as highlighted on this SQLServerCentral article. The Investigation SQL Server uses System Base Tables to save the password hashes of logins and contained database users. For logins it uses sys.sysxlgns, whereas for contained database users it leverages sys.sysowners. I’ll show you what I do to figure this stuff out: I create a login/contained user, and then I immediately browse the transaction log with, for example, fn_dblog. It’s pretty obvious that only two base tables touched by the operation are sys.sysxlgns, and also sys.sysprivs – the latter is used to track permissions. If I connect to the DAC on my instance, I can query for the password hash of this login I’ve just created. A few interesting things about this hash. This was taken on my laptop, and I happen to be running SQL Server 2014 RTM CU2, which is the latest public build of SQL Server 2014 as of time of writing. In 2008 R2 and prior versions (back to 2000), the password hashes would start with 0x0100. The reason why this changed is because starting with SQL Server 2012 password hashes are kept using a SHA512 algorithm, as opposed to SHA-1 (used since 2000) or Snefru (used in 6.5 and 7.0). SHA-1 is nowadays deemed unsafe and is very easy to crack. For regular SQL logins, this information is exposed through the sys.sql_logins catalog view, so there is really no need to connect to the DAC to grab an SID/password hash pair. For contained database users, there is (currently) no method of obtaining SID or password hashes without connecting to the DAC. If we create a contained database user, this is what we get from the transaction log: Note that the System Base Table used in this case is sys.sysowners. sys.sysprivs is used as well, and again this is to track permissions. To query sys.sysowners, you would have to connect to the DAC, as I mentioned previously. And this is what you would get: There are other ways to figure out what SQL Server uses under the hood to store contained database user password hashes, like looking at the execution plan for a query to sys.dm_db_uncontained_entities (Thanks, Robert Davis!) SIDs, Logins, Contained Users, and Why You Care…Or Not. One of the reasons behind the existence of Contained Users was the concept of portability of databases: it is really painful to maintain Server Principals (Logins) synced across most shared-nothing SQL Server HA/DR technologies (Mirroring, Availability Groups, and Log Shipping). Often times you would need the Security Identifier (SID) of these logins to match across instances, and that meant that you had to fetch whatever SID was assigned to the login on the principal instance so you could recreate it on a secondary. With contained users you normally wouldn’t care about SIDs, as the users are always available (and synced, as long as synchronization takes place) across instances. Now you might be presented some particular requirement that might specify that SIDs synced between logins on certain instances and contained database users on other databases. How would you go about creating a contained database user with a specific SID? The answer is that you can’t do it directly, but there’s a little trick that would allow you to do it. Create a login with a specified SID and password hash, create a user for that server principal on a partially contained database, then migrate that user to contained using the system stored procedure sp_user_migrate_to_contained, then drop the login. CREATE LOGIN <login_name> WITH PASSWORD = <password_hash> HASHED, SID = <sid> ; GO USE <partially_contained_db>; GO CREATE USER <user_name> FROM LOGIN <login_name>; GO EXEC sp_migrate_user_to_contained @username = <user_name>, @rename = N’keep_name’, @disablelogin = N‘disable_login’; GO DROP LOGIN <login_name>; GO Here’s how this skeleton would look like in action: And now I have a contained user with a specified SID and password hash. In my example above, I renamed the user after migrated it to contained so that it is, hopefully, easier to understand. Enjoy!

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  • Data structure: sort and search effectively

    - by Jiten Shah
    I need to have a data structure with say 4 keys . I can sort on any of these keys. What data structure can I opt for? Sorting time should be very little. I thought of a tree, but it will be only help searching on one key. For other keys I'll have to remake the tree on that particular key and then find it. Is there any data structure that can take care of all 4 keys at the same time? these 4 fields are of total 12 bytes and total size for each record - 40 bytes.. have memory constraints too... operations are : insertion, deletion, sorting on different keys.

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  • How do I ask google not to index certain parts of my page?

    - by Gavin Mannion
    I was searching for an old review on my site today and I noticed that Google is indexing the headline text in my latest article list on every page that it appears, obviously I guess. The problem is if I search for my Dragon's Lair review specifically to my site like this http://www.google.co.za/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Alazygamer.net+dragons+lair+review Then it returns a ton of pages that aren't appropriate as they aren't related to the review at all. The reason why I care is that I have a second Dragon's Lair review that was posted years ago and now I can't find it. Is there a way to hint to google that certain text isn't relevant to the actual content on the page? is it a terrible idea?

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  • Best Practices and Etiquette for Setting up Email Notifications

    - by George Stocker
    If you were going to set up a Email Alerts for the customers of your website to subscribe to, what rules of etiquette ought to be followed? I can think of a few off the top of my head: Users can Opt-Out Text Only (Or tasteful Remote Images) Not sent out more than once a week Clients have fine-grained control over what they receive emails about (Only receive what they are interested in) What other points should I consider? From a programming standpoint, what is the best method for setting up and running email notifications? Should I use an ASP.NET Service? A Windows Service? What are the pitfalls to either? How should I log emails that are sent? I don't care if they're received, but I do need to be able to prove that I did or did not send an email.

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  • How to customize Unity Launcher's background

    - by Luis Alvarado - The Wolverine
    In this question I do not want to customize the launcher for each workspace, or change the animations or behaviors of the icons. I only want to change how the background of the Launcher looks. Let me show you what I mean: If I do not open the Dash, the launcher looks like the following: It looks like this because I have a background that has gray, black and white colors. So Unity tries to accommodate the launcher to contrast with it. Now when I open the Dash, the launcher looks like this: What I want is to make the launcher look the same as if my Dash were open (Darker, richer background). I thought maybe to invert the colors of an opened Dash with a closed one, but that the end I do not care if the colors do change when I open the Dash, so long as the darker richer version stays. Is it possible to do this, to make the background stay with a darker color like shown in the pictures above?

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  • MIT vs. BSD vs. Dual License

    - by ryanve
    My understanding is that: MIT-licensed projects can be used/redistributed in BSD-licensed projects. BSD-licensed projects can be used/redistributed in MIT-licensed projects. The MIT and the BSD 2-clause licenses are essentially identical. BSD 3-clause = BSD 2-clause + the "no endorsement" clause Issuing a dual license allows users to choose from those licenses—not be bound to both. If all of the above is correct, then what is the point of using a dual MIT/BSD license? Even if the BSD refers to the 3-clause version, then can't a user legally choose to only abide by the MIT license? It seems that if you really want the "no endorsement" clause to apply then you have to license it as just BSD (not dual). If you don't care about the "no endorsement" clause, then MIT alone is sufficient and MIT/BSD is redundant. Similarly, since the MIT and BSD licenses are both "GPL-compatible" and can be redistributed in GPL-licensed projects, then dual licensing MIT/GPL also seems redundant.

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  • R2 and Idera Idera SQL Safe (Freeware Edition)

    - by DavidWimbush
    Good news: the Freeware edition of Idera SQL Safe works on R2. You might not care but I certainly do. Here's why:  In September last year I started using Idera SQL Safe (the Freeware Edition) to get backup compression on my SQL 2005 servers. It seemed like a good idea at the time - it was free and my backups ran much faster and took up much less disk space. I really thought I'd actually scored a free lunch. Until they discontinued the product. I was thinking about what to do when I heard that R2 Standard would include native backup compression so I've just been keeping my fingers crossed since then. So I installed R2 Developer on my laptop, installed SQL Safe and kicked off a restore with it. No problem. Phew! Now I won't have to do a special, non-compressed backup and restore when we migrate.

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  • Alternative printing method(s) for an unsupported printer

    - by B. Roland
    Hello! I have in my office, a Konica Minolta bizhub 211 multifunction printer, it works well with windows workstations... It has a lot of good features, like duplex... I haven't found any drivers for UNIX, so I'm looking for alternative methods, how can we make it useable in Ubuntu. I'm thinking on some windows based server, or what I know... I wrote here requesting for drivers: ubuntu.hu, linuxforums.org, forums.debian.net, ubuntuforums.org; and also to the manufacturer, but they said only, that "the first PostScript supported printer is only bizhub 223", so they don't care that thing. Please suggest working methods, Thanks, B. Roland

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  • please help setup apache webserver and domain forwarding

    - by bemonolit
    Situation: I have Apache2 server with Linux Ubuntu OS 11.10. Then I install a PhP5, MyAdmin, DNS server, LAMP server, MY SQL server. This is what I have done: - check localhost 127.0.0.1 and it works! - edit index.html default webpage located in /var/www - change my IP address to static - restart /etc/init.d/apache2 restart {OK} - bought a domain name - turn off Firewall on my router Now I need Your HELP! Please tell me how and what needs to be done that other people around the world can type my domain name and connect to my server and default web page index.html located in /var/www? I do not care about security. I changed permission on /var/www/to 777 for the moment , because I want to host my simple website or webpage but only on my local server. THANK YOU this is my first server and I guess YOU got the point. And thanks for help.If possible step by step.

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