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• Why Is Vertical Resolution Monitor Resolution so Often a Multiple of 360?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Stare at a list of monitor resolutions long enough and you might notice a pattern: many of the vertical resolutions, especially those of gaming or multimedia displays, are multiples of 360 (720, 1080, 1440, etc.) But why exactly is this the case? Is it arbitrary or is there something more at work? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Trojandestroy recently noticed something about his display interface and needs answers: YouTube recently added 1440p functionality, and for the first time I realized that all (most?) vertical resolutions are multiples of 360. Is this just because the smallest common resolution is 480×360, and it’s convenient to use multiples? (Not doubting that multiples are convenient.) And/or was that the first viewable/conveniently sized resolution, so hardware (TVs, monitors, etc) grew with 360 in mind? Taking it further, why not have a square resolution? Or something else unusual? (Assuming it’s usual enough that it’s viewable). Is it merely a pleasing-the-eye situation? So why have the display be a multiple of 360? The Answer SuperUser contributor User26129 offers us not just an answer as to why the numerical pattern exists but a history of screen design in the process: Alright, there are a couple of questions and a lot of factors here. Resolutions are a really interesting field of psychooptics meeting marketing. First of all, why are the vertical resolutions on youtube multiples of 360. This is of course just arbitrary, there is no real reason this is the case. The reason is that resolution here is not the limiting factor for Youtube videos – bandwidth is. Youtube has to re-encode every video that is uploaded a couple of times, and tries to use as little re-encoding formats/bitrates/resolutions as possible to cover all the different use cases. For low-res mobile devices they have 360×240, for higher res mobile there’s 480p, and for the computer crowd there is 360p for 2xISDN/multiuser landlines, 720p for DSL and 1080p for higher speed internet. For a while there were some other codecs than h.264, but these are slowly being phased out with h.264 having essentially ‘won’ the format war and all computers being outfitted with hardware codecs for this. Now, there is some interesting psychooptics going on as well. As I said: resolution isn’t everything. 720p with really strong compression can and will look worse than 240p at a very high bitrate. But on the other side of the spectrum: throwing more bits at a certain resolution doesn’t magically make it better beyond some point. There is an optimum here, which of course depends on both resolution and codec. In general: the optimal bitrate is actually proportional to the resolution. So the next question is: what kind of resolution steps make sense? Apparently, people need about a 2x increase in resolution to really see (and prefer) a marked difference. Anything less than that and many people will simply not bother with the higher bitrates, they’d rather use their bandwidth for other stuff. This has been researched quite a long time ago and is the big reason why we went from 720×576 (415kpix) to 1280×720 (922kpix), and then again from 1280×720 to 1920×1080 (2MP). Stuff in between is not a viable optimization target. And again, 1440P is about 3.7MP, another ~2x increase over HD. You will see a difference there. 4K is the next step after that. Next up is that magical number of 360 vertical pixels. Actually, the magic number is 120 or 128. All resolutions are some kind of multiple of 120 pixels nowadays, back in the day they used to be multiples of 128. This is something that just grew out of LCD panel industry. LCD panels use what are called line drivers, little chips that sit on the sides of your LCD screen that control how bright each subpixel is. Because historically, for reasons I don’t really know for sure, probably memory constraints, these multiple-of-128 or multiple-of-120 resolutions already existed, the industry standard line drivers became drivers with 360 line outputs (1 per subpixel). If you would tear down your 1920×1080 screen, I would be putting money on there being 16 line drivers on the top/bottom and 9 on one of the sides. Oh hey, that’s 16:9. Guess how obvious that resolution choice was back when 16:9 was ‘invented’. Then there’s the issue of aspect ratio. This is really a completely different field of psychology, but it boils down to: historically, people have believed and measured that we have a sort of wide-screen view of the world. Naturally, people believed that the most natural representation of data on a screen would be in a wide-screen view, and this is where the great anamorphic revolution of the ’60s came from when films were shot in ever wider aspect ratios. Since then, this kind of knowledge has been refined and mostly debunked. Yes, we do have a wide-angle view, but the area where we can actually see sharply – the center of our vision – is fairly round. Slightly elliptical and squashed, but not really more than about 4:3 or 3:2. So for detailed viewing, for instance for reading text on a screen, you can utilize most of your detail vision by employing an almost-square screen, a bit like the screens up to the mid-2000s. However, again this is not how marketing took it. Computers in ye olden days were used mostly for productivity and detailed work, but as they commoditized and as the computer as media consumption device evolved, people didn’t necessarily use their computer for work most of the time. They used it to watch media content: movies, television series and photos. And for that kind of viewing, you get the most ‘immersion factor’ if the screen fills as much of your vision (including your peripheral vision) as possible. Which means widescreen. But there’s more marketing still. When detail work was still an important factor, people cared about resolution. As many pixels as possible on the screen. SGI was selling almost-4K CRTs! The most optimal way to get the maximum amount of pixels out of a glass substrate is to cut it as square as possible. 1:1 or 4:3 screens have the most pixels per diagonal inch. But with displays becoming more consumery, inch-size became more important, not amount of pixels. And this is a completely different optimization target. To get the most diagonal inches out of a substrate, you want to make the screen as wide as possible. First we got 16:10, then 16:9 and there have been moderately successful panel manufacturers making 22:9 and 2:1 screens (like Philips). Even though pixel density and absolute resolution went down for a couple of years, inch-sizes went up and that’s what sold. Why buy a 19″ 1280×1024 when you can buy a 21″ 1366×768? Eh… I think that about covers all the major aspects here. There’s more of course; bandwidth limits of HDMI, DVI, DP and of course VGA played a role, and if you go back to the pre-2000s, graphics memory, in-computer bandwdith and simply the limits of commercially available RAMDACs played an important role. But for today’s considerations, this is about all you need to know. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Per-pixel displacement mapping GLSL

  - by Chris

  Im trying to implement a per-pixel displacement shader in GLSL. I read through several papers and "tutorials" I found and ended up with trying to implement the approach NVIDIA used in their Cascade Demo (http://www.slideshare.net/icastano/cascades-demo-secrets) starting at Slide 82. At the moment I am completly stuck with following problem: When I am far away the displacement seems to work. But as more I move closer to my surface, the texture gets bent in x-axis and somehow it looks like there is a little bent in general in one direction. EDIT: I added a video: click I added some screen to illustrate the problem: Well I tried lots of things already and I am starting to get a bit frustrated as my ideas run out. I added my full VS and FS code: VS: #version 400 layout(location = 0) in vec3 IN_VS_Position; layout(location = 1) in vec3 IN_VS_Normal; layout(location = 2) in vec2 IN_VS_Texcoord; layout(location = 3) in vec3 IN_VS_Tangent; layout(location = 4) in vec3 IN_VS_BiTangent; uniform vec3 uLightPos; uniform vec3 uCameraDirection; uniform mat4 uViewProjection; uniform mat4 uModel; uniform mat4 uView; uniform mat3 uNormalMatrix; out vec2 IN_FS_Texcoord; out vec3 IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent; out vec3 IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent; void main( void ) { IN_FS_Texcoord = IN_VS_Texcoord; vec4 posObject = uModel * vec4(IN_VS_Position, 1.0); vec3 normalObject = (uModel * vec4(IN_VS_Normal, 0.0)).xyz; vec3 tangentObject = (uModel * vec4(IN_VS_Tangent, 0.0)).xyz; //vec3 binormalObject = (uModel * vec4(IN_VS_BiTangent, 0.0)).xyz; vec3 binormalObject = normalize(cross(tangentObject, normalObject)); // uCameraDirection is the camera position, just bad named vec3 fvViewDirection = normalize( uCameraDirection - posObject.xyz); vec3 fvLightDirection = normalize( uLightPos.xyz - posObject.xyz ); IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent.x = dot( tangentObject, fvViewDirection ); IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent.y = dot( binormalObject, fvViewDirection ); IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent.z = dot( normalObject, fvViewDirection ); IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent.x = dot( tangentObject, fvLightDirection ); IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent.y = dot( binormalObject, fvLightDirection ); IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent.z = dot( normalObject, fvLightDirection ); gl_Position = (uViewProjection*uModel) * vec4(IN_VS_Position, 1.0); } The VS just builds the TBN matrix, from incoming normal, tangent and binormal in world space. Calculates the light and eye direction in worldspace. And finally transforms the light and eye direction into tangent space. FS: #version 400 // uniforms uniform Light { vec4 fvDiffuse; vec4 fvAmbient; vec4 fvSpecular; }; uniform Material { vec4 diffuse; vec4 ambient; vec4 specular; vec4 emissive; float fSpecularPower; float shininessStrength; }; uniform sampler2D colorSampler; uniform sampler2D normalMapSampler; uniform sampler2D heightMapSampler; in vec2 IN_FS_Texcoord; in vec3 IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent; in vec3 IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent; out vec4 color; vec2 TraceRay(in float height, in vec2 coords, in vec3 dir, in float mipmap){ vec2 NewCoords = coords; vec2 dUV = - dir.xy * height * 0.08; float SearchHeight = 1.0; float prev_hits = 0.0; float hit_h = 0.0; for(int i=0;i<10;i++){ SearchHeight -= 0.1; NewCoords += dUV; float CurrentHeight = textureLod(heightMapSampler,NewCoords.xy, mipmap).r; float first_hit = clamp((CurrentHeight - SearchHeight - prev_hits) * 499999.0,0.0,1.0); hit_h += first_hit * SearchHeight; prev_hits += first_hit; } NewCoords = coords + dUV * (1.0-hit_h) * 10.0f - dUV; vec2 Temp = NewCoords; SearchHeight = hit_h+0.1; float Start = SearchHeight; dUV *= 0.2; prev_hits = 0.0; hit_h = 0.0; for(int i=0;i<5;i++){ SearchHeight -= 0.02; NewCoords += dUV; float CurrentHeight = textureLod(heightMapSampler,NewCoords.xy, mipmap).r; float first_hit = clamp((CurrentHeight - SearchHeight - prev_hits) * 499999.0,0.0,1.0); hit_h += first_hit * SearchHeight; prev_hits += first_hit; } NewCoords = Temp + dUV * (Start - hit_h) * 50.0f; return NewCoords; } void main( void ) { vec3 fvLightDirection = normalize( IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent ); vec3 fvViewDirection = normalize( IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent ); float mipmap = 0; vec2 NewCoord = TraceRay(0.1,IN_FS_Texcoord,fvViewDirection,mipmap); //vec2 ddx = dFdx(NewCoord); //vec2 ddy = dFdy(NewCoord); vec3 BumpMapNormal = textureLod(normalMapSampler, NewCoord.xy, mipmap).xyz; BumpMapNormal = normalize(2.0 * BumpMapNormal - vec3(1.0, 1.0, 1.0)); vec3 fvNormal = BumpMapNormal; float fNDotL = dot( fvNormal, fvLightDirection ); vec3 fvReflection = normalize( ( ( 2.0 * fvNormal ) * fNDotL ) - fvLightDirection ); float fRDotV = max( 0.0, dot( fvReflection, fvViewDirection ) ); vec4 fvBaseColor = textureLod( colorSampler, NewCoord.xy,mipmap); vec4 fvTotalAmbient = fvAmbient * fvBaseColor; vec4 fvTotalDiffuse = fvDiffuse * fNDotL * fvBaseColor; vec4 fvTotalSpecular = fvSpecular * ( pow( fRDotV, fSpecularPower ) ); color = ( fvTotalAmbient + (fvTotalDiffuse + fvTotalSpecular) ); } The FS implements the displacement technique in TraceRay method, while always using mipmap level 0. Most of the code is from NVIDIA sample and another paper I found on the web, so I guess there cannot be much wrong in here. At the end it uses the modified UV coords for getting the displaced normal from the normal map and the color from the color map. I looking forward for some ideas. Thanks in advance! Edit: Here is the code loading the heightmap: glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, mWidth, mHeight, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, mImageData); glGenerateMipmap(GL_TEXTURE_2D); //glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR); //glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR); //glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_REPEAT); //glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_REPEAT); Maybe something wrong in here?

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• We've completed the first iteration

  - by CliveT

  There are a lot of features in C# that are implemented by the compiler and not by the underlying platform. One such feature is a lambda expression. Since local variables cannot be accessed once the current method activation finishes, the compiler has to go out of its way to generate a new class which acts as a home for any variable whose lifetime needs to be extended past the activation of the procedure. Take the following example:     Random generator = new Random();     Func func = () = generator.Next(10); In this case, the compiler generates a new class called c_DisplayClass1 which is marked with the CompilerGenerated attribute. [CompilerGenerated] private sealed class c__DisplayClass1 {     // Fields     public Random generator;     // Methods     public int b__0()     {         return this.generator.Next(10);     } } Two quick comments on this: (i)    A display was the means that compilers for languages like Algol recorded the various lexical contours of the nested procedure activations on the stack. I imagine that this is what has led to the name. (ii)    It is a shame that the same attribute is used to mark all compiler generated classes as it makes it hard to figure out what they are being used for. Indeed, you could imagine optimisations that the runtime could perform if it knew that classes corresponded to certain high level concepts. We can see that the local variable generator has been turned into a field in the class, and the body of the lambda expression has been turned into a method of the new class. The code that builds the Func object simply constructs an instance of this class and initialises the fields to their initial values.     c__DisplayClass1 class2 = new c__DisplayClass1();     class2.generator = new Random();     Func func = new Func(class2.b__0); Reflector already contains code to spot this pattern of code and reproduce the form containing the lambda expression, so this is example is correctly decompiled. The use of compiler generated code is even more spectacular in the case of iterators. C# introduced the idea of a method that could automatically store its state between calls, so that it can pick up where it left off. The code can express the logical flow with yield return and yield break denoting places where the method should return a particular value and be prepared to resume.         {             yield return 1;             yield return 2;             yield return 3;         } Of course, there was already a .NET pattern for expressing the idea of returning a sequence of values with the computation proceeding lazily (in the sense that the work for the next value is executed on demand). This is expressed by the IEnumerable interface with its Current property for fetching the current value and the MoveNext method for forcing the computation of the next value. The sequence is terminated when this method returns false. The C# compiler links these two ideas together so that an IEnumerator returning method using the yield keyword causes the compiler to produce the implementation of an Iterator. Take the following piece of code.         IEnumerable GetItems()         {             yield return 1;             yield return 2;             yield return 3;         } The compiler implements this by defining a new class that implements a state machine. This has an integer state that records which yield point we should go to if we are resumed. It also has a field that records the Current value of the enumerator and a field for recording the thread. This latter value is used for optimising the creation of iterator instances. [CompilerGenerated] private sealed class d__0 : IEnumerable, IEnumerable, IEnumerator, IEnumerator, IDisposable {     // Fields     private int 1__state;     private int 2__current;     public Program 4__this;     private int l__initialThreadId; The body gets converted into the code to construct and initialize this new class. private IEnumerable GetItems() {     d__0 d__ = new d__0(-2);     d__.4__this = this;     return d__; } When the class is constructed we set the state, which was passed through as -2 and the current thread. public d__0(int 1__state) {     this.1__state = 1__state;     this.l__initialThreadId = Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId; } The state needs to be set to 0 to represent a valid enumerator and this is done in the GetEnumerator method which optimises for the usual case where the returned enumerator is only used once. IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator() {     if ((Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId == this.l__initialThreadId)               && (this.1__state == -2))     {         this.1__state = 0;         return this;     } The state machine itself is implemented inside the MoveNext method. private bool MoveNext() {     switch (this.1__state)     {         case 0:             this.1__state = -1;             this.2__current = 1;             this.1__state = 1;             return true;         case 1:             this.1__state = -1;             this.2__current = 2;             this.1__state = 2;             return true;         case 2:             this.1__state = -1;             this.2__current = 3;             this.1__state = 3;             return true;         case 3:             this.1__state = -1;             break;     }     return false; } At each stage, the current value of the state is used to determine how far we got, and then we generate the next value which we return after recording the next state. Finally we return false from the MoveNext to signify the end of the sequence. Of course, that example was really simple. The original method body didn't have any local variables. Any local variables need to live between the calls to MoveNext and so they need to be transformed into fields in much the same way that we did in the case of the lambda expression. More complicated MoveNext methods are required to deal with resources that need to be disposed when the iterator finishes, and sometimes the compiler uses a temporary variable to hold the return value. Why all of this explanation? We've implemented the de-compilation of iterators in the current EAP version of Reflector (7). This contrasts with previous version where all you could do was look at the MoveNext method and try to figure out the control flow. There's a fair amount of things we have to do. We have to spot the use of a CompilerGenerated class which implements the Enumerator pattern. We need to go to the class and figure out the fields corresponding to the local variables. We then need to go to the MoveNext method and try to break it into the various possible states and spot the state transitions. We can then take these pieces and put them back together into an object model that uses yield return to show the transition points. After that Reflector can carry on optimising using its usual optimisations. The pattern matching is currently a little too sensitive to changes in the code generation, and we only do a limited analysis of the MoveNext method to determine use of the compiler generated fields. In some ways, it is a pity that iterators are compiled away and there is no metadata that reflects the original intent. Without it, we are always going to dependent on our knowledge of the compiler's implementation. For example, we have noticed that the Async CTP changes the way that iterators are code generated, so we'll have to do some more work to support that. However, with that warning in place, we seem to do a reasonable job of decompiling the iterators that are built into the framework. Hopefully, the EAP will give us a chance to find examples where we don't spot the pattern correctly or regenerate the wrong code, and we can improve things. Please give it a go, and report any problems.

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• Cancelling Route Navigation in AngularJS Controllers

  - by dwahlin

  If you’re new to AngularJS check out my AngularJS in 60-ish Minutes video tutorial or download the free eBook. Also check out The AngularJS Magazine for up-to-date information on using AngularJS to build Single Page Applications (SPAs). Routing provides a nice way to associate views with controllers in AngularJS using a minimal amount of code. While a user is normally able to navigate directly to a specific route, there may be times when a user triggers a route change before they’ve finalized an important action such as saving data. In these types of situations you may want to cancel the route navigation and ask the user if they’d like to finish what they were doing so that their data isn’t lost. In this post I’ll talk about a technique that can be used to accomplish this type of routing task.   The $locationChangeStart Event When route navigation occurs in an AngularJS application a few events are raised. One is named $locationChangeStart and the other is named $routeChangeStart (there are other events as well). At the current time (version 1.2) the $routeChangeStart doesn’t provide a way to cancel route navigation, however, the $locationChangeStart event can be used to cancel navigation. If you dig into the AngularJS core script you’ll find the following code that shows how the $locationChangeStart event is raised as the $browser object’s onUrlChange() function is invoked:   $browser.onUrlChange(function (newUrl) { if ($location.absUrl() != newUrl) { if ($rootScope.$broadcast('$locationChangeStart', newUrl, $location.absUrl()).defaultPrevented) { $browser.url($location.absUrl()); return; } $rootScope.$evalAsync(function () { var oldUrl = $location.absUrl(); $location.$$parse(newUrl); afterLocationChange(oldUrl); }); if (!$rootScope.$$phase) $rootScope.$digest(); } }); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The key part of the code is the call to $broadcast. This call broadcasts the $locationChangeStart event to all child scopes so that they can be notified before a location change is made. To handle the $locationChangeStart event you can use the $rootScope.on() function. For this example I’ve added a call to $on() into a function that is called immediately after the controller is invoked:   function init() { //initialize data here.. //Make sure they're warned if they made a change but didn't save it //Call to $on returns a "deregistration" function that can be called to //remove the listener (see routeChange() for an example of using it) onRouteChangeOff = $rootScope.$on('$locationChangeStart', routeChange); } This code listens for the $locationChangeStart event and calls routeChange() when it occurs. The value returned from calling $on is a “deregistration” function that can be called to detach from the event. In this case the deregistration function is named onRouteChangeOff (it’s accessible throughout the controller). You’ll see how the onRouteChangeOff function is used in just a moment.   Cancelling Route Navigation The routeChange() callback triggered by the $locationChangeStart event displays a modal dialog similar to the following to prompt the user:     Here’s the code for routeChange(): function routeChange(event, newUrl) { //Navigate to newUrl if the form isn't dirty if (!$scope.editForm.$dirty) return; var modalOptions = { closeButtonText: 'Cancel', actionButtonText: 'Ignore Changes', headerText: 'Unsaved Changes', bodyText: 'You have unsaved changes. Leave the page?' }; modalService.showModal({}, modalOptions).then(function (result) { if (result === 'ok') { onRouteChangeOff(); //Stop listening for location changes $location.path(newUrl); //Go to page they're interested in } }); //prevent navigation by default since we'll handle it //once the user selects a dialog option event.preventDefault(); return; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Looking at the parameters of routeChange() you can see that it accepts an event object and the new route that the user is trying to navigate to. The event object is used to prevent navigation since we need to prompt the user before leaving the current view. Notice the call to event.preventDefault() at the end of the function. The modal dialog is shown by calling modalService.showModal() (see my previous post for more information about the custom modalService that acts as a wrapper around Angular UI Bootstrap’s $modal service). If the user selects “Ignore Changes” then their changes will be discarded and the application will navigate to the route they intended to go to originally. This is done by first detaching from the $locationChangeStart event by calling onRouteChangeOff() (recall that this is the function returned from the call to $on()) so that we don’t get stuck in a never ending cycle where the dialog continues to display when they click the “Ignore Changes” button. A call is then made to $location.path(newUrl) to handle navigating to the target view. If the user cancels the operation they’ll stay on the current view. Conclusion The key to canceling routes is understanding how to work with the $locationChangeStart event and cancelling it so that route navigation doesn’t occur. I’m hoping that in the future the same type of task can be done using the $routeChangeStart event but for now this code gets the job done. You can see this code in action in the Customer Manager application available on Github (specifically the customerEdit view). Learn more about the application here.

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• I Know What I Did This Summer: Put Down Trex Decking

  - by thatjeffsmith

  If you’re wondering why I would bore everyone with my pictures and frequent status updates/tweets from the past week – it’s so I could document the process of refurbishing my deck, or what some would call a porch. When we go to take a vacation, buy a car, do anything – we also read personal blogs to get the real story. So, if you’re curious about what it takes to tackle this sort of project, read on. Skills/Equipment/Manpower We Possessed I took the old decking out by myself. I’m about 230 lbs, more than 6′ tall, and I’m pretty healthy. This took about 8 hours over two afternoons. Three of us put the deck back together. My wife has two engineering degrees. Her father also has two engineering degrees. Lots of brainpower available here. Also, her dad ran the public works department for a country for more than 20 years – so lots and lots of practical experience on hand. We had a compound mitre saw, a skilsaw, 2-3 crowbars, a framing hammer, 3 cordless drills, a corded drill, lots of sawhorses, a power sander, an angle grinder, a 10×10 Coleman canopy tent, a Ford F-150 pickup truck, outdoor speakers and lots of iTunes playlists, plenty of water and cold beer. Why We Did This Our deck was relatively young – it was built in 2005. However, the pressure treated boards must not have been adequately maintained before we bought the house. I had powerwashed the deck every other year and had it stained a few times. The boards just rotted. We’re going to be in the house for a long time, and we wanted something that would look nice and require little maintenance. More bad deck boards The deck boards were in bad shape Things We Learned The two most important things: The hidden fasteners have to be put in JUST right. Wedge them into the grooved board, then bend down the bit that is screwed down. We didn’t do this on the first board and couldn’t get the second board to fit nearly close enough. Watching the official TREX YouTube video helped immensely, and we should have watched that first. When pre-drilling holes for the boards that need screwed down – DO NOT pre-drill through the underlying framing wood. ONLY pre-drill through the TREX itself. The screw won’t seat in the board properly. Instead of sitting down flush with the board, it will stop at the top of the board and just spin. I had to call the the place that sold me the screws to find this out. So about a third of our screws look like crap. If it doesn’t look or feel right – stop everything and pick up your computer or your phone. It’s not right, and it will be much easier to stop and find out why. We didn’t do this, and now I’m going to see every screw that’s not flush with the boards and get upset. Oh well. The Process How much time did it take? Well I spent about 8 hours taking the deck apart. And then the 3 of use spent 8 hours the first day, 10 hours the second day, 8 hours the third, and another 6 hours on the fourth day. That’s like 104 man-hours. We supposedly saved four or five thousand dollars in labor, but don’t do the math here or you might get a bit upset. The main thing is that we got what we wanted, and there won’t be any surprises later. Now for some pictures… This 6”+ pry bar made the destruction of the old deck much easier Most of the joists, once exposed, were OK. This joist wasn’t sitting on ANYTHING before. We think a lazy gas person cut the board to sneak a gas line in. Awesome… These monster lag bolts had to be accounted for when putting in the additional framing The border pattern Sheri wanted to put in required a lot more framing. These were the first boards to go down – we screwed them in as there was no way to attach clips I sat, kicked in the boards, and then drilled these clips in – but my wife was able to go MUCH faster by using her hands to lock the boards in and drill on her knees. I liked locking the board in with my feet when they needed to be ‘encouraged’ to go straight. The first board took FOREVER to go in, but then when we got rolling, we were able to put in a 20′ board in less than 10 minutes. This was end of construction day #2 – we got much further than we thought we would. Ah, the dreaded last 10% – what to do here? Remember those ‘floating’ stringers? Yeah, we fixed that up a bit, too. My wife used a website (and her brain) to calculate exactly how to cut the stringers to give us the rise/run we needed with the proper clearance and all that jazz. The stairs with stringers and toe kicks – this was worth the effort It started raining on us as I screwed down the steps – this we managed to get our shade tent up on the deck to protect us from the rain too The stairs, finished Finished, mostly Good corner shot The top of the stairs Stairs, looking down Celebratory beer In Summary There are a few things we’re not happy with. I think we can fix them up – but later. I have a few things left to finish, rewire the lighting, get the gas grille put back in, and rehang some screen doors. I was expecting this to be a lot worse than it was. If I didn’t have the help, I would have never done it myself. But I’m glad that I did have that help and did do that project. It’s not often you get to spend that kind of qualify time with family and building cool stuff.

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• Feedback on meeting of the Linux User Group of Mauritius

  Once upon a time in a country far far away... Okay, actually it's not that bad but it has been a while since the last meeting of the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM). There have been plans in the past but it never really happened. Finally, Selven took the opportunity and organised a new meetup with low administrative overhead, proper scheduling on alternative dates and a small attendee's survey on the preferred option. All the pre-work was nicely executed. First, I wasn't sure whether it would be possible to attend. Luckily I got some additional information, like children should come, too, and I was sold to this community gathering. According to other long-term members of the LUGM it was the first time 'ever' that a gathering was organised outside of Quatre Bornes, and I have to admit it was great! LUGM - user group meeting on the 15.06.2013 in L'Escalier Quick overview of Linux & the LUGM With a little bit of delay the LUGM meeting officially started with a quick overview and introduction to Linux presented by Avinash. During the session he told the audience that there had been quite some activity over the island some years ago but unfortunately it had been quiet during recent times. Of course, we also spoke about the acknowledged world dominance of Linux - thanks to Android - and the interesting possibilities for countries like Mauritius. It is known that a couple of public institutions have there back-end infrastructure running on Red Hat Linux systems but the presence on the desktop is still very low. Users are simply hanging on to Windows XP and older versions of Microsoft Office. Following the introduction of the LUGM Ajay joined into the session and it quickly changed into a panel discussion with lots of interesting questions and answers, sharing of first-hand experience either on the job or in private use of Linux, and a couple of ideas about how the LUGM could promote Linux a bit more in Mauritius. It was great to get an insight into other attendee's opinion and activities. Especially taking into consideration that I'm already using Linux since around 1996/97. Frankly speaking, I bought a SuSE 4.x distribution back in those days because I couldn't achieve certain tasks on Windows NT 4.0 without spending a fortune. OpenELEC Mediacenter Next, Selven gave us decent introduction on OpenELEC: Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center (OpenELEC) is a small Linux distribution built from scratch as a platform to turn your computer into an XBMC media center. OpenELEC is designed to make your system boot fast, and the install is so easy that anyone can turn a blank PC into a media machine in less than 15 minutes. I didn't know about it until this presentation. In the past, I was mainly attached to Video Disk Recorder (VDR) as it allows the use of satellite receiver cards very easily. Hm, somehow I'm still missing my precious HTPC that I had to leave back in Germany years ago. It was great piece of hardware and software; self-built PC in a standard HiFi-sized (43cm) black desktop casing with 2 full-featured Hauppauge DVB-s cards, an old-fashioned Voodoo graphics card, WiFi card, Pioneer slot-in DVD drive, and fully remote controlled via infra-red thanks to Debian, VDR and LIRC. With EP Guide, scheduled recordings and general multimedia centre it offered all the necessary comfort in the living room, besides a Nintendo game console; actually a GameCube at that time... But I have to admit that putting OpenELEC on a Raspberry Pi would be a cool DIY project in the near future. LUGM - our next generation of linux users (15.06.2013) Project Evil Genius (PEG) Don't be scared of the paragraph header. Ish gave us a cool explanation why he named it PEG - Project Evil Genius; it's because of the time of the day when he was scripting down his ideas to be able to build, package and provide software applications to various Linux distributions. The main influence came from openSuSE but the platform didn't cater for his needs and ideas, so he started to work out something on his own. During his passionate session he also talked about the amazing experience he had due to other Linux users from all over the world. During the next couple of days Ish promised to put his script to GitHub... Looking forward to that. Check out Ish's personal blog over at hacklog.in. Highly recommended to read. Why India? Simply because the registration fees per year for an Indian domain are approximately 20 times less than for a Mauritian domain (.mu). Exploring the beach of L'Escalier af the meeting 'After-party' at the beach of L'Escalier Puh, after such interesting sessions, ideas around Linux and good conversation during the breaks and over lunch it was time for a little break-out. Selven suggested that we all should head down to the beach of L'Escalier and get some impressions of nature down here in the south of the island. Talking about 'beach' ;-) - absolutely not comparable to the white-sanded ones here in Flic en Flac... There are no lagoons down at the south coast of Mauriitus, and watching the breaking waves is a different experience and joy after all. Unfortunately, I was a little bit worried about the thoughtless littering at such a remote location. You have to drive on natural paths through the sugar cane fields and I was really shocked by the amount of rubbish lying around almost everywhere. Sad, really sad and it concurs with Yasir's recent article on the same topic. Resumé & outlook It was a great event. I met with new people, had some good conversations, and even my children enjoyed themselves the whole day. The location was well-chosen, enough space for each and everyone, parking spaces and even a playground for the children. Also, a big "Thank You" to Selven and his helpers for the organisation and preparation of lunch. I'm kind of sure that this was an exceptional meeting of LUGM and I'm really looking forward to the next gathering of Linux geeks. Hopefully, soon. All images are courtesy of Avinash Meetoo. More pictures are available on Flickr.

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• Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student.  Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies".  There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience.  There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used.  With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler.  But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team.  In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes.  Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A:  The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues;  and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business.  It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!  Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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• PASS Summit – looking back on my first time

  - by Fatherjack

    So I was lucky enough to get my first experience of PASS Summit this year and took some time beforehand to read some blogs and reference material to get an idea on what to do and how to get the best out of my visit. Having been to other conferences – technical and non-technical – I had a reasonable idea on the routine and what to expect in general. Here is a list of a few things that I have learned/remembered as the week has gone by. Wear comfortable shoes. This actually needs to be broadened to Take several pairs of comfortable shoes. You will be spending many many hours, for several days one after another. Having comfortable feet that can literally support you for the duration will make the week in general a whole lot better. Not only at the conference but getting to and from you could well be walking. In the evenings you will be walking around town and standing talking in various bars and clubs. Looking back, on some days I was on my feet for over 20 hours. Make friends. This is a given for the long term benefits it brings but there is also an immediate reward in being at a conference with a friend or two. Some events are bigger and more popular than others and some have the type of session that every single attendee will want to be in. This is great for those that get in but if you are in the bathroom or queuing for coffee and you miss out it sucks. Having a friend that can get in to a room and reserve you a seat is a great advantage to make sure you get the content that you want to see and still have the coffee that you need. Don’t go to every session you want to see This might sound counter intuitive and it relies on the sessions being recorded in some way to guarantee you don’t totally miss out. Both PASS Summit and SQL Bits sessions are recorded (summit is audio, SQLBits is video) and this means that if you get into a good conversation with someone over a coffee you don’t have to break it up to go to a session. Obviously there is a trade-off here and you need to decide on the tipping point for yourself but a conversation at a place like this could make a big difference to the next contract or employer you have or it might simply be great catching up with some friends you don’t see so often. Go to at least one session you don’t want to Again, this will seem to be contrary to normal logic but there is no reason why you shouldn’t learn about a part of SQL Server that isn’t part of your daily routine. Not only will you learn something new but you will also pick up on the feelings and attitudes of the people in the session. So, if you are a DBA, head off to a BI session and so on. You’ll hear BI speakers speaking to a BI audience and get to understand their point of view and reasoning for making the decisions they do. You will also appreciate the way that your decisions and instructions affect the way they have to work. This will help you a lot when you are on a project, working with multiple teams and make you all more productive. Socialise While you are at the conference venue, speak to people. Ask questions, be interested in whoever you are speaking to. You get chances to talk to new friends at breakfast, dinner and every break between sessions. The only people that might not talk to you would be speakers that are about to go and give a session, in most cases speakers like peace and quiet before going on stage. Other than that the people around you are just waiting for someone to talk to them so make the first move. There is a whole lot going on outside of the conference hours and you should make an effort to join in with some of this too. At karaoke evenings or just out for a quiet drink with a few of the people you meet at the conference. Either way, don’t be a recluse and hide in your room or be alone out in the town. Don’t talk to people Once again this sounds wrong but stay with me. I have spoken to a number of speakers since Summit 2013 finished and they have all mentioned the time it has taken them to move about the conference venue due to people stopping them for a chat or to ask a question. 45 minutes to walk from a session room to the speaker room in one case. Wow. While none of the speakers were upset about this sort of delay I think delegates should take the situation into account and possibly defer their question to an email or to a time when the person they want is clearly less in demand. Give them a chance to enjoy the conference in the same way that you are, they may actually want to go to a session or just have a rest after giving their session – talking for 75 minutes is hard work, taking an extra 45 minutes right after is unbelievable. I certainly hope that they get good feedback on their sessions and perhaps if you spoke to a speaker outside a session you can give them a mention in the ‘any other comments’ part of the feedback, just to convey your gratitude for them giving up their time and expertise for free. Say thank you I just mentioned giving the speakers a clear, visible ‘thank you’ in the feedback but there are plenty of people that help make any conference the success it is that would really appreciate hearing that their efforts are valued. People on the registration desk, volunteers giving schedule guidance and directions, people on the community zone are all volunteers giving their time to help you have the best experience possible. Send an email to PASS and convey your thoughts about the work that was done. Maybe you want to be a volunteer next time so you could enquire how you get into that position at the same time. This isn’t an exclusive list and you may agree or disagree with the points I have made, please add anything you think is good advice in the comments. I’d like to finish by saying a huge thank you to all the people involved in planning, facilitating and executing the PASS Summit 2013, it was an excellent event and I know many others think it was a totally worthwhile event to attend.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 28, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 28, 2012Popular ReleasesWPUtils: WPUtils 1.2: Just fixed an issue related to isolated storage path for ChoosePhotoBehavior. Specifically CreateDirectory method only accepts relative path, but was given a "/photos/" path which would result in exception. Please make sure you have this fix if you are using ChoosePhotoBehavior! NOTE: Windows Phone SDK 7.1 or higher is required.TFS Timesheets: TFS Timesheets 2.0: New features: Visual Studio 2012 support Bug fixes: Scaling mode inherited rather than font scalingCRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta What's New: Fixed scrolling issue in UnHide dialog Added support for connecting via ADFS / IFD Added support for more than one action for a button Added support for empty StringParameter for Javascript functions Fixed bug in rule CrmClientTypeRule when selecting Outlook option Extended Prefix field in New Button dialogFree Aspx Image Gallery: Free Aspx Image Gallery Release V1: This is first basic release of my free aspx image gallery project. It is free to use and modify by the user without any need of providing any credit to me.Simple Microsoft Excel Document Converter (Convert To XLS, XLSX, PDF, XPS): ExcelDocConverter 0.1 Beta: Initial Release Microsoft Excel Documents Converter. Microsoft Excel 1997-2003 (XLS) Microsoft Excel 2007/2010 (XLSX) Portable Document Format (PDF) Microsoft XPS Document (XPS) Difference between NET2.0 and NET3.5 This program uses .NET Framework runtime library to run. Basically, they are no differences. Only the runtime library version is different. For older computers, i.e. Windows XP, might not have .NET Framework 3.5 installed, then use NET2.0 in stead. But, some Windows XP SP2 mig...Office File Properties: Office File Properties 3.3.1: Bug fix. Convert file extension to lowercase before checking.LoBDb.NET: LoBDb.NET 1.0.9: Centido.Core library: 1) SQL Server script bug fix: an error when changing the MaxLength property of an indexed string column or when changing the Precision-Scale properties of a decimal column. LobDb.NET Manager: 1) Changing the Precision, Scale, Default Value, Minimum and Maximum properties of a decimal column now enables the Save button. 2) The MaxLength property of a string column and the Precision+Scale values of a decimal column are now displayed in the column list. 3) Changing the Min...Chaos games: Chaos games: Small app for generating fractals using chaos gamesVisual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.2: This version contains no new images from v1.5.1 Contains the following improvements: Better support for detecting the installed languages The extract & inject commands won’t run if Visual Studio is running You may now run in extract or inject mode The p/invoke code was cleaned up based on Code Analysis recommendations When a p/invoke method fails the Win32 error message is now displayed Error messages use red text Status messages use green textMCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.16: Changelog for 2.2.16 (32bit and 64bit) Now a standalone remote client also available to control the Engine remotely. 1. Added support for remote connections for status and configuration. MCEBuddy now uses port 23332. The remote server name, remote server port and local server port can be updated from the MCEBuddy.conf file BUT the Service or GUI needs to be restarted (i.e. reboot or restart service or restart program) for it to take effect. Refer to documentation for more details http://mce...ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.9.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved api better Unity support Windows RT binaries Windows CE binaries new Windows Service demo new WPF demo WindowsCE Hotfix: Fixes an error with ISO8859-1 encoding and scannning of QR-Codes. The hotfix is only needed for the WindowsCE platform.SSIS GoogleAnalyticsSource: Version 1.1 Alpha 2: The component uses now the Google API V2.4 including the management API.MVC Bootstrap: MVC Boostrap 0.5.1: A small demo site, based on the default ASP.NET MVC 3 project template, showing off some of the features of MVC Bootstrap. This release uses Entity Framework 5 for data access and Ninject 3 for dependency injection. If you download and use this project, please give some feedback, good or bad!menu4web: menu4web 1.0 - free javascript menu for web sites: menu4web 1.0 has been tested with all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera and Safari. Minified m4w.js library is less than 9K. Includes 21 menu examples of different styles. Can be freely distributed under The MIT License (MIT).Rawr: Rawr 5.0.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.26: The zh-CN issue has been solved. We also add a project management module.VidCoder: 1.4.1 Beta: Updated to HandBrake 4971. This should fix some issues with stuck PGS subtitles. Fixed build break which prevented pre-compiled XML serializers from showing up. Fixed problem where a preset would get errantly marked as modified when re-opening the encode settings window or importing a new preset.JSLint for Visual Studio 2010: 1.4.0: VS2012 support is alphaBlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.2: 2012.09.23 Ver5.7.2 (1)InetTest?? (2)HTTP?????????????????100???????????Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (Preview 6): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 5 Added separate samples download with .vsix dependencies instead of source dependencies Support for FreeWheel SmartXML ad responses Support for Smooth Streaming SDK DownloaderPlugins Support for VMAP and TTML polling for live scenarios Support for custom smooth streaming byte stream and scheme handlers Support for new play time and position tracking plugin Added IsLiveChanged event Added AdaptivePlugin.MaxBitrate property Add...New ProjectsChaos games: Small app to generating fractals using chaos gamesDocument Digitalization System: This system will allow the users with on one or more PCs to digitalize pdf files and store it or export it to other file formats.ExternalTokenAnalysisOffline: SPUser?UserToken????????????????。FinalProjectSeniorProject: ***Unfinished*** Senior project build GL Ponpes Selamat Kendal: Aplikasi Akuntansi Sekolah Pondok Pesantren Modern Selamat KendalHealth Care Manager: One of keynote planned for the Brazzaville Microsoft event coming soon.Orchard Commerce History with PayPal: Project expands on Nwazet.Commerce module (and is required for this module to work). Adds a purchase history, product role associations, and PayPal.PDF.NET: PWMIS ?????? Ver 4.5 ???? SMS Egypt: This project is intended to make it easy for people to send SMS to their customers using SMS gateways inside and outside Egypt. Strong Caml: Use the familiar CAML syntax, but now do it in strongly-typed, dynamic code. Just follow Visual Studio's IntelliSense, and your CAML query can't go wrong!TrainingFrameWork: TrainingFrameWork

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• Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 10 &ndash; In Depth TCP/IP Networking

  - by MarkPearl

  After reading this section you should be able to Understand methods of network design unique to TCP/IP networks, including subnetting, CIDR, and address translation Explain the differences between public and private TCP/IP networks Describe protocols used between mail clients and mail servers, including SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 Employ multiple TCP/IP utilities for network discovery and troubleshooting Designing TCP/IP-Based Networks The following sections explain how network and host information in an IPv4 address can be manipulated to subdivide networks into smaller segments. Subnetting Subnetting separates a network into multiple logically defined segments, or subnets. Networks are commonly subnetted according to geographic locations, departmental boundaries, or technology types. A network administrator might separate traffic to accomplish the following… Enhance security Improve performance Simplify troubleshooting The challenges of Classful Addressing in IPv4 (No subnetting) The simplest type of IPv4 is known as classful addressing (which was the Class A, Class B & Class C network addresses). Classful addressing has the following limitations. Restriction in the number of usable IPv4 addresses (class C would be limited to 254 addresses) Difficult to separate traffic from various parts of a network Because of the above reasons, subnetting was introduced. IPv4 Subnet Masks Subnetting depends on the use of subnet masks to identify how a network is subdivided. A subnet mask indicates where network information is located in an IPv4 address. The 1 in a subnet mask indicates that corresponding bits in the IPv4 address contain network information (likewise 0 indicates the opposite) Each network class is associated with a default subnet mask… Class A = 255.0.0.0 Class B = 255.255.0.0 Class C = 255.255.255.0 An example of calculating  the network ID for a particular device with a subnet mask is shown below.. IP Address = 199.34.89.127 Subnet Mask = 255.255.255.0 Resultant Network ID = 199.34.89.0 IPv4 Subnetting Techniques Subnetting breaks the rules of classful IPv4 addressing. Read page 490 for a detailed explanation Calculating IPv4 Subnets Read page 491 – 494 for an explanation Important… Subnetting only applies to the devices internal to your network. Everything external looks at the class of the IP address instead of the subnet network ID. This way, traffic directed to your network externally still knows where to go, and once it has entered your internal network it can then be prioritized and segmented. CIDR (classless Interdomain Routing) CIDR is also known as classless routing or supernetting. In CIDR conventional network class distinctions do not exist, a subnet boundary can move to the left, therefore generating more usable IP addresses on your network. A subnet created by moving the subnet boundary to the left is known as a supernet. With CIDR also came new shorthand for denoting the position of subnet boundaries known as CIDR notation or slash notation. CIDR notation takes the form of the network ID followed by a forward slash (/) followed by the number of bits that are used for the extended network prefix. To take advantage of classless routing, your networks routers must be able to interpret IP addresses that don;t adhere to conventional network class parameters. Routers that rely on older routing protocols (i.e. RIP) are not capable of interpreting classless IP addresses. Internet Gateways Gateways are a combination of software and hardware that enable two different network segments to exchange data. A gateway facilitates communication between different networks or subnets. Because on device cannot send data directly to a device on another subnet, a gateway must intercede and hand off the information. Every device on a TCP/IP based network has a default gateway (a gateway that first interprets its outbound requests to other subnets, and then interprets its inbound requests from other subnets). The internet contains a vast number of routers and gateways. If each gateway had to track addressing information for every other gateway on the Internet, it would be overtaxed. Instead, each handles only a relatively small amount of addressing information, which it uses to forward data to another gateway that knows more about the data’s destination. The gateways that make up the internet backbone are called core gateways. Address Translation An organizations default gateway can also be used to “hide” the organizations internal IP addresses and keep them from being recognized on a public network. A public network is one that any user may access with little or no restrictions. On private networks, hiding IP addresses allows network managers more flexibility in assigning addresses. Clients behind a gateway may use any IP addressing scheme, regardless of whether it is recognized as legitimate by the Internet authorities but as soon as those devices need to go on the internet, they must have legitimate IP addresses to exchange data. When a clients transmission reaches the default gateway, the gateway opens the IP datagram and replaces the client’s private IP address with an Internet recognized IP address. This process is known as NAT (Network Address Translation). TCP/IP Mail Services All Internet mail services rely on the same principles of mail delivery, storage, and pickup, though they may use different types of software to accomplish these functions. Email servers and clients communicate through special TCP/IP application layer protocols. These protocols, all of which operate on a variety of operating systems are discussed below… SMTP (Simple Mail transfer Protocol) The protocol responsible for moving messages from one mail server to another over TCP/IP based networks. SMTP belongs to the application layer of the ODI model and relies on TCP as its transport protocol. Operates from port 25 on the SMTP server Simple sub-protocol, incapable of doing anything more than transporting mail or holding it in a queue MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) The standard message format specified by SMTP allows for lines that contain no more than 1000 ascii characters meaning if you relied solely on SMTP you would have very short messages and nothing like pictures included in an email. MIME us a standard for encoding and interpreting binary files, images, video, and non-ascii character sets within an email message. MIME identifies each element of a mail message according to content type. MIME does not replace SMTP but works in conjunction with it. Most modern email clients and servers support MIME POP (Post Office Protocol) POP is an application layer protocol used to retrieve messages from a mail server POP3 relies on TCP and operates over port 110 With POP3 mail is delivered and stored on a mail server until it is downloaded by a user Disadvantage of POP3 is that it typically does not allow users to save their messages on the server because of this IMAP is sometimes used IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) IMAP is a retrieval protocol that was developed as a more sophisticated alternative to POP3 The single biggest advantage IMAP4 has over POP3 is that users can store messages on the mail server, rather than having to continually download them Users can retrieve all or only a portion of any mail message Users can review their messages and delete them while the messages remain on the server Users can create sophisticated methods of organizing messages on the server Users can share a mailbox in a central location Disadvantages of IMAP are typically related to the fact that it requires more storage space on the server. Additional TCP/IP Utilities Nearly all TCP/IP utilities can be accessed from the command prompt on any type of server or client running TCP/IP. The syntaxt may differ depending on the OS of the client. Below is a list of additional TCP/IP utilities – research their use on your own! Ipconfig (Windows) & Ifconfig (Linux) Netstat Nbtstat Hostname, Host & Nslookup Dig (Linux) Whois (Linux) Traceroute (Tracert) Mtr (my traceroute) Route

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• Ubuntu 12.04 wireless (wifi) not working, can not upgrade to 12.10, touchpad gestures not working. What to do?

  - by Ritwik

  I installed ubuntu 12.04 LTS 3 days ago and since then wireless feature and touchpad gestures are not working. Tried everything on internet but still unsuccessful. I cant upgrade to ubuntu 12.10. These are the following comments I tried. Please help me. EDIT: just realized usb 3.0 is also not working. COMMAND lsb_release -r OUTPUT ----------------------------------------------------------------- Release: 12.04 ----------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND lspci OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------ 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 06) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor PCI Express x16 Controller (rev 06) 00:01.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor PCI Express x8 Controller (rev 06) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 06) 00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor HD Audio Controller (rev 06) 00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI (rev 05) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB EHCI #2 (rev 05) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #1 (rev d5) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #2 (rev d5) 00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #3 (rev d5) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB EHCI #1 (rev 05) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation HM86 Express LPC Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller 1 [AHCI mode] (rev 05) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 05) 07:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF117M [GeForce 610M/710M / GT 620M/625M/630M/720M] (rev a1) 08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller (rev 07) 09:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5229 PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01) 0f:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9565 / AR9565 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01) ------------------------------------------------------------------ COMMAND sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-generic OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-generic ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND cat /etc/lsb-release; uname -a OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS" Linux ritwik-PC 3.2.0-67-generic #101-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 15 17:46:11 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 net OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- 08:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller [10ec:8136] (rev 07) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device [103c:225d] Kernel driver in use: r8169 -- 0f:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9565 / AR9565 Wireless Network Adapter [168c:0036] (rev 01) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device [103c:217f] ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND lsusb OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:8008 Intel Corp. Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:8000 Intel Corp. ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND iwconfig OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND rfkill list all OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- 0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 1: hp-bluetooth: Bluetooth Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND lsmod OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- Module Size Used by snd_hda_codec_realtek 224215 1 bnep 18281 2 rfcomm 47604 0 bluetooth 180113 10 bnep,rfcomm parport_pc 32866 0 ppdev 17113 0 nls_iso8859_1 12713 1 nls_cp437 16991 1 vfat 17585 1 fat 61512 1 vfat snd_hda_intel 33719 3 snd_hda_codec 127706 2 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel snd_hwdep 17764 1 snd_hda_codec snd_pcm 97275 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec snd_seq_midi 13324 0 snd_rawmidi 30748 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq_midi_event 14899 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 61929 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event nouveau 775039 0 joydev 17693 0 snd_timer 29990 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14540 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq ttm 76949 1 nouveau uvcvideo 72627 0 snd 79041 15 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device videodev 98259 1 uvcvideo drm_kms_helper 46978 1 nouveau psmouse 98051 0 drm 241971 3 nouveau,ttm,drm_kms_helper i2c_algo_bit 13423 1 nouveau soundcore 15091 1 snd snd_page_alloc 18529 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm v4l2_compat_ioctl32 17128 1 videodev hp_wmi 18092 0 serio_raw 13211 0 sparse_keymap 13890 1 hp_wmi mxm_wmi 13021 1 nouveau video 19651 1 nouveau wmi 19256 2 hp_wmi,mxm_wmi mac_hid 13253 0 lp 17799 0 parport 46562 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp r8169 62190 0 ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND sudo su modprobe -v ath9k OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- insmod /lib/modules/3.2.0-67-generic/kernel/net/wireless/cfg80211.ko insmod /lib/modules/3.2.0-67-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath.ko insmod /lib/modules/3.2.0-67-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/ath9k_hw.ko insmod /lib/modules/3.2.0-67-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/ath9k_common.ko insmod /lib/modules/3.2.0-67-generic/kernel/net/mac80211/mac80211.ko insmod /lib/modules/3.2.0-67-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/ath9k.ko ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND do-release-upgrade OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- Err Upgrade tool signature 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.149 80] Err Upgrade tool 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.149 80] Fetched 0 B in 0s (0 B/s) WARNING:root:file 'quantal.tar.gz.gpg' missing Failed to fetch Fetching the upgrade failed. There may be a network problem. ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND sudo modprobe ath9k dmesg | grep ath9k NO OUTPUT FOR THEM COMMAND dmesg | grep -e ath -e 80211 OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 13.232372] type=1400 audit(1408867538.399:9): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/mission-control-5" pid=975 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 13.232615] type=1400 audit(1408867538.399:10): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/telepathy-*" pid=975 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 15.186599] ath3k: probe of 3-4:1.0 failed with error -110 [ 15.186635] usbcore: registered new interface driver ath3k [ 88.219329] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain [ 88.351665] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated: [ 88.351667] cfg80211: (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp) [ 88.351670] cfg80211: (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 88.351671] cfg80211: (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 88.351673] cfg80211: (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 88.351674] cfg80211: (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 88.351675] cfg80211: (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) ------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMAND sudo apt-get install touchpad-indicator OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------- Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: gir1.2-gconf-2.0 python-pyudev Suggested packages: python-qt4 python-pyside.qtcore The following NEW packages will be installed: gir1.2-gconf-2.0 python-pyudev touchpad-indicator 0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 84.1 kB of archives. After this operation, 1,136 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y Get:1 http://ppa.launchpad.net/atareao/atareao/ubuntu/ precise/main touchpad-indicator all 0.9.3.12-1ubuntu1 [46.5 kB] Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main gir1.2-gconf-2.0 amd64 3.2.5-0ubuntu2 [7,098 B] Get:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main python-pyudev all 0.13-1 [30.5 kB] Fetched 84.1 kB in 2s (31.6 kB/s) Selecting previously unselected package gir1.2-gconf-2.0. (Reading database ... 169322 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking gir1.2-gconf-2.0 (from .../gir1.2-gconf-2.0_3.2.5-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package python-pyudev. Unpacking python-pyudev (from .../python-pyudev_0.13-1_all.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package touchpad-indicator. Unpacking touchpad-indicator (from .../touchpad-indicator_0.9.3.12-1ubuntu1_all.deb) ... Processing triggers for bamfdaemon ... Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index... Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils ... Processing triggers for gnome-menus ... Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme ... Processing triggers for software-center ... INFO:softwarecenter.db.update:no translation information in database needed Setting up gir1.2-gconf-2.0 (3.2.5-0ubuntu2) ... Setting up python-pyudev (0.13-1) ... Setting up touchpad-indicator (0.9.3.12-1ubuntu1) ... ------------------------------------------------------------------- Not able to find ( drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/hw.c ) or ( drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/hw.h )

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• HTG Explains: Should You Buy Extended Warranties?

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Buy something at an electronics store and you’ll be confronted by a pushy salesperson who insists you need an extended warranty. You’ll also see extended warranties pushed hard when shopping online. But are they worth it? There’s a reason stores push extended warranties so hard. They’re almost always pure profit for the store involved. An electronics store may live on razor-thin product margins and make big profits on extended warranties and overpriced HDMI cables. You’re Already Getting Multiple Warranties First, back up. The product you’re buying already includes a warranty. In fact, you’re probably getting several different types of warranties. Store Return and Exchange: Most electronics stores allow you to return a malfunctioning product within the first 15 or 30 days and they’ll provide you with a new one. The exact period of time will vary from store to store. If you walk out of the store with a defective product and have to swap it for a new one within the first few weeks, this should be easy. Manufacturer Warranty: A device’s manufacturer — whether the device is a laptop, a television, or a graphics card — offers their own warranty period. The manufacturer warranty covers you after the store refuses to take the product back and exchange it. The length of this warranty depends on the type of product. For example, a cheap laptop may only offer a one-year manufacturer warranty, while a more expensive laptop may offer a two-year warranty. Credit Card Warranty Extension: Many credit cards offer free extended warranties on products you buy with that credit card. Credit card companies will often give you an additional year of warranty. For example, if you buy a laptop with a two year warranty and it fails in the third year, you could then contact your credit card company and they’d cover the cost of fixing or replacing it. Check your credit card’s benefits and fine print for more information. Why Extended Warranties Are Bad You’re already getting a fairly long warranty period, especially if you have a credit card that offers you a free extended warranty — these are fairly common. If the product you get is a “lemon” and has a manufacturing error, it will likely fail pretty soon — well within your warranty period. The extended warranty matters after all your other warranties are exhausted. In the case of a laptop with a two-year warranty that you purchase with a credit card giving you a one-year warranty extension, your extended warranty will kick in three years after you purchase the laptop. In that many years, your current laptop will likely feel pretty old and laptops that are as good — or better — will likely be pretty cheap. If it’s a television, better television displays will be available at a lower price point. You’ll either want to upgrade to a newer model or you’ll be able to buy a new, just-as-good product for very cheap. You’ll only have to pay out-of-pocket if your device fails after the normal warranty period — in over two or three years for typical laptops purchased with a decent credit card. Save the money you would have spent on the warranty and put it towards a future upgrade. How Much Do Extended Warranties Cost? Let’s look at an example from a typical pushy retail outlet, Best Buy. We went to Best Buy’s website and found a pretty standard $600 Samsung laptop. This laptop comes with a one-year warranty period. If purchased with a fairly common credit card, you can easily get a two-year warranty period on this laptop without spending an additional penny. (Yes, such credit cards are available with no yearly fees.) During the check-out process, Best Buy tries to sell you a Geek Squad “Accidental Protection Plan.” To get an additional year of Best Buy’s extended warranty, you’d have to pay $324.98 for a “3-Year Accidental Protection Plan”. You’d basically be paying more than half the price of your laptop for an additional year of warranty — remember, the standard warranties would cover you anyway for the first two years. If this laptop did break sometime between two and three years from now, we wouldn’t be surprised if you could purchase a comparable laptop for about $325 anyway. And, if you don’t need to replace it, you’ve saved that money. Best Buy would object that this isn’t a standard extended warranty. It’s a supercharged warranty plan that will also provide coverage if you spill something on your laptop or drop it and break it. You just have to ask yourself a question. What are the odds that you’ll drop your laptop or spill something on it? They’re probably pretty low if you’re a typical human being. Is it worth spending more than half the price of the laptop just in case you’ll make an uncommon mistake? Probably not. There may be occasional exceptions to this — some Apple users swear by Apple’s AppleCare, for example — but you should generally avoid buying these things. There’s a reason stores are so pushy about extended warranties, and it’s not because they want to help protect you. It’s because they’re making lots of profit from these plans, and they’re making so much profit because they’re not a good deal for customers. Image Credit: Philip Taylor on Flickr     

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• Delight and Excite

  - by Applications User Experience

  Mick McGee, CEO & President, EchoUser Editor’s Note: EchoUser is a User Experience design firm in San Francisco and a member of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Mick and his staff regularly consult on Oracle Applications UX projects. Being part of a user experience design firm, we have the luxury of working with a lot of great people across many great companies. We get to help people solve their problems.  At least we used to. The basic design challenge is still the same; however, the goal is not necessarily to solve “problems” anymore; it is, “I want our products to delight and excite!” The question for us as UX professionals is how to design to those goals, and then how to assess them from a usability perspective. I’m not sure where I first heard “delight and excite” (A book? blog post? Facebook  status? Steve Jobs quote?), but now I hear these listed as user experience goals all the time. In particular, somewhat paradoxically, I routinely hear them in enterprise software conversations. And when asking these same enterprise companies what will make the project successful, we very often hear, “Make it like Apple.” In past days, it was “make it like Yahoo (or Amazon or Google“) but now Apple is the common benchmark. Steve Jobs and Apple were not secrets, but with Jobs’ passing and Apple becoming the world’s most valuable company in the last year, the impact of great design and experience is suddenly very widespread. In particular, users’ expectations have gone way up. Being an enterprise company is no shield to the general expectations that users now have, for all products. Designing a “Minimum Viable Product” The user experience challenge has historically been, to echo the words of Eric Ries (author of Lean Startup) , to create a “minimum viable product”: the proverbial, “make it good enough”. But, in our profession, the “minimum viable” part of that phrase has oftentimes, unfortunately, referred to the design and user experience. Technology typically dominated the focus of the biggest, most successful companies. Few have had the laser focus of Apple to also create and sell design and user experience alongside great technology. But now that Apple is the most valuable company in the world, copying their success is a common undertaking. Great design is now a premium offering that everyone wants, from the one-person startup to the largest companies, consumer and enterprise. This emerging business paradigm will have significant impact across the user experience design process and profession. One area that particularly interests me is, how are we going to evaluate these new emerging “delight and excite” experiences, which are further customized to each particular domain? How to Measure “Delight and Excite” Traditional usability measures of task completion rate, assists, time, and errors are still extremely useful in many situations; however, they are too blunt to offer much insight into emerging experiences “Satisfaction” is usually assessed in user testing, in roughly equivalent importance to the above objective metrics. Various surveys and scales have provided ways to measure satisfying UX, with whatever questions they include. However, to meet the demands of new business goals and keep users at the center of design and development processes, we have to explore new methods to better capture custom-experience goals and emotion-driven user responses. We have had success assessing custom experiences, including “delight and excite”, by employing a variety of user testing methods that tend to combine formative and summative techniques (formative being focused more on identifying usability issues and ways to improve design, and summative focused more on metrics). Our most successful tool has been one we’ve been using for a long time, Magnitude Estimation Technique (MET). But it’s not necessarily about MET as a measure, rather how it is created. Caption: For one client, EchoUser did two rounds of testing.  Each test was a mix of performing representative tasks and gathering qualitative impressions. Each user participated in an in-person moderated 1-on-1 session for 1 hour, using a testing set-up where they held the phone. The primary goal was to identify usability issues and recommend design improvements. MET is based on a definition of the desired experience, which users will then use to rate items of interest (usually tasks in a usability test). In other words, a custom experience definition needs to be created. This can then be used to measure satisfaction in accomplishing tasks; “delight and excite”; or anything else from strategic goals, user demands, or elsewhere. For reference, our standard MET definition in usability testing is: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well designed and productive an interface is to complete tasks.” Articulating the User Experience We’ve helped construct experience definitions for several clients to better match their business goals. One example is a modification of the above that was needed for a company that makes medical-related products: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well-designed, productive and safe an interface is for conducting tasks. ‘Safe’ is how free an environment (including devices, software, facilities, people, etc.) is from danger, risk, and injury.” Another example is from a company that is pushing hard to incorporate “delight” into their enterprise business line: “User experience is your perception of a product’s ease of use and learning, satisfaction and delight in design, and ability to accomplish objectives.” I find the last one particularly compelling in that there is little that identifies the experience as being for a highly technical enterprise application. That definition could easily be applied to any number of consumer products. We have gone further than the above, including “sexy” and “cool” where decision-makers insisted they were part of the desired experience. We also applied it to completely different experiences where the “interface” was, for example, riding public transit, the “tasks” were train rides, and we followed the participants through the train-riding journey and rated various aspects accordingly: “A good public transportation experience is a cost-effective way of reliably, conveniently, and safely getting me to my intended destination on time.” To construct these definitions, we’ve employed both bottom-up and top-down approaches, depending on circumstances. For bottom-up, user inputs help dictate the terms that best fit the desired experience (usually by way of cluster and factor analysis). Top-down depends on strategic, visionary goals expressed by upper management that we then attempt to integrate into product development (e.g., “delight and excite”). We like a combination of both approaches to push the innovation envelope, but still be mindful of current user concerns. Hopefully the idea of crafting your own custom experience, and a way to measure it, can provide you with some ideas how you can adapt your user experience needs to whatever company you are in. Whether product-development or service-oriented, nearly every company is ultimately providing a user experience. The Bottom Line Creating great experiences may have been popularized by Steve Jobs and Apple, but I’ll be honest, it’s a good feeling to be moving from “good enough” to “delight and excite,” despite the challenge that entails. In fact, it’s because of that challenge that we will expand what we do as UX professionals to help deliver and assess those experiences. I’m excited to see how we, Oracle, and the rest of the industry will live up to that challenge.

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• Screenshot Tour: Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on a Nexus 7

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will “form the basis of the first commercially available Ubuntu tablets,” according to Canonical. We installed Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on our own hardware to see what those tablets will be like. We don’t recommend installing this yourself, as it’s still not a polished, complete experience. We’re using “Ubuntu Touch” as shorthand here — apparently this project’s new name is “Ubuntu For Devices.” The Welcome Screen Ubuntu’s touch interface is all about edge swipes and hidden interface elements — it has a lot in common with Windows 8, actually. You’ll see the welcome screen when you boot up or unlock a Ubuntu tablet or phone. If you have new emails, text messages, or other information, it will appear on this screen along with the time and date. If you don’t, you’ll just see a message saying “No data sources available.” The Dash Swipe in from the right edge of the welcome screen to access the Dash, or home screen. This is actually very similar to the Dash on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. This isn’t a surprise — Canonical wants the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu to use the same code. In the future, the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu will use the same version of Unity and Unity will adjust its interface depending on what type of device your’e using. Here you’ll find apps you have installed and apps available to install. Tap an installed app to launch it or tap an available app to view more details and install it. Tap the My apps or Available headings to view a complete list of apps you have installed or apps you can install. Tap the Search box at the top of the screen to start searching — this is how you’d search for new apps to install. As you’d expect, a touch keyboard appears when you tap in the Search field or any other text field. The launcher isn’t just for apps. Tap the Apps heading at the top of the screen and you’ll see hidden text appear — Music, Video, and Scopes. This hidden navigation is used throughout Ubuntu’s different apps and can be easy to miss at first. Swipe to the left or right to move between these screens. These screens are also similar to the different panels in Unity on the desktop. The Scopes section allows you to view different search scopes you have installed. These are used to search different sources when you start a search from the Dash. Search from the Music or Videos scopes to search for local media files on your device or media files online. For example, searching in the Music scope will show you music results from Grooveshark by default. Navigating Ubuntu Touch Swipe in from the left edge anywhere on the system to open the launcher, a bar with shortcuts to apps. This launcher is very similar to the launcher on the left of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop — that’s the whole idea, after all. Once you’ve opened an app, you can leave the app by swiping in from the left. The launcher will appear — keep moving your finger towards the right edge of teh screen. This will swipe the current app off the screen, taking you back to the Dash. Once back on the Dash, you’ll see your open apps represented as thumbnails under Recent. Tap a thumbnail here to go back to a running app. To remove an app from here, long-press it and tap the X button that appears. Swipe in from the right edge in any app to quickly switch between recent apps. Swipe in from the right edge and hold your finger down to reveal an application switcher that shows all your recent apps and lets you choose between them. Swipe down from the top of the screen to access the indicator panel. Here you can connect to Wi-Fi networks, view upcoming events, control GPS and Bluetooth hardware, adjust sound settings, see incoming messages, and more. This panel is for quick access to hardware settings and notifications, just like the indicators on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. The Apps System settings not included in the pull-down panel are available in the System Settings app. To access it, tap My apps on the Dash and tap System Settings, search for the System Settings app, or open the launcher bar and tap the settings icon. The settings here a bit limited compared to other operating systems, but many of the important options are available here. You can add Evernote, Ubuntu One, Twitter, Facebook, and Google accounts from here. A free Ubuntu One account is mandatory for downloading and updating apps. A Google account can be used to sync contacts and calendar events. Some apps on Ubuntu are native apps, while many are web apps. For example, the Twitter, Gmail, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay apps included by default are all web apps that open each service’s mobile website as an app. Other applications, such as the Weather, Calendar, Dialer, Calculator, and Notes apps are native applications. Theoretically, both types of apps will be able to scale to different screen resolutions. Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu desktop may one day share the same apps, which will adapt to different display sizes and input methods. Like Windows 8 apps, Ubuntu apps hide interface elements by default, providing you with a full-screen view of the content. Swipe up from the bottom of an app’s screen to view its interface elements. For example, swiping up from the bottom of the Web Browser app reveals Back, Forward, and Refresh buttons, along with an address bar and Activity button so you can view current and recent web pages. Swipe up even more from the bottom and you’ll see a button hovering in the middle of the app. Tap the button and you’ll see many more settings. This is an overflow area for application options and functions that can’t fit on the navigation bar. The Terminal app has a few surprising Easter eggs in this panel, including a “Hack into the NSA” option. Tap it and the following text will appear in the terminal: That’s not very nice, now tracing your location . . . . . . . . . . . .Trace failed You got away this time, but don’t try again. We’d expect to see such Easter eggs disappear before Ubuntu Touch actually ships on real devices. Ubuntu Touch has come a long way, but it’s still not something you want to use today. For example, it doesn’t even have a built-in email client — you’ll have to us your email service’s mobile website. Few apps are available, and many of the ones that are are just mobile websites. It’s not a polished operating system intended for normal users yet — it’s more of a preview for developers and device manufacturers. If you really want to try it yourself, you can install it on a Wi-Fi Nexus 7 (2013), Nexus 10, or Nexus 4 device. Follow Ubuntu’s installation instructions here.

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• Different Not Automatically Implies Better

  - by Alois Kraus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/11/05/154556.aspxRecently I was digging deeper why some WCF hosted workflow application did consume quite a lot of memory although it did basically only load a xaml workflow. The first tool of choice is Process Explorer or even better Process Hacker (has more options and the best feature copy&paste does work). The three most important numbers of a process with regards to memory are Working Set, Private Working Set and Private Bytes. Working set is the currently consumed physical memory (parts can be shared between processes e.g. loaded dlls which are read only) Private Working Set is the physical memory needed by this process which is not shareable Private Bytes is the number of non shareable which is only visible in the current process (e.g. all new, malloc, VirtualAlloc calls do create private bytes) When you have a bigger workflow it can consume under 64 bit easily 500MB for a 1-2 MB xaml file. This does not look very scalable. Under 64 bit the issue is excessive private bytes consumption and not the managed heap. The picture is quite different for 32 bit which looks a bit strange but it seems that the hosted VB compiler is a lot less memory hungry under 32 bit. I did try to repro the issue with a medium sized xaml file (400KB) which does contain 1000 variables and 1000 if which can be represented by C# code like this: string Var1; string Var2; ... string Var1000; if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Var1) ) { Console.WriteLine(“Var1”); } if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Var2) ) { Console.WriteLine(“Var2”); } ....   Since WF is based on VB.NET expressions you are bound to the hosted VB.NET compiler which does result in (x64) 140 MB of private bytes which is ca. 140 KB for each if clause which is quite a lot if you think about the actually present functionality. But there is hope. .NET 4.5 does allow now C# expressions for WF which is a major step forward for all C# lovers. I did create some simple patcher to “cross compile” my xaml to C# expressions. Lets look at the result: C# Expressions VB Expressions x86 x86 On my home machine I have only 32 bit which gives you quite exactly half of the memory consumption under 64 bit. C# expressions are 10 times more memory hungry than VB.NET expressions! I wanted to do more with less memory but instead it did consume a magnitude more memory. That is surprising to say the least. The workflow does initialize in about the same time under x64 and x86 where the VB code does it in 2s whereas the C# version needs 18s. Also nearly ten times slower. That is a too high price to pay for any bigger sized xaml workflow to convert from VB.NET to C# expressions. If I do reduce the number of expressions to 500 then it does need 400MB which is about half of the memory. It seems that the cost per if does rise linear with the number of total expressions in a xaml workflow.  Expression Language Cost per IF Startup Time C# 1000 Ifs x64 1,5 MB 18s C# 500 Ifs x64 750 KB 9s VB 1000 Ifs x64 140 KB 2s VB 500 Ifs x64 70 KB 1s Now we can directly compare two MS implementations. It is clear that the VB.NET compiler uses the same underlying structure but it has much higher offset compared to the highly inefficient C# expression compiler. I have filed a connect bug here with a harsher wording about recent advances in memory consumption. The funniest thing is that one MS employee did give an Azure AppFabric demo around early 2011 which was so slow that he needed to investigate with xperf. He was after startup time and the call stacks with regards to VB.NET expression compilation were remarkably similar. In fact I only found this post by googling for parts of my call stacks. … “C# expressions will be coming soon to WF, and that will have different performance characteristics than VB” … What did he know Jan 2011 what I did no know until today? ;-). He knew that C# expression will come but that they will not be automatically have better footprint. It is about time to fix that. In its current state C# expressions are not usable for bigger workflows. That also explains the headline for today. You can cheat startup time by prestarting workflows so that the demo looks nice and snappy but it does hurt scalability a lot since you do need much more memory than necessary. I did find the stacks by enabling virtual allocation tracking within XPerf which is still the best tool out there. But first you need to look at your process to check where the memory is hiding: For the C# Expression compiler you do not need xperf. You can directly dump the managed heap and check with a profiler of your choice. But if the allocations are happening on the Private Data ( VirtualAlloc ) you can find it with xperf. There is a nice video on channel 9 explaining VirtualAlloc tracking it in greater detail. If your data allocations are on the Heap it does mean that the C/C++ runtime did create a heap for you where all malloc, new calls do allocate from it. You can enable heap tracing with xperf and full call stack support as well which is doable via xperf like it is shown also on channel 9. Or you can use WPRUI directly: To make “Heap Usage” it work you need to set for your executable the tracing flags (before you start it). For example devenv.exe HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\devenv.exe DWORD TracingFlags 1 Do not forget to disable it after you did complete profiling the process or it will impact the startup time quite a lot. You can with xperf attach directly to a running process and collect heap allocation information from a gone wild process. Very handy if you need to find out what a process was doing which has arrived in a funny state. “VirtualAlloc usage” does work without explicitly enabling stuff for a specific process and is always on machine wide. I had issues on my Windows 7 machines with the call stack collection and the latest Windows 8.1 Performance Toolkit. I was told that WPA from Windows 8.0 should work fine but I do not want to downgrade.

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• Nokia Windows Phone 8 App Collection

  - by Tim Murphy

  I recently upgraded to a Nokia Lumia 920.  Along with it came the availability of a number of Nokia developed apps or apps that Nokia has made available from other developers.  Below is a summary of some of the ones that I have used to this point.  There are quite a few of them so I won’t be covering everything that is available. Nokia Maps I am quite pleased with the accuracy of Nokia Maps and not having to tap the screen for each turn any more.  The information on the screen is quite good as well.  The couple of improvements I would like to see are for the voice directions to include which street or exit you need to use and improve the search accuracy.  Bing maps had much better search results in my opinion. Nokia Drive This one really had me confused when I first setup the phone.  I was driving down the road and suddenly I am getting notification tones, but there were no visual notifications on the phone.  It seems that in their infinite wisdom Nokia thinks I don’t know when I am going over the speed limit and need to be told. ESPN I really liked my ESPN app on Windows Phone 7.5, but I am not getting the type of experience I was looking for out of this app.  While it allows me to pick my favorite teams, but there isn’t a pivot page or panorama page that shows a summary of my favorite teams.  I have also found that the live tile don’t update very often.  Over all I am rather disappointed compared app produced by ESPN. Smart Shoot I really need to get the kids to let me use this on.  I like the concept, but I need to spend more time with it.  The idea how running the camera through a continuous shooting mode and then picking the best is something that I have done with my DSLR and am glad to see it available here. Cinemagraph Here is a fun filter.  It doesn’t have the most accurate editing features, but it is fun to stop certain parts of a scene and let other parts move.  As a test I stopped the traffic on the highway and let the traffic on the frontage road flow.  It makes for a fun effect.  If nothing else it could be great for sending prank animations to your friends. YouSendIt I have only briefly touched this application.  What I don’t understand is why it is needed.  Most of the functionality seems to be similar to SkyDrive and it gives you less storage.  They only feature that seems to differentiate the app is the signature capability. Creative Studio This app has some nice quick edits, but it is not very comprehensive.  I am also not to thrilled with the user experience.  It puts you though an initial color cast series that I’m not sure why it is there.  Discovery of the remaining adjustments isn’t that great.  In the end I found myself wanting Thumbia back. Panorama This is one of the apps that I like.  I found it easy to use as it guides you with a target circle that you center for it to take the next pictures.  It also stitches the images with amazing speed.  The one thing I wish it had was the capability to turn the phone into portrait orientation and do a taller panorama.  Perhaps we will see this in the future. Nokia Music After getting over the missing album art I found that there were a number of missing features with this app as well.  I have a Zune HD and I am used to being able to go through my collection and adding songs, albums or artists to my now playing.  There also doesn’t seem to be a way to manage playlists that I have seen yet.  Other than that the UI is familiar and it give Nokia City Lens Augmented reality is a cool concept, but I still haven’t seen it implemented in a compelling fashion beyond a demo at TED a couple of years ago.  The app still leaves me wanting as well.  It does give an interesting toy.  It gives you the ability to look for general categories and see general direction and clusters of locations.  I think as this concept is better thought out it will become more compelling. Nokia Trailers I don’t know how often I will use this app, but I do like being able to see what movies are being promoted.  I can’t wait for The Hobbit to come out and the trailer was just what the doctor ordered.  I can see coming back to this app from time to time. PhotoBeamer PhotoBeamer is a strange beast that needs a better instruction manual.  It seems a lot like magic but very confusing.  I need some more testing, but I don’t think this is something that most people are going to understand quickly and may give up before getting it to work.  I may put an update here after playing with it further. Ringtone Maker The app was just published and it didn’t work very well for me. It couldn’t find 95% of the songs that Nokia Music was playing for me and crashed several times.  It also had songs named wrong that when I checked them in Nokia Music they were fine.  This app looks like it has a long way to go. Summary In all I think that Nokia is offering a well rounded set of initial applications that can get any new owner started.  There is definitely room for improvement in all of these apps.  The main need is usability upgrades.  I would guess that with feedback from users they will come up to acceptable levels.  Try them out and see if you agree. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Nokia,Lumia,Nokia Apps,ESPN,PhotoBeamer,City Lens,YouSendIt,Drive,Maps

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• hyper-v fails when attaching more disk to VM. The VM won't start and generates an error

  - by CasperDK

  I'm lost at what to do about this: Hi... System: Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V farm running with failover cluster with a EVA 4400 as backend. When I attach a new disk to a VM it fails when I try to start it. If I move the VM to another, say node 1, I can add the disk and I can get them to start. If I move the VM back to node 2 where the problem arose and the VM is running, I get an error during live migration and the VM fails back to node1 where it did run... So it's like there is something wrong with Hyper-V on node 2 and not node 1. Also node 3 has the same issue. Restarting the nodes is NOT an option since I will have this problem again at a later time AND because not all the VMs can run on node 1 which means my client company will experience downtime on the VMs not running on node 1. Any fix for this? An update I have missed perhaps? It has been two years... Here are the errors: An error ocurred while attempting to change the state of virtual machine XXX. 'XXX' failed to start. Microsoft Emulated IDE Controller (Instance ID {83F8638B-8DCA-4152-9EDA-2CA8B33039B4}): Failed to power on with Error 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' Failed to open attachment 'X:\XXX.vhd'. Error: 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' Failed to open attachment 'X:\XXX.vhd'. Error: 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' 'XXX' failed to start. (Virtual machine 36563C78-65B5-4C40-A52D-689BB39E8B08) Microsoft Emulated IDE Controller (Instance ID {83F8638B-8DCA-4152-9EDA-2CA8B33039B4}): Failed to power on with Error 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' (0x8007001F). (Virtual machine 36563C78-65B5-4C40-A52D-689BB39E8B08) 'XXX': Failed to open attachment 'X:\XXX.vhd'. Error: 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' (0x8007001F). (Virtual machine 36563C78-65B5-4C40-A52D-689BB39E8B08) 'XXX': Failed to open attachment 'X:\XXX.vhd'. Error: 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' (0x8007001F). (Virtual machine 36563C78-65B5-4C40-A52D-689BB39E8B08) An error ocurred while attempting to change the state of virtual machine XXX. 'XXX' failed to start. Microsoft Emulated IDE Controller (Instance ID {83F8638B-8DCA-4152-9EDA-2CA8B33039B4}): Failed to power on with Error 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' Failed to open attachment 'X:\XXX.vhd'. Error: 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' Failed to open attachment 'X:\XXX.vhd'. Error: 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' 'XXX' failed to start. (Virtual machine 36563C78-65B5-4C40-A52D-689BB39E8B08) Microsoft Emulated IDE Controller (Instance ID {83F8638B-8DCA-4152-9EDA-2CA8B33039B4}): Failed to power on with Error 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' (0x8007001F). (Virtual machine 36563C78-65B5-4C40-A52D-689BB39E8B08) 'XXX': Failed to open attachment 'X:\XXX.vhd'. Error: 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' (0x8007001F). (Virtual machine 36563C78-65B5-4C40-A52D-689BB39E8B08) 'XXX': Failed to open attachment 'X:\XXX.vhd'. Error: 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' (0x8007001F). (Virtual machine 36563C78-65B5-4C40-A52D-689BB39E8B08) An error ocurred while attempting to change the state of virtual machine XXX. 'XXX' failed to start. Microsoft Emulated IDE Controller (Instance ID {83F8638B-8DCA-4152-9EDA-2CA8B33039B4}): Failed to power on with Error 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' Failed to open attachment 'c:\clusterstorage/volume1/XXX.vhd'. Error: 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' Failed to open attachment 'c:\clusterstorage/volume1\XXX.vhd'. Error: 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' 'XXX' failed to start. (Virtual machine 36563C78-65B5-4C40-A52D-689BB39E8B08) Microsoft Emulated IDE Controller (Instance ID {83F8638B-8DCA-4152-9EDA-2CA8B33039B4}): Failed to power on with Error 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' (0x8007001F). (Virtual machine 36563C78-65B5-4C40-A52D-689BB39E8B08) 'XXX': Failed to open attachment 'c:\clusterstorage/volume1\XXX.vhd'. Error: 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' (0x8007001F). (Virtual machine 36563C78-65B5-4C40-A52D-689BB39E8B08) 'XXX': Failed to open attachment 'c:\clusterstorage/volume1\XXX.vhd'. Error: 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' (0x8007001F). (Virtual machine 36563C78-65B5-4C40-A52D-689BB39E8B08) In the Hyper-V logs I found some more errors: In the hyper-v VMMS logs I have this: 'ServerName' failed to perform the operation. The virtual machine is not in a valid state to perform the operation. (Virtual machine ID 0A6CC4A9-39D6-4413-8CF0-B6DAA35B68D7)

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• Adobe Coldfusion Railo OpenBD Apache Tomcat Multiple Sites

  - by chris hough

  Here's what I am trying to do, unless I am crazy: I am trying to use Tomcat with the multiple workers, so far I got OpenBD working, but having trouble with Railo, and will be tackling Adobe after. each engine deployed as a war separated by different workers I wanted to keep both the sites and engines inside my sites directory I have to remap the symlink for the WEB-INF when I switch engines = have not found a way around this my thought is to have everything separated into modules and I want to be able to execute both cfm and php code in a single site.  Ideally, it would be amazing if there would be a way to not have to remap the symlink as well. thoughts? can this be done? I am trying to mimic how this would be setup on a live server, not using eclipse for example. here is what I am working with so far: my apache workers.properties worker.list=openbd, openbdadmin, railo, railoadmin  worker.openbd.type=ajp13  worker.openbd.host=local.mydev.openbd  worker.openbd.port=8009 worker.openbdadmin.type=ajp13  worker.openbdadmin.host=local.admin.openbd worker.openbdadmin.port=8009   worker.railo.type=ajp13  worker.railo.host=local.mydev.railo  worker.railo.port=8009 worker.railoadmin.type=ajp13  worker.railoadmin.host=local.admin.railo worker.railoadmin.port=8009   my tomcat servers.xml < Host name="local.admin.openbd" appBase="/Users/[myusername]/Websites/coldfusion.engines"  unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="true" xmlNamespaceAware="false"        < Context path="" docBase="openbd/" reloadable="true" privileged="true" antiResourceLocking="false" anitJARLocking="false" allowLinking="true" < /Host        < Host name="local.admin.railo"   appBase="/Users/[my username]/Websites/coldfusion.engines" unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="true" xmlNamespaceAware="false"        < Context path="" docBase="railo/"  reloadable="true" privileged="true" antiResourceLocking="false" anitJARLocking="false" allowLinking="true" < /Host < Host name="local.mydev.openbd"   appBase="/Users/[my username]/Websites/coldfusion.engines" unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="true" xmlNamespaceAware="false" < Context path="" docBase="/Users/[my username]/Websites/example.mydev/wwwroot/"  reloadable="true" privileged="true" antiResourceLocking="false" anitJARLocking="false" allowLinking="true"< /Context < /Host < Host name="local.mydev.railo"   appBase="/Users/[my username]/Websites/coldfusion.engines"  unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="true" xmlNamespaceAware="false" < Context path="" docBase="/Users/[my username]/Websites/example.mydev/wwwroot/"  reloadable="true" privileged="true" antiResourceLocking="false" anitJARLocking="false" allowLinking="true" < /Host my apache vhosts ServerName local.admin.openbd DocumentRoot /Users/[my username]/Websites/coldfusion.engines/openBD/ #Mount OpenBD and tell it to only server cfml files JkMount /*.cfm openbdadmin ErrorLog "/Users/[my username]/Websites/apache.logs/local_openbdadmin_error.log" ServerName local.admin.railo DocumentRoot /Users/[my username]/Websites/coldfusion.engines/railo/ #Mount Railo and tell it to only server cfml files JkMount /*.cfm railoadmin ErrorLog "/Users/[my username]/Websites/apache.logs/local_railoadmin_error.log" ServerName local.mydev DocumentRoot /Users/[my username]/Websites/example.mydev/wwwroot ErrorLog "/Users/[my username]/Websites/apache.logs/local_example_mydev_error.log" ServerName local.mydev.openbd DocumentRoot /Users/[my username]/Websites/example.mydev/wwwroot #Mount OpenBD and tell it to only server cfml files JkMount /*.cfm openbd ErrorLog "/Users/[my username]/Websites/apache.logs/local_example_mydev_openbd_error.log" ServerName local.mydev.railo DocumentRoot /Users/[my username]/Websites/example.mydev/wwwroot JkMount /*.cfm railo ErrorLog "/Users/[my username]/Websites/apache.logs/local_example_mydev_railo_error.log" my folder structure I am using websites/apache.logs/ websites/coldfusion.engines/ websites/coldfusion.engines/cfusion/ websites/coldfusion.engines/openBD/ websites/coldfusion.engines/railo/ websites/example.mydev/ websites/example.mydev/wwwroot/ websites/example.mydev/wwwroot/index.cfm   websites/example.mydev/wwwroot/index.htm   websites/example.mydev/wwwroot/index.php   error log output [Thu Aug 27 00:54:50.443 2009] [11279:2686719776] [info] init_jk::mod_jk.c (3183): mod_jk/1.2.28 initialized [Thu Aug 27 00:54:51.346 2009] [11280:2686719776] [info] init_jk::mod_jk.c (3183): mod_jk/1.2.28 initialized [Thu Aug 27 00:55:18.963 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (594): connect to 127.0.0.1:8009 failed (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:18.963 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] ajp_connect_to_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (922): Failed opening socket to (127.0.0.1:8009) (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:18.963 2009] [11284:2686719776] [error] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1507): (openbdadmin) connecting to backend failed. Tomcat is probably not started or is listening on the wrong port (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:18.963 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2447): (openbdadmin) sending request to tomcat failed (recoverable), because of error during request sending (attempt=1) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:19.063 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (594): connect to 127.0.0.1:8009 failed (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:19.063 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] ajp_connect_to_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (922): Failed opening socket to (127.0.0.1:8009) (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:19.063 2009] [11284:2686719776] [error] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1507): (openbdadmin) connecting to backend failed. Tomcat is probably not started or is listening on the wrong port (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:19.063 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2447): (openbdadmin) sending request to tomcat failed (recoverable), because of error during request sending (attempt=2) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:19.063 2009] [11284:2686719776] [error] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2466): (openbdadmin) connecting to tomcat failed. [Thu Aug 27 00:55:19.063 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] jk_handler::mod_jk.c (2615): Service error=-3 for worker=openbdadmin [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.377 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (594): connect to 127.0.0.1:8009 failed (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.377 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] ajp_connect_to_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (922): Failed opening socket to (127.0.0.1:8009) (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.377 2009] [11283:2686719776] [error] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1507): (railoadmin) connecting to backend failed. Tomcat is probably not started or is listening on the wrong port (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.377 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2447): (railoadmin) sending request to tomcat failed (recoverable), because of error during request sending (attempt=1) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.477 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (594): connect to 127.0.0.1:8009 failed (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.477 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] ajp_connect_to_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (922): Failed opening socket to (127.0.0.1:8009) (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.477 2009] [11283:2686719776] [error] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1507): (railoadmin) connecting to backend failed. Tomcat is probably not started or is listening on the wrong port (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.477 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2447): (railoadmin) sending request to tomcat failed (recoverable), because of error during request sending (attempt=2) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.477 2009] [11283:2686719776] [error] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2466): (railoadmin) connecting to tomcat failed. [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.477 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] jk_handler::mod_jk.c (2615): Service error=-3 for worker=railoadmin

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• Exim mail server slow on sending through SMTP

  - by catalint

  It takes about 30 seconds for the server to send me the banner, but initial connection is done instantly only happens when I am at the office, from home it works fine at the office I have a rRns set-up for my client ip that it's not working. Server: Exim, public fixed ip, rDNS, no ports blocked, in a datacenter Config: hostlist loopback = <; 127.0.0.0/8 ; 0.0.0.0 ; ::1 ; 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:7f00:0000/8 hostlist senderverifybypass_hosts = net-iplsearch;/etc/senderverifybypasshosts hostlist skipsmtpcheck_hosts = net-iplsearch;/etc/skipsmtpcheckhosts hostlist spammeripblocks = net-iplsearch;/etc/spammeripblocks hostlist backupmx_hosts = lsearch;/etc/backupmxhosts hostlist trustedmailhosts = lsearch;/etc/trustedmailhosts domainlist user_domains = ${if exists{/etc/userdomains} {lsearch;/etc/userdomains} fail} This happens super fast on the server: 30132 ident connection to 89.238.207.49 failed: Connection refused 30132 sender_fullhost = [89.238.207.49] 30132 sender_rcvhost = [89.238.207.49] 30132 Process 30132 is handling incoming connection from [89.238.207.49] 30132 host in host_lookup? no (option unset) 30132 set_process_info: 30132 handling incoming connection from [89.238.207.49] 30132 host in host_reject_connection? no (option unset) 30132 host in sender_unqualified_hosts? no (option unset) 30132 host in recipient_unqualified_hosts? no (option unset) 30132 host in helo_verify_hosts? no (option unset) 30132 host in helo_try_verify_hosts? no (option unset) 30132 host in helo_accept_junk_hosts? yes (matched "*") 30132 using ACL "acl_connect" 30132 processing "accept" 30132 check hosts = +trustedmailhosts 30132 sender host name required, to match against lsearch;/etc/trustedmailhosts 30132 looking up host name for 89.238.207.49 30132 IP address lookup yielded relay.easycomm.ro Client side 2011.09.14 13:08:13 SMTP (mail.server.ro): Begin execution 2011.09.14 13:08:13 SMTP (mail.server.ro): Port: 465, Secure: SSL, SPA: no 2011.09.14 13:08:13 SMTP (mail.server.ro): Finding host 2011.09.14 13:08:13 SMTP (mail.server.ro): Connecting to host 2011.09.14 13:08:13 SMTP (mail.server.ro): Securing connection 2011.09.14 13:08:13 SMTP (mail.server.ro): Connected to host ---> This is a 1 minute 5 seconds gap 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 220-genius.filipnet.ro ESMTP Exim 4.69 #1 Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:09:26 +0300 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 220-We do not authorize the use of this system to transport unsolicited, 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 220 and/or bulk e-mail. 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): [tx] EHLO CatalinDell 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 250-genius.filipnet.ro Hello CatalinDell [89.238.207.49] 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 250-SIZE 52428800 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 250-PIPELINING 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 250-AUTH PLAIN LOGIN 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 250 HELP 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): Authorizing to server 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): [tx] AUTH LOGIN 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): [tx] dGVzdEBzcG9ydGd1cnUucm8= 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): [tx] ***** 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 235 Authentication succeeded 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): Authorized to host 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): Connected to host 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): [tx] MAIL FROM: <*****> 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 250 OK 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): [tx] RCPT TO: <*****> 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 250 Accepted 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): [tx] DATA 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself 2011.09.14 13:09:18 SMTP (mail.server.ro): [tx] . ---> This is a 1 minute 10 seconds gap 2011.09.14 13:10:28 SMTP (mail.server.ro): <rx> 250 OK id=1R3mPG-0004T4-7Q 2011.09.14 13:10:28 SMTP (mail.server.ro): End execution --- Initial info I've setup an email account on "Windows Live Mail" that comes with Windows 7 Receiving is super fast, but for some reason sending is very slow, I had to increase the outgoing timeout to 3 minutes in order to make it work. Server software is Exim / Dovecot / cPanel. Do you have any ideeas why there is a slow sending process? Thank you!

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• localhost/phpmyadmin pulls blank page

  - by Atul Modi

  When I tried configuring local machine as a Internet Gateway with website development capabilities over it and I installed all required software into it. I also had disable the selinux into it. But PROBLEM is when I do http://localhost/phpMyAdmin or all lower case than the page shows it as a blank page. I am pasting code from httpd.conf file into this as well as from phpMyAdmin.conf file I am using Fedora 16 for this. httpd.conf ServerTokens OS ServerRoot "/etc/httpd" PidFile run/httpd.pid Timeout 60 KeepAlive Off MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 KeepAliveTimeout 5 StartServers 8 MinSpareServers 5 MaxSpareServers 20 ServerLimit 256 MaxClients 256 MaxRequestsPerChild 4000 StartServers 4 MaxClients 300 MinSpareThreads 25 MaxSpareThreads 75 ThreadsPerChild 25 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 Listen 80 LoadModule auth_basic_module modules/mod_auth_basic.so LoadModule auth_digest_module modules/mod_auth_digest.so LoadModule authn_file_module modules/mod_authn_file.so LoadModule authn_alias_module modules/mod_authn_alias.so LoadModule authn_anon_module modules/mod_authn_anon.so LoadModule authn_dbm_module modules/mod_authn_dbm.so LoadModule authn_default_module modules/mod_authn_default.so LoadModule authz_host_module modules/mod_authz_host.so LoadModule authz_user_module modules/mod_authz_user.so LoadModule authz_owner_module modules/mod_authz_owner.so LoadModule authz_groupfile_module modules/mod_authz_groupfile.so LoadModule authz_dbm_module modules/mod_authz_dbm.so LoadModule authz_default_module modules/mod_authz_default.so LoadModule authn_dbd_module modules/mod_authn_dbd.so LoadModule dbd_module modules/mod_dbd.so LoadModule ldap_module modules/mod_ldap.so LoadModule authnz_ldap_module modules/mod_authnz_ldap.so LoadModule include_module modules/mod_include.so LoadModule log_config_module modules/mod_log_config.so LoadModule logio_module modules/mod_logio.so LoadModule env_module modules/mod_env.so LoadModule ext_filter_module modules/mod_ext_filter.so LoadModule mime_magic_module modules/mod_mime_magic.so LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so LoadModule usertrack_module modules/mod_usertrack.so LoadModule setenvif_module modules/mod_setenvif.so LoadModule mime_module modules/mod_mime.so LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so LoadModule status_module modules/mod_status.so LoadModule autoindex_module modules/mod_autoindex.so LoadModule info_module modules/mod_info.so LoadModule dav_fs_module modules/mod_dav_fs.so LoadModule vhost_alias_module modules/mod_vhost_alias.so LoadModule negotiation_module modules/mod_negotiation.so LoadModule dir_module modules/mod_dir.so LoadModule actions_module modules/mod_actions.so LoadModule speling_module modules/mod_speling.so LoadModule userdir_module modules/mod_userdir.so LoadModule alias_module modules/mod_alias.so LoadModule substitute_module modules/mod_substitute.so LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so LoadModule proxy_balancer_module modules/mod_proxy_balancer.so LoadModule proxy_ftp_module modules/mod_proxy_ftp.so LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so LoadModule proxy_ajp_module modules/mod_proxy_ajp.so LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so LoadModule cache_module modules/mod_cache.so LoadModule suexec_module modules/mod_suexec.so LoadModule disk_cache_module modules/mod_disk_cache.so LoadModule cgi_module modules/mod_cgi.so LoadModule version_module modules/mod_version.so Include conf.d/*.conf User apache Group apache ServerAdmin root@localhost UseCanonicalName Off DocumentRoot "/var/www/html" Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order allow,deny Allow from all UserDir disabled DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php AccessFileName .htaccess Order allow,deny Deny from all Satisfy All TypesConfig /etc/mime.types DefaultType text/plain MIMEMagicFile conf/magic HostnameLookups Off ErrorLog logs/error_log LogLevel warn LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b" common LogFormat "%{Referer}i - %U" referer LogFormat "%{User-agent}i" agent CustomLog logs/access_log combined ServerSignature On Alias /icons/ "/var/www/icons/" Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order allow,deny Allow from all # Location of the WebDAV lock database. DAVLockDB /var/lib/dav/lockdb ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/var/www/cgi-bin/" AllowOverride None Options None Order allow,deny Allow from all IndexOptions FancyIndexing VersionSort NameWidth=* HTMLTable Charset=UTF-8 AddIconByEncoding (CMP,/icons/compressed.gif) x-compress x-gzip AddIconByType (TXT,/icons/text.gif) text/* AddIconByType (IMG,/icons/image2.gif) image/* AddIconByType (SND,/icons/sound2.gif) audio/* AddIconByType (VID,/icons/movie.gif) video/* AddIcon /icons/binary.gif .bin .exe AddIcon /icons/binhex.gif .hqx AddIcon /icons/tar.gif .tar AddIcon /icons/world2.gif .wrl .wrl.gz .vrml .vrm .iv AddIcon /icons/compressed.gif .Z .z .tgz .gz .zip AddIcon /icons/a.gif .ps .ai .eps AddIcon /icons/layout.gif .html .shtml .htm .pdf AddIcon /icons/text.gif .txt AddIcon /icons/c.gif .c AddIcon /icons/p.gif .pl .py AddIcon /icons/f.gif .for AddIcon /icons/dvi.gif .dvi AddIcon /icons/uuencoded.gif .uu AddIcon /icons/script.gif .conf .sh .shar .csh .ksh .tcl AddIcon /icons/tex.gif .tex AddIcon /icons/bomb.gif core AddIcon /icons/back.gif .. AddIcon /icons/hand.right.gif README AddIcon /icons/folder.gif ^^DIRECTORY^^ AddIcon /icons/blank.gif ^^BLANKICON^^ DefaultIcon /icons/unknown.gif ReadmeName README.html HeaderName HEADER.html IndexIgnore .??* *~ # HEADER README* RCS CVS *,v *,t AddLanguage ca .ca AddLanguage cs .cz .cs AddLanguage da .dk AddLanguage de .de AddLanguage el .el AddLanguage en .en AddLanguage eo .eo AddLanguage es .es AddLanguage et .et AddLanguage fr .fr AddLanguage he .he AddLanguage hr .hr AddLanguage it .it AddLanguage ja .ja AddLanguage ko .ko AddLanguage ltz .ltz AddLanguage nl .nl AddLanguage nn .nn AddLanguage no .no AddLanguage pl .po AddLanguage pt .pt AddLanguage pt-BR .pt-br AddLanguage ru .ru AddLanguage sv .sv AddLanguage zh-CN .zh-cn AddLanguage zh-TW .zh-tw LanguagePriority en ca cs da de el eo es et fr he hr it ja ko ltz nl nn no pl pt pt-BR ru sv zh-CN zh-TW ForceLanguagePriority Prefer Fallback AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 AddType application/x-tar .tgz AddType application/x-httpd-php .php AddType application/x-httpd-php .xml AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .xml AddType application/x-compress .Z AddType application/x-gzip .gz .tgz AddType application/x-x509-ca-cert .crt AddType application/x-pkcs7-crl .crl AddHandler type-map var AddType text/html .shtml AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml Alias /error/ "/var/www/error/" AllowOverride None Options IncludesNoExec AddOutputFilter Includes html AddHandler type-map var Order allow,deny Allow from all LanguagePriority en ForceLanguagePriority Prefer Fallback ErrorDocument 400 /error/HTTP_BAD_REQUEST.html.var ErrorDocument 401 /error/HTTP_UNAUTHORIZED.html.var ErrorDocument 403 /error/HTTP_FORBIDDEN.html.var ErrorDocument 404 /error/HTTP_NOT_FOUND.html.var ErrorDocument 405 /error/HTTP_METHOD_NOT_ALLOWED.html.var ErrorDocument 408 /error/HTTP_REQUEST_TIME_OUT.html.var ErrorDocument 500 /error/HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR.html.var ErrorDocument 503 /error/HTTP_SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE.html.var BrowserMatch "Mozilla/2" nokeepalive BrowserMatch "MSIE 4.0b2;" nokeepalive downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "RealPlayer 4.0" force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "Java/1.0" force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "JDK/1.0" force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "Microsoft Data Access Internet Publishing Provider" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "MS FrontPage" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^WebDrive" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^WebDAVFS/1.[0123]" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^gnome-vfs/1.0" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^XML Spy" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^Dreamweaver-WebDAV-SCM1" redirect-carefully Order allow,deny Allow from all # phpMyAdmin.conf Alias /phpMyAdmin /usr/share/phpMyAdmin Alias /phpmyadmin /usr/share/phpMyAdmin Order Allow,Deny Allow from All Allow from 127.0.0.1 Allow from ::1 Order Allow,Deny Allow from All Allow from 127.0.0.1 Allow from ::1 Order Deny,Allow Deny from All Allow from None Order Deny,Allow Deny from All Allow from None Order Deny,Allow Deny from All Allow from None Can anyone help into this area please. Urgent reply will be appreciatable because i am struggling since one and half month for this matter. thank you, Atul

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• How does one get rid of fishy behavior in Windows?

  - by Tom Wijsman

  After I had boot my computer this morning there suddenly flooded water from the top of the screen, after which some fishes dropped into it. Now I can barely see what I am doing because the water distorts the view. Sometimes the fish follow the cursor so I need to move it away or wait for the fish to mind their own business. This makes it very annoying to use my system. What have I tried? Reboot the system. This caused the water to deplete from the desktop. Upon reboot, the screen was refilled with water and fishes. Attach another monitor. Same problem, fills that monitor as well and gives me extra fish. Clicking the fish. Makes them turn direction. Right clicking the fish. Changes color of the fish, not really useful. I'm locked out of changing the background or screen saver settings. Hence, I had to post the lady below... Safe mode doesn't save me from the fishes. It does give me another background there, but I can't screenshot easily. Other user accounts experience this as well. The Guest account seems to experience more fish than the other accounts. Using HijackThis, OTL Timekeeper List, Syninternal Autoruns, RootKitRevealer, ShellExView and similar tools I can't seem to find any entries that could be it, the Sysinternals tools show everything as verified. I'm suspecting this to be a driver problem. Randomly removing drivers doesn't seem to alleviate the problem. When removing the Graphics Drivers, it makes my screen black. While that could be considered the solution, it's not what I want. Changing the time / date settings does also not seem to affect the fishes. Changing the time a few years in the future, I would have expected the fishes to be dead. But, the same fishes are still there... They simply won't die! Tried to get used to them. They are really bothering me, looks like they require food. I don't know how to give them food, but apparently they get it elsewhere during reboot... Tried to disable my mouse pointer and use the keyboard. This works, they now swim around more randomly. They do put their attention to huge changes on the screen, so I need to type slow. Or otherwise I can't see what I'm tying exactly. Hold my laptop upside down. This seems to affect the water and fishes, but the water stays in the screen. They seem super resistant against water sickness and confusion though... What does the problem look like? What do I need? A way to get rid of these fishes on my screen forever, they are really annoying me a lot and I'm about to crack the screen to see if that makes them escape. Do you have any idea why this problem is occurring? What are my considerations? Buying an USB fish tank could make the fish leave the screen, I am uncertain though whether the fish could leave the screen through the USB cable. Using the FISh (programming language) which seems to provide EXPRESSIVE POWER and EFFICIENT EXECUTION, I can however not find any examples on how to remove fish. What are my Specifications? I'm using a Sony Vaio Fishy laptop. Sony VAIO VGN-Fishy, VAIO. Processor: 1337 MHz, Intel Core 2 Duo, T5432, 1 MB, Intel PM965 Express, 667 MHz. Memory: 1024 MB, DDR2-SDRAM, 667 MHz, 2 x 1024 MB, 4 GB. Disk Drive: 50 GB, Serial ATA, 5400 RPM. Storage Media: Memory Stick™, Memory Stick PRO™. Display: 15.4 ", 1280 x 800 pixels, LCD. Video: GeForce 8400M GT, 128 MB. Optical Drive: DVD±R/RW DL, 24 x, 24 x, 24 x, 6 x, 4 x, 6 x, 4 x, 5 x, 5 x, 8 x, 8 x, 8 x, 8 x, 6 x, 6 x, 24 x, 24 x, 24 x, 16 x. Camera: 1.3 MP, 30 fps. Networking: 2.0+EDR. Keyboard: Touchpad, AZERTY. Operating System/Software: Windows Vista Home Premium. Security: Kensington. Weight & Dimensions: 98.8 oz (2800 g), 14 " (355.8 mm), 10 " (254.4 mm), 0.98 " (24.9 mm). Other features: 100 BASE-TX/10 BASE-T, 802.11a/b/g/n/Draft n, V92/V.90, fishes. Plz! Help me...

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• Problem installing Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit side by side with Vista by using a bootable USB drive. What n

  - by Adam Siddhi

  What happened I decided to install Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit side by side with Vista Home Premium (I guess on another partition) with a USB stick. I found instructions on how to do this here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick To create the bootable USB drive I had to download a program called Unetbootin. That process was simple enough. All I had to do was just choose the disk image option, select the ubuntu-10.04-desktop-amd64.iso image, make sure it recognizes my USB drive and then press OK. It takes only like a few minutes to create a working bootable USB drive. Then I have to restart my computer, enter the BIOS, select my USB drive as the first boot drive, save options and continue with booting up. After this Ubuntu actually loads up. I think this is known as the Live version of Ubuntu so you can try it out before fully installing it. Any ways, on the Ubuntu 10.04 desktop I saw an installer. I click it and begin the installation process. Just so you know, I tried installing it 2 times. I will explain what happened each time: The first time I tried installing Ubuntu 10.04 I got stuck at step 4 of 7. I remember selecting the last option in the window which was Specify Partitions Manually (Advanced) I made my partition for Ubuntu like 52 gigs. I clicked forward and a little pop up window appeared saying Please Wait. So the installation process stalled on this window so I closed out of it and quit the installation process. So at this point I was worried because I had already selected the partition size and assumed it started making it. Since it stalled I had to quit out though. Anyways, once again I reached step 4 of 7 a decided to select the first option which is Install them side by side choosing between them each startup. I figured this was the safe way to go. I did that and the pop up window saying Please Wait popped up again but lasted only like 10 seconds. Then I got to I guess step 6 where it asks you to enter your desired name and password. Did that and clicked forward. The Ubuntu 10.04 installation load screen appeared and the loading bar at the bottom started filling up. So I got to 83% and stalled during the Importing other profile information (I think it was called this. I had the option to do this during I think step 6) process. So at this point I decided to get stop the installation process. I was getting very nervous. I tried to restart the computer but all that happened was that Ubuntu restarted. I finally got the computer to restart. I was pretty sure I had screwed something up big time by this point. As my computer was restarting I entered BIOS again and switched back to it booting from my main hard drive containing Vista. Saved it and continued the boot process. My worst fears were confirmed as Vista would not boot up. I mean I saw the little Microsoft Windows choppy animated green loading bar at the bottom of the screen and then boom! It decided to restart. When it restarted I had the option to run a memory test check to see if there was anything that needed to be repaired. That took like 20 minutes and at the end I saw that I did indeed have to repair something. I had to go through 2 repair processes. After each I had to restart the computer. The 2nd time it went through the repair process it said that it could not fully repair the damage. I was scared and restarted but Vista did load up. I got to my desktop and saw a message saying something like Repairs have been made, Please restart for changes to take effect I noticed that some Notification icons were missing and I could not hear volume in a video. Things were a bit funky. So I did restart and here I am. Now what?! So since I got back into Vista and thankfully have a working Internet connection I am trying to find answers to my problem (that is why I am writing this post). I am scared that I have partioned my hard drive 2 times after researching Installing Ubuntu 10.04 and seeing this post http://techie-buzz.com/foss/ubuntu-10-04-lts-installation-guide.html The author shows screen shots of installing Ubuntu 10.04. He shows the image of step 4 of 7 with a caption at the bottom. I will recreate it below: Select a partitioning option. Unless you want to format all the hard drive and install Ubuntu afresh, select the last option and proceed. Questions If I have indeed partitioned my HD 2 times (which I am sure it is), how do I get to a point where I can see all my bad, unfinished Ubuntu partitions and get rid of them? How do I clean this big mess up? & How can I ensure that this mess will not happen next time I try installing Ubuntu 10.04? Thank you Adam

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• Print driver installs failing

  - by Kasius

  All of the Windows 7 64-bit Enterprise machines in my organization are failing to install a good number of printer drivers that previously installed without issue. This only happens with printer drivers. And not with all printer drivers. Just some. Network drivers, video drivers, etc. have had no problems. Here is part of setupapi.dev.log for a Dymo LabelWriter printer driver that is failing to install: dvi: {Plug and Play Service: Device Install for USBPRINT\DYMOLABELWRITER_450_TURBO\6&538F51D&0&USB001} ump: Creating Install Process: DrvInst.exe 09:36:58.071 ndv: Infpath=C:\Windows\INF\oem0.inf ndv: DriverNodeName=dymo.inf:DYMO.NTamd64.6.0:LW_450_TURBO_VISTA:8.1.0.363:usbprint\dymolabelwriter_450_aa08 ndv: DriverStorepath=C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\dymo.inf_amd64_neutral_3a631b118b7a5828\dymo.inf ndv: Building driver list from driver node strong name... dvi: Searching for hardware ID(s): dvi: usbprint\dymolabelwriter_450_aa08 dvi: dymolabelwriter_450_aa08 inf: Opened PNF: 'C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\dymo.inf_amd64_neutral_3a631b118b7a5828\dymo.inf' ([strings]) dvi: Selected driver installs from section [LW_450_TURBO_VISTA] in 'c:\windows\system32\driverstore\filerepository\dymo.inf_amd64_neutral_3a631b118b7a5828\dymo.inf'. dvi: Class GUID of device changed to: {4d36e979-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}. dvi: Set selected driver complete. ndv: {Core Device Install} 09:36:58.133 inf: Opened INF: 'C:\Windows\INF\oem0.inf' ([strings]) inf: Saved PNF: 'C:\Windows\INF\oem0.PNF' (Language = 0409) dvi: {DIF_ALLOW_INSTALL} 09:36:58.164 dvi: Using exported function 'ClassInstall32' in module 'C:\Windows\system32\ntprint.dll'. dvi: Class installer == ntprint.dll,ClassInstall32 dvi: No CoInstallers found dvi: Class installer: Enter 09:36:58.164 dvi: Class installer: Exit dvi: Default installer: Enter 09:36:58.180 dvi: Default installer: Exit dvi: {DIF_ALLOW_INSTALL - exit(0xe000020e)} 09:36:58.180 ndv: Installing files... dvi: {DIF_INSTALLDEVICEFILES} 09:36:58.180 dvi: Class installer: Enter 09:36:58.180 inf: Opened INF: 'C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\dymo.inf_amd64_neutral_3a631b118b7a5828\dymo.inf' ([strings]) inf: Opened INF: 'C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\dymo.inf_amd64_neutral_3a631b118b7a5828\dymo.inf' ([strings]) !!! dvi: Class installer: failed(0x00000490)! !!! dvi: Error 1168: Element not found. dvi: {DIF_INSTALLDEVICEFILES - exit(0x00000490)} 09:37:22.063 ndv: Device install status=0x00000490 ndv: Performing device install final cleanup... ! ndv: Queueing up error report since device installation failed... ndv: {Core Device Install - exit(0x00000490)} 09:37:22.063 dvi: {DIF_DESTROYPRIVATEDATA} 09:37:22.063 dvi: Class installer: Enter 09:37:22.063 dvi: Class installer: Exit dvi: Default installer: Enter 09:37:22.063 dvi: Default installer: Exit dvi: {DIF_DESTROYPRIVATEDATA - exit(0xe000020e)} 09:37:22.063 ump: Server install process exited with code 0x00000490 09:37:22.063 ump: {Plug and Play Service: Device Install exit(00000490)} Notice these lines in particular: !!! dvi: Class installer: failed(0x00000490)! !!! dvi: Error 1168: Element not found. dvi: {DIF_INSTALLDEVICEFILES - exit(0x00000490)} 09:37:22.063 ndv: Device install status=0x00000490 From what I have read, the "Element not found" error should be accompanied by an event describing what element was not found. The error that appears in Device Manager is "The driver cannot be installed because it is either not digitally signed or not signed in the appropriate manner." It appears to be signed fine though. It has an accompanying .CAT file and worked previously. And when installing, the following messages are logged in setupapi.dev.log: sto: {DRIVERSTORE_IMPORT_NOTIFY_VALIDATE} 09:36:56.277 inf: Opened INF: 'C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\Temp\{272e2305-961c-7942-9ede-966f01047043}\dymo.inf' ([strings]) sig: {_VERIFY_FILE_SIGNATURE} 09:36:56.292 sig: Key = dymo.inf sig: FilePath = C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\Temp\{272e2305-961c-7942-9ede-966f01047043}\dymo.inf sig: Catalog = C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\Temp\{272e2305-961c-7942-9ede-966f01047043}\DYMO.CAT sig: Success: File is signed in catalog. sig: {_VERIFY_FILE_SIGNATURE exit(0x00000000)} 09:36:56.355 sto: Validating driver package files against catalog 'DYMO.CAT'. sto: Driver package is valid. sto: {DRIVERSTORE_IMPORT_NOTIFY_VALIDATE exit(0x00000000)} 09:36:56.402 sto: Verified driver package signature: sto: Digital Signer Score = 0x0D000005 sto: Digital Signer Name = Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher Now here's where it gets strange. If I take it off the domain, it installs fine. But it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Group Policy. I moved the machine to an OU that blocks inheritance, ran a gpupdate, ran rsop.msc to verify, and tried again. And it still didn't work. Likewise, I removed a machine from the domain, manually set all of the domain Group Policy settings in gpedit.msc, and tried that way, and it worked fine. So it seems like the Group Policy settings are irrelevant. What other domain-related issue could be causing this though? Any ideas on what to try next would be greatly appreciated. I'm not sure where to go from here. Thanks!

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• Adobe Coldfusion Railo OpenBD Apache Tomcat Multiple Sites

  - by chris hough

  Here's what I am trying to do, unless I am crazy: I am trying to use Tomcat with the multiple workers, so far I got OpenBD working, but having trouble with Railo, and will be tackling Adobe after. each engine deployed as a war separated by different workers I wanted to keep both the sites and engines inside my sites directory I have to remap the symlink for the WEB-INF when I switch engines = have not found a way around this my thought is to have everything separated into modules and I want to be able to execute both cfm and php code in a single site.  Ideally, it would be amazing if there would be a way to not have to remap the symlink as well. thoughts? can this be done? I am trying to mimic how this would be setup on a live server, not using eclipse for example. here is what I am working with so far: my apache workers.properties worker.list=openbd, openbdadmin, railo, railoadmin  worker.openbd.type=ajp13  worker.openbd.host=local.mydev.openbd  worker.openbd.port=8009 worker.openbdadmin.type=ajp13  worker.openbdadmin.host=local.admin.openbd worker.openbdadmin.port=8009   worker.railo.type=ajp13  worker.railo.host=local.mydev.railo  worker.railo.port=8009 worker.railoadmin.type=ajp13  worker.railoadmin.host=local.admin.railo worker.railoadmin.port=8009   my tomcat servers.xml < Host name="local.admin.openbd" appBase="/Users/[myusername]/Websites/coldfusion.engines"  unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="true" xmlNamespaceAware="false"        < Context path="" docBase="openbd/" reloadable="true" privileged="true" antiResourceLocking="false" anitJARLocking="false" allowLinking="true" < /Host        < Host name="local.admin.railo"   appBase="/Users/[my username]/Websites/coldfusion.engines" unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="true" xmlNamespaceAware="false"        < Context path="" docBase="railo/"  reloadable="true" privileged="true" antiResourceLocking="false" anitJARLocking="false" allowLinking="true" < /Host < Host name="local.mydev.openbd"   appBase="/Users/[my username]/Websites/coldfusion.engines" unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="true" xmlNamespaceAware="false" < Context path="" docBase="/Users/[my username]/Websites/example.mydev/wwwroot/"  reloadable="true" privileged="true" antiResourceLocking="false" anitJARLocking="false" allowLinking="true"< /Context < /Host < Host name="local.mydev.railo"   appBase="/Users/[my username]/Websites/coldfusion.engines"  unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="true" xmlNamespaceAware="false" < Context path="" docBase="/Users/[my username]/Websites/example.mydev/wwwroot/"  reloadable="true" privileged="true" antiResourceLocking="false" anitJARLocking="false" allowLinking="true" < /Host my apache vhosts ServerName local.admin.openbd DocumentRoot /Users/[my username]/Websites/coldfusion.engines/openBD/ #Mount OpenBD and tell it to only server cfml files JkMount /*.cfm openbdadmin ErrorLog "/Users/[my username]/Websites/apache.logs/local_openbdadmin_error.log" ServerName local.admin.railo DocumentRoot /Users/[my username]/Websites/coldfusion.engines/railo/ #Mount Railo and tell it to only server cfml files JkMount /*.cfm railoadmin ErrorLog "/Users/[my username]/Websites/apache.logs/local_railoadmin_error.log" ServerName local.mydev DocumentRoot /Users/[my username]/Websites/example.mydev/wwwroot ErrorLog "/Users/[my username]/Websites/apache.logs/local_example_mydev_error.log" ServerName local.mydev.openbd DocumentRoot /Users/[my username]/Websites/example.mydev/wwwroot #Mount OpenBD and tell it to only server cfml files JkMount /*.cfm openbd ErrorLog "/Users/[my username]/Websites/apache.logs/local_example_mydev_openbd_error.log" ServerName local.mydev.railo DocumentRoot /Users/[my username]/Websites/example.mydev/wwwroot JkMount /*.cfm railo ErrorLog "/Users/[my username]/Websites/apache.logs/local_example_mydev_railo_error.log" my folder structure I am using websites/apache.logs/ websites/coldfusion.engines/ websites/coldfusion.engines/cfusion/ websites/coldfusion.engines/openBD/ websites/coldfusion.engines/railo/ websites/example.mydev/ websites/example.mydev/wwwroot/ websites/example.mydev/wwwroot/index.cfm   websites/example.mydev/wwwroot/index.htm   websites/example.mydev/wwwroot/index.php   error log output [Thu Aug 27 00:54:50.443 2009] [11279:2686719776] [info] init_jk::mod_jk.c (3183): mod_jk/1.2.28 initialized [Thu Aug 27 00:54:51.346 2009] [11280:2686719776] [info] init_jk::mod_jk.c (3183): mod_jk/1.2.28 initialized [Thu Aug 27 00:55:18.963 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (594): connect to 127.0.0.1:8009 failed (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:18.963 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] ajp_connect_to_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (922): Failed opening socket to (127.0.0.1:8009) (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:18.963 2009] [11284:2686719776] [error] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1507): (openbdadmin) connecting to backend failed. Tomcat is probably not started or is listening on the wrong port (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:18.963 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2447): (openbdadmin) sending request to tomcat failed (recoverable), because of error during request sending (attempt=1) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:19.063 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (594): connect to 127.0.0.1:8009 failed (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:19.063 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] ajp_connect_to_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (922): Failed opening socket to (127.0.0.1:8009) (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:19.063 2009] [11284:2686719776] [error] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1507): (openbdadmin) connecting to backend failed. Tomcat is probably not started or is listening on the wrong port (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:19.063 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2447): (openbdadmin) sending request to tomcat failed (recoverable), because of error during request sending (attempt=2) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:19.063 2009] [11284:2686719776] [error] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2466): (openbdadmin) connecting to tomcat failed. [Thu Aug 27 00:55:19.063 2009] [11284:2686719776] [info] jk_handler::mod_jk.c (2615): Service error=-3 for worker=openbdadmin [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.377 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (594): connect to 127.0.0.1:8009 failed (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.377 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] ajp_connect_to_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (922): Failed opening socket to (127.0.0.1:8009) (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.377 2009] [11283:2686719776] [error] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1507): (railoadmin) connecting to backend failed. Tomcat is probably not started or is listening on the wrong port (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.377 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2447): (railoadmin) sending request to tomcat failed (recoverable), because of error during request sending (attempt=1) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.477 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (594): connect to 127.0.0.1:8009 failed (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.477 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] ajp_connect_to_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (922): Failed opening socket to (127.0.0.1:8009) (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.477 2009] [11283:2686719776] [error] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1507): (railoadmin) connecting to backend failed. Tomcat is probably not started or is listening on the wrong port (errno=61) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.477 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2447): (railoadmin) sending request to tomcat failed (recoverable), because of error during request sending (attempt=2) [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.477 2009] [11283:2686719776] [error] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2466): (railoadmin) connecting to tomcat failed. [Thu Aug 27 00:55:20.477 2009] [11283:2686719776] [info] jk_handler::mod_jk.c (2615): Service error=-3 for worker=railoadmin

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• Installing Windows on HP Proliant Servers without SmartStart

  - by Fitzroy

  I have a PXE server for deploying Windows XP and Windows 7 to workstations. The process is as follows: Boot the workstation from the NIC. Workstation sends a DHCP request. DHCP server responds with an IP address and the location of the PXE server. Workstation downloads WinPE image file from PXE server via TFTP Workstation stores WinPE image file in memory and executes it. Once booted into WinPE, I connect to a network share to gain access to either the Windows XP or Windows 7 installation files. A custom script is launched to guide you through the process of formatting and partitioning the hard drive(s) (using DISKPART and FORMAT). Another custom script asks for details such as the hostname to assign to the workstation. The answers provided are used to build an unattended answer file (SIF [Setup Information File] for WinXP and XML for Win7). The Windows setup EXE is launched, passing the unattended answer file to it as a parameter. The Windows XP and Windows 7 installation sources have been customised to include the drivers for our Dell workstations. They also run a number of scripts upon first booting up to install software packages. This process works very well for our workstations and I would now like to use it for building our servers too. The vast majority of our servers are HP Proliant DL360 G6, DL380 G5 and DL380 G6. They’re running Windows Server 2003 (various editions) or 2008 (various editions). To date, we have always built the HP Proliant servers using the SmartStart CD provided. SmartStart does three useful things for us: Setup RAID with HP Array Configuration Utility (ACU). Installs and configures SNMP Installs various HP Tools for Windows (HP Array Configuration Utility, HP Array Diagnostic Utility, HP Proliant Integrated Management Log Viewer, etc) Using SmartStart I have never had to manually download and install Windows drivers for network, sound, video, etc. I'm not sure if this is because SmartStart copies drivers from the CD during setup, or whether Windows just has the drivers natively in its driver CAB. If I abandon the SmartStart CD in favour of my PXE server I would have to do the following: As I wont have access to ACU, I'll configure the RAID (before booting to the PXE server) by pressing F8 (during the boot process) to access Option ROM Configuration for Arrays (ORCA). Installation of SNMP and the HP Tools will have to be installed once the Windows installation is complete using the Proliant Support Pack. Is this method OK? Is there anything that the SmartStart CD does that I'll be unable to do by other means? Are there any disadvantages to not using the SmartStart CD? Many thanks. UPDATE 05/01/12 I’ve been reading through the SmartStart Scripting Toolkit documentation. The scripting toolkit contains command line tools which work within WinPE and can such things as configure BIOS settings, configure an array and setup ILO. I’m personally not too bothered about configuring BIOS settings as I rarely deviate from the defaults (unless the server is to be a Hyper-V host). I’m not too fussed about being able to configure the array from within WinPE, as I’m happy to just press F8 and use Option ROM Configuration for Arrays (ORCA). Although, if it’s easy enough to do, I will explore this further, as it saves time if everything can be configured from within WinPE. One of the nice features all the tools possess is that you can pass input files to them. EG. Configure one server to your requirements, capture its configuration to a file (using the appropriate tool), you can then use the tool on other servers passing the input file with the captured configuration. Array controller drivers appear to be included with the toolkit along with example of how to incorporate them within a WinPE build. I suppose WinPE won’t be able to see logical volumes (I.E 2x physical disks in a RAID 1 configuration) without the array controller drivers? I mentioned in my post that SmartStart normally installs a bunch of Windows HP tools for you. I’ve had a look today, and if you run the SmartStart CD from within Windows all the tools can be installed. Therefore I can do this after the Windows installation is complete. The SmartStart CD appears to contain a lot Windows drivers. I can customise my Windows 2008 source to incorporate these drivers. However, I understand that incorporating an array controller driver is a little different to most drivers. I believe that you have to provide the driver during the very early stages of the Windows setup. I’m working through the Scripting Toolkit documentation to try and work this out...

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