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• Tomcat 7 ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.tomcat.JarScanner

  - by CodesLikeA_Mokey

  When I try and start my app I get this error. I have verified that JarScanner exists in the CATALINA_HOME directory so I dont know why it cant find it. Is there anything that could lead to this issue starting my app? I noticed that earlier in the same log i find this: [Loaded org.apache.tomcat.JarScanner from file:/usr/local/apache-tomcat-7.0.30/lib/tomcat-api.jar] Here is the actual error further down: Oct 8, 2012 1:24:01 PM org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase addChildInternal SEVERE: ContainerBase.addChild: start: org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: Failed to start component [StandardEngine[Catalina].StandardHost[localhost].StandardContext[/client]] at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:154) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChildInternal(ContainerBase.java:901) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChild(ContainerBase.java:877) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.addChild(StandardHost.java:618) at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptor(HostConfig.java:650) at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig$DeployDescriptor.run(HostConfig.java:1582) at java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Executors.java:441) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRun(FutureTask.java:303) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:138) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:886) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:908) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662) Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/tomcat/JarScanner at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method) at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClassCond(ClassLoader.java:631) at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:615) at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:141) at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:283) at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(URLClassLoader.java:58) at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:197) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306) at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:295) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.getJarScanner(StandardContext.java:1025) at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processJarsForWebFragments(ContextConfig.java:1911) at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.webConfig(ContextConfig.java:1265) at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.configureStart(ContextConfig.java:878) at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.lifecycleEvent(ContextConfig.java:369) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:119) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleBase.java:90) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.startInternal(StandardContext.java:5173) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:150) ... 11 more Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.tomcat.JarScanner at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306) at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247) ... 33 more Oct 8, 2012 1:24:01 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployDescriptor SEVERE: Error deploying configuration descriptor /software/sirsi/tomcat_sbox7/conf/Catalina/localhost/client.xml java.lang.IllegalStateException: ContainerBase.addChild: start: org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: Failed to start component [StandardEngine[Catalina].StandardHost[localhost].StandardContext[/client]] at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChildInternal(ContainerBase.java:904) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChild(ContainerBase.java:877) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.addChild(StandardHost.java:618) at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptor(HostConfig.java:650) at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig$DeployDescriptor.run(HostConfig.java:1582) at java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Executors.java:441) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRun(FutureTask.java:303) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:138) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:886) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:908) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662) Oct 8, 2012 1:24:01 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployDescriptor INFO: Deploying configuration descriptor /software/sirsi/tomcat_sbox7/conf/Catalina/localhost/custom.xml Oct 8, 2012 1:24:01 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext setPath WARNING: A context path must either be an empty string or start with a '/'. The path [custom] does not meet these criteria and has been changed to [/custom] Oct 8, 2012 1:24:01 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.SetContextPropertiesRule begin WARNING: [SetContextPropertiesRule]{Context} Setting property 'debug' to '0' did not find a matching property. Oct 8, 2012 1:24:01 PM org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase addChildInternal SEVERE: ContainerBase.addChild: start: org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: Failed to start component [StandardEngine[Catalina].StandardHost[localhost].StandardContext[/custom]] at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:154) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChildInternal(ContainerBase.java:901) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChild(ContainerBase.java:877) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.addChild(StandardHost.java:618) at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptor(HostConfig.java:650) at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig$DeployDescriptor.run(HostConfig.java:1582) at java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Executors.java:441) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRun(FutureTask.java:303) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:138) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:886) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:908) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662) Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/tomcat/util/scan/StandardJarScanner at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.getJarScanner(StandardContext.java:1025) at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processJarsForWebFragments(ContextConfig.java:1911) at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.webConfig(ContextConfig.java:1265) at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.configureStart(ContextConfig.java:878) at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.lifecycleEvent(ContextConfig.java:369) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:119) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleBase.java:90) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.startInternal(StandardContext.java:5173) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:150) ... 11 more Oct 8, 2012 1:24:01 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployDescriptor SEVERE: Error deploying configuration descriptor /software/sirsi/tomcat_sbox7/conf/Catalina/localhost/custom.xml java.lang.IllegalStateException: ContainerBase.addChild: start: org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: Failed to start component [StandardEngine[Catalina].StandardHost[localhost].StandardContext[/custom]] at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChildInternal(ContainerBase.java:904) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChild(ContainerBase.java:877) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.addChild(StandardHost.java:618) at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptor(HostConfig.java:650) at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig$DeployDescriptor.run(HostConfig.java:1582) at java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Executors.java:441) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRun(FutureTask.java:303) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:138) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:886) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:908) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662)

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• Silverlight for Windows Embedded tutorial (step 6)

  - by Valter Minute

  In this tutorial step we will develop a very simple clock application that may be used as a screensaver on our devices and will allow us to discover a new feature of Silverlight for Windows Embedded (transforms) and how to use an “old” feature of Windows CE (timers) inside a Silverlight for Windows Embedded application. Let’s start with some XAML, as usual: <UserControl xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Width="640" Height="480" FontSize="18" x:Name="Clock">   <Canvas x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="#FF000000"> <Grid Height="24" Width="150" Canvas.Left="320" Canvas.Top="234" x:Name="SecondsHand" Background="#FFFF0000"> <TextBlock Text="Seconds" TextWrapping="Wrap" Width="50" HorizontalAlignment="Right" VerticalAlignment="Center" x:Name="SecondsText" Foreground="#FFFFFFFF" TextAlignment="Right" Margin="2,2,2,2"/> </Grid> <Grid Height="24" x:Name="MinutesHand" Width="100" Background="#FF00FF00" Canvas.Left="320" Canvas.Top="234"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Right" x:Name="MinutesText" VerticalAlignment="Center" Width="50" Text="Minutes" TextWrapping="Wrap" Foreground="#FFFFFFFF" TextAlignment="Right" Margin="2,2,2,2"/> </Grid> <Grid Height="24" x:Name="HoursHand" Width="50" Background="#FF0000FF" Canvas.Left="320" Canvas.Top="234"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Right" x:Name="HoursText" VerticalAlignment="Center" Width="50" Text="Hours" TextWrapping="Wrap" Foreground="#FFFFFFFF" TextAlignment="Right" Margin="2,2,2,2"/> </Grid> </Canvas> </UserControl> This XAML file defines three grid panels, one for each hand of our clock (we are implementing an analog clock using one of the most advanced technologies of the digital world… how cool is that?). Inside each hand we put a TextBlock that will be used to display the current hour, minute, second inside the dial (you can’t do that on plain old analog clocks, but it looks nice). As usual we use XAML2CPP to generate the boring part of our code. We declare a class named “Clock” and derives from the TClock template that XAML2CPP has declared for us. class Clock : public TClock<Clock> { ... }; Our WinMain function is more or less the same we used in all the previous samples. It initializes the XAML runtime, create an instance of our class, initialize it and shows it as a dialog: int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPTSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow) { if (!XamlRuntimeInitialize()) return -1;   HRESULT retcode;   IXRApplicationPtr app; if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return -1; Clock clock;   if (FAILED(clock.Init(hInstance,app))) return -1;     UINT exitcode;   if (FAILED(clock.GetVisualHost()->StartDialog(&exitcode))) return -1;   return exitcode; } Silverlight for Windows Embedded provides a lot of features to implement our UI, but it does not provide timers. How we can update our clock if we don’t have a timer feature? We just use plain old Windows timers, as we do in “regular” Windows CE applications! To use a timer in WinCE we should declare an id for it: #define IDT_CLOCKUPDATE 0x12341234 We also need an HWND that will be used to receive WM_TIMER messages. Our Silverlight for Windows Embedded page is “hosted” inside a GWES Window and we can retrieve its handle using the GetContainerHWND function of our VisualHost object. Let’s see how this is implemented inside our Clock class’ Init method: HRESULT Init(HINSTANCE hInstance,IXRApplication* app) { HRESULT retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=TClock<Clock>::Init(hInstance,app))) return retcode;   // create the timer user to update the clock HWND clockhwnd;   if (FAILED(GetVisualHost()->GetContainerHWND(&clockhwnd))) return -1;   timer=SetTimer(clockhwnd,IDT_CLOCKUPDATE,1000,NULL); return 0; } We use SetTimer to create a new timer and GWES will send a WM_TIMER to our window every second, giving us a chance to update our clock. That sounds great… but how could we handle the WM_TIMER message if we didn’t implement a window procedure for our window? We have to move a step back and look how a visual host is created. This code is generated by XAML2CPP and is inside xaml2cppbase.h: virtual HRESULT CreateHost(HINSTANCE hInstance,IXRApplication* app) { HRESULT retcode; XRWindowCreateParams wp;   ZeroMemory(&wp, sizeof(XRWindowCreateParams)); InitWindowParms(&wp);   XRXamlSource xamlsrc;   SetXAMLSource(hInstance,&xamlsrc); if (FAILED(retcode=app->CreateHostFromXaml(&xamlsrc, &wp, &vhost))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=vhost->GetRootElement(&root))) return retcode; return S_OK; } As you can see the CreateHostFromXaml function of IXRApplication accepts a structure named XRWindowCreateParams that control how the “plain old” GWES Window is created by the runtime. This structure is initialized inside the InitWindowParm method: // Initializes Windows parameters, can be overridden in the user class to change its appearance virtual void InitWindowParms(XRWindowCreateParams* wp) { wp->Style = WS_OVERLAPPED; wp->pTitle = windowtitle; wp->Left = 0; wp->Top = 0; } This method set up the window style, title and position. But the XRWindowCreateParams contains also other fields and, since the function is declared as virtual, we could initialize them inside our version of InitWindowParms: // add hook procedure to the standard windows creation parms virtual void InitWindowParms(XRWindowCreateParams* wp) { TClock<Clock>::InitWindowParms(wp);   wp->pHookProc=StaticHostHookProc; wp->pvUserParam=this; } This method calls the base class implementation (useful to not having to re-write some code, did I told you that I’m quite lazy?) and then initializes the pHookProc and pvUserParam members of the XRWindowsCreateParams structure. Those members will allow us to install a “hook” procedure that will be called each time the GWES window “hosting” our Silverlight for Windows Embedded UI receives a message. We can declare a hook procedure inside our Clock class: // static hook procedure static BOOL CALLBACK StaticHostHookProc(VOID* pv,HWND hwnd,UINT Msg,WPARAM wParam,LPARAM lParam,LRESULT* pRetVal) { ... } You should notice two things here. First that the function is declared as static. This is required because a non-static function has a “hidden” parameters, that is the “this” pointer of our object. Having an extra parameter is not allowed for the type defined for the pHookProc member of the XRWindowsCreateParams struct and so we should implement our hook procedure as static. But in a static procedure we will not have a this pointer. How could we access the data member of our class? Here’s the second thing to notice. We initialized also the pvUserParam of the XRWindowsCreateParams struct. We set it to our this pointer. This value will be passed as the first parameter of the hook procedure. In this way we can retrieve our this pointer and use it to call a non-static version of our hook procedure: // static hook procedure static BOOL CALLBACK StaticHostHookProc(VOID* pv,HWND hwnd,UINT Msg,WPARAM wParam,LPARAM lParam,LRESULT* pRetVal) { return ((Clock*)pv)->HostHookProc(hwnd,Msg,wParam,lParam,pRetVal); } Inside our non-static hook procedure we will have access to our this pointer and we will be able to update our clock: // hook procedure (handles timers) BOOL HostHookProc(HWND hwnd,UINT Msg,WPARAM wParam,LPARAM lParam,LRESULT* pRetVal) { switch (Msg) { case WM_TIMER: if (wParam==IDT_CLOCKUPDATE) UpdateClock(); *pRetVal=0; return TRUE; } return FALSE; } The UpdateClock member function will update the text inside our TextBlocks and rotate the hands to reflect current time: // udates Hands positions and labels HRESULT UpdateClock() { SYSTEMTIME time; HRESULT retcode;   GetLocalTime(&time);   //updates the text fields TCHAR timebuffer[32];   _itow(time.wSecond,timebuffer,10);   SecondsText->SetText(timebuffer);   _itow(time.wMinute,timebuffer,10);   MinutesText->SetText(timebuffer);   _itow(time.wHour,timebuffer,10);   HoursText->SetText(timebuffer);   if (FAILED(retcode=RotateHand(((float)time.wSecond)*6-90,SecondsHand))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=RotateHand(((float)time.wMinute)*6-90,MinutesHand))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=RotateHand(((float)(time.wHour%12))*30-90,HoursHand))) return retcode;   return S_OK; } The function retrieves current time, convert hours, minutes and seconds to strings and display those strings inside the three TextBlocks that we put inside our clock hands. Then it rotates the hands to position them at the right angle (angles are in degrees and we have to subtract 90 degrees because 0 degrees means horizontal on Silverlight for Windows Embedded and usually a clock 0 is in the top position of the dial. The code of the RotateHand function uses transforms to rotate our clock hands on the screen: // rotates a Hand HRESULT RotateHand(float angle,IXRFrameworkElement* Hand) { HRESULT retcode; IXRRotateTransformPtr rotatetransform; IXRApplicationPtr app;   if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=app->CreateObject(IID_IXRRotateTransform,&rotatetransform))) return retcode;     if (FAILED(retcode=rotatetransform->SetAngle(angle))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=rotatetransform->SetCenterX(0.0))) return retcode;   float height;   if (FAILED(retcode==Hand->GetActualHeight(&height))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=rotatetransform->SetCenterY(height/2))) return retcode; if (FAILED(retcode=Hand->SetRenderTransform(rotatetransform))) return retcode;   return S_OK; } It creates a IXRotateTransform object, set its rotation angle and origin (the default origin is at the top-left corner of our Grid panel, we move it in the vertical center to keep the hand rotating around a single point in a more “clock like” way. Then we can apply the transform to our UI object using SetRenderTransform. Every UI element (derived from IXRFrameworkElement) can be rotated! And using different subclasses of IXRTransform also moved, scaled, skewed and distorted in many ways. You can also concatenate multiple transforms and apply them at once suing a IXRTransformGroup object. The XAML engine uses vector graphics and object will not look “pixelated” when they are rotated or scaled. As usual you can download the code here: http://cid-9b7b0aefe3514dc5.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/Clock.zip If you read up to (down to?) this point you seem to be interested in Silverlight for Windows Embedded. If you want me to discuss some specific topic, please feel free to point it out in the comments! Technorati Tags: Silverlight for Windows Embedded,Windows CE

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• Introducing… SharePress!

  - by Bil Simser

  For those that follow me I’ve been away from blogging and twittering for a couple of months. This is the reason. For the last few months I’ve been working with a cross-functional team putting together a new product from the people that run WordPress, the free premiere blogging platform. The result is a new product we call SharePress, a highly extensible blogging and content management platform with the usability of WordPress and the power of SharePoint combined into a single product. SharePress gives you SharePoint sites that are SEO-friendly delivered with a Web 2.0 ease of use, leveraging all of the existing abilities of SharePoint and WordPress that we know today. The Reason Back in December I was approached by the WordPress team about building a new platform that took advantage of the power of SharePoint but the ease of WordPress. I’m no stranger to WordPress and it’s 5 minute no-holds-barred install (I’ve always wanted SharePoint to do this!) and I run my personal blog on WordPress as does my better half, Princess Jenn. There’s always been a pitch by so-called Web 2.0 applications to deliver the power of SharePoint but the ease of [insert product here] over the past year or so. I checked each and every one of them out, but they fell woefully short when it came to SharePoint’s document management, versioning, and customization. They try, but it’s never been up to par in my books. On the flipside, SharePoint has always been tops in collaboration in the Enterprise but it’s painful to develop web parts, UI customization can be tricky, and there’s just no user community for something as simple as themes and designs. The Product Enter SharePress. Is it SharePoint? Is it WordPress? It’s both, and neither. Everything you like about both products are there but this is a bold new product that is positioned to bring SharePoint to the masses while maintaining the fidelity of an Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform. SharePress delivers on all fronts including: The ability to leverage any WordPress/Joomla/Drupal/DotNetNuke themes and skins inside of SharePoint Run any WordPress/Drupal/Joomla/DotNetNuke/SharePoint plug-in/module/web part/feature works out of the box with SharePress SEO-friendly URLs and pages Permalinks for all content All the features of SharePoint Server 2010 (including InfoPath, Excel, and Access services) included in the price Small deployment footprint. You decide how much to deploy and where. Independent Database Abstraction Layer (iDal) that allows you to deploy to SQL Server 2005/2008, MySQL, and PostgreSQL Portable Rendering Engine Layer (PREL) so you host .NET or PHP on Apache or IIS (version 7 or higher). The install feature is built around WordPress and it’s famous 5-minute install (actually, it’s never taken me more than 1 minute). SharePress installs with two screens after the files are uploaded to your server (which can be done entirely using FTP): After you enter two fields of information click “Install SharePress” and you’ll be done: No mess, no fuss, no complicated dependencies, and no server access required! How simpler could this be? The Technology WordPress plug-ins and themes working with SharePoint? Of course! The answer is IronPython which has now reached a maturity level capable of doing on the fly code language conversions. SharePress is a brand new product not built on top of any previous platform but leverages all the power of each of those applications through a patent pending technique called SharePress Multi-plAtfoRm Technology (SMART). SMART will convert PHP code on the fly into Python (using SWIG as an intermediate processor) which is then compiled to MSIL and then delivered back as an ASP.NET MVC application (output is C# or VB.NET, but you can build your own SMART converter to output a different language). Sound complicated? It is, but it’s all behind the scenes and you don’t have to worry about a thing. This image illustrates the technology stack and process: So users can load up out of the box PHP themes and plug-ins from the WordPress/Joomla/Drupal community into the SMART converter and output MSIL that is used by the SharePress engine and rendered on the fly to the end user. Supported PHP versions are 4.xx and 5.xx with version 6 support to come when it’s released. Similarly you can take any .NET application, DotNetNuke Module, SharePoint Web Part or event handler and feed it into the converter to output the same. Everything is reverse compiled into MSIL so it becomes technology agnostic. No source code access is needed and the SMART converter can handle obfuscated .NET assemblies that were built with .NET 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.5, and 4.0. With this technology you can also with the flip of a switch have the output create PHP pages for you. This allows you to run SharePress on Unix based systems running PHP and MySQL, allowing you to deliver your SharePoint like experience to your users with a $0 infrastructure footprint. Here’s SharePress with the default WordPress post imported then a stock SharePoint collaboration site was imported. The site was then applied with the default Kubrick theme from WordPress. The Features Deploy any of the freely available 100,000 WordPress/Joomla/Drupal themes instantly to your runtime SharePress environment and preview or activate them right from your browser. Built-in Web 2.0 jQuery Enabled End User and Administrator Web Interface. Never have to remote into a server again! Run any SharePoint Web Part or Event Handler directly without modification or access to source code in SharePress. Use any WordPress/Joomla/Drupal plug-in directly in SharePress, no local admin or access to server. Just upload and activate. Upload and Activate any SharePoint Solution Package to any site remotely. No rebuilding. Changes made to sites require no compiling or rebuilding and are published immediately. Password Protected Content. You can give passwords to individual posts, articles, pages, documents, forms, and list items. A powerful polymorphic Captcha system backs the security interface and vendors can easily tie into smart card readers, fingerprint readers, and retina scanners for authorization and identification. OpenID, Windows Live, and Windows Authentication are supported out of the box. Infinitely customizable and extensible. You can leverage plug-ins from the open source community to do practically anything, all configured and uploaded via the browser. Additionally the developer API (available soon) allows you to build extensions in .NET, PHP, and Python with little effort. Easy Importing. We have importers for Blogger, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke, and SharePoint so you can populate your site quickly and easily with full metadata modeling and creation. Banner Management. It’s easy to setup banners for your web site complete with impression numbers, special URLs, and more. Menu Manager. The Menu Manager allows you to create as many menus as you want, each one can be associated to specific audiences or roles and then be styled across multiple contexts including the same menu delivered as a fly out, rollover, drop down, and just about any navigation you can think of. Collaborative ShareBook. Our exclusive book feature allows you to setup a “book” and then authorize individuals to contribute content. Permalinks. All content in SharePress has a permanent or “perma link” associated with it so people can link to it freely without fear of broken links. Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X support. Deliver SharePress the way *you* want from the platform *you* decide. Database Independence. We know people wanted to run on any database platform so SharePress is built on top of a database abstraction layer that allows you to run on SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL. Other databases can be supported by writing a supporting database script consisting of fourteen function calls. The script can be written in Perl, Python, AWK, PowerShell, Unix Shell scripts, VBA, or simple DOS batch files. The Team SharePress is the work of a lot of people in both the WordPress and SharePoint community. I worked with a lot of SharePoint MVPs to create this new product as we really wanted to deliver the most compatible and feature rich system in a product that we would be proud of. Many thanks go out to Eli Bleeker, Todd Robillard, Scot Larson, Daniel Hillier, Shane Fox, Box Peran, Amanda English, and Bill Murray for doing the heavy lifting and all of their expertise and innovative thinking to get this product out. Licensing and Pricing SharePress is still in the final stages for pricing but we’re looking at a price point somewhere between $99-$100 to make it affordable for everyone. We plan to announce final pricing sometime in the next few weeks. There are no additional charges for Enterprise versions or additional features. Everything you see is what’s available and it’s just a matter of lighting up your site with whatever feature you want to enable. The product will not be open source but source code licenses will be available to ISVs who are interested in interfacing with the API at a low level. Cost will be $25,000 USD per developer and gives you complete access to the source code to the SharePress Foundation System and the .NET 4.0 Framework source code. Conclusion We hope you enjoy the launch of SharePress as the new premium blogging and content management platform for both Intranets and the Internet. We think we’ve build the best of breed solutions here and made it easy for anyone to get started with a minimal of infrastructure but allow the scalability of SharePress to shine through in the Enterprise 2.0 world. We encourage your feedback so please leave comments as to what you’re looking for in this system as we’re always evolving it to make it a better product for everyone.

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• Getting Started with ASP.NET Membership, Profile and RoleManager

  - by Ben Griswold

  A new ASP.NET MVC project includes preconfigured Membership, Profile and RoleManager providers right out of the box.  Try it yourself – create a ASP.NET MVC application, crack open the web.config file and have a look.  First, you’ll find the ApplicationServices database connection: <connectionStrings>   <add name="ApplicationServices"        connectionString="data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|aspnetdb.mdf;User Instance=true"        providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/> </connectionStrings>   Notice the connection string is referencing the aspnetdb.mdf database hosted by SQL Express and it’s using integrated security so it’ll just work for you without having to call out a specific database login or anything. Scroll down the file a bit and you’ll find each of the three noted sections: <membership>   <providers>     <clear/>     <add name="AspNetSqlMembershipProvider"          type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"          connectionStringName="ApplicationServices"          enablePasswordRetrieval="false"          enablePasswordReset="true"          requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false"          requiresUniqueEmail="false"          passwordFormat="Hashed"          maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5"          minRequiredPasswordLength="6"          minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0"          passwordAttemptWindow="10"          passwordStrengthRegularExpression=""          applicationName="/"             />   </providers> </membership>   <profile>   <providers>     <clear/>     <add name="AspNetSqlProfileProvider"          type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"          connectionStringName="ApplicationServices"          applicationName="/"             />   </providers> </profile>   <roleManager enabled="false">   <providers>     <clear />     <add connectionStringName="ApplicationServices" applicationName="/" name="AspNetSqlRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />     <add applicationName="/" name="AspNetWindowsTokenRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Security.WindowsTokenRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />   </providers> </roleManager> Really. It’s all there. Still don’t believe me.  Run the application, walk through the registration process and finally login and logout.  Completely functional – and you didn’t have to do a thing! What else?  Well, you can manage your users via the Configuration Manager which is hiding in Visual Studio behind Projects > ASP.NET Configuration. The ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool isn’t MVC-specific (neither is the Membership, Profile or RoleManager stuff) but it’s neat and I hardly ever see anyone using it.  Here you can set up and edit users, roles, and set access permissions for your site. You can manage application settings, establish your SMTP settings, configure debugging and tracing, define default error page and even take your application offline.  The UI is rather plain-Jane but it works great. And here’s the best of all.  Let’s say you, like most of us, don’t want to run your application on top of the aspnetdb.mdf database.  Let’s suppose you want to use your own database and you’d like to add the membership stuff to it.  Well, that’s easy enough. Take a look inside your [drive:]\%windir%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727\ folder.  Here you’ll find a bunch of files.  If you were to run the InstallCommon.sql, InstallMembership.sql, InstallRoles.sql and InstallProfile.sql files against the database of your choices, you’d be installing the same membership, profile and role artifacts which are found in the aspnet.db to your own database.  Too much trouble?  Okay. Run [drive:]\%windir%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regsql.exe from the command line instead.  This will launch the ASP.NET SQL Server Setup Wizard which walks you through the installation of those same database objects into the new or existing database of your choice. You may not always have the luxury of using this tool on your destination server, but you should use it whenever you can.  Last tip: don’t forget to update the ApplicationServices connectionstring to point to your custom database after the setup is complete. At the risk of sounding like a smarty, everything I’ve mentioned in this post has been around for quite a while. The thing is that not everyone has had the opportunity to use it.  And it makes sense. I know I’ve worked on projects which used custom membership services.  Why bother with the out-of-the-box stuff, right?   And the .NET framework is so massive, who can know it all. Well, eventually you might have a chance to architect your own solution using any implementation you’d like or you will have the time to play around with another aspect of the framework.  When you do, think back to this post.

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• Replacing jQuery.live() with jQuery.on()

  - by Rick Strahl

  jQuery 1.9 and 1.10 have introduced a host of changes, but for the most part these changes are mostly transparent to existing application usage of jQuery. After spending some time last week with a few of my projects and going through them with a specific eye for jQuery failures I found that for the most part there wasn't a big issue. The vast majority of code continues to run just fine with either 1.9 or 1.10 (which are supposed to be in sync but with 1.10 removing support for legacy Internet Explorer pre-9.0 versions). However, one particular change in the new versions has caused me quite a bit of update trouble, is the removal of the jQuery.live() function. This is my own fault I suppose - .live() has been deprecated for a while, but with 1.9 and later it was finally removed altogether from jQuery. In the past I had quite a bit of jQuery code that used .live() and it's one of the things that's holding back my upgrade process, although I'm slowly cleaning up my code and switching to the .on() function as the replacement. jQuery.live() jQuery.live() was introduced a long time ago to simplify handling events on matched elements that exist currently on the document and those that are are added in the future and also match the selector. jQuery uses event bubbling, special event binding, plus some magic using meta data attached to a parent level element to check and see if the original target event element matches the selected selected elements (for more info see Elijah Manor's comment below). An Example Assume a list of items like the following in HTML for example and further assume that the items in this list can be appended to at a later point. In this app there's a smallish initial list that loads to start, and as the user scrolls towards the end of the initial small list more items are loaded dynamically and added to the list.<div id="PostItemContainer" class="scrollbox"> <div class="postitem" data-id="4z6qhomm"> <div class="post-icon"></div> <div class="postitemheader"><a href="show/4z6qhomm" target="Content">1999 Buick Century For Sale!</a></div> <div class="postitemprice rightalign">$ 3,500 O.B.O.</div> <div class="smalltext leftalign">Jun. 07 @ 1:06am</div> <div class="post-byline">- Vehicles - Automobiles</div> </div> <div class="postitem" data-id="2jtvuu17"> <div class="postitemheader"><a href="show/2jtvuu17" target="Content">Toyota VAN 1987</a></div> <div class="postitemprice rightalign">$950</div> <div class="smalltext leftalign">Jun. 07 @ 12:29am</div> <div class="post-byline">- Vehicles - Automobiles</div> </div> … </div> With the jQuery.live() function you could easily select elements and hook up a click handler like this:$(".postitem").live("click", function() {...}); Simple and perfectly readable. The behavior of the .live handler generally was the same as the corresponding simple event handlers like .click(), except that you have to explicitly name the event instead of using one of the methods. Re-writing with jQuery.on() With .live() removed in 1.9 and later we have to re-write .live() code above with an alternative. The jQuery documentation points you at the .on() or .delegate() functions to update your code. jQuery.on() is a more generic event handler function, and it's what jQuery uses internally to map the high level event functions like .click(),.change() etc. that jQuery exposes. Using jQuery.on() however is not a one to one replacement of the .live() function. While .on() can handle events directly and use the same syntax as .live() did, you'll find if you simply switch out .live() with .on() that events on not-yet existing elements will not fire. IOW, the key feature of .live() is not working. You can use .on() to get the desired effect however, but you have to change the syntax to explicitly handle the event you're interested in on the container and then provide a filter selector to specify which elements you are actually interested in for handling the event for. Sounds more complicated than it is and it's easier to see with an example. For the list above hooking .postitem clicks, using jQuery.on() looks like this:$("#PostItemContainer").on("click", ".postitem", function() {...}); You specify a container that can handle the .click event and then provide a filter selector to find the child elements that trigger the  the actual event. So here #PostItemContainer contains many .postitems, whose click events I want to handle. Any container will do including document, but I tend to use the container closest to the elements I actually want to handle the events on to minimize the event bubbling that occurs to capture the event. With this code I get the same behavior as with .live() and now as new .postitem elements are added the click events are always available. Sweet. Here's the full event signature for the .on() function: .on( events [, selector ] [, data ], handler(eventObject) ) Note that the selector is optional - if you omit it you essentially create a simple event handler that handles the event directly on the selected object. The filter/child selector required if you want life-like - uh, .live() like behavior to happen. While it's a bit more verbose than what .live() did, .on() provides the same functionality by being more explicit on what your parent container for trapping events is. .on() is good Practice even for ordinary static Element Lists As a side note, it's a good practice to use jQuery.on() or jQuery.delegate() for events in most cases anyway, using this 'container event trapping' syntax. That's because rather than requiring lots of event handlers on each of the child elements (.postitem in the sample above), there's just one event handler on the container, and only when clicked does jQuery drill down to find the matching filter element and tries to match it to the originating element. In the early days of jQuery I used manually build handlers that did this and manually drilled from the event object into the originalTarget to determine if it's a matching element. With later versions of jQuery the various event functions in jQuery essentially provide this functionality out of the box with functions like .on() and .delegate(). All of this is nothing new, but I thought I'd write this up because I have on a few occasions forgotten what exactly was needed to replace the many .live() function calls that litter my code - especially older code. This will be a nice reminder next time I have a memory blank on this topic. And maybe along the way I've helped one or two of you as well to clean up your .live() code…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in jQuery   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Back to Basics: When does a .NET Assembly Dependency get loaded

  - by Rick Strahl

  When we work on typical day to day applications, it's easy to forget some of the core features of the .NET framework. For me personally it's been a long time since I've learned about some of the underlying CLR system level services even though I rely on them on a daily basis. I often think only about high level application constructs and/or high level framework functionality, but the low level stuff is often just taken for granted. Over the last week at DevConnections I had all sorts of low level discussions with other developers about the inner workings of this or that technology (especially in light of my Low Level ASP.NET Architecture talk and the Razor Hosting talk). One topic that came up a couple of times and ended up a point of confusion even amongst some seasoned developers (including some folks from Microsoft <snicker>) is when assemblies actually load into a .NET process. There are a number of different ways that assemblies are loaded in .NET. When you create a typical project assemblies usually come from: The Assembly reference list of the top level 'executable' project The Assembly references of referenced projects Dynamically loaded at runtime via AppDomain/Reflection loading In addition .NET automatically loads mscorlib (most of the System namespace) the boot process that hosts the .NET runtime in EXE apps, or some other kind of runtime hosting environment (runtime hosting in servers like IIS, SQL Server or COM Interop). In hosting environments the runtime host may also pre-load a bunch of assemblies on its own (for example the ASP.NET host requires all sorts of assemblies just to run itself, before ever routing into your user specific code). Assembly Loading The most obvious source of loaded assemblies is the top level application's assembly reference list. You can add assembly references to a top level application and those assembly references are then available to the application. In a nutshell, referenced assemblies are not immediately loaded - they are loaded on the fly as needed. So regardless of whether you have an assembly reference in a top level project, or a dependent assembly assemblies typically load on an as needed basis, unless explicitly loaded by user code. The same is true of dependent assemblies. To check this out I ran a simple test: I have a utility assembly Westwind.Utilities which is a general purpose library that can work in any type of project. Due to a couple of small requirements for encoding and a logging piece that allows logging Web content (dependency on HttpContext.Current) this utility library has a dependency on System.Web. Now System.Web is a pretty large assembly and generally you'd want to avoid adding it to a non-Web project if it can be helped. So I created a Console Application that loads my utility library: You can see that the top level Console app a reference to Westwind.Utilities and System.Data (beyond the core .NET libs). The Westwind.Utilities project on the other hand has quite a few dependencies including System.Web. I then add a main program that accesses only a simple utillity method in the Westwind.Utilities library that doesn't require any of the classes that access System.Web: static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(StringUtils.NewStringId()); Console.ReadLine(); } StringUtils.NewStringId() calls into Westwind.Utilities, but it doesn't rely on System.Web. Any guesses what the assembly list looks like when I stop the code on the ReadLine() command? I'll wait here while you think about it… … … So, when I stop on ReadLine() and then fire up Process Explorer and check the assembly list I get: We can see here that .NET has not actually loaded any of the dependencies of the Westwind.Utilities assembly. Also not loaded is the top level System.Data reference even though it's in the dependent assembly list of the top level project. Since this particular function I called only uses core System functionality (contained in mscorlib) there's in fact nothing else loaded beyond the main application and my Westwind.Utilities assembly that contains the method accessed. None of the dependencies of Westwind.Utilities loaded. If you were to open the assembly in a disassembler like Reflector or ILSpy, you would however see all the compiled in dependencies. The referenced assemblies are in the dependency list and they are loadable, but they are not immediately loaded by the application. In other words the C# compiler and .NET linker are smart enough to figure out the dependencies based on the code that actually is referenced from your application and any dependencies cascading down into the dependencies from your top level application into the referenced assemblies. In the example above the usage requirement is pretty obvious since I'm only calling a single static method and then exiting the app, but in more complex applications these dependency relationships become very complicated - however it's all taken care of by the compiler and linker figuring out what types and members are actually referenced and including only those assemblies that are in fact referenced in your code or required by any of your dependencies. The good news here is: That if you are referencing an assembly that has a dependency on something like System.Web in a few places that are not actually accessed by any of your code or any dependent assembly code that you are calling, that assembly is never loaded into memory! Some Hosting Environments pre-load Assemblies The load behavior can vary however. In Console and desktop applications we have full control over assembly loading so we see the core CLR behavior. However other environments like ASP.NET for example will preload referenced assemblies explicitly as part of the startup process - primarily to minimize load conflicts. Specifically ASP.NET pre-loads all assemblies referenced in the assembly list and the /bin folder. So in Web applications it definitely pays to minimize your top level assemblies if they are not used. Understanding when Assemblies Load To clarify and see it actually happen what I described in the first example , let's look at a couple of other scenarios. To see assemblies loading at runtime in real time lets create a utility function to print out loaded assemblies to the console: public static void PrintAssemblies() { var assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies(); foreach (var assembly in assemblies) { Console.WriteLine(assembly.GetName()); } } Now let's look at the first scenario where I have class method that references internally uses System.Web. In the first scenario lets add a method to my main program like this: static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(StringUtils.NewStringId()); Console.ReadLine(); PrintAssemblies(); } public static void WebLogEntry() { var entry = new WebLogEntry(); entry.UpdateFromRequest(); Console.WriteLine(entry.QueryString); } UpdateFromWebRequest() internally accesses HttpContext.Current to read some information of the ASP.NET Request object so it clearly needs a reference System.Web to work. In this first example, the method that holds the calling code is never called, but exists as a static method that can potentially be called externally at some point. What do you think will happen here with the assembly loading? Will System.Web load in this example? No - it doesn't. Because the WebLogEntry() method is never called by the mainline application (or anywhere else) System.Web is not loaded. .NET dynamically loads assemblies as code that needs it is called. No code references the WebLogEntry() method and so System.Web is never loaded. Next, let's add the call to this method, which should trigger System.Web to be loaded because a dependency exists. Let's change the code to: static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(StringUtils.NewStringId()); Console.WriteLine("--- Before:"); PrintAssemblies(); WebLogEntry(); Console.WriteLine("--- After:"); PrintAssemblies(); Console.ReadLine(); } public static void WebLogEntry() { var entry = new WebLogEntry(); entry.UpdateFromRequest(); Console.WriteLine(entry.QueryString); } Looking at the code now, when do you think System.Web will be loaded? Will the before list include it? Yup System.Web gets loaded, but only after it's actually referenced. In fact, just until before the call to UpdateFromRequest() System.Web is not loaded - it only loads when the method is actually called and requires the reference in the executing code. Moral of the Story So what have we learned - or maybe remembered again? Dependent Assembly References are not pre-loaded when an application starts (by default) Dependent Assemblies that are not referenced by executing code are never loaded Dependent Assemblies are just in time loaded when first referenced in code All of this is nothing new - .NET has always worked like this. But it's good to have a refresher now and then and go through the exercise of seeing it work in action. It's not one of those things we think about everyday, and as I found out last week, I couldn't remember exactly how it worked since it's been so long since I've learned about this. And apparently I'm not the only one as several other people I had discussions with in relation to loaded assemblies also didn't recall exactly what should happen or assumed incorrectly that just having a reference automatically loads the assembly. The moral of the story for me is: Trying at all costs to eliminate an assembly reference from a component is not quite as important as it's often made out to be. For example, the Westwind.Utilities module described above has a logging component, including a Web specific logging entry that supports pulling information from the active HTTP Context. Adding that feature requires a reference to System.Web. Should I worry about this in the scope of this library? Probably not, because if I don't use that one class of nearly a hundred, System.Web never gets pulled into the parent process. IOW, System.Web only loads when I use that specific feature and if I am, well I clearly have to be running in a Web environment anyway to use it realistically. The alternative would be considerably uglier: Pulling out the WebLogEntry class and sticking it into another assembly and breaking up the logging code. In this case - definitely not worth it. So, .NET definitely goes through some pretty nifty optimizations to ensure that it loads only what it needs and in most cases you can just rely on .NET to do the right thing. Sometimes though assembly loading can go wrong (especially when signed and versioned local assemblies are involved), but that's subject for a whole other post…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET  CSharp   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Add Free Google Apps to Your Website or Blog

  - by Matthew Guay

  Would you like to have an email address from your own domain, but prefer Gmail’s interface and integration with Google Docs?  Here’s how you can add the free Google Apps Standard to your site and get the best of both worlds. Note: To signup for Google Apps and get it setup on your domain, you will need to be able to add info to your WordPress blog or change Domain settings manually. Getting Started Head to the Google Apps signup page (link below), and click the Get Started button on the right.  Note that we are signing up for the free Google Apps which allows a max of 50 users; if you need more than 50 email addresses for your domain, you can choose Premiere Edition instead for $50/year. Select that you are the Administrator of the domain, and enter the domain or subdomain you want to use with Google Apps.  Here we’re adding Google Apps to the techinch.com site, but we could instead add Apps to mail.techinch.com if needed…click Get Started. Enter your name, phone number, an existing email address, and other Administrator information.  The Apps signup page also includes some survey questions about your organization, but you only have to fill in the required fields. On the next page, enter a username and password for the administrator account.  Note that the user name will also be the administrative email address as [email protected]. Now you’re ready to authenticate your Google Apps account with your domain.  The steps are slightly different depending on whether your site is on WordPress.com or on your own hosting service or server, so we’ll show how to do it both ways.   Authenticate and Integrate Google Apps with WordPress.com To add Google Apps to a domain you have linked to your WordPress.com blog, select Change yourdomain.com CNAME record and click Continue. Copy the code under #2, which should be something like googleabcdefg123456.  Do not click the button at the bottom; wait until we’ve completed the next step.   Now, in a separate browser window or tab, open your WordPress Dashboard.  Click the arrow beside Upgrades, and select Domains from the menu. Click the Edit DNS link beside the domain name you’re adding to Google Apps. Scroll down to the Google Apps section, and paste your code from Google Apps into the verification code field.  Click Generate DNS records when you’re done. This will add the needed DNS settings to your records in the box above the Google Apps section.  Click Save DNS records. Now, go back to the Google Apps signup page, and click I’ve completed the steps above. Authenticate Google Apps on Your Own Server If your website is hosted on your own server or hosting account, you’ll need to take a few more steps to add Google Apps to your domain.  You can add a CNAME record to your domain host using the same information that you would use with a WordPress account, or you can upload an HTML file to your site’s main directory.  In this test we’re going to upload an HTML file to our site for verification. Copy the code under #1, which should be something like googleabcdefg123456.  Do not click the button at the bottom; wait until we’ve completed the next step first. Create a new HTML file and paste the code in it.  You can do this easily in Notepad: create a new document, paste the code, and then save as googlehostedservice.html.  Make sure to select the type as All Files or otherwise the file will have a .txt extension. Upload this file to your web server via FTP or a web dashboard for your site.  Make sure it is in the top level of your site’s directory structure, and try visiting it at yoursite.com/googlehostedservice.html. Now, go back to the Google Apps signup page, and click I’ve completed the steps above. Setup Your Email on Google Apps When this is done, your Google Apps account should be activated and ready to finish setting up.  Google Apps will offer to launch a guide to step you through the rest of the process; you can click Launch guide if you want, or click Skip this guide to continue on your own and go directly to the Apps dashboard.   If you choose to open the guide, you’ll be able to easily learn the ropes of Google Apps administration.  Once you’ve completed the tutorial, you’ll be taken to the Google Apps dashboard. Most of the Google Apps will be available for immediate use, but Email may take a bit more setup.  Click Activate email to get your Gmail-powered email running on your domain.    Add Google MX Records to Your Server You will need to add Google MX records to your domain registrar in order to have your mail routed to Google.  If your domain is hosted on WordPress.com, you’ve already made these changes so simply click I have completed these steps.  Otherwise, you’ll need to manually add these records before clicking that button.   Adding MX Entries is fairly easy, but the steps may depend on your hosting company or registrar.  With some hosts, you may have to contact support to have them add the MX records for you.  Our site’s host uses the popular cPanel for website administration, so here’s how we added the MX Entries through cPanel. Add MX Entries through cPanel Login to your site’s cPanel, and click the MX Entry link under Mail. Delete any existing MX Records for your domain or subdomain first to avoid any complications or interactions with Google Apps.  If you think you may want to revert to your old email service in the future, save a copy of the records so you can switch back if you need. Now, enter the MX Records that Google listed.  Here’s our account after we added all of the entries to our account. Finally, return to your Google Apps Dashboard and click the I have completed these steps button at the bottom of the page. Activating Service You’re now officially finished activating and setting up your Google Apps account.  Google will first have to check the MX records for your domain; this only took around an hour in our test, but Google warns it can take up to 48 hours in some cases. You may then see that Google is updating its servers with your account information.  Once again, this took much less time than Google’s estimate. When everything’s finished, you can click the link to access the inbox of your new Administrator email account in Google Apps. Welcome to Gmail … at your own domain!  All of the Google Apps work just the same in this version as they do in the public @gmail.com version, so you should feel right at home. You can return to the Google Apps dashboard from the Administrative email account by clicking the Manage this domain at the top right. In the Dashboard, you can easily add new users and email accounts, as well as change settings in your Google Apps account and add your site’s branding to your Apps. Your Google Apps will work just like their standard @gmail.com counterparts.  Here’s an example of an inbox customized with the techinch logo and a Gmail theme. Links to Remember Here are the common links to your Google Apps online.  Substitute your domain or subdomain for yourdomain.com. Dashboard https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com Email https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com Calendar https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/yourdomain.com Docs https://docs.google.com/a/yourdomain.com Sites https://sites.google.com/a/yourdomain.com Conclusion Google Apps offers you great webapps and webmail for your domain, and let’s you take advantage of Google’s services while still maintaining the professional look of your own domain.  Setting up your account can be slightly complicated, but once it’s finished, it will run seamlessly and you’ll never have to worry about email or collaboration with your team again. Signup for the free Google Apps Standard Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Mysticgeek Blog: Create Your Own Simple iGoogle GadgetAccess Your Favorite Google Services in Chrome the Easy WayRevo Uninstaller Pro [REVIEW]Mysticgeek Blog: A Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 on Windows XPFind Similar Websites in Google Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7 Map the Stars with Stellarium Use ILovePDF To Split and Merge PDF Files TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool Easily Create More Bookmark Toolbars in Firefox

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• Problem with RAID5 (mdadm) - disk detached

  - by poscaman

  Having these lines in /var/log/syslog Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816036] ata4: EH in SWNCQ mode,QC:qc_active 0x1 sactive 0x1 Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816058] ata4: SWNCQ:qc_active 0x1 defer_bits 0x0 last_issue_tag 0x0 Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816059] dhfis 0x1 dmafis 0x1 sdbfis 0x0 Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816093] ata4: ATA_REG 0x40 ERR_REG 0x0 Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816108] ata4: tag : dhfis dmafis sdbfis sacitve Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816125] ata4: tag 0x0: 1 1 0 1 Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816150] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816178] ata4.00: failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816199] ata4.00: cmd 61/08:00:00:88:e0/00:00:e8:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 out Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816200] res 40/00:00:01:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout) Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816253] ata4.00: status: { DRDY } Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816272] ata4: hard resetting link Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816274] ata4: nv: skipping hardreset on occupied port Apr 18 16:53:06 Server kernel: [4487879.676029] ata4: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) Apr 18 16:53:07 Server kernel: [4487880.416749] ata4.00: n_sectors mismatch 3907029168 != 268435455 Apr 18 16:53:07 Server kernel: [4487880.416752] ata4.00: revalidation failed (errno=-19) Apr 18 16:53:07 Server kernel: [4487880.416773] ata4.00: limiting speed to UDMA/133:PIO2 Apr 18 16:53:11 Server kernel: [4487884.676024] ata4: hard resetting link Apr 18 16:53:11 Server kernel: [4487884.676027] ata4: nv: skipping hardreset on occupied port Apr 18 16:53:12 Server kernel: [4487885.144032] ata4: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) Apr 18 16:53:12 Server kernel: [4487885.240185] ata4.00: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80) Apr 18 16:53:12 Server kernel: [4487885.240190] ata4.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5) Apr 18 16:53:12 Server kernel: [4487885.240210] ata4.00: disabled Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487890.144023] ata4: hard resetting link Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.024033] ata4: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.033357] ata4.00: ATA-8: WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1, 80.00A80, max UDMA/133 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.033360] ata4.00: 3907029168 sectors, multi 1: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32) Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048347] ata4.00: configured for UDMA/133 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048361] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048365] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Aborted Command [current] [descriptor] Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048369] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex): Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048371] 72 0b 00 00 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048378] 00 00 00 00 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048382] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: No additional sense information Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048385] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] CDB: Write(10): 2a 00 e8 e0 88 00 00 00 08 00 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048393] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 3907028992 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048420] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048440] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048458] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 3907028992 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048477] md: super_written gets error=-5, uptodate=0 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048482] raid5: Disk failure on sdc, disabling device. Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048483] raid5: Operation continuing on 3 devices. Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048525] ata4: EH complete Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048554] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048576] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048596] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048615] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] READ CAPACITY(16) failed Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048617] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048620] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense not available. Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048624] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048643] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048663] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048681] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] READ CAPACITY failed Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048683] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048685] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense not available. Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048689] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048709] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048800] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048860] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.049028] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Asking for cache data failed Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.049048] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.049071] sdc: detected capacity change from 2000398934016 to 0 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.049080] ata4.00: detaching (SCSI 3:0:0:0) Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.061149] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Stopping disk Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.485492] RAID5 conf printout: Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.485496] --- rd:4 wd:3 Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.485500] disk 0, o:1, dev:sdb Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.485502] disk 1, o:0, dev:sdc Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.485504] disk 2, o:1, dev:sdd Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.485506] disk 3, o:1, dev:sde Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.497014] RAID5 conf printout: Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.497016] --- rd:4 wd:3 Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.497018] disk 0, o:1, dev:sdb Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.497019] disk 2, o:1, dev:sdd Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.497021] disk 3, o:1, dev:sde Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.838719] scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA WDC WD20EARS-00S 80.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.838886] sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0 Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.838911] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdf] 3907029168 512-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1.81 TiB) Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.838964] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.838967] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdf] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.838988] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdf] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA Apr 18 16:53:20 Server kernel: [4487891.839147] sdf: unknown partition table Apr 18 16:53:20 Server kernel: [4487893.130026] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI disk Right now, i'm unable to do anything on /dev/sdc. Is there any way to try to re-attach it? I don't want to power-down the server unless absolutely necessary System: Debian Stable 2.6.32-5-amd64 mdadm version 3.1.4-1+8efb9d1 cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] md0 : active raid5 sdb[0] sdc[4](F) sde[3] sdd[2] 5860543488 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [U_UU] unused devices: <none> mdadm --examine --scan ARRAY /dev/md0 UUID=1a7744b5:912ec7af:f82a9565:e3b453b4

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• Connecting Linux to WatchGuard Firebox SSL (OpenVPN client)

  Recently, I got a new project assignment that requires to connect permanently to the customer's network through VPN. They are using a so-called SSL VPN. As I am using OpenVPN since more than 5 years within my company's network I was quite curious about their solution and how it would actually be different from OpenVPN. Well, short version: It is a disguised version of OpenVPN. Unfortunately, the company only offers a client for Windows and Mac OS which shouldn't bother any Linux user after all. OpenVPN is part of every recent distribution and can be activated in a couple of minutes - both client as well as server (if necessary). WatchGuard Firebox SSL - About dialog Borrowing some files from a Windows client installation Initially, I didn't know about the product, so therefore I went through the installation on Windows 8. No obstacles (and no restart despite installation of TAP device drivers!) here and the secured VPN channel was up and running in less than 2 minutes or so. Much appreciated from both parties - customer and me. Of course, this whole client package and my long year approved and stable installation ignited my interest to have a closer look at the WatchGuard client. Compared to the original OpenVPN client (okay, I have to admit this is years ago) this commercial product is smarter in terms of file locations during installation. You'll be able to access the configuration and key files below your roaming application data folder. To get there, simply enter '%AppData%\WatchGuard\Mobile VPN' in your Windows/File Explorer and confirm with Enter/Return. This will display the following files: Application folder below user profile with configuration and certificate files From there we are going to borrow four files, namely: ca.crt client.crt client.ovpn client.pem and transfer them to the Linux system. You might also be able to isolate those four files from a Mac OS client. Frankly, I'm just too lazy to run the WatchGuard client installation on a Mac mini only to find the folder location, and I'm going to describe why a little bit further down this article. I know that you can do that! Feedback in the comment section is appreciated. Configuration of OpenVPN (console) Depending on your distribution the following steps might be a little different but in general you should be able to get the important information from it. I'm going to describe the steps in Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail). As usual, there are two possibilities to achieve your goal: console and UI. Let's what it is necessary to be done. First of all, you should ensure that you have OpenVPN installed on your system. Open your favourite terminal application and run the following statement: $ sudo apt-get install openvpn network-manager-openvpn network-manager-openvpn-gnome Just to be on the safe side. The four above mentioned files from your Windows machine could be copied anywhere but either you place them below your own user directory or you put them (as root) below the default directory: /etc/openvpn At this stage you would be able to do a test run already. Just in case, run the following command and check the output (it's the similar information you would get from the 'View Logs...' context menu entry in Windows: $ sudo openvpn --config client.ovpn Pay attention to the correct path to your configuration and certificate files. OpenVPN will ask you to enter your Auth Username and Auth Password in order to establish the VPN connection, same as the Windows client. Remote server and user authentication to establish the VPN Please complete the test run and see whether all went well. You can disconnect pressing Ctrl+C. Simplifying your life - authentication file In my case, I actually set up the OpenVPN client on my gateway/router. This establishes a VPN channel between my network and my client's network and allows me to switch machines easily without having the necessity to install the WatchGuard client on each and every machine. That's also very handy for my various virtualised Windows machines. Anyway, as the client configuration, key and certificate files are located on a headless system somewhere under the roof, it is mandatory to have an automatic connection to the remote site. For that you should first change the file extension '.ovpn' to '.conf' which is the default extension on Linux systems for OpenVPN, and then open the client configuration file in order to extend an existing line. $ sudo mv client.ovpn client.conf $ sudo nano client.conf You should have a similar content to this one here: dev tunclientproto tcp-clientca ca.crtcert client.crtkey client.pemtls-remote "/O=WatchGuard_Technologies/OU=Fireware/CN=Fireware_SSLVPN_Server"remote-cert-eku "TLS Web Server Authentication"remote 1.2.3.4 443persist-keypersist-tunverb 3mute 20keepalive 10 60cipher AES-256-CBCauth SHA1float 1reneg-sec 3660nobindmute-replay-warningsauth-user-pass auth.txt Note: I changed the IP address of the remote directive above (which should be obvious, right?). Anyway, the required change is marked in red and we have to create a new authentication file 'auth.txt'. You can give the directive 'auth-user-pass' any file name you'd like to. Due to my existing OpenVPN infrastructure my setup differs completely from the above written content but for sake of simplicity I just keep it 'as-is'. Okay, let's create this file 'auth.txt' $ sudo nano auth.txt and just put two lines of information in it - username on the first, and password on the second line, like so: myvpnusernameverysecretpassword Store the file, change permissions, and call openvpn with your configuration file again: $ sudo chmod 0600 auth.txt $ sudo openvpn --config client.conf This should now work without being prompted to enter username and password. In case that you placed your files below the system-wide location /etc/openvpn you can operate your VPNs also via service command like so: $ sudo service openvpn start client $ sudo service openvpn stop client Using Network Manager For newer Linux users or the ones with 'console-phobia' I'm going to describe now how to use Network Manager to setup the OpenVPN client. For this move your mouse to the systray area and click on Network Connections => VPN Connections => Configure VPNs... which opens your Network Connections dialog. Alternatively, use the HUD and enter 'Network Connections'. Network connections overview in Ubuntu Click on 'Add' button. On the next dialog select 'Import a saved VPN configuration...' from the dropdown list and click on 'Create...' Choose connection type to import VPN configuration Now you navigate to your folder where you put the client files from the Windows system and you open the 'client.ovpn' file. Next, on the tab 'VPN' proceed with the following steps (directives from the configuration file are referred): General Check the IP address of Gateway ('remote' - we used 1.2.3.4 in this setup) Authentication Change Type to 'Password with Certificates (TLS)' ('auth-pass-user') Enter User name to access your client keys (Auth Name: myvpnusername) Enter Password (Auth Password: verysecretpassword) and choose your password handling Browse for your User Certificate ('cert' - should be pre-selected with client.crt) Browse for your CA Certificate ('ca' - should be filled as ca.crt) Specify your Private Key ('key' - here: client.pem) Then click on the 'Advanced...' button and check the following values: Use custom gateway port: 443 (second value of 'remote' directive) Check the selected value of Cipher ('cipher') Check HMAC Authentication ('auth') Enter the Subject Match: /O=WatchGuard_Technologies/OU=Fireware/CN=Fireware_SSLVPN_Server ('tls-remote') Finally, you have to confirm and close all dialogs. You should be able to establish your OpenVPN-WatchGuard connection via Network Manager. For that, click on the 'VPN Connections => client' entry on your Network Manager in the systray. It is advised that you keep an eye on the syslog to see whether there are any problematic issues that would require some additional attention. Advanced topic: routing As stated above, I'm running the 'WatchGuard client for Linux' on my head-less server, and since then I'm actually establishing a secure communication channel between two networks. In order to enable your network clients to get access to machines on the remote side there are two possibilities to enable that: Proper routing on both sides of the connection which enables both-direction access, or Network masquerading on the 'client side' of the connection Following, I'm going to describe the second option a little bit more in detail. The Linux system that I'm using is already configured as a gateway to the internet. I won't explain the necessary steps to do that, and will only focus on the additional tweaks I had to do. You can find tons of very good instructions and tutorials on 'How to setup a Linux gateway/router' - just use Google. OK, back to the actual modifications. First, we need to have some information about the network topology and IP address range used on the 'other' side. We can get this very easily from /var/log/syslog after we established the OpenVPN channel, like so: $ sudo tail -n20 /var/log/syslog Or if your system is quite busy with logging, like so: $ sudo less /var/log/syslog | grep ovpn The output should contain PUSH received message similar to the following one: Jul 23 23:13:28 ios1 ovpn-client[789]: PUSH: Received control message: 'PUSH_REPLY,topology subnet,route 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0,dhcp-option DOMAIN ,route-gateway 192.168.6.1,topology subnet,ping 10,ping-restart 60,ifconfig 192.168.6.2 255.255.255.0' The interesting part for us is the route command which I highlighted already in the sample PUSH_REPLY. Depending on your remote server there might be multiple networks defined (172.16.x.x and/or 10.x.x.x). Important: The IP address range on both sides of the connection has to be different, otherwise you will have to shuffle IPs or increase your the netmask. {loadposition content_adsense} After the VPN connection is established, we have to extend the rules for iptables in order to route and masquerade IP packets properly. I created a shell script to take care of those steps: #!/bin/sh -eIPTABLES=/sbin/iptablesDEV_LAN=eth0DEV_VPNS=tun+VPN=192.168.1.0/24 $IPTABLES -A FORWARD -i $DEV_LAN -o $DEV_VPNS -d $VPN -j ACCEPT$IPTABLES -A FORWARD -i $DEV_VPNS -o $DEV_LAN -s $VPN -j ACCEPT$IPTABLES -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o $DEV_VPNS -d $VPN -j MASQUERADE I'm using the wildcard interface 'tun+' because I have multiple client configurations for OpenVPN on my server. In your case, it might be sufficient to specify device 'tun0' only. Simplifying your life - automatic connect on boot Now, that the client connection works flawless, configuration of routing and iptables is okay, we might consider to add another 'laziness' factor into our setup. Due to kernel updates or other circumstances it might be necessary to reboot your system. Wouldn't it be nice that the VPN connections are established during the boot procedure? Yes, of course it would be. To achieve this, we have to configure OpenVPN to automatically start our VPNs via init script. Let's have a look at the responsible 'default' file and adjust the settings accordingly. $ sudo nano /etc/default/openvpn Which should have a similar content to this: # This is the configuration file for /etc/init.d/openvpn## Start only these VPNs automatically via init script.# Allowed values are "all", "none" or space separated list of# names of the VPNs. If empty, "all" is assumed.# The VPN name refers to the VPN configutation file name.# i.e. "home" would be /etc/openvpn/home.conf#AUTOSTART="all"#AUTOSTART="none"#AUTOSTART="home office"## ... more information which remains unmodified ... With the OpenVPN client configuration as described above you would either set AUTOSTART to "all" or to "client" to enable automatic start of your VPN(s) during boot. You should also take care that your iptables commands are executed after the link has been established, too. You can easily test this configuration without reboot, like so: $ sudo service openvpn restart Enjoy stable VPN connections between your Linux system(s) and a WatchGuard Firebox SSL remote server. Cheers, JoKi

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• SQLAuthority News – Pluralsight Course Review – Practices for Software Startups – Part 2 of 2

  - by pinaldave

  This is the second part of the two part series of Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Please read the first part of this series over here. The course is written by Stephen Forte (Blog | Twitter). Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of the venture backed company, Telerik. Personal Learning Schedule After these three sessions it was 6:30 am and time to do my own blog.  But for the rest of the day, I kept thinking about the course, and wanted to go back and finish.  I was wishing that I had woken up at 3 am so I could finish all at one go.  All day long I was digesting what I had learned.  At 10 pm, after my daughter had gone to bed, I sighed on again.  I was not disappointed by the long wait.  As I mentioned before, Stephen has started four to six companies, and all of them are very successful today. Here is the video I promised yesterday – it discusses the importance of Right Sizing Your Startup. The Heartbeat of Startup – Technology Stephen has combined all technology knowledge into one 30 minute session.  He discussed  how to start your project, how to deal with opinions, and how to deal with multiple ideas – every start up has multiple directions it can go. He spent a lot of time emphasized deciding which direction to go and how to decide which will be the best for you.  He called it a continuous development cycle. One of the biggest hazards for a start-up company is one person deciding the direction the company will go, until down the road another team member announces that there is a glitch in their part of the work and that everyone will have to start over.  Even though a team of two or five people can move quickly, often the decision has gone too long and cannot be easily fixed.   Stephen used an example from his own life:  he was biased for one type of technology, and his teammate for another.  In the end they opted for his teammate’s  choice , and in the end it was a good decision, even though he was unfamiliar with that particular program.  He argues that technology should not be a barrier to progress, that you cannot rely on your experience only.  This really spoke to me because I am a big fan of SQL, but I know there is more out there, and I should be more open to it.  I give my thanks to Stephen, I learned something in this module besides startups. Money, Success and Epic Win! The longest, but most interesting, the module was funding your start-up.  You need to fund the start-up right at the very beginning, if not done right you will run into trouble.  The good news is that a few years ago start-ups required a lot more money – think millions of dollars – but now start-ups can get off the ground for thousands.  Stephen used an example of a company that years ago would have needed a million dollars, but today could be started for $600.  It is true that things have changed, but you still need money.  For $600 you can start small and add dynamically, as needed.  But the truth is that if you have $600, $6000, or $6 million, it will be spent.  Don’t think of it as trying to save money, think of it as investing in your future.   You will need money, and you will need to (quickly) decide what you do with the money: shares, stakeholders, investing in a team, hiring a CEO.  This is so important because once you have money and start the company, the company IS your money.  It is your biggest currency – having a percentage of ownership in the company.  Investors will want percentages as repayment for their investment, and they will want a say in the business as well.  You will have to decide how far you will dilute your shares, and how the company will be divided, if at all.  If you don’t plan in advance, you will find that after gaining three or four investors, suddenly you are the minority owner in your own dream.  You need to understand funding carefully.  This single module is worth all the money you would have spent on the whole course alone.  I encourage everyone to listen to this single module even if they don’t watch any of the others.     Press End to Start the Game – Exists! The final module is exit strategies.  You did all this work, dealt with all political and legal issues.  What are you going to get out of it? The answer is simple: money.  Maybe you want your company to be bought out, for you talent to bring you a profit.  You can sell the company to someone and still head it.  Many options are available.  You could sell and still work as an employee but no longer own the company.  There are many exit strategies.  This is where all your hard work comes into play.  It is important not to feel fooled at any step.  There are so many good ideas that end up in the garbage because of poor planning, so that if you find yourself successful, you don’t want to blow it at this step!  The exit is important.  I thought that this aspect of the course was completely unique, and I loved Stephen’s point of view.  I was lost deep in thought after this module ended.  I actually took two hours worth of notes on this section alone – and it was only a three hour course.  I am planning on attending this course one more time next week, just to catch up on all the small bits of wisdom I’m sure I missed. Thank you Stephen for bringing your real world experience with us!  I recommend that everyone attends this course, even if they don’t want to begin their own start-up company. It was indeed a long day for me. Do not forget to read part 1 of this story and attend course Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• TFS, G.I. Joe and Under-doing

  If I were to rank the most consistently irritating parts of my work day, using TFS would come in first by a wide margin. Even repeated network outages this week seem like a pleasant reprieve from this monolithic beast. This is not a reflexive anti-Microsoft feeling, that attitude just wouldnt work for a consultant who does .NET development. It is also not an utter dismissal of TFS as worthless; Ive seen people use it effectively on several projects. So why? Ill start with a laundry list of shortcomings. An out of the box UI for work items that is insultingly bad, a source control system that is confoundingly fragile when handling merges, folder renames and long file names, the arcane XML wizardry necessary to customize a template and a build system that adds an extra layer of oddness on top of msbuild. Im sure my legion of readers will soon point out to me how I can work around all these issues, how this is fixed in TFS 2010 or with this add-in, and how once you have everything set up, youre fine. And theyd be right, any one of these problems could be worked around. If not dirty laundry, what else? I thought about it for a while, and came to the conclusion that TFS is so irritating to me because it represents a vision of software development that I find unappealing. To expand upon this, lets start with some wisdom from those great PSAs at the end of the G.I. Joe cartoons of the 80s: Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. In software development, Id go further and say knowing is more than half the battle. Understanding the dimensions of the problem you are trying to solve, the needs of the users, the value that your software can provide are more than half the battle. Implementation of this understanding is not easy, but it is not even possible without this knowledge. Assuming we have a fixed amount of time and mental energy for any project, why does this spell trouble for TFS? If you think about what TFS is doing, its offering you a huge array of options to track the day to day implementation of your project. From tasks, to code churn, to test coverage. All valuable metrics, but only in exchange for valuable time to get it all working. In addition, when you have a shiny toy like TFS, the temptation is to feel obligated to use it. So the push from TFS is to encourage a project manager and team to focus on process and metrics around process. You can get great visibility, and graphs to show your project stakeholders, but none of that is important if you are not implementing the right product. Not just unimportant, these activities can be harmful as they drain your time and sap your creativity away from the rest of the project. To be more concrete, lets suppose your organization has invested the time to create a template for your projects and trained people in how to use it, so there is no longer a big investment of time for each project to get up and running. First, Id challenge if that template could be specific enough to be full featured and still applicable for any project. Second, the very existence of this template would be a indication to a project manager that the success of their project was somehow directly related to fitting management of that project into this format. Again, while the capabilities are wonderful, the mirage is there; just get everything into TFS and your project will run smoothly. Ill close the loop on this first topic by proposing a thought experiment. Think of the projects youve worked on. How many times have you been chagrined to discover youve implemented the wrong feature, misunderstood how a feature should work or just plain spent too much time on a screen that nobody uses? That sounds like a really worthwhile area to invest time in improving. How about going back to these projects and thinking about how many times you wished you had optimized the state change flow of your tasks or been embarrassed to not have a code churn report linked back to the latest changeset? With thanks to the Real American Heroes, Ill move on to a more current influence, that of the developers at 37signals, and their philosophy towards software development. This philosophy, fully detailed in the books Getting Real and Rework, is a vision of software that under does the competition. This is software that is deliberately limited in functionality in order to concentrate fully on making sure ever feature that is there is awesome and needed. Why is this relevant? Well, in one of those fun seeming paradoxes in life, constraints can be a spark for creativity. Think Twitter, the small screen of an iPhone, the limitations of HTML for applications, the low memory limits of older or embedded system. As long as there is some freedom within those constraints, amazing things emerge. For project management, some of the most respected people in the industry recommend using just index cards, pens and tape. They argue that with change the constant in software development, your process should be as limited (yet rigorous) as possible. Looking at TFS, this is not a system designed to under do anybody. It is a big jumble of components and options, with every feature you could think of. Predictably this means many basic functions are hard to use. For task management, many people just use an Excel spreadsheet linked up to TFS. Not a stirring endorsement of the tooling there. TFS as a whole would be far more appealing to me if there was less of it, but better. Id cut 50% of the features to make the other half really amaze and inspire me. And thats really the heart of the matter. TFS has great promise and I want to believe it can work better. But ultimately it focuses your attention on a lot of stuff that doesnt really matter and then clamps down your creativity in a mess of forms and dialogs obscuring what does.   --- Relevant Links --- All those great G.I. Joe PSAs are on YouTube, including lots of mashed up versions. A simple Google search will get you on the right track.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Learning AngularJS by Example – The Customer Manager Application

  - by dwahlin

  I’m always tinkering around with different ideas and toward the beginning of 2013 decided to build a sample application using AngularJS that I call Customer Manager. It’s not exactly the most creative name or concept, but I wanted to build something that highlighted a lot of the different features offered by AngularJS and how they could be used together to build a full-featured app. One of the goals of the application was to ensure that it was approachable by people new to Angular since I’ve never found overly complex applications great for learning new concepts. The application initially started out small and was used in my AngularJS in 60-ish Minutes video on YouTube but has gradually had more and more features added to it and will continue to be enhanced over time. It’ll be used in a new “end-to-end” training course my company is working on for AngularjS as well as in some video courses that will be coming out. Here’s a quick look at what the application home page looks like: In this post I’m going to provide an overview about how the application is organized, back-end options that are available, and some of the features it demonstrates. I’ve already written about some of the features so if you’re interested check out the following posts: Building an AngularJS Modal Service Building a Custom AngularJS Unique Value Directive Using an AngularJS Factory to Interact with a RESTful Service Application Structure The structure of the application is shown to the right. The  homepage is index.html and is located at the root of the application folder. It defines where application views will be loaded using the ng-view directive and includes script references to AngularJS, AngularJS routing and animation scripts, plus a few others located in the Scripts folder and to custom application scripts located in the app folder. The app folder contains all of the key scripts used in the application. There are several techniques that can be used for organizing script files but after experimenting with several of them I decided that I prefer things in folders such as controllers, views, services, etc. Doing that helps me find things a lot faster and allows me to categorize files (such as controllers) by functionality. My recommendation is to go with whatever works best for you. Anyone who says, “You’re doing it wrong!” should be ignored. Contrary to what some people think, there is no “one right way” to organize scripts and other files. As long as the scripts make it down to the client properly (you’ll likely minify and concatenate them anyway to reduce bandwidth and minimize HTTP calls), the way you organize them is completely up to you. Here’s what I ended up doing for this application: Animation code for some custom animations is located in the animations folder. In addition to AngularJS animations (which are defined using CSS in Content/animations.css), it also animates the initial customer data load using a 3rd party script called GreenSock. Controllers are located in the controllers folder. Some of the controllers are placed in subfolders based upon the their functionality while others are placed at the root of the controllers folder since they’re more generic:   The directives folder contains the custom directives created for the application. The filters folder contains the custom filters created for the application that filter city/state and product information. The partials folder contains partial views. This includes things like modal dialogs used in the application. The services folder contains AngularJS factories and services used for various purposes in the application. Most of the scripts in this folder provide data functionality. The views folder contains the different views used in the application. Like the controllers folder, the views are organized into subfolders based on their functionality:   Back-End Services The Customer Manager application (grab it from Github) provides two different options on the back-end including ASP.NET Web API and Node.js. The ASP.NET Web API back-end uses Entity Framework for data access and stores data in SQL Server (LocalDb). The other option on the back-end is Node.js, Express, and MongoDB.   Using the ASP.NET Web API Back-End To run the application using ASP.NET Web API/SQL Server back-end open the .sln file at the root of the project in Visual Studio 2012 or higher (the free Express 2013 for Web version is fine). Press F5 and a browser will automatically launch and display the application. Using the Node.js Back-End To run the application using the Node.js/MongoDB back-end follow these steps: In the CustomerManager directory execute 'npm install' to install Express, MongoDB and Mongoose (package.json). Load sample data into MongoDB by performing the following steps: Execute 'mongod' to start the MongoDB daemon Navigate to the CustomerManager directory (the one that has initMongoCustData.js in it) then execute 'mongo' to start the MongoDB shell Enter the following in the mongo shell to load the seed files that handle seeding the database with initial data: use custmgr load("initMongoCustData.js") load("initMongoSettingsData.js") load("initMongoStateData.js") Start the Node/Express server by navigating to the CustomerManager/server directory and executing 'node app.js' View the application at http://localhost:3000 in your browser. Key Features The Customer Manager application certainly doesn’t cover every feature provided by AngularJS (as mentioned the intent was to keep it as simple as possible) but does provide insight into several key areas: Using factories and services as re-useable data services (see the app/services folder) Creating custom directives (see the app/directives folder) Custom paging (see app/views/customers/customers.html and app/controllers/customers/customersController.js) Custom filters (see app/filters) Showing custom modal dialogs with a re-useable service (see app/services/modalService.js) Making Ajax calls using a factory (see app/services/customersService.js) Using Breeze to retrieve and work with data (see app/services/customersBreezeService.js). Switch the application to use the Breeze factory by opening app/services.config.js and changing the useBreeze property to true. Intercepting HTTP requests to display a custom overlay during Ajax calls (see app/directives/wcOverlay.js) Custom animations using the GreenSock library (see app/animations/listAnimations.js) Creating custom AngularJS animations using CSS (see Content/animations.css) JavaScript patterns for defining controllers, services/factories, directives, filters, and more (see any JavaScript file in the app folder) Card View and List View display of data (see app/views/customers/customers.html and app/controllers/customers/customersController.js) Using AngularJS validation functionality (see app/views/customerEdit.html, app/controllers/customerEditController.js, and app/directives/wcUnique.js) More… Conclusion I’ll be enhancing the application even more over time and welcome contributions as well. Tony Quinn contributed the initial Node.js/MongoDB code which is very cool to have as a back-end option. Access the standard application here and a version that has custom routing in it here. Additional information about the custom routing can be found in this post.

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• C# Neural Networks with Encog

  - by JoshReuben

  Neural Networks ·       I recently read a book Introduction to Neural Networks for C# , by Jeff Heaton. http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Neural-Networks-C-2nd/dp/1604390093/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296821004&sr=8-2-spell. Not the 1st ANN book I've perused, but a nice revision.   ·       Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are a mechanism of machine learning – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Machine_learning ·       Problems Not Suited to a Neural Network Solution- Programs that are easily written out as flowcharts consisting of well-defined steps, program logic that is unlikely to change, problems in which you must know exactly how the solution was derived. ·       Problems Suited to a Neural Network – pattern recognition, classification, series prediction, and data mining. Pattern recognition - network attempts to determine if the input data matches a pattern that it has been trained to recognize. Classification - take input samples and classify them into fuzzy groups. ·       As far as machine learning approaches go, I thing SVMs are superior (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine ) - a neural network has certain disadvantages in comparison: an ANN can be overtrained, different training sets can produce non-deterministic weights and it is not possible to discern the underlying decision function of an ANN from its weight matrix – they are black box. ·       In this post, I'm not going to go into internals (believe me I know them). An autoassociative network (e.g. a Hopfield network) will echo back a pattern if it is recognized. ·       Under the hood, there is very little maths. In a nutshell - Some simple matrix operations occur during training: the input array is processed (normalized into bipolar values of 1, -1) - transposed from input column vector into a row vector, these are subject to matrix multiplication and then subtraction of the identity matrix to get a contribution matrix. The dot product is taken against the weight matrix to yield a boolean match result. For backpropogation training, a derivative function is required. In learning, hill climbing mechanisms such as Genetic Algorithms and Simulated Annealing are used to escape local minima. For unsupervised training, such as found in Self Organizing Maps used for OCR, Hebbs rule is applied. ·       The purpose of this post is not to mire you in technical and conceptual details, but to show you how to leverage neural networks via an abstraction API - Encog   Encog ·       Encog is a neural network API ·       Links to Encog: http://www.encog.org , http://www.heatonresearch.com/encog, http://www.heatonresearch.com/forum ·       Encog requires .Net 3.5 or higher – there is also a Silverlight version. Third-Party Libraries – log4net and nunit. ·       Encog supports feedforward, recurrent, self-organizing maps, radial basis function and Hopfield neural networks. ·       Encog neural networks, and related data, can be stored in .EG XML files. ·       Encog Workbench allows you to edit, train and visualize neural networks. The Encog Workbench can generate code. Synapses and layers ·       the primary building blocks - Almost every neural network will have, at a minimum, an input and output layer. In some cases, the same layer will function as both input and output layer. ·       To adapt a problem to a neural network, you must determine how to feed the problem into the input layer of a neural network, and receive the solution through the output layer of a neural network. ·       The Input Layer - For each input neuron, one double value is stored. An array is passed as input to a layer. Encog uses the interface INeuralData to hold these arrays. The class BasicNeuralData implements the INeuralData interface. Once the neural network processes the input, an INeuralData based class will be returned from the neural network's output layer. ·       convert a double array into an INeuralData object : INeuralData data = new BasicNeuralData(= new double[10]); ·       the Output Layer- The neural network outputs an array of doubles, wraped in a class based on the INeuralData interface. ·        The real power of a neural network comes from its pattern recognition capabilities. The neural network should be able to produce the desired output even if the input has been slightly distorted. ·       Hidden Layers– optional. between the input and output layers. very much a “black box”. If the structure of the hidden layer is too simple it may not learn the problem. If the structure is too complex, it will learn the problem but will be very slow to train and execute. Some neural networks have no hidden layers. The input layer may be directly connected to the output layer. Further, some neural networks have only a single layer. A single layer neural network has the single layer self-connected. ·       connections, called synapses, contain individual weight matrixes. These values are changed as the neural network learns. Constructing a Neural Network ·       the XOR operator is a frequent “first example” -the “Hello World” application for neural networks. ·       The XOR Operator- only returns true when both inputs differ. 0 XOR 0 = 0 1 XOR 0 = 1 0 XOR 1 = 1 1 XOR 1 = 0 ·       Structuring a Neural Network for XOR  - two inputs to the XOR operator and one output. ·       input: 0.0,0.0 1.0,0.0 0.0,1.0 1.0,1.0 ·       Expected output: 0.0 1.0 1.0 0.0 ·       A Perceptron - a simple feedforward neural network to learn the XOR operator. ·       Because the XOR operator has two inputs and one output, the neural network will follow suit. Additionally, the neural network will have a single hidden layer, with two neurons to help process the data. The choice for 2 neurons in the hidden layer is arbitrary, and often comes down to trial and error. ·       Neuron Diagram for the XOR Network ·       ·       The Encog workbench displays neural networks on a layer-by-layer basis. ·       Encog Layer Diagram for the XOR Network:   ·       Create a BasicNetwork - Three layers are added to this network. the FinalizeStructure method must be called to inform the network that no more layers are to be added. The call to Reset randomizes the weights in the connections between these layers. var network = new BasicNetwork(); network.AddLayer(new BasicLayer(2)); network.AddLayer(new BasicLayer(2)); network.AddLayer(new BasicLayer(1)); network.Structure.FinalizeStructure(); network.Reset(); ·       Neural networks frequently start with a random weight matrix. This provides a starting point for the training methods. These random values will be tested and refined into an acceptable solution. However, sometimes the initial random values are too far off. Sometimes it may be necessary to reset the weights again, if training is ineffective. These weights make up the long-term memory of the neural network. Additionally, some layers have threshold values that also contribute to the long-term memory of the neural network. Some neural networks also contain context layers, which give the neural network a short-term memory as well. The neural network learns by modifying these weight and threshold values. ·       Now that the neural network has been created, it must be trained. Training a Neural Network ·       construct a INeuralDataSet object - contains the input array and the expected output array (of corresponding range). Even though there is only one output value, we must still use a two-dimensional array to represent the output. public static double[][] XOR_INPUT ={ new double[2] { 0.0, 0.0 }, new double[2] { 1.0, 0.0 }, new double[2] { 0.0, 1.0 }, new double[2] { 1.0, 1.0 } };   public static double[][] XOR_IDEAL = { new double[1] { 0.0 }, new double[1] { 1.0 }, new double[1] { 1.0 }, new double[1] { 0.0 } };   INeuralDataSet trainingSet = new BasicNeuralDataSet(XOR_INPUT, XOR_IDEAL); ·       Training is the process where the neural network's weights are adjusted to better produce the expected output. Training will continue for many iterations, until the error rate of the network is below an acceptable level. Encog supports many different types of training. Resilient Propagation (RPROP) - general-purpose training algorithm. All training classes implement the ITrain interface. The RPROP algorithm is implemented by the ResilientPropagation class. Training the neural network involves calling the Iteration method on the ITrain class until the error is below a specific value. The code loops through as many iterations, or epochs, as it takes to get the error rate for the neural network to be below 1%. Once the neural network has been trained, it is ready for use. ITrain train = new ResilientPropagation(network, trainingSet);   for (int epoch=0; epoch < 10000; epoch++) { train.Iteration(); Debug.Print("Epoch #" + epoch + " Error:" + train.Error); if (train.Error > 0.01) break; } Executing a Neural Network ·       Call the Compute method on the BasicNetwork class. Console.WriteLine("Neural Network Results:"); foreach (INeuralDataPair pair in trainingSet) { INeuralData output = network.Compute(pair.Input); Console.WriteLine(pair.Input[0] + "," + pair.Input[1] + ", actual=" + output[0] + ",ideal=" + pair.Ideal[0]); } ·       The Compute method accepts an INeuralData class and also returns a INeuralData object. Neural Network Results: 0.0,0.0, actual=0.002782538818034049,ideal=0.0 1.0,0.0, actual=0.9903741937121177,ideal=1.0 0.0,1.0, actual=0.9836807956566187,ideal=1.0 1.0,1.0, actual=0.0011646072586172778,ideal=0.0 ·       the network has not been trained to give the exact results. This is normal. Because the network was trained to 1% error, each of the results will also be within generally 1% of the expected value.

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• dasBlog

  - by Daniel Moth

  Some people like blogging on a site that is completely managed by someone else (e.g. http://wordpress.com/) and others, like me, prefer hosting their own blog at their own domain. In the latter case you need to decide what blog engine to install on your web space to power your blog. There are many free blog engines to choose from (e.g. the one from http://wordpress.org/). If, like me, you want to use a blog engine that is based on the .NET platform you have many choices including BlogEngine.NET, Subtext and the one I picked: dasBlog. In this post I'll describe the steps I took to get going with the open source dasBlog (home page, source page). A. Installing First I installed dasBlog on my local Windows 7 machine where I have IIS7 installed. To install dasBlog, I started by clicking the "Install" button on its web gallery page. After that I went through configuration, theming and adding content as described below. Once I was happy that everything was working correctly on the local machine, I set this up on a hosting service. I went for a Windows IIS7 shared hosting 3 month Economy plan from GoDaddy. The dasBlog site lists a bunch of other hosts. You can read the installation instructions for dasBlog, and with GoDaddy I just had to click one button since it is available as part of their quick-install apps. With GoDaddy I had a previewdns option that allowed me to play around and preview my site before going live. B. Configuring After it was installed (on local machine and/or hosting provider), I followed the obvious steps to create an admin user and logged in. This displays an admin navigation bar with the following options: 1. Navigator Links: I decided I was not going to use this feature. I manage links on the side of my blog manually elsewhere as part of the theme. So, I deleted every entry on this page and ignored it thereafter. 2. Blogroll: Ditto - same comment as for Navigator Links. 3. Content Filters: I did not delete (or add) these, but I did ensure both checkboxes are not checked. I.e. I am not using this feature now, but I may return to it in the future. 4. Activity: This is a read-only view of various statistics. So nothing to configure here, but useful to come back to for complementary statistics to whatever other statistical package you use (e.g. free stats as part of the hosting and I also use feedburner for syndication stats). 5. Cross-posting: I did not need that, so I turned it off via the Configuration Settings discussed next. 6. Configuration Settings: This is where the bulk of the configuration for the blog takes place and they are stored in a single XML file: Site.Config file. There are truly self-explanatory options to pick for Basic Settings, Services Settings and Services to Ping, Syndication Settings (this is where you link to your feedburner name if you have one) and Mail to Weblog Settings (I keep this turned off). There are also "Xml Storage System Settings" (I keep this turned off), "OpenId Settings" (I allow OpenID commenters), "Spammer Settings" (Enable captcha, never show email addresses) and "Comment settings" (Enable comments, don't allow on older posts, don't allow html). There are also Appearance Settings (I checked the "Use Post Title for Permalink", replaced spaces with hyphen and unchecked the "Use Unique Title"). Finally, there are also Notification Settings, but they are a bit of hit and miss in my case, in that I don’t always get the emails (still investigating this). C. Adding Content You can add content via the "Add Entry" link on the admin navigation bar or by configuring the "Mail to Weblog" settings and sending email or, do what I've started doing, use Live Writer (also the team has a blog). Another way to add content is programmatically if, for example, you are migrating content from another blog (and I'll cover that in separate post sharing the code). What you should know is that all blog content (posts and comments) live in XML files in a folder called "content" under your dasBlog installation. D. Theming There is a very good guide about themes for dasBlog, there is also a similar guide with screenshots (scroll down to "So how do I create a theme") and the dasBlog macro reference. When you install dasBlog, there are many themes available; each theme is in its own folder (representing the folder name) under the themes folder. You may have noticed that you can switch between these via the "Appearance Settings" described above (look for the combobox after the Default Theme label). I created my own theme by copy-pasting an existing theme folder, renaming it and then switching to it as the default. I then opened the folder in Visual Studio and hacked around the HTML in the 3 files (itemTemplate, homeTemplate and dayTemplate). These files have a blogtemplate file extension, which I temporarily renamed to HTML as I was editing them. There is no more advice I can offer here as this is a matter of taste and the aforementioned links is all I used. Personally, I had salvaged the CSS (and structure) from my previous blog and wanted to make this one match it as closely as possible - I think I have succeeded. E. If you run into any issue with dasBlog... ...use your favorite search engine to find answers. Many bloggers have been using this engine for a while and have documented issues and workarounds over time. One such example is ScottHa's dasBlog category; another example is therightstuff where I "borrowed" the idea/macro for the outlook-style on-page navigation. If you don't find what you want through searching, try posting a question to the forums. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Cloud MBaaS : The Next Big Thing in Enterprise Mobility

  - by shiju

  In this blog post, I will take a look at Cloud Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) and how we can leverage Cloud based Mobile Backend as a Service for building enterprise mobile apps. Today, mobile apps are incredibly significant in both consumer and enterprise space and the demand for the mobile apps is unbelievably increasing in day to day business. An enterprise can’t survive in business without a proper mobility strategy. A better mobility strategy and faster delivery of your mobile apps will give you an extra mileage for your business and IT strategy. So organizations and mobile developers are looking for different strategy for meeting this demand and adopting different development strategy for their mobile apps. Some developers are adopting hybrid mobile app development platforms, for delivering their products for multiple platforms, for fast time-to-market. Others are adopting a Mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) such as Kony for their enterprise mobile apps for fast time-to-market and better business integration. The Challenges of Enterprise Mobility The real challenge of enterprise mobile apps, is not about creating the front-end environment or developing front-end for multiple platforms. The most important thing of enterprise mobile apps is to expose your enterprise data to mobile devices where the real pain is your business data might be residing in lot of different systems including legacy systems, ERP systems etc., and these systems will be deployed with lot of security restrictions. Exposing your data from the on-premises servers, is not a easy thing for most of the business organizations. Many organizations are spending too much time for their front-end development strategy, but they are really lacking for building a strategy on their back-end for exposing the business data to mobile apps. So building a REST services layer and mobile back-end services, on the top of legacy systems and existing middleware systems, is the key part of most of the enterprise mobile apps, where multiple mobile platforms can easily consume these REST services and other mobile back-end services for building mobile apps. For some mobile apps, we can’t predict its user base, especially for products where customers can gradually increase at any time. And for today’s mobile apps, faster time-to-market is very critical so that spending too much time for mobile app’s scalability, will not be worth. The real power of Cloud is the agility and on-demand scalability, where we can scale-up and scale-down our applications very easily. It would be great if we could use the power of Cloud to mobile apps. So using Cloud for mobile apps is a natural fit, where we can use Cloud as the storage for mobile apps and hosting mechanism for mobile back-end services, where we can enjoy the full power of Cloud with greater level of on-demand scalability and operational agility. So Cloud based Mobile Backend as a Service is great choice for building enterprise mobile apps, where enterprises can enjoy the massive scalability power of their mobile apps, provided by public cloud vendors such as Microsoft Windows Azure. Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) We have discussed the key challenges of enterprise mobile apps and how we can leverage Cloud for hosting mobile backend services. MBaaS is a set of cloud-based, server-side mobile services for multiple mobile platforms and HTML5 platform, which can be used as a backend for your mobile apps with the scalability power of Cloud. The information below provides the key features of a typical MBaaS platform: Cloud based storage for your application data. Automatic REST API services on the application data, for CRUD operations. Native push notification services with massive scalability power. User management services for authenticate users. User authentication via Social accounts such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. Scheduler services for periodically sending data to mobile devices. Native SDKs for multiple mobile platforms such as Windows Phone and Windows Store, Android, Apple iOS, and HTML5, for easily accessing the mobile services from mobile apps, with better security.  Typically, a MBaaS platform will provide native SDKs for multiple mobile platforms so that we can easily consume the server-side mobile services. MBaaS based REST APIs can use for integrating to enterprise backend systems. We can use the same mobile services for multiple platform so hat we can reuse the application logic to multiple mobile platforms. Public cloud vendors are building the mobile services on the top of their PaaS offerings. Windows Azure Mobile Services is a great platform for a MBaaS offering that is leveraging Windows Azure Cloud platform’s PaaS capabilities. Hybrid mobile development platform Titanium provides their own MBaaS services. LoopBack is a new MBaaS service provided by Node.js consulting firm StrongLoop, which can be hosted on multiple cloud platforms and also for on-premises servers. The Challenges of MBaaS Solutions If you are building your mobile apps with a new data storage, it will be very easy, since there is not any integration challenges you have to face. But most of the use cases, you have to extract your application data in which stored in on-premises servers which might be under VPNs and firewalls. So exposing these data to your MBaaS solution with a proper security would be a big challenge. The capability of your MBaaS vendor is very important as you have to interact with your legacy systems for many enterprise mobile apps. So you should be very careful about choosing for MBaaS vendor. At the same time, you should have a proper strategy for mobilizing your application data which stored in on-premises legacy systems, where your solution architecture and strategy is more important than platforms and tools.  Windows Azure Mobile Services Windows Azure Mobile Services is an MBaaS offerings from Windows Azure cloud platform. IMHO, Microsoft Windows Azure is the best PaaS platform in the Cloud space. Windows Azure Mobile Services extends the PaaS capabilities of Windows Azure, to mobile devices, which can be used as a cloud backend for your mobile apps, which will provide global availability and reach for your mobile apps. Windows Azure Mobile Services provides storage services, user management with social network integration, push notification services and scheduler services and provides native SDKs for all major mobile platforms and HTML5. In Windows Azure Mobile Services, you can write server-side scripts in Node.js where you can enjoy the full power of Node.js including the use of NPM modules for your server-side scripts. In the previous section, we had discussed some challenges of MBaaS solutions. You can leverage Windows Azure Cloud platform for solving many challenges regarding with enterprise mobility. The entire Windows Azure platform can play a key role for working as the backend for your mobile apps where you can leverage the entire Windows Azure platform for your mobile apps. With Windows Azure, you can easily connect to your on-premises systems which is a key thing for mobile backend solutions. Another key point is that Windows Azure provides better integration with services like Active Directory, which makes Windows Azure as the de facto platform for enterprise mobility, for enterprises, who have been leveraging Microsoft ecosystem for their application and IT infrastructure. Windows Azure Mobile Services  is going to next evolution where you can expect some exciting features in near future. One area, where Windows Azure Mobile Services should definitely need an improvement, is about the default storage mechanism in which currently it is depends on SQL Server. IMHO, developers should be able to choose multiple default storage option when creating a new mobile service instance. Let’s say, there should be a different storage providers such as SQL Server storage provider and Table storage provider where developers should be able to choose their choice of storage provider when creating a new mobile services project. I have been used Windows Azure and Windows Azure Mobile Services as the backend for production apps for mobile, where it performed very well. MBaaS Over MEAP Recently, many larger enterprises has been adopted Mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) for their mobile apps. I haven’t worked on any production MEAP solution, but I heard that developers are really struggling with MEAP in different way. The learning curve for a proprietary MEAP platform is very high. I am completely against for using larger proprietary ecosystem for mobile apps. For enterprise mobile apps, I highly recommend to use native iOS/Android/Windows Phone or HTML5  for front-end with a cloud hosted MBaaS solution as the middleware. A MBaaS service can be consumed from multiple mobile apps where REST APIs are using to integrating with enterprise backend systems. Enterprise mobility should start with exposing REST APIs on the enterprise backend systems and these REST APIs can host on Cloud where we can enjoy the power of Cloud for our services. If you are having REST APIs for your enterprise data, then you can easily build mobile frontends for multiple platforms.   You can follow me on Twitter @shijucv

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• Stream Media and Live TV Across the Internet with Orb

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Looking for a way to stream your media collection across the Internet? Or perhaps watch and record TV remotely? Today we are going to look at how to do all that and more with Orb. Requirements Windows XP / Vista / 7 or Intel based Mac w/ OS X 10.5 or later. 1 GB RAM or more Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or higher / AMD Athlon 3200+ Broadband connections TV Tuner for streaming and recording live TV (optional) Note: Slower internet connections may result in stuttering during playback. Installation and Setup Download and install Orb on your home computer. (Download link below) You’ll want to take the defaults for the initial portion of the install. When we get to the Orb Account setup portion of the install is when we will have to enter information and make some decisions. Choose your language and click Next. We’ll need to create and user account and password. A valid email address is required as we’ll need to confirm the account later. Click Next.   Now you’ll want to choose your media sources. Orb will automatically look for folders that may contain media files. You can add or remove folders click on the (+) or (-) buttons. To remove a folder, click on it once to select it from the list and then click the minus (-) button. To add a folder, click the plus (+) button and browse for the folder. You can add local folders as well as shared folders from networked computers and USB attached storage. Note: Both the host computer running Orb and the networked computer will need to be running to access shared network folders remotely. When you’ve selected all your media files, click Next. Orb will proceed to index your media files… When the indexing is complete, click Next. Orb TV Setup Note: Streaming Live TV to Macs is not currently supported. If you have a TV tuner card connected to your PC, you can opt to configure Orb to stream live or recorded TV. Click Next  to configure TV. Or, choose Skip if you don’t wish to configure Orb for TV.   If you have a Digital tuner card, type in your Zip Code and click Get List to pull your channel listings. Select a TV provider from the list and click Next. If not, click Skip.   You can select or deselect any channels by checking or un-checking the box to each channel. Select Auto Scan to let Orb find more channels or disable the ones with no reception. Click Next when finished.   Next choose an analog provider, if necessary, and click Next.   Select “Yes” or “No” for a set top box and click Next. Just as we did with the Digital tuner, select or deselect any channels by checking or un-checking the box to each channel. Select Auto Scan to let Orb find more channels or disable the ones with no reception. Click Next when finished.   Now we’re finished with the setup. Click Close. Accessing your Media Remotely Media files are accessed through a web-based interface. Before we go any further, however, we’ll need to confirm our username and password. Check your inbox for an email from Orb Networks. Click the enclosed confirmation link. You’ll be prompted to enter the username and password you selected in your browser then click Next.   Your account will be confirmed. Now, we’re ready to enjoy our media remotely. To get started, point your browser to the MyCast website from your remote computer. (See link below) Enter your credentials and click Log In. Once logged in, you’ll be presented with the MyCast Home screen. By default you’ll see a handful of “channels” such as a TV program guide, random audio and photos, video favorites, and weather. You can add, remove, or customize channels. To add additional channels, click on Add Channels at the top right…   …and select from the dropdown list. To access your full media libraries, click Open Application at the top left and select from one of the options. Live and Recorded TV If you have a TV tuner card you configured for Orb, you’ll see your program guide on the TV / Webcams screen. To watch or record a show, click on the program listing to bring up a detail box. Then click the red button to record, or the green button to play. When recording a show, you’ll see a pulsating red icon at the top right of the listing in the program guide. If you want to watch Live TV, you may be prompted to choose your media player, depending on your browser and settings. Playback should begin shortly.   Note for Windows Media Center Users If you try to stream live TV in Orb while Windows Media Center is running on your PC, you’ll get an error message. Click the Stop MediaCenter button and then try again.   Audio On the Audio screen, you’ll find your music files indexed by genre, artist, and album. You can play a selection by clicking once and then clicking the green play button, or by simply double-clicking.   Playback will begin in the default media player for the streaming format.   Video Video works essentially the same as audio. Click on a selection and press the green play button, or double-click on the video title. Video playback will begin in the default media player for the streaming format.   Streaming Formats You can change the default streaming format in the control panel settings. To access the Control Panel, click on Open Applications  and select Control Panel. You can also click Settings at the top right.   Select General from the drop down list and then click on the Streaming Formats tab. You are provided four options. Flash, Windows Media, .SDP, and .PLS.   Creating Playlists To create playlists, drag and drop your media title to the playlist work area on the right, or click Add to playlist on the top menu. Click Save when finished.    Sharing your Media Orb allows you to share media playlists across the Internet with friends and family. There are a few ways to accomplish this. We’ll start by click the Share button at the bottom of the playlist work area after you’ve compiled your playlist. You’ll be prompted to choose a method by which to share your playlist. You’ll have the option to share your playlist publicly or privately. You can share publically through links, blogs, or on your Orb public profile.  By choosing the Public Profile option, Orb will automatically create a profile page for you with a URL like http://public.orb.com/username that anyone can easily access on the Internet. The private sharing option allows you to invite friends by email and requires recipients to register with Orb. You can also give your playlist a custom name, or accept the auto-generated title. Click OK when finished. Users who visit your public profile will be able to view and stream any of your shared playlists to their computer or supported device.   Portable Media Devices and Smartphones Orb can stream media to many portable devices and 3G phones. Streaming audio is supported on the iPhone and iPod Touch through the Safari browser. However, video and live TV streaming requires the Orb Live iPhone App.  Orb Live is available in the App store for $9.99. To stream media to your portable device, go to the MyCast website in your mobile browser and login. Browse for your media or playlist. Make a selection and play the media. Playback will begin. We found streaming music to both the Droid and the iPhone to work quite nicely. Video playback on the Droid, however, left a bit to be desired. The video looked good, but the audio tended to be out of sync. System Tray Control Panel By default Orb runs in the system tray on start up. To access the System Tray Control Panel, right-click on the Orb icon in the system tray and select Control Panel. Login with your Orb username and  password and click OK.   From here you can add or remove media sources, add manage accounts, change your password, and more. If you’d rather not run Orb on Startup, click the General icon.   Unselect the checkbox next to Start Orb when the system starts. Conclusion It may seem like a lot of steps, but getting Orb up and running isn’t terribly difficult. Orb is available for both Windows and Intel based Macs. It also supports streaming to many Game Consoles such as the Wii, PS3, and XBox 360. If you are running Windows 7 on multiple computers, you may want to check out our write-up on how to stream music and video over the Internet with Windows Media Player 12. Downloads Download Orb Logon to MyCast Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Stream Music and Video Over the Internet with Windows Media Player 12Enable Media Streaming in Windows Home Server to Windows Media PlayerStream Media from Windows 7 to XP with VLC Media PlayerShare Digital Media With Other Computers on a Home Network with Windows 7Automatically Start Windows 7 Media Center in Live TV Mode TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Looking for Good Windows Media Player 12 Plug-ins? Find Out the Celebrity You Resemble With FaceDouble Whoa ! Use Printflush to Solve Printing Problems Icelandic Volcano Webcams Open Multiple Links At One Go

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• Messing with the Team

  - by Robert May

  Good Product Owners will help the team be the best that they can be.  Bad product owners will mess with the team and won’t care about the team.  If you’re a product owner, seek to do good and avoid bad behavior at all costs.  Remember, this is for YOUR benefit and you have much power given to you.  Use that power wisely. Scope Creep The product owner has several tools at his disposal to inject scope into an iteration.  First, the product owner can use defects to inject scope.  To do this, they’ll tell the team what functionality that they want to see in a feature.  Then, after the feature is developed, the Product Owner will decide that they don’t really like how the functionality behaves.  To change it, rather than creating a new story, they’ll add a defect.  The functionality is correct, as designed, but the Product Owner doesn’t like it.  By creating the defect, the Product Owner destroys the trust that the team has of the product owner.  They may not be able to count the story, because the Product Owner changed the story in the iteration, and the team then ends up looking like they have low velocity for something over which they have no control.  This is bad.  One way to deal with this is to add “Product Owner Time” to the iteration.  This will slow the velocity, but then the ScrumMaster can tell stake holders that this time is strictly in place to deal with bad behavior of the Product Owner. Another mechanism often used to inject Scope is the concept of directed development.  Outside of planning, stand-ups, or any other meeting, the Product Owner will take a developer aside and ask them to complete a task for them.  This is bad!  The team should be allocating all of their time to development.  If the Product Owner asks for a favor, then time that would normally be used for development will be used for a pet project of the Product Owner and the team will not get credit for this work.  Selfish product owners do this, and I typically see people who were “managers” do this behavior.  Authoritarian command and control development environments also see this happen.  The best thing that can happen is for the team member to report the issue to the ScrumMaster and the ScrumMaster to get very aggressive with management and the Product Owner to try and stop the behavior.  This may result in the ScrumMaster being fired, but if the behavior continues, Scrum is doomed.  This problem is especially bad in cases where the team member’s direct supervisor is the Product Owner.  I don’t recommend that the Product Owner or ScrumMaster have a direct report relationship with team members, since team members need the ability to say no.  To work around this issue, team members need to say no.  If that fails, team members need to add extra time to the iteration to deal with the scope creep injection and accept the lower velocity. As discussed above, another mechanism for injecting scope is by changing acceptance tests after the work is complete.  This is similar to adding defects to change scope and is bad.  To get around, add time for Product Owner uncertainty to the iteration and make sure that stakeholders are aware of the need to add this time because of the Product Owner. Refusing to Prioritize Refusing to prioritize causes chaos for the team.  From the team’s perspective, things that are not important will be worked on while things that the team knows are vital will be ignored.  A poor Product Owner will often pick the stories for the iteration on a whim.  This leads to the team working on many different aspects of the product and results in a lower velocity, since each iteration the team must switch context to the new area of development. The team will also experience confusion about priorities.  In one iteration, Feature X was the highest priority and had to be done.  Then, the following iteration, even though parts of Feature X still need to be completed, no stories to address them will be in the iteration.  However, three iterations later, Feature X will again become high priority. This will cause the team to not trust the Product Owner, and eventually, they’ll stop caring about the features they implement.  They won’t know what is important, so to insulate themselves from the ever changing chaos, they’ll become apathetic to all features.  Team members are some of the most creative people in a company.  By losing their engagement, the company is going to have a substandard product because the passion for the product won’t be in the team. Other signs that the Product Owner refuses to prioritize is that no one outside of the product owner will be consulted on priorities.  Additionally, the product, release, and iteration backlogs will be weak or non-existent. Dealing with this issue is not easy.  This really isn’t something the team can fix, short of taking over the role of Product Owner themselves.  An appeal to the stake holders might work, but only if the Product Owner isn’t a “manager” themselves.  The ScrumMaster needs to protect the team and do what they can to either get the Product Owner to prioritize or have the Product Owner replaced. Managing the Team A Product Owner that is also the “boss” of team members is a Scrum team that is waiting to fail.  If your boss tells you to do something, failing to do that something can cause you to be fired.  The team needs the ability to tell the Product Owner NO.  If the product owner introduces scope creep, the team has a responsibility to tell the Product Owner no.  If the Product Owner tries to get the team to commit to more than they can accomplish in an iteration, the team needs the ability to tell the Product Owner no. If the Product Owner is your boss and determines your pay increases, you’re probably not going to ever tell them no, and Scrum will likely fail.  The team can’t do much in this situation. Another aspect of “managing the team” that often happens is the Product Owner tries to tell the team how to develop the stories that are in the iteration.  This is one reason why I recommend that Product Owners are NOT technical people.  That way, the team can come up with the tasks that are needed to accomplish the stories and the Product Owner won’t know better.  If the Product Owner is technical, the ScrumMaster will need to take great care to protect the team from the ScrumMaster changing how the team thinks they need to implement the stories. Product Owners can also try to manage the team by their body language.  If the team says a task is going to take 6 hours to complete, and the Product Owner disagrees, they will use some kind of sour body language to indicate this disagreement.  In weak teams, this may cause the team to revise their estimate down, which will result in them taking longer than estimated and may result in them missing the iteration.  The ScrumMaster will need to make sure that the Product Owner doesn’t send such messages and that the team ignores them and estimates what they REALLY think it will take to complete the tasks.  Forcing the team to deal with such items in the retrospective can be helpful. Absenteeism The team is completely dependent upon the Product Owner to develop features for the customer.  The Product Owner IS the voice of the customer and without them, the team will lack direction.  Being the Product Owner is a full time job!  If the Product Owner cannot dedicate daily time with the team, a different product owner should be found. The Product Owner needs to attend every stand-up, planning meeting, showcase, and retrospective that the team has.  The team also must be able to have instant communication with the product owner.  They must not be required to schedule meetings to speak with their product owner.  The team must be the highest priority task that the Product Owner has. The best way to work around an absent Product Owner is to appoint a new Product Owner in the team.  This person will be responsible for making the decisions that the Product Owner should be making and to act as the liaison to the absent Product Owner.  If the delegate Product Owner doesn’t have authority to make decisions for the team, Scrum will fail.  If the Product Owner is absent, the ScrumMaster should seek to have that Product Owner replaced by someone who has the time and ability to be a real Product Owner. Making it Personal Too often Product Owners will become convinced that their ideas are the ones that matter and that anyone who disagrees is making a personal attack on them.  Remember that Product Owners will inherently be at odds with many people, simply because they have the need to prioritize.  Others will frequently question prioritization because they only see part of the picture that Product Owners face. Product Owners must have a thick skin and think egos.  If they don’t, they tend to make things personal, which causes them to become emotional and causes them to take actions that can destroy the trust that team members have in the Product Owner. If a Product Owner is making things person, the best thing that team members can do is reassure them that its not personal, but be firm about doing what is best for the Company and for the users.  The ScrumMaster should also spend significant time coaching the Product Owner on how to not react emotionally and how to accept criticism without becoming defensive. Conclusion I’m sure there are other ways that a Product Owner can mess with the team, but these are the most common that I’ve seen.  I would encourage all Product Owners to seek to be a good Product Owner.  If you find yourself behaving in any of the bad product owner ways, change your behavior today!  Your team will thank you. Remember, being Product Owner is very difficult!  Product Owner is one of the most difficult roles in Scrum.  However, it can also be one of the most rewarding roles in Scrum, since Product Owners literally see their ideas brought to life on the computer screen.  Product Owners need to be very patient, even in the face of criticism and need to be willing to make tough decisions on priority, but then not become offended when others disagree with those decisions.  Companies should spend the time needed to find the right product owners for their teams.  Doing so will only help the company to write better software. Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• Who IS Brian Solis?

  - by Michael Snow

  Q: Brian, Welcome to the WebCenter Blog. Can you tell our readers your current role and what career path brought you here? A: I’m proudly serving as a principal analyst at Altimeter Group, a research based advisory firm in Silicon Valley. My career path, well, let’s just say it’s a long and winding road. As a kid, I was fascinated with technology. I learned programming at an early age and found myself naturally drawn to all things tech. I started my career as a database programmer at a technology marketing agency in Southern California. When I saw the chance to work with tech companies and help them better market their capabilities to businesses and consumers, I switched focus from programming to marketing and advertising. As technologist, my approach to marketing was different. I didn’t believe in hype, fluff or buzz words. I believed in translating features into benefits and specifications and capabilities into solutions for real world problems and opportunities. In the mid 90’s I experimented with direct to consumer/customer engagement in dedicated technology forums and boards. I quickly realized that the entire approach to do so would need to change. Therefore, I learned and developed new methods for a more social and informed way of engaging people in ways that helped them, marketed the company, and also tied to tangible benefits for the company. This work would lead me to start an agency in 1999 dedicated to interactive marketing. As I continued to experiment with interactive platforms, I developed interesting methods for converting one-to-many forms of media into one-to-one-to-many programs. I ran that company until joining Altimeter Group. Along the way, in the early 2000s, I realized that everything was changing and that there were others like me finding success in what would become a more social form of media. I dedicated a significant amount of my time to sharing everything that I learned in the form of articles, blogs, and eventually books. My mission became to share my experience with anyone who’d listen. It would later become much bigger than marketing, this would lead to a decade of work, that still continues, in business transformation. Then and now, I find myself always assuming the role of a student. Q: As an industry analyst & technology change evangelist, what are you primarily focused on these days? A: As a digital analyst, I study how disruptive technology impacts business. As an aspiring social scientist, I study how technology affects human behavior. I explore both horizons professionally and personally to better understand the future of popular culture and also the opportunities that exist for organizations to improve relationships and experiences with customers and the people that are important to them. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? A: The line between work and life isn’t blurred it’s been overtly crossed and erased. We live in an always on society. The digital lifestyle keeps us connected to one another it keeps us connected all the time. Whether your sending or checking email, trying to catch up, or simply trying to get ahead, people are spending the equivalent of an extra day at work in the time they spend out of work…working. That’s absurd. It’s a matter of survival. It’s also a matter of unintended, subconscious self-causation. We brought this on ourselves and continue to do so. Think about your day. You’re in meetings for the better part of each day. You probably spend evenings and weekends catching up on email and actually doing the work you couldn’t get to during the day. And, your co-workers and executives are doing the same thing. So if you try to slow down, you find yourself at a disadvantage as you’re willfully pulling yourself out of an unfortunate culture of whenever wherever business dynamics. If you’re unresponsive or unreachable, someone within your organization or on your team is accessible. Over time, this could contribute to unfavorable impressions. I choose to steer my life balance in ways that complement one another. But, I don’t pretend to have this figured out by any means. In fact, I find myself swimming upstream like those around me. It’s essentially a competition for relevance and at some point I’ll learn how to earn attention and relevance while redrawing the line between work and life. Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? A: The easy answer is that people can keep up with me at briansolis.com. But, I also try to reach people where their attention is focused. Whether it’s Facebook (facebook.com/briansolis), Twitter (@briansolis), Google+ (+briansolis), Youtube (briansolis.tv) or through books and conferences, people can usually find me in a place of their choosing. Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon? A: I spent some time with the Oracle team reviewing the idea of Digital Darwinism and how technology and society are evolving faster than many organizations can adapt. Digital Darwinism: How Brands Can Survive the Rapid Evolution of Society and Technology Thursday, December 13, 2012, 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast? A: We’re inviting guests to join us online as we dive into the future of business and how the convergence of technology and connected consumerism would ultimately impact how business is done. It’ll be an exciting and revealing conversation that explores just how much everything is changing. We’ll also review the importance of adapting to emergent trends and how to compete for the future. It’s important to recognize that change is not happening to us, it’s happening because of us. We are part of the revolution and therefore we need to help organizations adapt from the inside out. Watch the Entire Oracle Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series On-Demand and Stay Tuned for More to Come in 2013!

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• CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server

  - by The Geek

  Overview CloudBerry Online Backup version 1.5 is a front end application for Amazon S3 storage for backing up your Windows Home Server data. It makes backing up your essential data to Amazon S3 an easy process in the event the disaster strikes. Installation You install the Cloudberry Addin as you do for any addins for Windows Home Server. On a PC on your network, browse to the shared folders on your server and open the Add-Ins folder and copy over WHS_CloudBerryOnlineBackupSetup_v1.5.0.81S3o.msi (link below), then close out of the folder. Next launch the Windows Home Server Console, click Settings, then Add-Ins. Click on the Available tab and click the Install button. It installs very quickly, and when you get the Installation Succeeded dialog click OK. You will lose connection through the Console, just click OK, then reconnect. After reconnecting, you’ll see CloudBerry Backup has been installed, and you can begin using it. You can setup a backup plan right away or find out what’s new with version 1.5. Amazon S3 Account If you don’t already have an Amazon S3 account, you’ll be prompted to create a new one. Click on the Create an account hyperlink, which takes you to the Amazon S3 page where you can sign up. After reviewing the functionality of Amazon S3, click on the Sign Up for Amazon S3 button. Enter in your contact information and accept the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement. You’re then shown their pricing for storage plans. The amount of storage space you use will depend on your needs. It’s relatively cheap for smaller amounts of data. Just keep in mind the more data you store and download, the more S3 is going to cost. Note: Amazon S3 is introducing Reduced Redundancy Storage which will lower the cost of the data stored on S3. CloudBerry 1.5 will support this new feature. You can find out more about this new pricing structure. Note: Keep in mind that after you first sign up for an Amazon S3 account, it can take up to 24 hours to be authorized. In fact, you may want to sign up for the S3 account before installing the Add-In. After you sign up for your S3 Account, you’ll be given access credentials which you can enter in and create a Storage Bucket name. Features & Use CloudBerry is wizard driven, straight-forward and easy to use. Here we take a look at creating a backup plan. To begin, click on the Setup Backup Plan button to kick off the wizard. Select your backup mode based on the amount of features you want. In our example we’re going to select Advanced Mode as it offers more features than Simple Mode. Select your backup storage account or create a new one. You can select a default account by checking Use currently selected account as default. Now you can go through and select the files and folders you want to backup from your home server. Check the box Show physical drives to get more of a selection of files and folders. This also allows you to backup files from your data drive as well. It has full support for drive extenders so you can backup your shares as well. The cool thing about Cloudberry is it allows you to drill down specific files and folders unlike other WHS backup utilities. Next you can use advanced filters to specify files and/or folders to skip if you want. There are compression and encryption options as well. This will save storage space, bandwidth, and keep your data secure. Purge Options allow you to customize options for getting rid of older files. You can also select the option to delete files from the S3 service that have been deleted locally. Be careful with this option however, as you won’t be able to restore files if you delete them locally. You have some nice scheduling options from running backups manually, specific date and time, or recurring daily, weekly or monthly. Receive email notifications in all cases or when a backup fails. This is a good option so you know if things were successful or something failed, and you need to back it up manually. Email notifications… Give your plan a name… Then if the summary page looks good you can continue, or still go back at this point if something doesn’t look correct and needs adjusting. That’s it! You’re ready to go, and you have an option to start your first backup right away. After you’ve created a backup plan, you can go in and edit, delete, view history, or restore files. Restoring Files using CloudBerry To restore data from your backups kick off the Restore Wizard and select the backup to restore from. You can select the last backup, a specific point in time, or manually browse through the files. Browse through the directory and select the files you need to restore. Choose the destination to restore the files to. You can select from the original location, a specific location, to overwrite existing files, or set the location as the default for future restores. If the files are encrypted, enter in the correct passwords. If the summary looks good, click on Next to start the restore process. You’ll be shown a progress bar at the bottom of the screen while the files are restored. After the process has completed, close out of the Restore Wizard. In this example we restored a couple of music files to the desktop of Windows Home Server… But as shown above you can save them to the original location, other network locations, or WHS shared folders. This can make it a lot easier to keep track of files you’ve restored. You can also access different options for CloudBerry by clicking Settings in WHS Console then CloudBerry Backup. Here you can set up a new storage account, check for updates, app options, Diagnostics, and send feedback. Under Options there are several settings you can tweak to get the best experience for your WHS backups. CloudBerry Web Interface Another nice feature is the CloudBerry Web Interface so you can access your data from anywhere you have an Internet connection. To check it out in WHS Console, click on the Backup Web Interface link…you’ll probably want to bookmark the link in your favorite browser. Note: This feature is still in beta and at the time of this review, the Web Interface wasn’t up and running so we weren’t able to test it out. Performance The Cloudberry app works very well through the Windows Home Server Console. The amount of time it takes to backup or restore your data will depend on the speed of your Internet connection and size of the files. In our tests, backing up 1GB of data to the Amazon S3 account took around an hour, but we were running it on a DSL with limited upload speeds so your mileage will vary. Product Support In our experience, the team at CloudBerry offered great support in a timely manner when contacting them. You can fill out a help request through a form on their website and they also have a community forum. Conclusion We were very pleased with CloudBerry Online Backup for WHS. It’s wizard driven interface makes it extremely easy to use, and offers comprehensive backup choices for your Amazon S3 account. CloudBerry will only backup files that have been modified, so if files haven’t been changed, they won’t be backed up again.They offer a free 15 day trial and is $29.99 after that for a full license. Once you buy the app you own it, and charges to your S3 account will vary depending on the amount of data you upload. If you’re looking for an effective and easy to use front end application to backup your Windows Home Server data to your Amazon S3 account, CloudBerry is a recommended affordable choice. Download CloudBerry for Windows Home Server Sign Up For Amazon S3 Account Rating Installation: 9 Ease of Use: 8 Features: 8 Performance: 8 Product Support: 8 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Restore Files from Backups on Windows Home ServerGMedia Blog: Setting Up a Windows Home ServerBackup Windows Home Server Folders to an External Hard DriveBackup Your Windows Home Server Off-Site with Asus WebstorageRemove a Network Computer from Windows Home Server TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox) Hyperwords addon (Firefox) Backup Outlook 2010 Daily Motivator (Firefox)

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• The new workflow management of Oracle´s Hyperion Planning: Define more details with Planning Unit Hierarchies and Promotional Paths

  - by Alexandra Georgescu

  After having been almost unchanged for several years, starting with the 11.1.2 release of Oracle´s Hyperion Planning the Process Management has not only got a new name: “Approvals” now is offering the possibility to further split Planning Units (comprised of a unique Scenario-Version-Entity combination) into more detailed combinations along additional secondary dimensions, a so called Planning Unit Hierarchy, and also to pre-define a path of planners, reviewers and approvers, called Promotional Path. I´d like to introduce you to changes and enhancements in this new process management and arouse your curiosity for checking out more details on it. One reason of using the former process management in Planning was to limit data entry rights to one person at a time based on the assignment of a planning unit. So the lowest level of granularity for this assignment was, for a given Scenario-Version combination, the individual entity. Even if in many cases one person wasn´t responsible for all data being entered into that entity, but for only part of it, it was not possible to split the ownership along another additional dimension, for example by assigning ownership to different accounts at the same time. By defining a so called Planning Unit Hierarchy (PUH) in Approvals this gap is now closed. Complementing new Shared Services roles for Planning have been created in order to manage set up and use of Approvals: The Approvals Administrator consisting of the following roles: Approvals Ownership Assigner, who assigns owners and reviewers to planning units for which Write access is assigned (including Planner responsibilities). Approvals Supervisor, who stops and starts planning units and takes any action on planning units for which Write access is assigned. Approvals Process Designer, who can modify planning unit hierarchy secondary dimensions and entity members for which Write access is assigned, can also modify scenarios and versions that are assigned to planning unit hierarchies and can edit validation rules on data forms for which access is assigned. (this includes as well Planner and Ownership Assigner responsibilities) Set up of a Planning Unit Hierarchy is done under the Administration menu, by selecting Approvals, then Planning Unit Hierarchy. Here you create new PUH´s or edit existing ones. The following window displays: After providing a name and an optional description, a pre-selection of entities can be made for which the PUH will be defined. Available options are: All, which pre-selects all entities to be included for the definitions on the subsequent tabs None, manual entity selections will be made subsequently Custom, which offers the selection for an ancestor and the relative generations, that should be included for further definitions. Finally a pattern needs to be selected, which will determine the general flow of ownership: Free-form, uses the flow/assignment of ownerships according to Planning releases prior to 11.1.2 In Bottom-up, data input is done at the leaf member level. Ownership follows the hierarchy of approval along the entity dimension, including refinements using a secondary dimension in the PUH, amended by defined additional reviewers in the promotional path. Distributed, uses data input at the leaf level, while ownership starts at the top level and then is distributed down the organizational hierarchy (entities). After ownership reaches the lower levels, budgets are submitted back to the top through the approval process. Proceeding to the next step, now a secondary dimension and the respective members from that dimension might be selected, in order to create more detailed combinations underneath each entity. After selecting the Dimension and a Parent Member, the definition of a Relative Generation below this member assists in populating the field for Selected Members, while the Count column shows the number of selected members. For refining this list, you might click on the icon right beside the selected member field and use the check-boxes in the appearing list for deselecting members. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TIP: In order to reduce maintenance of the PUH due to changes in the dimensions included (members added, moved or removed) you should consider to dynamically link those dimensions in the PUH with the dimension hierarchies in the planning application. For secondary dimensions this is done using the check-boxes in the Auto Include column. For the primary dimension, the respective selection criteria is applied by right-clicking the name of an entity activated as planning unit, then selecting an item of the shown list of include or exclude options (children, descendants, etc.). Anyway in order to apply dimension changes impacting the PUH a synchronization must be run. If this is really necessary or not is shown on the first screen after selecting from the menu Administration, then Approvals, then Planning Unit Hierarchy: under Synchronized you find the statuses Yes, No or Locked, where the last one indicates, that another user is just changing or synchronizing the PUH. Select one of the not synchronized PUH´s (status No) and click the Synchronize option in order to execute. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the next step owners and reviewers are assigned to the PUH. Using the icons with the magnifying glass right besides the columns for Owner and Reviewer the respective assignments can be made in the ordermthat you want them to review the planning unit. While it is possible to assign only one owner per entity or combination of entity+ member of the secondary dimension, the selection for reviewers might consist of more than one person. The complete Promotional Path, including the defined owners and reviewers for the entity parents, can be shown by clicking the icon. In addition optional users might be defined for being notified about promotions for a planning unit. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TIP: Reviewers cannot change data, but can only review data according to their data access permissions and reject or promote planning units. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In order to complete your PUH definitions click Finish - this saves the PUH and closes the window. As a final step, before starting the approvals process, you need to assign the PUH to the Scenario-Version combination for which it should be used. From the Administration menu select Approvals, then Scenario and Version Assignment. Expand the PUH in order to see already existing assignments. Under Actions click the add icon and select scenarios and versions to be assigned. If needed, click the remove icon in order to delete entries. After these steps, set up is completed for starting the approvals process. Start, stop and control of the approvals process is now done under the Tools menu, and then Manage Approvals. The new PUH feature is complemented by various additional settings and features; some of them at least should be mentioned here: Export/Import of PUHs: Out of Office agent: Validation Rules changing promotional/approval path if violated (including the use of User-defined Attributes (UDAs)): And various new and helpful reviewer actions with corresponding approval states. About the Author: Bernhard Kinkel started working for Hyperion Solutions as a Presales Consultant and Consultant in 1998 and moved to Hyperion Education Services in 1999. He joined Oracle University in 2007 where he is a Principal Education Consultant. Based on these many years of working with Hyperion products he has detailed product knowledge across several versions. He delivers both classroom and live virtual courses. His areas of expertise are Oracle/Hyperion Essbase, Oracle Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Web Analysis.

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• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Providers

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction This will be the first of a number of posts on ASP.NET extensibility. At this moment I don’t know exactly how many will be and I only know a couple of subjects that I want to talk about, so more will come in the next days. I have the sensation that the providers offered by ASP.NET are not widely know, although everyone uses, for example, sessions, they may not be aware of the extensibility points that Microsoft included. This post won’t go into details of how to configure and extend each of the providers, but will hopefully give some pointers on that direction. Canonical These are the most widely known and used providers, coming from ASP.NET 1, chances are, you have used them already. Good support for invoking client side, either from a .NET application or from JavaScript. Lots of server-side controls use them, such as the Login control for example. Membership The Membership provider is responsible for managing registered users, including creating new ones, authenticating them, changing passwords, etc. ASP.NET comes with two implementations, one that uses a SQL Server database and another that uses the Active Directory. The base class is Membership and new providers are registered on the membership section on the Web.config file, as well as parameters for specifying minimum password lengths, complexities, maximum age, etc. One reason for creating a custom provider would be, for example, storing membership information in a different database engine. 1: <membership defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 4: </providers> 5: </membership> Role The Role provider assigns roles to authenticated users. The base class is Role and there are three out of the box implementations: XML-based, SQL Server and Windows-based. Also registered on Web.config through the roleManager section, where you can also say if your roles should be cached on a cookie. If you want your roles to come from a different place, implement a custom provider. 1: <roleManager defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> 4: </providers> 5: </roleManager> Profile The Profile provider allows defining a set of properties that will be tied and made available to authenticated or even anonymous ones, which must be tracked by using anonymous authentication. The base class is Profile and the only included implementation stores these settings in a SQL Server database. Configured through profile section, where you also specify the properties to make available, a custom provider would allow storing these properties in different locations. 1: <profile defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 4: </providers> 5: </profile> Basic OK, I didn’t know what to call these, so Basic is probably as good as a name as anything else. Not supported client-side (doesn’t even make sense). Session The Session provider allows storing data tied to the current “session”, which is normally created when a user first accesses the site, even when it is not yet authenticated, and remains all the way. The base class and only included implementation is SessionStateStoreProviderBase and it is capable of storing data in one of three locations: In the process memory (default, not suitable for web farms or increased reliability); A SQL Server database (best for reliability and clustering); The ASP.NET State Service, which is a Windows Service that is installed with the .NET Framework (ok for clustering). The configuration is made through the sessionState section. By adding a custom Session provider, you can store the data in different locations – think for example of a distributed cache. 1: <sessionState customProvider=”MyProvider”> 2: <providers> 3: <add name=”MyProvider” type=”MyClass, MyAssembly” /> 4: </providers> 5: </sessionState> Resource A not so known provider, allows you to change the origin of localized resource elements. By default, these come from RESX files and are used whenever you use the Resources expression builder or the GetGlobalResourceObject and GetLocalResourceObject methods, but if you implement a custom provider, you can have these elements come from some place else, such as a database. The base class is ResourceProviderFactory and there’s only one internal implementation which uses these RESX files. Configuration is through the globalization section. 1: <globalization resourceProviderFactoryType="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> Health Monitoring Health Monitoring is also probably not so well known, and actually not a good name for it. First, in order to understand what it does, you have to know that ASP.NET fires “events” at specific times and when specific things happen, such as when logging in, an exception is raised. These are not user interface events and you can create your own and fire them, nothing will happen, but the Health Monitoring provider will detect it. You can configure it to do things when certain conditions are met, such as a number of events being fired in a certain amount of time. You define these rules and route them to a specific provider, which must inherit from WebEventProvider. Out of the box implementations include sending mails, logging to a SQL Server database, writing to the Windows Event Log, Windows Management Instrumentation, the IIS 7 Trace infrastructure or the debugger Trace. Its configuration is achieved by the healthMonitoring section and a reason for implementing a custom provider would be, for example, locking down a web application in the event of a significant number of failed login attempts occurring in a small period of time. 1: <healthMonitoring> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 4: </providers> 5: </healthMonitoring> Sitemap The Sitemap provider allows defining the site’s navigation structure and associated required permissions for each node, in a tree-like fashion. Usually this is statically defined, and the included provider allows it, by supplying this structure in a Web.sitemap XML file. The base class is SiteMapProvider and you can extend it in order to supply you own source for the site’s structure, which may even be dynamic. Its configuration must be done through the siteMap section. 1: <siteMap defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 2: <providers><add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> 3: </providers> 4: </siteMap> Web Part Personalization Web Parts are better known by SharePoint users, but since ASP.NET 2.0 they are included in the core Framework. Web Parts are server-side controls that offer certain possibilities of configuration by clients visiting the page where they are located. The infrastructure handles this configuration per user or globally for all users and this provider is responsible for just that. The base class is PersonalizationProvider and the only included implementation stores settings on SQL Server. Add new providers through the personalization section. 1: <webParts> 2: <personalization defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 3: <providers> 4: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 5: </providers> 6: </personalization> 7: </webParts> Build The Build provider is responsible for compiling whatever files are present on your web folder. There’s a base class, BuildProvider, and, as can be expected, internal implementations for building pages (ASPX), master pages (Master), user web controls (ASCX), handlers (ASHX), themes (Skin), XML Schemas (XSD), web services (ASMX, SVC), resources (RESX), browser capabilities files (Browser) and so on. You would write a build provider if you wanted to generate code from any kind of non-code file so that you have strong typing at development time. Configuration goes on the buildProviders section and it is per extension. 1: <buildProviders> 2: <add extension=".ext" type="MyClass, MyAssembly” /> 3: </buildProviders> New in ASP.NET 4 Not exactly new since they exist since 2010, but in ASP.NET terms, still new. Output Cache The Output Cache for ASPX pages and ASCX user controls is now extensible, through the Output Cache provider, which means you can implement a custom mechanism for storing and retrieving cached data, for example, in a distributed fashion. The base class is OutputCacheProvider and the only implementation is private. Configuration goes on the outputCache section and on each page and web user control you can choose the provider you want to use. 1: <caching> 2: <outputCache defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 3: <providers> 4: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 5: </providers> 6: </outputCache> 7: </caching> Request Validation A big change introduced in ASP.NET 4 (and refined in 4.5, by the way) is the introduction of extensible request validation, by means of a Request Validation provider. This means we are not limited to either enabling or disabling event validation for all pages or for a specific page, but we now have fine control over each of the elements of the request, including cookies, headers, query string and form values. The base provider class is RequestValidator and the configuration goes on the httpRuntime section. 1: <httpRuntime requestValidationType="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> Browser Capabilities The Browser Capabilities provider is new in ASP.NET 4, although the concept exists from ASP.NET 2. The idea is to map a browser brand and version to its supported capabilities, such as JavaScript version, Flash support, ActiveX support, and so on. Previously, this was all hardcoded in .Browser files located in %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework(64)\vXXXXX\Config\Browsers, but now you can have a class inherit from HttpCapabilitiesProvider and implement your own mechanism. Register in on the browserCaps section. 1: <browserCaps provider="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> Encoder The Encoder provider is responsible for encoding every string that is sent to the browser on a page or header. This includes for example converting special characters for their standard codes and is implemented by the base class HttpEncoder. Another implementation takes care of Anti Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. Build your own by inheriting from one of these classes if you want to add some additional processing to these strings. The configuration will go on the httpRuntime section. 1: <httpRuntime encoderType="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> Conclusion That’s about it for ASP.NET providers. It was by no means a thorough description, but I hope I managed to raise your interest on this subject. There are lots of pointers on the Internet, so I only included direct references to the Framework classes and configuration sections. Stay tuned for more extensibility!

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• Why does my MacBook Pro have long ping times over Wi-Fi?

  - by randynov

  I have been having problems connecting with my Wi-Fi. It is weird, the ping times to the router (<30 feet away) seem to surge, often getting over 10 seconds before slowly coming back down. You can see the trend below. I'm on a MacBook Pro and have done the normal stuff (reset the PRAM and SMC, changed wireless channels, etc.). It happens across different routers, so I think it must be my laptop, but I don't know what it could be. The RSSI value hovers around -57, but I've seen the transmit rate flip between 0, 48 and 54. The signal strength is ~60% with 9% noise. Currently, there are 17 other wireless networks in range, but only one in the same channel. 1 - How can I figure out what's going on? 2 - How can I correct the situation? PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=254 time=781.107 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=254 time=681.551 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=254 time=610.001 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=254 time=544.915 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=254 time=547.622 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=254 time=468.914 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=254 time=237.368 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=254 time=229.902 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=254 time=11754.151 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=254 time=10753.943 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=10 ttl=254 time=9754.428 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=11 ttl=254 time=8754.199 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=12 ttl=254 time=7754.138 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=13 ttl=254 time=6754.159 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=14 ttl=254 time=5753.991 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=15 ttl=254 time=4754.068 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=16 ttl=254 time=3753.930 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=17 ttl=254 time=2753.768 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=18 ttl=254 time=1753.866 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=19 ttl=254 time=753.592 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=20 ttl=254 time=517.315 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=37 ttl=254 time=1.315 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=38 ttl=254 time=1.035 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=39 ttl=254 time=4.597 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=21 ttl=254 time=18010.681 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=22 ttl=254 time=17010.449 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=23 ttl=254 time=16010.430 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=24 ttl=254 time=15010.540 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=25 ttl=254 time=14010.450 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=26 ttl=254 time=13010.175 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=27 ttl=254 time=12010.282 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=28 ttl=254 time=11010.265 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=29 ttl=254 time=10010.285 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=30 ttl=254 time=9010.235 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=31 ttl=254 time=8010.399 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=32 ttl=254 time=7010.144 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=33 ttl=254 time=6010.113 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=34 ttl=254 time=5010.025 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=35 ttl=254 time=4009.966 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=36 ttl=254 time=3009.825 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=40 ttl=254 time=16000.676 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=41 ttl=254 time=15000.477 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=42 ttl=254 time=14000.388 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=43 ttl=254 time=13000.549 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=44 ttl=254 time=12000.469 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=45 ttl=254 time=11000.332 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=46 ttl=254 time=10000.339 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=47 ttl=254 time=9000.338 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=48 ttl=254 time=8000.198 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=49 ttl=254 time=7000.388 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=50 ttl=254 time=6000.217 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=51 ttl=254 time=5000.084 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=52 ttl=254 time=3999.920 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=53 ttl=254 time=3000.010 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=54 ttl=254 time=1999.832 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=55 ttl=254 time=1000.072 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=58 ttl=254 time=1.125 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=59 ttl=254 time=1.070 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=60 ttl=254 time=2.515 ms

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• Advantages of SQL Backup Pro

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Getting backups of your databases in place is a fundamental issue for protection of the business. Yes, I said business, not data, not databases, but business. Because of a lack of good, tested, backups, companies have gone completely out of business or suffered traumatic financial loss. That’s just a simple fact (outlined with a few examples here). So you want to get backups right. That’s a big part of why we make Red Gate SQL Backup Pro work the way it does. Yes, you could just use native backups, but you’ll be missing a few advantages that we provide over and above what you get out of the box from Microsoft. Let’s talk about them. Guidance If you’re a hard-core DBA with 20+ years of experience on every version of SQL Server and several other data platforms besides, you may already know what you need in order to get a set of tested backups in place. But, if you’re not, maybe a little help would be a good thing. To set up backups for your servers, we supply a wizard that will step you through the entire process. It will also act to guide you down good paths. For example, if your databases are in Full Recovery, you should set up transaction log backups to run on a regular basis. When you choose a transaction log backup from the Backup Type you’ll see that only those databases that are in Full Recovery will be listed: This makes it very easy to be sure you have a log backup set up for all the databases you should and none of the databases where you won’t be able to. There are other examples of guidance throughout the product. If you have the responsibility of managing backups but very little knowledge or time, we can help you out. Throughout the software you’ll notice little green question marks. You can see two in the screen above and more in each of the screens in other topics below this one. Clicking on these will open a window with additional information about the topic in question which should help to guide you through some of the tougher decisions you may have to make while setting up your backup jobs. Here’s an example: Backup Copies As a part of the wizard you can choose to make a copy of your backup on your network. This process runs as part of the Red Gate SQL Backup engine. It will copy your backup, after completing the backup so it doesn’t cause any additional blocking or resource use within the backup process, to the network location you define. Creating a copy acts as a mechanism of protection for your backups. You can then backup that copy or do other things with it, all without affecting the original backup file. This requires either an additional backup or additional scripting to get it done within the native Microsoft backup engine. Offsite Storage Red Gate offers you the ability to immediately copy your backup to the cloud as a further, off-site, protection of your backups. It’s a service we provide and expose through the Backup wizard. Your backup will complete first, just like with the network backup copy, then an asynchronous process will copy that backup to cloud storage. Again, this is built right into the wizard or even the command line calls to SQL Backup, so it’s part a single process within your system. With native backup you would need to write additional scripts, possibly outside of T-SQL, to make this happen. Before you can use this with your backups you’ll need to do a little setup, but it’s built right into the product to get this done. You’ll be directed to the web site for our hosted storage where you can set up an account. Compression If you have SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, or you’re on SQL Server 2008R2 or greater and you have a Standard or Enterprise license, then you have backup compression. It’s built right in and works well. But, if you need even more compression then you might want to consider Red Gate SQL Backup Pro. We offer four levels of compression within the product. This means you can get a little compression faster, or you can just sacrifice some CPU time and get even more compression. You decide. For just a simple example I backed up AdventureWorks2012 using both methods of compression. The resulting file from native was 53mb. Our file was 33mb. That’s a file that is smaller by 38%, not a small number when we start talking gigabytes. We even provide guidance here to help you determine which level of compression would be right for you and your system: So for this test, if you wanted maximum compression with minimum CPU use you’d probably want to go with Level 2 which gets you almost as much compression as Level 3 but will use fewer resources. And that compression is still better than the native one by 10%. Restore Testing Backups are vital. But, a backup is just a file until you restore it. How do you know that you can restore that backup? Of course, you’ll use CHECKSUM to validate that what was read from disk during the backup process is what gets written to the backup file. You’ll also use VERIFYONLY to check that the backup header and the checksums on the backup file are valid. But, this doesn’t do a complete test of the backup. The only complete test is a restore. So, what you really need is a process that tests your backups. This is something you’ll have to schedule separately from your backups, but we provide a couple of mechanisms to help you out here. First, when you create a backup schedule, all done through our wizard which gives you as much guidance as you get when running backups, you get the option of creating a reminder to create a job to test your restores. You can enable this or disable it as you choose when creating your scheduled backups. Once you’re ready to schedule test restores for your databases, we have a wizard for this as well. After you choose the databases and restores you want to test, all configurable for automation, you get to decide if you’re going to restore to a specified copy or to the original database: If you’re doing your tests on a new server (probably the best choice) you can just overwrite the original database if it’s there. If not, you may want to create a new database each time you test your restores. Another part of validating your backups is ensuring that they can pass consistency checks. So we have DBCC built right into the process. You can even decide how you want DBCC run, which error messages to include, limit or add to the checks being run. With this you could offload some DBCC checks from your production system so that you only run the physical checks on your production box, but run the full check on this backup. That makes backup testing not just a general safety process, but a performance enhancer as well: Finally, assuming the tests pass, you can delete the database, leave it in place, or delete it regardless of the tests passing. All this is automated and scheduled through the SQL Agent job on your servers. Running your databases through this process will ensure that you don’t just have backups, but that you have tested backups. Single Point of Management If you have more than one server to maintain, getting backups setup could be a tedious process. But, with Red Gate SQL Backup Pro you can connect to multiple servers and then manage all your databases and all your servers backups from a single location. You’ll be able to see what is scheduled, what has run successfully and what has failed, all from a single interface without having to connect to different servers. Log Shipping Wizard If you want to set up log shipping as part of a disaster recovery process, it can frequently be a pain to get configured correctly. We supply a wizard that will walk you through every step of the process including setting up alerts so you’ll know should your log shipping fail. Summary You want to get your backups right. As outlined above, Red Gate SQL Backup Pro will absolutely help you there. We supply a number of processes and functionalities above and beyond what you get with SQL Server native. Plus, with our guidance, hints and reminders, you will get your backups set up in a way that protects your business.

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• Translating with Google Translate without API and C# Code

  - by Rick Strahl

  Some time back I created a data base driven ASP.NET Resource Provider along with some tools that make it easy to edit ASP.NET resources interactively in a Web application. One of the small helper features of the interactive resource admin tool is the ability to do simple translations using both Google Translate and Babelfish. Here's what this looks like in the resource administration form: When a resource is displayed, the user can click a Translate button and it will show the current resource text and then lets you set the source and target languages to translate. The Go button fires the translation for both Google and Babelfish and displays them - pressing use then changes the language of the resource to the target language and sets the resource value to the newly translated value. It's a nice and quick way to get a quick translation going. Ch… Ch… Changes Originally, both implementations basically did some screen scraping of the interactive Web sites and retrieved translated text out of result HTML. Screen scraping is always kind of an iffy proposition as content can be changed easily, but surprisingly that code worked for many years without fail. Recently however, Google at least changed their input pages to use AJAX callbacks and the page updates no longer worked the same way. End result: The Google translate code was broken. Now, Google does have an official API that you can access, but the API is being deprecated and you actually need to have an API key. Since I have public samples that people can download the API key is an issue if I want people to have the samples work out of the box - the only way I could even do this is by sharing my API key (not allowed).   However, after a bit of spelunking and playing around with the public site however I found that Google's interactive translate page actually makes callbacks using plain public access without an API key. By intercepting some of those AJAX calls and calling them directly from code I was able to get translation back up and working with minimal fuss, by parsing out the JSON these AJAX calls return. I don't think this particular Warning: This is hacky code, but after a fair bit of testing I found this to work very well with all sorts of languages and accented and escaped text etc. as long as you stick to small blocks of translated text. I thought I'd share it in case anybody else had been relying on a screen scraping mechanism like I did and needed a non-API based replacement. Here's the code: /// <summary> /// Translates a string into another language using Google's translate API JSON calls. /// <seealso>Class TranslationServices</seealso> /// </summary> /// <param name="Text">Text to translate. Should be a single word or sentence.</param> /// <param name="FromCulture"> /// Two letter culture (en of en-us, fr of fr-ca, de of de-ch) /// </param> /// <param name="ToCulture"> /// Two letter culture (as for FromCulture) /// </param> public string TranslateGoogle(string text, string fromCulture, string toCulture) { fromCulture = fromCulture.ToLower(); toCulture = toCulture.ToLower(); // normalize the culture in case something like en-us was passed // retrieve only en since Google doesn't support sub-locales string[] tokens = fromCulture.Split('-'); if (tokens.Length > 1) fromCulture = tokens[0]; // normalize ToCulture tokens = toCulture.Split('-'); if (tokens.Length > 1) toCulture = tokens[0]; string url = string.Format(@"http://translate.google.com/translate_a/t?client=j&text={0}&hl=en&sl={1}&tl={2}", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(text),fromCulture,toCulture); // Retrieve Translation with HTTP GET call string html = null; try { WebClient web = new WebClient(); // MUST add a known browser user agent or else response encoding doen't return UTF-8 (WTF Google?) web.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.UserAgent, "Mozilla/5.0"); web.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.AcceptCharset, "UTF-8"); // Make sure we have response encoding to UTF-8 web.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8; html = web.DownloadString(url); } catch (Exception ex) { this.ErrorMessage = Westwind.Globalization.Resources.Resources.ConnectionFailed + ": " + ex.GetBaseException().Message; return null; } // Extract out trans":"...[Extracted]...","from the JSON string string result = Regex.Match(html, "trans\":(\".*?\"),\"", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase).Groups[1].Value; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(result)) { this.ErrorMessage = Westwind.Globalization.Resources.Resources.InvalidSearchResult; return null; } //return WebUtils.DecodeJsString(result); // Result is a JavaScript string so we need to deserialize it properly JavaScriptSerializer ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); return ser.Deserialize(result, typeof(string)) as string; } To use the code is straightforward enough - simply provide a string to translate and a pair of two letter source and target languages: string result = service.TranslateGoogle("Life is great and one is spoiled when it goes on and on and on", "en", "de"); TestContext.WriteLine(result); How it works The code to translate is fairly straightforward. It basically uses the URL I snagged from the Google Translate Web Page slightly changed to return a JSON result (&client=j) instead of the funky nested PHP style JSON array that the default returns. The JSON result returned looks like this: {"sentences":[{"trans":"Das Leben ist großartig und man wird verwöhnt, wenn es weiter und weiter und weiter geht","orig":"Life is great and one is spoiled when it goes on and on and on","translit":"","src_translit":""}],"src":"en","server_time":24} I use WebClient to make an HTTP GET call to retrieve the JSON data and strip out part of the full JSON response that contains the actual translated text. Since this is a JSON response I need to deserialize the JSON string in case it's encoded (for upper/lower ASCII chars or quotes etc.). Couple of odd things to note in this code: First note that a valid user agent string must be passed (or at least one starting with a common browser identification - I use Mozilla/5.0). Without this Google doesn't encode the result with UTF-8, but instead uses a ISO encoding that .NET can't easily decode. Google seems to ignore the character set header and use the user agent instead which is - odd to say the least. The other is that the code returns a full JSON response. Rather than use the full response and decode it into a custom type that matches Google's result object, I just strip out the translated text. Yeah I know that's hacky but avoids an extra type and firing up the JavaScript deserializer. My internal version uses a small DecodeJsString() method to decode Javascript without the overhead of a full JSON parser. It's obviously not rocket science but as mentioned above what's nice about it is that it works without an Google API key. I can't vouch on how many translates you can do before there are cut offs but in my limited testing running a few stress tests on a Web server under load I didn't run into any problems. Limitations There are some restrictions with this: It only works on single words or single sentences - multiple sentences (delimited by .) are cut off at the ".". There is also a length limitation which appears to happen at around 220 characters or so. While that may not sound  like much for typical word or phrase translations this this is plenty of length. Use with a grain of salt - Google seems to be trying to limit their exposure to usage of the Translate APIs so this code might break in the future, but for now at least it works. FWIW, I also found that Google's translation is not as good as Babelfish, especially for contextual content like sentences. Google is faster, but Babelfish tends to give better translations. This is why in my translation tool I show both Google and Babelfish values retrieved. You can check out the code for this in the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit's TranslationService.cs file which contains both the Google and Babelfish translation code pieces. Ironically the Babelfish code has been working forever using screen scraping and continues to work just fine today. I think it's a good idea to have multiple translation providers in case one is down or changes its format, hence the dual display in my translation form above. I hope this has been helpful to some of you - I've actually had many small uses for this code in a number of applications and it's sweet to have a simple routine that performs these operations for me easily. Resources Live Localization Sample Localization Resource Provider Administration form that includes options to translate text using Google and Babelfish interactively. TranslationService.cs The full source code in the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit's Globalization library that contains the translation code. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in CSharp  HTTP   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Mr Flibble: As Seen Through a Lens, Darkly

  - by Phil Factor

  One of the rewarding things about getting involved with Simple-Talk has been in meeting and working with some pretty daunting talents. I’d like to say that Dom Reed’s talents are at the end of the visible spectrum, but then there is Richard, who pops up on national radio occasionally, presenting intellectual programs, Andrew, master of the ukulele, with his pioneering local history work, and Tony with marathon running and his past as a university lecturer. However, Dom, who is Red Gate’s head of creative design and who did the preliminary design work for Simple-Talk, has taken the art photography to an extreme that was impossible before Photoshop. He’s not the first person to take a photograph of himself every day for two years, but he is definitely the first to weave the results into a frightening narrative that veers from comedy to pathos, using all the arts of Photoshop to create a fictional character, Mr Flibble.   Have a look at some of the Flickr pages. Uncle Spike The B-Men – Woolverine The 2011 BoyZ iN Sink reunion tour turned out to be their last Error 404 – Flibble not found Mr Flibble is not a normal type of alter-ego. We generally prefer to choose bronze age warriors of impossibly magnificent physique and stamina; superheroes who bestride the world, scorning the forces of evil and anarchy in a series noble and righteous quests. Not so Dom, whose Mr Flibble is vulnerable, and laid low by an addiction to toxic substances. His work has gained an international cult following and is used as course material by several courses in photography. Although his work was for a while ignored by the more conventional world of ‘art’ photography they became famous through the internet. His photos have received well over a million views on Flickr. It was definitely time to turn this work into a book, because the whole sequence of images has its maximum effect when seen in sequence. He has a Kickstarter project page, one of the first following the recent UK launch of the crowdfunding platform. The publication of the book should be a major event and the £45 I shall divvy up will be one of the securest investments I shall ever make. The local news in Cambridge picked up on the project and I can quote from the report by the excellent Cabume website , the source of Tech news from the ‘Cambridge cluster’ Put really simply Mr Flibble likes to dress up and take pictures of himself. One of the benefits of a split personality, however is that Mr Flibble is supported in his endeavour by Reed’s top notch photography skills, supreme mastery of Photoshop and unflinching dedication to the cause. The duo have collaborated to take a picture every day for the past 730-plus days. It is not a big surprise that neither Mr Flibble nor Reed watches any TV: In addition to his full-time role at Cambridge software house,Red Gate Software as head of creativity and the two to five hours a day he spends taking the Mr Flibble shots, Reed also helps organise the . And now Reed is using Kickstarter to see if the world is ready for a Mr Flibble coffee table book. Judging by the early response it is. At the time of writing, just a few days after it went live, ‘I Drink Lead Paint: An absurd photography book by Mr Flibble’ had raised £1,545 of the £10,000 target it needs to raise by the Friday 30 November deadline from 37 backers. Following the standard Kickstarter template, Reed is offering a series of rewards based on the amount pledged, ranging from a Mr Flibble desktop wallpaper for pledges of £5 or more to a signed copy of the book for pledges of £45 or more, right up to a starring role in the book for £1,500. Mr Flibble is unquestionably one of the more deranged Kickstarter hopefuls, but don’t think for a second that he doesn’t have a firm grasp on the challenges he faces on the road to immortalisation on 150 gsm stock. Under the section ‘risks and challenges’ on his Kickstarter page his statement begins: “An angry horde of telepathic iguanas discover the world’s last remaining stock of vintage lead paint and hold me to ransom. Gosh how I love to guzzle lead paint. Anyway… faced with such brazen bravado, I cower at the thought of taking on their combined might and die a sad and lonely Flibble deprived of my one and only true liquid love.” At which point, Reed manages to wrestle away the keyboard, giving him the opportunity to present slightly more cogent analysis of the obstacles the project must still overcome. We asked Reed a few questions about Mr Flibble’s Kickstarter adventure and felt that his responses were worth publishing in full: Firstly, how did you manage it – holding down a full time job and also conceiving and executing these ideas on a daily basis? I employed a small team of ferocious gerbils to feed me ideas on a daily basis. Whilst most of their ideas were incomprehensibly rubbish and usually revolved around food, just occasionally they’d give me an idea like my B-Men series. As a backup plan though, I found that the best way to generate ideas was to actually start taking photos. If I were to stand in front of the camera, pull a silly face, place a vegetable on my head or something else equally stupid, the resulting photo of that would typically spark an idea when I came to look at it. Sitting around idly trying to think of an idea was doomed to result in no ideas. I admit that I really struggled with time. I’m proud that I never missed a day, but it was definitely hard when you were late from work, tired or doing something socially on the same day. I don’t watch TV, which I guess really helps, because I’d frequently be spending 2-5 hours taking and processing the photos every day. Are there any overlaps between software development and creative thinking? Software is an inherently creative business and the speed that it moves ensures you always have to find solutions to new things. Everyone in the team needs to be a problem solver. Has it helped me specifically with my photography? Probably. Working within teams that continually need to figure out new stuff keeps the brain feisty I suppose, and I guess I’m continually exposed to a lot of possible sources of inspiration. How specifically will this Kickstarter project allow you to test the commercial appeal of your work and do you plan to get the book into shops? It’s taken a while to be confident saying it, but I know that people like the work that I do. I’ve had well over a million views of my pictures, many humbling comments and I know I’ve garnered some loyal fans out there who anticipate my next photo. For me, this Kickstarter is about seeing if there’s worth to my work beyond just making people smile. In an online world where there’s an abundance of freely available content, can you hope to receive anything from what you do, or would people just move onto the next piece of content if you happen to ask for some support? A book has been the single-most requested thing that people have asked me to produce and it’s something that I feel would showcase my work well. It’s just hard to convince people in the publishing industry just now to take any kind of risk – they’ve been hit hard. If I can show that people would like my work enough to buy a book, then it sends a pretty clear picture that publishers might hear, or it gives me the confidence enough to invest in myself a bit more – hard to do when you’re riddled with self-doubt! I’d love to see my work in the shops, yes. I could see it being the thing that someone flips through idly as they’re Christmas shopping and recognizing that it’d be just the perfect gift for their difficult to buy for friend or relative. That said, working in the software industry means I’m clearly aware of how I could use technology to distribute my work, but I can’t deny that there’s something very appealing to having a physical thing to hold in your hands. If the project is successful is there a chance that it could become a full-time job? At the moment that seems like a distant dream, as should this be successful, there are many more steps I’d need to take to reach any kind of business viability. Kickstarter seems exactly that – a way for people to help kick start me into something that could take off. If people like my work and want me to succeed with it, then taking a look at my Kickstarter page (and hopefully pledging a bit of support) would make my elbows blush considerably. So there is is. An opportunity to open the wallet just a bit to ensure that one of the more unusual talents sees the light in the format it deserves.  

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