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  • USB hard drive doesn't graceful power off after eject on Windows 7

    - by Sim
    I have a couple of Seagate FreeAgent Go external USB hard drives and would like them to gracefully power off after ejecting in Windows 7. With Windows XP a few seconds after they are ejected they gracefully power off. When ejecting them on Windows 7 they just stay on and have to be physically disconnected before they lose power. I have checked the hard drive removal policy and it is set to quick removal. I have also looked in the Seagate forums but I couldn't find any info on this so I thought I'd ask the SuperUser community on any ideas why the difference and how to get the same behaviour in Windows 7 as in XP? Update: I am finding that this also happens with USB thumb drives as well. My current theory is that there were changes to the driver model with Vista/Win 7 that haven't been reflected in the device drivers yet. So things that worked under XP don't under Win7 as the drivers haven't been updated for the new model. Does that sound right?

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  • Silabs cp2102 driver problem

    - by Zxy
    I downloaded appropriate driver from its own site, unzipped it and then tried to install it. But: root@ghostrider:/home/zero/Downloads# tar xvf cp210x-3.1.0.tar.gz cp210x-3.1.0/ cp210x-3.1.0/COPYING cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/ cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x-3.1.0.spec cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/.rpmmacros cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/configure cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210x.c cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210x.h cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210xuniversal.c cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210xuniversal.h cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/installmod cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/Makefile24 cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/Makefile26 cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/rpmmacros24 cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/rpmmacros26 cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/Rules.make cp210x-3.1.0/INSTALL cp210x-3.1.0/makerpm cp210x-3.1.0/PACKAGE-LIST cp210x-3.1.0/README cp210x-3.1.0/RELEASE-NOTES cp210x-3.1.0/REPORTING-BUGS cp210x-3.1.0/rpm/ cp210x-3.1.0/rpm/brp-java-repack-jars cp210x-3.1.0/rpm/brp-python-bytecompile cp210x-3.1.0/rpm/check-rpaths cp210x-3.1.0/rpm/check-rpaths-worker root@ghostrider:/home/zero/Downloads# cd cp210x-3.1.0 root@ghostrider:/home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0# ls COPYING cp210x-3.1.0.spec makerpm README REPORTING-BUGS cp210x INSTALL PACKAGE-LIST RELEASE-NOTES rpm root@ghostrider:/home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0# run ./makerpm No command 'run' found, did you mean: Command 'zrun' from package 'moreutils' (universe) Command 'runq' from package 'exim4-daemon-heavy' (main) Command 'runq' from package 'exim4-daemon-light' (main) Command 'runq' from package 'sendmail-bin' (universe) Command 'grun' from package 'grun' (universe) Command 'qrun' from package 'torque-client' (universe) Command 'qrun' from package 'torque-client-x11' (universe) Command 'lrun' from package 'lustre-utils' (universe) Command 'rn' from package 'trn' (multiverse) Command 'rn' from package 'trn4' (multiverse) Command 'rup' from package 'rstat-client' (universe) Command 'srun' from package 'slurm-llnl' (universe) run: command not found root@ghostrider:/home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0# sudo ./makerpm + uname -r + kernel_release=3.2.0-25-generic-pae + pwd + current_dir=/home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0 + export current_dir + uname -r + KVER=3.2.0-25-generic-pae + echo 3.2.0-25-generic-pae + awk -F . -- { print $1 } + KVER1=3 + echo 3.2.0-25-generic-pae + awk -F . -- { print $2 } + KVER2=2 + sed -e s/3\.2\.//g + echo 3.2.0-25-generic-pae + KVER3=0-25-generic-pae + [ -f /root/.rpmmacros ] + echo 2 2 + [ 2 == 4 ] ./makerpm: 25: [: 2: unexpected operator + echo 0-25-generic-pae 0-25-generic-pae + [ 0-25-generic-pae -gt 15 ] ./makerpm: 29: [: Illegal number: 0-25-generic-pae + cp /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/rpmmacros24 /root/.rpmmacros + d=/var/tmp/silabs + [ ! -d /var/tmp/silabs ] + mkdir /var/tmp/silabs + cd /var/tmp/silabs + r=/var/tmp/silabs/rpmbuild + o=cp210x-3.1.0 + s=/var/tmp/silabs/rpmbuild/SOURCES + spec=cp210x-3.1.0.spec + rm -rf /var/tmp/silabs/rpmbuild + mkdir rpmbuild + mkdir rpmbuild/SOURCES + mkdir rpmbuild/SRPMS + mkdir rpmbuild/SPECS + mkdir rpmbuild/BUILD + mkdir rpmbuild/RPMS + cd /var/tmp/silabs/rpmbuild/SOURCES + rm -rf cp210x-3.1.0 + mkdir cp210x-3.1.0 + cp -r /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/Makefile24 /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/Makefile26 /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x- 3.1.0/cp210x/Rules.make /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/configure /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210x.c /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x- 3.1.0/cp210x/cp210x.h /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210xuniversal.c /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/cp210xuniversal.h /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x- 3.1.0/cp210x/installmod /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/rpmmacros24 /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/rpmmacros26 cp210x-3.1.0 + echo 2 2 + [ 2 == 4 ] ./makerpm: 64: [: 2: unexpected operator + echo 0-25-generic-pae 0-25-generic-pae + [ 0-25-generic-pae -gt 15 ] ./makerpm: 68: [: Illegal number: 0-25-generic-pae + cp /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/.rpmmacros24 cp210x-3.1.0/.rpmmacros cp: cannot stat `/home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x/.rpmmacros24': No such file or directory + MyCopy=0 + rm -f cp210x-3.1.0.tar + rm -f cp210x-3.1.0.tar.gz + tar -cf cp210x-3.1.0.tar cp210x-3.1.0 + gzip cp210x-3.1.0.tar + cp /home/zero/Downloads/cp210x-3.1.0/cp210x-3.1.0.spec /var/tmp/silabs/rpmbuild/SPECS + rpmbuild -ba /var/tmp/silabs/rpmbuild/SPECS/cp210x-3.1.0.spec ./makerpm: 121: ./makerpm: rpmbuild: not found + [ -f /root/.rpmmacros.cp210x ] How may I solve my problem? Thanks

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  • How to Install a Wireless Card in Linux Using Windows Drivers

    - by Justin Garrison
    Linux has come a long way with hardware support, but if you have a wireless card that still does not have native Linux drivers you might be able to get the card working with a Windows driver and ndiswrapper. Using a Windows driver inside of Linux may also give you faster transfer rates or better encryption support depending on your wireless card. If your wireless card is working, it is not recommended to install the Windows driver just for fun because it could cause a conflict with the native Linux driver Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Smart Taskbar Is a Thumb Friendly Android Task Launcher Comix is an Awesome Comics Archive Viewer for Linux Get the MakeUseOf eBook Guide to Speeding Up Windows for Free Need Tech Support? Call the Star Wars Help Desk! [Video Classic] Reclaim Vertical UI Space by Adding a Toolbar to the Left or Right Side of Firefox Androidify Turns You into an Android-style Avatar

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  • Ruby on Rails - Belongs_to and Active Admin not creating foreign ID

    - by Milo
    I have the following setup: class Category < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :products end class Product < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :category has_attached_file :photo, :styles => { :medium => "300x300>", :thumb => "200x200>" } validates_attachment_content_type :photo, :content_type => /\Aimage\/.*\Z/ end ActiveAdmin.register Product do permit_params :title, :price, :slideshow, :photo, :category form do |f| f.inputs "Product Details" do f.input :title f.input :category f.input :price f.input :slideshow f.input :photo, :required => false, :as => :file end f.actions end show do |ad| attributes_table do row :title row :category row :photo do image_tag(ad.photo.url(:medium)) end end end index do column :id column :title column :category column :price do |product| number_to_currency product.price end actions end class ProductController < ApplicationController def create @product = Product.create(params[:id]) end end Every time I make a product item in activeadmin the category comes up empty. It wont populate the column category_id for the product. It just leaves it empty. What am I doing wrong?

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  • Can you swap dpi buttons on the Astra Dragon War mouse with 4th and 5th buttons?

    - by Denny Nuyts
    I'm left-handed and I'm in need of a good computer mouse with at least five buttons. However, most computer mice on the market are sadly right-handed and very impracticable to use with the extra buttons on my pinkie side instead of on my thumb side. The Dragon War Astra has two buttons on both sides. Buttons 4 and 5 on the left side and the dpi-buttons on the right side. If I were just able to re-assign them so they swap positions I'd have a great left-handed mouse. Sadly, the program X-Mouse Button Control doesn't allow the user to re-assign dpi buttons. My question is whether there exist other methods to still get it to work for me (third party programs, perhaps?). Or should I get another gaming mouse?

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  • How to Boot a VMware Virtual Machine from a USB Drive

    - by Usman
    Do you have an OS installed on your USB thumb drive? Booting from it in a VM is now possible, you’ll just have to use a simple trick to get it to work. Last week we showed you how to put Ubuntu on a USB drive in a separate partition, and we also discussed working with VMware Player (our favourite VM Client). But have you ever tried booting from a USB drive in VMWare? It doesn’t allow doing so, but we will force it to boot from a USB, with a bit of old geekery. If you remember, we have showed you how to boot from a USB drive even if your old PC doesn’t allow booting from one. That’s right, using Plop Boot Manager. All we need to do is to load the Plop ISO in VMware, attach and enable the USB drive in VMware, and finally select the USB option in Plop Boot Manager to boot from the USB. So, visit the Plop boot manager download site. HTG Explains: When Do You Need to Update Your Drivers? How to Make the Kindle Fire Silk Browser *Actually* Fast! Amazon’s New Kindle Fire Tablet: the How-To Geek Review

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  • Practical RAID Performance?

    - by wag2639
    I've always thought the following to be a general rule of thumb for RAID: RAID 0: Best performance for READ and WRITE from stripping, greatest risk RAID 1: Redundant, decent for READ (I believe it can read from different parts of a file from different hard drives), not the best for WRITE RAID 0+1 (01): combines redundancy of RAID 1 with performance of RAID 0 RAID 1+0 (10): slightly better version of RAID 0+1 RAID 5: good READ performance, bad WRITE performance, redundant IS THIS ASSUMPTION CORRECT? (and how do they compare to a JBOD setup for R/W IO performance) Are certain practical RAID setups better for different applications: gaming, video editing, database (Acccess or SQL)? I was thinking about hard disk drives but does this apply to solid state drives as well?

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  • MySQL Connect in 4 Days - Sessions From Users and Customers

    - by Bertrand Matthelié
    72 1024x768 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif";} Let’s review today the conference sessions where users and customers will describe their use of MySQL as well as best practices. Remember you can plan your schedule with Schedule Builder. Saturday, 11.30 am, Room Golden Gate 7: MySQL and Hadoop—Chris Schneider, Ning.com Saturday, 1.00 pm, Room Golden Gate 7: Thriving in a MySQL Replicated World—Ed Presz and Andrew Yee, Ticketmaster Saturday, 1.00 pm, Room Golden Gate 8: Rick’s RoTs (Rules of Thumb)—Rick James, Yahoo! Saturday, 2.30 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: Scaling Pinterest—Yashwanth Nelapati and Evrhet Milam, Pinterest Saturday, 4.00 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: MySQL Pool Scanner: An Automated Service for Host Management—Levi Junkert, Facebook Sunday, 10.15 am, Room Golden Gate 3: Big Data Is a Big Scam (Most of the Time)—Daniel Austin, PayPal Sunday, 11.45 am, Room Golden Gate 3: MySQL at Twitter: Development and Deployment—Jeremy Cole and Davi Arnaut, Twitter Sunday, 1.15 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: CERN’s MySQL-as-a-Service Deployment with Oracle VM: Empowering Users—Dawid Wojcik and Eric Grancher, DBA, CERN Sunday, 2.45 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: Database Scaling at Mozilla—Sheeri Cabral, Mozilla Sunday, 5.45 pm, Room Golden Gate 4: MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition @ El Chavo, Latin America’s #1 Facebook Game—Carlos Morales, Playful Play You can check out the full program here as well as in the September edition of the MySQL newsletter. Not registered yet? You can still save US$ 300 over the on-site fee – Register Now!

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  • DIVIDE vs division operator in #dax

    - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)
    Alberto Ferrari wrote an interesting article about DIVIDE performance in DAX. This new function has been introduced in SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 SP1, so it is available also in Excel 2013 (which still doesn’t have other features/fixes introduced by following Cumulative Updates…). The idea that instead of writing: IF ( Sales[Quantity] <> 0, Sales[Amount] / Sales[Quantity], BLANK () ) you can write: DIVIDE ( Sales[Amount], Sales[Quantity] ) There is a third optional argument in DIVIDE that defines the result in case the denominator (second argument) is zero, and by default its value is BLANK, so I omitted the third argument in my example. Using DIVIDE is very important, especially when you use a measure in MDX (for example in an Excel PivotTable) because it raise the chance that the non empty evaluation for the result is evaluated in bulk mode instead of cell-by-cell. However, from a DAX point of view, you might find it’s better to use the standard division operator removing the IF statement. I suggest you to read Alberto’s article, because you will find that an expression applying a filter using FILTER is faster than using CALCULATE, which is against any rule of thumb you might have read until now! Again, this is not always true, and depends on many conditions – trying to simplify, we might say that for a simple calculation, the query plan generated by FILTER could be more efficient – but, as usual, it depends, and 90% of the times using FILTER instead of CALCULATE produces slower performance. Do not take anything for granted, and always check the query plan when performance are your first issue!

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  • Incremental backups in Quickbooks 2005

    - by Nathan DeWitt
    My church uses Quickbooks 2005. They have a backup to a 512 MB thumbdrive. They have been backing up about every week for the past 18 months. The filesize of the backups have grown from 14 MB to about 23 MB. I was planning on giving them a 1 or 2 GB thumb drive and calling it a day, but when I dumped this info into Excel and projected out the growth rate, I found that we'll hit 1 GB in July, and 10 GB in about another 18 months, and then 100 GB about 18 months after that. It looks to me like Quickbooks saves all the transactions with every backup. Is there a way to force incremental backups? If this is the way it is, that's fine, but I'd rather not keep buying another order of magnitude of storage space every 18 months. Can I safely delete the previous backups, and just keep the recent 2 or 3 months worth? Thanks.

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  • Url rewrite subfolder to root and forbid accessing subfolder

    - by Alessandro Pezzato
    I have drupal installed in a subfolder drupal, but I want to access pages as it is in root folder: http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/drupal I'm able to have this working, but it's also working with url containing subfolder, so I have http://www.example.com and a clone site in http://www.example.com/drupal What is the rule to forbid access to subfolder? I want all url starting with http://www.example.com/drupal being forbidden. This is .htaccess in / directory: Options -Indexes Options +FollowSymLinks <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] RewriteRule ^(.*+)$ drupal/$1 [L,QSA] </IfModule> And this is drupal .htaccess in /drupal/ directory: Options -Indexes Options +FollowSymLinks ErrorDocument 404 index.php DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm # Override PHP settings that cannot be changed at runtime. See # sites/default/default.settings.php and drupal_initialize_variables() in # includes/bootstrap.inc for settings that can be changed at runtime. # PHP 5, Apache 1 and 2. <IfModule mod_php5.c> php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off php_flag magic_quotes_sybase off php_flag register_globals off php_flag session.auto_start off php_value mbstring.http_input pass php_value mbstring.http_output pass php_flag mbstring.encoding_translation off </IfModule> # Requires mod_expires to be enabled. <IfModule mod_expires.c> # Enable expirations. ExpiresActive On # Cache all files for 2 weeks after access (A). ExpiresDefault A1209600 <FilesMatch \.php$> # Do not allow PHP scripts to be cached unless they explicitly send cache # headers themselves. Otherwise all scripts would have to overwrite the # headers set by mod_expires if they want another caching behavior. This may # fail if an error occurs early in the bootstrap process, and it may cause # problems if a non-Drupal PHP file is installed in a subdirectory. ExpiresActive Off </FilesMatch> </IfModule> # Various rewrite rules. <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine on # Block access to "hidden" directories whose names begin with a period. This # includes directories used by version control systems such as Subversion or # Git to store control files. Files whose names begin with a period, as well # as the control files used by CVS, are protected by the FilesMatch directive # above. RewriteRule "(^|/)\." - [F] # To redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix, # (http://example.com/... will be redirected to http://www.example.com/...) # uncomment the following: # RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC] # RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] # # To redirect all users to access the site WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix, # (http://www.example.com/... will be redirected to http://example.com/...) # uncomment the following: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] RewriteBase /drupal # Pass all requests not referring directly to files in the filesystem to # index.php. Clean URLs are handled in drupal_environment_initialize(). RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico #RewriteRule ^ index.php [L] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA] # Rules to correctly serve gzip compressed CSS and JS files. # Requires both mod_rewrite and mod_headers to be enabled. <IfModule mod_headers.c> # Serve gzip compressed CSS files if they exist and the client accepts gzip. RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-encoding} gzip RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.gz -s RewriteRule ^(.*)\.css $1\.css\.gz [QSA] # Serve gzip compressed JS files if they exist and the client accepts gzip. RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-encoding} gzip RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.gz -s RewriteRule ^(.*)\.js $1\.js\.gz [QSA] # Serve correct content types, and prevent mod_deflate double gzip. RewriteRule \.css\.gz$ - [T=text/css,E=no-gzip:1] RewriteRule \.js\.gz$ - [T=text/javascript,E=no-gzip:1] <FilesMatch "(\.js\.gz|\.css\.gz)$"> # Serve correct encoding type. Header append Content-Encoding gzip # Force proxies to cache gzipped & non-gzipped css/js files separately. Header append Vary Accept-Encoding </FilesMatch> </IfModule> </IfModule>

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  • Creating a Synchronous BPEL composite using File Adapter

    - by [email protected]
    By default, the JDeveloper wizard generates asynchronous WSDLs when you use technology adapters. Typically, a user follows these steps when creating an adapter scenario in 11g: 1) Create a SOA Application with either "Composite with BPEL" or an "Empty Composite". Furthermore, if  the user chooses "Empty Composite", then he or she is required to drop the "BPEL Process" from the "Service Components" pane onto the SOA Composite Editor. Either way, the user comes to the screen below where he/she fills in the process details. Please note that the user is required to choose "Define Service Later" as the template. 2) Creates the inbound service and outbound references and wires them with the BPEL component:     3) And, finally creates the BPEL process with the initiating <receive> activity to retrieve the payload and an <invoke> activity to write the payload.     This is how most BPEL processes that use Adapters are modeled. And, if we scrutinize the generated WSDL, we can clearly see that the generated WSDL is one way and that makes the BPEL process asynchronous (see below)   In other words, the inbound FileAdapter would poll for files in the directory and for every file that it finds there, it would translate the content into XML and publish to BPEL. But, since the BPEL process is asynchronous, the adapter would return immediately after the publish and perform the required post processing e.g. deletion/archival and so on.  The disadvantage with such asynchronous BPEL processes is that it becomes difficult to throttle the inbound adapter. In otherwords, the inbound adapter would keep sending messages to BPEL without waiting for the downstream business processes to complete. This might lead to several issues including higher memory usage, CPU usage and so on. In order to alleviate these problems, we will manually tweak the WSDL and BPEL artifacts into synchronous processes. Once we have synchronous BPEL processes, the inbound adapter would automatically throttle itself since the adapter would be forced to wait for the downstream process to complete with a <reply> before processing the next file or message and so on. Please see the tweaked WSDL below and please note that we have converted the one-way to a two-way WSDL and thereby making the WSDL synchronous: Add a <reply> activity to the inbound adapter partnerlink at the end of your BPEL process e.g.   Finally, your process will look like this:   You are done.   Please remember that such an excercise is NOT required for Mediator since the Mediator routing rules are sequential by default. In other words, the Mediator uses the caller thread (inbound file adapter thread) for processing the routing rules. This is the case even if the WSDL for mediator is one-way.

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  • 256 Worker Role 3D Rendering Demo is now a Lab on my Azure Course

    - by Alan Smith
    Ever since I came up with the crazy idea of creating an Azure application that would spin up 256 worker roles (please vote if you like it ) to render a 3D animation created using the Kinect depth camera I have been trying to think of something useful to do with it. I have also been busy working on developing training materials for a Windows Azure course that I will be delivering through a training partner in Stockholm, and for customers wanting to learn Windows Azure. I hit on the idea of combining the render demo and a course lab and creating a lab where the students would create and deploy their own mini render farms, which would participate in a single render job, consisting of 2,000 frames. The architecture of the solution is shown below. As students would be creating and deploying their own applications, I thought it would be fun to introduce some competitiveness into the lab. In the 256 worker role demo I capture the rendering statistics for each role, so it was fairly simple to include the students name in these statistics. This allowed the process monitor application to capture the number of frames each student had rendered and display a high-score table. When I demoed the application I deployed one instance that started rendering a frame every few minutes, and the challenge for the students was to deploy and scale their applications, and then overtake my single role instance by the end of the lab time. I had the process monitor running on the projector during the lab so the class could see the progress of their deployments, and how they were performing against my implementation and their classmates. When I tested the lab for the first time in Oslo last week it was a great success, the students were keen to be the first to build and deploy their solution and then watch the frames appear. As the students mostly had MSDN suspicions they were able to scale to the full 20 worker role instances and before long we had over 100 worker roles working on the animation. There were, however, a few issues who the couple of issues caused by the competitive nature of the lab. The first student to scale the application to 20 instances would render the most frames and win; there was no way for others to catch up. Also, as they were competing against each other, there was no incentive to help others on the course get their application up and running. I have now re-written the lab to divide the student into teams that will compete to render the most frames. This means that if one developer on the team can deploy and scale quickly, the other team still has a chance to catch up. It also means that if a student finishes quickly and puts their team in the lead they will have an incentive to help the other developers on their team get up and running. As I was using “Sharks with Lasers” for a lot of my demos, and reserved the sharkswithfreakinlasers namespaces for some of the Azure services (well somebody had to do it), the students came up with some creative alternatives, like “Camels with Cannons” and “Honey Badgers with Homing Missiles”. That gave me the idea for the teams having to choose a creative name involving animals and weapons. The team rendering architecture diagram is shown below.   Render Challenge Rules In order to ensure fair play a number of rules are imposed on the lab. ·         The class will be divided into teams, each team choses a name. ·         The team name must consist of a ferocious animal combined with a hazardous weapon. ·         Teams can allocate as many worker roles as they can muster to the render job. ·         Frame processing statistics and rendered frames will be vigilantly monitored; any cheating, tampering, and other foul play will result in penalties. The screenshot below shows an example of the team render farm in action, Badgers with Bombs have taken a lead over Camels with Cannons, and both are  leaving the Sharks with Lasers standing. If you are interested in attending a scheduled delivery of my Windows Azure or Windows Azure Service bus courses, or would like on-site training, more details are here.

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  • C# : When to go Fluent

    - by ach
    In many respects I really like the idea of Fluent interfaces, but with all of the modern features of C# (initializers, lambdas, named parameters) I find myself thinking, "is it worth it?", and "Is this the right pattern to use?". Could anyone give me, if not an accepted practice, at least their own experience or decision matrix for when to use the Fluent pattern? Conclusion: Some good rules of thumb from the answers so far: Fluent interfaces help greatly when you have more actions than setters, since calls benefit more from the context pass-through. Fluent interfaces should be thought of as a layer over top of an api, not the sole means of use. The modern features such as lambdas, initializers, and named parameters, can work hand-in-hand to make a fluent interface even more friendly. ... Edit: Here is an example of what I mean by the modern features making it feel less needed. Take for example a (perhaps poor example) Fluent interface that allows me to create an Employee like: Employees.CreateNew().WithFirstName("Peter") .WihtLastName("Gibbons") .WithManager() .WithFirstName("Bill") .WithLastName("Lumbergh") .WithTitle("Manager") .WithDepartment("Y2K"); Could easily be written with initiallizers like: Employees.Add(new Employee() { FirstName = "Peter", LastName = "Gibbons", Manager = new Employee() { FirstName = "Bill", LastName = "Lumbergh", Title = "Manager", Department = "Y2K" } }); I could also have used named parameters in a constructors in this example.

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  • See the Lord of the Rings Epic from the Perspective of Mordor [eBook]

    - by ETC
    Much like the wildly popular book “Wicked” mixed up the good/bad dichotomy in the Wizard of Oz, “The Last Ring-Bearer” shows us the Mordor’s take on the Lord of the Rings. The work of a Russian paleontologist, Kirill Yeskov, “The Last Ring-Bearer” frames the conflict in the Lord of the Rings from the perspective of the citizens of Mordor. Salon magazine offers this summary, as part of their larger review: In Yeskov’s retelling, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science “destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!” He’s in cahoots with the elves, who aim to become “masters of the world,” and turn Middle-earth into a “bad copy” of their magical homeland across the sea. Barad-dur, also known as the Dark Tower and Sauron’s citadel, is, by contrast, described as “that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.” Hit up the link below to grab a PDF of the official English translation of Yeskov’s work. The Last Ring-Bearer [via Salon] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Lucky Kid Gets Playable Angry Birds Cake [Video] See the Lord of the Rings Epic from the Perspective of Mordor [eBook] Smart Taskbar Is a Thumb Friendly Android Task Launcher Comix is an Awesome Comics Archive Viewer for Linux Get the MakeUseOf eBook Guide to Speeding Up Windows for Free Need Tech Support? Call the Star Wars Help Desk! [Video Classic]

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  • SQL SERVER – Why Do We Need Master Data Management – Importance and Significance of Master Data Management (MDM)

    - by pinaldave
    Let me paint a picture of everyday life for you.  Let’s say you and your wife both have address books for your groups of friends.  There is definitely overlap between them, so that you both have the addresses for your mutual friends, and there are addresses that only you know, and some only she knows.  They also might be organized differently.  You might list your friend under “J” for “Joe” or even under “W” for “Work,” while she might list him under “S” for “Joe Smith” or under your name because he is your friend.  If you happened to trade, neither of you would be able to find anything! This is where data management would be very important.  If you were to consolidate into one address book, you would have to set rules about how to organize the book, and both of you would have to follow them.  You would also make sure that poor Joe doesn’t get entered twice under “J” and under “S.” This might be a familiar situation to you, whether you are thinking about address books, record collections, books, or even shopping lists.  Wherever there is a lot of data to consolidate, you are going to run into problems unless everyone is following the same rules. I’m sure that my readers can figure out where I am going with this.  What is SQL Server but a computerized way to organize data?  And Microsoft is making it easier and easier to get all your “addresses” into one place.  In the  2008 version of SQL they introduced a new tool called Master Data Services (MDS) for Master Data Management, and they have improved it for the new 2012 version. MDM was hailed as a major improvement for business intelligence.  You might not think that an organizational system is terribly exciting, but think about the kind of “address books” a company might have.  Many companies have lots of important information, like addresses, credit card numbers, purchase history, and so much more.  To organize all this efficiently so that customers are well cared for and properly billed (only once, not never or multiple times!) is a major part of business intelligence. MDM comes into play because it will comb through these mountains of data and make sure that all the information is consistent, accurate, and all placed in one database so that employees don’t have to search high and low and waste their time. MDM also has operational MDM functions.  This is not a redundancy.  Operational MDM means that when one employee updates one bit of information in the database, for example – updating a new address for a customer, operational MDM ensures that this address is updated throughout the system so that all departments will have the correct information. Another cool thing about MDM is that it features Master Data Services Configuration Manager, which is exactly what it sounds like.  It has a built-in “helper” that lets you set up your database quickly, easily, and with the correct configurations.  While talking about cool features, I can’t skip over the add-in for Excel.  This allows you to link certain data to Excel files for easier sharing and uploading. In summary, I want to emphasize that the scariest part of the database is slowly disappearing.  Everyone knows that a database – one consolidated area for all your data – is a good idea, but the idea of setting one up is daunting.  But SQL Server is making data management easier and easier with features like Master Data Services (MDS). Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Master Data Services, MDM

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  • GWB | May 2010 Newsletter

    - by Staff of Geeks
    Geekswithblogs.net - May 2010 Newsletter   Was your newsletter messed up? If the first newsletter we sent was all white with links all over the place, I apologize. We haven’t sent a newsletter in quite some time and I forgot the rules of theming for email clients.   TechEd 2010 New Orleans - Who is coming? John and Jeff will be at TechEd 2010 New Orleans for a short time to pass out shirts to our bloggers. These are the standard GWB shirts you see some of our other bloggers wearing and one could be yours if you let us know you are coming and what your size is. We will announce where we will be once we arrive so you can wear your Geekswithblogs.net shirt and let everyone know where you blog. These shirts will be without URLs, if you want one of those, you will have to join the contest mentioned later in the newsletter. Deadline for response is next Wednesday? Email [email protected] to let us know you are coming!   wblo.gs Shortened Url Everyone has URL shorteners these days so we needed our own. Currently Geekswithblogs.net has implemented http://wblo.gs as a shortened URL for you blog. Instead of pushing people to geekswithblogs.net/your_url you can now use wblo.gs/your_url. We hope to published a version of the shortener that will give each post a short URL and a button via your blog to publish to Twitter. This release should be available in the early summer time period.   Always wanted one of our awesome Geekswithblogs.net T-Shirts? Starting on May 15th until July 13th, we will giving our Geekswithblogs.net t-shirts away to those members who create 30 technical posts. That is 30 posts in 60 days! This should not be a difficult task with all the new releases from Microsoft. You have Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation 2010, SharePoint 2010, Silverlight 4.0, Office 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, and so many others to pick from. We will be keeping an eye on the results and publishing those bloggers who successfully meet the requirements by the date. A few rules to remember. The post must be technical in nature, the post must be original content created by the blogger, and the post must be originated during the contest (no pulling content from you old blog). Each shirt will be customized with your URL on the back and you can let us know you size and address when you successfully complete the contest.   What features do you want to see? We would love to hear your feedback. It has been awhile since we have published a release of Geekswithblogs.net and we want to get your feature requests in it. Do you like a particular skin we don’t have? Do you want to see comments change? Do you want to see more Twitter integration? Whatever it is, we want to know. Submit your thoughts to [email protected] and we will start a dialog with you shortly after we receive them.   Follow Us on Twitter We want to hear from you and make sure you know what is going on with Geekswithblogs.net. Follow the staff on Twitter (@StaffOfGeeks) and feel free to let us know what you think or questions you have here.

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  • External USB Drive

    - by ErocM
    I have a server that I hooked up an external USB drive. It was formatted in windows and has files on it already. I'm new to Ubuntu so please be patient... I have two questions: Will Ubuntu see the drive since it was formatted in windows? How do I mount this drive or rather, how do I know it's seen by Ubuntu? Thanks! I did fdisk -l and this is what I have but I don't see it. It's a 1tb drive: Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0001eb47 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 499711 248832 83 Linux /dev/sda2 501758 625141759 312320001 5 Extended /dev/sda5 501760 625141759 312320000 8e Linux LVM Disk /dev/sdc: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/sdc doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/mapper/ubuntu-root: 316.6 GB, 316577677312 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38488 cylinders, total 618315776 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/mapper/ubuntu-root doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/mapper/ubuntu-swap_1: 3217 MB, 3217031168 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 391 cylinders, total 6283264 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 this is an external USB hard drive not a thumb drive :)

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  • How to install network drivers during installation?

    - by Matt
    I have a server that I'm attempting to install windows onto. However, the disk is an iscsi target provided by ipxe. Everything appears to go well until about 3/4 through the install process I get an error about a critical driver missing and the installation is cancelled. I would say the critical driver would be the network card. It's an intel nic and the drivers are not on the windows installation CD. I tried slipstreaming them with RTSevenLite, but after it created the CD it seems it failed to make it bootable. I've also not been successful in making a bootable USB thumb drive or USB HDD. I suspect a buggy bios even though I have the latest. How to install network drivers during installation? Windows used to provide an optional F6 during install feature but this seems to be missing in Windows Servert 2008. Perhaps there is a way to do this, or another method?

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  • Developing a feature which sole purpose to be taken out?

    - by adib
    What is the name of the pattern in which individual contributors (programmers/designers) developed an artifact for the sole purpose is to serve as a diversion so that management can remove that feature in the final product? This is a folklore I heard from an ex-colleague who used to work at a large game development company. At that company, it is well known that middle management is pressurized to "give inputs" and "make changes" to the product otherwise they risk being seen as not contributing to the project. This situation have delayed many projects because of these superfluous "management inputs". In one project at the above company, the artists and developers created a supernumerary animated character that appears in every cutscene and sticks out like a sore thumb. They designed it in such a way that it can be easily removed before the game is shipped (this was when games were still sold in physical media and not a downloadable product). Obviously the management then voted to remove the animation. On the positive side, management didn't introduced any unnecessary changes that would have delayed the project because they have shown that they provided constructive inputs to the product. This process pattern has a name among game programmers that work in corporates, but I forgot what was the actual name. I believe it's duck-something. Anybody can help pointing out the name and perhaps some rather credible reference to how the pattern develops?.

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  • T-SQL Tuesday #025 &ndash; CHECK Constraint Tricks

    - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)
    Allen White (blog | twitter), marathoner, SQL Server MVP and presenter, and all-around awesome author is hosting this month's T-SQL Tuesday on sharing SQL Server Tips and Tricks.  And for those of you who have attended my Revenge: The SQL presentation, you know that I have 1 or 2 of them.  You'll also know that I don't recommend using anything I talk about in a production system, and will continue that advice here…although you might be sorely tempted.  Suffice it to say I'm not using these examples myself, but I think they're worth sharing anyway. Some of you have seen or read about SQL Server constraints and have applied them to your table designs…unless you're a vendor ;)…and may even use CHECK constraints to limit numeric values, or length of strings, allowable characters and such.  CHECK constraints can, however, do more than that, and can even provide enhanced security and other restrictions. One tip or trick that I didn't cover very well in the presentation is using constraints to do unusual things; specifically, limiting or preventing inserts into tables.  The idea was to use a CHECK constraint in a way that didn't depend on the actual data: -- create a table that cannot accept data CREATE TABLE dbo.JustTryIt(a BIT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, CONSTRAINT chk_no_insert CHECK (GETDATE()=GETDATE()+1)) INSERT dbo.JustTryIt VALUES(1)   I'll let you run that yourself, but I'm sure you'll see that this is a pretty stupid table to have, since the CHECK condition will always be false, and therefore will prevent any data from ever being inserted.  I can't remember why I used this example but it was for some vague and esoteric purpose that applies to about, maybe, zero people.  I come up with a lot of examples like that. However, if you realize that these CHECKs are not limited to column references, and if you explore the SQL Server function list, you could come up with a few that might be useful.  I'll let the names describe what they do instead of explaining them all: CREATE TABLE NoSA(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_No_sa CHECK (SUSER_SNAME()<>'sa')) CREATE TABLE NoSysAdmin(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_No_sysadmin CHECK (IS_SRVROLEMEMBER('sysadmin')=0)) CREATE TABLE NoAdHoc(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_No_AdHoc CHECK (OBJECT_NAME(@@PROCID) IS NOT NULL)) CREATE TABLE NoAdHoc2(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_No_AdHoc2 CHECK (@@NESTLEVEL>0)) CREATE TABLE NoCursors(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_No_Cursors CHECK (@@CURSOR_ROWS=0)) CREATE TABLE ANSI_PADDING_ON(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_ANSI_PADDING_ON CHECK (@@OPTIONS & 16=16)) CREATE TABLE TimeOfDay(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_TimeOfDay CHECK (DATEPART(hour,GETDATE()) BETWEEN 0 AND 1)) GO -- log in as sa or a sysadmin server role member, and try this: INSERT NoSA VALUES(1) INSERT NoSysAdmin VALUES(1) -- note the difference when using sa vs. non-sa -- then try it again with a non-sysadmin login -- see if this works: INSERT NoAdHoc VALUES(1) INSERT NoAdHoc2 VALUES(1) GO -- then try this: CREATE PROCEDURE NotAdHoc @val1 int, @val2 int AS SET NOCOUNT ON; INSERT NoAdHoc VALUES(@val1) INSERT NoAdHoc2 VALUES(@val2) GO EXEC NotAdHoc 2,2 -- which values got inserted? SELECT * FROM NoAdHoc SELECT * FROM NoAdHoc2   -- and this one just makes me happy :) INSERT NoCursors VALUES(1) DECLARE curs CURSOR FOR SELECT 1 OPEN curs INSERT NoCursors VALUES(2) CLOSE curs DEALLOCATE curs INSERT NoCursors VALUES(3) SELECT * FROM NoCursors   I'll leave the ANSI_PADDING_ON and TimeOfDay tables for you to test on your own, I think you get the idea.  (Also take a look at the NoCursors example, notice anything interesting?)  The real eye-opener, for me anyway, is the ability to limit bad coding practices like cursors, ad-hoc SQL, and sa use/abuse by using declarative SQL objects.  I'm sure you can see how and why this would come up when discussing Revenge: The SQL.;) And the best part IMHO is that these work on pretty much any version of SQL Server, without needing Policy Based Management, DDL/login triggers, or similar tools to enforce best practices. All seriousness aside, I highly recommend that you spend some time letting your mind go wild with the possibilities and see how far you can take things.  There are no rules! (Hmmmm, what can I do with rules?) #TSQL2sDay

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  • Does it matter the direction of a Huffman's tree child node?

    - by Omega
    So, I'm on my quest about creating a Java implementation of Huffman's algorithm for compressing/decompressing files (as you might know, ever since Why create a Huffman tree per character instead of a Node?) for a school assignment. I now have a better understanding of how is this thing supposed to work. Wikipedia has a great-looking algorithm here that seemed to make my life way easier. Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding: Create a leaf node for each symbol and add it to the priority queue. While there is more than one node in the queue: Remove the two nodes of highest priority (lowest probability) from the queue Create a new internal node with these two nodes as children and with probability equal to the sum of the two nodes' probabilities. Add the new node to the queue. The remaining node is the root node and the tree is complete. It looks simple and great. However, it left me wondering: when I "merge" two nodes (make them children of a new internal node), does it even matter what direction (left or right) will each node be afterwards? I still don't fully understand Huffman coding, and I'm not very sure if there is a criteria used to tell whether a node should go to the right or to the left. I assumed that, perhaps the highest-frequency node would go to the right, but I've seen some Huffman trees in the web that don't seem to follow such criteria. For instance, Wikipedia's example image http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/Huffman_tree_2.svg/625px-Huffman_tree_2.svg.png seems to put the highest ones to the right. But other images like this one http://thalia.spec.gmu.edu/~pparis/classes/notes_101/img25.gif has them all to the left. However, they're never mixed up in the same image (some to the right and others to the left). So, does it matter? Why?

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  • HPCM 11.1.2.2.x - HPCM Standard Costing Generating >99 Calc Scipts

    - by Jane Story
    HPCM Standard Profitability calculation scripts are named based on a documented naming convention. From 11.1.2.2.x, the script name = a script suffix (1 letter) + POV identifier (3 digits) + Stage Order Number (1 digit) + “_” + index (2 digits) (please see documentation for more information (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_admin/apes01.html). This naming convention results in the name being 8 characters in length i.e. the maximum number of characters permitted calculation script names in non-unicode Essbase BSO databases. The index in the name will indicate the number of scripts per stage. In the vast majority of cases, the number of scripts generated per stage will be significantly less than 100 and therefore, there will be no issue. However, in some cases, the number of scripts generated can exceed 99. It is unusual for an application to generate more than 99 calculation scripts for one stage. This may indicate that explicit assignments are being extensively used. An assessment should be made of the design to see if assignment rules can be used instead. Assignment rules will reduce the need for so many calculation script lines which will reduce the requirement for such a large number of calculation scripts. In cases where the scripts generates exceeds 100, the length of the name of the 100th calculation script is different from the 99th as the calculation script name changes from being 8 characters long and becomes 9 characters long (e.g. A6811_100 rather than A6811_99). A name of 9 characters is not permitted in non Unicode applications. It is “too long”. When this occurs, an error will show in the hpcm.log as “Error processing calculation scripts” and “Unexpected error in business logic “. Further down the log, it is possible to see that this is “Caused by: Error copying object “ and “Caused by: com.essbase.api.base.EssException: Cannot put olap file object ... object name_[<calc script name> e.g. A6811_100] too long for non-unicode mode application”. The error file will give the name of the calculation script which is causing the issue. In my example, this is A6811_100 and you can see this is 9 characters in length. It is not possible to increase the number of characters allowed in a calculation script name. However, it is possible to increase the size of each calculation script. The default for an HPCM application, set in the preferences, is set to 4mb. If the size of each calculation script is larger, the number of scripts generated will reduce and, therefore, less than 100 scripts will be generated which means that the name of the calculation script will remain 8 characters long. To increase the size of the generated calculation scripts for an application, in the HPM_APPLICATION_PREFERENCE table for the application, find the row where HPM_PREFERENCE_NAME_ID=20. The default value in this row is 4194304. This can be increased e.g. 7340032 will increase this to 7mb. Please restart the profitability service after making the change.

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  • Does anyone use the L-Track trackball?

    - by thethinman
    I've been using the Logitech Trackman Marble Mouse for years. Now I'm looking for a trackball with a scroll wheel, larger and heavier ball, and preferably rollers instead of pins. It must be finger (not thumb) operated. The Kensington Expert Mouse is close, but from what I've read the scroll wheel is poorly implemented. They also switched from rollers to pins. I bought a Kensington Orbit Trackball and it's not bad but the scroll wheel is rough and the ball is the same as the marble mouse. I'm still looking for something better. I found the L-Trac and it looks good but there's little info on the web. Has anyone used it and can provide their impressions? Or can you point out another option?

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  • How to prepare for a programming competition? Graphs, Stacks, Trees, oh my! [closed]

    - by Simucal
    Last semester I attended ACM's (Association for Computing Machinery) bi-annual programming competition at a local University. My University sent 2 teams of 3 people and we competed amongst other schools in the mid-west. We got our butts kicked. You are given a packet with about 11 problems (1 problem per page) and you have 4 hours to solve as many as you can. They'll run your program you submit against a set of data and your output must match theirs exactly. In fact, the judging is automated for the most part. In any case.. I went there fairly confident in my programming skills and I left there feeling drained and weak. It was a terribly humbling experience. In 4 hours my team of 3 people completed only one of the problems. The top team completed 4 of them and took 1st place. The problems they asked were like no problems I have ever had to answer before. I later learned that in order to solve them some of them effectively you have to use graphs/graph algorithms, trees, stacks. Some of them were simply "greedy" algo's. My question is, how can I better prepare for this semesters programming competition so I don't leave there feeling like a complete moron? What tips do you have for me to be able to answer these problems that involve graphs, trees, various "well known" algorithms? How can I easily identify the algorithm we should implement for a given problem? I have yet to take Algorithm Design in school so I just feel a little out of my element. Here are some examples of the questions asked at the competitions: ACM Problem Sets Update: Just wanted to update this since the latest competition is over. My team placed 1st for our small region (about 6-7 universities with between 1-5 teams each school) and ~15th for the midwest! So, it is a marked improvement over last years performance for sure. We also had no graduate students on our team and after reviewing the rules we found out that many teams had several! So, that would be a pretty big advantage in my own opinion. Problems this semester ranged from about 1-2 "easy" problems (ie bit manipulation, string manipulation) to hard (graph problems involving fairly complex math and network flow problems). We were able to solve 4 problems in our 5 hours. Just wanted to thank everyone for the resources they provided here, we used them for our weekly team practices and it definitely helped! Some quick tips that I have that aren't suggested below: When you are seated at your computer before the competition starts, quickly type out various data structures that you might need that you won't have access to in your languages libraries. I typed out a Graph data-structure complete with floyd-warshall and dijkstra's algorithm before the competition began. We ended up using it in our 2nd problem that we solved and this is the main reason why we solved this problem before anyone else in the midwest. We had it ready to go from the beginning. Similarly, type out the code to read in a file since this will be required for every problem. Save this answer "template" someplace so you can quickly copy/paste it to your IDE at the beginning of each problem. There are no rules on programming anything before the competition starts so get any boilerplate code out the way. We found it useful to have one person who is on permanent whiteboard duty. This is usually the person who is best at math and at working out solutions to get a head start on future problems you will be doing. One person is on permanent programming duty. Your fastest/most skilled "programmer" (most familiar with the language). This will save debugging time also. The last person has several roles between assessing the packet of problems for the next "easiest" problem, helping the person on the whiteboard work out solutions and helping the person programming work out bugs/issues. This person needs to be flexible and be able to switch between roles easily.

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