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  • How to add a new item in a sharepoint list using web services in C sharp

    - by Frank
    Hi, I'm trying to add a new item to a sharepoint list from a winform application in c# using web services. As only result, I'm getting the useless exception "Exception of type 'Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer.SoapServerException' was thrown." I have a web reference named WebSrvRef to http://server/site/subsite/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx And this code: XmlDocument xmlDoc; XmlElement elBatch; XmlNode ndReturn; string[] sValues; string sListGUID; string sViewGUID; if (lstResults.Items.Count < 1) { MessageBox.Show("Unable to Add To SharePoint\n" + "No test file processed. The list is blank.", "Add To SharePoint", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Exclamation); return; } WebSrvRef.Lists listService = new WebSrvRef.Lists(); sViewGUID = "{xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}"; // Test List View GUID sListGUID = "{xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}"; // Test List GUID listService.Credentials= System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials; frmAddToSharePoint dlgAddSharePoint = new frmAddToSharePoint(); if (dlgAddSharePoint.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.Cancel) { dlgAddSharePoint.Dispose(); listService.Dispose(); return; } sValues = dlgAddSharePoint.Tag.ToString().Split('~'); dlgAddSharePoint.Dispose(); string strBatch = "<Method ID='1' Cmd='New'>" + "<Field Name='Client#'>" + sValues[0] + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Company'>" + sValues[1] + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Contact Name'>" + sValues[2] + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Phone Number'>" + sValues[3] + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Brand'>" + sValues[4] + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Model'>" + sValues[5] + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='DPI'>" + sValues[6] + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Color'>" + sValues[7] + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Compression'>" + sValues[8] + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Value % 1'>" + (((float)lstResults.Groups["Value 1"].Tag)*100).ToString("##0.00") + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Value % 2'>" + (((float)lstResults.Groups["Value 2"].Tag)*100).ToString("##0.00") + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Value % 3'>" + (((float)lstResults.Groups["Value 3"].Tag)*100).ToString("##0.00") + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Value % 4'>" + (((float)lstResults.Groups["Value 4"].Tag)*100).ToString("##0.00") + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Value % 5'>" + (((float)lstResults.Groups["Value 5"].Tag)*100).ToString("##0.00") + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Comments'></Field>" + "<Field Name='Overall'>" + (fTotalScore*100).ToString("##0.00") + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Average'>" + (fTotalAvg * 100).ToString("##0.00") + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Transfered'>" + sValues[9] + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Notes'>" + sValues[10] + "</Field>" + "<Field Name='Resolved'>" + sValues[11] + "</Field>" + "</Method>"; try { xmlDoc = new System.Xml.XmlDocument(); elBatch = xmlDoc.CreateElement("Batch"); elBatch.SetAttribute("OnError", "Continue"); elBatch.SetAttribute("ListVersion", "1"); elBatch.SetAttribute("ViewName", sViewGUID); strBatch = strBatch.Replace("&", "&amp;"); elBatch.InnerXml = strBatch; ndReturn = listService.UpdateListItems(sListGUID, elBatch); MessageBox.Show(ndReturn.OuterXml); listService.Dispose(); } catch(Exception Ex) { MessageBox.Show(Ex.Message + "\n\nSource\n" + Ex.Source + "\n\nTargetSite\n" + Ex.TargetSite + "\n\nStackTrace\n" + Ex.StackTrace, "Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error); listService.Dispose(); } What am I doing wrong? What am I missing? Please help!! Frank

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  • iPhone OpenGL ES freezes for no reason

    - by KJ
    Hi, I'm quite new to iPhone OpenGL ES, and I'm really stuck. I was trying to implement shadow mapping on iPhone, and I allocated two 512*1024*32bit textures for the shadow map and the diffuse map respectively. The problem is that my application started to freeze and reboot the device after I added the shadow map allocation part to the code (so I guess the shadow map allocation is causing all this mess). It happens randomly, but mostly within 10 minutes. (sometimes within a few secs) And it only happens on the real iPhone device, not on the virtual device. I backtracked the problem by removing irrelevant code lines by lines and now my code is really simple, but it's still crashing (I mean, freezing). Could anybody please download my xcode project linked below and see what on earth is wrong? The code is really simple: http://www.tempfiles.net/download/201004/95922/CrashTest.html I would really appreciate if someone can help me. My iPhone is a 3GS and running on the OS version 3.1. Again, run the code and it'll take about 5 mins in average for the device to freeze and reboot. (Don't worry, it does no harm) It'll just display cyan screen before it freezes, but you'll be able to notice when it happens because the device will reboot soon, so please be patient. Just in case you can't reproduce the problem, please let me know. (That could possibly mean it's specifically my device that something's wrong with) Observation: The problem goes away when I change the size of the shadow map to 512*512. (but with the diffuse map still 512*1024) I'm desperate for help, thanks in advance! Just for the people's information who can't download the link, here is the OpenGL code: #import "GLView.h" #import <OpenGLES/ES2/glext.h> #import <QuartzCore/QuartzCore.h> @implementation GLView + (Class)layerClass { return [CAEAGLLayer class]; } - (id)initWithCoder: (NSCoder*)coder { if ((self = [super initWithCoder:coder])) { CAEAGLLayer* layer = (CAEAGLLayer*)self.layer; layer.opaque = YES; layer.drawableProperties = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys: [NSNumber numberWithBool: NO], kEAGLDrawablePropertyRetainedBacking, kEAGLColorFormatRGBA8, kEAGLDrawablePropertyColorFormat, nil]; displayLink_ = nil; context_ = [[EAGLContext alloc] initWithAPI: kEAGLRenderingAPIOpenGLES2]; if (!context_ || ![EAGLContext setCurrentContext: context_]) { [self release]; return nil; } glGenFramebuffers(1, &framebuffer_); glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, framebuffer_); glViewport(0, 0, self.bounds.size.width, self.bounds.size.height); glGenRenderbuffers(1, &defaultColorBuffer_); glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, defaultColorBuffer_); [context_ renderbufferStorage: GL_RENDERBUFFER fromDrawable: layer]; glFramebufferRenderbuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, GL_RENDERBUFFER, defaultColorBuffer_); glGenTextures(1, &shadowColorBuffer_); glActiveTexture(GL_TEXTURE1); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowColorBuffer_); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, 512, 1024, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, NULL); glGenTextures(1, &texture_); glActiveTexture(GL_TEXTURE0); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture_); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, 512, 1024, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, NULL); } return self; } - (void)startAnimation { displayLink_ = [CADisplayLink displayLinkWithTarget: self selector: @selector(drawView:)]; [displayLink_ setFrameInterval: 1]; [displayLink_ addToRunLoop: [NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] forMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode]; } - (void)useDefaultBuffers { glFramebufferRenderbuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, GL_RENDERBUFFER, defaultColorBuffer_); glClearColor(0.0, 0.8, 0.8, 1); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); } - (void)useShadowBuffers { glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowColorBuffer_, 0); glClearColor(0, 0, 0, 0); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); } - (void)drawView: (id)sender { NSTimeInterval startTime = [NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate]; [EAGLContext setCurrentContext: context_]; [self useShadowBuffers]; [self useDefaultBuffers]; glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, defaultColorBuffer_); [context_ presentRenderbuffer: GL_RENDERBUFFER]; NSTimeInterval endTime = [NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate]; NSLog(@"FPS : %.1f", 1 / (endTime - startTime)); } - (void)stopAnimation { [displayLink_ invalidate]; displayLink_ = nil; } - (void)dealloc { if (framebuffer_) glDeleteFramebuffers(1, &framebuffer_); if (defaultColorBuffer_) glDeleteRenderbuffers(1, &defaultColorBuffer_); if (shadowColorBuffer_) glDeleteTextures(1, &shadowColorBuffer_); glDeleteTextures(1, &texture_); if ([EAGLContext currentContext] == context_) [EAGLContext setCurrentContext: nil]; [context_ release]; context_ = nil; [super dealloc]; } @end

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  • Cisco VPN Client Behind ASA 5505

    - by fdf33
    I'm trying to get connected to another ASA via Cisco VPN Client. I am behind an ASA 5505 myself and I am tryihng to VPN to a 5510. I get the message: Secure VPN Connection terminated locally by the Client. Reason 412: The remote peer is no longer responding. I can connect to the other ASA if I use a normal cheap Linksys. Here's the version of my ASA: Result of the command: "sh ver" Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance Software Version 8.4(1) Any help would be great. Thanks running-config : Saved : Written by enable_15 at 23:12:32.378 UTC Fri Jul 1 2011 ! ASA Version 8.4(1) ! hostname aaaasa domain-name aaa.local enable password xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx encrypted passwd xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx encrypted names ! interface Vlan1 nameif inside security-level 100 ip address 192.168.1.254 255.255.255.0 ! interface Vlan2 nameif outside security-level 0 ip address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 255.255.254.0 ! interface Vlan5 no nameif security-level 50 ip address 172.16.0.254 255.255.255.0 ! interface Vlan500 no nameif security-level 100 ip address 10.10.10.1 255.255.255.0 ! interface Ethernet0/0 switchport access vlan 2 ! interface Ethernet0/1 ! interface Ethernet0/2 ! interface Ethernet0/3 ! interface Ethernet0/4 ! interface Ethernet0/5 ! interface Ethernet0/6 ! interface Ethernet0/7 ! boot system disk0:/asa841-k8.bin ftp mode passive dns domain-lookup inside dns domain-lookup outside dns server-group DefaultDNS name-server 4.2.2.2 domain-name aaa.local same-security-traffic permit inter-interface same-security-traffic permit intra-interface object network obj_any subnet 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 object network A_93.97.168.1 host 93.97.168.1 object network rdp host 192.168.1.2 object network NETWORK_OBJ_192.168.1.0_24 subnet 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 access-list 101 extended permit tcp any host 192.168.1.2 eq 3389 access-list 101 extended permit icmp any any echo-reply access-list 101 extended permit icmp any any source-quench access-list 101 extended permit icmp any any time-exceeded access-list 101 extended permit icmp any any unreachable access-list 102 extended permit ip any any pager lines 24 logging enable logging asdm informational mtu inside 1500 mtu outside 1492 ip local pool VPNPool 192.168.2.200-192.168.2.210 mask 255.255.255.0 icmp unreachable rate-limit 1 burst-size 1 asdm image disk0:/asdm-641.bin no asdm history enable arp timeout 14400 ! object network rdp nat (inside,outside) static interface service tcp 3389 3389 ! nat (inside,outside) after-auto source dynamic any interface access-group 101 in interface outside access-group 102 out interface outside ! router ospf 1 network 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 area 0 log-adj-changes ! route outside 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 93.97.168.1 1 timeout xlate 3:00:00 timeout conn 1:00:00 half-closed 0:10:00 udp 0:02:00 icmp 0:00:02 timeout sunrpc 0:10:00 h323 0:05:00 h225 1:00:00 mgcp 0:05:00 mgcp-pat 0:05:00 timeout sip 0:30:00 sip_media 0:02:00 sip-invite 0:03:00 sip-disconnect 0:02:00 timeout sip-provisional-media 0:02:00 uauth 0:05:00 absolute timeout tcp-proxy-reassembly 0:01:00 dynamic-access-policy-record DfltAccessPolicy http server enable http 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 inside no snmp-server location no snmp-server contact snmp-server enable traps snmp authentication linkup linkdown coldstart crypto ipsec ikev2 ipsec-proposal DES protocol esp encryption des protocol esp integrity sha-1 md5 crypto ipsec ikev2 ipsec-proposal 3DES protocol esp encryption 3des protocol esp integrity sha-1 md5 crypto ipsec ikev2 ipsec-proposal AES protocol esp encryption aes protocol esp integrity sha-1 md5 crypto ipsec ikev2 ipsec-proposal AES192 protocol esp encryption aes-192 protocol esp integrity sha-1 md5 crypto ipsec ikev2 ipsec-proposal AES256 protocol esp encryption aes-256 protocol esp integrity sha-1 md5 crypto dynamic-map SYSTEM_DEFAULT_CRYPTO_MAP 65535 set ikev2 ipsec-proposal AES256 AES192 AES 3DES DES crypto map outside_map 65535 ipsec-isakmp dynamic SYSTEM_DEFAULT_CRYPTO_MAP crypto map outside_map interface outside crypto ca trustpoint ASDM_TrustPoint0 enrollment self subject-name CN=ciscoasa proxy-ldc-issuer crl configure crypto ca certificate chain ASDM_TrustPoint0 certificate 8877d64d 30820248 308201b1 a0030201 02020488 77d64d30 0d06092a 864886f7 0d010105 05003036 3111300f 06035504 03130863 6973636f 61736131 21301f06 092a8648 86f70d01 09021612 63697363 6f617361 2e6e6a64 2e6c6f63 616c301e 170d3131 30353231 30383533 34325a17 0d323130 35313830 38353334 325a3036 3111300f 06035504 03130863 6973636f 61736131 21301f06 092a8648 86f70d01 09021612 63697363 6f617361 2e6e6a64 2e6c6f63 616c3081 9f300d06 092a8648 86f70d01 01010500 03818d00 30818902 818100ea 1aa95141 480e616c efee6816 a96d6511 313b6776 cd3dd57b cd84b4d2 5e108aee 7c980086 4d92e2eb b6c7bf66 4585af0a ccbf153a db9270be c6f5c67b db9dd8d1 2f78d033 3348b056 df4be0da 70e08953 53adf294 9db6c020 597d250f bf448b43 b90179c8 ff0b15d8 744632d9 31c1945f 0b11e258 b4c1d224 692efff4 7b2f5102 03010001 a3633061 300f0603 551d1301 01ff0405 30030101 ff300e06 03551d0f 0101ff04 04030201 86301f06 03551d23 04183016 8014493c 19db183a ab1af9e9 b1e44ad4 2a408b3c 89d1301d 0603551d 0e041604 14493c19 db183aab 1af9e9b1 e44ad42a 408b3c89 d1300d06 092a8648 86f70d01 01050500 03818100 1dd1760a fdd15941 4803fb9a cd6f44a7 2e275854 a1c0fbe1 d19f2cc9 182d43ef a547f854 8df96d15 3ea79c62 cf3fcb1c 5820360b c607dbfc 4de8bb16 19f727e9 b928a085 665816d8 138e4a35 ed610950 7910dd4a 0b1a9dd9 0e26f1c8 b78bc0cc cbf19eb2 4c4c3931 45199ea5 249e3266 661e44fd 7a00d376 dcfc6e4e d43f10b8 quit crypto isakmp nat-traversal 30 crypto ikev2 policy 1 encryption aes-256 integrity sha group 5 prf sha lifetime seconds 86400 crypto ikev2 policy 10 encryption aes-192 integrity sha group 5 prf sha lifetime seconds 86400 crypto ikev2 policy 20 encryption aes integrity sha group 5 prf sha lifetime seconds 86400 crypto ikev2 policy 30 encryption 3des integrity sha group 5 prf sha lifetime seconds 86400 crypto ikev2 policy 40 encryption des integrity sha group 5 prf sha lifetime seconds 86400 crypto ikev2 enable outside client-services port 443 crypto ikev2 remote-access trustpoint ASDM_TrustPoint0 telnet timeout 5 ssh 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 inside ssh timeout 5 console timeout 0 dhcpd auto_config outside ! dhcpd address 192.168.1.5-192.168.1.36 inside dhcpd dns 4.2.2.2 interface inside dhcpd enable inside ! threat-detection basic-threat threat-detection statistics host number-of-rate 3 threat-detection statistics port threat-detection statistics protocol threat-detection statistics access-list threat-detection statistics tcp-intercept rate-interval 30 burst-rate 400 average-rate 200 ntp server 82.219.4.31 source outside prefer ssl trust-point ASDM_TrustPoint0 outside webvpn enable outside anyconnect image disk0:/anyconnect-win-2.4.1012-k9.pkg 1 anyconnect profiles AnyConnectVPN_client_profile disk0:/AnyConnectVPN_client_profile.xml anyconnect profiles SSLAnyConnectVPN_client_profile disk0:/SSLAnyConnectVPN_client_profile.xml anyconnect enable tunnel-group-list enable group-policy GroupPolicy_AnyConnectVPN internal group-policy GroupPolicy_AnyConnectVPN attributes wins-server none dns-server value 4.2.2.2 vpn-tunnel-protocol ikev2 ssl-client ssl-clientless default-domain value aaa.local webvpn url-list none anyconnect profiles value AnyConnectVPN_client_profile type user group-policy GroupPolicy_SSLAnyConnectVPN internal group-policy GroupPolicy_SSLAnyConnectVPN attributes wins-server none dns-server value 4.2.2.2 vpn-tunnel-protocol ikev2 ssl-client default-domain value aaa.local webvpn anyconnect profiles value SSLAnyConnectVPN_client_profile type user username testuser password xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx encrypted privilege 0 username testuser attributes vpn-group-policy GroupPolicy_AnyConnectVPN tunnel-group SSLPOL type remote-access tunnel-group SSLPOL general-attributes default-group-policy GroupPolicy_AnyConnectVPN tunnel-group SSLAnyConnectVPN type remote-access tunnel-group SSLAnyConnectVPN general-attributes address-pool VPNPool default-group-policy GroupPolicy_SSLAnyConnectVPN tunnel-group SSLAnyConnectVPN webvpn-attributes group-alias SSLAnyConnectVPN enable ! class-map inspection_default match default-inspection-traffic ! ! policy-map type inspect dns preset_dns_map parameters message-length maximum 512 policy-map global_policy class inspection_default inspect dns preset_dns_map inspect esmtp inspect ftp inspect h323 h225 inspect h323 ras inspect ip-options inspect netbios inspect rsh inspect rtsp inspect sip inspect skinny inspect sqlnet inspect sunrpc inspect tftp inspect xdmcp ! service-policy global_policy global prompt hostname context call-home profile CiscoTAC-1 no active destination address http https://tools.cisco.com/its/service/oddce/services/DDCEService destination address email [email protected] destination transport-method http subscribe-to-alert-group diagnostic subscribe-to-alert-group environment subscribe-to-alert-group inventory periodic monthly subscribe-to-alert-group configuration periodic monthly subscribe-to-alert-group telemetry periodic daily Cryptochecksum:94a65341aa27d3929d5e92a32ba22120 : end

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  • Fast block placement algorithm, advice needed?

    - by James Morris
    I need to emulate the window placement strategy of the Fluxbox window manager. As a rough guide, visualize randomly sized windows filling up the screen one at a time, where the rough size of each results in an average of 80 windows on screen without any window overlapping another. It is important to note that windows will close and the space that closed windows previously occupied becomes available once more for the placement of new windows. The window placement strategy has three binary options: Windows build horizontal rows or vertical columns (potentially) Windows are placed from left to right or right to left Windows are placed from top to bottom or bottom to top Why is the algorithm a problem? It needs to operate to the deadlines of a real time thread in an audio application. At this moment I am only concerned with getting a fast algorithm, don't concern yourself over the implications of real time threads and all the hurdles in programming that that brings. So far I have two choices which I have built loose prototypes for: 1) A port of the Fluxbox placement algorithm into my code. The problem with this is, the client (my program) gets kicked out of the audio server (JACK) when I try placing the worst case scenario of 256 blocks using the algorithm. This algorithm performs over 14000 full (linear) scans of the list of blocks already placed when placing the 256th window. 2) My alternative approach. Only partially implemented, this approach uses a data structure for each area of rectangular free unused space (the list of windows can be entirely separate, and is not required for testing of this algorithm). The data structure acts as a node in a doubly linked list (with sorted insertion), as well as containing the coordinates of the top-left corner, and the width and height. Furthermore, each block data structure also contains four links which connect to each immediately adjacent (touching) block on each of the four sides. IMPORTANT RULE: Each block may only touch with one block per side. The problem with this approach is, it's very complex. I have implemented the straightforward cases where 1) space is removed from one corner of a block, 2) splitting neighbouring blocks so that the IMPORTANT RULE is adhered to. The less straightforward case, where the space to be removed can only be found within a column or row of boxes, is only partially implemented - if one of the blocks to be removed is an exact fit for width (ie column) or height (ie row) then problems occur. And don't even mention the fact this only checks columns one box wide, and rows one box tall. I've implemented this algorithm in C - the language I am using for this project (I've not used C++ for a few years and am uncomfortable using it after having focused all my attention to C development, it's a hobby). The implementation is 700+ lines of code (including plenty of blank lines, brace lines, comments etc). The implementation only works for the horizontal-rows + left-right + top-bottom placement strategy. So I've either got to add some way of making this +700 lines of code work for the other 7 placement strategy options, or I'm going to have to duplicate those +700 lines of code for the other seven options. Neither of these is attractive, the first, because the existing code is complex enough, the second, because of bloat. The algorithm is not even at a stage where I can use it in the real time worst case scenario, because of missing functionality, so I still don't know if it actually performs better or worse than the first approach. What else is there? I've skimmed over and discounted: Bin Packing algorithms: their emphasis on optimal fit does not match the requirements of this algorithm. Recursive Bisection Placement algorithms: sounds promising, but these are for circuit design. Their emphasis is optimal wire length. Both of these, especially the latter, all elements to be placed/packs are known before the algorithm begins. I need an algorithm which works accumulatively with what it is given to do when it is told to do it. What are your thoughts on this? How would you approach it? What other algorithms should I look at? Or even what concepts should I research seeing as I've not studied computer science/software engineering? Please ask questions in comments if further information is needed. [edit] If it makes any difference, the units for the coordinates will not be pixels. The units are unimportant, but the grid where windows/blocks/whatever can be placed will be 127 x 127 units.

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  • Where is the virtual function call overhead?

    - by Semen Semenych
    Hello everybody, I'm trying to benchmark the difference between a function pointer call and a virtual function call. To do this, I have written two pieces of code, that do the same mathematical computation over an array. One variant uses an array of pointers to functions and calls those in a loop. The other variant uses an array of pointers to a base class and calls its virtual function, which is overloaded in the derived classes to do absolutely the same thing as the functions in the first variant. Then I print the time elapsed and use a simple shell script to run the benchmark many times and compute the average run time. Here is the code: #include <iostream> #include <cstdlib> #include <ctime> #include <cmath> using namespace std; long long timespecDiff(struct timespec *timeA_p, struct timespec *timeB_p) { return ((timeA_p->tv_sec * 1000000000) + timeA_p->tv_nsec) - ((timeB_p->tv_sec * 1000000000) + timeB_p->tv_nsec); } void function_not( double *d ) { *d = sin(*d); } void function_and( double *d ) { *d = cos(*d); } void function_or( double *d ) { *d = tan(*d); } void function_xor( double *d ) { *d = sqrt(*d); } void ( * const function_table[4] )( double* ) = { &function_not, &function_and, &function_or, &function_xor }; int main(void) { srand(time(0)); void ( * index_array[100000] )( double * ); double array[100000]; for ( long int i = 0; i < 100000; ++i ) { index_array[i] = function_table[ rand() % 4 ]; array[i] = ( double )( rand() / 1000 ); } struct timespec start, end; clock_gettime(CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID, &start); for ( long int i = 0; i < 100000; ++i ) { index_array[i]( &array[i] ); } clock_gettime(CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID, &end); unsigned long long time_elapsed = timespecDiff(&end, &start); cout << time_elapsed / 1000000000.0 << endl; } and here is the virtual function variant: #include <iostream> #include <cstdlib> #include <ctime> #include <cmath> using namespace std; long long timespecDiff(struct timespec *timeA_p, struct timespec *timeB_p) { return ((timeA_p->tv_sec * 1000000000) + timeA_p->tv_nsec) - ((timeB_p->tv_sec * 1000000000) + timeB_p->tv_nsec); } class A { public: virtual void calculate( double *i ) = 0; }; class A1 : public A { public: void calculate( double *i ) { *i = sin(*i); } }; class A2 : public A { public: void calculate( double *i ) { *i = cos(*i); } }; class A3 : public A { public: void calculate( double *i ) { *i = tan(*i); } }; class A4 : public A { public: void calculate( double *i ) { *i = sqrt(*i); } }; int main(void) { srand(time(0)); A *base[100000]; double array[100000]; for ( long int i = 0; i < 100000; ++i ) { array[i] = ( double )( rand() / 1000 ); switch ( rand() % 4 ) { case 0: base[i] = new A1(); break; case 1: base[i] = new A2(); break; case 2: base[i] = new A3(); break; case 3: base[i] = new A4(); break; } } struct timespec start, end; clock_gettime(CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID, &start); for ( int i = 0; i < 100000; ++i ) { base[i]->calculate( &array[i] ); } clock_gettime(CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID, &end); unsigned long long time_elapsed = timespecDiff(&end, &start); cout << time_elapsed / 1000000000.0 << endl; } My system is LInux, Fedora 13, gcc 4.4.2. The code is compiled it with g++ -O3. The first one is test1, the second is test2. Now I see this in console: [Ignat@localhost circuit_testing]$ ./test2 && ./test2 0.0153142 0.0153166 Well, more or less, I think. And then, this: [Ignat@localhost circuit_testing]$ ./test2 && ./test2 0.01531 0.0152476 Where are the 25% which should be visible? How can the first executable be even slower than the second one? I'm asking this because I'm doing a project which involves calling a lot of small functions in a row like this in order to compute the values of an array, and the code I've inherited does a very complex manipulation to avoid the virtual function call overhead. Now where is this famous call overhead?

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  • EC2 instance suddenly refusing SSH connections and won't respond to ping

    - by Chris
    My instance was running fine and this morning I was able to access a Ruby on Rails app hosted on it. An hour later I suddenly wasn't able to access my site, my SSH connection attempts were refused and the server wasn't even responding to ping. I didn't change anything on my system during that hour and reboots aren't fixing it. I've never had any problems connecting or pinging the system before. Can someone please help? This is on my production system! OS: CentOS 5 AMI ID: ami-10b55379 Type: m1.small [] ~% ssh -v *****@meeteor.com OpenSSH_5.2p1, OpenSSL 0.9.8l 5 Nov 2009 debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh_config debug1: Connecting to meeteor.com [184.73.235.191] port 22. debug1: connect to address 184.73.235.191 port 22: Connection refused ssh: connect to host meeteor.com port 22: Connection refused [] ~% ping meeteor.com PING meeteor.com (184.73.235.191): 56 data bytes Request timeout for icmp_seq 0 Request timeout for icmp_seq 1 Request timeout for icmp_seq 2 ^C --- meeteor.com ping statistics --- 4 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100.0% packet loss [] ~% ========= System Log ========= Restarting system. Linux version 2.6.16-xenU ([email protected]) (gcc version 4.0.1 20050727 (Red Hat 4.0.1-5)) #1 SMP Mon May 28 03:41:49 SAST 2007 BIOS-provided physical RAM map: Xen: 0000000000000000 - 000000006a400000 (usable) 980MB HIGHMEM available. 727MB LOWMEM available. NX (Execute Disable) protection: active IRQ lockup detection disabled Built 1 zonelists Kernel command line: root=/dev/sda1 ro 4 Enabling fast FPU save and restore... done. Enabling unmasked SIMD FPU exception support... done. Initializing CPU#0 PID hash table entries: 4096 (order: 12, 65536 bytes) Xen reported: 2599.998 MHz processor. Dentry cache hash table entries: 131072 (order: 7, 524288 bytes) Inode-cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes) Software IO TLB disabled vmalloc area: ee000000-f53fe000, maxmem 2d7fe000 Memory: 1718700k/1748992k available (1958k kernel code, 20948k reserved, 620k data, 144k init, 1003528k highmem) Checking if this processor honours the WP bit even in supervisor mode... Ok. Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 5202.30 BogoMIPS (lpj=26011526) Mount-cache hash table entries: 512 CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (64 bytes/line), D cache 64K (64 bytes/line) CPU: L2 Cache: 1024K (64 bytes/line) Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK. Brought up 1 CPUs migration_cost=0 Grant table initialized NET: Registered protocol family 16 Brought up 1 CPUs xen_mem: Initialising balloon driver. highmem bounce pool size: 64 pages VFS: Disk quotas dquot_6.5.1 Dquot-cache hash table entries: 1024 (order 0, 4096 bytes) Initializing Cryptographic API io scheduler noop registered io scheduler anticipatory registered (default) io scheduler deadline registered io scheduler cfq registered i8042.c: No controller found. RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size 1024 blocksize Xen virtual console successfully installed as tty1 Event-channel device installed. netfront: Initialising virtual ethernet driver. mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice md: md driver 0.90.3 MAX_MD_DEVS=256, MD_SB_DISKS=27 md: bitmap version 4.39 NET: Registered protocol family 2 Registering block device major 8 IP route cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes) TCP established hash table entries: 262144 (order: 9, 2097152 bytes) TCP bind hash table entries: 65536 (order: 7, 524288 bytes) TCP: Hash tables configured (established 262144 bind 65536) TCP reno registered TCP bic registered NET: Registered protocol family 1 NET: Registered protocol family 17 NET: Registered protocol family 15 Using IPI No-Shortcut mode md: Autodetecting RAID arrays. md: autorun ... md: ... autorun DONE. kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. VFS: Mounted root (ext3 filesystem) readonly. Freeing unused kernel memory: 144k freed *************************************************************** *************************************************************** ** WARNING: Currently emulating unsupported memory accesses ** ** in /lib/tls glibc libraries. The emulation is ** ** slow. To ensure full performance you should ** ** install a 'xen-friendly' (nosegneg) version of ** ** the library, or disable tls support by executing ** ** the following as root: ** ** mv /lib/tls /lib/tls.disabled ** ** Offending process: init (pid=1) ** *************************************************************** *************************************************************** Pausing... 5Pausing... 4Pausing... 3Pausing... 2Pausing... 1Continuing... INIT: version 2.86 booting Welcome to CentOS release 5.4 (Final) Press 'I' to enter interactive startup. Setting clock : Fri Oct 1 14:35:26 EDT 2010 [ OK ] Starting udev: [ OK ] Setting hostname localhost.localdomain: [ OK ] No devices found Setting up Logical Volume Management: [ OK ] Checking filesystems Checking all file systems. [/sbin/fsck.ext3 (1) -- /] fsck.ext3 -a /dev/sda1 /dev/sda1: clean, 275424/1310720 files, 1161123/2621440 blocks [ OK ] Remounting root filesystem in read-write mode: [ OK ] Mounting local filesystems: [ OK ] Enabling local filesystem quotas: [ OK ] Enabling /etc/fstab swaps: [ OK ] INIT: Entering runlevel: 4 Entering non-interactive startup Starting background readahead: [ OK ] Applying ip6tables firewall rules: modprobe: FATAL: Module ip6_tables not found. ip6tables-restore v1.3.5: ip6tables-restore: unable to initializetable 'filter' Error occurred at line: 3 Try `ip6tables-restore -h' or 'ip6tables-restore --help' for more information. [FAILED] Applying iptables firewall rules: [ OK ] Loading additional iptables modules: ip_conntrack_netbios_ns [ OK ] Bringing up loopback interface: [ OK ] Bringing up interface eth0: Determining IP information for eth0... done. [ OK ] Starting auditd: [FAILED] Starting irqbalance: [ OK ] Starting portmap: [ OK ] FATAL: Module lockd not found. Starting NFS statd: [ OK ] Starting RPC idmapd: FATAL: Module sunrpc not found. FATAL: Error running install command for sunrpc Error: RPC MTAB does not exist. Starting system message bus: [ OK ] Starting Bluetooth services:[ OK ] [ OK ] Can't open RFCOMM control socket: Address family not supported by protocol Mounting other filesystems: [ OK ] Starting PC/SC smart card daemon (pcscd): [ OK ] Starting hidd: Can't open HIDP control socket: Address family not supported by protocol [FAILED] Starting autofs: Starting automount: automount: test mount forbidden or incorrect kernel protocol version, kernel protocol version 5.00 or above required. [FAILED] [FAILED] Starting sshd: [ OK ] Starting cups: [ OK ] Starting sendmail: [ OK ] Starting sm-client: [ OK ] Starting console mouse services: no console device found[FAILED] Starting crond: [ OK ] Starting xfs: [ OK ] Starting anacron: [ OK ] Starting atd: [ OK ] % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 390 100 390 0 0 58130 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 58130 100 390 100 390 0 0 56984 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0 Starting yum-updatesd: [ OK ] Starting Avahi daemon... [ OK ] Starting HAL daemon: [ OK ] Starting OSSEC: [ OK ] Starting smartd: [ OK ] c CentOS release 5.4 (Final) Kernel 2.6.16-xenU on an i686 domU-12-31-39-00-C4-97 login: INIT: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes INIT: Id "3" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes INIT: Id "4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes INIT: Id "5" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes INIT: Id "6" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

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  • Matlab Image watermarking question , using both SVD and DWT

    - by Georgek
    Hello all . here is a code that i got over the net ,and it is supposed to embed a watermark of size(50*20) called _copyright.bmp in the Code below . the size of the cover object is (512*512), it is called _lena_std_bw.bmp.What we did here is we did DWT2 2 times for the image , when we reached our second dwt2 cA2 size is 128*128. You should notice that the blocksize and it equals 4, it is used to determine the max msg size based on cA2 according to the following code:max_message=RcA2*CcA2/(blocksize^2). in our current case max_message would equal 128*128/(4^2)=1024. i want to embed a bigger watermark in the 2nd dwt2 and lets say the size of that watermark is 400*10(i can change the dimension using MS PAINT), what i have to do is change the size of the blocksize to 2. so max_message=4096.Matlab gives me 3 errors and they are : ??? Error using == plus Matrix dimensions must agree. Error in == idwt2 at 93 x = upsconv2(a,{Lo_R,Lo_R},sx,dwtEXTM,shift)+ ... % Approximation. Error in == two_dwt_svd_low_low at 88 CAA1 = idwt2(cA22,cH2,cV2,cD2,'haar',[RcA1,CcA1]); The origional Code is (the origional code where blocksize =4): %This algorithm makes DWT for the whole image and after that make DWT for %cH1 and make SVD for cH2 and embed the watermark in every level after SVD %(1) -------------- Embed Watermark ------------------------------------ %Add the watermar W to original image I and give the watermarked image in J %-------------------------------------------------------------------------- % set the gain factor for embeding and threshold for evaluation clc; clear all; close all; % save start time start_time=cputime; % set the value of threshold and alpha thresh=.5; alpha =0.01; % read in the cover object file_name='_lena_std_bw.bmp'; cover_object=double(imread(file_name)); % determine size of watermarked image Mc=size(cover_object,1); %Height Nc=size(cover_object,2); %Width % read in the message image and reshape it into a vector file_name='_copyright.bmp'; message=double(imread(file_name)); T=message; Mm=size(message,1); %Height Nm=size(message,2); %Width % perform 1-level DWT for the whole cover image [cA1,cH1,cV1,cD1] = dwt2(cover_object,'haar'); % determine the size of cA1 [RcA1 CcA1]=size(cA1) % perform 2-level DWT for cA1 [cA2,cH2,cV2,cD2] = dwt2(cA1,'haar'); % determine the size of cA2 [RcA2 CcA2]=size(cA2) % set the value of blocksize blocksize=4 % reshape the watermark to a vector message_vector=round(reshape(message,Mm*Nm,1)./256); W=message_vector; % determine maximum message size based on cA2, and blocksize max_message=RcA2*CcA2/(blocksize^2) % check that the message isn't too large for cover if (length(message) max_message) error('Message too large to fit in Cover Object') end %----------------------- process the image in blocks ---------------------- x=1; y=1; for (kk = 1:length(message_vector)) [cA2u cA2s cA2v]=svd(cA2(y:y+blocksize-1,x:x+blocksize-1)); % if message bit contains zero, modify S of the original image if (message_vector(kk) == 0) cA2s = cA2s*(1 + alpha); % otherwise mask is filled with zeros else cA2s=cA2s; end cA22(y:y+blocksize-1,x:x+blocksize-1)=cA2u*cA2s*cA2v; % move to next block of mask along x; If at end of row, move to next row if (x+blocksize) >= CcA2 x=1; y=y+blocksize; else x=x+blocksize; end end % perform IDWT CAA1 = idwt2(cA22,cH2,cV2,cD2,'haar',[RcA1,CcA1]); watermarked_image= idwt2(CAA1,cH1,cV1,cD1,'haar',[Mc,Nc]); % convert back to uint8 watermarked_image_uint8=uint8(watermarked_image); % write watermarked Image to file imwrite(watermarked_image_uint8,'dwt_watermarked.bmp','bmp'); % display watermarked image figure(1) imshow(watermarked_image_uint8,[]) title('Watermarked Image') %(2) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- %---------- Extract Watermark from attacked watermarked image ------------- %-------------------------------------------------------------------------- % read in the watermarked object file_name='dwt_watermarked.bmp'; watermarked_image=double(imread(file_name)); % determine size of watermarked image Mw=size(watermarked_image,1); %Height Nw=size(watermarked_image,2); %Width % perform 1-level DWT for the whole watermarked image [ca1,ch1,cv1,cd1] = dwt2(watermarked_image,'haar'); % determine the size of ca1 [Rca1 Cca1]=size(ca1); % perform 2-level DWT for ca1 [ca2,ch2,cv2,cd2] = dwt2(ca1,'haar'); % determine the size of ca2 [Rca2 Cca2]=size(ca2); % process the image in blocks % for each block get a bit for message x=1; y=1; for (kk = 1:length(message_vector)) % sets correlation to 1 when patterns are identical to avoid /0 errors % otherwise calcluate difference between the cover image and the % watermarked image [cA2u cA2s cA2v]=svd(cA2(y:y+blocksize-1,x:x+blocksize-1)); [ca2u1 ca2s1 ca2v1]=svd(ca2(y:y+blocksize-1,x:x+blocksize-1)); correlation(kk)=diag(ca2s1-cA2s)'*diag(ca2s1-cA2s)/(alpha*alpha)/(diag(cA2s)*diag(cA2s)); % move on to next block. At and of row move to next row if (x+blocksize) >= Cca2 x=1; y=y+blocksize; else x=x+blocksize; end end % if correlation exceeds average correlation correlation(kk)=correlation(kk)+mean(correlation(1:Mm*Nm)); for kk = 1:length(correlation) if (correlation(kk) > thresh*alpha);%thresh*mean(correlation(1:Mo*No))) message_vector(kk)=0; end end % reshape the message vector and display recovered watermark. figure(2) message=reshape(message_vector(1:Mm*Nm),Mm,Nm); imshow(message,[]) title('Recovered Watermark') % display processing time elapsed_time=cputime-start_time, please do help,its my graduation project and i have been trying this code for along time but failed miserable. Thanks in advance

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  • ProFTPd server on Ubuntu getting access denied message when successfully authenticated?

    - by exxoid
    I have a Ubuntu box with a ProFTPD 1.3.4a Server, when I try to log in via my FTP Client I cannot do anything as it does not allow me to list directories; I have tried logging in as root and as a regular user and tried accessing different paths within the FTP Server. The error I get in my FTP Client is: Status: Retrieving directory listing... Command: CDUP Response: 250 CDUP command successful Command: PWD Response: 257 "/var" is the current directory Command: PASV Response: 227 Entering Passive Mode (172,16,4,22,237,205). Command: MLSD Response: 550 Access is denied. Error: Failed to retrieve directory listing Any idea? Here is the config of my proftpd: # # /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf -- This is a basic ProFTPD configuration file. # To really apply changes, reload proftpd after modifications, if # it runs in daemon mode. It is not required in inetd/xinetd mode. # # Includes DSO modules Include /etc/proftpd/modules.conf # Set off to disable IPv6 support which is annoying on IPv4 only boxes. UseIPv6 off # If set on you can experience a longer connection delay in many cases. IdentLookups off ServerName "Drupal Intranet" ServerType standalone ServerIdent on "FTP Server ready" DeferWelcome on # Set the user and group that the server runs as User nobody Group nogroup MultilineRFC2228 on DefaultServer on ShowSymlinks on TimeoutNoTransfer 600 TimeoutStalled 600 TimeoutIdle 1200 DisplayLogin welcome.msg DisplayChdir .message true ListOptions "-l" DenyFilter \*.*/ # Use this to jail all users in their homes # DefaultRoot ~ # Users require a valid shell listed in /etc/shells to login. # Use this directive to release that constrain. # RequireValidShell off # Port 21 is the standard FTP port. Port 21 # In some cases you have to specify passive ports range to by-pass # firewall limitations. Ephemeral ports can be used for that, but # feel free to use a more narrow range. # PassivePorts 49152 65534 # If your host was NATted, this option is useful in order to # allow passive tranfers to work. You have to use your public # address and opening the passive ports used on your firewall as well. # MasqueradeAddress 1.2.3.4 # This is useful for masquerading address with dynamic IPs: # refresh any configured MasqueradeAddress directives every 8 hours <IfModule mod_dynmasq.c> # DynMasqRefresh 28800 </IfModule> # To prevent DoS attacks, set the maximum number of child processes # to 30. If you need to allow more than 30 concurrent connections # at once, simply increase this value. Note that this ONLY works # in standalone mode, in inetd mode you should use an inetd server # that allows you to limit maximum number of processes per service # (such as xinetd) MaxInstances 30 # Set the user and group that the server normally runs at. # Umask 022 is a good standard umask to prevent new files and dirs # (second parm) from being group and world writable. Umask 022 022 # Normally, we want files to be overwriteable. AllowOverwrite on # Uncomment this if you are using NIS or LDAP via NSS to retrieve passwords: # PersistentPasswd off # This is required to use both PAM-based authentication and local passwords AuthPAMConfig proftpd AuthOrder mod_auth_pam.c* mod_auth_unix.c # Be warned: use of this directive impacts CPU average load! # Uncomment this if you like to see progress and transfer rate with ftpwho # in downloads. That is not needed for uploads rates. # UseSendFile off TransferLog /var/log/proftpd/xferlog SystemLog /var/log/proftpd/proftpd.log # Logging onto /var/log/lastlog is enabled but set to off by default #UseLastlog on # In order to keep log file dates consistent after chroot, use timezone info # from /etc/localtime. If this is not set, and proftpd is configured to # chroot (e.g. DefaultRoot or <Anonymous>), it will use the non-daylight # savings timezone regardless of whether DST is in effect. #SetEnv TZ :/etc/localtime <IfModule mod_quotatab.c> QuotaEngine off </IfModule> <IfModule mod_ratio.c> Ratios off </IfModule> # Delay engine reduces impact of the so-called Timing Attack described in # http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/11430/discuss # It is on by default. <IfModule mod_delay.c> DelayEngine on </IfModule> <IfModule mod_ctrls.c> ControlsEngine off ControlsMaxClients 2 ControlsLog /var/log/proftpd/controls.log ControlsInterval 5 ControlsSocket /var/run/proftpd/proftpd.sock </IfModule> <IfModule mod_ctrls_admin.c> AdminControlsEngine off </IfModule> # # Alternative authentication frameworks # #Include /etc/proftpd/ldap.conf #Include /etc/proftpd/sql.conf # # This is used for FTPS connections # #Include /etc/proftpd/tls.conf # # Useful to keep VirtualHost/VirtualRoot directives separated # #Include /etc/proftpd/virtuals.con # A basic anonymous configuration, no upload directories. # <Anonymous ~ftp> # User ftp # Group nogroup # # We want clients to be able to login with "anonymous" as well as "ftp" # UserAlias anonymous ftp # # Cosmetic changes, all files belongs to ftp user # DirFakeUser on ftp # DirFakeGroup on ftp # # RequireValidShell off # # # Limit the maximum number of anonymous logins # MaxClients 10 # # # We want 'welcome.msg' displayed at login, and '.message' displayed # # in each newly chdired directory. # DisplayLogin welcome.msg # DisplayChdir .message # # # Limit WRITE everywhere in the anonymous chroot # <Directory *> # <Limit WRITE> # DenyAll # </Limit> # </Directory> # # # Uncomment this if you're brave. # # <Directory incoming> # # # Umask 022 is a good standard umask to prevent new files and dirs # # # (second parm) from being group and world writable. # # Umask 022 022 # # <Limit READ WRITE> # # DenyAll # # </Limit> # # <Limit STOR> # # AllowAll # # </Limit> # # </Directory> # # </Anonymous> # Include other custom configuration files Include /etc/proftpd/conf.d/ UseReverseDNS off <Global> RootLogin on UseFtpUsers on ServerIdent on DefaultChdir /var/www DeleteAbortedStores on LoginPasswordPrompt on AccessGrantMsg "You have been authenticated successfully." </Global> Any idea what could be wrong? Thanks for your help!

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  • How can I further optimize this color difference function?

    - by aLfa
    I have made this function to calculate color differences in the CIE Lab colorspace, but it lacks speed. Since I'm not a Java expert, I wonder if any Java guru around has some tips that can improve the speed here. The code is based on the matlab function mentioned in the comment block. /** * Compute the CIEDE2000 color-difference between the sample color with * CIELab coordinates 'sample' and a standard color with CIELab coordinates * 'std' * * Based on the article: * "The CIEDE2000 Color-Difference Formula: Implementation Notes, * Supplementary Test Data, and Mathematical Observations,", G. Sharma, * W. Wu, E. N. Dalal, submitted to Color Research and Application, * January 2004. * available at http://www.ece.rochester.edu/~gsharma/ciede2000/ */ public static double deltaE2000(double[] lab1, double[] lab2) { double L1 = lab1[0]; double a1 = lab1[1]; double b1 = lab1[2]; double L2 = lab2[0]; double a2 = lab2[1]; double b2 = lab2[2]; // Cab = sqrt(a^2 + b^2) double Cab1 = Math.sqrt(a1 * a1 + b1 * b1); double Cab2 = Math.sqrt(a2 * a2 + b2 * b2); // CabAvg = (Cab1 + Cab2) / 2 double CabAvg = (Cab1 + Cab2) / 2; // G = 1 + (1 - sqrt((CabAvg^7) / (CabAvg^7 + 25^7))) / 2 double CabAvg7 = Math.pow(CabAvg, 7); double G = 1 + (1 - Math.sqrt(CabAvg7 / (CabAvg7 + 6103515625.0))) / 2; // ap = G * a double ap1 = G * a1; double ap2 = G * a2; // Cp = sqrt(ap^2 + b^2) double Cp1 = Math.sqrt(ap1 * ap1 + b1 * b1); double Cp2 = Math.sqrt(ap2 * ap2 + b2 * b2); // CpProd = (Cp1 * Cp2) double CpProd = Cp1 * Cp2; // hp1 = atan2(b1, ap1) double hp1 = Math.atan2(b1, ap1); // ensure hue is between 0 and 2pi if (hp1 < 0) { // hp1 = hp1 + 2pi hp1 += 6.283185307179586476925286766559; } // hp2 = atan2(b2, ap2) double hp2 = Math.atan2(b2, ap2); // ensure hue is between 0 and 2pi if (hp2 < 0) { // hp2 = hp2 + 2pi hp2 += 6.283185307179586476925286766559; } // dL = L2 - L1 double dL = L2 - L1; // dC = Cp2 - Cp1 double dC = Cp2 - Cp1; // computation of hue difference double dhp = 0.0; // set hue difference to zero if the product of chromas is zero if (CpProd != 0) { // dhp = hp2 - hp1 dhp = hp2 - hp1; if (dhp > Math.PI) { // dhp = dhp - 2pi dhp -= 6.283185307179586476925286766559; } else if (dhp < -Math.PI) { // dhp = dhp + 2pi dhp += 6.283185307179586476925286766559; } } // dH = 2 * sqrt(CpProd) * sin(dhp / 2) double dH = 2 * Math.sqrt(CpProd) * Math.sin(dhp / 2); // weighting functions // Lp = (L1 + L2) / 2 - 50 double Lp = (L1 + L2) / 2 - 50; // Cp = (Cp1 + Cp2) / 2 double Cp = (Cp1 + Cp2) / 2; // average hue computation // hp = (hp1 + hp2) / 2 double hp = (hp1 + hp2) / 2; // identify positions for which abs hue diff exceeds 180 degrees if (Math.abs(hp1 - hp2) > Math.PI) { // hp = hp - pi hp -= Math.PI; } // ensure hue is between 0 and 2pi if (hp < 0) { // hp = hp + 2pi hp += 6.283185307179586476925286766559; } // LpSqr = Lp^2 double LpSqr = Lp * Lp; // Sl = 1 + 0.015 * LpSqr / sqrt(20 + LpSqr) double Sl = 1 + 0.015 * LpSqr / Math.sqrt(20 + LpSqr); // Sc = 1 + 0.045 * Cp double Sc = 1 + 0.045 * Cp; // T = 1 - 0.17 * cos(hp - pi / 6) + // + 0.24 * cos(2 * hp) + // + 0.32 * cos(3 * hp + pi / 30) - // - 0.20 * cos(4 * hp - 63 * pi / 180) double hphp = hp + hp; double T = 1 - 0.17 * Math.cos(hp - 0.52359877559829887307710723054658) + 0.24 * Math.cos(hphp) + 0.32 * Math.cos(hphp + hp + 0.10471975511965977461542144610932) - 0.20 * Math.cos(hphp + hphp - 1.0995574287564276334619251841478); // Sh = 1 + 0.015 * Cp * T double Sh = 1 + 0.015 * Cp * T; // deltaThetaRad = (pi / 3) * e^-(36 / (5 * pi) * hp - 11)^2 double powerBase = hp - 4.799655442984406; double deltaThetaRad = 1.0471975511965977461542144610932 * Math.exp(-5.25249016001879 * powerBase * powerBase); // Rc = 2 * sqrt((Cp^7) / (Cp^7 + 25^7)) double Cp7 = Math.pow(Cp, 7); double Rc = 2 * Math.sqrt(Cp7 / (Cp7 + 6103515625.0)); // RT = -sin(delthetarad) * Rc double RT = -Math.sin(deltaThetaRad) * Rc; // de00 = sqrt((dL / Sl)^2 + (dC / Sc)^2 + (dH / Sh)^2 + RT * (dC / Sc) * (dH / Sh)) double dLSl = dL / Sl; double dCSc = dC / Sc; double dHSh = dH / Sh; return Math.sqrt(dLSl * dLSl + dCSc * dCSc + dHSh * dHSh + RT * dCSc * dHSh); }

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  • High memory usage on the server - can't determine the process

    - by HTF
    I've noticed high memory usage on the server. Details: OS: CentOS 6.3 - x86_64 Web server: Nginx with PHP-FPM The server is generating PDF documents so the traffic is minimum. top: # top -b -n 1 -a top - 10:04:51 up 21 days, 18:57, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Tasks: 92 total, 1 running, 91 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.3%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.6%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 3923092k total, 3720380k used, 202712k free, 133904k buffers Swap: 4194296k total, 12k used, 4194284k free, 147404k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 15855 www-data 20 0 199m 4952 2128 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.06 php-fpm 15853 www-data 20 0 199m 4940 2028 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.06 php-fpm 15850 www-data 20 0 199m 4928 2020 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.05 php-fpm 15851 www-data 20 0 199m 4888 2020 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.06 php-fpm 15852 www-data 20 0 199m 4852 2020 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.06 php-fpm 15857 www-data 20 0 198m 4716 2020 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.06 php-fpm 17553 root 20 0 97816 3860 2924 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.03 sshd 15849 root 20 0 198m 3460 1072 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.12 php-fpm 13441 nginx 20 0 65608 2968 1604 S 0.0 0.1 0:02.06 nginx 13440 nginx 20 0 65608 2964 1600 S 0.0 0.1 0:01.87 nginx 17561 root 20 0 105m 1944 1488 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 bash 1150 xfs 20 0 20980 1784 704 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.13 xfs 15863 root 20 0 179m 1424 1028 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 rsyslogd 1 root 20 0 19224 1360 1088 S 0.0 0.0 0:17.96 init 1201 nrpe 20 0 40928 1288 704 S 0.0 0.0 3:57.64 nrpe 13226 root 20 0 114m 1216 612 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 crond 6691 root 20 0 64068 1156 488 S 0.0 0.0 0:09.59 sshd 13439 root 20 0 65104 1128 292 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 nginx 19026 root 20 0 15040 1116 844 R 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 top 451 root 16 -4 11052 1096 316 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 udevd 1174 root 18 -2 11048 1064 288 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 udevd 1175 root 18 -2 11048 1064 288 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 udevd 1065 root 16 -4 93168 824 560 S 0.0 0.0 0:16.00 auditd 1165 root 20 0 4056 564 480 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 mingetty 1167 root 20 0 4056 564 480 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 mingetty 1169 root 20 0 4056 564 480 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 mingetty 1171 root 20 0 4056 564 480 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 mingetty 1163 root 20 0 4056 560 480 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 mingetty 1176 root 20 0 4056 560 480 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 mingetty 2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd 3 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:11.75 migration/0 4 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 44:30.28 ksoftirqd/0 5 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0 6 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:03.51 watchdog/0 7 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:11.63 migration/1 8 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/1 9 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 11:35.50 ksoftirqd/1 10 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:03.34 watchdog/1 11 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 1:36.68 events/0 12 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 1:50.57 events/1 13 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 cgroup 14 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper 15 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 netns 16 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 async/mgr 17 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pm 18 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:07.86 sync_supers 19 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:10.38 bdi-default 20 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kintegrityd/0 21 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kintegrityd/1 22 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:04.35 kblockd/0 23 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:04.18 kblockd/1 24 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid 25 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpi_notify 26 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpi_hotplug 27 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata/0 28 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata/1 29 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata_aux 30 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksuspend_usbd 31 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd 32 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod 33 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 md/0 34 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 md/1 35 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 md_misc/0 36 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 md_misc/1 37 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.48 khungtaskd 38 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 1:07.52 kswapd0 39 root 25 5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksmd 40 root 39 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:22.00 khugepaged 41 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0 42 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/1 43 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 crypto/0 44 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 crypto/1 49 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthrotld/0 50 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthrotld/1 52 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kpsmoused 53 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 usbhid_resumer 83 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kstriped 233 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_0 234 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_1 321 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 virtio-blk 359 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:03.24 kdmflush 360 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kdmflush 380 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:20.64 jbd2/dm-0-8 381 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ext4-dio-unwrit 382 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ext4-dio-unwrit 694 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 vballoon 697 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 virtio-net 818 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 jbd2/vda1-8 819 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ext4-dio-unwrit 820 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ext4-dio-unwrit 851 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:06.96 kauditd 1013 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:15.45 flush-253:0 ps: # ps aux --sort -vsz | head USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND www-data 13213 0.0 0.1 204416 4772 ? S 08:28 0:00 php-fpm: pool default www-data 13214 0.0 0.1 204416 4776 ? S 08:28 0:00 php-fpm: pool default www-data 13215 0.0 0.1 204416 4832 ? S 08:28 0:00 php-fpm: pool default www-data 13216 0.0 0.1 204416 4776 ? S 08:28 0:00 php-fpm: pool default www-data 13218 0.0 0.1 204416 4956 ? S 08:28 0:00 php-fpm: pool default free: #free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3831 3530 300 0 130 143 -/+ buffers/cache: 3256 574 Swap: 4095 0 4095 When I stooped Nginx, PHP-FPM the memory usage was still the same. Could you help me to investigate what is consuming the memory on the system? Regards

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  • A new method of supporting FOSS?

    - by James
    I have been kicking an idea around for sometime and wondered if something of it's nature hadn't already been invented. The premise is a website that integrates code management, project/team management, and micro-transactions. Donations, in and of themselves, are a sporadic, and unreliable method of supporting developers. Furthermore most free software that accepts donations is started by programmers ,be it to learn, because of a hobby, or because they saw a niche that needed to be filled. There is no method in place of of saying "hay, the FOSS community needs this kind of software, will someone develop it, and accept donations!?" Programmers should be programming, not busy begging for money. Basically the idea is people can go to the site in question, and start a project or make a request. Anyone signed up with the site can start a request. Each member account is free to support or "upvote" a project request. Requests and the associated number of votes let programmers in the community know the needs of the community. When a project is started a request for developers can be put forth. Developers have a ranking based on commits to other projects. The project founder can send invites to known Developers, or accept invites from members based on developer ranking. Once the project has at least one team-member, an objectives sheet or "draft" can be put out, listing design, goals, and features. The founding member and each team-member may contribute to this sheet. Each "milestone", or "Feature" is represented by an article. An article is any unit of a draft that can be voted on by The Project Founder, Team-members, and contributors...which brings me to the next half of this idea. --Microtransactions-- People signed up with this hypothetical website can purchase credits which then can be transfered to projects they would like to support. Anyone who transfers credits to a project is known as a contributor to that project. At anytime a Founder, or the lead team-member may submit an article, or a design (multiple articles) for consideration. All team-members, as well as the Founder, can vote once for each article freely. Contributors may vote yes or no on a number of articles (independent of any given meeting where a particular design or article is considered) equal to the number of credits they have placed into a contributors fund for that particular project. A contributors fund is a proxy between a sites credit account, and a projects credit account. It is sort of like a promise to contribute, instead of an actual contribution. Contributers may place constraints on particular articles such that if those constraints (a yes or no vote) are satisfied then a manually specified amount of credits is automatically transfered to the project account. This allows a project to develop based on the needs of those who may (in the future) financially rely on the project. --- Code commits & milestones --- When a team-member makes a commit, they may specify if it's a minor commit, a bug fix, a compatibility patch (i.e. for a new platform), or a milestone (an article voted on previously). People signed up with the website, may download the updated project and test it to see if the programmer's assertion is true about the commit. A report may then be filed on a small form, giving a one or two paragraphs, and a positive or negative confirmation of the programmer's goal for that particular commit. After all milestones for a particular draft are complete, a new draft is submitted for voting. Also funds may withdrawn by each team-member based on the proportion of commits and milestones confirmed (fulfilled the stated purpose) for each programmer. --- voting --- Members, contributor, and non-contributor, may make priority requests for particular articles of a draft. The project founder may or may not opt to fill those requests based on the volume of upvotes. A fulfilled priority request means that any team-member that makes a community-confirmed commit for an article is, when all articles for the draft are fulfilled, granted a portion of project credits in proportion to the average priority of all the articles he committed. ---- Notes --- While this is horribly prone to design-by-committee the one saving grace is that the lead team-member may place constraints on a draft such that some, or ALL articles must be voted yes. Commits may not begin until a draft satisfying said constraints is approved. What does SO think, is this idea feasible? Does anyone see major problems with this? Is there any insights, or improvements that could be made?

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  • VPN still working after rebooting without client - DrayTek client shows "No Connection"

    - by HeavenCore
    My home network is a simple router + pc's setup, nothing fancy - the router has DHCP enabled for 192.168.0.X (255.255.255.0) and my PC picks up the address 192.168.0.82. There are no devices on my local lan in the 192.168.1.x range. On my pc i have the DrayTek VPN client, and a company i do some work for has a DrayTek Vigor router. The VPN client establishes a VPN to that remote company using an IPSec Tunnel (PreShared Key - no encryption) Last night i shut down my pc with the VPN tunnel still connected, when i turned my computer on this morning i accidentally clicked an RDP shortcut to 192.168.1.2 (a host in the remote company) and to my amazement it connected?!? I checked and the DrayTek VPN client isnt running, and when i did run it, it clearly shows "Status: No connection". confused as to how my machine can still talk to this remote machine i tried a trace: C:\Users\HeavenCore>tracert 192.168.1.2 Tracing route to C4SERVERII [192.168.1.2] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 * * * Request timed out. 2 * * * Request timed out. 3 * * * Request timed out. 4 * * * Request timed out. 5 * * * Request timed out. 6 * * * Request timed out. 7 * * * Request timed out. 8 * * * Request timed out. 9 * * * Request timed out. 10 * * * Request timed out. 11 * * * Request timed out. 12 15 ms 21 ms 32 ms C4SERVERII [192.168.1.2] Trace complete. No indication there as to how it's getting from my network to the remote host. with my network mask being 255.255.255.0 with ip 192.168.0.1 i dont even see how packets are routing to 192.168.1.1 - unless there was a static route in place, so i checked the route table: IPv4 Route Table =========================================================================== Active Routes: Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.82 266 127.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 127.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 On-link 192.168.0.82 266 192.168.0.82 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.0.82 266 192.168.0.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.0.82 266 224.0.0.0 240.0.0.0 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 224.0.0.0 240.0.0.0 On-link 192.168.0.82 266 255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.0.82 266 =========================================================================== Persistent Routes: Network Address Netmask Gateway Address Metric 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 Default =========================================================================== As far as i can see, nothing indicating how my packets are getting to 192.168.1.2??? To confirm i was on a different subnet i did an ipconfig /all: Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Marvell Yukon 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ether net Controller Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-23-54-F3-4E-BA DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.82(Preferred) Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1 DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1 208.67.222.222 NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled Yet straight after confirming my ip and subnet as above i can go ahead and ping the remote machine: C:\Users\HeavenCore>ping 192.168.1.2 Pinging 192.168.1.2 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 192.168.1.2: bytes=32 time=48ms TTL=127 Reply from 192.168.1.2: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=127 Reply from 192.168.1.2: bytes=32 time=103ms TTL=127 Reply from 192.168.1.2: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=127 Ping statistics for 192.168.1.2: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 23ms, Maximum = 103ms, Average = 49ms Also, note on the ping how the times are 35ms ish, this clearly shows the pings are to the remote host and not something on my local lan (all stuff on my local lan pings in 0ms) - plus i verified the host was actually the host via RDP. My Question: Can an IPSec tunnel stay up some how after a reboot without use of the VPN client? (well, i can clearly see that it can) - where in windows is there visibility of this? how does my machine know where to route the packets? I appreciate any insights & thoughts!

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  • Cobol: science and fiction

    - by user847
    There are a few threads about the relevance of the Cobol programming language on this forum, e.g. this thread links to a collection of them. What I am interested in here is a frequently repeated claim based on a study by Gartner from 1997: that there were around 200 billion lines of code in active use at that time! I would like to ask some questions to verify or falsify a couple of related points. My goal is to understand if this statement has any truth to it or if it is totally unrealistic. I apologize in advance for being a little verbose in presenting my line of thought and my own opinion on the things I am not sure about, but I think it might help to put things in context and thus highlight any wrong assumptions and conclusions I have made. Sometimes, the "200 billion lines" number is accompanied by the added claim that this corresponded to 80% of all programming code in any language in active use. Other times, the 80% merely refer to so-called "business code" (or some other vague phrase hinting that the reader is not to count mainstream software, embedded systems or anything else where Cobol is practically non-existent). In the following I assume that the code does not include double-counting of multiple installations of the same software (since that is cheating!). In particular in the time prior to the y2k problem, it has been noted that a lot of Cobol code is already 20 to 30 years old. That would mean it was written in the late 60ies and 70ies. At that time, the market leader was IBM with the IBM/370 mainframe. IBM has put up a historical announcement on his website quoting prices and availability. According to the sheet, prices are about one million dollars for machines with up to half a megabyte of memory. Question 1: How many mainframes have actually been sold? I have not found any numbers for those times; the latest numbers are for the year 2000, again by Gartner. :^( I would guess that the actual number is in the hundreds or the low thousands; if the market size was 50 billion in 2000 and the market has grown exponentially like any other technology, it might have been merely a few billions back in 1970. Since the IBM/370 was sold for twenty years, twenty times a few thousand will result in a couple of ten-thousands of machines (and that is pretty optimistic)! Question 2: How large were the programs in lines of code? I don't know how many bytes of machine code result from one line of source code on that architecture. But since the IBM/370 was a 32-bit machine, any address access must have used 4 bytes plus instruction (2, maybe 3 bytes for that?). If you count in operating system and data for the program, how many lines of code would have fit into the main memory of half a megabyte? Question 3: Was there no standard software? Did every single machine sold run a unique hand-coded system without any standard software? Seriously, even if every machine was programmed from scratch without any reuse of legacy code (wait ... didn't that violate one of the claims we started from to begin with???) we might have O(50,000 l.o.c./machine) * O(20,000 machines) = O(1,000,000,000 l.o.c.). That is still far, far, far away from 200 billion! Am I missing something obvious here? Question 4: How many programmers did we need to write 200 billion lines of code? I am really not sure about this one, but if we take an average of 10 l.o.c. per day, we would need 55 million man-years to achieve this! In the time-frame of 20 to 30 years this would mean that there must have existed two to three million programmers constantly writing, testing, debugging and documenting code. That would be about as many programmers as we have in China today, wouldn't it? Question 5: What about the competition? So far, I have come up with two things here: 1) IBM had their own programming language, PL/I. Above I have assumed that the majority of code has been written exclusively using Cobol. However, all other things being equal I wonder if IBM marketing had really pushed their own development off the market in favor of Cobol on their machines. Was there really no relevant code base of PL/I? 2) Sometimes (also on this board in the thread quoted above) I come across the claim that the "200 billion lines of code" are simply invisible to anybody outside of "governments, banks ..." (and whatnot). Actually, the DoD had funded their own language in order to increase cost effectiveness and reduce the proliferation of programming language. This lead to their use of Ada. Would they really worry about having so many different programming languages if they had predominantly used Cobol? If there was any language running on "government and military" systems outside the perception of mainstream computing, wouldn't that language be Ada? I hope someone can point out any flaws in my assumptions and/or conclusions and shed some light on whether the above claim has any truth to it or not.

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  • Why is insertion into my tree faster on sorted input than random input?

    - by Juliet
    Now I've always heard binary search trees are faster to build from randomly selected data than ordered data, simply because ordered data requires explicit rebalancing to keep the tree height at a minimum. Recently I implemented an immutable treap, a special kind of binary search tree which uses randomization to keep itself relatively balanced. In contrast to what I expected, I found I can consistently build a treap about 2x faster and generally better balanced from ordered data than unordered data -- and I have no idea why. Here's my treap implementation: http://pastebin.com/VAfSJRwZ And here's a test program: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Diagnostics; namespace ConsoleApplication1 { class Program { static Random rnd = new Random(); const int ITERATION_COUNT = 20; static void Main(string[] args) { List<double> rndTimes = new List<double>(); List<double> orderedTimes = new List<double>(); rndTimes.Add(TimeIt(50, RandomInsert)); rndTimes.Add(TimeIt(100, RandomInsert)); rndTimes.Add(TimeIt(200, RandomInsert)); rndTimes.Add(TimeIt(400, RandomInsert)); rndTimes.Add(TimeIt(800, RandomInsert)); rndTimes.Add(TimeIt(1000, RandomInsert)); rndTimes.Add(TimeIt(2000, RandomInsert)); rndTimes.Add(TimeIt(4000, RandomInsert)); rndTimes.Add(TimeIt(8000, RandomInsert)); rndTimes.Add(TimeIt(16000, RandomInsert)); rndTimes.Add(TimeIt(32000, RandomInsert)); rndTimes.Add(TimeIt(64000, RandomInsert)); rndTimes.Add(TimeIt(128000, RandomInsert)); string rndTimesAsString = string.Join("\n", rndTimes.Select(x => x.ToString()).ToArray()); orderedTimes.Add(TimeIt(50, OrderedInsert)); orderedTimes.Add(TimeIt(100, OrderedInsert)); orderedTimes.Add(TimeIt(200, OrderedInsert)); orderedTimes.Add(TimeIt(400, OrderedInsert)); orderedTimes.Add(TimeIt(800, OrderedInsert)); orderedTimes.Add(TimeIt(1000, OrderedInsert)); orderedTimes.Add(TimeIt(2000, OrderedInsert)); orderedTimes.Add(TimeIt(4000, OrderedInsert)); orderedTimes.Add(TimeIt(8000, OrderedInsert)); orderedTimes.Add(TimeIt(16000, OrderedInsert)); orderedTimes.Add(TimeIt(32000, OrderedInsert)); orderedTimes.Add(TimeIt(64000, OrderedInsert)); orderedTimes.Add(TimeIt(128000, OrderedInsert)); string orderedTimesAsString = string.Join("\n", orderedTimes.Select(x => x.ToString()).ToArray()); Console.WriteLine("Done"); } static double TimeIt(int insertCount, Action<int> f) { Console.WriteLine("TimeIt({0}, {1})", insertCount, f.Method.Name); List<double> times = new List<double>(); for (int i = 0; i < ITERATION_COUNT; i++) { Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); f(insertCount); sw.Stop(); times.Add(sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds); } return times.Average(); } static void RandomInsert(int insertCount) { Treap<double> tree = new Treap<double>((x, y) => x.CompareTo(y)); for (int i = 0; i < insertCount; i++) { tree = tree.Insert(rnd.NextDouble()); } } static void OrderedInsert(int insertCount) { Treap<double> tree = new Treap<double>((x, y) => x.CompareTo(y)); for(int i = 0; i < insertCount; i++) { tree = tree.Insert(i + rnd.NextDouble()); } } } } And here's a chart comparing random and ordered insertion times in milliseconds: Insertions Random Ordered RandomTime / OrderedTime 50 1.031665 0.261585 3.94 100 0.544345 1.377155 0.4 200 1.268320 0.734570 1.73 400 2.765555 1.639150 1.69 800 6.089700 3.558350 1.71 1000 7.855150 4.704190 1.67 2000 17.852000 12.554065 1.42 4000 40.157340 22.474445 1.79 8000 88.375430 48.364265 1.83 16000 197.524000 109.082200 1.81 32000 459.277050 238.154405 1.93 64000 1055.508875 512.020310 2.06 128000 2481.694230 1107.980425 2.24 I don't see anything in the code which makes ordered input asymptotically faster than unordered input, so I'm at a loss to explain the difference. Why is it so much faster to build a treap from ordered input than random input?

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  • weird space in IE - Any suggestions?

    - by Guru
    The below table is the only element inside a body tag - This displays fine in Firefox 3 as i expect it to be but it does not look good in IE7. There is a weird space just between the nested table and the row above. Can you please suggest some way to remove that weird space? - Thanks <table> <tr> <td colspan="14"> <div> <table id="value_table" width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" style="border-collapse: collapse; display: block"> <tr> <td height="20" align="center" valign="Middle" class="Header"> <div align="left"><b>  Search Relationships</b></div> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>This is working</td> </tr> <tr valign="top"> <td>second row</td> <td nowrap="nowrap" class="GrayRow" valign="top" border="1" height="40" align="center" style="border: none"> just above the table <table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" align="left"> <tr valign="top"> <td>new row inside table</td> <td class="GrayRow" nowrap="nowrap"> <b>Select:</b>   <select id="j_id19:browseType" name="j_id19:browseType" size="1" class="TextBlackNormal" onchange="showDynamicBox(this);"> <option value="NAME">User Name</option> <option value="ID">User Id</option> <option value="IBD/Office/IP">IBD/Office /IP</option> <option value="APA#">APA#</option></select>    </td> <td> <div id="dynamicBox1" style="display: block"><input id="j_id19:j_id23" name="j_id19:j_id23" type="text" value="" size="32" class="TextBlackNormal" /></div> </td>     <td> <div id="dynamicBox2" style="display: none"><input id="j_id19:j_id25" name="j_id19:j_id25" type="text" value="" size="32" class="TextBlackNormal" /></div> </td>     <td> <div id="dynamicBox3" style="display: none"> IBD   <input id="j_id19:ibdval1" name="j_id19:ibdval1" type="text" value="" maxlength="3" size="3" onkeyup="goToNextFocus(this);" class="TextBlackNormal" />   OFF   <input id="j_id19:ibdval2" name="j_id19:ibdval2" type="text" value="" maxlength="3" size="3" onkeyup="goToNextFocus(this);" class="TextBlackNormal" />   IP    <input id="j_id19:ibdval3" name="j_id19:ibdval3" type="text" value="" maxlength="3" size="3" onkeyup="goToNextFocus(this);" class="TextBlackNormal" /> </div> </td>     <td> <div id="dynamicBox4" style="display: none"> Average Price Account#    <input id="j_id19:apaval1" name="j_id19:apaval1" type="text" value="" maxlength="3" size="3" onkeyup="goToNextFocus(this);" class="TextBlackNormal" />  <input id="j_id19:apaval2" name="j_id19:apaval2" type="text" value="" maxlength="3" size="3" onkeyup="goToNextFocus(this);" class="TextBlackNormal" />  <input id="j_id19:apaval3" name="j_id19:apaval3" type="text" value="" maxlength="3" size="3" onkeyup="goToNextFocus(this);" class="TextBlackNormal" /> </div> </td>        <td class="GrayRow" nowrap="nowrap"> <div id="msg_multiple_inputs" style="display:none"> <font color="#990000" size="1">Enter multiple separated by commas   </font> </div>                                   </td> <td><input id="j_id19:display" name="j_id19:display" type="submit" value="Display" class="TextBlackNormal" /></td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table> </div> </td> </tr> </table>

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  • What do I need to change to get this 'acts_as_rateable' Rails plugin working with this code from the

    - by tepidsam
    Hello! I'm working my way through the 'Foundation Rails 2' book. In Chapter 9, we are building a little "plugins" app. In the book, he installs the acts_as_rateable plugin found at http://juixe.com/svn/acts_as_rateable. This plugin doesn't appear to exist in 2010 (the page for this "old" plugin seems to be working again...it was down when I tried it earlier), so I found another acts_as_rateable plugin at http://github.com/azabaj/acts_as_rateable. These plugins are different and I'm trying to get the "new" plugin working with the code/project/app from the Foudations 2 book. I was able to use the migration generator included with the "new" plugin and it worked. Now,though, I'm a bit confused. In the book, he has us create a new controller to work with the plugin (the old plugin). Here's the code for that: class RatingsController < ApplicationController def create @plugin = Plugin.find(params[:plugin_id]) rating = Rating.new(:rating => params[:rating]) @plugin.ratings << average_rating redirect_to @plugin end end Then he had us change the routing: map.resources :plugins, :has_many => :ratings map.resources :categories map.root :controller => 'plugins' Next, we modified the following to the 'show' template so that it looks like this: <div id="rate_plugin"> <h2>Rate this plugin</h2> <ul class="star-rating"> <li> <%= link_to "1", @plugin.rate_it(1), :method => :post, :title => "1 star out of 5", :class => "one-star" %> </li> <li> <%= link_to "2", plugin_ratings_path(@plugin, :rating => 2), :method => :post, :title => "2 stars out of 5", :class => "two-stars" %> </li> <li> <%= link_to "3", plugin_ratings_path(@plugin, :rating => 3), :method => :post, :title => "3 stars out of 5", :class => "three-stars" %> </li> <li> <%= link_to "4", plugin_ratings_path(@plugin, :rating => 4), :method => :post, :title => "4 stars out of 5", :class => "four-stars" %> </li> <li> <%= link_to "5", plugin_ratings_path(@plugin, :rating => 5), :method => :post, :title => "5 stars out of 5", :class => "five-stars" %> </li> </ul> </div> The problem is that we're using code for a different plugin. When I try to actually "rate" one of the plugins, I get an "unknown attribute" error. That makes sense. I'm using attribute names for the "old" plugin, but I should be using attributes names for the "new" plugin. The problem is...I've tried using a variety of different attribute names and I keep getting the same error. From the README for the "new" plugin, I think I should be using some of these but I haven't been able to get them working: Install the plugin into your vendor/plugins directory, insert 'acts_as_rateable' into your model, then restart your application. class Post < ActiveRecord::Base acts_as_rateable end Now your model is extended by the plugin, you can rate it ( 1-# )or calculate the average rating. @plugin.rate_it( 4, current_user.id ) @plugin.average_rating #=> 4.0 @plugin.average_rating_round #=> 4 @plugin.average_rating_percent #=> 80 @plugin.rated_by?( current_user ) #=> rating || false Plugin.find_average_of( 4 ) #=> array of posts See acts_as_rateable.rb for further details! I'm guessing that I might have to make some "bigger" changes to get this plugin working. I'm asking this question to learn and only learn. The book gives code to get things working with the old plugin, but if one were actually building this app today it would be necessary to use this "new" plugin, so I would like to see how it could be used. Cheers! Any ideas on what I could change to get the "new" plugin working?

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  • UPDATE FOR BI PUBLISHER ENTERPRISE 10.1.3.4.1 MARCH 2010

    - by Tim Dexter
    Latest roll up patch for 10.1.3.4.1 is now out in the wild. Yep, there are bug fixes but the guys have implemented some great enhancements. I'll be covering some of them over the coming weeks, from collapsing bookmarks in your PDFs to better MS AD support to 'true' Excel templates, yes you read that correctly! Patch is available from Oracle's support site. Just search for patch 9546699. Here's the contents and readme, apologies for the big list but at least you can search against it for a particular fix. This patch contains backports of following bugs for BI Publisher Enterprise 10.1.3.4.0 and 10.1.3.4.1. 6193342 - REG:SAMPLE DATA FILE FOR PDF FORM MAPPING IS NOT VALIDATED 6261875 - ERRONEOUS PRECISION VALIDATION ON ONLINE ANALYZER 6439437 - NULL POINTER EXCEPTION WHEN PROCESSING TABLE OF CONTENT 6460974 - BACS EFT PAYMENT INSTRUCTION OUTPUT FILE IS EMPTY 6939721 - BIP: REPORT BUSTING DELIVERY KEY VALUES CANNOT CONTAIN SEVERAL SPECIAL CHARACTER 6996069 - USING XML DB FOR BI REPOSITORY FAILS WITH RESOURCENOTFOUNDEXCEPTION 7207434 - TIMEZONE:SHOULD NOT DO TIMEZONE CONVERSION AGAINST CANONICAL DATE YYYY-MM-DD 7371531 - SUPPORT FOR CSV OUTPUT FOR STRUCTURED XML AND NON SQL DATA SOURCES 7596148 - ER: LDAP FOR MS AD TO SEARCH FROM AD ROOT 7646139 - WEBSERVICES ERROR 7829516 - BIP STANDALONE FAILS TO BURST USING XSL-FO TEMPLATES 8219848 - PDF TEMPLATE REPORT NOT PERFORMING PAGE BREAK 8232116 - PARAMETER VALUE IS PASSED AS NULL,IF IT CONTAINS 'AND' WITHIN THE STRING 8250690 - NOT ABLE TO UPLOAD TEMPLATE VIA BIP API 8288459 - ER: QUERY BUILDER OPTION TO NOT INCLUDE TABLENAME. PREFIX IN SQL 8289600 - REPORT TITLE AND DESCRIPTION CAN'T SUPPORT MULTIPLE LANGUAGES 8327080 - CAN NOT CONFIGURE ORACLE EBUSINESS SUITE SECURITY MODEL WITH ORACLE RAC 8332164 - AN XDO PROPERTY TO ENABLE DEBUG LOGGING 8333289 - WEB SERVICE JOBS FAIL AFTER BIP STARTED UP 8340239 - HTTP NOTIFY IS MISSING IN SCHEDULEREPORTREQUEST 8360933 - UNABLE TO USE LOGGED IN BI USER AS THE WSSECURITY USERNAME IN A VARIABLE FORMAT 8400744 - ADMINISTRATOR USER DOES NOT HAVE FULL ADMINISTRATOR RIGHTS 8402436 - CRASH CAUSED BY UNDETERMINED ATTRKEY ERROR IN MULTI-THREADED 8403779 - IMPOSSIBLE TO CONFIGURE PARAMETER FOR A REPORT 8412259 - PDF, RTF OUTPUT NOT HANDLING THE TABLE BORDER AND CONTENT OVERFLOWS TO NEXT PAGE 8483919 - DYNAMIC DATASOURCE WEBSERVICE SHOULD WORK WITH SERVERSIDE CONNECTIONS 8444382 - ID ATTRIBUTE IN TITLE-PAGE DOES NOT WORK WITH SELECTACTION PROPERTY 8446681 - UI LANGUAGE IS NOT REFLECTED AT THE FIRST LOG IN 8449884 - PUBLICREPORTSERVICE FAILS ON EMAIL DELIVERY USING BIP 10.1.3.4.0D+ - NPE 8454858 - DB: XMLP_ADMIN CAN SEE ALL THE FOLDERS BUT ONLY HAS VIEW PERMISSIONS 8458818 - PDFBOOKBINDER FAILS WITH OUTOFMEMORY ERROR WHEN TRYING TO BIND > 1500 PDFS 8463992 - INCORRECT IMPLEMENTATION OF XLIFF SPECIFICATION 8468777 - BI PUBLISHER QUERY BUILDER NOT LOADING SCHEMA OBJECTS 8477310 - QUERY BUILDER NOT WORK WITH SSL ON STANDALONE OC4J 8506701 - POSITIVE PAY FILE WITH OPTIONS NOT CREATING FILE CHECKS OVER 2500 8506761 - PERFORMANCE: PDFBOOKBINDER CLASS TAKES 4 HOURS TO BIND 4000 PAGES 8535604 - NPE WHEN CLICKING "ANALYZER FOR EXCEL" BUTTON IN ALL_* REPORTS 8536246 - REMOVE-PDF-FIELDS DOES NOT WORK WITH CHECKBOXES WITH OPT ARRAY 8541792 - NULLPOINTER EXCEPTION WHILE USING SFTP PROTOCOL 8554443 - LOGGING TIME STAMP IN 10G: THE HOUR PART IS WRONG 8558007 - UNABLE TO LOGIN BIP WITH UNPRIVILEGED USER WHEN XDB IS USED FOR REPORSITORY STOR 8565758 - NEED TO CONNECT IMPERSONATION TO DATA SOURCE WITH PL/SQL FUNCTION 8567235 - EFTPROCESSOR AND XDO DEBUG ENABLED CAUSES ORG.XML.SAX.SAXPARSEEXCEPTION 8572216 - EFTPROCESSOR NOT THREAD SAFE - CAUSING CORRUPTED REPORTS TO BE GENERATED 8575776 - LANDSCAPE REPORT ORIENTAION NOT SELECTED WHEN REPORT IS PRINTED WITH PS 8588330 - XLIFF GENERATING WITH WRONG MAXWIDTH ATTRIBUTE IN SOME TRANS-UNITS 8584446 - EFTGENERATOR DOES NOT USE XSLT SCALABILITY - JAVA.LANG.OUTOFMEMORY EXCEPTION 8594954 - ENG: BIP NOTIFY MESSAGE BECOMES ENGLISH 8599646 - ER:EXTRA SPACE ADDED BELOW IMAGE IN A TABLE CELL OF TEMPLATE IN FIREFOX 8605110 - PDFSIGNATURE API ENCOUNTERS JAVA.LANG.NULLPOINTEREXCEPTION ON PDF WITH WATERMARK 8660915 - BURSTING WITH DATA TEMPLATE NOT WORKING WITH OPTION: VALUE=FALSE 8660920 - ER: EXTRACT XHTML DATA USING XDODTEXE IN XHTML FORMAT 8667150 - PROBLEM WITH 3RD APPLICATION ABOUT PDF GENERATED WITH BI PUBLISHER 8683547 - "CLICK VIEW REPORT BUTTON TO GENERATE THE REPORT" MESSAGE IS DISPLAYED 8713080 - SEARCH" PARAMETER IS NOT SHOWING NON ENGLISH DATA IN INTERNET EXPLORER 8724778 - EXCEL ANALYZER PARAMETERS DO NOT WORK WITH EXCEL 2007 8725450 - UIX 2.3.6.6 UPTAKE FOR 10.1.3.4.1 8728807 - DYNAMIC JDBC DATA SOURCE WITH PRE-PROCESS FUNCTION BASED ON EXISTING DATA SOURCE 8759558 - XDO TEMPLATE SHOWS CURRENCY IN WRONG FORMAT FOR DUNNING 8792894 - EFTPROCESSOR DOES NOT SUPPORT XSL TEMPLATE AS INPUTSTREAM 8793550 - BIP GENERATES CSV REPORTS OUTPUT FORMAT WITH EXTENTION .OUT NOT .CSV IN EMAIL 8819869 - PERIOD CLOSE VALUE SUMMARY REPORT (XML) RUNNING INTO WARNING 8825732 - MY FOLDERS LINK BROKEN WITH USER NAME THAT INCLUDES A SLASH (/) OBIEE SECURITY 8831948 - TRYING TO GENERATE A SCATTER PLOT USING THE CHART WIZARD 8842299 - SEEDED QUERY ALWAYS RETURNS RESULTS BASED ON FIRST COLUMN 8858027 - NODE.GETTEXTCONTEXT() NOT AVAILABLE IN 10G UNDER OC4J 8859957 - REPORT TITLE ALIGNMENT GOES BAD FOR REPORTS WITH XLIFF FILE ATTACHED 8860957 - ER: IMPROVE PERFORMANCE OF ANSWERS PARAMETERS 8891537 - GETREPORTPARAMETERS WEB SERVICE API ISSUES WITH OAAM REPORTS 8891558 - GETTING SQLEXCEPTION IN GENERATEREPORT WEB SERVICE API ON OAAM REPORTS 8927796 - ER: DYANAMIC DATA SOURCE SUPPORT BY DATA SOURCE NAME 8969898 - BI PUBLISHER WEB SERVICE GETREPORTPARAMETERS DOES NOT TRANSLATE PARAMETER LABEL 8998967 - MULTIPLE XSL PREDICATES ELEMENT[A='A'] [B='B'] CAUSES XML-22019 ERROR 9012511 - SCALABLE MODE IS NOT WORKING IN XMLPUBLISHER 10.1.3.4 9016976 - ER: PRINT XSL-T AND FOPROCESSING TIMING INFORMATION 9018580 - WEB SERVICE CALL FAILS WHEN REPORT INCLUDES SEARCH TYPE 9018657 - JOB FAILS WHEN LOV QUERY CONTAINS BIND VARIABLES :XDO_USER_UI_LOCALE 9021224 - PERFORMANCE ISSUE TO VIEW DASHBOARD PAGE WITH BIP REPORT LINKS 9022440 - ER: SUPPORT "COMB OF N CHARACTERS" FEATURE PDF FORM TEXT FIELDS 9026236 - XPATH DOES NOT WORK CORRECTLY IN 10.1.3.4.1 9051652 - FILE EXTENSION OF CSV OUTPUT IS TXT WHEN IT IS EXPORTED FROM REPORT VIEWER 9053770 - WHEN SENDING CSV REPORT OUTPUT BY EMAIL SOMETIMES IT IS SENT WITHOUT EXTENSION 9066483 - PDFBOOKBINDER LEAVE SOME TEMPORARY FILES AFTER MERGING TITLE PAGE OR TOC 9102420 - USE RELATIVE PATHS IN HYPERLINKS 9127185 - CHECKBOX NOT WORK ON SUB TEMPLATE 9149679 - BASE URL IS NOT PASSED CORRECTLY 9149691 - PROVIDE A WAY TO DISABLE THE ABILITY TO CREATE SCHEDULED REPORT JOB "PUBLIC" 9167822 - NOTIFICATION URL BREAKS ON FOLDER NAMES WITH SPACES 9167913 - CHARTS ARE MISSING IN PDF OUTPUTS WHEN THE DEFAULT OUTPUT FORMAT IS NOT A PDF 9217965 - REPORT HISTORY TAKES LONG TIME TO RENDER THE PAGE 9236674 - BI PUBLISHER PARAMETERS DO NOT CASCADE REFRESH AFTER SECOND PARAMETER 9283933 - OPTION TO COLLAPSE PDF OUTPUT BOOKMARKS BY DEFAULT 9287245 - SAVE COMPLETED SCHEDULED REPORTS IN ITS REPORT NAME AND NOT IN A GENERIC NAME 9348862 - ADD FEATURE TO DISABLE THE XSLT1.0-COMPATIBILITY IN RTF TEMPLATE 9355897 - ER: NEED A SAFE DIVIDE FUNCTION 9364169 - UIX 2.3.6.6 PATCH UPTAKE FOR 10.1.3.4.1 9365153 - LEADING WHITESPACE CHARACTERS IN A FIELD TRIMMED WHEN RUN VIEW OR EXPORT TO .CSV 9389039 - LONG TEXT IS NOT WRAPPED PROPERLY IN THE AUTOSHAPE ON RTF TEMPLATE 9475697 - ENH: SUB-TEMPLATE:DYNAMIC VARIABLE WITH PARAMETER VALUE IN CALL-TEMPLATE CLAUSE 9484549 - CHANGE DEFAULT FOR "XSLT1.0-COMPATIBILITY" TO FALSE FOR 10G 9508499 - UNABLE TO READ EXCEL FILE IF MORE THAN 1800 ROWS GENERATED 9546078 - EMAIL DELIVERY INFORMATION SHOULD NOT BE SAVED AND AUTO-FED IN JOB SUBMISSION 9546101 - EXCEPTION OCCURS WHEN SFTP/FTP REMOTE FILENAME DOSE NOT CONTAIN A SLASH '/' 9546117 - SFTP REPORT DELIVERY FAILS WITH NO CLASS DEF FOUND EXCEPTION ON WEBLOGIC 9.2 Following bugs are included in 10.1.3.4.1 and they are only applied to 10.1.3.4.0. 4612604 - FROM EDGE ATTRIBUTE OF HEADER AND FOOTER IS NOT PRESERVED 6621006 - PARAMNAMEVALUE ELEMENT DEFINITION SHOULD HAVE PARAMETER TYPE 6811967 - DATE PARAMETER NOT HANDLING DATE OFFSET WHEN PASSED UPPERCASE Z FOR OFFSET 6864451 - WHEN BIP REPORTS TIMEOUT, THE PROCESS TO LOG BACK IN IS NOT USER FRIENDLY 6869887 - FUSION CURRENCY BRD:4.1.4/4.1.6 OVERRIDINDG MASK /W XSLT._XDOCURMASKS /W SYMBOL 6959078 - "TEXT FIELD CONTAINS COMMA-SEPARATED VALUES" DOESN'T WORK IN CASE OF STRING 6994647 - GETTING ERROR MESSAGE SAYING JOB FAILED EVEN THOUGH WORKS OK IN BI PUBLISHER 7133143 - ENABLE USER TO ENTER 'TODAY' AS VALUE TO DATE PARAMETER IN SCHEDULE REPORT UI 7165117 - QA_BIP_FUNC:-CLOSED LIFE TIME REPORT ERROR MESSAGE IN CMD 7167068 - LEADER-LENGTH OR RULE-THICKNESS PROPRTY IS TOO LARGE 7219517 - NEED EXTENSION FUNCTIONS TO URL ENCODE TEXT STRING. 7269228 - TEMPLATEHELPER PRODUCES A GARBLED OUTPUT WHEN INVOKED BY MULTIPLE THREADS 7276813 - GETREPORTPARAMETERSRETURN ELEMENT SHOULD HAVE DEFAULT VALUE 7279046 - SCHDEULER:UNABLE TO DELETE A JOB USING API 7280336 - ER: BI PUBLISHER - SITEMINDER SUPPORT - GENERIC NON-ORACLE SSO SUPPORT 7281468 - MODIFY SQL SERVER PROPERTIES TO USE HYP DATA DIRECT IN JDBCDEFAULTS.XML 7281495 - PLEASE ADD SUPPORTED DBS TO JDBCDEFAULT.XML AND LIST EACH DB VERSION SEPARATELY 7282456 - FUSION CURRENCY BRD 4.1.9.2: CURRENCY AMOUTS SHOULD NOT BE WRAPPED. MINUS SIGN 7282507 - FUSION CURRENCY BRD4.1.2.5:DISPLAY CURRENCY AND LOCALE DERIVED CURRENCY SYMBOL 7284780 - FUSION CURRENCY BRD 4.1.12.4 CORRECTLY ALIGN NEGATIVE CURRENCY AMOUNTS 7306874 - OPP ERROR - JAVA.LANG.OUTOFMEMORYERROR: ZIP002:OUTOFMEMORYERROR, MEM_ERROR 7309596 - SIEBELCRM: BIP ENHANCEMENT REQUEST FOR SIEBEL PARAMETERIZATION 7337173 - UI LOCALE IS ALWAYS REWRITTEN TO EN WHEN MOVE FROM DASHBOARD 7338349 - REG:ANALYZER REPORT WITH AVERAGE FUNCTION FAIL TO RUN FOR NON INTERACTIVE FORMAT 7343757 - OUTPUT FORMAT OF TEMPLATES IS NOT SAVING 7345989 - SET XDK REPLACEILLEGALCHARS AND ENHANCE XSLTWRAPPER WARNING 7354775 - UNEXPECTED BEHAVIOR OF LAYOUT TEMPLATE PARAMETER OF RUNREPORT WEBSERVICES API 7354798 - SEQUENCE ORDER OF PARAMETERS FOR THE RUNREPORT WEBSERVICES API 7358973 - PARALLEL SFTP DELIVERY FAILS DUE TO SSHEXCEPTION: CORRUPT MAC ON INPUT 7370110 - REGN:FAIL WHEN USE JNDI TO XMLDB REPORT REPOSITORY 7375859 - NEW WEBSERVICE REQUIRED FOR RUNREPORT 7375892 - REQUIRE NEW WEBSERVICE TO CHECK IF REPORTFOLDER EXISTS 7377686 - TEXT-ALIGN NOT APPLIED IN PDF IN HEBREW LOCALE 7413722 - RUNREPORT API DOES NOT PASS BACK ANY GENERATED EXCEPTIONS TO SCHEDULEREPORT 7435420 - FUSION CURRENCY: SUPPORT MICROSOFT(JAVA) FORMAT MASK WITH CURRENCY 7441486 - ER: ADD PARAMETER FOR SFTP TO BURSTING QUERY 7458169 - SSO WITH OID LDAP COULD NOT FETCH OID ROLES 7461161 - EMAIL DELIVERY FAILS - DELIVERYEXCEPTION: 0 BYTE AVAILABLE IN THE GIVEN INPU 7580715 - INCORRECT FORMATTING OF DATES IN TIMEZONE GMT+13 7582694 - INVALID MAXWIDTH VALUE CAUSES NLS FAILURES 7583693 - JAVA.LANG.NULLPOINTEREXCEPTION RAISED WHEN GENERATING HRMS BENEFITS PDF REPORT 7587998 - NEWLY CREATED USERS IN OID CANT ACCESS REPORTS UNTILL BI PUBLISHER IS RESTARTED 7588317 - TABLE OF CONTENT ALWAYS IN THE SAME FONT 7590084 - REMOVING THE BIP ENTERPRISE BANNER BUT KEEPING THE REPORTS & SCHEDULES TAB 7590112 - SOMEONE NOT PRIVILEGED ACCESS BIP DIRECTLY SHOULD GET A CUSTOM PAGE 7590125 - AUTOMATING CREATION OF USERS AND ROLES 7597902 - TIMEZONE SUPPORT IN RUNREPORT WEBSERVICE API 7599031 - XML PUBLISHER SUM(CURRENT-GROUP()) FAILS 7609178 - ISSUE WITH TAGS EXTRACTED FROM RTF TEMPLATE 7613024 - HEADER/FOOTER SETTINGS OF RTF TEMPLATE ARE NOT RETAINING IN THE RTF OUTPUT 7623988 - ADD XSLT FUNCTION TO PRINT XDO PROPERTIES 7625975 - RETRIEVING PARAMETER LOV FROM RTF TEMPLATE 7629445 - SPELL OUT A NUMBER INTO WORDS 7641827 - ANALYTICS FROZED AFTER PAGE TAB WHICH INCLUDES [BI PUBLISHER REPORT] WERE CLICKE 7645504 - BIP REPORT FROZED AFTER THE SAME DASHBOARD BIP REPORTS WERE CLICKED SIMULTANEOUS 7649561 - RECEIVE 'TO MANY OPEN FILE HANDLES' ERROR CAUSING BI TO CRASH 7654155 - BIP REMOVES THE FIRST FILE SEPARATOR WHEN RE-ENTER REPOSITORY LOCATION IN ADMIN 7656834 - NEED AN OPTION TO NOT APPEND SCHEMA NAME IN GENERATED QUERY 7660292 - ER: XDOPARSER UPGRADE TO XDK 11G 7687862 - BIP DATA EXTRACTING ENHANCEMENT FOR SIEBEL BIP INTEGRATION 7694875 - ADMINISTRATOR IS SUPER USER WHETHER CONFIGURED MANDATORY_USER_ROLE OR NOT 7697592 - BI PUBLISHER STRINGINDEXOUTOFBOUNDSEXCEPTION WHEN PRINTING LABEL FROM SIM 7702372 - ARABIC/ENGLISH NUMBER/DATE PROBLEM, TOTAL PAGE NUMBER NOT RENDERED IN ENGLISH 7707987 - OUTOFMEMORY BURSTING A BI PUBLISHER REPORT BI SERVER DATA SOURCE 7712026 - ER: CHANGE CHART OUTPUT FORMAT TO PNG IN HTML OUTPUT 7833732 - THE 'SEARCH' PARAMETER TYPE CANNOT BE USED IN IE6 UNDER WINDOWS 8214839 - ER: INCREASE COLUMN SIZE IN SCHEDULER TABLE XMLP_SCHED_JOB 8218271 - ISSUES WHILE CONVERTING EXCEL TO XML 8218452 - BI PUBLISHER STANDALONE : GRAPHICS WITHOUT COLORS IF MORE THAN 33 PAGES 8250980 - USER WITH XMLP_ADMIN RESPONSIBILITY IS NOT ABLE TO EDIT REPORT IN BIP 8262410 - IMPOSSIBLE TO PRINT PDF CREATED BY BI PUBLISHER VIA 3RD PARTY PDF APPLICATION 8274369 - QA: CANNOT DELETE EMAIL SERVER UNDER DELIVERY CONFIGURATION 8284173 - FO:VISIBILITY="HIDDEN" DOESN'T WORK WITH FO:PAGE-NUMBER-CITATION 8288421 - THE VALUE OF VIEW BY GO BACK TO MY HISTORY IN SCHEDULES TAB 8299212 - REG: THE SPECIFICAL BI USER DIDN'T GET THE CORRECT REPORT HISTORY 8301767 - ORA-01795 ERROR OCCURED AFTER ACCESSING DASHBOARD PAGE WHICH INCLUDES BIP 8304944 - ADD SIEBEL SECURITY MODEL IN BI PUBLISHER 10.1.3.4.1 8312814 - QA:HOT:OBI SERVER JDBC DRIVER BIJDBC14.JAR IN XMLPSERVER.WAR IS INCORRECT 8323679 - BI PUBLISHER SENDS HTML REPORT TO OUTLOOK CLIENT AS ATTACHMENT NOT INLINE 8370794 - HISTORY OF COMPLETED SCHEDULER JOBS STILL SHOW ONE AS RUNNING ON CLUSTER ENV 8390970 - OUT OF MEMORY EXCEPTION RAISED, WHILE SAVING THE DATA 8393681 - CHECKBOX IS SHOWING UP AS CHECKED WHEN DATA IS NOT CHECKED VALUE 8725450 - UIX 2.3.6.6 UPTAKE FOR 10.1.3.4.1 UIX fixes: 6866363 - SUPPORT FOR JAVA DATE FORMAT AS PER JDK 1.4 AND ABOVE 6829124 - DATE PARAMETER NOT HANDLING DATE OFFSET AS PER JAVA STANDARDS ---------------------------- INSTALLATION FOR ENTERPRISE ---------------------------- Upgrade from 10.1.3.4.0d (patch 8284524, 8398280) and 10.1.3.4.1 does not require step 8 and step 9. 1 - Make a backup copy of the xmlp-server-config.xml file located in <application installation>/WEB-INF/ directory, where your application server unpacked the BI Publisher war or ear file. Example: In an Oracle AS/OC4J 10.1.3 deployment, the location is <ORACLE_HOME>/j2ee/home/applications/xmlpserver/xmlpserver/WEB-INF/xmlp-server-config.xml 2 - Back up all the directories under the BI Publisher repository (for example: {Oracle_Home}/xmlp/XMLP). 3 - If you are using Scheduling, back up your existing BI Publisher Scheduler schema. 4 - Shut down BI Publisher. 5 - Undeploy the BI Publisher application ("xmlpserver") from your J2EE application server. See your application server documentation for instructions how to undeploy an application. 6 - Deploy the 10.1.3.4 xmlpserver.ear or xmlpserver.war to your application server. See "Manually Installing BI Publisher to Your J2EE Application Server" secition of BI Publisher Installation Guide for guidelines for your application server type. 7 - Copy the saved backup copy of the xmlp-server-config.xml file from step 1 to the newly created BI Publisher <application installation>/WEB-INF/ directory, where your application server unpacked the BI Publisher war or ear file. Example: In an Oracle AS/OC4J 10.1.3 deployment, the location is <ORACLE_HOME>/j2ee/home/applications/xmlpserver/xmlpserver/WEB-INF/xmlp-server-config.xml 8 - Copy ssodefaults.xml to the following directory. And replace [host]:[port] with your server's information. Default values for other properties can be updated depending on your configuration. <Existing Repository>\XMLP\Admin\Security 9 - Copy database-config.xml to the following directory. <Existing Repository>\XMLP\Admin\Scheduler 10 - Restart xmlpserver application or Application Server ---------------------------------- IBM WEBSPHERE 6.1 DEPLOYMENT NOTE ---------------------------------- When users fail to log on to BI Publisher with "HTTP 500 Internal Server Error" on WebSphere 6.1, you must change Class Loader configuration to avoid the error. (bug7506253 - XMLPSERVER WON'T START AFTER DEPLOYMENT TO WEBSPHERE 6.1) SystemErr.log: java.lang.VerifyError: class loading constraint violated (class: oracle/xml/parser/v2/XMLNode method: xdkSetQxName(Loracle/xml/util/QxName;)V) at pc: 0 .... Class Loader Configuration Steps: 1 - Login to WebSphere Admin console. Click Enterprise Applications under Applications menu 2 - Click xmlpserver application name from the list 3 - Select "Class loading and update detection" 4 - Update class loader configuration as follows in Class Loader -> General Properties * Polling interval for updated files: [0] Seconds * Class loader order: [x] Classes loaded with application class loader first * WAR class loader policy: [x] Single class loader for application 5 - Apply this change and save the new configuration. 6 - Restart xmlpserver application Please refer to WebSphere 6.1 documentation for more details. "http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.base.doc/info/aes/ae/trun_classload_entapp.html"> http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.base.doc/info/aes/ae/trun_classload_entapp.html ------------------------------------------------------- Oracle WebLogic Server 11g R1 (10.3.1) Deployment NOTE ------------------------------------------------------- If you are deploying BI Publisher to WebLogic Server 10.3.1, you must add the following setting at startup for the domain that contains the BI Publisher server in the /weblogic_home/user_projects/domains/base_domain/bin/startWebLogic.sh script : -Dtoplink.xml.platform=oracle.toplink.platform.xml.jaxp.JAXPPlatform This setting is required to enable BI Publisher to find the TopLink JAR files to create the Scheduler tables.

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  • 10 Essential Tools for building ASP.NET Websites

    - by Stephen Walther
    I recently put together a simple public website created with ASP.NET for my company at Superexpert.com. I was surprised by the number of free tools that I ended up using to put together the website. Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to create a list of essential tools for building ASP.NET websites. These tools work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Performance Tools After reading Steve Souders two (very excellent) books on front-end website performance High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites, I have been super sensitive to front-end website performance. According to Souders’ Performance Golden Rule: “Optimize front-end performance first, that's where 80% or more of the end-user response time is spent” You can use the tools below to reduce the size of the images, JavaScript files, and CSS files used by an ASP.NET application. 1. Sprite and Image Optimization Framework CSS sprites were first described in an article written for A List Apart entitled CSS sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death. When you use sprites, you combine multiple images used by a website into a single image. Next, you use CSS trickery to display particular sub-images from the combined image in a webpage. The primary advantage of sprites is that they reduce the number of requests required to display a webpage. Requesting a single large image is faster than requesting multiple small images. In general, the more resources – images, JavaScript files, CSS files – that must be moved across the wire, the slower your website. However, most people avoid using sprites because they require a lot of work. You need to combine all of the images and write just the right CSS rules to display the sub-images. The Microsoft Sprite and Image Optimization Framework enables you to avoid all of this work. The framework combines the images for you automatically. Furthermore, the framework includes an ASP.NET Web Forms control and an ASP.NET MVC helper that makes it easy to display the sub-images. You can download the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework from CodePlex at http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/50869. The Sprite and Image Optimization Framework was written by Morgan McClean who worked in the office next to mine at Microsoft. Morgan was a scary smart Intern from Canada and we discussed the Framework while he was building it (I was really excited to learn that he was working on it). Morgan added some great advanced features to this framework. For example, the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework supports something called image inlining. When you use image inlining, the actual image is stored in the CSS file. Here’s an example of what image inlining looks like: .Home_StephenWalther_small-jpg { width:75px; height:100px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAEsAAABkCAIAAABB1lpeAAAAB GdBTUEAALGOfPtRkwAAACBjSFJNAACHDwAAjA8AAP1SAACBQAAAfXkAAOmLAAA85QAAGcxzPIV3AAAKL s+zNfREAAAAASUVORK5CYII=) no-repeat 0% 0%; } The actual image (in this case a picture of me that is displayed on the home page of the Superexpert.com website) is stored in the CSS file. If you visit the Superexpert.com website then very few separate images are downloaded. For example, all of the images with a red border in the screenshot below take advantage of CSS sprites: Unfortunately, there are some significant Gotchas that you need to be aware of when using the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework. There are workarounds for these Gotchas. I plan to write about these Gotchas and workarounds in a future blog entry. 2. Microsoft Ajax Minifier Whenever possible you should combine, minify, compress, and cache with a far future header all of your JavaScript and CSS files. The Microsoft Ajax Minifier makes it easy to minify JavaScript and CSS files. Don’t confuse minification and compression. You need to do both. According to Souders, you can reduce the size of a JavaScript file by an additional 20% (on average) by minifying a JavaScript file after you compress the file. When you minify a JavaScript or CSS file, you use various tricks to reduce the size of the file before you compress the file. For example, you can minify a JavaScript file by replacing long JavaScript variables names with short variables names and removing unnecessary white space and comments. You can minify a CSS file by doing such things as replacing long color names such as #ffffff with shorter equivalents such as #fff. The Microsoft Ajax Minifier was created by Microsoft employee Ron Logan. Internally, this tool was being used by several large Microsoft websites. We also used the tool heavily on the ASP.NET team. I convinced Ron to publish the tool on CodePlex so that everyone in the world could take advantage of it. You can download the tool from the ASP.NET Ajax website and read documentation for the tool here. I created the installer for the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. When creating the installer, I also created a Visual Studio build task to make it easy to minify all of your JavaScript and CSS files whenever you do a build within Visual Studio automatically. Read the Ajax Minifier Quick Start to learn how to configure the build task. 3. ySlow The ySlow tool is a free add-on for Firefox created by Yahoo that enables you to test the front-end of your website. For example, here are the current test results for the Superexpert.com website: The Superexpert.com website has an overall score of B (not perfect but not bad). The ySlow tool is not perfect. For example, the Superexpert.com website received a failing grade of F for not using a Content Delivery Network even though the website using the Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network for JavaScript files such as jQuery. Uptime After publishing a website live to the world, you want to ensure that the website does not encounter any issues and that it stays live. I use the following tools to monitor the Superexpert.com website now that it is live. 4. ELMAH ELMAH stands for Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET. ELMAH enables you to record any errors that happen at your website so you can review them in the future. You can download ELMAH for free from the ELMAH project website. ELMAH works great with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. You can configure ELMAH to store errors in a number of different stores including XML files, the Event Log, an Access database, a SQL database, an Oracle database, or in computer RAM. You also can configure ELMAH to email error messages to you when they happen. By default, you can access ELMAH by requesting the elmah.axd page from a website with ELMAH installed. Here’s what the elmah page looks like from the Superexpert.com website (this page is password-protected because secret information can be revealed in an error message): If you click on a particular error message, you can view the original Yellow Screen ASP.NET error message (even when the error message was never displayed to the actual user). I installed ELMAH by taking advantage of the new package manager for ASP.NET named NuGet (originally named NuPack). You can read the details about NuGet in the following blog entry by Scott Guthrie. You can download NuGet from CodePlex. 5. Pingdom I use Pingdom to verify that the Superexpert.com website is always up. You can sign up for Pingdom by visiting Pingdom.com. You can use Pingdom to monitor a single website for free. At the Pingdom website, you configure the frequency that your website gets pinged. I verify that the Superexpert.com website is up every 5 minutes. I have the Pingdom service verify that it can retrieve the string “Contact Us” from the website homepage. If your website goes down, you can configure Pingdom so that it sends an email, Twitter, SMS, or iPhone alert. I use the Pingdom iPhone app which looks like this: 6. Host Tracker If your website does go down then you need some way of determining whether it is a problem with your local network or if your website is down for everyone. I use a website named Host-Tracker.com to check how badly a website is down. Here’s what the Host-Tracker website displays for the Superexpert.com website when the website can be successfully pinged from everywhere in the world: Notice that Host-Tracker pinged the Superexpert.com website from 68 locations including Roubaix, France and Scranton, PA. Debugging I mean debugging in the broadest possible sense. I use the following tools when building a website to verify that I have not made a mistake. 7. HTML Spell Checker Why doesn’t Visual Studio have a built-in spell checker? Don’t know – I’ve always found this mysterious. Fortunately, however, a former member of the ASP.NET team wrote a free spell checker that you can use with your ASP.NET pages. I find a spell checker indispensible. It is easy to delude yourself that you are capable of perfect spelling. I’m always super embarrassed when I actually run the spell checking tool and discover all of my spelling mistakes. The fastest way to add the HTML Spell Checker extension to Visual Studio is to select the menu option Tools, Extension Manager within Visual Studio. Click on Online Gallery and search for HTML Spell Checker: 8. IIS SEO Toolkit If people cannot find your website through Google then you should not even bother to create it. Microsoft has a great extension for IIS named the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit that you can use to identify issue with your website that would hurt its page rank. You also can use this tool to quickly create a sitemap for your website that you can submit to Google or Bing. You can even generate the sitemap for an ASP.NET MVC website. Here’s what the report overview for the Superexpert.com website looks like: Notice that the Sueprexpert.com website had plenty of violations. For example, there are 65 cases in which a page has a broken hyperlink. You can drill into these violations to identity the exact page and location where these violations occur. 9. LinqPad If your ASP.NET website accesses a database then you should be using LINQ to Entities with the Entity Framework. Using LINQ involves some magic. LINQ queries written in C# get converted into SQL queries for you. If you are not careful about how you write your LINQ queries, you could unintentionally build a really badly performing website. LinqPad is a free tool that enables you to experiment with your LINQ queries. It even works with Microsoft SQL CE 4 and Azure. You can use LinqPad to execute a LINQ to Entities query and see the results. You also can use it to see the resulting SQL that gets executed against the database: 10. .NET Reflector I use .NET Reflector daily. The .NET Reflector tool enables you to take any assembly and disassemble the assembly into C# or VB.NET code. You can use .NET Reflector to see the “Source Code” of an assembly even when you do not have the actual source code. You can download a free version of .NET Reflector from the Redgate website. I use .NET Reflector primarily to help me understand what code is doing internally. For example, I used .NET Reflector with the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework to better understand how the MVC Image helper works. Here’s part of the disassembled code from the Image helper class: Summary In this blog entry, I’ve discussed several of the tools that I used to create the Superexpert.com website. These are tools that I use to improve the performance, improve the SEO, verify the uptime, or debug the Superexpert.com website. All of the tools discussed in this blog entry are free. Furthermore, all of these tools work with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Let me know if there are any tools that you use daily when building ASP.NET websites.

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  • Using VLOOKUP in Excel

    - by Mark Virtue
    VLOOKUP is one of Excel’s most useful functions, and it’s also one of the least understood.  In this article, we demystify VLOOKUP by way of a real-life example.  We’ll create a usable Invoice Template for a fictitious company. So what is VLOOKUP?  Well, of course it’s an Excel function.  This article will assume that the reader already has a passing understanding of Excel functions, and can use basic functions such as SUM, AVERAGE, and TODAY.  In its most common usage, VLOOKUP is a database function, meaning that it works with database tables – or more simply, lists of things in an Excel worksheet.  What sort of things?   Well, any sort of thing.  You may have a worksheet that contains a list of employees, or products, or customers, or CDs in your CD collection, or stars in the night sky.  It doesn’t really matter. Here’s an example of a list, or database.  In this case it’s a list of products that our fictitious company sells: Usually lists like this have some sort of unique identifier for each item in the list.  In this case, the unique identifier is in the “Item Code” column.  Note:  For the VLOOKUP function to work with a database/list, that list must have a column containing the unique identifier (or “key”, or “ID”), and that column must be the first column in the table.  Our sample database above satisfies this criterion. The hardest part of using VLOOKUP is understanding exactly what it’s for.  So let’s see if we can get that clear first: VLOOKUP retrieves information from a database/list based on a supplied instance of the unique identifier. Put another way, if you put the VLOOKUP function into a cell and pass it one of the unique identifiers from your database, it will return you one of the pieces of information associated with that unique identifier.  In the example above, you would pass VLOOKUP an item code, and it would return to you either the corresponding item’s description, its price, or its availability (its “In stock” quantity).  Which of these pieces of information will it pass you back?  Well, you get to decide this when you’re creating the formula. If all you need is one piece of information from the database, it would be a lot of trouble to go to to construct a formula with a VLOOKUP function in it.  Typically you would use this sort of functionality in a reusable spreadsheet, such as a template.  Each time someone enters a valid item code, the system would retrieve all the necessary information about the corresponding item. Let’s create an example of this:  An Invoice Template that we can reuse over and over in our fictitious company. First we start Excel… …and we create ourselves a blank invoice: This is how it’s going to work:  The person using the invoice template will fill in a series of item codes in column “A”, and the system will retrieve each item’s description and price, which will be used to calculate the line total for each item (assuming we enter a valid quantity). For the purposes of keeping this example simple, we will locate the product database on a separate sheet in the same workbook: In reality, it’s more likely that the product database would be located in a separate workbook.  It makes little difference to the VLOOKUP function, which doesn’t really care if the database is located on the same sheet, a different sheet, or a completely different workbook. In order to test the VLOOKUP formula we’re about to write, we first enter a valid item code into cell A11: Next, we move the active cell to the cell in which we want information retrieved from the database by VLOOKUP to be stored.  Interestingly, this is the step that most people get wrong.  To explain further:  We are about to create a VLOOKUP formula that will retrieve the description that corresponds to the item code in cell A11.  Where do we want this description put when we get it?  In cell B11, of course.  So that’s where we write the VLOOKUP formula – in cell B11. Select cell B11: We need to locate the list of all available functions that Excel has to offer, so that we can choose VLOOKUP and get some assistance in completing the formula.  This is found by first clicking the Formulas tab, and then clicking Insert Function:   A box appears that allows us to select any of the functions available in Excel.  To find the one we’re looking for, we could type a search term like “lookup” (because the function we’re interested in is a lookup function).  The system would return us a list of all lookup-related functions in Excel.  VLOOKUP is the second one in the list.  Select it an click OK… The Function Arguments box appears, prompting us for all the arguments (or parameters) needed in order to complete the VLOOKUP function.  You can think of this box as the function is asking us the following questions: What unique identifier are you looking up in the database? Where is the database? Which piece of information from the database, associated with the unique identifier, do you wish to have retrieved for you? The first three arguments are shown in bold, indicating that they are mandatory arguments (the VLOOKUP function is incomplete without them and will not return a valid value).  The fourth argument is not bold, meaning that it’s optional:   We will complete the arguments in order, top to bottom. The first argument we need to complete is the Lookup_value argument.  The function needs us to tell it where to find the unique identifier (the item code in this case) that it should be retuning the description of.  We must select the item code we entered earlier (in A11). Click on the selector icon to the right of the first argument: Then click once on the cell containing the item code (A11), and press Enter: The value of “A11” is inserted into the first argument. Now we need to enter a value for the Table_array argument.  In other words, we need to tell VLOOKUP where to find the database/list.  Click on the selector icon next to the second argument: Now locate the database/list and select the entire list – not including the header line.  The database is located on a separate worksheet, so we first click on that worksheet tab: Next we select the entire database, not including the header line: …and press Enter.  The range of cells that represents the database (in this case “’Product Database’!A2:D7”) is entered automatically for us into the second argument. Now we need to enter the third argument, Col_index_num.  We use this argument to specify to VLOOKUP which piece of information from the database, associate with our item code in A11, we wish to have returned to us.  In this particular example, we wish to have the item’s description returned to us.  If you look on the database worksheet, you’ll notice that the “Description” column is the second column in the database.  This means that we must enter a value of “2” into the Col_index_num box: It is important to note that that we are not entering a “2” here because the “Description” column is in the B column on that worksheet.  If the database happened to start in column K of the worksheet, we would still enter a “2” in this field. Finally, we need to decide whether to enter a value into the final VLOOKUP argument, Range_lookup.  This argument requires either a true or false value, or it should be left blank.  When using VLOOKUP with databases (as is true 90% of the time), then the way to decide what to put in this argument can be thought of as follows: If the first column of the database (the column that contains the unique identifiers) is sorted alphabetically/numerically in ascending order, then it’s possible to enter a value of true into this argument, or leave it blank. If the first column of the database is not sorted, or it’s sorted in descending order, then you must enter a value of false into this argument As the first column of our database is not sorted, we enter false into this argument: That’s it!  We’ve entered all the information required for VLOOKUP to return the value we need.  Click the OK button and notice that the description corresponding to item code “R99245” has been correctly entered into cell B11: The formula that was created for us looks like this: If we enter a different item code into cell A11, we will begin to see the power of the VLOOKUP function:  The description cell changes to match the new item code: We can perform a similar set of steps to get the item’s price returned into cell E11.  Note that the new formula must be created in cell E11.  The result will look like this: …and the formula will look like this: Note that the only difference between the two formulae is the third argument (Col_index_num) has changed from a “2” to a “3” (because we want data retrieved from the 3rd column in the database). If we decided to buy 2 of these items, we would enter a “2” into cell D11.  We would then enter a simple formula into cell F11 to get the line total: =D11*E11 …which looks like this… Completing the Invoice Template We’ve learned a lot about VLOOKUP so far.  In fact, we’ve learned all we’re going to learn in this article.  It’s important to note that VLOOKUP can be used in other circumstances besides databases.  This is less common, and may be covered in future How-To Geek articles. Our invoice template is not yet complete.  In order to complete it, we would do the following: We would remove the sample item code from cell A11 and the “2” from cell D11.  This will cause our newly created VLOOKUP formulae to display error messages: We can remedy this by judicious use of Excel’s IF() and ISBLANK() functions.  We change our formula from this…       =VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE) …to this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE)) We would copy the formulas in cells B11, E11 and F11 down to the remainder of the item rows of the invoice.  Note that if we do this, the resulting formulas will no longer correctly refer to the database table.  We could fix this by changing the cell references for the database to absolute cell references.  Alternatively – and even better – we could create a range name for the entire product database (such as “Products”), and use this range name instead of the cell references.  The formula would change from this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE)) …to this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,Products,2,FALSE)) …and then copy the formulas down to the rest of the invoice item rows. We would probably “lock” the cells that contain our formulae (or rather unlock the other cells), and then protect the worksheet, in order to ensure that our carefully constructed formulae are not accidentally overwritten when someone comes to fill in the invoice. We would save the file as a template, so that it could be reused by everyone in our company If we were feeling really clever, we would create a database of all our customers in another worksheet, and then use the customer ID entered in cell F5 to automatically fill in the customer’s name and address in cells B6, B7 and B8. If you would like to practice with VLOOKUP, or simply see our resulting Invoice Template, it can be downloaded from here. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make Excel 2007 Print Gridlines In Workbook FileMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 FormatImport Microsoft Access Data Into ExcelChange the Default Font in Excel 2007 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 Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver Optimize your computer the Microsoft way Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data

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  • Sorting Algorithms

    - by MarkPearl
    General Every time I go back to university I find myself wading through sorting algorithms and their implementation in C++. Up to now I haven’t really appreciated their true value. However as I discovered this last week with Dictionaries in C# – having a knowledge of some basic programming principles can greatly improve the performance of a system and make one think twice about how to tackle a problem. I’m going to cover briefly in this post the following: Selection Sort Insertion Sort Shellsort Quicksort Mergesort Heapsort (not complete) Selection Sort Array based selection sort is a simple approach to sorting an unsorted array. Simply put, it repeats two basic steps to achieve a sorted collection. It starts with a collection of data and repeatedly parses it, each time sorting out one element and reducing the size of the next iteration of parsed data by one. So the first iteration would go something like this… Go through the entire array of data and find the lowest value Place the value at the front of the array The second iteration would go something like this… Go through the array from position two (position one has already been sorted with the smallest value) and find the next lowest value in the array. Place the value at the second position in the array This process would be completed until the entire array had been sorted. A positive about selection sort is that it does not make many item movements. In fact, in a worst case scenario every items is only moved once. Selection sort is however a comparison intensive sort. If you had 10 items in a collection, just to parse the collection you would have 10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2=54 comparisons to sort regardless of how sorted the collection was to start with. If you think about it, if you applied selection sort to a collection already sorted, you would still perform relatively the same number of iterations as if it was not sorted at all. Many of the following algorithms try and reduce the number of comparisons if the list is already sorted – leaving one with a best case and worst case scenario for comparisons. Likewise different approaches have different levels of item movement. Depending on what is more expensive, one may give priority to one approach compared to another based on what is more expensive, a comparison or a item move. Insertion Sort Insertion sort tries to reduce the number of key comparisons it performs compared to selection sort by not “doing anything” if things are sorted. Assume you had an collection of numbers in the following order… 10 18 25 30 23 17 45 35 There are 8 elements in the list. If we were to start at the front of the list – 10 18 25 & 30 are already sorted. Element 5 (23) however is smaller than element 4 (30) and so needs to be repositioned. We do this by copying the value at element 5 to a temporary holder, and then begin shifting the elements before it up one. So… Element 5 would be copied to a temporary holder 10 18 25 30 23 17 45 35 – T 23 Element 4 would shift to Element 5 10 18 25 30 30 17 45 35 – T 23 Element 3 would shift to Element 4 10 18 25 25 30 17 45 35 – T 23 Element 2 (18) is smaller than the temporary holder so we put the temporary holder value into Element 3. 10 18 23 25 30 17 45 35 – T 23   We now have a sorted list up to element 6. And so we would repeat the same process by moving element 6 to a temporary value and then shifting everything up by one from element 2 to element 5. As you can see, one major setback for this technique is the shifting values up one – this is because up to now we have been considering the collection to be an array. If however the collection was a linked list, we would not need to shift values up, but merely remove the link from the unsorted value and “reinsert” it in a sorted position. Which would reduce the number of transactions performed on the collection. So.. Insertion sort seems to perform better than selection sort – however an implementation is slightly more complicated. This is typical with most sorting algorithms – generally, greater performance leads to greater complexity. Also, insertion sort performs better if a collection of data is already sorted. If for instance you were handed a sorted collection of size n, then only n number of comparisons would need to be performed to verify that it is sorted. It’s important to note that insertion sort (array based) performs a number item moves – every time an item is “out of place” several items before it get shifted up. Shellsort – Diminishing Increment Sort So up to now we have covered Selection Sort & Insertion Sort. Selection Sort makes many comparisons and insertion sort (with an array) has the potential of making many item movements. Shellsort is an approach that takes the normal insertion sort and tries to reduce the number of item movements. In Shellsort, elements in a collection are viewed as sub-collections of a particular size. Each sub-collection is sorted so that the elements that are far apart move closer to their final position. Suppose we had a collection of 15 elements… 10 20 15 45 36 48 7 60 18 50 2 19 43 30 55 First we may view the collection as 7 sub-collections and sort each sublist, lets say at intervals of 7 10 60 55 – 20 18 – 15 50 – 45 2 – 36 19 – 48 43 – 7 30 10 55 60 – 18 20 – 15 50 – 2 45 – 19 36 – 43 48 – 7 30 (Sorted) We then sort each sublist at a smaller inter – lets say 4 10 55 60 18 – 20 15 50 2 – 45 19 36 43 – 48 7 30 10 18 55 60 – 2 15 20 50 – 19 36 43 45 – 7 30 48 (Sorted) We then sort elements at a distance of 1 (i.e. we apply a normal insertion sort) 10 18 55 60 2 15 20 50 19 36 43 45 7 30 48 2 7 10 15 18 19 20 30 36 43 45 48 50 55 (Sorted) The important thing with shellsort is deciding on the increment sequence of each sub-collection. From what I can tell, there isn’t any definitive method and depending on the order of your elements, different increment sequences may perform better than others. There are however certain increment sequences that you may want to avoid. An even based increment sequence (e.g. 2 4 8 16 32 …) should typically be avoided because it does not allow for even elements to be compared with odd elements until the final sort phase – which in a way would negate many of the benefits of using sub-collections. The performance on the number of comparisons and item movements of Shellsort is hard to determine, however it is considered to be considerably better than the normal insertion sort. Quicksort Quicksort uses a divide and conquer approach to sort a collection of items. The collection is divided into two sub-collections – and the two sub-collections are sorted and combined into one list in such a way that the combined list is sorted. The algorithm is in general pseudo code below… Divide the collection into two sub-collections Quicksort the lower sub-collection Quicksort the upper sub-collection Combine the lower & upper sub-collection together As hinted at above, quicksort uses recursion in its implementation. The real trick with quicksort is to get the lower and upper sub-collections to be of equal size. The size of a sub-collection is determined by what value the pivot is. Once a pivot is determined, one would partition to sub-collections and then repeat the process on each sub collection until you reach the base case. With quicksort, the work is done when dividing the sub-collections into lower & upper collections. The actual combining of the lower & upper sub-collections at the end is relatively simple since every element in the lower sub-collection is smaller than the smallest element in the upper sub-collection. Mergesort With quicksort, the average-case complexity was O(nlog2n) however the worst case complexity was still O(N*N). Mergesort improves on quicksort by always having a complexity of O(nlog2n) regardless of the best or worst case. So how does it do this? Mergesort makes use of the divide and conquer approach to partition a collection into two sub-collections. It then sorts each sub-collection and combines the sorted sub-collections into one sorted collection. The general algorithm for mergesort is as follows… Divide the collection into two sub-collections Mergesort the first sub-collection Mergesort the second sub-collection Merge the first sub-collection and the second sub-collection As you can see.. it still pretty much looks like quicksort – so lets see where it differs… Firstly, mergesort differs from quicksort in how it partitions the sub-collections. Instead of having a pivot – merge sort partitions each sub-collection based on size so that the first and second sub-collection of relatively the same size. This dividing keeps getting repeated until the sub-collections are the size of a single element. If a sub-collection is one element in size – it is now sorted! So the trick is how do we put all these sub-collections together so that they maintain their sorted order. Sorted sub-collections are merged into a sorted collection by comparing the elements of the sub-collection and then adjusting the sorted collection. Lets have a look at a few examples… Assume 2 sub-collections with 1 element each 10 & 20 Compare the first element of the first sub-collection with the first element of the second sub-collection. Take the smallest of the two and place it as the first element in the sorted collection. In this scenario 10 is smaller than 20 so 10 is taken from sub-collection 1 leaving that sub-collection empty, which means by default the next smallest element is in sub-collection 2 (20). So the sorted collection would be 10 20 Lets assume 2 sub-collections with 2 elements each 10 20 & 15 19 So… again we would Compare 10 with 15 – 10 is the winner so we add it to our sorted collection (10) leaving us with 20 & 15 19 Compare 20 with 15 – 15 is the winner so we add it to our sorted collection (10 15) leaving us with 20 & 19 Compare 20 with 19 – 19 is the winner so we add it to our sorted collection (10 15 19) leaving us with 20 & _ 20 is by default the winner so our sorted collection is 10 15 19 20. Make sense? Heapsort (still needs to be completed) So by now I am tired of sorting algorithms and trying to remember why they were so important. I think every year I go through this stuff I wonder to myself why are we made to learn about selection sort and insertion sort if they are so bad – why didn’t we just skip to Mergesort & Quicksort. I guess the only explanation I have for this is that sometimes you learn things so that you can implement them in future – and other times you learn things so that you know it isn’t the best way of implementing things and that you don’t need to implement it in future. Anyhow… luckily this is going to be the last one of my sorts for today. The first step in heapsort is to convert a collection of data into a heap. After the data is converted into a heap, sorting begins… So what is the definition of a heap? If we have to convert a collection of data into a heap, how do we know when it is a heap and when it is not? The definition of a heap is as follows: A heap is a list in which each element contains a key, such that the key in the element at position k in the list is at least as large as the key in the element at position 2k +1 (if it exists) and 2k + 2 (if it exists). Does that make sense? At first glance I’m thinking what the heck??? But then after re-reading my notes I see that we are doing something different – up to now we have really looked at data as an array or sequential collection of data that we need to sort – a heap represents data in a slightly different way – although the data is stored in a sequential collection, for a sequential collection of data to be in a valid heap – it is “semi sorted”. Let me try and explain a bit further with an example… Example 1 of Potential Heap Data Assume we had a collection of numbers as follows 1[1] 2[2] 3[3] 4[4] 5[5] 6[6] For this to be a valid heap element with value of 1 at position [1] needs to be greater or equal to the element at position [3] (2k +1) and position [4] (2k +2). So in the above example, the collection of numbers is not in a valid heap. Example 2 of Potential Heap Data Lets look at another collection of numbers as follows 6[1] 5[2] 4[3] 3[4] 2[5] 1[6] Is this a valid heap? Well… element with the value 6 at position 1 must be greater or equal to the element at position [3] and position [4]. Is 6 > 4 and 6 > 3? Yes it is. Lets look at element 5 as position 2. It must be greater than the values at [4] & [5]. Is 5 > 3 and 5 > 2? Yes it is. If you continued to examine this second collection of data you would find that it is in a valid heap based on the definition of a heap.

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  • From Bluehost to WP Engine, My WordPress Story

    - by thatjeffsmith
    This is probably the longest blog post I’ve written in a LONG time. And if you’re used to coming here for the Oracle stuff, this post is not about that. It’s about my blog, and the stuff under the hood that makes it run, AKA WordPress. If you want to skip to the juicy stuff, then use these shortcuts: My Site Slowed Down How I Moved to WP Engine How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me Why WP Engine? I started thatJeffSmith.com on May 28th, 2010. I had been already been blogging for several years, but a couple of really smart people I respected (Andy, Brent – thanks again!) suggested that I take ownership of my content and begin building my personal brand. I thought that was a good idea, and so I signed up for service with bluehost. Bluehost makes setting up a WordPress site very, very easy. And, they continued to be easy to work with for the past 2 years. I would even recommend them to anyone looking to host their own WordPress install/site. For $83.40, I purchased a year’s worth of service and my domain name registration – a very good value. And then last year I paid $107.40 for another year’s services. And when that year expired I paid another $190.80 for an additional two year’s service in advance. I had been up to that point, getting my money’s worth. And then, just a few weeks ago… My Site Slowed to a Crawl That spike was from an April Fool's Day Post, I think Why? Well, when I first started blogging, I had the same problem that most beginner bloggers have – not many readers. In my first year of blogging, I think the highest number of readers on a single day was about 125. I remember that day as I was very excited to break 100! Bluehost was very reliable, serving up my content with maybe a total of 3-4 outages in the past 2 years. Support was usually very prompt with answers and solutions, and I love their ‘Chat now’ technology – much nicer than message boards only or pay-to-talk phone support. In the past 6 months however, I noticed a couple of things: daily traffic was increasing – woohoo! my service was experiencing severe CPU throttling – doh! To be honest, I wasn’t aware the throttling was occuring, but I did know that the response time of my blog was starting to lag. Average load times were approaching 20-30 seconds. Not good when good sites are loading in 5 seconds or less. And just this past week, in getting ready to launch a new website for work that sucked in an RSS feed from my blog, the new page was left waiting for more than a minute. Not good! In fact my boss asked, why aren’t you blogging on Blogger? Ugh. I tried a few things to fix the problem: I paid for a premium WordPress theme – Themify’s Grido (thanks to @SQLRockstar for the heads-up) I installed a couple of WP caching plugins I read every WP optimization blog post I could get my greedy little eyes on However, at the same time I was also getting addicted to WordPress bloggers talking about all the cool things you could do with your blog. As a result I had at one point about 30 different plugins installed. WordPress runs on MySQL, and certain queries running via these plugins were starving for CPU. Plugins that would be called every page load meant that as more people clicked on my site, the more CPU I needed. I’m not stupid, so I eventually figured out that maybe less plugins was better, and was able to go down to just 20. But still, the site was running like a dog. CPU Throttling, makes MySQL wait to run a query Bluehost runs shared servers. Your site runs on the same box that several hundred (or thousand?) other services are running on. If you take more CPU than they think you should have, they will limit your service by making you stand in line for CPU, AKA ‘throttling.’ This is not bad. This business model allows them to serve many, many users for a very fair price. It works great until, well, until it doesn’t. I noticed in the last week that for every minute of service, I was being throttled between 60 and 300 seconds. If there were 5 MySQL processes running, then every single one of them were being held in check. The blog visitor notice this as their page requests would take a minute or more to be answered. Bluehost unfortunately doesn’t offer dedicated server hosting, so there was no real upgrade path for me follow and remain one of their customers. So what was I to do? Uninstall every plugin and hope the site sped up? Ask for people to take turns on my blog? I decided to spend my way out of the problem. I signed up for service with WP Engine and moved ThatJeffSmith.com The first 2 months are free, and after that it’s about $29/month to run my site on their system. My math tells me that’s a good bit more expensive than what Bluehost was charging me – to the tune of about 300% more a month. Oh, and I should just say that my blog is a personal blog even though I talk about work stuff here. I don’t get paid for blogging, I don’t sell ads, and I don’t expense the service fees – this is my personal passion. So is it worth it? In the first 4 days, it seems to be totally worth it. Load times have gone from 20-30 seconds to less than 5 seconds. A few folks have told me via Twitter that they notice faster page loads. I anticipate this will indirectly lead to more traffic as Google penalizes you in search results if your site is too slow, and of course some folks won’t even bother waiting more than 5-10 seconds. I noticed right away that writing posts, uploading pictures, and just using the WordPress dashboard in general was much more responsive. So writing is less of a chore now, which means I won’t have a good reason not to write How I Moved to WP Engine I signed up for the service and registered my domain. I then took a full export of my ‘old’ site by doing a FTP GET of all my files, then did a MySQL database backup, exported my WordPress Theme settings to a .zip file, and then finally used the WordPress ‘Export’ feature. I then used the WordPress ‘Import’ on the new site to load up my posts. Then I uploaded the theme .zip package from Themify. Then I FTP’d the ‘wp-content’ directory up to my new server using SFTP (WP Engine only supports secure FTP – good on them!) Using a temporary URL to see my new site, I was able to confirm that everything looked mostly OK – I’ll detail the challenges and issues of fixing the content next – but then it was time to ‘flip the switch.’ I updated the IP address that the DNS lookup tables use to route traffic to my new server. In a matter of minutes the DNS servers around the world were updated and it was time to see the new site! But It Was ‘Broken’ I had never moved a website before, and in my rush to update the DNS, I had changed the records without really finding out what I was supposed to do first. After re-reading the directions provided by WP Engine and following the guidance of their support engineer, I realized I had needed to set the CNAME (Alias) ‘www’ record to point to a different URL than the ‘www.thatjeffsmith.com’ entry I had set. Once corrected the site was up and running in less than a minute. Then It Was Only Mostly Broken Many of my plugins weren’t working. Apparently just ftp’ing the wp-content directory up wasn’t the proper way to re-install the plugin. I suspect file permissions or file ownership wasn’t proper. Some plug-ins were working, many had their settings wiped to the defaults, and a few just didn’t work again. I had to delete the directory of the plug-in manually via SFTP, and then use the WP Dashboard to install it from scratch. And here was my first ‘lesson’ – don’t switch the DNS records until you’ve completely tested your new site. I wasn’t able to navigate the old WP console to review my plug-in settings. Thankfully I was able to use the Wayback Machine to reverse engineer some things, and of course most plug-ins aren’t that complicated to setup to begin with. An example of one that I had to redo from scratch is the ‘Twitter @Anywhere Plus’ plugin that I use to create the form that allows folks to tweet a post they enjoyed at the end of each story. How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me I actually signed up with another provider first. They ranked highly in Google searches and a few Tweeps recommended them to me. But hours after signing up and I still didn’t have sever reyady, I was ready to give up on them. They offered no chat or phone support – only mail and message boards. And the message boards were rife with posts about how the service had gone downhill in the past 6 months. To their credit, they did make it easy to cancel, although I did have to do so via email as their website ‘cancel’ button was non-existent. Within minutes of activating my WP Engine account I had received my welcome message and directions on how to get started. I was able to see my staged website right away. They also did something very cool before I even got started – they looked at my existing site and told me by how much they could improve its performance. The proof is in the web pudding. I like this for a few reasons, but primarily I liked their business model. It told me they knew what they were doing, and that they were willing to put their money where their mouth was. This was further evident by their 60-day money back guarantee. And if I understand it correctly, they don’t even take your money until after that 60 day period is over. After a day, I was welcomed by the WP Engine social media team, and was given the opportunity to subscribe to their newsletter and follow their account on Twitter. I noticed their Twitter team is sure to post regular WordPress tips several times a day. It’s not just an account that’s setup for the sake of having a Twitter presence. These little things add up and give me confidence in my decision to choose them as my hosting partner. ‘Partner’ – that’s a lot nicer word than just ‘service provider,’ isn’t it? Oh, and they offered me a t-shirt. Don’t ever doubt the power of a ‘free’ t-shirt! How awesome is this e-mail, from a customer perspective? I wasn’t really expecting any of this. Exceeding expectations before I have even handed over a single dollar seems like a pretty good business plan. This is how you treat customers. Love them to death, and they reward you with loyalty. But Jeff, You Skipped a Piece Here, Why WP Engine? I found them on one of those ‘Top 10′ list posts, and pulled up their webpage. I noticed they offered a specialized service – they host WordPress installs, and that’s it. Their servers are tuned specifically for running WordPress. They had in bolded text, things like ‘INSANELY FAST. INFINITELY SCALABLE.’ and ‘LIGHTNING SPEED.’ And then they offered insurance against hackers and they took care of automatic backups and restores. The only drawbacks I have noticed so far relate to plugins I used that have been ‘blacklisted.’ In order to guarantee that ‘lightning’ speed, they have banned the use of the CPU-suckiest plugins. One of those is the ‘Related Posts’ plugin. So if you are a subscriber and are reading this in your email, you’ll notice there’s no links back to my blog to continue reading other related stories. Since that referral traffic is very small single-digit for my site, I decided that I’m OK with that. I’d rather have the warp-speed page loads. Again, I think that will lead to higher traffic down the road. In 50+ days I will need to decide if WP Engine is a permanent solution. I’ll be sure to update this post when that time comes and let y’all know how it turns out.

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  • Flow-Design Cheat Sheet &ndash; Part I, Notation

    - by Ralf Westphal
    You want to avoid the pitfalls of object oriented design? Then this is the right place to start. Use Flow-Oriented Analysis (FOA) and –Design (FOD or just FD for Flow-Design) to understand a problem domain and design a software solution. Flow-Orientation as described here is related to Flow-Based Programming, Event-Based Programming, Business Process Modelling, and even Event-Driven Architectures. But even though “thinking in flows” is not new, I found it helpful to deviate from those precursors for several reasons. Some aim at too big systems for the average programmer, some are concerned with only asynchronous processing, some are even not very much concerned with programming at all. What I was looking for was a design method to help in software projects of any size, be they large or tiny, involing synchronous or asynchronous processing, being local or distributed, running on the web or on the desktop or on a smartphone. That´s why I took ideas from all of the above sources and some additional and came up with Event-Based Components which later got repositioned and renamed to Flow-Design. In the meantime this has generated some discussion (in the German developer community) and several teams have started to work with Flow-Design. Also I´ve conducted quite some trainings using Flow-Orientation for design. The results are very promising. Developers find it much easier to design software using Flow-Orientation than OOAD-based object orientation. Since Flow-Orientation is moving fast and is not covered completely by a single source like a book, demand has increased for at least an overview of the current state of its notation. This page is trying to answer this demand by briefly introducing/describing every notational element as well as their translation into C# source code. Take this as a cheat sheet to put next to your whiteboard when designing software. However, please do not expect any explanation as to the reasons behind Flow-Design elements. Details on why Flow-Design at all and why in this specific way you´ll find in the literature covering the topic. Here´s a resource page on Flow-Design/Event-Based Components, if you´re able to read German. Notation Connected Functional Units The basic element of any FOD are functional units (FU): Think of FUs as some kind of software code block processing data. For the moment forget about classes, methods, “components”, assemblies or whatever. See a FU as an abstract piece of code. Software then consists of just collaborating FUs. I´m using circles/ellipses to draw FUs. But if you like, use rectangles. Whatever suites your whiteboard needs best.   The purpose of FUs is to process input and produce output. FUs are transformational. However, FUs are not called and do not call other FUs. There is no dependency between FUs. Data just flows into a FU (input) and out of it (output). From where and where to is of no concern to a FU.   This way FUs can be concatenated in arbitrary ways:   Each FU can accept input from many sources and produce output for many sinks:   Flows Connected FUs form a flow with a start and an end. Data is entering a flow at a source, and it´s leaving it through a sink. Think of sources and sinks as special FUs which conntect wires to the environment of a network of FUs.   Wiring Details Data is flowing into/out of FUs through wires. This is to allude to electrical engineering which since long has been working with composable parts. Wires are attached to FUs usings pins. They are the entry/exit points for the data flowing along the wires. Input-/output pins currently need not be drawn explicitly. This is to keep designing on a whiteboard simple and quick.   Data flowing is of some type, so wires have a type attached to them. And pins have names. If there is only one input pin and output pin on a FU, though, you don´t need to mention them. The default is Process for a single input pin, and Result for a single output pin. But you´re free to give even single pins different names.   There is a shortcut in use to address a certain pin on a destination FU:   The type of the wire is put in parantheses for two reasons. 1. This way a “no-type” wire can be easily denoted, 2. this is a natural way to describe tuples of data.   To describe how much data is flowing, a star can be put next to the wire type:   Nesting – Boards and Parts If more than 5 to 10 FUs need to be put in a flow a FD starts to become hard to understand. To keep diagrams clutter free they can be nested. You can turn any FU into a flow: This leads to Flow-Designs with different levels of abstraction. A in the above illustration is a high level functional unit, A.1 and A.2 are lower level functional units. One of the purposes of Flow-Design is to be able to describe systems on different levels of abstraction and thus make it easier to understand them. Humans use abstraction/decomposition to get a grip on complexity. Flow-Design strives to support this and make levels of abstraction first class citizens for programming. You can read the above illustration like this: Functional units A.1 and A.2 detail what A is supposed to do. The whole of A´s responsibility is decomposed into smaller responsibilities A.1 and A.2. FU A thus does not do anything itself anymore! All A is responsible for is actually accomplished by the collaboration between A.1 and A.2. Since A now is not doing anything anymore except containing A.1 and A.2 functional units are devided into two categories: boards and parts. Boards are just containing other functional units; their sole responsibility is to wire them up. A is a board. Boards thus depend on the functional units nested within them. This dependency is not of a functional nature, though. Boards are not dependent on services provided by nested functional units. They are just concerned with their interface to be able to plug them together. Parts are the workhorses of flows. They contain the real domain logic. They actually transform input into output. However, they do not depend on other functional units. Please note the usage of source and sink in boards. They correspond to input-pins and output-pins of the board.   Implicit Dependencies Nesting functional units leads to a dependency tree. Boards depend on nested functional units, they are the inner nodes of the tree. Parts are independent, they are the leafs: Even though dependencies are the bane of software development, Flow-Design does not usually draw these dependencies. They are implicitly created by visually nesting functional units. And they are harmless. Boards are so simple in their functionality, they are little affected by changes in functional units they are depending on. But functional units are implicitly dependent on more than nested functional units. They are also dependent on the data types of the wires attached to them: This is also natural and thus does not need to be made explicit. And it pertains mainly to parts being dependent. Since boards don´t do anything with regard to a problem domain, they don´t care much about data types. Their infrastructural purpose just needs types of input/output-pins to match.   Explicit Dependencies You could say, Flow-Orientation is about tackling complexity at its root cause: that´s dependencies. “Natural” dependencies are depicted naturally, i.e. implicitly. And whereever possible dependencies are not even created. Functional units don´t know their collaborators within a flow. This is core to Flow-Orientation. That makes for high composability of functional units. A part is as independent of other functional units as a motor is from the rest of the car. And a board is as dependend on nested functional units as a motor is on a spark plug or a crank shaft. With Flow-Design software development moves closer to how hardware is constructed. Implicit dependencies are not enough, though. Sometimes explicit dependencies make designs easier – as counterintuitive this might sound. So FD notation needs a ways to denote explicit dependencies: Data flows along wires. But data does not flow along dependency relations. Instead dependency relations represent service calls. Functional unit C is depending on/calling services on functional unit S. If you want to be more specific, name the services next to the dependency relation: Although you should try to stay clear of explicit dependencies, they are fundamentally ok. See them as a way to add another dimension to a flow. Usually the functionality of the independent FU (“Customer repository” above) is orthogonal to the domain of the flow it is referenced by. If you like emphasize this by using different shapes for dependent and independent FUs like above. Such dependencies can be used to link in resources like databases or shared in-memory state. FUs can not only produce output but also can have side effects. A common pattern for using such explizit dependencies is to hook a GUI into a flow as the source and/or the sink of data: Which can be shortened to: Treat FUs others depend on as boards (with a special non-FD API the dependent part is connected to), but do not embed them in a flow in the diagram they are depended upon.   Attributes of Functional Units Creation and usage of functional units can be modified with attributes. So far the following have shown to be helpful: Singleton: FUs are by default multitons. FUs in the same of different flows with the same name refer to the same functionality, but to different instances. Think of functional units as objects that get instanciated anew whereever they appear in a design. Sometimes though it´s helpful to reuse the same instance of a functional unit; this is always due to valuable state it holds. Signify this by annotating the FU with a “(S)”. Multiton: FUs on which others depend are singletons by default. This is, because they usually are introduced where shared state comes into play. If you want to change them to be a singletons mark them with a “(M)”. Configurable: Some parts need to be configured before the can do they work in a flow. Annotate them with a “(C)” to have them initialized before any data items to be processed by them arrive. Do not assume any order in which FUs are configured. How such configuration is happening is an implementation detail. Entry point: In each design there needs to be a single part where “it all starts”. That´s the entry point for all processing. It´s like Program.Main() in C# programs. Mark the entry point part with an “(E)”. Quite often this will be the GUI part. How the entry point is started is an implementation detail. Just consider it the first FU to start do its job.   Patterns / Standard Parts If more than a single wire is attached to an output-pin that´s called a split (or fork). The same data is flowing on all of the wires. Remember: Flow-Designs are synchronous by default. So a split does not mean data is processed in parallel afterwards. Processing still happens synchronously and thus one branch after another. Do not assume any specific order of the processing on the different branches after the split.   It is common to do a split and let only parts of the original data flow on through the branches. This effectively means a map is needed after a split. This map can be implicit or explicit.   Although FUs can have multiple input-pins it is preferrable in most cases to combine input data from different branches using an explicit join: The default output of a join is a tuple of its input values. The default behavior of a join is to output a value whenever a new input is received. However, to produce its first output a join needs an input for all its input-pins. Other join behaviors can be: reset all inputs after an output only produce output if data arrives on certain input-pins

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 01, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 01, 2011Popular ReleasesAgFx Windows Phone Application Data Caching Framework: AgFx November Update: This update is primarily a bug fix release, which provides a number of stability and performance enhancements to AgFx. Available as a NuGet package here. Release Notes Fix IsoStore exceptions during shutdown (Changelist 81729) Thread safety and sequencings issues (Changelists 78682,79252, 80707) Fix landscape layout issue in auth sample Fix async keyword collision Supporting overlapping/multiple notifications for Load requestsiTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.4.4322: Added German (unverified, apologies if incorrect) Properly source invariant resources with correct resIDs Replaced obsolete lyric providers with working providers Fix Pseudolater to correctly morph every third char Fix null reference in CatalogBaseDevpad: 4.6: Whats new for Devpad 4.6: New Recent Files New Run in Safari Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsWindows Workflow Foundation on Codeplex: Microsoft.Activities v1.8.8: Microsoft.Activities Overview How do I install Microsoft.Activities? Updates in this release9318Technical Analysis Engine for .NET: Technical Analysis Engine 1.25: What's new in the 1.25 release (2011-11-01): - Added Williams %R indicator - Added Moving Average Envelopes indicatorBF3Rcon.NET: BF3Rcon 3.0: This release is targeted for RCON documentation based on R3. Everything should be beta stable, but it's alpha because I haven't been able to fully test it. When a stable release is ready, a proper changelog will be kept. Important Edit: There's one method that will keep this from working in Mono. GeneratePasswordHash uses void HashAlgorithm.Dispose(), which isn't in Mono. This will have to be changed to Clear() in the next release. If anyone needs a Mono version of this immediately, you can...BoxWorld: BoxWorld_2011.10.30: BoxWorld - 8.0.1110.30 This is the initial release of BoxWorld. I'd recommend downloading the installer as it contains the compiled code and everything all nicely contained. By default, you end up with this directory structure: C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Data C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Interface C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Source In the root you have the compiled EXE files, one for the main release, one for the LITE release ...VidCoder: 1.2.1: Fixed a couple regressions: video encoder was blank in queue and crashes with the High Profile preset when opening the Settings window. Fixed problem with auto-update introduced in 1.2.0. If you have 1.2.0 you will need to update manually to get this.AssaultCube Reloaded: Release 2.3: THE RELEASE YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR! IT CAN NOW BE CONSIDERED STABLE Linux has Debian 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, download the Linux package. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for linux (source included) If you are using Windows and require the source code, download the source package!Koober: Koober - The Ebook Creator 0.2: The official release of Koober as Open source. Koober is a ebook creator for Windows, and Koob Reader is the reader.A Microblog API (SINA weibo.com open API in C#, .Net???????API): AMicroblogAPI v1.0: AMicroBlogAPI is a C# implementation, a strong-typed deep encapsulation, a easy-to-use .net wrapper of SINA microblog API v1.0. App developers no longer need to parse various HTTP responses -- all responses are parsed into strong types; No longer need to construt the request query strings -- just simply gives the values of parameters; No longer need to implement the OAuth -- a single call could logs the user on. In this release (AMicroblogAPI v1.0), all basic data APIs are implemented. For ...patterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contrib: Enterprise Library Contrib - 5.0 (Oct 2011): This release of Enterprise Library Contrib is based on the Microsoft patterns & practices Enterprise Library 5.0 core and contains the following: Common extensionsTypeConfigurationElement<T> - A Polymorphic Configuration Element without having to be part of a PolymorphicConfigurationElementCollection. AnonymousConfigurationElement - A Configuration element that can be uniquely identified without having to define its name explicitly. Data Access Application Block extensionsMySql Provider - ...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2748: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, NetowrkMonitor_Parsers.msi continues to improve quality and fix bugs. It has included the fo...Duckworth Lewis Professional Edition Calculator: DLcalc 3.0: DLcalc 3.0 can perform Duckworth/Lewis Professional Edition calculations 100% accurately. It also produces over-by-over and ball-by-ball PAR score tables.Media Companion: MC 3.420b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movies Fixed: Fanart and poster scraping issues TV Shows (Re)Added: Rebuild single show Fixed: Issue when shows are moved from original location Ability to handle " for actor nicknames Crash when episode name contains "<" (does not scrape yet) Clears fanart when switch...patterns & practices - Unity: Unity 3.0 for .NET4.5 Preview: The Unity 3.0.1026.0 Preview enables Unity to work on .NET 4.5 with both the WinRT and desktop profiles. The major changes include: Unity projects updated to target .NET 4.5. Dynamic build plans modified to use compiled lambda expressions instead of Reflection.Emit Converting reflection to use the new TypeInfo for reflection. Projects updated to work with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2011 Preview Notes/Known Issues: The Microsoft.Practices.Unity.UnityServiceLocator class cannot be use...Managed Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 4: Detailed information on this release is available on the BCL team blog.AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????,??????????????????????,???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????,???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????,???,???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??,????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??:????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64),?????"?????????"??? ??????????????,??????????: ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6?? ??“????”...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.0: Added: The new Client Blocks feaure of Views A new "move" js method for the TreeViews The NewHtmlCreated js event to the DataGrid Improved the ChoiceList structure that now allows also the selection list of a dropdown to be chosen with a lambda expression Improved the AcceptViewHintAttribute controller filter. Now a client can specify not only the name of a View or Partial View it prefers, but also to receive just the rough data in Json format. Now the the SMinimum and SMaximum par...Free SharePoint Master Pages: Buried Alive (Halloween) Theme: Release Notes *Created for Halloween, you will find theme file, custom css file and images. *Created by Al Roome @AlstarRoome Features: Custom styling for web part Custom background *Screenshot https://s3.amazonaws.com/kkhipple/post/sharepoint-showcase-halloween.pngNew ProjectsarlTH: "Airport Link Thailand" Application for Windows Phone 7.1Audio Tags Editor For Excel: The purpose of the project is to create a tool to edit tags of audio files through the excel application. The program is an Excel add-in.AW Load Tester: AW Load Tester is a simple and easy to use website load tester that very closely mimics a regular users browsing session on your website. Many popular load tester only download HTML. AW Load Tester downloads all the related items on a page simultaneously. 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FreeboxHDVideoPlayer simplifie, pour les utilisateurs de free.fr, la lecture et la gestion des vidéos stockées sur le disque du boitier Freebox HD.guglex - google docs xtraz: my studying project for asp.net mvc 3. now displaying spreadsheet rows in card viewIP-Camera MJPEG HTTP Web-Server Emulator: Turns web-camera into IP-camera with mjpeg streaming and access it over network. Usage of i-Lids (Imagery Library for Intelligent Detection Systems) and other data for surveillance systems development. Sends WMV, folder with images, web-camera data over the wire.LIM: LIM is .net software for archive manage.Luminji.CorWeb: luminji's company web.Map Generator: Map Generator for your Civ/Col/Roguelike games in VB.NET.Microformat Parsers for .NET: Microformat's Parsers for .NET helps you to collect information you run into on the web, that is stored by means of microformats. 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The logging is done using Apache log4net from http://logging.apache.org/log4net. The idea here is not to only present the code, but also to document how the de...Scriptster Gearbox: Scriptster Gearbox is a full C# scripting system based on Scriptster (also on CodePlex). It is aimed at Visual Studio developers and power users who need to automate the sorts of things that DOS is generally good at, but which using C# can make more powerful and more familiar.Technical Analysis Engine for .NET: Technical Analysis Engine is a .NET based library for technical analysis. It is fast, free, easy to use and provides functionality for financial market analysis.ValidationDSL: A Fluent validation engine with ease to use and reusable around the multi-tenant applicationsWebFormsUtilities: WebFormsUtilities is a collection of tools that assist in using MVC/MVP functionality to webforms in an unobtrusive manner. This differs from a hybrid MVC/WebForms page in that you can use methods like UpdateModel() or TryValidateModel() in a WebForms Page class.Wen - WPF 3D Navigator: Control the camera and the lights of a WPF 3D application without any code modification.WindStudios: WindStudiosWrite My Expect Statement: Have Rhino Mocks automatically generate your expect() and return() statements for you.zion xtraz: some basic helpful classes for use in every project

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  • How to Visualize your Audit Data with BI Publisher?

    - by kanichiro.nishida
      Do you know how many reports on your BI Publisher server are accessed yesterday ? Or, how many users accessed to the reports yesterday, or what are the average number of the users accessed to the reports during the week vs. weekend or morning vs. afternoon ? With BI Publisher 11G, now you can audit your user’s reports access and understand the state of the reporting environment at your server, each user, or each report level. At the previous post I’ve talked about what the BI Publisher’s auditing functionality and how to enable it so that BI Publisher can start collecting such data. (How to Audit and Monitor BI Publisher Reports Access?)Now, how can you visualize such auditing data to have a better understanding and gain more insights? With Fusion Middleware Audit Framework you have an option to store the auditing data into a database instead of a log file, which is the default option. Once you enable the database storage option, that means you have your auditing data (or, user report access data) in your database tables, now no brainer, you can start visualize the data, create reports, analyze, and share with BI Publisher. So, first, let’s take a look on how to enable the database storage option for the auditing data. How to Feed the Auditing Data into Database First you need to create a database schema for Fusion Middleware Audit Framework with RCU (Repository Creation Utility). If you have already installed BI Publisher 11G you should be familiar with this RCU. It creates any database schema necessary to run any Fusion Middleware products including BI stuff. And you can use the same RCU that you used for your BI or BI Publisher installation to create this Audit schema. Create Audit Schema with RCU Here are the steps: Go to $RCU_HOME/bin and execute the ‘rcu’ command Choose Create at the starting screen and click Next. Enter your database details and click Next. Choose the option to create a new prefix, for example ‘BIP’, ‘KAN’, etc. Select 'Audit Services' from the list of schemas. Click Next and accept the tablespace creation. Click Finish to start the process. After this, there should be following three Audit related schema created in your database. <prefix>_IAU (e.g. KAN_IAU) <prefix>_IAU_APPEND (e.g. KAN_IAU_APPEND) <prefix>_IAU_VIEWER (e.g. KAN_IAU_VIEWER) Setup Datasource at WebLogic After you create a database schema for your auditing data, now you need to create a JDBC connection on your WebLogic Server so the Audit Framework can access to the database schema that was created with the RCU with the previous step. Connect to the Oracle WebLogic Server administration console: http://hostname:port/console (e.g. http://report.oracle.com:7001/console) Under Services, click the Data Sources link. Click ‘Lock & Edit’ so that you can make changes Click New –> ‘Generic Datasource’ to create a new data source. Enter the following details for the new data source:  Name: Enter a name such as Audit Data Source-0.  JNDI Name: jdbc/AuditDB  Database Type: Oracle  Click Next and select ‘Oracle's Driver (Thin XA) Versions: 9.0.1 or later’ as Database Driver (if you’re using Oracle database), and click Next. The Connection Properties page appears. Enter the following information: Database Name: Enter the name of the database (SID) to which you will connect. Host Name: Enter the hostname of the database.  Port: Enter the database port.  Database User Name: This is the name of the audit schema that you created in RCU. The suffix is always IAU for the audit schema. For example, if you gave the prefix as ‘BIP’, then the schema name would be ‘KAN_IAU’.  Password: This is the password for the audit schema that you created in RCU.   Click Next. Accept the defaults, and click Test Configuration to verify the connection. Click Next Check listed servers where you want to make this JDBC connection available. Click ‘Finish’ ! After that, make sure you click ‘Activate Changes’ at the left hand side top to take the new JDBC connection in effect. Register your Audit Data Storing Database to your Domain Finally, you can register the JNDI/JDBC datasource as your Auditing data storage with Fusion Middleware Control (EM). Here are the steps: 1. Login to Fusion Middleware Control 2. Navigate to Weblogic Domain, right click on ‘bifoundation…..’, select Security, then Audit Store. 3. Click the searchlight icon next to the Datasource JNDI Name field. 4.Select the Audit JNDI/JDBC datasource you created in the previous step in the pop-up window and click OK. 5. Click Apply to continue. 6. Restart the whole WebLogic Servers in the domain. After this, now the BI Publisher should start feeding all the auditing data into the database table called ‘IAU_BASE’. Try login to BI Publisher and open a couple of reports, you should see the activity audited in the ‘IAU_BASE’ table. If not working, you might want to check the log file, which is located at $BI_HOME/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/logs/AdminServer-diagnostic.log to see if there is any error. Once you have the data in the database table, now, it’s time to visualize with BI Publisher reports! Create a First BI Publisher Auditing Report Register Auditing Datasource as JNDI datasource First thing you need to do is to register the audit datasource (JNDI/JDBC connection) you created in the previous step as JNDI data source at BI Publisher. It is a JDBC connection registered as JNDI, that means you don’t need to create a new JDBC connection by typing the connection URL, username/password, etc. You can just register it using the JNDI name. (e.g. jdbc/AuditDB) Login to BI Publisher as Administrator (e.g. weblogic) Go to Administration Page Click ‘JNDI Connection’ under Data Sources and Click ‘New’ Type Data Source Name and JNDI Name. The JNDI Name is the one you created in the WebLogic Console as the auditing datasource. (e.g. jdbc/AuditDB) Click ‘Test Connection’ to make sure the datasource connection works. Provide appropriate roles so that the report developers or viewers can share this data source to view reports. Click ‘Apply’ to save. Create Data Model Select Data Model from the tool bar menu ‘New’ Set ‘Default Data Source’ to the audit JNDI data source you have created in the previous step. Select ‘SQL Query’ for your data set Use Query Builder to build a query or just type a sql query. Either way, the table you want to report against is ‘IAU_BASE’. This IAU_BASE table contains all the auditing data for other products running on the WebLogic Server such as JPS, OID, etc. So, if you care only specific to BI Publisher then you want to filter by using  ‘IAU_COMPONENTTYPE’ column which contains the product name (e.g. ’xmlpserver’ for BI Publisher). Here is my sample sql query. select     "IAU_BASE"."IAU_COMPONENTTYPE" as "IAU_COMPONENTTYPE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_EVENTTYPE" as "IAU_EVENTTYPE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_EVENTCATEGORY" as "IAU_EVENTCATEGORY",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_TSTZORIGINATING" as "IAU_TSTZORIGINATING",    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'YYYY-MM-DD') IAU_DATE,    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'DAY') as IAU_DAY,    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'HH24') as IAU_HH24,    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'WW') as IAU_WEEK_OF_YEAR,      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_INITIATOR" as "IAU_INITIATOR",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_RESOURCE" as "IAU_RESOURCE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_TARGET" as "IAU_TARGET",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_MESSAGETEXT" as "IAU_MESSAGETEXT",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_FAILURECODE" as "IAU_FAILURECODE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_REMOTEIP" as "IAU_REMOTEIP" from    "KAN3_IAU"."IAU_BASE" "IAU_BASE" where "IAU_BASE"."IAU_COMPONENTTYPE" = 'xmlpserver' Once you saved a sample XML for this data model, now you can create a report with this data model. Create Report Now you can use one of the BI Publisher’s layout options to design the report layout and visualize the auditing data. I’m a big fan of Online Layout Editor, it’s just so easy and simple to create reports, and on top of that, all the reports created with Online Layout Editor has the Interactive View with automatic data linking and filtering feature without any setting or coding. If you haven’t checked the Interactive View or Online Layout Editor you might want to check these previous blog posts. (Interactive Reporting with BI Publisher 11G, Interactive Master Detail Report Just A Few Clicks Away!) But of course, you can use other layout design option such as RTF template. Here are some sample screenshots of my report design with Online Layout Editor.     Visualize and Gain More Insights about your Customers (Users) ! Now you can visualize your auditing data to have better understanding and gain more insights about your reporting environment you manage. It’s been actually helping me personally to answer the  questios like below.  How many reports are accessed or opened yesterday, today, last week ? Who is accessing which report at what time ? What are the time windows when the most of the reports access happening ? What are the most viewed reports ? Who are the active users ? What are the # of reports access or user access trend for the last month, last 6 months, last 12 months, etc ? I was talking with one of the best concierge in the world at this hotel the other day, and he was telling me that the best concierge knows about their customers inside-out therefore they can provide a very private service that is customized to each customer to meet each customer’s specific needs. Well, this is true when it comes to how to administrate and manage your reporting environment, right ? The best way to serve your customers (report users, including both viewers and developers) is to understand how they use, what they use, when they use. Auditing is not just about compliance, but it’s the way to improve the customer service. The BI Publisher 11G Auditing feature enables just that to help you understand your customers better. Happy customer service, be the best reporting concierge! p.s. please share with us on what other information would be helpful for you for the auditing! Always, any feedback is a great value and inspiration for us!  

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  • Overview of SOA Diagnostics in 11.1.1.6

    - by ShawnBailey
    What tools are available for diagnosing SOA Suite issues? There are a variety of tools available to help you and Support diagnose SOA Suite issues in 11g but it can be confusing as to which tool is appropriate for a particular situation and what their relationships are. This blog post will introduce the various tools and attempt to clarify what each is for and how they are related. Let's first list the tools we'll be addressing: RDA: Remote Diagnostic Agent DFW: Diagnostic Framework Selective Tracing DMS: Dynamic Monitoring Service ODL: Oracle Diagnostic Logging ADR: Automatic Diagnostics Repository ADRCI: Automatic Diagnostics Repository Command Interpreter WLDF: WebLogic Diagnostic Framework This overview is not mean to be a comprehensive guide on using all of these tools, however, extensive reference materials are included that will provide many more details on their execution. Another point to note is that all of these tools are applicable for Fusion Middleware as a whole but specific products may or may not have implemented features to leverage them. A couple of the tools have a WebLogic Scripting Tool or 'WLST' interface. WLST is a command interface for executing pre-built functions and custom scripts against a domain. A detailed WLST tutorial is beyond the scope of this post but you can find general information here. There are more specific resources in the below sections. In this post when we refer to 'Enterprise Manager' or 'EM' we are referring to Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. RDA (Remote Diagnostic Agent) RDA is a standalone tool that is used to collect both static configuration and dynamic runtime information from the SOA environment. RDA is generally run manually from the command line against a domain or single server. When opening a new Service Request, including an RDA collection can dramatically decrease the back and forth required to collect logs and configuration information for Support. After installing RDA you configure it to use the SOA Suite module as decribed in the referenced resources. The SOA module includes the Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) module by default in order to include all of the relevant information for the environment. In addition to this basic configuration there is also an advanced mode where you can set the number of thread dumps for the collections, log files, Incidents, etc. When would you use it? When creating a Service Request or otherwise working with Oracle resources on an issue, capturing environment snapshots to baseline your configuration or to diagnose an issue on your own. How is it related to the other tools? RDA is related to DFW in that it collects the last 10 Incidents from the server by default. In a similar manner, RDA is related to ODL through its collection of the diagnostic logs and these may contain information from Selective Tracing sessions. Examples of what it currently collects: (for details please see the links in the Resources section) Diagnostic Logs (ODL) Diagnostic Framework Incidents (DFW) SOA MDS Deployment Descriptors SOA Repository Summary Statistics Thread Dumps Complete Domain Configuration RDA Resources: Webcast Recording: Using RDA with Oracle SOA Suite 11g Blog Post: Diagnose SOA Suite 11g Issues Using RDA Download RDA How to Collect Analysis Information Using RDA for Oracle SOA Suite 11g Products [ID 1350313.1] How to Collect Analysis Information Using RDA for Oracle SOA Suite and BPEL Process Manager 11g [ID 1352181.1] Getting Started With Remote Diagnostic Agent: Case Study - Oracle WebLogic Server (Video) [ID 1262157.1] top DFW (Diagnostic Framework) DFW provides the ability to collect specific information for a particular problem when that problem occurs. DFW is included with your SOA Suite installation and deployed to the domain. Let's define the components of DFW. Diagnostic Dumps: Specific diagnostic collections that are defined at either the 'system' or product level. Examples would be diagnostic logs or thread dumps. Incident: A collection of Diagnostic Dumps associated with a particular problem Log Conditions: An Oracle Diagnostic Logging event that DFW is configured to listen for. If the event is identified then an Incident will be created. WLDF Watch: The WebLogic Diagnostic Framework or 'WLDF' is not a component of DFW, however, it can be a source of DFW Incident creation through the use of a 'Watch'. WLDF Notification: A Notification is a component of WLDF and is the link between the Watch and DFW. You can configure multiple Notification types in WLDF and associate them with your Watches. 'FMWDFW-notification' is available to you out of the box to allow for DFW notification of Watch execution. Rule: Defines a WLDF Watch or Log Condition for which we want to associate a set of Diagnostic Dumps. When triggered the specified dumps will be collected and added to the Incident Rule Action: Defines the specific Diagnostic Dumps to collect for a particular rule ADR: Automatic Diagnostics Repository; Defined for every server in a domain. This is where Incidents are stored Now let's walk through a simple flow: Oracle Web Services error message OWS-04086 (SOAP Fault) is generated on managed server 1 DFW Log Condition for OWS-04086 evaluates to TRUE DFW creates a new Incident in the ADR for managed server 1 DFW executes the specified Diagnostic Dumps and adds the output to the Incident In this case we'll grab the diagnostic log and thread dump. We might also want to collect the WSDL binding information and SOA audit trail When would you use it? When you want to automatically collect Diagnostic Dumps at a particular time using a trigger or when you want to manually collect the information. In either case it can be readily uploaded to Oracle Support through the Service Request. How is it related to the other tools? DFW generates Incidents which are collections of Diagnostic Dumps. One of the system level Diagonstic Dumps collects the current server diagnostic log which is generated by ODL and can contain information from Selective Tracing sessions. Incidents are included in RDA collections by default and ADRCI is a tool that is used to package an Incident for upload to Oracle Support. In addition, both ODL and DMS can be used to trigger Incident creation through DFW. The conditions and rules for generating Incidents can become quite complicated and the below resources go into more detail. A simpler approach to leveraging at least the Diagnostic Dumps is through WLST (WebLogic Scripting Tool) where there are commands to do the following: Create an Incident Execute a single Diagnostic Dump Describe a Diagnostic Dump List the available Diagnostic Dumps The WLST option offers greater control in what is generated and when. It can be a great help when collecting information for Support. There are overlaps with RDA, however, DFW is geared towards collecting specific runtime information when an issue occurs while existing Incidents are collected by RDA. There are 3 WLDF Watches configured by default in a SOA Suite 11g domain: Stuck Threads, Unchecked Exception and Deadlock. These Watches are enabled by default and will generate Incidents in ADR. They are configured to reset automatically after 30 seconds so they have the potential to create multiple Incidents if these conditions are consistent. The Incidents generated by these Watches will only contain System level Diagnostic Dumps. These same System level Diagnostic Dumps will be included in any application scoped Incident as well. Starting in 11.1.1.6, SOA Suite is including its own set of application scoped Diagnostic Dumps that can be executed from WLST or through a WLDF Watch or Log Condition. These Diagnostic Dumps can be added to an Incident such as in the earlier example using the error code OWS-04086. soa.config: MDS configuration files and deployed-composites.xml soa.composite: All artifacts related to the deployed composite soa.wsdl: Summary of endpoints configured for the composite soa.edn: EDN configuration summary if applicable soa.db: Summary DB information for the SOA repository soa.env: Coherence cluster configuration summary soa.composite.trail: Partial audit trail information for the running composite The current release of RDA has the option to collect the soa.wsdl and soa.composite Diagnostic Dumps. More Diagnostic Dumps for SOA Suite products are planned for future releases along with enhancements to DFW itself. DFW Resources: Webcast Recording: SOA Diagnostics Sessions: Diagnostic Framework Diagnostic Framework Documentation DFW WLST Command Reference Documentation for SOA Diagnostic Dumps in 11.1.1.6 top Selective Tracing Selective Tracing is a facility available starting in version 11.1.1.4 that allows you to increase the logging level for specific loggers and for a specific context. What this means is that you have greater capability to collect needed diagnostic log information in a production environment with reduced overhead. For example, a Selective Tracing session can be executed that only increases the log level for one composite, only one logger, limited to one server in the cluster and for a preset period of time. In an environment where dozens of composites are deployed this can dramatically reduce the volume and overhead of the logging without sacrificing relevance. Selective Tracing can be administered either from Enterprise Manager or through WLST. WLST provides a bit more flexibility in terms of exactly where the tracing is run. When would you use it? When there is an issue in production or another environment that lends itself to filtering by an available context criteria and increasing the log level globally results in too much overhead or irrelevant information. The information is written to the server diagnostic log and is exportable from Enterprise Manager How is it related to the other tools? Selective Tracing output is written to the server diagnostic log. This log can be collected by a system level Diagnostic Dump using DFW or through a default RDA collection. Selective Tracing also heavily leverages ODL fields to determine what to trace and to tag information that is part of a particular tracing session. Available Context Criteria: Application Name Client Address Client Host Composite Name User Name Web Service Name Web Service Port Selective Tracing Resources: Webcast Recording: SOA Diagnostics Session: Using Selective Tracing to Diagnose SOA Suite Issues How to Use Selective Tracing for SOA [ID 1367174.1] Selective Tracing WLST Reference top DMS (Dynamic Monitoring Service) DMS exposes runtime information for monitoring. This information can be monitored in two ways: Through the DMS servlet As exposed MBeans The servlet is deployed by default and can be accessed through http://<host>:<port>/dms/Spy (use administrative credentials to access). The landing page of the servlet shows identical columns of what are known as Noun Types. If you select a Noun Type you will see a table in the right frame that shows the attributes (Sensors) for the Noun Type and the available instances. SOA Suite has several exposed Noun Types that are available for viewing through the Spy servlet. Screenshots of the Spy servlet are available in the Knowledge Base article How to Monitor Runtime SOA Performance With the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS). Every Noun instance in the runtime is exposed as an MBean instance. As such they are generally available through an MBean browser and available for monitoring through WLDF. You can configure a WLDF Watch to monitor a particular attribute and fire a notification when the threshold is exceeded. A WLDF Watch can use the out of the box DFW notification type to notify DFW to create an Incident. When would you use it? When you want to monitor a metric or set of metrics either manually or through an automated system. When you want to trigger a WLDF Watch based on a metric exposed through DMS. How is it related to the other tools? DMS metrics can be monitored with WLDF Watches which can in turn notify DFW to create an Incident. DMS Resources: How to Monitor Runtime SOA Performance With the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS) [ID 1368291.1] How to Reset a SOA 11g DMS Metric DMS Documentation top ODL (Oracle Diagnostic Logging) ODL is the primary facility for most Fusion Middleware applications to log what they are doing. Whenever you change a logging level through Enterprise Manager it is ultimately exposed through ODL and written to the server diagnostic log. A notable exception to this is WebLogic Server which uses its own log format / file. ODL logs entries in a consistent, structured way using predefined fields and name/value pairs. Here's an example of a SOA Suite entry: [2012-04-25T12:49:28.083-06:00] [AdminServer] [ERROR] [] [oracle.soa.bpel.engine] [tid: [ACTIVE].ExecuteThread: '1' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'] [userId: ] [ecid: 0963fdde7e77631c:-31a6431d:136eaa46cda:-8000-00000000000000b4,0] [errid: 41] [WEBSERVICE_PORT.name: BPELProcess2_pt] [APP: soa-infra] [composite_name: TestProject2] [J2EE_MODULE.name: fabric] [WEBSERVICE.name: bpelprocess1_client_ep] [J2EE_APP.name: soa-infra] Error occured while handling a post operation[[ When would you use it? You'll use ODL almost every time you want to identify and diagnose a problem in the environment. The entries are written to the server diagnostic log. How is it related to the other tools? The server diagnostic logs are collected by DFW and RDA. Selective Tracing writes its information to the diagnostic log as well. Additionally, DFW log conditions are triggered by ODL log events. ODL Resources: ODL Documentation top ADR (Automatic Diagnostics Repository) ADR is not a tool in and of itself but is where DFW stores the Incidents it creates. Every server in the domain has an ADR location which can be found under <SERVER_HOME>/adr. This is referred to the as the ADR 'Base' location. ADR also has what are known as 'Home' locations. Example: You have a domain called 'myDomain' and an associated managed server called 'myServer'. Your admin server is called 'AdminServer'. Your domain home directory is called 'myDomain' and it contains a 'servers' directory. The 'servers' directory contains a directory for the managed server called 'myServer' and here is where you'll find the 'adr' directory which is the ADR 'Base' location for myServer. To get to the ADR 'Home' locations we drill through a few levels: diag/ofm/myDomain/ In an 11.1.1.6 SOA Suite domain you will see 2 directories here, 'myServer' and 'soa-infra'. These are the ADR 'Home' locations. 'myServer' is the 'system' ADR home and contains system level Incidents. 'soa-infra' is the name that SOA Suite used to register with DFW and this ADR home contains SOA Suite related Incidents Each ADR home location contains a series of directories, one of which is called 'incident'. This is where your Incidents are stored. When would you use it? It's a good idea to check on these locations from time to time to see whether a lot of Incidents are being generated. They can be cleaned out by deleting the Incident directories or through the ADRCI tool. If you know that an Incident is of particular interest for an issue you're working with Oracle you can simply zip it up and provide it. How does it relate to the other tools? ADR is obviously very important for DFW since it's where the Incidents are stored. Incidents contain Diagnostic Dumps that may relate to diagnostic logs (ODL) and DMS metrics. The most recent 10 Incident directories are collected by RDA by default and ADRCI relies on the ADR locations to help manage the contents. top ADRCI (Automatic Diagnostics Repository Command Interpreter) ADRCI is a command line tool for packaging and managing Incidents. When would you use it? When purging Incidents from an ADR Home location or when you want to package an Incident along with an offline RDA collection for upload to Oracle Support. How does it relate to the other tools? ADRCI contains a tool called the Incident Packaging System or IPS. This is used to package an Incident for upload to Oracle Support through a Service Request. Starting in 11.1.1.6 IPS will attempt to collect an offline RDA collection and include it with the Incident package. This will only work if Perl is available on the path, otherwise it will give a warning and package only the Incident files. ADRCI Resources: How to Use the Incident Packaging System (IPS) in SOA 11g [ID 1381259.1] ADRCI Documentation top WLDF (WebLogic Diagnostic Framework) WLDF is functionality available in WebLogic Server since version 9. Starting with FMw 11g a link has been added between WLDF and the pre-existing DFW, the WLDF Watch Notification. Let's take a closer look at the flow: There is a need to monitor the performance of your SOA Suite message processing A WLDF Watch is created in the WLS console that will trigger if the average message processing time exceeds 2 seconds. This metric is monitored through a DMS MBean instance. The out of the box DFW Notification (the Notification is called FMWDFW-notification) is added to the Watch. Under the covers this notification is of type JMX. The Watch is triggered when the threshold is exceeded and fires the Notification. DFW has a listener that picks up the Notification and evaluates it according to its rules, etc When it comes to automatic Incident creation, WLDF is a key component with capabilities that will grow over time. When would you use it? When you want to monitor the WLS server log or an MBean metric for some condition and fire a notification when the Watch is triggered. How does it relate to the other tools? WLDF is used to automatically trigger Incident creation through DFW using the DFW Notification. WLDF Resources: How to Monitor Runtime SOA Performance With the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS) [ID 1368291.1] How To Script the Creation of a SOA WLDF Watch in 11g [ID 1377986.1] WLDF Documentation top

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