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• Can I use RegFree Com with an application written in Excel VBA?

  - by Steven

  I have an application that is written in Excel VBA, myApp.xls. Currently we use InstallShield to distribute the application. Since we are moving to Windows Vista, I need to be able to install the application as a standard user. This does not allow for me to update the registry during the install process. In addition to the excel application we also have several VB6 applications. In order to install those applications, I was able to use RegFree com and Make My Manifest (MMM) as suggested by people on this forum (I greatly appreciate the insight btw!). This process, although a bit tedious, worked well. I then packaged the output from MMM in a VS '05 installer project and removed the UAC prompt on the msi using msiinfo.exe. Now I am faced with installing an application that basically lives in an Excel file. I modified a manifest that MMM created for me for one of my VB6 apps and tried to run the excel file through that, but I did not have much luck. Does anybody know of a way to do this? Does RegFree com work with VBA? Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks, Steve

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• Asp.Net MVC 2: How exactly does a view model bind back to the model upon post back?

  - by Dr. Zim

  Sorry for the length, but a picture is worth 1000 words: In ASP.NET MVC 2, the input form field "name" attribute must contain exactly the syntax below that you would use to reference the object in C# in order to bind it back to the object upon post back. That said, if you have an object like the following where it contains multiple Orders having multiple OrderLines, the names would look and work well like this (case sensitive): This works: Order[0].id Order[0].orderDate Order[0].Customer.name Order[0].Customer.Address Order[0].OrderLine[0].itemID // first order line Order[0].OrderLine[0].description Order[0].OrderLine[0].qty Order[0].OrderLine[0].price Order[0].OrderLine[1].itemID // second order line, same names Order[0].OrderLine[1].description Order[0].OrderLine[1].qty Order[0].OrderLine[1].price However we want to add order lines and remove order lines at the client browser. Apparently, the indexes must start at zero and contain every consecutive index number to N. The black belt ninja Phil Haack's blog entry here explains how to remove the [0] index, have duplicate names, and let MVC auto-enumerate duplicate names with the [0] notation. However, I have failed to get this to bind back using a nested object: This fails: Order.id // Duplicate names should enumerate at 0 .. N Order.orderDate Order.Customer.name Order.Customer.Address Order.OrderLine.itemID // And likewise for nested properties? Order.OrderLine.description Order.OrderLine.qty Order.OrderLine.price Order.OrderLine.itemID Order.OrderLine.description Order.OrderLine.qty Order.OrderLine.price I haven't found any advice out there yet that describes how this works for binding back nested ViewModels on post. Any links to existing code examples or strict examples on the exact names necessary to do nested binding with ILists? Steve Sanderson has code that does this sort of thing here, but we cannot seem to get this to bind back to nested objects. Anything not having the [0]..[n] AND being consecutive in numbering simply drops off of the return object. Any ideas?

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• XML String into a DataGridView (C#)

  - by Justin Daniels

  I am currently working with a webservice to pull a report about users in a remote support system. After pulling my report and receiving the result, I am given the following string back by the method: <report><header><field id="0">Source</field><field id="1">Session ID</field><field id="2">Date</field><field id="3">Name</field><field id="24">Technician Name</field><field id="25">Technician ID</field></header><data><row><field id="0">Email</field><field id="1">55037806</field><field id="2">4/13/2010 2:28:06 AM</field><field id="3">Bill Gates</field><field id="24">John</field><field id="25">1821852</field></row><row><field id="0">Telephone</field><field id="1">55034548</field><field id="2">4/13/2010 12:59:44 AM</field><field id="3">Steve Jobs</field><field id="24">John</field><field id="25">1821852</field></row></data></report> After receiving this string, I need to take it and display the actual data in a datagridview. I've tried putting it into an XMLDocument then reading that, but it seems to keep failing. Just interested in another set of eyes :) Application is written in C# in VS2010.

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• Trying to debug a 'Assertion failure in -[UIActionSheet showInView:]' error....

  - by dsobol

  I am working through "Beginning iPad Application Development" and am getting hung up in Chapter 3 where I have created a project that works with an Action Sheet. As it stands now, my application loads into the simulator just fine with no errors that I am aware of, but as it runs, it crashes with the following errors showing up in the debugger window: 2010-05-31 19:44:39.703 UsingViewsActionSheet[49538:207] * Assertion failure in -[UIActionSheet showInView:], /SourceCache/UIKit_Sim/UIKit-1145.66/UIAlert.m:7073 2010-05-31 19:44:39.705 UsingViewsActionSheet[49538:207] * Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInternalInconsistencyException', reason: 'Invalid parameter not satisfying: view != nil' I am sure that this is the block where the app breaks based upon my use of breakpoints. //Implement viewDidLoad to do additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib. - (void)viewDidLoad { UIActionSheet *action = [[UIActionSheet alloc] initWithTitle:@"This is my Action Sheet!" delegate:self cancelButtonTitle:@"OK" destructiveButtonTitle:@"Delete Message!" otherButtonTitles:@"Option 1", @"Option 2", @"Option 3", nil]; [action showInView:self.view]; // <-- This line seems to trigger the crash.... [action release]; [super viewDidLoad]; } Am I missing something obvious, or is there more to the problem than is shown here? I have looked at the abstract for showInView and cannot divine anything there yet. I appreciate any and all asssitance. Regards, Steve O'Sullivan

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• How to use a viewstate'd object as a datasource for controls on a user control

  - by user557325

  I've got a listview on a control. Each row comprises a checkbox and another listview. The outer listview is bound to a property on the control (via a method call, can't set a property as a SelectMethod on an ObjectDataSource it would appear) which is lazy loaded suchly: Public ReadOnly Property ProductLineChargeDetails() As List(Of WebServiceProductLineChargeDetail) Get If ViewState("WSProductLineChargeDetails") Is Nothing Then ViewState("WSProductLineChargeDetails") = GetWebServiceProductLineChargeDetails() End If Return DirectCast(ViewState("WSProductLineChargeDetails"), Global.System.Collections.Generic.List(Of Global.MI.Open.WebServiceProductLineChargeDetail)) End Get End Property The shape of the object referenced by the data source is something like this: (psuedocode) Product { bool Licenced; List<Charge> charges; } Charge { int property1; string property2; bool property3 . . . } The reason for the use of viewstate is this: When an one of the checkboxes on one of the outer list view rows is checked or unchecked I want to modify the object that the ODS represents (for example I'll add a couple of Charge objects to the relevant Product object) and then rebind. The problem I'm getting is that after every postback (specifically after checking or unchecking one of the rows' checkbox) my viewstate is empty. Thiss means that any changes I make to my viewstate'd object is lost. Now, I've worked out (after much googling and reading, amongst many others, Scott Mitchel's excellent bit on ViewState) that during initial databinding IsTrackingViewState is set to false. That means, I think, that assigning the return from GetWebServiceProductLineChargeDetails() to the ViewState item in my Property Get during the initial databind won't work. Mind you, even when the IsTrackingViewState is true and I call the Property Get, come the next postback, the viewstate is empty. So do you chaps have any ideas on how I keep the object referenced by the ObjectDataSource in ViewState between postbacks and update it and get those changes to stay in ViewState? This has been going on for a couple of days now and I'm getting fed up! Cheers in advance Steve

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• NullReferenceException when initializing NServiceBus within web application Application_Start method

  - by SteveBering

  I am running the 2.0 RTM of NServiceBus and am getting a NullReferenceException when my MessageModule binds the CurrentSessionContext to my NHibernate sessionfactory. From within my Application_Start, I call the following method: public static void WithWeb(IUnityContainer container) { log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator.Configure(); var childContainer = container.CreateChildContainer(); childContainer.RegisterInstance<ISessionFactory>(NHibernateSession.SessionFactory); var bus = NServiceBus.Configure.WithWeb() .UnityBuilder(childContainer) .Log4Net() .XmlSerializer() .MsmqTransport() .IsTransactional(true) .PurgeOnStartup(false) .UnicastBus() .ImpersonateSender(false) .LoadMessageHandlers() .CreateBus(); var activeBus = bus.Start(); container.RegisterInstance(typeof(IBus), activeBus); } When the bus is started, my message module starts with the following: public void HandleBeginMessage() { try { CurrentSessionContext.Bind(_sessionFactory.OpenSession()); } catch (Exception e) { _log.Error("Error occurred in HandleBeginMessage of NHibernateMessageModule", e); throw; } } In looking at my log, we are logging the following error when the bind method is called: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at NHibernate.Context.WebSessionContext.GetMap() at NHibernate.Context.MapBasedSessionContext.set_Session(ISession value) at NHibernate.Context.CurrentSessionContext.Bind(ISession session) Apparently, there is some issue in getting access to the HttpContext. Should this call to configure NServiceBus occur later in the lifecycle than Application_Start? Or is there another workaround that others have used to get handlers working within an Asp.NET Web application? Thanks, Steve

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• html5 vs flash - full comparison chart anywhere?

  - by iddqd

  So since Steve Jobs said Flash sucks and implied that HTML5 can do everything Flash can without the need for a Plugin, I keep hearing those exact words from a lot of People. I would really like to have a Chart somewhere (similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_%28HTML5%29#Form_elements_and_attributes ) that I can just show to those people. Showing all the little things that Flash can do right now, that HTML5/Ajax/CSS is not yet even thinking about. But of course also the things that HTML5 does better. I would like to see details compared like audio playback, realtime audio processing, byte level access, bitmap data manipulation, webcam access, binary sockets, stuff in the works such as P2P technology (adobe stratus) and all the stuff I don't know about myself. Ideally with examples of what can be accomplished with, lets say Binary Sockets (such as a POP3 client) because otherwise it won't mean a lot to non-programmers since they will just say "well we can do without Binary Sockets". And ideally with some current benchmarks and some examples of websites that use this technology. I've searched the web and am surprised not to find anything. So is there such a comparison somewhere? Or does anybody want to create this and post it to Wikipedia? ;-)

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• sorl-thumbnail unit tests fail by 1 pixel (!)

  - by stevejalim

  Hi I'm using sorl-thumbnail in a Django 1.2 (currently 1.2 RC) project and getting a surprising failure of four of sorl's built-in unit tests. Essentially, the resized images are all 1px shorter than the unit tests expect them to be. See below for details I'm developing on OSX 10.5.8 (not Snow Leopard) with Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Feb 6 2009, 19:02:12) and PIL 1.1.6. Any thoughts what might be up? Cheers Steve ====================================================================== FAIL: test_extension (sorl.thumbnail.tests.fields.FieldTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/django/myprojectnamehere/lib/sorl/thumbnail/tests/fields.py", line 66, in test_extension self.verify_thumbnail((50, 37), thumb, expected_filename) File "/usr/local/django/myprojectnamehere/lib/sorl/thumbnail/tests/base.py", line 92, in verify_thumbnail self.assertEqual(image.size, expected_size) AssertionError: (50, 38) != (50, 37) ====================================================================== FAIL: test_thumbnail (sorl.thumbnail.tests.fields.ImageWithThumbnailsFieldTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/django/myprojectnamehere/lib/sorl/thumbnail/tests/fields.py", line 111, in test_thumbnail self.verify_thumbnail((50, 37), thumb, expected_filename) File "/usr/local/django/myprojectnamehere/lib/sorl/thumbnail/tests/base.py", line 92, in verify_thumbnail self.assertEqual(image.size, expected_size) AssertionError: (50, 38) != (50, 37) ====================================================================== FAIL: testTag (sorl.thumbnail.tests.templatetags.ThumbnailTagTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/django/myprojectnamehere/lib/sorl/thumbnail/tests/templatetags.py", line 118, in testTag self.verify_thumbnail((90, 67), expected_filename=expected_fn) File "/usr/local/django/myprojectnamehere/lib/sorl/thumbnail/tests/base.py", line 92, in verify_thumbnail self.assertEqual(image.size, expected_size) AssertionError: (90, 68) != (90, 67)

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• How reliable is Verify() in Moq?

  - by matthewayinde

  I'm only new to Unit Testing and ASP.NET MVC. I've been trying to get my head into both using Steve Sanderson's "Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework". In the book there is this piece of code: public class AdminController : Controller { ... [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)] public ActionResult Edit(Product product, HttpPostedFileBase image) { ... productsRepository.SaveProduct(product); TempData["message"] = product.Name + " has been saved."; return RedirectToAction("Index"); } } That he tests like so: [Test] public void Edit_Action_Saves_Product_To_Repository_And_Redirects_To_Index() { // Arrange AdminController controller = new AdminController(mockRepos.Object); Product newProduct = new Product(); // Act var result = (RedirectToRouteResult)controller.Edit(newProduct, null); // Assert: Saved product to repository and redirected mockRepos.Verify(x => x.SaveProduct(newProduct)); Assert.AreEqual("Index", result.RouteValues["action"]); } THE TEST PASSES. So I intensionally corrupt the code by adding "productsRepository.DeleteProduct(product);" after the "SaveProduct(product);" as in: ... productsRepository.SaveProduct(product); productsRepository.DeleteProduct(product); ... THE TEST PASSES.(i.e Condones a calamitous [hypnosis + intellisense]-induced typo :) ) Could this test be written better? Or is there something I should know? Thanks a lot.

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• Converter problem with XmlDataProvider

  - by Andrew

  Sorry for this, I've just started programming with wpf. I can't seem to figure out why the following xaml displays "System.Xml.XmlElement" instead of the actual xml node content. This is displayed 5 times in the listbox whenever I run it. Not sure where I'm going wrong... <Window x:Class="TestBinding.Window1" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300"> <Window.Resources> <XmlDataProvider x:Key="myXmlSource" XPath="/root"> <x:XData> <root xmlns=""> <name>Steve</name> <name>Arthur</name> <name>Sidney</name> <name>Billy</name> <name>Steven</name> </root> </x:XData> </XmlDataProvider> <DataTemplate x:Key="shmooga"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding}"/> </DataTemplate> </Window.Resources> <Grid> <ListBox ItemTemplate="{StaticResource shmooga}" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource myXmlSource}, XPath=name}"> </ListBox> </Grid> </Window> Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

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• maintaining continuous count in php

  - by LiveEn

  I have a small problem maintain a count for the position. i have written a function function that will select all the users within a page and positions them in the order. Eg: Mike Position 1 Steve Postion 2.............. .... Jacob Position 30 but the problem that i have when i move to the second page, the count is started from first Eg: Jenny should be number 31 but the list goes, Jenny Position 1 Tanya Position 2....... Below is my function function nrk($duty,$page,$position) { $url="http://www.test.com/people.php?q=$duty&start=$page"; $ch=curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url); $result=curl_exec($ch); $dom = new DOMDocument(); @$dom->loadHTML($result); $xpath=new DOMXPath($dom); $elements = $xpath->evaluate("//div"); foreach ($elements as $element) { $name = $element->getElementsByTagName("name")->item(0)->nodeValue; $position=$position+1; echo $name." Position:".$position."<br>"; } return $position; } Below is the for loop where i try to loop thru the page count for ($page=0;$page<=$pageNumb;$page=$page + 10) { nrk($duty,$page,$position); } I dont want to maintain a array key value in the for each coz i drop certain names...

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• How can I create a horizontal table in a single foreach loop in MVC?

  - by GenericTypeTea

  Is there any way, in ASP.Net MVC, to condense the following code to a single foreach loop? <table class="table"> <tr> <td> Name </td> <% foreach (var item in Model) { %> <td> <%= item.Name %> </td> <% } %> </tr> <tr> <td> Item </td> <% foreach (var item in Model) { %> <td> <%= item.Company %> </td> <% } %> </tr> </table> Where model is a simple object: public class SomeObject { public virtual Name {get;set;} public virtual Company {get;set;} } This would output a table as follows: Name | Bob | Sam | Bill | Steve | Company | Builder | Fireman | MS | Apple | I know I could probably use an extension method to write out each row, but is it possible to build all rows using a single iteration over the model? This is a follow on from this question as I'm unhappy with my accepted answer and cannot believe I've provided the best solution.

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• Moving from SVN to HG : branching and backup

  - by rorycl

  My company runs svn right now and we are very familiar with it. However, because we do a lot of concurrent development, merging can become very complicated.. We've been playing with hg and we really like the ability to make fast and effective clones on a per-feature basis. We've got two main issues we'd like to resolve before we move to hg: Branches for erstwhile svn users I'm familiar with the "4 ways to branch in Mercurial" as set out in Steve Losh's article. We think we should "materialise" the branches because I think the dev team will find this the most straightforward way of migrating from svn. Consequently I guess we should follow the "branching with clones" model which means that separate clones for branches are made on the server. While this means that every clone/branch needs to be made on the server and published separately, this isn't too much of an issue for us as we are used to checking out svn branches which come down as separate copies. I'm worried, however, that merging changes and following history may become difficult between branches in this model. Backup If programmers in our team make local clones of a branch, how do they backup the local clone? We're used to seeing svn commit messages like this on a feature branch "Interim commit: db function not yet working". I can't see a way of doing this easily in hg. Advice gratefully received. Rory

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• Simple Database normalization question...

  - by user365531

  Hi all, I have a quick question regarding a database that I am designing and making sure it is normalized... I have a customer table, with a primary key of customerId. It has a StatusCode column that has a code which reflects the customers account status ie. 1 = Open, 2 = Closed, 3 = Suspended etc... Now I would like to have another field in the customer table that flags whether the account is allowed to be suspended or not... certain customers will be automatically suspended if they break there trading terms... others not... so the relevant table fields will be as so: Customers (CustomerId(PK):StatusCode:IsSuspensionAllowed) Now both fields are dependent on the primary key as you can not determine the status or whether suspensions are allowed on a particular customer unless you know the specific customer, except of course when the IsSuspensionAllowed field is set to YES, the the customer should never have a StatusCode of 3 (Suspended). It seems from the above table design it is possible for this to happen unless a check contraint is added to my table. I can't see how another table could be added to the relational design to enforce this though as it's only in the case where IsSuspensionAllowed is set to YES and StatusCode is set to 3 when the two have a dependence on each other. So after my long winded explanation my question is this: Is this a normalization problem and I'm not seeing a relational design that will enforce this... or is it actually just a business rule that should be enforced with a check contraint and the table is in fact still normalized. Cheers, Steve

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• Why doesn't the Java Collections API include a Graph implementation?

  - by dvanaria

  I’m currently learning the Java Collections API and feel I have a good understanding of the basics, but I’ve never understood why this standard API doesn’t include a Graph implementation. The three base classes are easily understandable (List, Set, and Map) and all their implementations in the API are mostly straightforward and consistent. Considering how often graphs come up as a potential way to model a given problem, this just doesn’t make sense to me (it’s possible it does exist in the API and I’m not looking in the right place of course). Steve Yegge suggests in one of his blog posts that a programmer should consider graphs first when attacking a problem, and if the problem domain doesn’t fit naturally into this data structure, only then consider the alternative structures. My first guess is that there is no universal way to represent graphs, or that their interfaces may not be generic enough for an API implementation to be useful? But if you strip down a graph to its basic components (vertices and a set of edges that connect some or all of the vertices) and consider the ways that graphs are commonly constructed (methods like addVertex(v) and insertEdge(v1, v2)) it seems that a generic Graph implementation would be possible and useful. Thanks for helping me understand this better.

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• Appending an existing XML file with c#

  - by Farstucker

  I have an existing XML file that I would like to append without changing the format. Existing File looks like this: <Clients> <User username="farstucker"> <UserID>1</UserID> <DOB /> <FirstName>Steve</FirstName> <LastName>Lawrence</LastName> <Location>NYC</Location> </User> </Clients> How can I add another user using this format? My existing code is: string fileLocation = "clients.xml"; XmlTextWriter writer; if (!File.Exists(fileLocation)) { writer = new XmlTextWriter(fileLocation, null); writer.WriteStartDocument(); // Write the Root Element writer.WriteStartElement("Clients"); // End Element and Close writer.WriteEndElement(); writer.Close(); } // Append new data here Ive thought about using XmlDocument Fragment to append the data but Im not certain if I can maintain the existing format ( and empty tags ) without messing up the file. Any advice you could give is much appreciated. EDIT Ive changed the code to read the original XML but the file keeps getting overwritten.

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• Prohibit ampersand in Rails form

  - by snlsn

  NOT a Rails 3 issue In a Contact model I have a company_name attribute. For reasons that don't matter to this question, I want to prohibit an ampersand character. We have a lot of clients with ampersands in their company name, and users forget they aren't allowed to use this character. This isn't an html sanitize issue. I don't care about whitespace or CDATA or anything. The entries in this field are plain text and I don't want an ampersand to be entered in this one field in any way, shape or form. I assume a validation on the model is the way to go. I have tried validates_exclusion_of. I have tried validates_format_of. No success. I'm unsophisticated when it comes to regex, so I might be doing things very wrong. But the bottom line is - I need to prevent a user from entering that "&" character in the company_name field. Thanks a million. Steve

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• find consecutive nonzero values

  - by thymeandspace

  I am trying to write a simple MATLAB program that will find the first chain (more than 70) of consecutive nonzero values and return the starting value of that consecutive chain. I am working with movement data from a joystick and there are a few thousand rows of data with a mix of zeros and nonzero values before the actual trial begins (coming from subjects slightly moving the joystick before the trial actually started). I need to get rid of these rows before I can start analyzing the movement from the trials. I am sure this is a relatively simple thing to do so I was hoping someone could offer insight. Thank you in advance -Lilly EDIT: Here's what I tried: s = zeros(size(x1)); for i=2:length(x1) if(x1(i-1) ~= 0) s(i) = 1 + s(i-1); end end display(S); for a vector x1 which has a max chain of 72 but I dont know how to find the max chain and return its first value, so I know where to trim. I also really don't think this is the best strategy, since the max chain in my data will be tens of thousands of values. Thanks for helping me edit, Steve. :)

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• Can a lambda can be used to change a List's values in-place ( without creating a new list)?

  - by Saint Hill

  I am trying to determine the correct way of transforming all the values in a List using the new lambdas feature in the upcoming release of Java 8 without creating a **new** List. This pertains to times when a List is passed in by a caller and needs to have a function applied to change all the contents to a new value. For example, the way Collections.sort(list) changes a list in-place. What is the easiest way given this transforming function and this starting list: String function(String s){ return [some change made to value of s]; } List<String> list = Arrays.asList("Bob", "Steve", "Jim", "Arbby"); The usual way of applying a change to all the values in-place was this: for (int i = 0; i < list.size(); i++) { list.set(i, function( list.get(i) ); } Does lambdas and Java 8 offer: an easier and more expressive way? a way to do this without setting up all the scaffolding of the for(..) loop?

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• nginx can't see MySQL

  - by user135235

  I have a fully working Joomla 2.5.6 install driven by a local MySQL server, but I'd like to test nginx to see if it's a faster web serving experience than Apache. \ PHP 5.4.6 (PHP54w) \ CentOS 6.2 \ Joomla 2.5.6 \ PHP54w-fpm.i386 (FastCGI process manager) \ php -m shows: mysql & mysqli modules loaded Nginx seems to have installed fine via yum, it can process a PHP-info file via FastCGI perfectly OK (http://37.128.190.241/php.php) but when I stop Apache, start nginx instead and visit my site I get: "Database connection error (1): The MySQL adapter 'mysqli' is not available." I've tried adjusting my Joomla configuration.php to use mysql instead of mysqli but I get the same basic error, only this time "Database connection error (1): The MySQL adapter 'mysql' is not available" of course! Can anyone think what the problem might be please? I did try explicitly setting extension = mysqli.so and extension = mysql.so in my php.ini to try and force the issue (despite php -m showing they were both successfully loaded anyway) - no difference. I have a pretty standard nginx default.conf: server { listen 80; server_name www.MYDOMAIN.com; server_name_in_redirect off; access_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.access_log main; error_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.error_log info; root /var/www/html/MYROOT_DIR; index index.php index.html index.htm default.html default.htm; # Support Clean (aka Search Engine Friendly) URLs location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args; } # deny running scripts inside writable directories location ~* /(images|cache|media|logs|tmp)/.*\.(php|pl|py|jsp|asp|sh|cgi)$ { return 403; error_page 403 /403_error.html; } location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf; } # caching of files location ~* \.(ico|pdf|flv)$ { expires 1y; } location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|swf|xml|txt)$ { expires 14d; } } Snip of output from phpinfo under nginx: Server API FPM/FastCGI Virtual Directory Support disabled Configuration File (php.ini) Path /etc Loaded Configuration File /etc/php.ini Scan this dir for additional .ini files /etc/php.d Additional .ini files parsed /etc/php.d/curl.ini, /etc/php.d/fileinfo.ini, /etc/php.d/json.ini, /etc/php.d/phar.ini, /etc/php.d/zip.ini Snip of output from phpinfo under Apache: Server API Apache 2.0 Handler Virtual Directory Support disabled Configuration File (php.ini) Path /etc Loaded Configuration File /etc/php.ini Scan this dir for additional .ini files /etc/php.d Additional .ini files parsed /etc/php.d/curl.ini, /etc/php.d/fileinfo.ini, /etc/php.d/json.ini, /etc/php.d/mysql.ini, /etc/php.d/mysqli.ini, /etc/php.d/pdo.ini, /etc/php.d/pdo_mysql.ini, /etc/php.d/pdo_sqlite.ini, /etc/php.d/phar.ini, /etc/php.d/sqlite3.ini, /etc/php.d/zip.ini Seems that with Apache, PHP is loading substantially more additional .ini files, including ones relating to mysql (mysql.ini, mysqli.ini, pdo_mysql.ini) than nginx. Any ideas how I get nginix to also call these additional .ini's ? Thanks in advance, Steve

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• Google Chrome and Firefox Rendering

  - by user13503

  When attempting to visit sites running javascript, Google Chrome and Firefox often fail to render them properly. For example, when hitting google.com/codesearch results, I just get a blank page. http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/8527/200910071518.png This rendering problem happens in both browsers on a machine running Windows XP Professional x64. Internet explorer is able to render the page just fine. Also, controls on other pages sometimes fail to respond, for example in Google Docs. Has anyone encountered this issue before in Chrome/Firefox? Do they share a common installation of the V8 javascript engine? I'm baffled by this issue. Here's the source code for the image above that Chrome loads when attempting to retrieve the page: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"><html><head><script>function a(c){this.t={};this.tick=function(d,e,b){var f=b?b:(new Date).getTime();this.t[d]=[f,e]};this.tick("start",null,c)}var g=new a;window.jstiming={Timer:a,load:g};try{window.jstiming.pt=window.external.pageT}catch(h){}; </script><title></title><script language="javascript" src="/codesearch/js/CachedFile/F1A2CB189D0FCB1FF201C42BF6A5447C.cache.js"></script></head><body><iframe src="javascript:''" id="__gwt_historyFrame" style="width:0;height:0;border:0"></iframe><script>if(window.jstiming){window.jstiming.a={};window.jstiming.c=1;function k(a,d,f){var b=a.t[d];if(!b)return undefined;b=a.t[d][0];if(f!=undefined)var h=f;else h=a.t.start[0];return b-h}window.jstiming.report=function(a,d,f){var b="";if(window.jstiming.pt){b+="&srt="+window.jstiming.pt;delete window.jstiming.pt}try{if(window.external&&window.external.tran)b+="&tran="+window.external.tran}catch(h){}if(a.b)b+="&"+a.b;var e=a.t,p=e.start,l=[],i=[];for(var c in e)if(!(c=="start"))if(!(c.indexOf("_")==0)){var j= e[c][1];if(j)e[j]&&i.push(c+"."+k(a,c,e[j][0]));else p&&l.push(c+"."+k(a,c))}delete e.start;if(d)for(var m in d)b+="&"+m+"="+d[m];var n=[f?f:"http://csi.gstatic.com/csi","?v=3","&s="+(window.jstiming.sn?window.jstiming.sn:"codesearch")+"&action=",a.name,i.length?"&it="+i.join(",")+b:b,"&rt=",l.join(",")].join(""),g=new Image,o=window.jstiming.c++;window.jstiming.a[o]=g;g.onload=g.onerror=function(){delete window.jstiming.a[o]};g.src=n;g=null;return n}}; </script></body></html> Thanks, Steve

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• Solaris 11 Launch Blog Carnival Roundup

  - by constant

  Solaris 11 is here! And together with the official launch activities, a lot of Oracle and non-Oracle bloggers contributed helpful and informative blog articles to help your datacenter go to eleven. Here are some notable blog postings, sorted by category for your Solaris 11 blog-reading pleasure: Getting Started/Overview A lot of people speculated that the official launch of Solaris 11 would be on 11/11 (whatever way you want to turn it), but it actually happened two days earlier. Larry Wake himself offers 11 Reasons Why Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Isn't Being Released on 11/11/11. Then, Larry goes on with a summary: Oracle Solaris 11: The First Cloud OS gives you a short and sweet rundown of what the major new features of Solaris 11 are. Jeff Victor has his own list of What's New in Oracle Solaris 11. A popular Solaris 11 meme is to write a blog post about 11 favourite features: Jim Laurent's 11 Reasons to Love Solaris 11, Darren Moffat's 11 Favourite Solaris 11 Features, Mike Gerdt's 11 of My Favourite Things! are just three examples of "11 Favourite Things..." type blog posts, I'm sure many more will follow... More official overview content for Solaris 11 is available from the Oracle Tech Network Solaris 11 Portal. Also, check out Rick Ramsey's blog post Solaris 11 Resources for System Administrators on the OTN Blog and his secret 5 Commands That Make Solaris Administration Easier post from the OTN Garage. (Automatic) Installation and the Image Packaging System (IPS) The brand new Image Packaging System (IPS) and the Automatic Installer (IPS), together with numerous other install/packaging/boot/patching features are among the most significant improvements in Solaris 11. But before installing, you may wonder whether Solaris 11 will support your particular set of hardware devices. Again, the OTN Garage comes to the rescue with Rick Ramsey's post How to Find Out Which Devices Are Supported By Solaris 11. Included is a useful guide to all the first steps to get your Solaris 11 system up and running. Tim Foster had a whole handful of blog posts lined up for the launch, teaching you everything you need to know about IPS but didn't dare to ask: The IPS System Repository, IPS Self-assembly - Part 1: Overlays and Part 2: Multiple Packages Delivering Configuration. Watch out for more IPS posts from Tim! If installing packages or upgrading your system from the net makes you uneasy, then you're not alone: Jim Laurent will tech you how Building a Solaris 11 Repository Without Network Connection will make your life easier. Many of you have already peeked into the future by installing Solaris 11 Express. If you're now wondering whether you can upgrade or whether a fresh install is necessary, then check out Alan Hargreaves's post Upgrading Solaris 11 Express b151a with support to Solaris 11. The trick is in upgrading your pkg(1M) first. Networking One of the first things to do after installing Solaris 11 (or any operating system for that matter), is to set it up for networking. Solaris 11 comes with the brand new "Network Auto-Magic" feature which can figure out everything by itself. For those cases where you want to exercise a little more control, Solaris 11 left a few people scratching their heads. Fortunately, Tschokko wrote up this cool blog post: Solaris 11 manual IPv4 & IPv6 configuration right after the launch ceremony. Thanks, Tschokko! And Milek points out a long awaited networking feature in Solaris 11 called Solaris 11 - hostmodel, which I know for a fact that many customers have looked forward to: How to "bind" a Solaris 11 system to a specific gateway for specific IP address it is using. Steffen Weiberle teaches us how to tune the Solaris 11 networking stack the proper way: ipadm(1M). No more fiddling with ndd(1M)! Check out his tutorial on Solaris 11 Network Tunables. And if you want to get even deeper into the networking stack, there's nothing better than DTrace. Alan Maguire teaches you in: DTracing TCP Congestion Control how to probe deeply into the Solaris 11 TCP/IP stack, the TCP congestion control part in particular. Don't miss his other DTrace and TCP related blog posts! DTrace And there we are: DTrace, the king of all observability tools. Long time DTrace veteran and co-author of The DTrace book*, Brendan Gregg blogged about Solaris 11 DTrace syscall provider changes. BTW, after you install Solaris 11, check out the DTrace toolkit which is installed by default in /usr/dtrace/DTT. It is chock full of handy DTrace scripts, many of which contributed by Brendan himself! Security Another big theme in Solaris 11, and one that is crucial for the success of any operating system in the Cloud is Security. Here are some notable posts in this category: Darren Moffat starts by showing us how to completely get rid of root: Completely Disabling Root Logins on Solaris 11. With no root user, there's one major entry point less to worry about. But that's only the start. In Immutable Zones on Encrypted ZFS, Darren shows us how to double the security of your services: First by locking them into the new Immutable Zones feature, then by encrypting their data using the new ZFS encryption feature. And if you're still missing sudo from your Linux days, Darren again has a solution: Password (PAM) caching for Solaris su - "a la sudo". If you're wondering how much compute power all this encryption will cost you, you're in luck: The Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine will make sure you'll use your Intel's embedded crypto support to its fullest. And if you own a brand new SPARC T4 machine you're even luckier: It comes with its own SPARC T4 OpenSSL Engine. Dan Anderson's posts show how there really is now excuse not to encrypt any more... Developers Solaris 11 has a lot to offer to developers as well. Ali Bahrami has a series of blog posts that cover diverse developer topics: elffile: ELF Specific File Identification Utility, Using Stub Objects and The Stub Proto: Not Just For Stub Objects Anymore to name a few. BTW, if you're a developer and want to shape the future of Solaris 11, then Vijay Tatkar has a hint for you: Oracle (Sun Systems Group) is hiring! Desktop and Graphics Yes, Solaris 11 is a 100% server OS, but it can also offer a decent desktop environment, especially if you are a developer. Alan Coopersmith starts by discussing S11 X11: ye olde window system in today's new operating system, then Calum Benson shows us around What's new on the Solaris 11 Desktop. Even accessibility is a first-class citizen in the Solaris 11 user interface. Peter Korn celebrates: Accessible Oracle Solaris 11 - released! Performance Gone are the days of "Slowaris", when Solaris was among the few OSes that "did the right thing" while others cut corners just to win benchmarks. Today, Solaris continues doing the right thing, and it delivers the right performance at the same time. Need proof? Check out Brian's BestPerf blog with continuous updates from the benchmarking lab, including Recent Benchmarks Using Oracle Solaris 11! Send Me More Solaris 11 Launch Articles! These are just a few of the more interesting blog articles that came out around the Solaris 11 launch, I'm sure there are many more! Feel free to post a comment below if you find a particularly interesting blog post that hasn't been listed so far and share your enthusiasm for Solaris 11! *Affiliate link: Buy cool stuff and support this blog at no extra cost. We both win! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'Solaris 11 Launch Blog Carnival Roundup'; var flattr_dsc = '<strong>Solaris 11 is here!</strong>And together with the official launch activities, a lot of Oracle and non-Oracle bloggers contributed helpful and informative blog articles to help your datacenter <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven">go to eleven</a>.Here are some notable blog postings, sorted by category for your Solaris 11 blog-reading pleasure:'; var flattr_tag = 'blogging,digest,Oracle,Solaris,solaris,solaris 11'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2011/11/solaris-11-launch-blog-carnival-roundup'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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• Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore

  - by sathya

  Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore Sorry for my delayed post on day 3 because I had to travel from Blore to Chennai So I couldnt write for the past two days. On day 3 as usual we had lot of simultaneous tracks on various sessions. This day I choose the Your Data, Our Platform Track. It had sessions on the following 5 topics :   Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam This was one of the superb sessions i have attended. He explained all the concepts in detail with a demo. The important thing in this is there is something called Data-Tier application project which is newly introduced in this VS2010 with which we can manage all our data along with our application inside our VS itself. We can create DB,Tables,Procs,Views etc. here itself and once we deploy it creates a compressed file called .dacpac which stores all the changes in Table Schema,Created procs, etc. on to that single file which reduces our (developer's) effort in preparing the deployment scripts and giving it to the DBA. It also has some policy configurations which can be managed easily by checking some rules like in outlook. For Ex : IF the SQL Server Version > 10 then deploy else dont. This rule specifies that even if we try to deploy on SQL Server DB with version less than 10 It will not do it. And if we deploy some .dacpac to SQL server production db with the option upgrade DB with this dacpac once everything completes successfully it will say success else it rollsback to the prior version. Even if it gets deployed successfully and later @ a point of time you wish to revert it back to the prior version, you can go ahead and delete the existing dacpac version so that it reverts to the older version of the db changes. And for the good questions that were asked in the session T-Shirts were given. SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M This one too was the best session. The speaker Vinod explained everything very much clearly. This was really useful session and you dont believe, as per my knowledge, in the total 3 days in the TechEd except the Keynote, for this session seats were full (House FULL)  People were even standing out to attend this session. Such a great one it was. The speaker did a deep dive in to the Query Plan section and showed which actually causes the problem. Its all about the thing that we need to understand about the execution of SQL server Queries. We think in a way and SQL Server never executes in that way. We need to understand that first. He also told about there might be two plans generated for a single query at a point of time because of parallel processors in the system. The Key is here in every query. There is something called Estimated Row Count and Actual Row Count in the query plan. If the estimated row count by SQL server tallies with the actual row count your performance will be awesome. He said some tweaks to achieve the same. After this as usual we had lunch SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan This was more of a DBA's session. Am really sorry I was totally blank and I was not interested to attend this session and walked out to attend Migrating to the cloud by Harish Ranganathan (My favorite Speaker) but unfortunately that was some other persons session. There the speaker was telling about how to configure the connection strings in such a way that we can connect to the SQL Azure platform from our VS and also showed us how to deploy the same in to Windows Azure. In between there were lot of technical problems like laptop hang, user locked and he was switching between systems, also i came in the half so i wasnt able to listen that fully. In between, Since I got an MCTS certification they gave me T-Shirt with the lines 'Iam Certified. Are you?' and they asked me to wear that. If we wear that we might get spotted and they would give us some goodies  So on the 3rd day I was wearing that T-Shirt. I got spotted by the person Tarun who was coordinating things about the certification, and he was accompanied with a cameraman and they interviewed me about the certification and I was shown live in the Teched and was seen by 60000 live viewers of the TechEd. I was really happy on that. Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M This was one of the best sessions too in the TechEd. This guy is really amazing. In front of us he crashed a DB and showed how to recover the same in 6 different ways for different no of failures. Showed about Different types of error msgs like : 823,824,825 msdb..suspect_pages DBCC CheckDB (different parameters to it) I am really waiting for his session to get uploaded live in the Teched Website. Here is his contact info If you wish to connect to him : Twitter : @vinodk_sql Website : www.ExtremeExperts.com Blog : http://blogs.sqlxml.org/vinodkumar Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Pinal Dave is a King in SQL and he is a SQL MVP and he is the owner of SQLAuthority.com He took the session on Spatial Databases from the start. Showed about the different types of Spatial : Geometric and Geographic Geometric : x and y axis its a planar surface Geographic : Spherical surface with 3600  as the maximum which is used to represent the geographic points on the earth and easy to draw maps of different kinds. He had a lot of obstacles during his session like rain coming inside the hall, mic wires got bursted due to rain, Videos off on the display screens. In spite of that he asked the audience to come in the front rows and managed to take a good session without ppts and finally we got the displays on and he was showing demos on the same what he explained orally. That was really a fun filled informative session. He gave some books for the persons who asked good questions and answered well for his questions and I got one too  (It was a book on Data Mining - Wrox Publishers) And finally after all these things there was Keynote session for close of the TechEd. and we all assembled in a big hall where Mr.Ashok Soota, a man of age around 70  co-founder of Mindtree was called to give some lecture on his successes. He was explaining about his past and what all companies he switched and for what reasons and what are all his successes and what are all his failures and the learnings of him from his past failures. and his success and failures on his partnerships with the other concern. And there were some questions for him like What is your suggestion on young entrepreneur? How did you learn from past failures? What is reiterating your success? What is your suggestion on partnerships? How to choose partnerships? etc. And they said @ 7.30 Pm there would be a party night, but unfortunately i was not able to attend that because I had to catch my train and before that i had to pack things, so I started @ 7 itself. Thats it about the TechED!!! Stay tuned for further Technology updates.

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• Brighton Rocks: UA Europe 2011

  - by ultan o'broin

  User Assistance Europe 2011 was held in Brighton, UK. Having seen Quadrophenia a dozen times, I just had to go along (OK, I wanted to talk about messages in enterprise applications). Sadly, it rained a lot, though that was still eminently more tolerable than being stuck home in Dublin during Bloomsday. So, here are my somewhat selective highlights and observations from the conference, massively skewed towards my own interests, as usual. Enjoyed Leah Guren's (Cow TC) great start ‘keynote’ on the Cultural Dimensions of Software Help Usage. Starting out by revisiting Hofstede's and Hall's work on culture (how many times I have done this for Multilingual magazine?) and then Neilsen’s findings on age as an indicator of performance, Leah showed how it is the expertise of the user that user assistance (UA) needs to be designed for (especially for high-end users), with some considerations made for age, while the gender and culture of users are not major factors. Help also needs to be contextual and concise, embedded close to the action. That users are saying things like “If I want help on Office, I go to Google ” isn't all that profound at this stage, but it is always worth reiterating how search can be optimized to return better results for users. Interestingly, regardless of user education level, the issue of information quality--hinging on the lynchpin of terminology reflecting that of the user--is critical. Major takeaway for me there. Matthew Ellison’s sessions on embedded help and demos were also impressive. Embedded help that is concise and contextual is definitely a powerful UX enabler, and I’m pleased to say that in Oracle Fusion Applications we have embraced the concept fully. Matthew also mentioned in his session about successful software demos that the principle of modality with demos is a must. Look no further than Oracle User Productivity Kit demos See It!, Try It!, Know It, and Do It! modes, for example. I also found some key takeaways in the presentation by Marie-Louise Flacke on notes and warnings. Here, legal considerations seemed to take precedence over providing any real information to users. I was delighted when Marie-Louise called out the Oracle JDeveloper documentation as an exemplar of how to use notes and instructions instead of trying to scare the bejaysus out of people and not providing them with any real information they’d find useful instead. My own session on designing messages for enterprise applications was well attended. Knowing your user profiles (remember user expertise is the king maker for UA so write for each audience involved), how users really work, the required application business and UI rules, what your application technology supports, and how messages integrate with the enterprise help desk and support policies and you will go much further than relying solely on the guideline of "writing messages in plain language". And, remember the value in warnings and confirmation messages too, and how you can use them smartly. I hope y’all got something from my presentation and from my answers to questions afterwards. Ellis Pratt stole the show with his presentation on applying game theory to software UA, using plenty of colorful, relevant examples (check out the Atlassian and DropBox approaches, for example), and striking just the right balance between theory and practice. Completely agree that the approach to take here is not to make UA itself a game, but to invoke UA as part of a bigger game dynamic (time-to-task completion, personal and communal goals, personal achievement and status, and so on). Sure there are gotchas and limitations to gamification, and we need to do more research. However, we'll hear a lot more about this subject in coming years, particularly in the enterprise space. I hope. I also heard good things about the different sessions about DITA usage (including one by Sonja Fuga that clearly opens the door for major innovation in the community content space using WordPress), the progressive disclosure of information (Cerys Willoughby), an overview of controlled language (or "information quality", as I like to position it) solutions and rationale by Dave Gash, and others. I also spent time chatting with Mike Hamilton of MadCap Software, who showed me a cool demo of their Flare product, and the Lingo translation solution. I liked the idea of their licensing model for workers-on-the-go; that’s smart UX-awareness in itself. Also chatted with Julian Murfitt of Mekon about uptake of DITA in the enterprise space. In all, it's worth attending UA Europe. I was surprised, however, not to see conference topics about mobile UA, community conversation and content, and search in its own right. These are unstoppable forces now, and the latter is pretty central to providing assistance now to all but the most irredentist of hard-copy fetishists or advanced technical or functional users working away on the back end of applications and systems. Only saw one iPad too (says the guy who carries three laptops). Tweeting during the conference was pretty much nonexistent during the event, so no community energy there. Perhaps all this can be addressed next year. I would love to see the next UA Europe event come to Dublin (despite Bloomsday, it's not a bad place place, really) now that hotels are so cheap and all. So, what is my overall impression of the state of user assistance in Europe? Clearly, there are still many people in the industry who feel there is something broken with the traditional forms of user assistance (particularly printed doc) and something needs to be done about it. I would suggest they move on and try and embrace change, instead. Many others see new possibilities, offered by UX and technology, as well as the reality of online user behavior in an increasingly connected world and that is encouraging. Such thought leaders need to be listened to. As Ellis Pratt says in his great book, Trends in Technical Communication - Rethinking Help: “To stay relevant means taking a new perspective on the role (of technical writer), and delivering “products” over and above the traditional manual and online Help file... there are a number of new trends in this field - some complementary, some conflicting. Whatever trends emerge as the norm, it’s likely the status quo will change.” It already has, IMO. I hear similar debates in the professional translation world about the onset of translation crowd sourcing (the Facebook model) and machine translation (trust me, that battle is over). Neither of these initiatives has put anyone out of a job and probably won't, though the nature of the work might change. If anything, such innovations have increased the overall need for professional translators as user expectations rise, new audiences emerge, and organizations need to collate and curate user-generated content, combining it with their own. Perhaps user assistance professionals can learn from other professions and grow accordingly.

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• Christmas in the Clouds

  - by andrewbrust

  I have been spending the last 2 weeks immersing myself in a number of Windows Azure and SQL Azure technologies.  And in setting up a new business (I’ll speak more about that in the future), I have also become a customer of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services).  In short, it has been a fortnight of Microsoft cloud computing. On the Azure side, I’ve looked, of course, at Web Roles and Worker Roles.  But I’ve also looked at Azure Storage’s REST API (including coding to it directly), I’ve looked at Azure Drive and the new VM Role; I’ve looked quite a bit at SQL Azure (including the project “Houston” Silverlight UI) and I’ve looked at SQL Azure labs’ OData service too. I’ve also looked at DataMarket and its integration with both PowerPivot and native Excel.  Then there’s AppFabric Caching, SQL Azure Reporting (what I could learn of it) and the Visual Studio tooling for Azure, including the storage of certificate-based credentials.  And to round it out with some user stuff, on the BPOS side, I’ve been working with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and LiveMeeting. I have to say I like a lot of what I’ve been seeing.  Azure’s not perfect, and BPOS certainly isn’t either.  But there’s good stuff in all these products, and there’s a lot of value. Azure Goes Deep Most people know that Web and Worker roles put the platform in charge of spinning virtual machines up and down, and keeping them up to date. But you can go way beyond that now.  The still-in-beta VM Role gives you the power to craft the machine (much as does Amazon’s EC2), though it takes away the platform’s self-managing attributes.  It still spins instances up and down, making drive storage non-durable, but Azure Drive gives you the ability to store VHD files as blobs and mount them as virtual hard drives that are readable and writeable.  Whether with Azure Storage or SQL Azure, Azure does data.  And OData is everywhere.  Azure Table Storage supports an OData Interface.  So does SQL Azure and so does DataMarket (the former project “Dallas”).  That means that Azure data repositories aren’t just straightforward to provision and configure…they’re also easy to program against, from just about any programming environment, in a RESTful manner.  And for more .NET-centric implementations, Azure AppFabric caching takes the technology formerly known as “Velocity” and throws it up into the cloud, speeding data access even more. Snapping in Place Once you get the hang of it, this stuff just starts to work in a way that becomes natural to understand.  I wasn’t expecting that, and I was really happy to discover it. In retrospect, I am not surprised, because I think the various Azure teams are the center of gravity for Redmond’s innovation right now.  The products belie this and so do my observations of the product teams’ motivation and high morale.  It is really good to see this; Microsoft needs to lead somewhere, and they need to be seen as the underdog while doing so.  With Azure, both requirements are in place.   BPOS: Bad Acronym, Easy Setup BPOS is about products you already know; Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting and Office Communications Server.  As such, it’s hard not to be underwhelmed by BPOS.  Until you realize how easy it makes it to get all that stuff set up.  I would say that from sign-up to productive use took me about 45 minutes…and that included the time necessary to wrestle with my DNS provider, set up Outlook and my SmartPhone up to talk to the Exchange account, create my SharePoint site collection, and configure the Outlook Conferencing add-in to talk to the provisioned Live Meeting account. Never before did I think setting up my own Exchange mail could come anywhere close to the simplicity of setting up an SMTP/POP account, and yet BPOS actually made it faster.   What I want from my Azure Christmas Next Year Not everything about Microsoft’s cloud is good.  I close this post with a list of things I’d like to see addressed: BPOS offerings are still based on the 2007 Wave of Microsoft server technologies.  We need to get to 2010, and fast.  Arguably, the 2010 products should have been released to the off-premises channel before the on-premise sone.  Office 365 can’t come fast enough. Azure’s Internet tooling and domain naming, is scattered and confusing.  Deployed ASP.NET applications go to cloudapp.net; SQL Azure and Azure storage work off windows.net.  The Azure portal and Project Houston are at azure.com.  Then there’s appfabriclabs.com and sqlazurelabs.com.  There is a new Silverlight portal that replaces most, but not all of the HTML ones.  And Project Houston is Silvelright-based too, though separate from the Silverlight portal tooling. Microsoft is the king off tooling.  They should not make me keep an entire OneNote notebook full of portal links, account names, access keys, assemblies and namespaces and do so much CTRL-C/CTRL-V work.  I’d like to see more project templates, have them automatically reference the appropriate assemblies, generate the right using/Imports statements and prime my config files with the right markup.  Then I want a UI that lets me log in with my Live ID and pick the appropriate project, database, namespace and key string to get set up fast. Beta programs, if they’re open, should onboard me quickly.  I know the process is difficult and everyone’s going as fast as they can.  But I don’t know why it’s so difficult or why it takes so long.  Getting developers up to speed on new features quickly helps popularize the platform.  Make this a priority. Make Azure accessible from the simplicity platforms, i.e. ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) and LightSwitch.  Support .NET 4 now.  Make WebMatrix, IIS Express and SQL Compact work with the Azure development fabric. Have HTML helpers make Azure programming easier.  Have LightSwitch work with SQL Azure and not require SQL Express.  LightSwitch has some promising Azure integration now.  But we need more.  WebMatrix has none and that’s just silly, now that the Extra Small Instance is being introduced. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is great.  But I want Microsoft to make it even better and I want them to evangelize it much more aggressively.  There’s a lot of good material on Azure development out there, but it’s scattered in the same way that the platform is.   The Training Kit ties a lot of disparate stuff together nicely.  Make it known. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot All in all, diving deep into Azure was a good way to end the year.  Diving deeper into Azure should a great way to spend next year, not just for me, but for Microsoft too.

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