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• can't access SATA card config screen on boot, nor access the disks

  - by Ronald

  We've just upgraded our file server using an ASUS P6T WS Pro board, running FreeBSD-RELEASE 8.2 and using zfs to manage 12 WD20EARS disks. Since our 3ware card has been giving us trouble we started using the six on-board SATA connectors and got a SuperMicro USAS2-L8i to provide eight more ports. Mechanically, the card is an awkward fit but electrically it all seems ok. Upon boot, the LSI controller shows up and states that pressing ctrl-c will bring up the LSI Config Utility. When doing that, the message changes to state that the utility will be started after initialization, however that never happens. There does seem to be an error message that's only displayed too briefly to read and seems to be about PCI and "not enough space". (That message is pushed off by a hardware summary and I've found no way to scroll back at this point.) The disks do not show up in any recognizable ways after booting, either. I found a hint in another discussion to check the address mapping on either the card or the motherboard BIOS, but have found no way to do that. So what I tried on a hunch is to disable everything that's on-board, including network adapters, Firewire controller and SATA. In fact, after doing that, I can successfully launch the LSI Config Utility. As far as I can tell, all looks well in there, and when booting in that configuration it also displays a list of the disks connected to it, which looks just fine as well. Only problem now is that I can't boot that way, because I need the on-board SATA controller and network adapters. As soon as I re-enable any of them I'm back to square one. That discussion I mentioned about mapping addresses said to try D000, then D7FF, then DFFF, in order. The LSI Config Utility shows the card address as D000 but offers no way of changing it. Any tips or insights would be appreciated.

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• Windows 8: Clean Install Fails BEFORE country Screen

  - by Mark

  G'day, I've been trying to (clean) install Windows 8 on my PC now for over two weeks now, and it's really getting old. You can see here that I've outlined my issue to the Windows Technical Community, which has resulted in... absolutely no help at all. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-windows_install/windows-8-clean-install-fails-before-country/64229d0a-0220-45a9-bdc6-c41062df8a75 Tl;dr? Yeah, me too. Basically, I've shrunk the HDD, it's working (I'm on that PC on XP). I've put both the x64 and the x86 DVD's, AND an another HDD with W8 installed on it from my test machine, and they ALL Fail to load. (I get the slanty windows logo, and after about 10 seconds BOOM. Sad face error screen.) I really don't want to have to remove the video card, or the unevenly/not partnered DIMM in the 2nd Memory channel - because the case is .. stupid, and in an awkward spot, but I'm running out of ideas! PS. I tried turning on ACHI tonight. All that resulted in was XP wigging out about new drivers & explorer.exe crashing. Fun times! :(

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• What is the fastest and best way to convert an rmvb video to mp4/mkv without losing any quality?

  - by Eric Leung

  the file will be played in a popbox3d. my old method was to convert the video using vidcoder (an offshoot of handbrake) using normal settings, but i've recently confirmed that this significantly reduces video and audio quality. i bumped up the conversion quality to 'high profile' and this produced a higher quality video but raised the conversion time to about twice the video length (95 minutes to convert a 45 minute video) on a core2duo laptop. this is less than ideal when a large number of videos need to be converted. i have tried a direct remuxing using mkv toolnix but this produced a video that refused to display video on the popbox3d, which is consistent with the reported: [quote=other old thread] it is possible to put RealMedia A/V in MKV container (used MKVtoolnix) - however, it is awkward to play later. RV40 is only suspected to be based on H.264 - simplify, is not consistent with MPEG-4 AVC specification. [/quote] i have read that ... [quote=from old thread] Under normal circumstances, [ffmpeg] should convert the video to .video.mp4 and the audio to (.wav then to) .audio.mp4, then mux the video and audio into a new .mp4 file and delete the temporary video-only and audio-only files.[/quote] and i am currently attempting to discover how this is done. help? PS: i download a lot of series from asia and for some strange reason, rmvb is a really popular format over there. sometimes, it's the only format that's available. unfortunately, it's a format that is incompatible with the popbox3d, so i have to convert the files before i can watch them on my tv.

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• Improve speed of "start menu" in Linux Mint 10 - Ubuntu 10.10 derivative

  - by Gabriel L. Oliveira

  I have a global menu (including application, administration and system tabs) that is taking too much time (for me) to load (about 2.5 seconds). Of course, this time is taken only during first start. After it have loaded, next times are better ( less than 0.2 miliseconds) The menu was taking more time before (about 5 seconds), and I found that was because of the 'Other' part of the menu, that included many applications installed with Wine, so I removed all of them (I didn't need them at all). I have a "normal" knowledge of programming, and I think that the process of starting the menu for the first time has some kind of "cache function", that tries to find which apps are present that need to be placed under menu to be shown to user. But didn't found this function so that I could analyze in details what he is doing (if searching for files under "~/.local/share/applications" or anything else). Also, I found that hitting "Alt-F2" also fires this "cache function", because after waiting it to load, the process of opening the menu took less than 0.2 miliseconds. So, could anyone help me in order to reduce this time? I found on internet that some user could reduce the time by resizing the icons of applications. But found here that most of my icons are already at 25x25 size. Any other idead? Maybe a multiprocess to load it, or include it under startup... don't know. Ps: Sorry if this is an awkward question, but I just do not like waiting for things to happen, and think that this process should be smoother than it's now. Also, thanks in advance!

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• Blending Background for Polar Distortion in GIMP

  - by Chris S

  I followed a tutorial to perform a polar distortion on a panoramic image. The instructions are geared for Photoshop but seem to mostly apply to GIMP as well. The only thing I couldn't really figure out was how they were able to automatically fill in the area around the circle by "extending" the border of the circle. e.g. In GIMP, performing the polar distortion leaves a black white canvas around the circle, not the attractive blended background shown in the tutorial. Is there an easy way to implement this? The only way I found was to reserve half of the "square" as blank canvas and then manually copy the image's top row of pixels over this empty portion. Then, after the polar distortion, I crop out the extra area. Although this achieves the effect, it seems a bit awkward. How do you stretch selections? Ideally, I just want to select the top row and stretch it vertically until it fills in half of the canvas. Instead I had to manaully copy, paste, translate, etc.

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• RRAS Problem routing to central site from RRAS server only?

  - by TomTom

  Given is an office connected to headquarters using a RRAS bridge (2 virtual machines using RRAS to route between the two networks). Naming: The office is A, the RRAS on A is a-lnk. THe headquartters is B, b-lnk the RRAS machine there. The VPN works perfectly - machines can ping and work between the sites. Domain controllers on both ends replicating, DFS working, remote desktop working. All in all... everything is fine. EXCEPT: a-lnk itself can not reach any machine in B. This would normally not be troublesome (noone ever does anything on a-lnk), but there are two exceptions: * a-lnk is supposed to get it's license from a KMS in B, so not being able to reach B means it is not prolonging. * a-lnk is supposed to pull updates from a WSUS in B - and not being able to reach B means - no updates. Given that thigns work (and security is a minor issue - A-lnk is not reachable from the internet as it is behing a NAT hardware anyway) this got not handled for months. I just wan to get this item ticked off now. Anyone an idea what this is? It definitely is not a "dns does not work" or "routing in general is bad" item, as any computer in A can connect to any computer in B, and the other way arount - only the RRAS computer itself seems to do something really awkward. Platform for both: 2008 R2 standard.

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• Dedicated virtual setup is slow with WordPress

  - by kovshenin

  Hey. I'm running a Fedora linux server on the Amazon EC2 platform. I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with my configuration as it seems to be very slow. SSH sometimes takes over 30 seconds to connect, a WordPress generated web page could take 5 seconds to load, and it could take 20 seconds to load, which is pretty awkward. MySQL queries are all executed in less than a second, so I don't think that's the case. I'm not really sure where the issue lies, but a simple page written in PHP loads instantly. A fresh WordPress installation starts lagging. Same works perfect on grid hosting at MediaTemple for instance, so I'm pretty sure I missed something. If you could please direct me to the right tools and articles which would help me out. Thanks so much! Fedora Core 8, php 5.2.6, MySQL 5.0.45, OpenSSH 4.7p1, OpenSSL 0.9.8b. PHP is configured as a module to Apache 2.2.9, all websites based on virtual hosts. I have some on-going php scripts running from time to time in the background via cron. Thanks.

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• Search behavior of Windows 7 start menu

  - by Kevin Ivarsen

  I'm coming to Windows 7 from XP, and there are aspects of the start menu search that I like. However, there are some behaviors that seem either inconsistent or surprising to me. For example: If I type "Pa" into the search bar, Paint is the first result (under the "Programs" heading), and it is selected for me. I can just hit Enter to start the program If I have a standalone exe "testing" on my desktop, and I type "test", the program comes up as the first item (under the "Files" heading), but it is not selected for me. I have to hit down-down-down-enter to open it from the keyboard. The same appears to be true for shortcuts and folders. What classifies something as a "Program" verses a "File"? Is there any way to configure the start menu so that the first search result is always selected? As a heavy keyboard user, it seems insane for the behavior to be inconsistent, and to require so many keypresses to select the top result. Also, are there resources that document the details, limitations, and tricks of the start menu search? (For example, a "Proc Exp" search will match "Process Explorer", but not "ProcessExplorer") EDIT: I've found that instead of hitting down-down-down to select the first item (when no Programs are in the list), you can just hit tab. This helps a bit, but the inconsistent behavior still makes this search feature more awkward and frustrating than necessary.

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• Things to check for an internet-facing email server.

  - by Shtééf

  I'm faced with the task of setting up a public-internet-facing email server, that will be relaying mail for all of our other servers in the network. While the software in itself is set up in few keystrokes, what little experience I have with managing an email server has thought me that there are tons of awkward filtering techniques employed by other email systems. Systems that my own server will inevitably interact with a some point. Hence, my questions: What things should be kept in mind and double checked when setting up an email server? What resources are available for checking if my email server is set-up correctly? I'm specifically NOT looking for instructions for any given mail server, such as Exchange or Postfix. But it's okay to say: “you should have X and Y in your set-up, because when talking to server software Z, it typically tries to weed out open relays by checking for these.” Some things I've discovered myself: Make sure forward and reverse DNS are set up. Mail servers tend to do a reverse lookup for the peer IP-address when receiving. Matching a reverse look up with a follow-up forward lookup is probably employed to weed out open relays run through malware on home networks. Make sure the user in the From-address exists. The From-address is easily spoofed. A receiving mail server may try to contact the mail server in the From-domain, and see if the From-user actually exists.

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• Is there such a thing as a file hosted container which deduplicates data held within?

  - by Mallow

  Background I have backups of a website which stores all of it's data into a single file. This file is several gigs large and I have many different backups of this file. Most of the data within is mostly the same plus whatever was added or changed to it. I want to keep all the concurrent backups I've made through the years in case I find a horrible surprise of data corruption along the line. However storing a 10gig file every month gets expensive. Seeking Solution I've often thought about different ways of alleviating this problem. One thought that comes up very often combines the idea of a duplicating file system which doesn't require it's own partitioned volume on a hard drive. Something like what truecrypt does, what it calls, "file hosted containers" which when using the truecrypt program allows you to mount and dismount that volume as a regular hard drive. Question Is there a virtual hard drive mounter which uses file-based container which uses data deduplicaiton file system? (This question is a little awkward to put into words, if you have a better idea on how to ask this question please feel free to help out.)

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• FluentPath: a fluent wrapper around System.IO

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  .NET is now more than eight years old, and some of its APIs got old with more grace than others. System.IO in particular has always been a little awkward. It’s mostly static method calls (Path.*, Directory.*, etc.) and some stateful classes (DirectoryInfo, FileInfo). In these APIs, paths are plain strings. Since .NET v1, lots of good things happened to C#: lambda expressions, extension methods, optional parameters to name just a few. Outside of .NET, other interesting things happened as well. For example, you might have heard about this JavaScript library that had some success introducing a fluent API to handle the hierarchical structure of the HTML DOM. You know? jQuery. Knowing all that, every time I need to use the stuff in System.IO, I cringe. So I thought I’d just build a more modern wrapper around it. I used a fluent API based on an essentially immutable Path type and an enumeration of such path objects. To achieve the fluent style, a healthy dose of lambda expressions is being used to act on the objects. Without further ado, here’s an example of what you can do with the new API. In that example, I’m using a Media Center extension that wants all video files to be in their own folder. For that, I need a small tool that creates directories for each video file and moves the files in there. Here’s the code for it: Path.Get(args[0]) .Select(p => p.Extension == ".avi" || p.Extension == ".m4v" || p.Extension == ".wmv" || p.Extension == ".mp4" || p.Extension == ".dvr-ms" || p.Extension == ".mpg" || p.Extension == ".mkv") .CreateDirectory(p => p.Parent .Combine(p.FileNameWithoutExtension)) .Previous() .Move(p => p.Parent .Combine(p.FileNameWithoutExtension) .Combine(p.FileName)); This code creates a Path object pointing at the path pointed to by the first command line argument of my executable. It then selects all video files. After that, it creates directories that have the same names as each of the files, but without their extension. The result of that operation is the set of created directories. We can now get back to the previous set using the Previous method, and finally we can move each of the files in the set to the corresponding freshly created directory, whose name is the combination of the parent directory and the filename without extension. The new fluent path library covers a fair part of what’s in System.IO in a single, convenient API. Check it out, I hope you’ll enjoy it. Suggestions are more than welcome. For example, should I make this its own project on CodePlex or is this informal style just OK? Anything missing that you’d like to see? Is there a specific example you’d like to see expressed with the new API? Bugs? The code can be downloaded from here (this is under a new BSD license): http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/bleroy/Samples/FluentPath.zip

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• Make Your Mouse Pointers Left-hand Friendly

  - by Matthew Guay

  It’s a right-centric world, with everything from pencils to computer mice expecting you to be right-handed.  Here’s how you can train your mouse and cursors in Windows 7 and Vista to respect your left-handedness. Using your Left Hand the Right Way It’s easy to switch your mouse to left-handed mode.  Enter “mouse” in your Start menu search, and select the first entry. Check the “Switch primary and secondary buttons” box to make your mouse more left-hand friendly.  Now your primary select button is your right button, and the secondary button (commonly referred to as right-click) is the left button. But, it can still be awkward to select items on screen with your left hand using the default cursors.  MSDN has a free set of cursors designed for left-handed users, that can fix this problem for you.  These cursors are exactly like the default Aero cursors in Windows 7 and Vista, except they are reversed to make them better for left-handed use. The cursors are available in 3 sizes: normal, large, and extra large.  The normal ones are the same size as the default ones in Windows 7; feel free to choose the other sizes if you prefer them.  Click each link to download all 6 cursors for your size (link below). Click “I Agree” after selecting the cursors to accept the license agreement and download them. Once you have all 6 cursors downloaded, select the Pointers tab in the Mouse Properties dialog.  Click the cursor to change, and then click Browse to select the new cursor. Browse to the folder you downloaded your new cursors to, select the correct cursor, and click Open. Do this for each of the 6 cursors to be changed.  Strangely, the Busy cursor (the spinning blue orb) is a static cursor, so you may not wish to change it.  All the other ones look and act like their standard counterparts. Here’s the cursors to be changed, and their equivalents in the default cursors: Normal Select: aero_arrow_left.cur Help Select: aero_helpsel_left.cur Working in Background: aero_working_left.ani Busy: aero_busy_left.cur Handwriting: aero_pen_left.cur Link Select: aero_link_left.cur After changing all the cursors, click Save As… to save this mouse scheme so you can easily select it in the future.  Finally click Ok to close the Mouse Properties dialog and accept the changes. Now your pointers will be easier to use left-handed! Conclusion Whether you’re right-handed or left-handed, you can enjoy the Aero cursors in Windows 7 or Vista in the way that works best for you.  Unfortunately, many mice are still designed for right-handed people, but this trick will help you make the best out of your mouse. We included all of the 6 cursors for you in a zip file you can download Here. This will make it easier for you to get them all together without having to download them individually. Link Download Left-Handed Mouse Pointers from MSDN Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Prevent Themes From Modifying Icons and Cursors in Windows 7How To Personalize Windows 7 StarterShow Two Time Zones in Your Outlook 2007 CalendarMake Mouse Navigation Faster in WindowsWhy Doesn’t Tab Work for Drop-down Controls in Firefox on OS X? 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 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow Combine MP3 Files Easily QuicklyCode Provides Cheatsheets & Other Programming Stuff

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• Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt2)

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  Planning. I could stop there and let that be the entirety post #2 in this series.  Planning is the single most important element in building a cluster and the Laptop Demo Cluster is no exception.  One of the more awkward parts of actually creating a cluster is coordinating information between Windows Clustering and SQL Clustering.  The dialog boxes show up hours apart, but still have to have matching and consistent information. Excel seems to be a good tool for tracking these settings.  My workbook has four pages: Systems, Storage, Network, and Service Accounts.  The systems page looks like this:   Name Role Software Location East Physical Cluster Node 1 Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Laptop VM West Physical Cluster Node 2 Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Laptop VM North Physical Cluster Node 3 (Future Reserved) Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Laptop VM MicroCluster Cluster Management Interface N/A Laptop VM SQL01 High-Performance High-Security Instance SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64 SP1 Laptop VM SQL02 High-Performance Standard-Security Instance SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64 SP1 Laptop VM SQL03 Standard-Performance High-Security Instance SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64 SP1 Laptop VM Note that everything that has a computer name is listed here, whether physical or virtual. Storage looks like this: Storage Name Instance Purpose Volume Path Size (GB) LUN ID Speed Quorum MicroCluster Cluster Quorum Quorum Q: 2     SQL01Anchor SQL01 Instance Anchor SQL01Anchor L: 2     SQL02Anchor SQL02 Instance Anchor SQL02Anchor M: 2     SQL01Data1 SQL01 SQL Data SQL01Data1 L:\MountPoints\SQL01Data1 2     SQL02Data1 SQL02 SQL Data SQL02Data1 M:\MountPoints\SQL02Data1       Starting at the left is the name used in the storage array.  It is important to rename resources at each level, whether it is Storage, LUN, Volume, or disk folder.  Otherwise, troubleshooting things gets complex and difficult.  You want to be able to glance at a resource at any level and see where it comes from and what it is connected to. Networking is the same way:   System Network VLAN  IP Subnet Mask Gateway DNS1 DNS2 East Public Cluster1 10.97.230.x(DHCP) 255.255.255.0 10.97.230.1 10.97.230.1 10.97.230.1 East Heartbeat Cluster2   255.255.255.0       West Public Cluster1 10.97.230.x(DHCP) 255.255.255.0 10.97.230.1 10.97.230.1 10.97.230.1 West Heartbeat Cluster2   255.255.255.0       North Public Cluster1 10.97.230.x(DHCP) 255.255.255.0 10.97.230.1 10.97.230.1 10.97.230.1 North Heartbeat Cluster2   255.255.255.0       SQL01 Public Cluster1 10.97.230.x(DHCP) 255.255.255.0       SQL02 Public Cluster1 10.97.230.x(DHCP) 255.255.255.0       One hallmark of a poorly planned and implemented cluster is a bunch of "Local Network Connection #n" entries in the network settings page.  That lets me know that somebody didn't care about the long-term supportabaility of the cluster.  This can be critically important with Hyper-V Clusters and their high NIC counts.  Final page:   Instance Service Name Account Password Domain OU SQL01 SQL Server SVCSQL01 Baseline22 MicroAD Service Accounts SQL01 SQL Agent SVCSQL01 Baseline22 MicroAD Service Accounts SQL02 SQL Server SVC_SQL02 Baseline22 MicroAD Service Accounts SQL02 SQL Agent SVC_SQL02 Baseline22 MicroAD Service Accounts SQL03 (Future) SQL Server SVC_SQL03 Baseline22 MicroAD Service Accounts SQL03 (Future) SQL Agent SVC_SQL03 Baseline22 MicroAD Service Accounts             Installation Account           administrator            Yes.  I write down the account information.  I secure the file via NTFS, but I don't want to fumble around looking for passwords when it comes time to rebuild a node. Always fill out the workbook COMPLETELY before installing anything.  The whole point is to have everything you need at your fingertips before you begin.  The install experience is so much better and more productive with this information in place.

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• HP and Microsoft: That&rsquo;s What Friends Are For ?

  - by andrewbrust

  Today, HP pre-announced the second coming out for its recently acquired Palm webOS mobile operating system.  I happen to think webOS is quite good, and when the Palm Pre first came out, I thought it a worthwhile phone.  I was worried though that the platform would never attract the developer mindshare it needed to be competitive, and that turned out to be the case.  But then HP acquired Palm and announced it would be revamping the webOS offering, not only on phones, but also on tablets.  It later announced that it would also use webOS as an embedded solution on HP printers. The timing of this came shortly after HP had announced it would be producing a “Slate” product running Windows 7. After the Palm deal, HP became vague about whether the Windows-powered slate would actually come out.  They did, in fact, bring the Slate 500 to market, but by some accounts, they only built 5000 units. Another recent awkward moment between HP and Microsoft: HP withdrew itself from the Windows Home Server ecosystem.  That one hurt, as they were the dominant OEM there.  But Microsoft’s decision to kill Drive Extender had driven away many parties, not just HP. On Wednesday, HP came out with their TouchPad, and new phone models.  Not a nice thing for Windows Phone 7, but other OEMs are taking a wait and see attitude there too, I suppose.  There was one more zinger though, and it was bigger: HP announced they’d be porting webOS to PCs. No Windows Phone 7? OK. No Windows Home Server?  Whatcha gonna do?  But no Windows 7 either?  From HP?  What comes after that, no ink and toner? Some people think Microsoft’s been around too long to be relevant.  But HP started out making oscilloscopes!  The notion that HP is too cool for Windows school is a it far-fetched.  This is the company that bought EDS. This is the company that bought Compaq.  And Compaq was the company that bought Digital Equipment Corporation.  Somehow, I don’t think the VT 220 outclasses Windows PCs. What could possibly be going on?  My sense is that HP wants to put webOS on PCs that also have Windows, and that people will buy because they have Windows.  And for every one of those sold, HP gets to count, technically speaking, another webOS unit in the install base.  webOS is really nice, as I said.  But being good isn’t good enough when you are trying to get market share.  Number of units shipped matters.  The question is whether counting PCs with webOS installed, but dormant, is helpful to HP’s cause.  Seems like a funny way to account for market share, and a strange way to treat a big partner in Redmond.

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• Some Original Expressions

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk newsletterIn a guest editorial for the Simple-Talk Newsletter, Phil Factor wonders if we are still likely to find some more novel and unexpected ways of using the newer features of Transact SQL: or maybe in some features that have always been there! There can be a great deal of fun to be had in trying out recent features of SQL Expressions to see if  they provide new functionality.  It is surprisingly rare to find things that couldn’t be done before, but in a different   and more cumbersome way; but it is great to experiment or to read of someone else making that discovery.  One such recent feature is the ‘table value constructor’, or ‘VALUES constructor’, that managed to get into SQL Server 2008 from Standard SQL.  This allows you to create derived tables of up to 1000 rows neatly within select statements that consist of  lists of row values.  E.g. SELECT Old_Welsh, number FROM (VALUES ('Un',1),('Dou',2),('Tri',3),('Petuar',4),('Pimp',5),('Chwech',6),('Seith',7),('Wyth',8),('Nau',9),('Dec',10)) AS WelshWordsToTen (Old_Welsh, number) These values can be expressions that return single values, including, surprisingly, subqueries. You can use this device to create views, or in the USING clause of a MERGE statement. Joe Celko covered  this here and here.  It can become extraordinarily handy to use once one gets into the way of thinking in these terms, and I’ve rewritten a lot of routines to use the constructor, but the old way of using UNION can be used the same way, but is a little slower and more long-winded. The use of scalar SQL subqueries as an expression in a VALUES constructor, and then applied to a MERGE, has got me thinking. It looks very clever, but what use could one put it to? I haven’t seen anything yet that couldn’t be done almost as  simply in SQL Server 2000, but I’m hopeful that someone will come up with a way of solving a tricky problem, just in the same way that a freak of the XML syntax forever made the in-line  production of delimited lists from an expression easy, or that a weird XML pirouette could do an elegant  pivot-table rotation. It is in this sort of experimentation where the community of users can make a real contribution. The dissemination of techniques such as the Number, or Tally table, or the unconventional ways that the UPDATE statement can be used, has been rapid due to articles and blogs. However, there is plenty to be done to explore some of the less obvious features of Transact SQL. Even some of the features introduced into SQL Server 2000 are hardly well-known. Certain operations on data are still awkward to perform in Transact SQL, but we mustn’t, I think, be too ready to state that certain things can only be done in the application layer, or using a CLR routine. With the vast array of features in the product, and with the tools that surround it, I feel that there is generally a way of getting tricky things done. Or should we just stick to our lasts and push anything difficult out into procedural code? I’d love to know your views.

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• Surviving MATLAB and R as a Hardcore Programmer

  - by dsimcha

  I love programming in languages that seem geared towards hardcore programmers. (My favorites are Python and D.) MATLAB is geared towards engineers and R is geared towards statisticians, and it seems like these languages were designed by people who aren't hardcore programmers and don't think like hardcore programmers. I always find them somewhat awkward to use, and to some extent I can't put my finger on why. Here are some issues I have managed to identify: (Both): The extreme emphasis on vectors and matrices to the extent that there are no true primitives. (Both): The difficulty of basic string manipulation. (Both): Lack of or awkwardness in support for basic data structures like hash tables and "real", i.e. type-parametric and nestable, arrays. (Both): They're really, really slow even by interpreted language standards, unless you bend over backwards to vectorize your code. (Both): They seem to not be designed to interact with the outside world. For example, both are fairly bulky programs that take a while to launch and seem to not be designed to make simple text filter programs easy to write. Furthermore, the lack of good string processing makes file I/O in anything but very standard forms near impossible. (Both): Object orientation seems to have a very bolted-on feel. Yes, you can do it, but it doesn't feel much more idiomatic than OO in C. (Both): No obvious, simple way to get a reference type. No pointers or class references. For example, I have no idea how you roll your own linked list in either of these languages. (MATLAB): You can't put multiple top level functions in a single file, encouraging very long functions and cut-and-paste coding. (MATLAB): Integers apparently don't exist as a first class type. (R): The basic builtin data structures seem way too high level and poorly documented, and never seem to do quite what I expect given my experience with similar but lower level data structures. (R): The documentation is spread all over the place and virtually impossible to browse or search. Even D, which is often knocked for bad documentation and is still fairly alpha-ish, is substantially better as far as I can tell. (R): At least as far as I'm aware, there's no good IDE for it. Again, even D, a fairly alpha-ish language with a small community, does better. In general, I also feel like MATLAB and R could be easily replaced by plain old libraries in more general-purpose langauges, if sufficiently comprehensive libraries existed. This is especially true in newer general purpose languages that include lots of features for library writers. Why do R and MATLAB seem so weird to me? Are there any other major issues that you've noticed that may make these languages come off as strange to hardcore programmers? When their use is necessary, what are some good survival tips? Edit: I'm seeing one issue from some of the answers I've gotten. I have a strong personal preference, when I analyze data, to have one script that incorporates the whole pipeline. This implies that a general purpose language needs to be used. I hate having to write a script to "clean up" the data and spit it out, then another to read it back in a completely different environment, etc. I find the friction of using MATLAB/R for some of my work and a completely different language with a completely different address space and way of thinking for the rest to be a huge source of friction. Furthermore, I know there are glue layers that exist, but they always seem to be horribly complicated and a source of friction.

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• Sweet and Sour Source Control

  - by Tony Davis

  Most database developers don't use Source Control. A recent anonymous poll on SQL Server Central asked its readers "Which Version Control system do you currently use to store you database scripts?" The winner, with almost 30% of the vote was...none: "We don't use source control for database scripts". In second place with almost 28% of the vote was Microsoft's VSS. VSS? Given its reputation for being buggy, unstable and lacking most of the basic features required of a proper source control system, answering VSS is really just another way of saying "I don't use Source Control". At first glance, it's a surprising thought. You wonder how database developers can work in a team and find out what changed, when the system worked before but is now broken; to work out what happened to their changes that now seem to have vanished; to roll-back a mistake quickly so that the rest of the team have a functioning build; to find instantly whether a suspect change has been deployed to production. Unfortunately, the survey didn't ask about the scale of the database development, and correlate the two questions. If there is only one database developer within a schema, who has an automated approach to regular generation of build scripts, then the need for a formal source control system is questionable. After all, a database stores far more about its metadata than a traditional compiled application. However, what is meat for a small development is poison for a team-based development. Here, we need a form of Source Control that can reconcile simultaneous changes, store the history of changes, derive versions and builds and that can cope with forks and merges. The problem comes when one borrows a solution that was designed for conventional programming. A database is not thought of as a "file", but a vast, interdependent and intricate matrix of tables, indexes, constraints, triggers, enumerations, static data and so on, all subtly interconnected. It is an awkward fit. Subversion with its support for merges and forks, and the tolerance of different work practices, can be made to work well, if used carefully. It has a standards-based architecture that allows it to be used on all platforms such as Windows Mac, and Linux. In the words of Erland Sommerskog, developers should "just do it". What's in a database is akin to a "binary file", and the developer must work only from the file. You check out the file, edit it, and save it to disk to compile it. Dependencies are validated at this point and if you've broken anything (e.g. you renamed a column and broke all the objects that reference the column), you'll find out about it right away, and you'll be forced to fix it. Nevertheless, for many this is an alien way of working with SQL Server. Subversion is the powerhouse, not the GUI. It doesn't work seamlessly with your existing IDE, and that usually means SSMS. So the question then becomes more subtle. Would developers be less reluctant to use a fully-featured source (revision) control system for a team database development if they had a turn-key, reliable system that fitted in with their existing work-practices? I'd love to hear what you think. Cheers, Tony.

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• Going by the eBook

  - by Tony Davis

  The book and magazine publishing world is rapidly going digital, and the industry is faced with making drastic changes to their ways of doing business. The sudden take-up of digital readers by the book-buying public has surprised even the most technological-savvy of the industry. Printed books just aren't selling like they did. In contrast, eBooks are doing well. The ePub file format is the standard around which all publishers are converging. ePub is a standard for formatting book content, so that it can be reflowed for various devices, with their widely differing screen-sizes, and can be read offline. If you unzip an ePub file, you'll find familiar formats such as XML, XHTML and CSS. This is both a blessing and a curse. Whilst it is good to be able to use familiar technologies that have been developed to a level of considerable sophistication, it doesn't get us all the way to producing a viable publication. XHTML is a page-description language, not a book-description language, as we soon found out during our initial experiments, when trying to specify headers, footers, indexes and chaptering. As a result, it is difficult to predict how any particular eBook application will decide to render a book. There isn't even a consensus as to how the cover image is specified. All of this is awkward for the publisher. Each book must be created and revised in a form from which can be generated a whole range of 'printed media', from print books, to Mobi for kindles, ePub for most Tablets and SmartPhones, HTML for excerpted chapters on websites, and a plethora of other formats for other eBook readers, each with its own idiosyncrasies. In theory, if we can get our content into a clean, semantic XML form, such as DOCBOOKS, we can, from there, after every revision, perform a series of relatively simple XSLT transformations to output anything from a HTML article, to an ePub file for reading on an iPad, to an ICML file (an XML-based file format supported by the InDesign tool), ready for print publication. As always, however, the task looks bigger the closer you get to the detail. On the way to the utopian world of an XML-based book format that encompasses all the diverse requirements of the different publication media, ePub looks like a reasonable format to adopt. Its forthcoming support for HTML 5 and CSS 3, with ePub 3.0, means that features, such as widow-and-orphan controls, multi-column flow and multi-media graphics can be incorporated into eBooks. This starts to make it possible to build an "app-like" experience into the eBook and to free publishers to think of putting context before container; to think of what content is required, be it graphical, textual or audio, from the point of view of the user, rather than what's possible in a given, traditional book "Container". In the meantime, there is a gap between what publishers require and what current technology can provide and, of course building this app-like experience is far from plain sailing. Real portability between devices is still a big challenge, and achieving the sort of wizardry seen in the likes of Theodore Grey's "Elements" eBook will require some serious device-specific programming skills. Cheers, Tony.

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• Philosophy of [WebInvoke(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)]

  - by Mikey Cee

  Hi everyone, I'm writing what I'm referring to as a POJ (Plain Old JSON) WCF web service - one that takes and emits standard JSON with none of the crap that ASP.NET Ajax likes to add to it. It seems that there are three steps to accomplish this: Change to in the endpoint's tag Decorate the method with [WebInvoke(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] Add an incantation of [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] to the service contract This is all working OK for me - I can pass in and am being returned nice plain JSON. If I remove the WebInvoke attribute, then I get XML returned instead, so it is certainly doing what it is supposed to do. But it strikes me as odd that the option to specify JSON output appears here and not in the configuration file. Say I wanted to expose my method as an XML endpoint too - how would I do this? Currently the only way I can see would be to have a second method that does exactly the same thing but does not have WebMethodFormat.Json specified. Then rinse and repeat for every method in my service? Yuck. Specifying that the output should be serialized to JSON in the attribute seems to be completely contrary to the philosophy of WCF, where the service is implemented is a transport and encoding agnostic manner, leaving the nasty details of how the data will be moved around to the configuration file. Is there a better way of doing what I want to do? Or are we stuck with this awkward attribute? Or do I not understanding WCF deeply enough?

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• Thread-safe data structures

  - by Inso Reiges

  Hello, I have to design a data structure that is to be used in a multi-threaded environment. The basic API is simple: insert element, remove element, retrieve element, check that element exists. The structure's implementation uses implicit locking to guarantee the atomicity of a single API call. After i implemented this it became apparent, that what i really need is atomicity across several API calls. For example if a caller needs to check the existence of an element before trying to insert it he can't do that atomically even if each single API call is atomic: if(!data_structure.exists(element)) { data_structure.insert(element); } The example is somewhat awkward, but the basic point is that we can't trust the result of exists call anymore after we return from atomic context (the generated assembly clearly shows a minor chance of context switch between the two calls). What i currently have in mind to solve this is exposing the lock through the data structure's public API. This way clients will have to explicitly lock things, but at least they won't have to create their own locks. Is there a better commonly-known solution to these kinds of problems? And as long as we're at it, can you advise some good literature on thread-safe design? Thank you.

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• Suggestions for doing async I/O with Task Parallel Library

  - by anelson

  I have some high performance file transfer code which I wrote in C# using the Async Programming Model (APM) idiom (eg, BeginRead/EndRead). This code reads a file from a local disk and writes it to a socket. For best performance on modern hardware, it's important to keep more than one outstanding I/O operation in flight whenever possible. Thus, I post several BeginRead operations on the file, then when one completes, I call a BeginSend on the socket, and when that completes I do another BeginRead on the file. The details are a bit more complicated than that but at the high level that's the idea. I've got the APM-based code working, but it's very hard to follow and probably has subtle concurrency bugs. I'd love to use TPL for this instead. I figured Task.Factory.FromAsync would just about do it, but there's a catch. All of the I/O samples I've seen (most particularly the StreamExtensions class in the Parallel Extensions Extras) assume one read followed by one write. This won't perform the way I need. I can't use something simple like Parallel.ForEach or the Extras extension Task.Factory.Iterate because the async I/O tasks don't spend much time on a worker thread, so Parallel just starts up another task, resulting in potentially dozens or hundreds of pending I/O operations; way too much! You can work around that by Waiting on your tasks, but that causes creation of an event handle (a kernel object), and a blocking wait on a task wait handle, which ties up a worker thread. My APM-based implementation avoids both of those things. I've been playing around with different ways to keep multiple read/write operations in flight, and I've managed to do so using continuations that call a method that creates another task, but it feels awkward, and definitely doesn't feel like idiomatic TPL. Has anyone else grappled with an issue like this with the TPL? Any suggestions?

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• Odd Infragistics UltraComboEditor data binding non-bug

  - by Richard Dunlap

  Within an Infragistics 8.2 UltraComboEditor, we had the following properties set via C#: DataSource = dataSource; ValueMember = "Measure"; DisplayMember = "Name"; DataBindings.Add("Value", repository, "Measure"); DataBindings["Value"].DataSourceUpdateMode = DataSourceUpdateMode.OnPropertyChanged; where dataSource was an array of objects, each with a property Measure, and repository was an object with a property Measure. (Those strings are actually constructor parameters -- just using explicit strings to simplify the example.) In the course of some refactoring, the name of the property on the objects in the array was changed to BaseEnum (the objects are actually wrapped enumerations, for the curious), but the name of ValueMember above was not changed. And yet, the combo box binding continued to work through initial testing, beta testing, and even after release... until two customers emailed in noting that the combo box was no longer changing the underlying parameter. We were able to dig out the problem by careful study of the source code repository... despite being in the awkward position of not being able to replicate the buggy behavior internally. Two part question: What's happening under the hood that allowed the binding to continue to function, and/or what might be unique about those two users that caused the binding to (correctly) fail? (O/S version isn't alone the answer, and we get the unexpectedly functioning binding on machines that have never had a version of the software before, so we're not looking at rogue binaries). Are there tools that might have been able to warn us about the misbind, even if something was cleaning up behind?

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• dumping the source code for an anonymous function

  - by intuited

  I'm working with a lot of anonymous functions, ie functions declared as part of a dictionary, aka "methods". It's getting pretty painful to debug, because I can't tell what function the errors are happening in. Vim's backtraces look like this: Error detected while processing function NamedFunction..2111..2105: line 1: E730: using List as a String This trace shows that the error occurred in the third level down the stack, on the first line of anonymous function #2105. IE NamedFunction called anonymous function #2111, which called anonymous function #2105. NamedFunction is one declared through the normal function NamedFunction() ... endfunction syntax; the others were declared using code like function dict.func() ... endfunction. So obviously I'd like to find out which function has number 2105. Assuming that it's still in scope, it's possible to find out what Dictionary entry references it by dumping all of the dictionary variables that might contain that reference. This is sort of awkward and it's difficult to be systematic about it, though I guess I could code up a function to search through all of the loaded dictionaries for a reference to that function, watching out for circular references. Although to be really thorough, it would have to search not only script-local and global dictionaries, but buffer-local dictionaries as well; is there a way to access another buffer's local variables? Anyway I'm wondering if it's possible to dump the source code for the anonymous function instead. This would be a lot easier and probably more reliable.

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• GPGPU programming with OpenGL ES 2.0

  - by Albus Dumbledore

  I am trying to do some image processing on the GPU, e.g. median, blur, brightness, etc. The general idea is to do something like this framework from GPU Gems 1. I am able to write the GLSL fragment shader for processing the pixels as I've been trying out different things in an effect designer app. I am not sure however how I should do the other part of the task. That is, I'd like to be working on the image in image coords and then outputting the result to a texture. I am aware of the gl_FragCoords variable. As far as I understand it it goes like that: I need to set up a view (an orthographic one maybe?) and a quad in such a way so that the pixel shader would be applied once to each pixel in the image and so that it would be rendering to a texture or something. But how can I achieve that considering there's depth that may make things somewhat awkward to me... I'd be very grateful if anyone could help me with this rather simple task as I am really frustrated with myself. UPDATE It seems I'll have to use an FBO, getting one like this: glBindFramebuffer(...)

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• CSS Rotation & IE: absolute positioning seems to break IE

  - by user263900

  I'm trying to rotate a variety of text blocks so they are vertically oriented, and position them in very specific locations on a diagram which will be previewed and then printed. CSS rotates the text very nicely in IE, FF, even Opera. But when I try to position a rotated element, IE 7 & 8 (not worried about 6) breaks completely and the element stays in its original location. Any way around this? I really need to-the-pixel control of where these labels are located. HTML <div class="content rotate"> <div id="Div1" class="txtblock">Ardvark Avacado<br />Awkward</div> <div id="Div2" class="txtblock">Brownies<br />Bacteria Brussel Sprouts</div> </div> CSS div.content { position: relative; width: 300px; height: 300px; margin: 30px; border-top: black 4px solid; border-right: blue 4px solid; border-bottom: black 4px dashed; border-left: blue 4px dashed; } .rotate { -webkit-transform: rotate(-90deg); -moz-transform: rotate(-90deg); -o-transform: rotate(-90deg); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3); } .txtblock { width: auto; position: absolute; } #Div1 { left:44px; top:70px; border:red 3px solid; } #Div2 { left:13px; top:170px; border:purple 3px solid; }

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