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• Successfully Deliver on State and Local Capital Projects through Project Portfolio Management

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} While the debate continues on Capitol Hill about which federal programs to cut and which to keep, communities and towns across America are feeling the budget crunch closer to home. State and local governments are trying to save as many projects as they can without promising too much to constituents – and they, in turn, want to know where their tax dollars are going. Fortunately, with the right planning and management, you can deliver successful projects and portfolios on a limited budget. Watch the replay of our recent webcast with Oracle Primavera and Industry Product Manager Garrett Harley that will demonstrate how state and local governments can get the most out of their capital projects and learn how two Oracle Primavera customers have implemented project portfolio management practices to: Predict the cost of long-term capital programs and projects Assess risk and mitigation strategies Collaborate and track performance across government agencies Speakers: Garrett Harley, Industry and Product Manager, Oracle Primavera Cory Davis, Director of Capital Renovation and New Construction, Chicago Public Schools Julie Owen, PSP™, CCC™, Sr. Project Controls Manager,LA Metro Transit Authority With the right planning and management, state and local governments can deliver successful projects on a limited budget. 1024x768 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Is Your Company Social on the Inside?

  - by Mike Stiles

  As we talk about the extension of social from an outbound-facing marketing tool to a platform that will reach across the entire enterprise, servicing multiple functions of that enterprise, it might be time to take a look at how social can be effectively employed for internal communications. Remember the printed company newsletter? Yeah, nobody reads it. Remember the emailed company newsletter? Yeah, nobody reads it. Why not? Shouldn’t your employees care about the company more than anything else in life and be voraciously hungry for any information related to it? The more realistic prospect is that a company’s employees don’t behave much differently at work where information is concerned than they do in their personal lives. They “tune in” to information that’s immediately relevant to them, that peaks their interest, and/or that’s presented in a visually engaging way. That currently makes an internal social platform the most ideal way to communicate within the organization. It not only facilitates more immediate, more targeted (and thus more relevant) messaging from the company out to employees, it sets a stage for employees to communicate with each other and efficiently get answers to questions from peers. It’s a collaboration tool on steroids. If you build such an internal social portal and you do it right, will employees use it? Considering social media has officially been declared more addictive than cigarettes, booze and sex…probably. But what does it mean to do an internal social platform “right”? The bar has been set pretty high. Your employees are used to Twitter and Facebook, and would roll their eyes at anything less simple or harder to navigate than those. All the Facebook best practices would apply to your internal social as well, including the importance of managing posting frequency, using photos and video, moderation & response, etc. And don’t worry, you won’t be the first to jump in. WPP's global digital agency Possible has its own social network called Colab. Nestle has “The Nest.” Red Robin’s got one. I myself got an in-depth look at McGraw-Hill’s internal social platform at Blogwell NYC. Some of these companies are building their own platforms, others are buying them off the shelf or customizing readymade solutions. But you won’t be the last either. Prescient Digital Media and the IABC learned 39% of companies don’t offer employees any social tools. Not a social network, not discussion forums, not even IM. And a great many continue to ban the use of Facebook and Twitter on the premises. That’s pretty astonishing since social has become as essential a modern day communications tool as the telephone. But such holdouts will pay a big price for being mired in fear while competitors exploit social connections unchallenged. Fish where the fish are. If social has become the way people communicate and take in information, let that be the way communication is trafficked in the organization.

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• How to add legend to imshow() in matplotlib

  - by rankthefirst

  I am using matplotlib In plot() or bar(), we can easily put legend, if we add labels to them. but what if it is a contourf() or imshow() I know there is a colorbar() which can present the color range, but it is not satisfied. I want such a legend which have names(labels). For what I can think of is that, add labels to each element in the matrix, then ,try legend(), to see if it works, but how to add label to the element, like a value?? in my case, the raw data is like: 1,2,3,3,4 2,3,4,4,5 1,1,1,2,2 for example, 1 represents 'grass', 2 represents 'sand', 3 represents 'hill'... and so on. imshow() works perfectly with my case, but without the legend. my question is: Is there a function that can automatically add legend, for example, in my case, I just have to do like this: someFunction('grass','sand',...) If there isn't, how do I add labels to each value in the matrix. For example, label all the 1 in the matrix 'grass', labell all the 2 in the matrix 'sand'...and so on. Thank you!

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• Valgrind says "stack allocation," I say "heap allocation"

  - by Joel J. Adamson

  Dear Friends, I am trying to trace a segfault with valgrind. I get the following message from valgrind: ==3683== Conditional jump or move depends on uninitialised value(s) ==3683== at 0x4C277C5: sparse_mat_mat_kron (sparse.c:165) ==3683== by 0x4C2706E: rec_mating (rec.c:176) ==3683== by 0x401C1C: age_dep_iterate (age_dep.c:287) ==3683== by 0x4014CB: main (age_dep.c:92) ==3683== Uninitialised value was created by a stack allocation ==3683== at 0x401848: age_dep_init_params (age_dep.c:131) ==3683== ==3683== Conditional jump or move depends on uninitialised value(s) ==3683== at 0x4C277C7: sparse_mat_mat_kron (sparse.c:165) ==3683== by 0x4C2706E: rec_mating (rec.c:176) ==3683== by 0x401C1C: age_dep_iterate (age_dep.c:287) ==3683== by 0x4014CB: main (age_dep.c:92) ==3683== Uninitialised value was created by a stack allocation ==3683== at 0x401848: age_dep_init_params (age_dep.c:131) However, here's the offending line: /* allocate mating table */ age_dep_data->mtable = malloc (age_dep_data->geno * sizeof (double *)); if (age_dep_data->mtable == NULL) error (ENOMEM, ENOMEM, nullmsg, __LINE__); for (int j = 0; j < age_dep_data->geno; j++) { 131=> age_dep_data->mtable[j] = calloc (age_dep_data->geno, sizeof (double)); if (age_dep_data->mtable[j] == NULL) error (ENOMEM, ENOMEM, nullmsg, __LINE__); } What gives? I thought any call to malloc or calloc allocated heap space; there is no other variable allocated here, right? Is it possible there's another allocation going on (the offending stack allocation) that I'm not seeing? You asked to see the code, here goes: /* Copyright 2010 Joel J. Adamson <[email protected]> $Id: age_dep.c 1010 2010-04-21 19:19:16Z joel $ age_dep.c:main file Joel J. Adamson -- http://www.unc.edu/~adamsonj Servedio Lab University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill CB #3280, Coker Hall Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3280 This file is part of an investigation of age-dependent sexual selection. This code is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with haploid. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. */ #include "age_dep.h" /* global variables */ extern struct argp age_dep_argp; /* global error message variables */ char * nullmsg = "Null pointer: %i"; /* error message for conversions: */ char * errmsg = "Representation error: %s"; /* precision for formatted output: */ const char prec[] = "%-#9.8f "; const size_t age_max = AGEMAX; /* maximum age of males */ static int keep_going_p = 1; int main (int argc, char ** argv) { /* often used counters: */ int i, j; /* read the command line */ struct age_dep_args age_dep_args = { NULL, NULL, NULL }; argp_parse (&age_dep_argp, argc, argv, 0, 0, &age_dep_args); /* set the parameters here: */ /* initialize an age_dep_params structure, set the members */ age_dep_params_t * params = malloc (sizeof (age_dep_params_t)); if (params == NULL) error (ENOMEM, ENOMEM, nullmsg, __LINE__); age_dep_init_params (params, &age_dep_args); /* initialize frequencies: this initializes a list of pointers to initial frqeuencies, terminated by a NULL pointer*/ params->freqs = age_dep_init (&age_dep_args); params->by = 0.0; /* what range of parameters do we want, and with what stepsize? */ /* we should go from 0 to half-of-theta with a step size of about 0.01 */ double from = 0.0; double to = params->theta / 2.0; double stepsz = 0.01; /* did you think I would spell the whole word? */ unsigned int numparts = floor(to / stepsz); do { #pragma omp parallel for private(i) firstprivate(params) \ shared(stepsz, numparts) for (i = 0; i < numparts; i++) { params->by = i * stepsz; int tries = 0; while (keep_going_p) { /* each time through, modify mfreqs and mating table, then go again */ keep_going_p = age_dep_iterate (params, ++tries); if (keep_going_p == ERANGE) error (ERANGE, ERANGE, "Failure to converge\n"); } fprintf (stdout, "%i iterations\n", tries); } /* for i < numparts */ params->freqs = params->freqs->next; } while (params->freqs->next != NULL); return 0; } inline double age_dep_pmate (double age_dep_t, unsigned int genot, double bp, double ba) { /* the probability of mating between these phenotypes */ /* the female preference depends on whether the female has the preference allele, the strength of preference (parameter bp) and the male phenotype (age_dep_t); if the female lacks the preference allele, then this will return 0, which is not quite accurate; it should return 1 */ return bits_isset (genot, CLOCI)? 1.0 - exp (-bp * age_dep_t) + ba: 1.0; } inline double age_dep_trait (int age, unsigned int genot, double by) { /* return the male trait, a function of the trait locus, age, the age-dependent scaling parameter (bx) and the males condition genotype */ double C; double T; /* get the male's condition genotype */ C = (double) bits_popcount (bits_extract (0, CLOCI, genot)); /* get his trait genotype */ T = bits_isset (genot, CLOCI + 1)? 1.0: 0.0; /* return the trait value */ return T * by * exp (age * C); } int age_dep_iterate (age_dep_params_t * data, unsigned int tries) { /* main driver routine */ /* number of bytes for female frequencies */ size_t geno = data->age_dep_data->geno; size_t genosize = geno * sizeof (double); /* female frequencies are equal to male frequencies at birth (before selection) */ double ffreqs[geno]; if (ffreqs == NULL) error (ENOMEM, ENOMEM, nullmsg, __LINE__); /* do not set! Use memcpy (we need to alter male frequencies (selection) without altering female frequencies) */ memmove (ffreqs, data->freqs->freqs[0], genosize); /* for (int i = 0; i < geno; i++) */ /* ffreqs[i] = data->freqs->freqs[0][i]; */ #ifdef PRMTABLE age_dep_pr_mfreqs (data); #endif /* PRMTABLE */ /* natural selection: */ age_dep_ns (data); /* normalized mating table with new frequencies */ age_dep_norm_mtable (ffreqs, data); #ifdef PRMTABLE age_dep_pr_mtable (data); #endif /* PRMTABLE */ double * newfreqs; /* mutate here */ /* i.e. get the new frequency of 0-year-olds using recombination; */ newfreqs = rec_mating (data->age_dep_data); /* return block */ { if (sim_stop_ck (data->freqs->freqs[0], newfreqs, GENO, TOL) == 0) { /* if we have converged, stop the iterations and handle the data */ age_dep_sim_out (data, stdout); return 0; } else if (tries > MAXTRIES) return ERANGE; else { /* advance generations */ for (int j = age_max - 1; j < 0; j--) memmove (data->freqs->freqs[j], data->freqs->freqs[j-1], genosize); /* advance the first age-class */ memmove (data->freqs->freqs[0], newfreqs, genosize); return 1; } } } void age_dep_ns (age_dep_params_t * data) { /* calculate the new frequency of genotypes given additive fitness and selection coefficient s */ size_t geno = data->age_dep_data->geno; double w[geno]; double wbar, dtheta, ttheta, dcond, tcond; double t, cond; /* fitness parameters */ double mu, nu; mu = data->wparams[0]; nu = data->wparams[1]; /* calculate fitness */ for (int j = 0; j < age_max; j++) { int i; for (i = 0; i < geno; i++) { /* calculate male trait: */ t = age_dep_trait(j, i, data->by); /* calculate condition: */ cond = (double) bits_popcount (bits_extract(0, CLOCI, i)); /* trait-based fitness term */ dtheta = data->theta - t; ttheta = (dtheta * dtheta) / (2.0 * nu * nu); /* condition-based fitness term */ dcond = CLOCI - cond; tcond = (dcond * dcond) / (2.0 * mu * mu); /* calculate male fitness */ w[i] = 1 + exp(-tcond) - exp(-ttheta); } /* calculate mean fitness */ /* as long as we calculate wbar before altering any values of freqs[], we're safe */ wbar = gen_mean (data->freqs->freqs[j], w, geno); for (i = 0; i < geno; i++) data->freqs->freqs[j][i] = (data->freqs->freqs[j][i] * w[i]) / wbar; } } void age_dep_norm_mtable (double * ffreqs, age_dep_params_t * params) { /* this function produces a single mating table that forms the input for recombination () */ /* i is female genotype; j is male genotype; k is male age */ int i,j,k; double norm_denom; double trait; size_t geno = params->age_dep_data->geno; for (i = 0; i < geno; i++) { double norm_mtable[geno]; /* initialize the denominator: */ norm_denom = 0.0; /* find the probability of mating and add it to the denominator */ for (j = 0; j < geno; j++) { /* initialize entry: */ norm_mtable[j] = 0.0; for (k = 0; k < age_max; k++) { trait = age_dep_trait (k, j, params->by); norm_mtable[j] += age_dep_pmate (trait, i, params->bp, params->ba) * (params->freqs->freqs)[k][j]; } norm_denom += norm_mtable[j]; } /* now calculate entry (i,j) */ for (j = 0; j < geno; j++) params->age_dep_data->mtable[i][j] = (ffreqs[i] * norm_mtable[j]) / norm_denom; } } My current suspicion is the array newfreqs: I can't memmove, memcpy or assign a stack variable then hope it will persist, can I? rec_mating() returns double *.

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• Google Calendar like interface

  - by John Virgolino

  I need to write an application that essentially functions like a week-view of a calendar, columns for the days and then rows for appointments. Where the height of the appointment box visually represents time. In my case, I just don't want the time of day as the vertical axis, I just want hours or mins. The Google AJAX approach is very clean and easy to use and would be perfect, I think, but my major knowledge comes in ASP.Net and Windows Forms (.Net). I don't want to reinvent the wheel, but I find my mind is stuck on this problem and that I would have to create an interface from scratch for this. I have checked out the Infragistics product (used it for other projects) and read up a lot on the Google API's including their Ajax toolkit. I haven't done Java, however learning a language is not my issue, it's learning the particulars that will help me reach my goal that I feel will take most of the time. Am I making a mountain out of a mole hill? Is this really a lot easier than I think? This is starting to sound like a Dear Abby post - I'll stop now. Any advice or insight would be great! Thanks all!

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• Books for Computer Networking

  - by Altimet Gaandu

  Hi, I am a student of computer engineering from Vasula University, Somalia. We have a subject called Advanced Computer Networks and the following is the list of recommended books: Text Books: 1. B. A. Forouzan, "TCP/IP Protocol Suite", Tata McGraw Hill edition, Third Edition. 2. N. Olifer, V. Olifer, "Computer Networks: Principles, Technologies and Protocols for Network design", Wiley India Edition, First edition. References: 1. W.Richard Stevens, "TCP/IP Volume1, 2, 3", Addison Wesley. 2. D.E.Comer,"TCP/IPVolumeI and II", PearsonEducation. . 3.W.R. Stevens, "Unix Network Programming", Vol. 1, Pearson Education. 4. J.Walrand, P. Var~fya, "High Performance Communication Networks", Morgan Kaufmann. . 5. A.S.Tanenbaum,"Computer Networks", Pearson Education, Fourth Edition. But we have been unable to find these either in the market or on the internet (read: torrents). Please provide download links to any of these books and oblige. Thanks.

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• Preloading Image Bug in IE6-8

  - by Kevin C.

  Page in question: http://phwsinc.com/our-work/one-rincon-hill.asp In IE6-8, when you click the left-most thumbnail in the gallery, the image never loads. If you click the thumbnail a second time, then it will load. I'm using jQuery, and here's my code that's powering the gallery: $(document).ready(function() { // PROJECT PHOTO GALLERY var thumbs = $('.thumbs li a'); var photoWrapper = $('div.photoWrapper'); if (thumbs.length) { thumbs.click( function(){ photoWrapper.addClass('loading'); var img_src = $(this).attr('href'); // The two lines below are what cause the bug in IE. They make the gallery run much faster in other browsers, though. var new_img = new Image(); new_img.src = img_src; var photo = $('#photo'); photo.fadeOut('slow', function() { photo.attr('src', img_src); photo.load(function() { photoWrapper.removeClass('loading'); photo.fadeIn('slow'); }); }); return false; }); } }); A coworker told me that he's always had problems with the js Image() object, and advised me to just append an <img /> element inside of a div set to display:none;, but that's a little messy for my tastes--I liked using the Image() object, it kept things nice and clean, no unnecessary added HTML markup. Any help would be appreciated. It still works without the image preloading, so if all else fails I'll just wrap the preloading in an if !($.browser.msie){ } and call it a day.

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• Emails not being delivered

  - by Tomtiger11

  Comment pointed out that this may fix my problem, and it did: Why don't mails show up in the recipient's mailspool? I use Postfix with Dovecot, and when I send an email from my gmail to my server, it is received at the server, but not at my email client using POP3. I can verify it being received at the server using the mail command. This is my main.cf: queue_directory = /var/spool/postfix command_directory = /usr/sbin daemon_directory = /usr/libexec/postfix data_directory = /var/lib/postfix mail_owner = postfix myhostname = tom4u.eu myorigin = $myhostname inet_interfaces = all inet_protocols = all unknown_local_recipient_reject_code = 550 relay_domains = $mydomain alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases debug_peer_level = 2 debugger_command = PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin ddd $daemon_directory/$process_name $process_id & sleep 5 sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix newaliases_path = /usr/bin/newaliases.postfix mailq_path = /usr/bin/mailq.postfix setgid_group = postdrop html_directory = no manpage_directory = /usr/share/man sample_directory = /usr/share/doc/postfix-2.6.6/samples readme_directory = /usr/share/doc/postfix-2.6.6/README_FILES smtpd_tls_cert_file = /etc/postfix/certs/cert.pem milter_protocol = 2 milter_default_action = accept smtpd_milters = inet:localhost:8891 non_smtpd_milters = inet:localhost:8891 smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes smtpd_sasl_security_options = noanonymous smtpd_sasl_local_domain = $myhostname smtpd_recipient_restrictions = reject_non_fqdn_recipient,permit_sasl_authenticated,permit_mynetworks,reject_unauth_destination,permit broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes smtpd_sasl_type = dovecot smtpd_sasl_path = private/auth If you could help me with this, I'd be most grateful, if you need any more information, please ask. var/log/maillog: May 30 22:44:25 tom4u postfix/smtpd[18626]: connect from mail-we0-f181.google.com[74.125.82.181] May 30 22:44:25 tom4u postfix/smtpd[18626]: 318F679B7F: client=mail-we0-f181.google.com[74.125.82.181] May 30 22:44:25 tom4u postfix/cleanup[18631]: 318F679B7F: message-id=<CAA_0zdxY-WUFGOC57K_yVn0G+5hN=8KSXuohJqMDB5Rm7bqu8w@mail.gmail.com> May 30 22:44:25 tom4u opendkim[15006]: 318F679B7F: mail-we0-f181.google.com [74.125.82.181] not internal May 30 22:44:25 tom4u opendkim[15006]: 318F679B7F: not authenticated May 30 22:44:25 tom4u opendkim[15006]: 318F679B7F: DKIM verification successful May 30 22:44:25 tom4u opendkim[15006]: 318F679B7F: s=20120113 d=gmail.com SSL May 30 22:44:25 tom4u postfix/qmgr[16282]: 318F679B7F: from=<[email protected]>, size=1720, nrcpt=1 (queue active) May 30 22:44:25 tom4u postfix/smtpd[18626]: disconnect from mail-we0-f181.google.com[74.125.82.181] May 30 22:44:25 tom4u postfix/local[18632]: 318F679B7F: to=<[email protected]>, relay=local, delay=0.17, delays=0.12/0.01/0/0.03, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (delivered to mailbox) May 30 22:44:25 tom4u postfix/qmgr[16282]: 318F679B7F: removed May 30 22:45:32 tom4u dovecot: pop3-login: Login: user=<tom>, method=PLAIN, rip=SNIP, lip=176.31.127.165, mpid=18679 May 30 22:45:32 tom4u dovecot: pop3(tom): Disconnected: Logged out top=0/0, retr=0/0, del=0/0, size=0 May 30 22:46:32 tom4u dovecot: pop3-login: Login: user=<tom>, method=PLAIN, rip=SNIP, lip=176.31.127.165, mpid=18725 May 30 22:46:32 tom4u dovecot: pop3(tom): Disconnected: Logged out top=0/0, retr=0/0, del=0/0, size=0

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 18, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 18, 2013Popular ReleasesVoya Media: Voya Media v. 1.2.255: Voya Media is free, open-source and provides one central place to play and organize all your music, pictures and videos. Voya Media | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ Features: Scans disk drives and network shares for valid media files. Generates playlist tags based on directory names. Supports MP3 tags and cover images. Supports built-in and external SRT/SUB subtitles. Gets TV Show episode details from the tvrage.com API. Gets Movie details from the themoviedb.org API. Supports Med...Aphid: Aphid 0.1.0.17 Alpha: Added several samples Fixed + operator bugpatterns & practices - Windows Azure Guidance: Cloud Design Patterns: 1st drop of Cloud Design Patterns project. It contains 14 patterns with 6 related guidance.Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.582b: New* Both - Added 'An' as option to ignore in title * Movie - Renaming - added %Z - Sorttitle to Legend * Movie - Renaming - added %O - Audio Channels to Legend * Movie - Remove a poster source from priority list. Reset List back to defaults. * Made Media Companion truly portable application. Fixed* Movie - browse for Poster Or Fanart, allows for jpg, tbn, png and bmp images * Movie - Alt Fanart Browser - Url or Browse window now fully visible. * Movie - Manual renaming checks if 'Use Fold...Json.NET: Json.NET 5.0 Release 8: Fix - Fixed not writing string quotes when QuoteName is falsePowerShell Community Extensions: 3.1 Production: PowerShell Community Extensions 3.1 Release NotesOct 17, 2013 This version of PSCX supports Windows PowerShell 3.0 and 4.0 See the ReleaseNotes.txt download above for more information.SQL Power Doc: Version 1.0.2.1: Misc. bug fixes Added logic to resolve members of a Windows Group server login Added columns to Excel workbooks to show definitions for server permissions, server roles, database permissions, and database rolesNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module: NB_Store v2.3.8 Rel1: v2.3.8 Is now DNN6 and DNN7 compatible NOTE: NB_Store v2.3.8 is NOT compatible with DNN5. SOURCE CODE : https://github.com/leedavi/NB_Store (Source code has been moved to GitHub, due to issues with codeplex SVN and the inability to move easily to GIT on codeplex)Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.9): This new version includes: - Download latest status update and use it as vertex tooltip - Limit the timelines to parse to me, my friends or both - Fixed some reported bugs about the fan page and group importer - Fixed the login bug reported latelyTerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v7.1 [Terraria Inventory Editor]: You can now backspace in number fields Items added in 1.2.0.3 no longer corrupt player files Buff durations capped at 9999999 Item stacks capped at 9999999 Version info added Prefix IDs corrected Shoe and Eye color box are now properly clickable Moved Bank and Safe into their own tab Users will now be notified of new updatesPython Tools for Visual Studio: 2.0: PTVS 2.0 We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 RTM. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, IPython, and cross platform and cross language debugging support. QUICK VIDEO OVERVIEW For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this v...Collection Commander for Configuration Manager 2012: CMCollCtr 1.0.0: Change log: - MSI Setup - UI Improved - CM12 Console integration - New Powershell code snippets - Client Center IntegrationSandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.8.0 with Visual Studio Package: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This new release contains bug fixes and feature enhancements. There are some potential breaking changes in this release as some features of the Help File Builder have been moved into...Fast YouTube Downloader: YouTube Downloader 2.2.0: YouTube Downloader 2.2.0VidCoder: 1.5.8 Beta: Added hardware acceleration options: Bicubic OpenCL scaling algorithm, QSV decoding/encoding and DXVA decoding. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5834. Updated VidCoder setup icon. Fixed crash when choosing the mp4v2 container on x86 and opening on x64. Warning: the hardware acceleration features require specific hardware or file types to work correctly: QSV: Need an Intel processor that supports Quick Sync Video encoding, with a monitor hooked up to the Intel HD Graphics output and the lat...ASP.net MVC Awesome - jQuery Ajax Helpers: 3.5.2: version 3.5.2 - fix for setting single value to multivalue controls - datepicker min max date offset fix - html encoding for keys fix - enable Column.ClientFormatFunc to be a function call that will return a function version 3.5.1 - fixed html attributes rendering - fixed loading animation rendering - css improvements version 3.5 ========================== - autosize for all popups ( can be turned off by calling in js awe.autoSize = false ) - added Parent, Paremeter extensions ...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.3.1310.12: Allow the Update Creation Wizard to be set in full screen mode. Fix a bug which prevent WPP to Reset Remote Sus Client ID. Change the behavior of links in the Update Detail Viewer. Left-Click to open, Right-Click to copy to the Clipboard.WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.6.maint: I think this covers all of the issues. new additions: fixed the thumbnail problem for backgrounds. general clean up and error checking. need to get this put through the wringer and all feedback is welcome.BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6.4: This BIDS Helper release brings the following new features and fixes: New Features: A new Bus Matrix style report option when you run the Printer Friendly Dimension Usage report for an SSAS cube. The Biml engine is now fully in sync with the supported subset of Varigence Mist 3.4. This includes a large number of language enhancements, bugfixes, and project deployment support. Fixed Issues: Fixed Biml execution for project connections fixing a bug with Tabular Translations Editor not a...Free language translator and file converter: Free Language Translator 3.4: fixes for new version look up.New ProjectsA Program to Calculate the Sum of Two Numbers: Dennis Gaya - University of HertfordshireAllow users to change their Active Directory password from SharePoint 2013: Allow users to change their Active Directory password from SharePoint 2013 user menu contextAutoCAD Code Pack: AutoCADCodePack is a powerful library that help you to develop AutoCAD plugins using the AutoCAD .NET API.Core Engine: A game engine, written by engineers, for engineers.EmeraldForum: A simple forumFcdbas: FcdbasFreedom: ...High School Behaviour Log: A web based tool for recording student detentions, behaviour issues as well as referrals and positive behaviour. Integrated with school's SIMS.net MIS system.htmlcxx unicode version: thanks for Davi de Castro Reis and Robson Braga Ara?o's work. also thanks for Kasper Peeters 's tree.hhLets Learn DirectX 11.1 Series: Lets Learn DirectX 11.1 is a project run by Ernest Loveland to make knowledge about DirectX 11.1 development more public and freely available.Migrate CPPUnit to VS2013: migrate CPPUnit to VS2013Poll System: Poll system for educational purposePort Layer: ????????，???????R.M.B: JUST XIXIRecetas_LosBorbotones: Recetas Los BorbotonesScrolltastic-Skin: Imagine A Free DotNetNuke responsive Skin, Which Will Make Your Wishes Come True. Sharepoint and web service: This is Sharepoint 2010 project, after deploy it, you can use javascript (ajax) to access sharepoint list, call a custom web service. Everything are very easy!SourceSareProject: 00TestWebApi: WebApi serviceTFSBuildMonitor: Application that in its current shape let you monitor build queues and finished builds in an easier way than what is possible throug the built in Build ExplorerTigerProjects: This project is to create a online RSS reader similar as Google ReaderVottReader: It is project simple reader and viewer for http://vott.ru site.WinFormStudy: C#??

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• Off The Beaten Path—Three Things Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful For

  - by Christine Randle

  By: Jim Lein, Senior Director, Oracle Accelerate Last Sunday I went on a walkabout.  That’s when I just step out the door of my Colorado home and hike through the mountains for hours with no predetermined destination. I favor “social trails”, the unmapped routes pioneered by both animal and human explorers.  These tracks  are usually more challenging than established, marked routes and you can’t be 100% sure of where you’re going to end up. But I’ve found the rewards to be much greater. For awhile, I pondered on how—depending upon your perspective—the current economic situation worldwide could be viewed as either a classic “the glass is half empty” or a “the glass is half full” scenario. Midsize companies buy Oracle to grow and so I’m continually amazed and fascinated by the success stories our customers relate to me.  Oracle’s successful midsize companies are growing via innovation, agility, and opportunity. For them, the glass isn’t half full—it’s overflowing. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Innovation The sun angling through the pine trees reminded me of a conversation with a European customer a year ago May.  You might not recognize the name but, chances are, your local evening weather report relies on this company’s weather observation, monitoring and measurement products.  For decades, the company was recognized in its industry for product innovation, but its recent rapid growth comes from tailoring end to end product and service solutions based on the needs of distinctly different customer groups across industrial, public sector, and defense sectors.  Hours after that phone call I was walking my dog in a local park and came upon a small white plastic box sprouting short antennas and dangling by a nylon cord from a tree branch.  I cut it down. The name of that customer’s company was stamped on the housing. “It’s a radiosonde from a high altitude weather balloon,” he told me the next day. “Keep it as a souvenir.”  It sits on my fireplace mantle and elicits many questions from guests. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Agility In July, I had another interesting discussion with the CFO of an Asia-Pacific company which owns and operates a large portfolio of leisure assets. They are best known for their epic outdoor theme parks. However, their primary growth today is coming from a chain of indoor amusement centers in the USA where billiards, bowling, and laser tag take the place of roller coasters, kiddy rides, and wave pools. With mountains and rivers right out my front door, I’m not much for theme parks, but I’ll take a spirited game of laser tag any day.  This company has grown dramatically since first implementing Oracle ERP more than a decade ago. Their profitable expansion into a completely foreign market is derived from the ability to replicate proven and efficient best business practices across diverse operating environments.  They recently went live on Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Taleo. Their CFO explained to me how, with thousands of employees in three countries, Fusion HCM and Taleo would enable them to remain incredibly agile by acting on trends linking individual employee performance to their management, establishing and maintaining those best practices. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Opportunity I have three GPS apps on my iPhone. I use them mainly to keep track of my stats—distance, time, and vertical gain. However, every once in awhile I need to find the most efficient route back home before dark from my current location (notice I didn’t use the word “lost”). In August I listened in on an interview with the CFO of another European company that designs and delivers telematics solutions—the integrated use of telecommunications and informatics—for managing the mobile workforce. These solutions enable customers to achieve evolutionary step-changes in their performance and service delivery. Forgive the overused metaphor, but this is route optimization on steroids.  The company’s executive team saw an opportunity in this emerging market and went “all in”. Consequently, they are being rewarded with tremendous growth results and market domination by providing the ability for their clients to collect and analyze performance information related to fuel consumption, service workforce safety, and asset productivity. This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for health, family, friends, and a career with an innovative company that helps companies leverage top tier software to drive and manage growth. And I’m thankful to have learned the lesson that good things happen when you get off the beaten path—both when hiking and when forging new routes through a complex world economy. Halfway through my walkabout on Sunday, after scrambling up a long stretch of scree-covered hill, I crested a ridge with an obstructed view of 14,265 ft Mt Evans just a few miles to the west.  There, nowhere near a house or a trail, someone had placed a wooden lounge chair. Its wood was worn and faded but it was sturdy. I had lunch and a cold drink in my pack. Opportunity knocked and I seized it. Happy Thanksgiving.  

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• XNA Notes 002

  - by George Clingerman

  This past week (much like every week in the XNA community) was filled with things happening and people doing cool things (and getting noticed for doing cool things!). You can definitely tell there are some Xbox LIVE Indie game developers starting to make some names for themselves. Can’t wait to name drop them at bars. Me- “Oh you played Game X? Yeah, I know the guy that made that. Pretty cool guy.” Yeah, I’ll be THAT guy.   Time Critical XNA News 30 days left to submit XBLIGs made in XNA Game Studio 3.1 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/08/30-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-to-app-hub.aspx Jeromy Walsh wants you to know his XNA 4.0 Winter Workshop starting soon, go get signed up! And the forum is now LIVE on GameDev.net http://gamedevelopedia.com/ http://tinyurl.com/4gg2cfv The XNA Team Per Nick Gravelyn, Aaron Stebner’s blog post is a must read for icons on Windows Phone http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72022/439597.aspx#439597 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2010/10/01/10070507.aspx Shawn Hargreaves writes about Sprite Billboards in a 3D world http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/01/12/spritebatch-billboards-in-a-3d-world.aspx XNA MVPs Andy “The ZMan” Dunn wants YOU to come to the MVP Summit and run a 5K http://www.indiegameguy.com/blogs/zman/archive/2010/12/26/come-to-the-mvp-summit-and-run-a-5k-yes-you.aspx Jim Perry updates his forum signature just to make it clear that he’s not speaking for Microsoft or giving official information (LOL, thanks Jim, now if only people will take the time to read that...) XNA MVP | Please use the Forum Search and read the Forum FAQs | My posts are not official info http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/70849/439613.aspx#439613 XNA Developers Robert Boyd (@werezombie) working hard at converting his RPG engine used to make Breath of Death VII and Chtulu Saves the World to XNA 4.0. If you haven’t done the upgrade yet yourself, might be useful to read back through his tweets and recent forum posts to see the problems/solutions he’s encountered. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71834/438099.aspx#438099 http://www.twitter.com/werezompire SpynDoctorGames is in the final phase before the release of Your Doodles are Bugged for the PC! Going to be interesting to watch as more XNA game developers explore the PC game market for their games. http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/24503173217521664 http://www.spyn-doctor.de @DrMistry shares some details of his next title YoYoYo http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/35-genblog/177-a-new-year-a-new-game-and-maybe-a-new-approach.html Travis Woodward (@RabidLionGames) has a blog post coming this weekend on Farseer and Mario-like platformer movement. http://twitter.com/RabidLionGames/statuses/24992762021548032 http://www.rabidlion.com/ S4G Interview with Radiangames http://n4g.com/news/679492/s4g-interview-with-radiangames XBLAratings.com interviews Steve Flores (@DragonDivide) developer of Alpha Squad http://www.xblaratings.com/developer-qaa/3621-alpha-squad-developer-interview XBox LIVE Indie Games If you haven’t been reading the roundups on IndieGames by NaviFairy on GayGamer, you’ve been missing out! http://gaygamer.net/2011/01/xbox_indie_review_roundup_1112.html Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 1 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/10/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-part-1/ Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 2 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/12/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-%E2%80%93-part-2/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews http://www.gamemarx.com/ Don’t forget to be following @XboxHornet . That’s a great way to snag free copies of Xbox LIVE Indie Games http://twitter.com/XboxHornet/statuses/24471103808208896 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Review posts the top 20 Xbox 360 LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://www.xbox-360-community-games-reviews.com/top-20-best-xbox-360-live-indie-games-of-2010/ VVGtv to Stream #XBLIG Again! Help out if you can. http://vvgtv.com/2011/01/07/vvgtv-to-stream-xblig-again/ Indie Gamer Magazine Issue 14 has a look at the Xbox LIVE Winter Indie Game Uprisiing http://www.indiegamemag.com/issue14/ XNA Game Development Andrew Russell announced and asked for help in his development of ExEn: XNA for iPhone, Android and Silverlight http://rockethub.com/projects/752-exen-xna-for-iphone-android-and-silverlight App Hub forums letting you down? Don’t forget about StackOverflow and the game development specific version gamedev.stackexchange http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/xna http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xna Transmute gets an update from Aaron Foley (@slyprid) and you can now add and visually edit parallax layers to your 2D tile game. http://twitpic.com/3nudj0 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/23418379574448128 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/Transmute/default.html Webcomics Weekly #75 touches on some feelings I’ve seen people try to express (myself included) when talking about game development and what types of games should be released for XBLIG http://www.pvponline.com/2011/01/05/webcomics-weekly-75-sour-oats/ Setting up a new PC for XNA development? Here’s a site that helps you quickly build a installer for all the most common applications developers use. http://ninite.com/ Fun wew thread on the XNA forums asking XBLIG/XNA developers just what their Top 10 favorite video games of all time are. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/107.aspx Christopher Hill (@Xalterax) stumbled across an entire community that does nothing but create box art. This is a great potential resource for Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers to get some awesome box art for their games. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/46582/441451.aspx#441451 http://www.vgboxart.com/browse/plat/360/ Don’t forget about the XNA Wiki, fantastic community resource (and roll up those sleeves and contribute already!) http://xnawiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

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• Find the best OpenWorld sessions for learning about UX highlights

  - by mvaughan

  By Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience  Have you clicked through the Oracle OpenWorld 2012 catalog? It’s amazingly dense, as usual. But one thing we noticed this year is that nearly half of the sessions mention some component of user experience, which is a sea change in our world. It means that more people understand, appreciate, and desire an effective user experience, and it also means that Oracle’s investment in its next-generation applications user experience, such as Oracle Fusion Applications, is increasingly apparent and interesting to its customers. So how do you choose the user experience sessions that make the most sense for you and your organization? Read our list to find out which sessions we think offer the most value for those interested in finding out more about the Oracle Applications user experience. If you’re interested in Oracle’s strategy for its user experience: CON9438: Oracle Fusion Applications: Transforming Insight into Action10:15 - 11:15 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2; Moscone West – 2007 CON9467: Oracle’s Roadmap to a Simple, Modern User Experience3:30 - 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3; Moscone West - 3002/3004 CON8718: Oracle Fusion Applications: Customizing and Extending with Oracle Composers11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4; Moscone West – 2008 GEN9663: General Session: A Panel of Masterminds—Where Are Oracle Applications Headed?1:45 - 2:45 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone North - Hall D If you’re interested in PeopleSoft/PeopleTools: GEN8928: General Session: PeopleSoft Update and Product Roadmap3:15 - 4:15 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone West - 3002/3004 CON9183: PeopleSoft PeopleTools Technology Roadmap4:45 - 5:45 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone West - 3002/3004 CON8932: New Functional PeopleSoft PeopleTools Capabilities for the Line-of-Business User5:00 - 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2; Moscone West – 3007 If you’re interested in E-Business Suite: GEN8474: General Session: Oracle E-Business Suite—Strategy, Update, and Roadmap12:15 - 1:15 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone West - 2002/2004 CON9026: Latest Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 User Interface and Usability Enhancements1:15 - 2:15 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2; Moscone West – 2016 If you’re interested in Siebel: CON9700: Siebel CRM Overview, Strategy, and Roadmap12:15 - 1:15 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone West – 2009 CON9703: User Interface Innovations with the New Siebel “Open UI”10:15 - 11:15 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2; Moscone West – 2009 If you’re interested in JD Edwards EnterpriseOne: HOL10452: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1 User Interface Changes10:15 - 11:15 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3; Marriott Marquis - Nob Hill AB CON9160: Showcase of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne User Experience1:15 - 2:15 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3; InterContinental - Grand Ballroom B CON9159: Euphoria with the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne User Experience11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3; InterContinental - Grand Ballroom B If you’re interested in Oracle Fusion Applications user experience design patterns: Functional design patterns that helped create the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience are now available. Learn more about these new, reusable usability solutions and best-practices at the Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF demopods during Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Or visit the OTN Lounge between 4:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 3, to talk to Ultan O'Broin from the Oracle Applications User Experience team.    Demopod location: Moscone Center, South Exhibition Hall Level 1, S-207 OTN (Oracle Technology Network) Lounge: Howard Street tent On the demogrounds: Head to the demogrounds to see new demos from the Applications User Experience team, including the new look for Fusion Applications and what we’re building for mobile platforms. Take a spin on our eye tracker, a very cool tool that we use to research the usability of a particular design. Visit the Usable Apps OpenWorld page to find out where our demopods will be located.Photo by Martin Taylor, Oracle Applications User ExperienceA tour takes place in one of the usability labs at Oracle’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif. At our labs, on-site and at HQ: We are also recruiting participants for our on-site lab, in which we gather feedback on new user experience designs, and taking reservations for a charter bus that will bring you to Oracle headquarters for a lab tour Thursday, Oct. 4, or Friday, Oct. 5. Tours leave at 10 a.m. and 1:45 p.m. from the Moscone Center in San Francisco. You’ll see more of our newest designs at the lab tour, and some of our research tools in action. For more information on any OpenWorld sessions, check the content catalog, also available at www.oracle.com/openworld. For information on Applications User Experience (Apps UX) sessions and activities, go to the Usable Apps OpenWorld page.

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• Books are Dead! Long Live the Books!

  - by smisner

  We live in interesting times with regard to the availability of technical material. We have lots of free written material online in the form of vendor documentation online, forums, blogs, and Twitter. And we have written material that we can buy in the form of books, magazines, and training materials. Online videos and training – some free and some not free – are also an option. All of these formats are useful for one need or another. As an author, I pay particular attention to the demand for books, and for now I see no reason to stop authoring books. I assure you that I don’t get rich from the effort, and fortunately that is not my motivation. As someone who likes to refer to books frequently, I am still a big believer in books and have evidence from book sales that there are others like me. If I can do my part to help others learn about the technologies I work with, I will continue to produce content in a variety of formats, including books. (You can view a list of all of my books on the Publications page of my site and my online training videos at Pluralsight.) As a consumer of technical information, I prefer books because a book typically can get into a topic much more deeply than a blog post, and can provide more context than vendor documentation. It comes with a table of contents and a (hopefully accurate) index that helps me zero in on a topic of interest, and of course I can use the Search feature in digital form. Some people suggest that technology books are outdated as soon as they get published. I guess it depends on where you are with technology. Not everyone is able to upgrade to the latest and greatest version at release. I do assume, however, that the SQL Server 7.0 titles in my library have little value for me now, but I’m certain that the minute I discard the book, I’m going to want it for some reason! Meanwhile, as electronic books overtake physical books in sales, my husband is grateful that I can continue to build my collection digitally rather than physically as the books have a way of taking over significant square footage in our house! Blog posts, on the other hand, are useful for describing the scenarios that come up in real-life implementations that wouldn’t fit neatly into a book. As many years that I have working with the Microsoft BI stack, I still run into new problems that require creative thinking. Likewise, people who work with BI and other technologies that I use share what they learn through their blogs. Internet search engines help us find information in blogs that simply isn’t available anywhere else. Another great thing about blogs, also, is the connection to community and the dialog that can ensue between people with common interests. With the trend towards electronic formats for books, I imagine that we’ll see books continue to adapt to incorporate different forms of media and better ways to keep the information current. At the moment, I wish I had a better way to help readers with my last two Reporting Services books. In the case of the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Reporting Services Step by Step book, I have heard many cases of readers having problems with the sample database that shipped on CD – either the database was missing or it was corrupt. So I’ve provided a copy of the database on my site for download from http://datainspirations.com/uploads/rs2005sbsDW.zip. Then for the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 Reporting Services Step by Step book, we decided to avoid the database problem by using the AdventureWorks2008 samples that Microsoft published on Codeplex (although code samples are still available on CD). We had this silly idea that the URL for the download would remain constant, but it seems that expectation was ill-founded. Currently, the sample database is found at http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/37109 but I have no idea how long that will remain valid. My latest books (#9 and #10 which are milestones I never anticipated), Building Integrated Business Intelligence Solutions with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010 (McGraw Hill, 2011) and Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Microsoft Press, 2011), will not ship with a CD, but will provide all code samples for download at a site maintained by the respective publishers. I expect that the URLs for the downloads for the book will remain valid, but there are lots of references to other sites that can change or disappear over time. Does that mean authors shouldn’t make reference to such sites? Personally, I think the benefits to be gained from including links are greater than the risks of the links becoming invalid at some point. Do you think the time for technology books has come to an end? Is the delivery of books in electronic format enough to keep them alive? If technological barriers were no object, what would make a book more valuable to you than other formats through which you can obtain information?

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• C# XPath Not Finding Anything

  - by ehdv

  I'm trying to use XPath to select the items which have a facet with Location values, but currently my attempts even to just select all items fail: The system happily reports that it found 0 items, then returns (instead the nodes should be processed by a foreach loop). I'd appreciate help either making my original query or just getting XPath to work at all. XML <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <Collection Name="My Collection" SchemaVersion="1.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/collection/metadata/2009" xmlns:p="http://schemas.microsoft.com/livelabs/pivot/collection/2009" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <FacetCategories> <FacetCategory Name="Current Address" Type="Location"/> <FacetCategory Name="Previous Addresses" Type="Location" /> </FacetCategories> <Items> <Item Id="1" Name="John Doe"> <Facets> <Facet Name="Current Address"> <Location Value="101 America Rd, A Dorm Rm 000, Chapel Hill, NC 27514" /> </Facet> <Facet Name="Previous Addresses"> <Location Value="123 Anywhere Ln, Darien, CT 06820" /> <Location Value="000 Foobar Rd, Cary, NC 27519" /> </Facet> </Facets> </Item> </Items> </Collection> C# public void countItems(string fileName) { XmlDocument document = new XmlDocument(); document.Load(fileName); XmlNode root = document.DocumentElement; XmlNodeList xnl = root.SelectNodes("//Item"); Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Found {0} items" , xnl.Count)); } There's more to the method than this, but since this is all that gets run I'm assuming the problem lies here. Calling root.ChildNodes accurately returns FacetCategories and Items, so I am completely at a loss. Thanks for your help!

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• How to use Koala Facebook Graph API?

  - by reko

  I am a Rails newbie. I want to use Koala's Graph API. In my controller @graph = Koala::Facebook::API.new('myFacebookAccessToken') @hello = @graph.get_object("my.Name") When I do this, I get something like this { "id"=>"123456", "name"=>"First Middle Last", "first_name"=>"First", "middle_name"=>"Middle", "last_name"=>"Last", "link"=>"http://www.facebook.com/MyName", "username"=>"my.name", "birthday"=>"12/12/1212", "hometown"=>{"id"=>"115200305133358163", "name"=>"City, State"}, "location"=>{"id"=>"1054648928202133335", "name"=>"City, State"}, "bio"=>"This is my awesome Bio.", "quotes"=>"I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. - William Ernest Henley\r\n\r\n"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.\" - Mark Twain", "work"=>[{"employer"=>{"id"=>"100751133333", "name"=>"Company1"}, "position"=>{"id"=>"105763693332790962", "name"=>"Position1"}, "start_date"=>"2010-08", "end_date"=>"2011-07"}], "sports"=>[{"id"=>"104019549633137", "name"=>"Sport1"}, {"id"=>"103992339636529", "name"=>"Sport2"}], "favorite_teams"=>[{"id"=>"105467226133353743", "name"=>"Fav1"}, {"id"=>"19031343444432369133", "name"=>"Fav2"}, {"id"=>"98027790139333", "name"=>"Fav3"}, {"id"=>"104055132963393331", "name"=>"Fav4"}, {"id"=>"191744431437533310", "name"=>"Fav5"}], "favorite_athletes"=>[{"id"=>"10836600585799922", "name"=>"Fava1"}, {"id"=>"18995689436787722", "name"=>"Fava2"}, {"id"=>"11156342219404022", "name"=>"Fava4"}, {"id"=>"11169998212279347", "name"=>"Fava5"}, {"id"=>"122326564475039", "name"=>"Fava6"}], "inspirational_people"=>[{"id"=>"16383141733798", "name"=>"Fava7"}, {"id"=>"113529011990793335", "name"=>"fava8"}, {"id"=>"112032333138809855566", "name"=>"Fava9"}, {"id"=>"10810367588423324", "name"=>"Fava10"}], "education"=>[{"school"=>{"id"=>"13478880321332322233663", "name"=>"School1"}, "type"=>"High School", "with"=>[{"id"=>"1401052755", "name"=>"Friend1"}]}, {"school"=>{"id"=>"11482777188037224", "name"=>"School2"}, "year"=>{"id"=>"138383069535219", "name"=>"2005"}, "type"=>"High School"}, {"school"=>{"id"=>"10604484633093514", "name"=>"School3"}, "year"=>{"id"=>"142963519060927", "name"=>"2010"}, "concentration"=>[{"id"=>"10407695629335773", "name"=>"c1"}], "type"=>"College"}, {"school"=>{"id"=>"22030497466330708", "name"=>"School4"}, "degree"=>{"id"=>"19233130157477979", "name"=>"c3"}, "year"=>{"id"=>"201638419856163", "name"=>"2011"}, "type"=>"Graduate School"}], "gender"=>"male", "interested_in"=>["female"], "relationship_status"=>"Single", "religion"=>"Religion1", "political"=>"Political1", "email"=>"[email protected]", "timezone"=>-8, "locale"=>"en_US", "languages"=>[{"id"=>"10605952233759137", "name"=>"English"}, {"id"=>"10337617475934611", "name"=>"L2"}, {"id"=>"11296944428713061", "name"=>"L3"}], "verified"=>true, "updated_time"=>"2012-02-24T04:18:05+0000" } How do I show this entire hash in the view in a good format? This is what I did from what ever I learnt.. In my view <% @hello.each do |key, value| %> <li><%=h "#{key.to_s} : #{value.to_s}" %></li> <% end %> This will get the entire thing converted to a list... It works awesome if its just one key.. but how to work with multiple keys and show only the information... something like when it outputs hometown : City, State rather than something like hometown : {"id"=>"115200305133358163", "name"=>"City, State"} Also for education if I just say education[school][name] to display list of schools attended? The error i get is can't convert String into Integer I also tried to do this in my controller, but I get the same error.. @fav_teams = @hello["favorite_teams"]["name"] Also, how can I save all these to the database.. something like just the list of all schools.. not their id no's? Update: The way I plan to save to my database is.. lets say for a user model, i want to save to database as :facebook_id, :facebook_name, :facebook_firstname, ...., :facebook_hometown .. here I only want to save name... when it comes to education.. I want to save.. school, concentration and type.. I have no idea on how to achieve this.. Looking forward for help! thanks!

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• C# Neural Networks with Encog

  - by JoshReuben

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

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• Is there a Generic USB TouchScreen Driver 12.04?

  - by lbjoum

  Is there a Generic USB TouchScreen Driver 12.04? Device 03eb:201c I've been looking for 4 days solid (not very skilled) and can't find a solution. I have a generic tablet: C97- Atom N2600 9.7" 2GB 32GB Bluetooth WiFi WebCam Ext.3G Windows 7 Tablet PC Using 12.04 and cannot find a driver. I installed android and the touchscreen works but still lots of other bugs. Oh well, stuck with Windows 7 and not happy about it. Will keep trying, but too much time wasted already. If you have a solution I would love to try it. ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ lsusb Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0cf2:6238 ENE Technology, Inc. Bus 001 Device 003: ID 1a40:0101 Terminus Technology Inc. 4-Port HUB Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05e1:0100 Syntek Semiconductor Co., Ltd 802.11g + Bluetooth Wireless Adapter Bus 001 Device 006: ID 090c:3731 Silicon Motion, Inc. - Taiwan (formerly Feiya Technology Corp.) Bus 003 Device 002: ID 03eb:201c Atmel Corp. at90usbkey sample firmware (HID mouse) (from Windows: HID\VID_03EB&PID_201C\6&5F38127&0&0000 USB\VID_03EB&PID_201C\5&193ADADC&1&2 ) Bus 001 Device 007: ID 0518:0001 EzKEY Corp. USB to PS2 Adaptor v1.09 Bus 001 Device 008: ID 192f:0916 Avago Technologies, Pte. ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo lsusb -v Bus 003 Device 002: ID 03eb:201c Atmel Corp. at90usbkey sample firmware (HID mouse) Device Descriptor: bLength 18 bDescriptorType 1 bcdUSB 2.00 bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level) bDeviceSubClass 0 bDeviceProtocol 0 bMaxPacketSize0 32 idVendor 0x03eb Atmel Corp. idProduct 0x201c at90usbkey sample firmware (HID mouse) bcdDevice 45.a2 iManufacturer 1 CDT iProduct 2 9.75 iSerial 0 bNumConfigurations 1 Configuration Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 2 wTotalLength 34 bNumInterfaces 1 bConfigurationValue 1 iConfiguration 0 bmAttributes 0x00 (Missing must-be-set bit!) (Bus Powered) MaxPower 100mA Interface Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 4 bInterfaceNumber 0 bAlternateSetting 0 bNumEndpoints 1 bInterfaceClass 3 Human Interface Device bInterfaceSubClass 0 No Subclass bInterfaceProtocol 0 None iInterface 0 HID Device Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 33 bcdHID 1.11 bCountryCode 0 Not supported bNumDescriptors 1 bDescriptorType 34 Report wDescriptorLength 177 Report Descriptors: ** UNAVAILABLE ** Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x81 EP 1 IN bmAttributes 3 Transfer Type Interrupt Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0020 1x 32 bytes bInterval 5 Device Status: 0x00fb Self Powered Remote Wakeup Enabled Debug Mode ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo lshw ubuntu description: Notebook product: To be filled by O.E.M. (To be filled by O.E.M.) vendor: To be filled by O.E.M. version: To be filled by O.E.M. serial: To be filled by O.E.M. width: 32 bits capabilities: smbios-2.7 dmi-2.7 smp-1.4 smp configuration: boot=normal chassis=notebook cpus=2 family=To be filled by O.E.M. sku=To be filled by O.E.M. uuid=00020003-0004-0005-0006-000700080009 *-core description: Motherboard product: Tiger Hill vendor: INTEL Corporation physical id: 0 version: To be filled by O.E.M. serial: To be filled by O.E.M. slot: To be filled by O.E.M. *-firmware description: BIOS vendor: American Megatrends Inc. physical id: 0 version: 4.6.5 date: 08/24/2012 size: 64KiB capacity: 960KiB capabilities: pci upgrade shadowing cdboot bootselect socketedrom edd int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int13floppy2880 int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer acpi usb biosbootspecification *-cpu:0 description: CPU product: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N2600 @ 1.60GHz vendor: Intel Corp. physical id: 4 bus info: cpu@0 version: 6.6.1 serial: 0003-0661-0000-0000-0000-0000 slot: CPU 1 size: 1600MHz capacity: 1600MHz width: 64 bits clock: 400MHz capabilities: x86-64 boot fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm movbe lahf_lm arat configuration: cores=2 enabledcores=1 id=2 threads=2 *-cache:0 description: L1 cache physical id: 5 slot: L1-Cache size: 24KiB capacity: 24KiB capabilities: internal write-back unified *-cache:1 description: L2 cache physical id: 6 slot: L2-Cache size: 512KiB capacity: 512KiB capabilities: internal varies unified *-logicalcpu:0 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.1 width: 64 bits capabilities: logical *-logicalcpu:1 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.2 width: 64 bits capabilities: logical *-logicalcpu:2 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.3 width: 64 bits capabilities: logical *-logicalcpu:3 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.4 width: 64 bits capabilities: logical *-memory description: System Memory physical id: 28 slot: System board or motherboard size: 2GiB *-bank:0 description: SODIMM [empty] product: [Empty] vendor: [Empty] physical id: 0 serial: [Empty] slot: DIMM0 *-bank:1 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 800 MHz (1.2 ns) vendor: 69 physical id: 1 serial: 00000210 slot: DIMM1 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 800MHz (1.2ns) *-cpu:1 physical id: 1 bus info: cpu@1 version: 6.6.1 serial: 0003-0661-0000-0000-0000-0000 size: 1600MHz capabilities: ht configuration: id=2 *-logicalcpu:0 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.1 capabilities: logical *-logicalcpu:1 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.2 capabilities: logical *-logicalcpu:2 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.3 capabilities: logical *-logicalcpu:3 description: Logical CPU physical id: 2.4 capabilities: logical *-pci description: Host bridge product: Atom Processor D2xxx/N2xxx DRAM Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 100 bus info: pci@0000:00:00.0 version: 03 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-display UNCLAIMED description: VGA compatible controller product: Atom Processor D2xxx/N2xxx Integrated Graphics Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 2 bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0 version: 09 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:dfe00000-dfefffff ioport:f100(size=8) *-multimedia description: Audio device product: N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1b bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0 version: 02 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0 resources: irq:42 memory:dff00000-dff03fff *-pci:0 description: PCI bridge product: N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.0 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:40 ioport:2000(size=4096) memory:80000000-801fffff ioport:80200000(size=2097152) *-usb:0 description: USB controller product: N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.0 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: uhci bus_master configuration: driver=uhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:23 ioport:f0a0(size=32) *-usb:1 description: USB controller product: N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #2 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d.1 bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.1 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: uhci bus_master configuration: driver=uhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:19 ioport:f080(size=32) *-usb:2 description: USB controller product: N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #3 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.2 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: uhci bus_master configuration: driver=uhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:18 ioport:f060(size=32) *-usb:3 description: USB controller product: N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #4 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.3 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: uhci bus_master configuration: driver=uhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:16 ioport:f040(size=32) *-usb:4 description: USB controller product: N10/ICH 7 Family USB2 EHCI Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d.7 bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.7 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:23 memory:dff05000-dff053ff *-pci:1 description: PCI bridge product: 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1e bus info: pci@0000:00:1e.0 version: e2 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci subtractive_decode bus_master cap_list *-isa description: ISA bridge product: NM10 Family LPC Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.0 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: isa bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 *-storage description: SATA controller product: N10/ICH7 Family SATA Controller [AHCI mode] vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.2 logical name: scsi0 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: storage msi pm ahci_1.0 bus_master cap_list emulated configuration: driver=ahci latency=0 resources: irq:41 ioport:f0f0(size=8) ioport:f0e0(size=4) ioport:f0d0(size=8) ioport:f0c0(size=4) ioport:f020(size=16) memory:dff04000-dff043ff *-disk description: ATA Disk product: BIWIN SSD physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: 1206 serial: 123403501060 size: 29GiB (32GB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=8fbe402b *-volume:0 description: Windows NTFS volume physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sda1 version: 3.1 serial: 249bde5d-8246-9a40-88c7-2d5e3bcaf692 size: 19GiB capacity: 19GiB capabilities: primary bootable ntfs initialized configuration: clustersize=4096 created=2011-04-04 02:27:51 filesystem=ntfs state=clean *-volume:1 description: Windows NTFS volume physical id: 2 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,2 logical name: /dev/sda2 version: 3.1 serial: de12d40f-d5ca-8642-b306-acd9349fda1a size: 10231MiB capacity: 10GiB capabilities: primary ntfs initialized configuration: clustersize=4096 created=2011-04-04 01:52:26 filesystem=ntfs state=clean *-serial UNCLAIMED description: SMBus product: N10/ICH 7 Family SMBus Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.3 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: latency=0 resources: ioport:f000(size=32) *-scsi:0 physical id: 2 bus info: usb@1:1 logical name: scsi4 capabilities: emulated scsi-host configuration: driver=usb-storage *-disk description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@4:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdb size: 29GiB (31GB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: signature=00017463 *-volume description: Windows FAT volume vendor: mkdosfs physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@4:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sdb1 logical name: /cdrom version: FAT32 serial: 129b-4f87 size: 29GiB capacity: 29GiB capabilities: primary bootable fat initialized configuration: FATs=2 filesystem=fat mount.fstype=vfat mount.options=rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro state=mounted *-scsi:1 physical id: 3 bus info: usb@1:3.1 logical name: scsi6 capabilities: emulated scsi-host configuration: driver=usb-storage *-disk description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdc size: 7400MiB (7759MB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: signature=c3072e18 *-volume description: Windows FAT volume vendor: mkdosfs physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sdc1 logical name: /media/JOUM8G version: FAT32 serial: e676-9311 size: 7394MiB capacity: 7394MiB capabilities: primary bootable fat initialized configuration: FATs=2 filesystem=fat label=Android mount.fstype=vfat mount.options=rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=999,gid=999,fmask=0022,dmask=0077,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,showexec,utf8,flush,errors=remount-ro state=mounted ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ xinput list ? Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)] ? ? Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)] ? ? Plus More Enterprise LTD. USB-compliant keyboard id=10 [slave pointer (2)] ? ? USB Optical Mouse id=11 [slave pointer (2)] ? Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)] ? Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Power Button id=7 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Sleep Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Plus More Enterprise LTD. USB-compliant keyboard id=9 [slave keyboard (3)] ? USB 2.0 Webcam - Front id=12 [slave keyboard (3)] ? AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=13 [slave keyboard (3)] ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

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• Remove/squash entries in a vertical hash

  - by Forkrul Assail

  I have a grid that represents an X, Y matrix, stored as a hash here. Some points on the X Y matrix may have values (as type string), and some may not. A typical grid could look like this: {[9, 5]=>"Alaina", [10, 3]=>"Courtney", [11, 1]=>"Gladys", [8, 7]=>"Alford", [14, 11]=>"Lesley", [17, 2]=>"Lawson", [0, 5]=>"Katrine", [2, 1]=>"Tyra", [3, 3]=>"Fredy", [1, 7]=>"Magnus", [6, 9]=>"Nels", [7, 11]=>"Kylie", [11, 0]=>"Kellen", [10, 2]=>"Johan", [14, 10]=>"Justice", [0, 4]=>"Barton", [2, 0]=>"Charley", [3, 2]=>"Magnolia", [1, 6]=>"Maximo", [7, 10]=>"Olga", [19, 5]=>"Isadore", [16, 3]=>"Delfina", [17, 1]=>"Noe", [20, 11]=>"Francis", [10, 5]=>"Creola", [9, 3]=>"Bulah", [8, 1]=>"Lempi", [11, 7]=>"Raquel", [13, 11]=>"Jace", [1, 5]=>"Garth", [3, 1]=>"Ernest", [2, 3]=>"Malcolm", [0, 7]=>"Alejandrin", [7, 9]=>"Marina", [6, 11]=>"Otilia", [16, 2]=>"Hailey", [20, 10]=>"Brandt", [8, 0]=>"Madeline", [9, 2]=>"Leanne", [13, 10]=>"Jenifer", [1, 4]=>"Humberto", [3, 0]=>"Nicholaus", [2, 2]=>"Nadia", [0, 6]=>"Abigail", [6, 10]=>"Zola", [20, 5]=>"Clementina", [23, 3]=>"Alvah", [19, 11]=>"Wallace", [11, 5]=>"Tracey", [8, 3]=>"Hulda", [9, 1]=>"Jedidiah", [10, 7]=>"Annetta", [12, 11]=>"Nicole", [2, 5]=>"Alison", [0, 1]=>"Wilma", [1, 3]=>"Shana", [3, 7]=>"Judd", [4, 9]=>"Lucio", [5, 11]=>"Hardy", [19, 10]=>"Immanuel", [9, 0]=>"Uriel", [8, 2]=>"Milton", [12, 10]=>"Elody", [5, 10]=>"Alexanne", [1, 2]=>"Lauretta", [0, 0]=>"Louvenia", [2, 4]=>"Adelia", [21, 5]=>"Erling", [18, 11]=>"Corene", [22, 3]=>"Haskell", [11, 11]=>"Leta", [10, 9]=>"Terrence", [14, 1]=>"Giuseppe", [15, 3]=>"Silas", [12, 5]=>"Johnnie", [4, 11]=>"Aurelie", [5, 9]=>"Meggie", [2, 7]=>"Phoebe", [0, 3]=>"Sister", [1, 1]=>"Violet", [3, 5]=>"Lilian", [18, 10]=>"Eusebio", [11, 10]=>"Emma", [15, 2]=>"Theodore", [14, 0]=>"Cassidy", [4, 10]=>"Edmund", [2, 6]=>"Claire", [0, 2]=>"Madisen", [1, 0]=>"Kasey", [3, 4]=>"Elijah", [17, 11]=>"Susana", [20, 1]=>"Nicklaus", [21, 3]=>"Kelsie", [10, 11]=>"Garnett", [11, 9]=>"Emanuel", [15, 1]=>"Louvenia", [14, 3]=>"Otho", [13, 5]=>"Vincenza", [3, 11]=>"Tate", [2, 9]=>"Beau", [5, 7]=>"Jason", [6, 1]=>"Jayde", [7, 3]=>"Lamont", [4, 5]=>"Curt", [17, 10]=>"Mack", [21, 2]=>"Lilyan", [10, 10]=>"Ruthe", [14, 2]=>"Georgianna", [4, 4]=>"Nyasia", [6, 0]=>"Sadie", [16, 11]=>"Emil", [21, 1]=>"Melba", [20, 3]=>"Delia", [3, 10]=>"Rosalee", [2, 8]=>"Myrtle", [7, 2]=>"Rigoberto", [14, 5]=>"Jedidiah", [13, 3]=>"Flavie", [12, 1]=>"Evie", [8, 9]=>"Olaf", [9, 11]=>"Stan", [20, 2]=>"Judge", [5, 5]=>"Cassie", [7, 1]=>"Gracie", [6, 3]=>"Armando", [4, 7]=>"Delia", [3, 9]=>"Marley", [16, 10]=>"Robyn", [2, 11]=>"Richie", [12, 0]=>"Gilberto", [13, 2]=>"Dedrick", [9, 10]=>"Liam", [5, 4]=>"Jabari", [7, 0]=>"Enola", [6, 2]=>"Lela", [3, 8]=>"Jade", [2, 10]=>"Johnson", [15, 5]=>"Willow", [12, 3]=>"Fredrick", [13, 1]=>"Beau", [9, 9]=>"Carlie", [8, 11]=>"Daisha", [6, 5]=>"Declan", [4, 1]=>"Carolina", [5, 3]=>"Cruz", [7, 7]=>"Jaime", [0, 9]=>"Anthony", [1, 11]=>"Esta", [13, 0]=>"Shaina", [12, 2]=>"Alec", [8, 10]=>"Lora", [6, 4]=>"Emely", [4, 0]=>"Rodger", [5, 2]=>"Cedrick", [0, 8]=>"Collin", [1, 10]=>"Armani", [16, 5]=>"Brooks", [19, 3]=>"Eleanora", [18, 1]=>"Alva", [7, 5]=>"Melissa", [5, 1]=>"Tabitha", [4, 3]=>"Aniya", [6, 7]=>"Marc", [1, 9]=>"Marjorie", [0, 11]=>"Arvilla", [19, 2]=>"Adela", [7, 4]=>"Zakary", [5, 0]=>"Emely", [4, 2]=>"Alison", [1, 8]=>"Lorenz", [0, 10]=>"Lisandro", [17, 5]=>"Aylin", [18, 3]=>"Giles", [19, 1]=>"Kyleigh", [8, 5]=>"Mary", [11, 3]=>"Claire", [10, 1]=>"Avis", [9, 7]=>"Manuela", [15, 11]=>"Chesley", [18, 2]=>"Kristopher", [24, 3]=>"Zola", [8, 4]=>"Pietro", [10, 0]=>"Delores", [11, 2]=>"Timmy", [15, 10]=>"Khalil", [18, 5]=>"Trudie", [17, 3]=>"Rafael", [16, 1]=>"Anthony"} What I need to do though, is basically remove all the empty entries. Let's say [17,3] = Raphael does not have an element in front of if (let's say - no [16,3] exists) then [17,3] should become [16,3] etc. So basically all empty items will be popped off the vertical (row) structure of the hash. Are there functions I should have a look at or is there an easy squash-like method that would just remove blanks and adjust and move other items? Thanks in advance for your help.

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• Js/Jquery bind Datatable or Datalist

  - by Robin Rieger

  Scenario I have a input box for post codes. When you put in a postcode it makes a call to a web service and gets all the suburb names back and binds them to a list, like an input dropdown list. This works when I return a List<string> from the web service for just the names. No problem. The problem arises when I go to save the values to the db. When it gets saved I cannot save the name of the suburb in the suburb column in the db. I have to save the id of that suburb for the foreign key constraint. So then I changed the List<> thing slighty and cheated and returned the following. <ArrayOfString> <string>8213</string> <string>BROOKFIELD</string> <string>8214</string> <string>CHAPEL HILL</string> <string>8215</string> <string>FIG TREE POCKET</string> etc.... The reason for this is so I can have the value of the item in the drop down as the id and hence can save that in the code behind on save. To do this, I did the following: $(result).each(function (index, value) { var suburbname; var pattern = new RegExp('[0-9*]'); var m = pattern.exec(value); if (m == null) { suburbname = value var o = new Option(suburbname, suburbid); /// jquerify the DOM object 'o' so we can use the html method $(o).html(suburbname); $(document.getElementById('<%= suburb.ClientID %>')).append($("<option></option>") .attr("value", suburbid) .text(suburbname)); } else { suburbid = value } That works as well... the drop down only has name and the value for those is the number The problem....? I am making assumptions above which I don't like... I.e. that the name never has a number it, that the web service will always return the id first to set the id before running the add to the dropdown for the first time. It just feels wrong.... :S (thoughts?) So, if I change the web service to return a datatable, to out the following (which is what the whole query returns): <Suburbs diffgr:id="Suburbs1" msdata:rowOrder="0"> <SuburbID>8213</SuburbID> <SuburbName>BROOKFIELD</SuburbName> <StateID>4</StateID> <StateCode>07</StateCode> <CountryCode>61</CountryCode> <TimeZones>10.00</TimeZones> <Postcode>4069</Postcode> </Suburbs> Is there a way of acheiving the same as above in js/jquery. So when the user inputs the postcode the webservice returns the datatable and then binds it to the select with the SuburbID going into the value and the name going into the text??? Any other ways I could return the data from the web service to solve this? Note: essentially I need the option to look like this: <option value="8213">BROOKFIELD</option> I also thought I could make a second call to get just the id on the bind of the text... but I kind of want to only make one call.... Thanks in adance, Cheers Robin .net, C#, js, jquery, web service..... Solution with guidance from Billy The adding to the select using the other method below did not work, but my original way did once I had the correct variables so just used that.... The service returns: <ArrayOfMyClass> <MyClass> <ID>8213</ID> <Name>BROOKFIELD</Name> </MyClass> ... etc The js is: (note: it is onchange of the postcode input box. it runs a web service and then on success runs the following) function OnCompleted(result) { var _suburbs = result; var i = 0; $(_suburbs).each(function () { var SuburbName = _suburbs[i].Name; var SuburbID = _suburbs[i].ID; $(document.getElementById('<%= suburb.ClientID %>')).append($("<option></option>") .attr("value", SuburbID) .text(SuburbName)); i = i + 1; });

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• C++ Linked List - Reading data from a file with a sentinel

  - by Nick

  So I've done quite a bit of research on this and can't get my output to work correctly. I need to read in data from a file and have it stored into a Linked List. The while loop used should stop once it hits the $$$$$ sentinel. Then I am to display the data (by searching by ID Number[user input]) I am not that far yet I just want to properly display the data and get it read in for right now. My problem is when it displays the data is isn't stopping at the $$$$$ (even if I do "inFile.peek() != EOF and omit the $$$$$) I am still getting an extra garbage record. I know it has something to do with my while loop and how I am creating a new Node but I can't get it to work any other way. Any help would be appreciated. students.txt Nick J Cooley 324123 60 70 80 90 Jay M Hill 412254 70 80 90 100 $$$$$ assign6.h file #pragma once #include <iostream> #include <string> using namespace std; class assign6 { public: assign6(); // constructor void displayStudents(); private: struct Node { string firstName; string midIni; string lastName; int idNum; int sco1; //Test score 1 int sco2; //Test score 2 int sco3; //Test score 3 int sco4; //Test score 4 Node *next; }; Node *head; Node *headPtr; }; assign6Imp.cpp // Implementation File #include "assign6.h" #include <fstream> #include <iostream> #include <string> using namespace std; assign6::assign6() //constructor { ifstream inFile; inFile.open("students.txt"); head = NULL; head = new Node; headPtr = head; while (inFile.peek() != EOF) //reading in from file and storing in linked list { inFile >> head->firstName >> head->midIni >> head->lastName; inFile >> head->idNum; inFile >> head->sco1; inFile >> head->sco2; inFile >> head->sco3; inFile >> head->sco4; if (inFile != "$$$$$") { head->next = NULL; head->next = new Node; head = head->next; } } head->next = NULL; inFile.close(); } void assign6::displayStudents() { int average = 0; for (Node *cur = headPtr; cur != NULL; cur = cur->next) { cout << cur->firstName << " " << cur->midIni << " " << cur->lastName << endl; cout << cur->idNum << endl; average = (cur->sco1 + cur->sco2 + cur->sco3 + cur->sco4)/4; cout << cur->sco1 << " " << cur->sco2 << " " << cur->sco3 << " " << cur->sco4 << " " << "average: " << average << endl; } }

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• A Taxonomy of Numerical Methods v1

  - by JoshReuben

  Numerical Analysis – When, What, (but not how) Once you understand the Math & know C++, Numerical Methods are basically blocks of iterative & conditional math code. I found the real trick was seeing the forest for the trees – knowing which method to use for which situation. Its pretty easy to get lost in the details – so I’ve tried to organize these methods in a way that I can quickly look this up. I’ve included links to detailed explanations and to C++ code examples. I’ve tried to classify Numerical methods in the following broad categories: Solving Systems of Linear Equations Solving Non-Linear Equations Iteratively Interpolation Curve Fitting Optimization Numerical Differentiation & Integration Solving ODEs Boundary Problems Solving EigenValue problems Enjoy – I did ! Solving Systems of Linear Equations Overview Solve sets of algebraic equations with x unknowns The set is commonly in matrix form Gauss-Jordan Elimination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Jordan_elimination C++: http://www.codekeep.net/snippets/623f1923-e03c-4636-8c92-c9dc7aa0d3c0.aspx Produces solution of the equations & the coefficient matrix Efficient, stable 2 steps: · Forward Elimination – matrix decomposition: reduce set to triangular form (0s below the diagonal) or row echelon form. If degenerate, then there is no solution · Backward Elimination –write the original matrix as the product of ints inverse matrix & its reduced row-echelon matrix à reduce set to row canonical form & use back-substitution to find the solution to the set Elementary ops for matrix decomposition: · Row multiplication · Row switching · Add multiples of rows to other rows Use pivoting to ensure rows are ordered for achieving triangular form LU Decomposition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LU_decomposition C++: http://ganeshtiwaridotcomdotnp.blogspot.co.il/2009/12/c-c-code-lu-decomposition-for-solving.html Represent the matrix as a product of lower & upper triangular matrices A modified version of GJ Elimination Advantage – can easily apply forward & backward elimination to solve triangular matrices Techniques: · Doolittle Method – sets the L matrix diagonal to unity · Crout Method - sets the U matrix diagonal to unity Note: both the L & U matrices share the same unity diagonal & can be stored compactly in the same matrix Gauss-Seidel Iteration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Seidel_method C++: http://www.nr.com/forum/showthread.php?t=722 Transform the linear set of equations into a single equation & then use numerical integration (as integration formulas have Sums, it is implemented iteratively). an optimization of Gauss-Jacobi: 1.5 times faster, requires 0.25 iterations to achieve the same tolerance Solving Non-Linear Equations Iteratively find roots of polynomials – there may be 0, 1 or n solutions for an n order polynomial use iterative techniques Iterative methods · used when there are no known analytical techniques · Requires set functions to be continuous & differentiable · Requires an initial seed value – choice is critical to convergence à conduct multiple runs with different starting points & then select best result · Systematic - iterate until diminishing returns, tolerance or max iteration conditions are met · bracketing techniques will always yield convergent solutions, non-bracketing methods may fail to converge Incremental method if a nonlinear function has opposite signs at 2 ends of a small interval x1 & x2, then there is likely to be a solution in their interval – solutions are detected by evaluating a function over interval steps, for a change in sign, adjusting the step size dynamically. Limitations – can miss closely spaced solutions in large intervals, cannot detect degenerate (coinciding) solutions, limited to functions that cross the x-axis, gives false positives for singularities Fixed point method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_iteration C++: http://books.google.co.il/books?id=weYj75E_t6MC&pg=PA79&lpg=PA79&dq=fixed+point+method++c%2B%2B&source=bl&ots=LQ-5P_taoC&sig=lENUUIYBK53tZtTwNfHLy5PEWDk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wezDUPW1J5DptQaMsIHQCw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=fixed%20point%20method%20%20c%2B%2B&f=false Algebraically rearrange a solution to isolate a variable then apply incremental method Bisection method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisection_method C++: http://numericalcomputing.wordpress.com/category/algorithms/ Bracketed - Select an initial interval, keep bisecting it ad midpoint into sub-intervals and then apply incremental method on smaller & smaller intervals – zoom in Adv: unaffected by function gradient à reliable Disadv: slow convergence False Position Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_position_method C++: http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/126100-bisection-and-false-position-methods/ Bracketed - Select an initial interval , & use the relative value of function at interval end points to select next sub-intervals (estimate how far between the end points the solution might be & subdivide based on this) Newton-Raphson method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_method C++: http://www-users.cselabs.umn.edu/classes/Summer-2012/csci1113/index.php?page=./newt3 Also known as Newton's method Convenient, efficient Not bracketed – only a single initial guess is required to start iteration – requires an analytical expression for the first derivative of the function as input. Evaluates the function & its derivative at each step. Can be extended to the Newton MutiRoot method for solving multiple roots Can be easily applied to an of n-coupled set of non-linear equations – conduct a Taylor Series expansion of a function, dropping terms of order n, rewrite as a Jacobian matrix of PDs & convert to simultaneous linear equations !!! Secant Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secant_method C++: http://forum.vcoderz.com/showthread.php?p=205230 Unlike N-R, can estimate first derivative from an initial interval (does not require root to be bracketed) instead of inputting it Since derivative is approximated, may converge slower. Is fast in practice as it does not have to evaluate the derivative at each step. Similar implementation to False Positive method Birge-Vieta Method http://mat.iitm.ac.in/home/sryedida/public_html/caimna/transcendental/polynomial%20methods/bv%20method.html C++: http://books.google.co.il/books?id=cL1boM2uyQwC&pg=SA3-PA51&lpg=SA3-PA51&dq=Birge-Vieta+Method+c%2B%2B&source=bl&ots=QZmnDTK3rC&sig=BPNcHHbpR_DKVoZXrLi4nVXD-gg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=R-_DUK2iNIjzsgbE5ID4Dg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Birge-Vieta%20Method%20c%2B%2B&f=false combines Horner's method of polynomial evaluation (transforming into lesser degree polynomials that are more computationally efficient to process) with Newton-Raphson to provide a computational speed-up Interpolation Overview Construct new data points for as close as possible fit within range of a discrete set of known points (that were obtained via sampling, experimentation) Use Taylor Series Expansion of a function f(x) around a specific value for x Linear Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_interpolation C++: http://www.hamaluik.com/?p=289 Straight line between 2 points à concatenate interpolants between each pair of data points Bilinear Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_interpolation C++: http://supercomputingblog.com/graphics/coding-bilinear-interpolation/2/ Extension of the linear function for interpolating functions of 2 variables – perform linear interpolation first in 1 direction, then in another. Used in image processing – e.g. texture mapping filter. Uses 4 vertices to interpolate a value within a unit cell. Lagrange Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_polynomial C++: http://www.codecogs.com/code/maths/approximation/interpolation/lagrange.php For polynomials Requires recomputation for all terms for each distinct x value – can only be applied for small number of nodes Numerically unstable Barycentric Interpolation http://epubs.siam.org/doi/pdf/10.1137/S0036144502417715 C++: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/621445-barycentric-coordinates-c-code-check/ Rearrange the terms in the equation of the Legrange interpolation by defining weight functions that are independent of the interpolated value of x Newton Divided Difference Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_polynomial C++: http://jee-appy.blogspot.co.il/2011/12/newton-divided-difference-interpolation.html Hermite Divided Differences: Interpolation polynomial approximation for a given set of data points in the NR form - divided differences are used to approximately calculate the various differences. For a given set of 3 data points , fit a quadratic interpolant through the data Bracketed functions allow Newton divided differences to be calculated recursively Difference table Cubic Spline Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spline_interpolation C++: https://www.marcusbannerman.co.uk/index.php/home/latestarticles/42-articles/96-cubic-spline-class.html Spline is a piecewise polynomial Provides smoothness – for interpolations with significantly varying data Use weighted coefficients to bend the function to be smooth & its 1st & 2nd derivatives are continuous through the edge points in the interval Curve Fitting A generalization of interpolating whereby given data points may contain noise à the curve does not necessarily pass through all the points Least Squares Fit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_squares C++: http://www.ccas.ru/mmes/educat/lab04k/02/least-squares.c Residual – difference between observed value & expected value Model function is often chosen as a linear combination of the specified functions Determines: A) The model instance in which the sum of squared residuals has the least value B) param values for which model best fits data Straight Line Fit Linear correlation between independent variable and dependent variable Linear Regression http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression C++: http://www.oocities.org/david_swaim/cpp/linregc.htm Special case of statistically exact extrapolation Leverage least squares Given a basis function, the sum of the residuals is determined and the corresponding gradient equation is expressed as a set of normal linear equations in matrix form that can be solved (e.g. using LU Decomposition) Can be weighted - Drop the assumption that all errors have the same significance –-> confidence of accuracy is different for each data point. Fit the function closer to points with higher weights Polynomial Fit - use a polynomial basis function Moving Average http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_average C++: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/17860/A-Simple-Moving-Average-Algorithm Used for smoothing (cancel fluctuations to highlight longer-term trends & cycles), time series data analysis, signal processing filters Replace each data point with average of neighbors. Can be simple (SMA), weighted (WMA), exponential (EMA). Lags behind latest data points – extra weight can be given to more recent data points. Weights can decrease arithmetically or exponentially according to distance from point. Parameters: smoothing factor, period, weight basis Optimization Overview Given function with multiple variables, find Min (or max by minimizing –f(x)) Iterative approach Efficient, but not necessarily reliable Conditions: noisy data, constraints, non-linear models Detection via sign of first derivative - Derivative of saddle points will be 0 Local minima Bisection method Similar method for finding a root for a non-linear equation Start with an interval that contains a minimum Golden Search method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_section_search C++: http://www.codecogs.com/code/maths/optimization/golden.php Bisect intervals according to golden ratio 0.618.. Achieves reduction by evaluating a single function instead of 2 Newton-Raphson Method Brent method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent's_method C++: http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/cpp_src/brent/brent.cpp Based on quadratic or parabolic interpolation – if the function is smooth & parabolic near to the minimum, then a parabola fitted through any 3 points should approximate the minima – fails when the 3 points are collinear , in which case the denominator is 0 Simplex Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_algorithm C++: http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/article.php/c17505/Simplex-Optimization-Algorithm-and-Implemetation-in-C-Programming.htm Find the global minima of any multi-variable function Direct search – no derivatives required At each step it maintains a non-degenerative simplex – a convex hull of n+1 vertices. Obtains the minimum for a function with n variables by evaluating the function at n-1 points, iteratively replacing the point of worst result with the point of best result, shrinking the multidimensional simplex around the best point. Point replacement involves expanding & contracting the simplex near the worst value point to determine a better replacement point Oscillation can be avoided by choosing the 2nd worst result Restart if it gets stuck Parameters: contraction & expansion factors Simulated Annealing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing C++: http://code.google.com/p/cppsimulatedannealing/ Analogy to heating & cooling metal to strengthen its structure Stochastic method – apply random permutation search for global minima - Avoid entrapment in local minima via hill climbing Heating schedule - Annealing schedule params: temperature, iterations at each temp, temperature delta Cooling schedule – can be linear, step-wise or exponential Differential Evolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_evolution C++: http://www.amichel.com/de/doc/html/ More advanced stochastic methods analogous to biological processes: Genetic algorithms, evolution strategies Parallel direct search method against multiple discrete or continuous variables Initial population of variable vectors chosen randomly – if weighted difference vector of 2 vectors yields a lower objective function value then it replaces the comparison vector Many params: #parents, #variables, step size, crossover constant etc Convergence is slow – many more function evaluations than simulated annealing Numerical Differentiation Overview 2 approaches to finite difference methods: · A) approximate function via polynomial interpolation then differentiate · B) Taylor series approximation – additionally provides error estimate Finite Difference methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_difference_method C++: http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/ETD/Available/etd-051807-164436/unrestricted/EAMPADU.pdf Find differences between high order derivative values - Approximate differential equations by finite differences at evenly spaced data points Based on forward & backward Taylor series expansion of f(x) about x plus or minus multiples of delta h. Forward / backward difference - the sums of the series contains even derivatives and the difference of the series contains odd derivatives – coupled equations that can be solved. Provide an approximation of the derivative within a O(h^2) accuracy There is also central difference & extended central difference which has a O(h^4) accuracy Richardson Extrapolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richardson_extrapolation C++: http://mathscoding.blogspot.co.il/2012/02/introduction-richardson-extrapolation.html A sequence acceleration method applied to finite differences Fast convergence, high accuracy O(h^4) Derivatives via Interpolation Cannot apply Finite Difference method to discrete data points at uneven intervals – so need to approximate the derivative of f(x) using the derivative of the interpolant via 3 point Lagrange Interpolation Note: the higher the order of the derivative, the lower the approximation precision Numerical Integration Estimate finite & infinite integrals of functions More accurate procedure than numerical differentiation Use when it is not possible to obtain an integral of a function analytically or when the function is not given, only the data points are Newton Cotes Methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%E2%80%93Cotes_formulas C++: http://www.siafoo.net/snippet/324 For equally spaced data points Computationally easy – based on local interpolation of n rectangular strip areas that is piecewise fitted to a polynomial to get the sum total area Evaluate the integrand at n+1 evenly spaced points – approximate definite integral by Sum Weights are derived from Lagrange Basis polynomials Leverage Trapezoidal Rule for default 2nd formulas, Simpson 1/3 Rule for substituting 3 point formulas, Simpson 3/8 Rule for 4 point formulas. For 4 point formulas use Bodes Rule. Higher orders obtain more accurate results Trapezoidal Rule uses simple area, Simpsons Rule replaces the integrand f(x) with a quadratic polynomial p(x) that uses the same values as f(x) for its end points, but adds a midpoint Romberg Integration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romberg's_method C++: http://code.google.com/p/romberg-integration/downloads/detail?name=romberg.cpp&can=2&q= Combines trapezoidal rule with Richardson Extrapolation Evaluates the integrand at equally spaced points The integrand must have continuous derivatives Each R(n,m) extrapolation uses a higher order integrand polynomial replacement rule (zeroth starts with trapezoidal) à a lower triangular matrix set of equation coefficients where the bottom right term has the most accurate approximation. The process continues until the difference between 2 successive diagonal terms becomes sufficiently small. Gaussian Quadrature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_quadrature C++: http://www.alglib.net/integration/gaussianquadratures.php Data points are chosen to yield best possible accuracy – requires fewer evaluations Ability to handle singularities, functions that are difficult to evaluate The integrand can include a weighting function determined by a set of orthogonal polynomials. Points & weights are selected so that the integrand yields the exact integral if f(x) is a polynomial of degree <= 2n+1 Techniques (basically different weighting functions): · Gauss-Legendre Integration w(x)=1 · Gauss-Laguerre Integration w(x)=e^-x · Gauss-Hermite Integration w(x)=e^-x^2 · Gauss-Chebyshev Integration w(x)= 1 / Sqrt(1-x^2) Solving ODEs Use when high order differential equations cannot be solved analytically Evaluated under boundary conditions RK for systems – a high order differential equation can always be transformed into a coupled first order system of equations Euler method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_method C++: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Euler_method First order Runge–Kutta method. Simple recursive method – given an initial value, calculate derivative deltas. Unstable & not very accurate (O(h) error) – not used in practice A first-order method - the local error (truncation error per step) is proportional to the square of the step size, and the global error (error at a given time) is proportional to the step size In evolving solution between data points xn & xn+1, only evaluates derivatives at beginning of interval xn à asymmetric at boundaries Higher order Runge Kutta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runge%E2%80%93Kutta_methods C++: http://www.dreamincode.net/code/snippet1441.htm 2nd & 4th order RK - Introduces parameterized midpoints for more symmetric solutions à accuracy at higher computational cost Adaptive RK – RK-Fehlberg – estimate the truncation at each integration step & automatically adjust the step size to keep error within prescribed limits. At each step 2 approximations are compared – if in disagreement to a specific accuracy, the step size is reduced Boundary Value Problems Where solution of differential equations are located at 2 different values of the independent variable x à more difficult, because cannot just start at point of initial value – there may not be enough starting conditions available at the end points to produce a unique solution An n-order equation will require n boundary conditions – need to determine the missing n-1 conditions which cause the given conditions at the other boundary to be satisfied Shooting Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_method C++: http://ganeshtiwaridotcomdotnp.blogspot.co.il/2009/12/c-c-code-shooting-method-for-solving.html Iteratively guess the missing values for one end & integrate, then inspect the discrepancy with the boundary values of the other end to adjust the estimate Given the starting boundary values u1 & u2 which contain the root u, solve u given the false position method (solving the differential equation as an initial value problem via 4th order RK), then use u to solve the differential equations. Finite Difference Method For linear & non-linear systems Higher order derivatives require more computational steps – some combinations for boundary conditions may not work though Improve the accuracy by increasing the number of mesh points Solving EigenValue Problems An eigenvalue can substitute a matrix when doing matrix multiplication à convert matrix multiplication into a polynomial EigenValue For a given set of equations in matrix form, determine what are the solution eigenvalue & eigenvectors Similar Matrices - have same eigenvalues. Use orthogonal similarity transforms to reduce a matrix to diagonal form from which eigenvalue(s) & eigenvectors can be computed iteratively Jacobi method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobi_method C++: http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/classes/acs2_2008/openmp/jacobi/jacobi.html Robust but Computationally intense – use for small matrices < 10x10 Power Iteration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_iteration For any given real symmetric matrix, generate the largest single eigenvalue & its eigenvectors Simplest method – does not compute matrix decomposition à suitable for large, sparse matrices Inverse Iteration Variation of power iteration method – generates the smallest eigenvalue from the inverse matrix Rayleigh Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh's_method_of_dimensional_analysis Variation of power iteration method Rayleigh Quotient Method Variation of inverse iteration method Matrix Tri-diagonalization Method Use householder algorithm to reduce an NxN symmetric matrix to a tridiagonal real symmetric matrix vua N-2 orthogonal transforms     Whats Next Outside of Numerical Methods there are lots of different types of algorithms that I’ve learned over the decades: Data Mining – (I covered this briefly in a previous post: http://geekswithblogs.net/JoshReuben/archive/2007/12/31/ssas-dm-algorithms.aspx ) Search & Sort Routing Problem Solving Logical Theorem Proving Planning Probabilistic Reasoning Machine Learning Solvers (eg MIP) Bioinformatics (Sequence Alignment, Protein Folding) Quant Finance (I read Wilmott’s books – interesting) Sooner or later, I’ll cover the above topics as well.

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• Scrum in 5 Minutes

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to explain the basic concepts of Scrum in less than five minutes. You learn how Scrum can help a team of developers to successfully complete a complex software project. Product Backlog and the Product Owner Imagine that you are part of a team which needs to create a new website – for example, an e-commerce website. You have an overwhelming amount of work to do. You need to build (or possibly buy) a shopping cart, install an SSL certificate, create a product catalog, create a Facebook page, and at least a hundred other things that you have not thought of yet. According to Scrum, the first thing you should do is create a list. Place the highest priority items at the top of the list and the lower priority items lower in the list. For example, creating the shopping cart and buying the domain name might be high priority items and creating a Facebook page might be a lower priority item. In Scrum, this list is called the Product Backlog. How do you prioritize the items in the Product Backlog? Different stakeholders in the project might have different priorities. Gary, your division VP, thinks that it is crucial that the e-commerce site has a mobile app. Sally, your direct manager, thinks taking advantage of new HTML5 features is much more important. Multiple people are pulling you in different directions. According to Scrum, it is important that you always designate one person, and only one person, as the Product Owner. The Product Owner is the person who decides what items should be added to the Product Backlog and the priority of the items in the Product Backlog. The Product Owner could be the customer who is paying the bills, the project manager who is responsible for delivering the project, or a customer representative. The critical point is that the Product Owner must always be a single person and that single person has absolute authority over the Product Backlog. Sprints and the Sprint Backlog So now the developer team has a prioritized list of items and they can start work. The team starts implementing the first item in the Backlog — the shopping cart — and the team is making good progress. Unfortunately, however, half-way through the work of implementing the shopping cart, the Product Owner changes his mind. The Product Owner decides that it is much more important to create the product catalog before the shopping cart. With some frustration, the team switches their developmental efforts to focus on implementing the product catalog. However, part way through completing this work, once again the Product Owner changes his mind about the highest priority item. Getting work done when priorities are constantly shifting is frustrating for the developer team and it results in lower productivity. At the same time, however, the Product Owner needs to have absolute authority over the priority of the items which need to get done. Scrum solves this conflict with the concept of Sprints. In Scrum, a developer team works in Sprints. At the beginning of a Sprint the developers and the Product Owner agree on the items from the backlog which they will complete during the Sprint. This subset of items from the Product Backlog becomes the Sprint Backlog. During the Sprint, the Product Owner is not allowed to change the items in the Sprint Backlog. In other words, the Product Owner cannot shift priorities on the developer team during the Sprint. Different teams use Sprints of different lengths such as one month Sprints, two-week Sprints, and one week Sprints. For high-stress, time critical projects, teams typically choose shorter sprints such as one week sprints. For more mature projects, longer one month sprints might be more appropriate. A team can pick whatever Sprint length makes sense for them just as long as the team is consistent. You should pick a Sprint length and stick with it. Daily Scrum During a Sprint, the developer team needs to have meetings to coordinate their work on completing the items in the Sprint Backlog. For example, the team needs to discuss who is working on what and whether any blocking issues have been discovered. Developers hate meetings (well, sane developers hate meetings). Meetings take developers away from their work of actually implementing stuff as opposed to talking about implementing stuff. However, a developer team which never has meetings and never coordinates their work also has problems. For example, Fred might get stuck on a programming problem for days and never reach out for help even though Tom (who sits in the cubicle next to him) has already solved the very same problem. Or, both Ted and Fred might have started working on the same item from the Sprint Backlog at the same time. In Scrum, these conflicting needs – limiting meetings but enabling team coordination – are resolved with the idea of the Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum is a meeting for coordinating the work of the developer team which happens once a day. To keep the meeting short, each developer answers only the following three questions: 1. What have you done since yesterday? 2. What do you plan to do today? 3. Any impediments in your way? During the Daily Scrum, developers are not allowed to talk about issues with their cat, do demos of their latest work, or tell heroic stories of programming problems overcome. The meeting must be kept short — typically about 15 minutes. Issues which come up during the Daily Scrum should be discussed in separate meetings which do not involve the whole developer team. Stories and Tasks Items in the Product or Sprint Backlog – such as building a shopping cart or creating a Facebook page – are often referred to as User Stories or Stories. The Stories are created by the Product Owner and should represent some business need. Unlike the Product Owner, the developer team needs to think about how a Story should be implemented. At the beginning of a Sprint, the developer team takes the Stories from the Sprint Backlog and breaks the stories into tasks. For example, the developer team might take the Create a Shopping Cart story and break it into the following tasks: · Enable users to add and remote items from shopping cart · Persist the shopping cart to database between visits · Redirect user to checkout page when Checkout button is clicked During the Daily Scrum, members of the developer team volunteer to complete the tasks required to implement the next Story in the Sprint Backlog. When a developer talks about what he did yesterday or plans to do tomorrow then the developer should be referring to a task. Stories are owned by the Product Owner and a story is all about business value. In contrast, the tasks are owned by the developer team and a task is all about implementation details. A story might take several days or weeks to complete. A task is something which a developer can complete in less than a day. Some teams get lazy about breaking stories into tasks. Neglecting to break stories into tasks can lead to “Never Ending Stories” If you don’t break a story into tasks, then you can’t know how much of a story has actually been completed because you don’t have a clear idea about the implementation steps required to complete the story. Scrumboard During the Daily Scrum, the developer team uses a Scrumboard to coordinate their work. A Scrumboard contains a list of the stories for the current Sprint, the tasks associated with each Story, and the state of each task. The developer team uses the Scrumboard so everyone on the team can see, at a glance, what everyone is working on. As a developer works on a task, the task moves from state to state and the state of the task is updated on the Scrumboard. Common task states are ToDo, In Progress, and Done. Some teams include additional task states such as Needs Review or Needs Testing. Some teams use a physical Scrumboard. In that case, you use index cards to represent the stories and the tasks and you tack the index cards onto a physical board. Using a physical Scrumboard has several disadvantages. A physical Scrumboard does not work well with a distributed team – for example, it is hard to share the same physical Scrumboard between Boston and Seattle. Also, generating reports from a physical Scrumboard is more difficult than generating reports from an online Scrumboard. Estimating Stories and Tasks Stakeholders in a project, the people investing in a project, need to have an idea of how a project is progressing and when the project will be completed. For example, if you are investing in creating an e-commerce site, you need to know when the site can be launched. It is not enough to just say that “the project will be done when it is done” because the stakeholders almost certainly have a limited budget to devote to the project. The people investing in the project cannot determine the business value of the project unless they can have an estimate of how long it will take to complete the project. Developers hate to give estimates. The reason that developers hate to give estimates is that the estimates are almost always completely made up. For example, you really don’t know how long it takes to build a shopping cart until you finish building a shopping cart, and at that point, the estimate is no longer useful. The problem is that writing code is much more like Finding a Cure for Cancer than Building a Brick Wall. Building a brick wall is very straightforward. After you learn how to add one brick to a wall, you understand everything that is involved in adding a brick to a wall. There is no additional research required and no surprises. If, on the other hand, I assembled a team of scientists and asked them to find a cure for cancer, and estimate exactly how long it will take, they would have no idea. The problem is that there are too many unknowns. I don’t know how to cure cancer, I need to do a lot of research here, so I cannot even begin to estimate how long it will take. So developers hate to provide estimates, but the Product Owner and other product stakeholders, have a legitimate need for estimates. Scrum resolves this conflict by using the idea of Story Points. Different teams use different units to represent Story Points. For example, some teams use shirt sizes such as Small, Medium, Large, and X-Large. Some teams prefer to use Coffee Cup sizes such as Tall, Short, and Grande. Finally, some teams like to use numbers from the Fibonacci series. These alternative units are converted into a Story Point value. Regardless of the type of unit which you use to represent Story Points, the goal is the same. Instead of attempting to estimate a Story in hours (which is doomed to failure), you use a much less fine-grained measure of work. A developer team is much more likely to be able to estimate that a Story is Small or X-Large than the exact number of hours required to complete the story. So you can think of Story Points as a compromise between the needs of the Product Owner and the developer team. When a Sprint starts, the developer team devotes more time to thinking about the Stories in a Sprint and the developer team breaks the Stories into Tasks. In Scrum, you estimate the work required to complete a Story by using Story Points and you estimate the work required to complete a task by using hours. The difference between Stories and Tasks is that you don’t create a task until you are just about ready to start working on a task. A task is something that you should be able to create within a day, so you have a much better chance of providing an accurate estimate of the work required to complete a task than a story. Burndown Charts In Scrum, you use Burndown charts to represent the remaining work on a project. You use Release Burndown charts to represent the overall remaining work for a project and you use Sprint Burndown charts to represent the overall remaining work for a particular Sprint. You create a Release Burndown chart by calculating the remaining number of uncompleted Story Points for the entire Product Backlog every day. The vertical axis represents Story Points and the horizontal axis represents time. A Sprint Burndown chart is similar to a Release Burndown chart, but it focuses on the remaining work for a particular Sprint. There are two different types of Sprint Burndown charts. You can either represent the remaining work in a Sprint with Story Points or with task hours (the following image, taken from Wikipedia, uses hours). When each Product Backlog Story is completed, the Release Burndown chart slopes down. When each Story or task is completed, the Sprint Burndown chart slopes down. Burndown charts typically do not always slope down over time. As new work is added to the Product Backlog, the Release Burndown chart slopes up. If new tasks are discovered during a Sprint, the Sprint Burndown chart will also slope up. The purpose of a Burndown chart is to give you a way to track team progress over time. If, halfway through a Sprint, the Sprint Burndown chart is still climbing a hill then you know that you are in trouble. Team Velocity Stakeholders in a project always want more work done faster. For example, the Product Owner for the e-commerce site wants the website to launch before tomorrow. Developers tend to be overly optimistic. Rarely do developers acknowledge the physical limitations of reality. So Project stakeholders and the developer team often collude to delude themselves about how much work can be done and how quickly. Too many software projects begin in a state of optimism and end in frustration as deadlines zoom by. In Scrum, this problem is overcome by calculating a number called the Team Velocity. The Team Velocity is a measure of the average number of Story Points which a team has completed in previous Sprints. Knowing the Team Velocity is important during the Sprint Planning meeting when the Product Owner and the developer team work together to determine the number of stories which can be completed in the next Sprint. If you know the Team Velocity then you can avoid committing to do more work than the team has been able to accomplish in the past, and your team is much more likely to complete all of the work required for the next Sprint. Scrum Master There are three roles in Scrum: the Product Owner, the developer team, and the Scrum Master. I’v e already discussed the Product Owner. The Product Owner is the one and only person who maintains the Product Backlog and prioritizes the stories. I’ve also described the role of the developer team. The members of the developer team do the work of implementing the stories by breaking the stories into tasks. The final role, which I have not discussed, is the role of the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that the team is following the Scrum process. For example, the Scrum Master is responsible for making sure that there is a Daily Scrum meeting and that everyone answers the standard three questions. The Scrum Master is also responsible for removing (non-technical) impediments which the team might encounter. For example, if the team cannot start work until everyone installs the latest version of Microsoft Visual Studio then the Scrum Master has the responsibility of working with management to get the latest version of Visual Studio as quickly as possible. The Scrum Master can be a member of the developer team. Furthermore, different people can take on the role of the Scrum Master over time. The Scrum Master, however, cannot be the same person as the Product Owner. Using SonicAgile SonicAgile (SonicAgile.com) is an online tool which you can use to manage your projects using Scrum. You can use the SonicAgile Product Backlog to create a prioritized list of stories. You can estimate the size of the Stories using different Story Point units such as Shirt Sizes and Coffee Cup sizes. You can use SonicAgile during the Sprint Planning meeting to select the Stories that you want to complete during a particular Sprint. You can configure Sprints to be any length of time. SonicAgile calculates Team Velocity automatically and displays a warning when you add too many stories to a Sprint. In other words, it warns you when it thinks you are overcommitting in a Sprint. SonicAgile also includes a Scrumboard which displays the list of Stories selected for a Sprint and the tasks associated with each story. You can drag tasks from one task state to another. Finally, SonicAgile enables you to generate Release Burndown and Sprint Burndown charts. You can use these charts to view the progress of your team. To learn more about SonicAgile, visit SonicAgile.com. Summary In this post, I described many of the basic concepts of Scrum. You learned how a Product Owner uses a Product Backlog to create a prioritized list of tasks. I explained why work is completed in Sprints so the developer team can be more productive. I also explained how a developer team uses the daily scrum to coordinate their work. You learned how the developer team uses a Scrumboard to see, at a glance, who is working on what and the state of each task. I also discussed Burndown charts. You learned how you can use both Release and Sprint Burndown charts to track team progress in completing a project. Finally, I described the crucial role of the Scrum Master – the person who is responsible for ensuring that the rules of Scrum are being followed. My goal was not to describe all of the concepts of Scrum. This post was intended to be an introductory overview. For a comprehensive explanation of Scrum, I recommend reading Ken Schwaber’s book Agile Project Management with Scrum: http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Project-Management-Microsoft-Professional/dp/073561993X/ref=la_B001H6ODMC_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345224000&sr=1-1

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• xslt cookbook example not working

  - by Liza dawson

  Hi I am working on this from xslt cookbook type my.xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <people> <person name="Al Zehtooney" age="33" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="Brad York" age="38" sex="m" smoker="yes"/> <person name="Charles Xavier" age="32" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="David Williams" age="33" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="Edward Ulster" age="33" sex="m" smoker="yes"/> <person name="Frank Townsend" age="35" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="Greg Sutter" age="40" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="Harry Rogers" age="37" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="John Quincy" age="43" sex="m" smoker="yes"/> <person name="Kent Peterson" age="31" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="Larry Newell" age="23" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="Max Milton" age="22" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="Norman Lamagna" age="30" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="Ollie Kensington" age="44" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="John Frank" age="24" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="Mary Williams" age="33" sex="f" smoker="no"/> <person name="Jane Frank" age="38" sex="f" smoker="yes"/> <person name="Jo Peterson" age="32" sex="f" smoker="no"/> <person name="Angie Frost" age="33" sex="f" smoker="no"/> <person name="Betty Bates" age="33" sex="f" smoker="no"/> <person name="Connie Date" age="35" sex="f" smoker="no"/> <person name="Donna Finster" age="20" sex="f" smoker="no"/> <person name="Esther Gates" age="37" sex="f" smoker="no"/> <person name="Fanny Hill" age="33" sex="f" smoker="yes"/> <person name="Geta Iota" age="27" sex="f" smoker="no"/> <person name="Hillary Johnson" age="22" sex="f" smoker="no"/> <person name="Ingrid Kent" age="21" sex="f" smoker="no"/> <person name="Jill Larson" age="20" sex="f" smoker="no"/> <person name="Kim Mulrooney" age="41" sex="f" smoker="no"/> <person name="Lisa Nevins" age="21" sex="f" smoker="no"/> </people> type generic-attr-to-csv.xslt <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:csv="http://www.ora.com/XSLTCookbook/namespaces/csv"> <xsl:param name="delimiter" select=" ',' "/> <xsl:output method="text" /> <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/> <xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:for-each select="$columns"> <xsl:value-of select="@name"/> <xsl:if test="position( ) != last( )"> <xsl:value-of select="$delimiter/> </xsl:if> </xsl:for-each> <xsl:text>&#xa;</xsl:text> <xsl:apply-templates/> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="/*/*"> <xsl:variable name="row" select="."/> <xsl:for-each select="$columns"> <xsl:apply-templates select="$row/@*[local-name(.)=current( )/@attr]" mode="csv:map-value"/> <xsl:if test="position( ) != last( )"> <xsl:value-of select="$delimiter"/> </xsl:if> </xsl:for-each> <xsl:text>&#xa;</xsl:text> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="@*" mode="map-value"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> type my.xsl <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:csv="http://www.ora.com/XSLTCookbook/namespaces/csv"> <xsl:import href="generic-attr-to-csv.xslt"/> <!--Defines the mapping from attributes to columns --> <xsl:variable name="columns" select="document('')/*/csv:column"/> <csv:column name="Name" attr="name"/> <csv:column name="Age" attr="age"/> <csv:column name="Gender" attr="sex"/> <csv:column name="Smoker" attr="smoker"/> <!-- Handle custom attribute mappings --> <xsl:template match="@sex" mode="csv:map-value"> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test=".='m'">male</xsl:when> <xsl:when test=".='f'">female</xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise>error</xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> using the apache xalan parser D:\Test>java org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -in my.xml -xsl my.xsl -out my.csv [Fatal Error] generic-attr-to-csv.xslt:15:6: The value of attribute "select" associated with an element type "xsl:v alue-of" must not contain the '<' character. file:///D:/Test/generic-attr-to-csv.xslt; Line #15; Column #6; org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The value of attribut e "select" associated with an element type "xsl:value-of" must not contain the '<' character. java.lang.NullPointerException at org.apache.xalan.transformer.TransformerImpl.createSerializationHandler(TransformerImpl.java:1171) at org.apache.xalan.transformer.TransformerImpl.createSerializationHandler(TransformerImpl.java:1060) at org.apache.xalan.transformer.TransformerImpl.transform(TransformerImpl.java:1268) at org.apache.xalan.transformer.TransformerImpl.transform(TransformerImpl.java:1251) at org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process.main(Process.java:1048) Exception in thread "main" java.lang.RuntimeException at org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process.doExit(Process.java:1155) at org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process.main(Process.java:1128) Any ideas what am i doing wrong

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• Array help Index out of range exeption was unhandled

  - by Michael Quiles

  I am trying to populate combo boxes from a text file using comma as a delimiter everything was working fine, but now when I debug I get the "Index out of range exeption was unhandled" warning. I guess I need a fresh pair of eyes to see where I went wrong, I commented on the line that gets the error //Fname = fields[1]; using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Drawing; using System.Drawing.Printing; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.IO; namespace Sullivan_Payroll { public partial class xEmpForm : Form { bool complete = false; public xEmpForm() { InitializeComponent(); } private void xEmpForm_Resize(object sender, EventArgs e) { this.xCenterPanel.Left = Convert.ToInt16((this.Width - this.xCenterPanel.Width) / 2); this.xCenterPanel.Top = Convert.ToInt16((this.Height - this.xCenterPanel.Height) / 2); Refresh(); } private void exitToolStripMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { //Exits the application this.Close(); } private void xEmpForm_FormClosing(object sender, FormClosingEventArgs e) //use this on xtrip calculator { DialogResult Response; if (complete == true) { Application.Exit(); } else { Response = MessageBox.Show("Are you sure you want to Exit?", "Exit", MessageBoxButtons.YesNo, MessageBoxIcon.Question, MessageBoxDefaultButton.Button2); if (Response == DialogResult.No) { complete = false; e.Cancel = true; } else { complete = true; Application.Exit(); } } } private void xEmpForm_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { //file sources string fileDept = "source\\Department.txt"; string fileSex = "source\\Sex.txt"; string fileStatus = "source\\Status.txt"; if (File.Exists(fileDept)) { using (System.IO.StreamReader sr = System.IO.File.OpenText(fileDept)) { string dept = ""; while ((dept = sr.ReadLine()) != null) { this.xDeptComboBox.Items.Add(dept); } } } else { MessageBox.Show("The Department file can not be found.", "Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error); } if (File.Exists(fileSex)) { using (System.IO.StreamReader sr = System.IO.File.OpenText(fileSex)) { string sex = ""; while ((sex = sr.ReadLine()) != null) { this.xSexComboBox.Items.Add(sex); } } } else { MessageBox.Show("The Sex file can not be found.", "Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error); } if (File.Exists(fileStatus)) { using (System.IO.StreamReader sr = System.IO.File.OpenText(fileStatus)) { string status = ""; while ((status = sr.ReadLine()) != null) { this.xStatusComboBox.Items.Add(status); } } } else { MessageBox.Show("The Status file can not be found.", "Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error); } } private void xFileSaveMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { { const string fileNew = "source\\New Staff.txt"; string recordIn; FileStream outFile = new FileStream(fileNew, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write); StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(outFile); for (int count = 0; count <= this.xEmployeeListBox.Items.Count - 1; count++) { this.xEmployeeListBox.SelectedIndex = count; recordIn = this.xEmployeeListBox.SelectedItem.ToString(); writer.WriteLine(recordIn); } writer.Close(); outFile.Close(); this.xDeptComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xStatusComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xSexComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; MessageBox.Show("your file is saved"); } } private void xViewFacultyMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { const string fileStaff = "source\\Staff.txt"; const char DELIM = ','; string Lname, Fname, Depart, Stat, Sex, Salary, cDept, cStat, cSex; double Gtotal; string recordIn; string[] fields; cDept = this.xDeptComboBox.SelectedItem.ToString(); cStat = this.xStatusComboBox.SelectedItem.ToString(); cSex = this.xSexComboBox.SelectedItem.ToString(); FileStream inFile = new FileStream(fileStaff, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read); StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(inFile); recordIn = reader.ReadLine(); while (recordIn != null) { fields = recordIn.Split(DELIM); Lname = fields[0]; Fname = fields[1]; // this is where the error appears Depart = fields[2]; Stat = fields[3]; Sex = fields[4]; Salary = fields[5]; Fname = fields[1].TrimStart(null); Depart = fields[2].TrimStart(null); Stat = fields[3].TrimStart(null); Sex = fields[4].TrimStart(null); Salary = fields[5].TrimStart(null); Gtotal = double.Parse(Salary); if (Depart == cDept && cStat == Stat && cSex == Sex) { this.xEmployeeListBox.Items.Add(recordIn); } recordIn = reader.ReadLine(); } reader.Close(); inFile.Close(); if (this.xEmployeeListBox.Items.Count >= 1) { this.xFileSaveMenuItem.Enabled = true; this.xFilePrintMenuItem.Enabled = true; this.xEditClearMenuItem.Enabled = true; } else { this.xFileSaveMenuItem.Enabled = false; this.xFilePrintMenuItem.Enabled = false; this.xEditClearMenuItem.Enabled = false; MessageBox.Show("Records not found"); } } private void xEditClearMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { this.xEmployeeListBox.Items.Clear(); this.xDeptComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xStatusComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xSexComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xFileSaveMenuItem.Enabled = false; this.xFilePrintMenuItem.Enabled = false; this.xEditClearMenuItem.Enabled = false; } } } Source file -- Anderson, Kristen, Accounting, Assistant, Female, 43155 Ball, Robin, Accounting, Instructor, Female, 42723 Chin, Roger, Accounting, Full, Male,59281 Coats, William, Accounting, Assistant, Male, 45371 Doepke, Cheryl, Accounting, Full, Female, 52105 Downs, Clifton, Accounting, Associate, Male, 46887 Garafano, Karen, Finance, Associate, Female, 49000 Hill, Trevor, Management, Instructor, Male, 38590 Jackson, Carole, Accounting, Instructor, Female, 38781 Jacobson, Andrew, Management, Full, Male, 56281 Lewis, Karl, Management, Associate, Male, 48387 Mack, Kevin, Management, Assistant, Male, 45000 McKaye, Susan, Management, Instructor, Female, 43979 Nelsen, Beth, Finance, Full, Female, 52339 Nelson, Dale, Accounting, Full, Male, 54578 Palermo, Sheryl, Accounting, Associate, Female, 45617 Rais, Mary, Finance, Instructor, Female, 27000 Scheib, Earl, Management, Instructor, Male, 37389 Smith, Tom, Finance, Full, Male, 57167 Smythe, Janice, Management, Associate, Female, 46887 True, David, Accounting, Full, Male, 53181 Young, Jeff, Management, Assistant, Male, 43513

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• PHP form auto response

  - by Mark

  Hi, I am using the following php code which has been given to me, it works fine, apart from the auto response bit. I know its not a lot of code I just dont know how to do it or why it snot working. Any help would be appreciated. thanks in advance. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <title> - Contact Us</title> <!-- css --> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/reset.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/styles.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/colorbox.css" /> <!-- javascript libraries --> <?php require_once('includes/js.php'); ?> </head> <body> <?php //FIll out the settings below before using this script $your_email = "(email address)"; $website = "(website name)"; //BOTS TO BLOCK $bots = "/(Indy|Blaiz|Java|libwww-perl|Python|OutfoxBot|User-Agent|PycURL|AlphaServer|T8Abot|Syntryx|WinHttp|WebBandit|nicebot)/i"; //Check if known bot is visiting if (preg_match($bots, $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"])) { exit ("Sorry bots are not allowed here!"); } //Known Exploits $exploits = "/(content-type|bcc:|cc:|from:|reply-to:|javascript|onclick|onload)/i"; //Spam words $spam_words = "/(viagra|poker|blackjack|porn|sex)/i"; // BAD WORDS $words = "/( bitch|dick|pussy|pussies|ass|fuck|cum|cumshot|cum shot| gangbang|gang bang|god dammit|goddammit|viagra|anus|analsex )/i"; //BAD WORD/SPAM WORD/EXPLOIT BLOCKER function wordBlock($word) { //Make variables global global $words; global $exploits; global $spam_words; if (preg_match($words, $word)) { $word = preg_replace($words, "#####", $word); } if(preg_match($exploits,$word)){ $word = preg_replace($exploits,"",$word); } if(preg_match($spam_words,$word)){ $word = preg_replace($spam_words,"$$$$",$word); } return $word; } //CLean data function function dataClean($data) { $data = stripslashes(trim(rawurldecode(strip_tags($data)))); return $data; } //CREATE MAIN VARIABLES $name = (isset ($_POST['name'])) ? dataClean($_POST['name']) : FALSE; $company = (isset ($_POST['company'])) ? dataClean($_POST['company']) : FALSE; $address = (isset ($_POST['address'])) ? dataClean($_POST['address']) : FALSE; $postcode = (isset ($_POST['postcode'])) ? dataClean($_POST['postcode']) : FALSE; $phone = (isset ($_POST['phone'])) ? dataClean($_POST['phone']) : FALSE; $email = (isset ($_POST['email'])) ? dataClean($_POST['email']) : FALSE; $comment = (isset ($_POST['message'])) ? wordBlock(dataClean($_POST['message'])) : FALSE; $submit = (isset ($_POST['send'])) ? TRUE : FALSE; $email_check = "/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,6}$/i"; //$ip = $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]; $errors = array(); //Check if send button was clicked if ($submit) { if (!$name) { $errors[] = "Please enter a name!"; } if ($name) { if (!ereg("^[A-Za-z' -]*$", $name)) { $errors[] = "You may not use special characters in the name field!"; } } if (!$email) { $errors[] = "Please enter an email address!"; } if ($email) { if (!preg_match($email_check, $email)) { $errors[] = "The E-mail you entered is invalid!"; } } /* if (!$subject) { $errors[] = "Please enter an email subject!"; } */ if (!$comment) { $errors[] = "Please don't leave the message field blank!"; } //Check if any errors are present if (count($errors) > 0) { foreach ($errors AS $error) { print "&bull; $error <br />"; } } else { //MESSAGE TO SEND TO ADMIN //Create main headers $headers = "From: " . $website . " <$your_email> \n"; $headers .= "Reply-to:" . $email . " \n"; $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"; $headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"; $headers .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8\n"; $message = ""; $message .= "<h1>New E-Mail From " . $website . "</h1><br /><br />"; $message .= "<b>Name:</b> " . $name . "<br />"; $message .= "<b>Company:</b> " . $company . "<br />"; $message .= "<b>Address:</b> " . $address . "<br />"; $message .= "<b>Postcode:</b > " . $postcode . "<br />"; $message .= "<b>Phone No:</b> " . $phone . "<br />"; $message .= "<b>E-mail:</b> " . $email . "<br />"; $message .= "<b>Message:</b> " . $comment . "<br />"; //E-mails subject $mail_subject = "Message from " . $website . ""; /* CHECK TO BE SURE FIRST E-MAIL TO ADMIN IS A SUCCESS AND SEND EMAIL TO ADMIN OTHERWISE DON'T SEND AUTO RESPONCE */ if (mail($your_email, $mail_subject, $message, $headers)) { //UNSET ALL VARIABLES unset ($name, $email, $company, $address, $postcode, $phone, $comment, $_REQUEST); //JAVASCRIPT SUCCESS MESSAGE echo " <script type='text/javascript' language='JavaScript'> alert('Your message has been sent'); </script> "; //SUCCESS MESSAGE TO SHOW IF JAVASCRIPT IS DISABLED echo "<noscript><p>THANK YOU YOUR MESSAGE HAS BEEN SENT</p></noscript>"; /* -----------------END MAIL BLOCK FOR SENDING TO ADMIN AND START AUTO RESPONCE SEND----------------- */ //AUTO RESPONCE MESSAGE //Create main headers $headers = "From: " . $website . " <$your_email> \n"; $headers .= "Reply-to:" . $your_email . " \n"; $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"; $headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"; $headers .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8\n"; $message = ""; $message .= "<h1>Thank You For Contacting Us </h1><br /><br />"; $message .= "On behalf of <b>" . $website . "</b> we wanna thank you for contacting us and to let you know we will respond to your message as soon as possible thank you again."; //E-mails subject $mail_subject = "Thank you for contacting " . $website . ""; //Send the email mail($email, $mail_subject, $message, $headers); /* -----------------END MAIL BLOCK FOR SENDING AUTO RESPONCE ----------------- */ } else { echo " <script type='text/javascript' language='JavaScript'> alert('Sorry could not send your message'); </script> "; echo "<noscript><p style='color:red;'>SORRY COULD NOT SEND YOUR MESSAGE</p></noscript>"; } } } ?> <div id="wrapper"> <div id="grad_overlay"> <!-- Header --> <div id="header"> <a href="index.php" title="Regal Balustrades"><img src="images/regal_logo.png" alt="Regal Balustrades" /></a> <div id="strapline"> <img src="images/strapline.png" alt="Architectural metalwork systems" /> </div> </div> <!-- Navigation --> <div id="nav"> <?php require_once('includes/nav.php'); ?> </div> <!-- Content --> <div id="content"> <div id="details"> <p class="getintouch env">Get In Touch</p> <ul class="details"> <li>T. (0117) 935 3888</li> <li>F. (0117) 967 7333</li> <li>E. <a href="mailto:[email protected]" title="Contact via email">[email protected]</a></li> </ul> <p class="whereto hse">Where To Find Us</p> <ul class="details"> <li>Regal Balustrades</li> <li>Regal House, </li> <li>Honey Hill Road,</li> <li>Kingswood, </li> <li>Bristol BS15 4HG</li> </ul> </div> <div id="contact"> <h1>Contact us</h1> <p>Please use this form to request further information about Regal Balustrades and our services. To speak to a member of our staff in person, please call us on 0117 9353888</p> <div id="form"> <form method='POST' action='<?php echo "".$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'].""; ?>'> <p class='form-element'> <label for='name'>Name:</label> <input type='text' name='name' value='<?php echo "" . $_REQUEST['name'] . "";?>' /> </p> <p class='form-element'> <label for='company'>Company:</label> <input type='text' name='company' value='<?php echo "" . $_REQUEST['company'] . "";?>' /> </p> <p class='form-element'> <label for='address'>Address:</label> <textarea name='address' rows='5' id='address' class='address' ><?php echo "" . $_REQUEST['address'] . "";?></textarea> </p> <p class='form-element'> <label for='postcode'>Postcode:</label> <input type='text' name='postcode' value='<?php echo "" . $_REQUEST['postcode'] . "";?>' /> </p> <p class='form-element'> <label for='phone'>Telephone:</label> <input type='text' name='phone' value='<?php echo "" . $_REQUEST['phone'] . "";?>' /> </p> <p class='form-element'> <label for='email'>Email:</label> <input type='text' name='email' value='<?php echo "" . $_REQUEST['email'] . "";?>' /> </p> </div> <div id='form-right'> <p class='form-element'> <label for='message'>Enquiry:</label> <textarea name='message' class='enquiry' id='enquiry' rows='5' cols='40' ><?php echo "" . $_REQUEST['message'] . "";?></textarea> </p> <p class='form-element'> <input type='submit' class='submit' name='send' value='Send message' /> </p> </div> <p class='nb'><em>We will respond as soon as possible.</em></p> </form> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <!-- Footer --> <div id="footer-container"> <?php require_once('includes/footer.php'); ?> </div> <!-- js functions --> <script> $(document).ready(function() { $("ul#navig li:nth-child(6)").addClass("navon"); }); </script> </body> </html>

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