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• rails named routes + controller as parameter

  - by user350785

  Hi, is it possible to have the controller value in a rails named route as a parameter, which I can pass at runtime to direct the call to the proper controller? e.g. map.ride 'ride' ,:controller = {some-way-of-specifying-a-parameter}, :action = 'ride' then at runtime, I want to pass the controller name to which this call should be going. My actions are doing different things depending to which controller the call gets sent. thanks

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• Yahoo is sending our server's transactional email to the Spam folder, even though we have set up SPF and DKIM

  - by Derrick Miller

  Yahoo Mail is sending our server's transactional emails to the Spam folder, even though we have taken quite a few anti-spam steps. By contrast, Gmail allows the messages through to the inbox just fine. Here are the things which are in place: SPF is set up for the domain holsteinplaza.com. Yahoo reports spf=pass in the message headers. DKIM is set up for the domain holsteinplaza.com. Yahoo reports dkim=pass in the message headers. We have a proper reverse DNS entry for the sending mail server. Name - IP matches IP - Name. Neither Domainkeys nor SenderID are set up. From what I can tell, DKIM is the way of the future, and there is not much to be gained from adding Domainkeys or SenderID. Following are the headers. Any ideas what more I should do to get Yahoo to stop flagging the emails as spam? From Holstein Plaza Auctions Sat Jun 25 18:30:08 2011 X-Apparently-To: [email protected] via 98.138.90.132; Sat, 25 Jun 2011 18:30:11 -0700 Return-Path: <[email protected]> X-YahooFilteredBulk: 70.32.113.42 Received-SPF: pass (domain of holsteinplaza.com designates 70.32.113.42 as permitted sender) X-YMailISG: i_vaA_QWLDuLOmXhDjUv3aBKJl5Un6EiP6Yk2m4yn3jeEuYK MkhpqIt9zDUbHARCwXrhl9pqjTANurGVca7gytSs.mryWVQcbWBx.DaItWRb VcyrIzwMzXKCSeu06H2a.cJ7HG5vJLJaKmHUUI_1ttXKn_Aegiu5yHvFX83R Lpth0witO9zfaKvOMaJV3LAxpIpFOydwvq1cqjZ8nURxQbxM3Cl.QW7MxxrC 09qLVn_D_xSdU94QdU22IsVmlaRHv.uU5dnIazu.KSkhKpYykDoZA2SH0SY4 JmTZj3LP8N926xXVDzYQ5K6QvKuJL5g0d9pYZx3KC59sgIu5oHlJ3Q15RdKb f3OJw0PR6oIyJ2yStVr8vfbDgOfj3qig03.Tw6g6MMNpv1G7Cuol4oJeUaYP xELxX6dHgBgCSuWMcbsrxbK4BIXcS2qhpMqYQ4Isk.XXyA8uvmFXyvgc1ds5 8jo0rW.Wsw.55Z.KTPaQ0gHXj0T3OGppYMELSJv1iuhPyyAnZpmq01CU0Qd5 CcRgdyW3HaqhmpXqJCS0Clo16zXA4HmAjR0tgIQrHRLc3D9N02AOzvmDgCb1 vCh0p00QeKVq8UNkcShPRxZFKi9khtkLhPBlXEKkhJ76zyDmHUxTY.dQHVVD 8D2hx7BxbqI9DINI8x5oR5Q8hYkZqHYQsmGNkaU77O2BnsEv5WxMEmzrBJ4Z h8zGCidgYPiZycZfnfaBp0Xb4tya2WMTN45W02JFcO1qq_UMJ9xPeqZhPEj. j9YvBAC8324GGF.c8eWcNB2VB34QHgTcVUl3.c0XUCuncls9Cyg4L7AoIdCi HvAklSzDDu9nW6732VEipV9FJ_JkDupDNQU2hfiPG.3OeF8GwTnVYnEn0EiZ aO0NCnZhXuLDcN3K7ml3846yRdASvzPFs9s4aJkzR0FkhVvptiMBEOdRkKdG wHWmvWpK4GTZpW4yU7CnKpW2MiWWn1MP0h_CCZFKs5.3mfmfPjPVIABN_RuU Q8ex5hdKnKlQiqK56LzcPRnYmNtrwdsUX9CYn9d6cPpXR_Bi5jrNJMNzdFvq lGO0CBT4QPe2V45U8PtpMitttuDA1cCvmyBPFswxNlL0jyX0a_W.vl0YW5.d HhDItpHhDxKRUscM28IR.exetq4QCzyM X-Originating-IP: [70.32.113.42] Authentication-Results: mta1267.mail.ac4.yahoo.com from=holsteinplaza.com; domainkeys=neutral (no sig); from=holsteinplaza.com; dkim=pass (ok) Received: from 127.0.0.1 (EHLO predator.axis80.com) (70.32.113.42) by mta1267.mail.ac4.yahoo.com with SMTP; Sat, 25 Jun 2011 18:30:11 -0700 Received: (qmail 1440 invoked by uid 48); 25 Jun 2011 21:30:09 -0400 To: [email protected] Subject: this is a test X-PHPMAILER-DKIM: phpmailer.worxware.com DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; q=dns/txt; l=203; s=auction; t=1309051808; c=relaxed/simple; h=From:To:Subject; d=holsteinplaza.com; [email protected]; z=From:=20Holstein=20Plaza=20Auctions=20<[email protected]> |To:[email protected] |Subject:=20this=20is=20a=20test; bh=B3Tw5AQb1va627KEoazuFEBZ0fg=; b=oQ5uFq+oekPTGhszyIritjuuIAi3qPNyeitu+aWMhdx3oC6O2j5hJsDFpK0sS5fms7QdnBkBcEzT0iekEvn9EfAdCkGZ2KrtEC0yv7QKQcrjXxy07GJpj9nq0LYbgOuPdw8mGvKxlRZ+jFBX0DRJm0xXFLkr+MEaILw7adHTCCM= Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2011 21:30:08 -0400 From: Holstein Plaza Auctions <[email protected]> Reply-to: Holstein Plaza Auctions <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[email protected]> X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: PHPMailer 5.1 (phpmailer.sourceforge.net) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Length: 195

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• centos6.3 varnish3.03 get the wrong backend

  - by Sola.Shawn

  I install varnish3.03 with yum! I got a problem with it my varnish config bellow:** # #backend weibo { .host = "192.168.1.178"; .port = "8080"; .connect_timeout=20s; .first_byte_timeout=20s; .between_bytes_timeout=20s; } #backend smth { .host = "192.168.1.115"; .port = "8080"; .connect_timeout=20s; .first_byte_timeout=20s; .between_bytes_timeout=20s; } #sub vcl_recv { if (req.restarts == 0) { if (req.http.x-forwarded-for) { set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = req.http.X-Forwarded-For + ", " + client.ip; } else { set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = client.ip; } } if (req.request != "GET" && req.request != "HEAD" && req.request != "PUT" && req.request != "POST" && req.request != "TRACE" && req.request != "OPTIONS" && req.request != "DELETE") { # /* Non-RFC2616 or CONNECT which is weird. */ return(pipe); } if (req.request != "GET" && req.request != "HEAD") { # /* We only deal with GET and HEAD by default */ return(pass); } if (req.http.Authorization || req.http.Cookie) { /* Not cacheable by default */ return(pass); } if (req.http.host ~ "^(hk.)?weibo.com"){ set req.http.host = "hk.weibo.com"; set req.backend = weibo; } elseif (req.http.host ~ "^(www.)?newsmth.net"){ set req.http.host = "www.newsmth.net"; set req.backend = smth; } else { error 404 "Unknown virtual host"; } return(lookup); } ##sub vcl_pipe { return(pipe); } #sub vcl_pass { return(pass); } #sub vcl_hash { hash_data(req.url); if(req.http.host) { hash_data(req.http.host); } else { hash_data(server.ip); } return(hash); } #sub vcl_hit { if(req.http.Cache-Control~"no-cache"||req.http.Cache-Control~"max-age=0"||req.http.Pragma~"no-cache"){ set obj.ttl=0s; return (restart); } return(deliver); } #sub vcl_miss { return(fetch); } #sub vcl_fetch { if (beresp.ttl <= 120s || beresp.http.Set-Cookie || beresp.http.Vary == "*") { /* * Mark as "Hit-For-Pass" for the next 2 minutes */ set beresp.ttl = 10s; return (hit_for_pass); } return(deliver); } #sub vcl_deliver { return(deliver); } #sub vcl_init { return(ok); } #sub vcl_fini { return(ok); } and my Win7's hosts file add bellow: 192.168.1.178 www.newsmth.net 192.168.1.178 hk.weibo.com start varnish varnishd -f /etc/varnish/dd.vcl -s malloc,100M -a 0.0.0.0:8000 -T 0.0.0.0:3500<br> but when I access the "hk.weibo.com:8000" it fine, and got: Hello,I am hk.weibo.com! but when access http://www.newsmth.net:8000/, got: Hello,I am hk.weibo.com! <br> My question is why it isn't "Hello,I am www.newsmth.net!"? varnish fetched the content from the wrong backend. Does anyone know how to fix this?

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• duplicate cache pages: Varnish

  - by Sukhjinder Singh

  Recently we have configured Varnish on our server, it was successfully setup but we noticed that if we open any page in multiple browsers, the Varnish send request to Apache not matter page is cached or not. If we refresh twice on each browser it creates duplicate copies of the same page. What exactly should happen: If any page is cached by Varnish, the subsequent request should be served from Varnish itself when we are opening the same page in browser OR we are opening that page from different IP address. Following is my default.vcl file backend default { .host = "127.0.0.1"; .port = "80"; } sub vcl_recv { if( req.url ~ "^/search/.*$") { }else { set req.url = regsub(req.url, "\?.*", ""); } if (req.restarts == 0) { if (req.http.x-forwarded-for) { set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = req.http.X-Forwarded-For + ", " + client.ip; } else { set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = client.ip; } } if (!req.backend.healthy) { unset req.http.Cookie; } set req.grace = 6h; if (req.url ~ "^/status\.php$" || req.url ~ "^/update\.php$" || req.url ~ "^/admin$" || req.url ~ "^/admin/.*$" || req.url ~ "^/flag/.*$" || req.url ~ "^.*/ajax/.*$" || req.url ~ "^.*/ahah/.*$") { return (pass); } if (req.url ~ "(?i)\.(pdf|asc|dat|txt|doc|xls|ppt|tgz|csv|png|gif|jpeg|jpg|ico|swf|css|js)(\?.*)?$") { unset req.http.Cookie; } if (req.http.Cookie) { set req.http.Cookie = ";" + req.http.Cookie; set req.http.Cookie = regsuball(req.http.Cookie, "; +", ";"); set req.http.Cookie = regsuball(req.http.Cookie, ";(SESS[a-z0-9]+|SSESS[a-z0-9]+|NO_CACHE)=", "; \1="); set req.http.Cookie = regsuball(req.http.Cookie, ";[^ ][^;]*", ""); set req.http.Cookie = regsuball(req.http.Cookie, "^[; ]+|[; ]+$", ""); if (req.http.Cookie == "") { unset req.http.Cookie; } else { return (pass); } } if (req.request != "GET" && req.request != "HEAD" && req.request != "PUT" && req.request != "POST" && req.request != "TRACE" && req.request != "OPTIONS" && req.request != "DELETE") {return(pipe);} /* Non-RFC2616 or CONNECT which is weird. */ if (req.request != "GET" && req.request != "HEAD") { return (pass); } if (req.http.Accept-Encoding) { if (req.url ~ "\.(jpg|png|gif|gz|tgz|bz2|tbz|mp3|ogg)$") { # No point in compressing these remove req.http.Accept-Encoding; } else if (req.http.Accept-Encoding ~ "gzip") { set req.http.Accept-Encoding = "gzip"; } else if (req.http.Accept-Encoding ~ "deflate") { set req.http.Accept-Encoding = "deflate"; } else { # unknown algorithm remove req.http.Accept-Encoding; } } return (lookup); } sub vcl_deliver { if (obj.hits > 0) { set resp.http.X-Varnish-Cache = "HIT"; } else { set resp.http.X-Varnish-Cache = "MISS"; } } sub vcl_fetch { if (beresp.status == 404 || beresp.status == 301 || beresp.status == 500) { set beresp.ttl = 10m; } if (req.url ~ "(?i)\.(pdf|asc|dat|txt|doc|xls|ppt|tgz|csv|png|gif|jpeg|jpg|ico|swf|css|js)(\?.*)?$") { unset beresp.http.set-cookie; } set beresp.grace = 6h; } sub vcl_hash { hash_data(req.url); if (req.http.host) { hash_data(req.http.host); } else { hash_data(server.ip); } return (hash); } sub vcl_pipe { set req.http.connection = "close"; } sub vcl_hit { if (req.request == "PURGE") {ban_url(req.url); error 200 "Purged";} if (!obj.ttl > 0s) {return(pass);} } sub vcl_miss { if (req.request == "PURGE") {error 200 "Not in cache";} }

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• Microsoft Declares the Future of ASP.NET is Web API

  - by sbwalker

  Sitting on a plane on my way home from Tech Ed 2012 in Orlando, I thought it would be a good time to jot down some key takeaways from this year’s conference. Some of these items I have known since the Microsoft MVP Summit which occurred in Redmond in late February ( but due to NDA restrictions I could not share them with the developer community at large ) and some of them are a result of insightful conversations with a wide variety of industry insiders and Microsoft employees at the conference. First, let’s travel back in time 4 years to the Microsoft MVP Summit in 2008. Microsoft was facing some heat from market newcomer Ruby on Rails and responded with a new web development framework of its own, ASP.NET MVC. At the Summit they estimated that MVC would only be applicable for ~10% of all new web development projects. Based on that prediction I questioned why they were investing such considerable resources for such a relative edge case, but my guess is that they felt it was an important edge case at the time as some of the more vocal .NET evangelists as well as some very high profile start-ups ( ie. Twitter ) had publicly announced their intent to use Rails. Microsoft made a lot of noise about MVC. In fact, they focused so much of their messaging and marketing hype around MVC that it appeared that WebForms was essentially dead. Yes, it may have been true that Microsoft continued to invest in WebForms, but from an outside perspective it really appeared that MVC was the only framework getting any real attention. As a result, MVC started to gain market share. An inside source at Microsoft told me that MVC usage has grown at a rate of about 5% per year and now sits at ~30%. Essentially by focusing so much marketing effort on MVC, Microsoft actually created a larger market demand for it.  This is because in the Microsoft ecosystem there is somewhat of a bandwagon mentality amongst developers. If Microsoft spends a lot of time talking about a specific technology, developers get the perception that it must be really important. So rather than choosing the right tool for the job, they often choose the tool with the most marketing hype and then try to sell it to the customer. In 2010, I blogged about the fact that MVC did not make any business sense for the DotNetNuke platform. This was because our ecosystem relied on third party extensions which were dependent on the WebForms model. If we migrated the core to MVC it would mean that all of the third party extensions would no longer be compatible, which would be an irresponsible business decision for us to make at the expense of our users and customers. However, this did not stop the debate from continuing to occur in our ecosystem. Clearly some developers had drunk Microsoft’s Kool-Aid about MVC and were of the mindset, to paraphrase an old Scottish saying, “If its not MVC, it’s crap”. Now, this is a rather ignorant position to take as most of the benefits of MVC can be achieved in WebForms with solid architecture and responsible coding practices. Clean separation of concerns, unit testing, and direct control over page output are all possible in the WebForms model – it just requires diligence and discipline. So over the past few years some horror stories have begun to bubble to the surface of software development projects focused on ground-up rewrites of web applications for the sole purpose of migrating from WebForms to MVC. These large scale rewrites were typically initiated by engineering teams with only a single argument driving the business decision, that Microsoft was promoting MVC as “the future”. These ill-fated rewrites offered no benefit to end users or customers and in fact resulted in a less stable, less scalable and more complicated systems – basically taking one step forward and two full steps back. A case in point is the announcement earlier this week that a popular open source .NET CMS provider has decided to pull the plug on their new MVC product which has been under active development for more than 18 months and revert back to WebForms. The availability of multiple server-side development models has deeply fragmented the Microsoft developer community. Some folks like to compare it to the age-old VB vs. C# language debate. However, the VB vs. C# language debate was ultimately more of a religious war because at least the two dominant programming languages were compatible with one another and could be used interchangeably. The issue with WebForms vs. MVC is much more challenging. This is because the messaging from Microsoft has positioned the two solutions as being incompatible with one another and as a result web developers feel like they are forced to choose one path or another. Yes, it is true that it has always been technically possible to use WebForms and MVC in the same project, but the tooling support has always made this feel “dirty”. The fragmentation has also made it difficult to attract newcomers as the perceived barrier to entry for learning ASP.NET has become higher. As a result many new software developers entering the market are gravitating to environments where the development model seems more simple and intuitive ( ie. PHP or Ruby ). At the same time that the Web Platform team was busy promoting ASP.NET MVC, the Microsoft Office team has been promoting Sharepoint as a platform for building internal enterprise web applications. Sharepoint has great penetration in the enterprise and over time has been enhanced with improved extensibility capabilities for software developers. But, like many other mature enterprise ASP.NET web applications, it is built on the WebForms development model. Similar to DotNetNuke, Sharepoint leverages a rich third party ecosystem for both generic web controls and more specialized WebParts – both of which rely on WebForms. So basically this resulted in a situation where the Web Platform group had headed off in one direction and the Office team had gone in another direction, and the end customer was stuck in the middle trying to figure out what to do with their existing investments in Microsoft technology. It really emphasized the perception that the left hand was not speaking to the right hand, as strategically speaking there did not seem to be any high level plan from Microsoft to ensure consistency and continuity across the different product lines. With the introduction of ASP.NET MVC, it also made some of the third party control vendors scratch their heads, and wonder what the heck Microsoft was thinking. The original value proposition of ASP.NET over Classic ASP was the ability for web developers to emulate the highly productive desktop development model by using abstract components for creating rich, interactive web interfaces. Web control vendors like Telerik, Infragistics, DevExpress, and ComponentArt had all built sizable businesses offering powerful user interface components to WebForms developers. And even after MVC was introduced these vendors continued to improve their products, offering greater productivity and a superior user experience via AJAX to what was possible in MVC. And since many developers were comfortable and satisfied with these third party solutions, the demand remained strong and the third party web control market continued to prosper despite the availability of MVC. While all of this was going on in the Microsoft ecosystem, there has also been a fundamental shift in the general software development industry. Driven by the explosion of Internet-enabled devices, the focus has now centered on service-oriented architecture (SOA). Service-oriented architecture is all about defining a public API for your product that any client can consume; whether it’s a native application running on a smart phone or tablet, a web browser taking advantage of HTML5 and Javascript, or a rich desktop application running on a PC. REST-based services which utilize the less verbose characteristics of JSON as a transport mechanism, have become the preferred approach over older, more bloated SOAP-based techniques. SOA also has the benefit of producing a cross-platform API, as every major technology stack is able to interact with standard REST-based web services. And for web applications, more and more developers are turning to robust Javascript libraries like JQuery and Knockout for browser-based client-side development techniques for calling web services and rendering content to end users. In fact, traditional server-side page rendering has largely fallen out of favor, resulting in decreased demand for server-side frameworks like Ruby on Rails, WebForms, and (gasp) MVC. In response to these new industry trends, Microsoft did what it always does – it immediately poured some resources into developing a solution which will ensure they remain relevant and competitive in the web space. This work culminated in a new framework which was branded as Web API. It is convention-based and designed to embrace native HTTP standards without copious layers of abstraction. This framework is designed to be the ultimate replacement for both the REST aspects of WCF and ASP.NET MVC Web Services. And since it was developed out of band with a dependency only on ASP.NET 4.0, it means that it can be used immediately in a variety of production scenarios. So at Tech Ed 2012 it was made abundantly clear in numerous sessions that Microsoft views Web API as the “Future of ASP.NET”. In fact, one Microsoft PM even went as far as to say that if we look 3-4 years into the future, that all ASP.NET web applications will be developed using the Web API approach. This is a fairly bold prediction and clearly telegraphs where Microsoft plans to allocate its resources going forward. Currently Web API is being delivered as part of the MVC4 package, but this is only temporary for the sake of convenience. It also sounds like there are still internal discussions going on in terms of how to brand the various aspects of ASP.NET going forward – perhaps the moniker of “ASP.NET Web Stack” coined a couple years ago by Scott Hanselman and utilized as part of the open source release of ASP.NET bits on Codeplex a few months back will eventually stick. Web API is being positioned as the unification of ASP.NET – the glue that is able to pull this fragmented mess back together again. The  “One ASP.NET” strategy will promote the use of all frameworks - WebForms, MVC, and Web API, even within the same web project. Basically the message is utilize the appropriate aspects of each framework to solve your business problems. Instead of navigating developers to a fork in the road, the plan is to educate them that “hybrid” applications are a great strategy for delivering solutions to customers. In addition, the service-oriented approach coupled with client-side development promoted by Web API can effectively be used in both WebForms and MVC applications. So this means it is also relevant to application platforms like DotNetNuke and Sharepoint, which means that it starts to create a unified development strategy across all ASP.NET product lines once again. And so what about MVC? There have actually been rumors floated that MVC has reached a stage of maturity where, similar to WebForms, it will be treated more as a maintenance product line going forward ( MVC4 may in fact be the last significant iteration of this framework ). This may sound alarming to some folks who have recently adopted MVC but it really shouldn’t, as both WebForms and MVC will continue to play a vital role in delivering solutions to customers. They will just not be the primary area where Microsoft is spending the majority of its R&D resources. That distinction will obviously go to Web API. And when the question comes up of why not enhance MVC to make it work with Web API, you must take a step back and look at this from the higher level to see that it really makes no sense. MVC is a server-side page compositing framework; whereas, Web API promotes client-side page compositing with a heavy focus on web services. In order to make MVC work well with Web API, would require a complete rewrite of MVC and at the end of the day, there would be no upgrade path for existing MVC applications. So it really does not make much business sense. So what does this have to do with DotNetNuke? Well, around 8-12 months ago we recognized the software industry trends towards web services and client-side development. We decided to utilize a “hybrid” model which would provide compatibility for existing modules while at the same time provide a bridge for developers who wanted to utilize more modern web techniques. Customers who like the productivity and familiarity of WebForms can continue to build custom modules using the traditional approach. However, in DotNetNuke 6.2 we also introduced a new Service Framework which is actually built on top of MVC2 ( we chose to leverage MVC because it had the most intuitive, light-weight REST implementation in the .NET stack ). The Services Framework allowed us to build some rich interactive features in DotNetNuke 6.2, including the Messaging and Notification Center and Activity Feed. But based on where we know Microsoft is heading, it makes sense for the next major version of DotNetNuke ( which is expected to be released in Q4 2012 ) to migrate from MVC2 to Web API. This will likely result in some breaking changes in the Services Framework but we feel it is the best approach for ensuring the platform remains highly modern and relevant. The fact that our development strategy is perfectly aligned with the “One ASP.NET” strategy from Microsoft means that our customers and developer community can be confident in their current and future investments in the DotNetNuke platform.

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• A Communication System for XAML Applications

  - by psheriff

  In any application, you want to keep the coupling between any two or more objects as loose as possible. Coupling happens when one class contains a property that is used in another class, or uses another class in one of its methods. If you have this situation, then this is called strong or tight coupling. One popular design pattern to help with keeping objects loosely coupled is called the Mediator design pattern. The basics of this pattern are very simple; avoid one object directly talking to another object, and instead use another class to mediate between the two. As with most of my blog posts, the purpose is to introduce you to a simple approach to using a message broker, not all of the fine details. IPDSAMessageBroker Interface As with most implementations of a design pattern, you typically start with an interface or an abstract base class. In this particular instance, an Interface will work just fine. The interface for our Message Broker class just contains a single method “SendMessage” and one event “MessageReceived”. public delegate void MessageReceivedEventHandler( object sender, PDSAMessageBrokerEventArgs e); public interface IPDSAMessageBroker{  void SendMessage(PDSAMessageBrokerMessage msg);   event MessageReceivedEventHandler MessageReceived;} PDSAMessageBrokerMessage Class As you can see in the interface, the SendMessage method requires a type of PDSAMessageBrokerMessage to be passed to it. This class simply has a MessageName which is a ‘string’ type and a MessageBody property which is of the type ‘object’ so you can pass whatever you want in the body. You might pass a string in the body, or a complete Customer object. The MessageName property will help the receiver of the message know what is in the MessageBody property. public class PDSAMessageBrokerMessage{  public PDSAMessageBrokerMessage()  {  }   public PDSAMessageBrokerMessage(string name, object body)  {    MessageName = name;    MessageBody = body;  }   public string MessageName { get; set; }   public object MessageBody { get; set; }} PDSAMessageBrokerEventArgs Class As our message broker class will be raising an event that others can respond to, it is a good idea to create your own event argument class. This class will inherit from the System.EventArgs class and add a couple of additional properties. The properties are the MessageName and Message. The MessageName property is simply a string value. The Message property is a type of a PDSAMessageBrokerMessage class. public class PDSAMessageBrokerEventArgs : EventArgs{  public PDSAMessageBrokerEventArgs()  {  }   public PDSAMessageBrokerEventArgs(string name,     PDSAMessageBrokerMessage msg)  {    MessageName = name;    Message = msg;  }   public string MessageName { get; set; }   public PDSAMessageBrokerMessage Message { get; set; }} PDSAMessageBroker Class Now that you have an interface class and a class to pass a message through an event, it is time to create your actual PDSAMessageBroker class. This class implements the SendMessage method and will also create the event handler for the delegate created in your Interface. public class PDSAMessageBroker : IPDSAMessageBroker{  public void SendMessage(PDSAMessageBrokerMessage msg)  {    PDSAMessageBrokerEventArgs args;     args = new PDSAMessageBrokerEventArgs(      msg.MessageName, msg);     RaiseMessageReceived(args);  }   public event MessageReceivedEventHandler MessageReceived;   protected void RaiseMessageReceived(    PDSAMessageBrokerEventArgs e)  {    if (null != MessageReceived)      MessageReceived(this, e);  }} The SendMessage method will take a PDSAMessageBrokerMessage object as an argument. It then creates an instance of a PDSAMessageBrokerEventArgs class, passing to the constructor two items: the MessageName from the PDSAMessageBrokerMessage object and also the object itself. It may seem a little redundant to pass in the message name when that same message name is part of the message, but it does make consuming the event and checking for the message name a little cleaner – as you will see in the next section. Create a Global Message Broker In your WPF application, create an instance of this message broker class in the App class located in the App.xaml file. Create a public property in the App class and create a new instance of that class in the OnStartUp event procedure as shown in the following code: public partial class App : Application{  public PDSAMessageBroker MessageBroker { get; set; }   protected override void OnStartup(StartupEventArgs e)  {    base.OnStartup(e);     MessageBroker = new PDSAMessageBroker();  }} Sending and Receiving Messages Let’s assume you have a user control that you load into a control on your main window and you want to send a message from that user control to the main window. You might have the main window display a message box, or put a string into a status bar as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: The main window can receive and send messages The first thing you do in the main window is to hook up an event procedure to the MessageReceived event of the global message broker. This is done in the constructor of the main window: public MainWindow(){  InitializeComponent();   (Application.Current as App).MessageBroker.     MessageReceived += new MessageReceivedEventHandler(       MessageBroker_MessageReceived);} One piece of code you might not be familiar with is accessing a property defined in the App class of your XAML application. Within the App.Xaml file is a class named App that inherits from the Application object. You access the global instance of this App class by using Application.Current. You cast Application.Current to ‘App’ prior to accessing any of the public properties or methods you defined in the App class. Thus, the code (Application.Current as App).MessageBroker, allows you to get at the MessageBroker property defined in the App class. In the MessageReceived event procedure in the main window (shown below) you can now check to see if the MessageName property of the PDSAMessageBrokerEventArgs is equal to “StatusBar” and if it is, then display the message body into the status bar text block control. void MessageBroker_MessageReceived(object sender,   PDSAMessageBrokerEventArgs e){  switch (e.MessageName)  {    case "StatusBar":      tbStatus.Text = e.Message.MessageBody.ToString();      break;  }} In the Page 1 user control’s Loaded event procedure you will send the message “StatusBar” through the global message broker to any listener using the following code: private void UserControl_Loaded(object sender,  RoutedEventArgs e){  // Send Status Message  (Application.Current as App).MessageBroker.    SendMessage(new PDSAMessageBrokerMessage("StatusBar",      "This is Page 1"));} Since the main window is listening for the message ‘StatusBar’, it will display the value “This is Page 1” in the status bar at the bottom of the main window. Sending a Message to a User Control The previous example sent a message from the user control to the main window. You can also send messages from the main window to any listener as well. Remember that the global message broker is really just a broadcaster to anyone who has hooked into the MessageReceived event. In the constructor of the user control named ucPage1 you can hook into the global message broker’s MessageReceived event. You can then listen for any messages that are sent to this control by using a similar switch-case structure like that in the main window. public ucPage1(){  InitializeComponent();   // Hook to the Global Message Broker  (Application.Current as App).MessageBroker.    MessageReceived += new MessageReceivedEventHandler(      MessageBroker_MessageReceived);} void MessageBroker_MessageReceived(object sender,  PDSAMessageBrokerEventArgs e){  // Look for messages intended for Page 1  switch (e.MessageName)  {    case "ForPage1":      MessageBox.Show(e.Message.MessageBody.ToString());      break;  }} Once the ucPage1 user control has been loaded into the main window you can then send a message using the following code: private void btnSendToPage1_Click(object sender,  RoutedEventArgs e){  PDSAMessageBrokerMessage arg =     new PDSAMessageBrokerMessage();   arg.MessageName = "ForPage1";  arg.MessageBody = "Message For Page 1";   // Send a message to Page 1  (Application.Current as App).MessageBroker.SendMessage(arg);} Since the MessageName matches what is in the ucPage1 MessageReceived event procedure, ucPage1 can do anything in response to that event. It is important to note that when the message gets sent it is sent to all MessageReceived event procedures, not just the one that is looking for a message called “ForPage1”. If the user control ucPage1 is not loaded and this message is broadcast, but no other code is listening for it, then it is simply ignored. Remove Event Handler In each class where you add an event handler to the MessageReceived event you need to make sure to remove those event handlers when you are done. Failure to do so can cause a strong reference to the class and thus not allow that object to be garbage collected. In each of your user control’s make sure in the Unloaded event to remove the event handler. private void UserControl_Unloaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e){  if (_MessageBroker != null)    _MessageBroker.MessageReceived -=         _MessageBroker_MessageReceived;} Problems with Message Brokering As with most “global” classes or classes that hook up events to other classes, garbage collection is something you need to consider. Just the simple act of hooking up an event procedure to a global event handler creates a reference between your user control and the message broker in the App class. This means that even when your user control is removed from your UI, the class will still be in memory because of the reference to the message broker. This can cause messages to still being handled even though the UI is not being displayed. It is up to you to make sure you remove those event handlers as discussed in the previous section. If you don’t, then the garbage collector cannot release those objects. Instead of using events to send messages from one object to another you might consider registering your objects with a central message broker. This message broker now becomes a collection class into which you pass an object and what messages that object wishes to receive. You do end up with the same problem however. You have to un-register your objects; otherwise they still stay in memory. To alleviate this problem you can look into using the WeakReference class as a method to store your objects so they can be garbage collected if need be. Discussing Weak References is beyond the scope of this post, but you can look this up on the web. Summary In this blog post you learned how to create a simple message broker system that will allow you to send messages from one object to another without having to reference objects directly. This does reduce the coupling between objects in your application. You do need to remember to get rid of any event handlers prior to your objects going out of scope or you run the risk of having memory leaks and events being called even though you can no longer access the object that is responding to that event. NOTE: You can download the sample code for this article by visiting my website at http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Select “Tips & Tricks”, then select “A Communication System for XAML Applications” from the drop down list.

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• Gmail rejects emails. Openspf.net fails the tests

  - by pablomedok

  I've got a problem with Gmail. It started after one of our trojan infected PCs sent spam for one day from our IP address. We've fixed the problem, but we got into 3 black lists. We've fixed that, too. But still every time we send an email to Gmail the message is rejected: So I've checked Google Bulk Sender's guide once again and found an error in our SPF record and fixed it. Google says everything should become fine after some time, but this doesn't happen. 3 weeks already passed but we still can't send emails to Gmail. Our MX setup is a bit complex, but not too much: We have a domain name delo-company.com, it has it's own mail @delo-company.com (this one is fine, but the problems are with sub-domain name corp.delo-company.com). Delo-company.com domain has several DNS records for the subdomain: corp A 82.209.198.147 corp MX 20 corp.delo-company.com corp.delo-company.com TXT "v=spf1 ip4:82.209.198.147 ~all" (I set ~all for testing purposes only, it was -all before that) These records are for our corporate Exchange 2003 server at 82.209.198.147. Its LAN name is s2.corp.delo-company.com so its HELO/EHLO greetings are also s2.corp.delo-company.com. To pass EHLO check we've also created some records in delo-company.com's DNS: s2.corp A 82.209.198.147 s2.corp.delo-company.com TXT "v=spf1 ip4:82.209.198.147 ~all" As I understand SPF verifications should be passed in this way: Out server s2 connects to MX of the recepient (Rcp.MX): EHLO s2.corp.delo-company.com Rcp.MX says Ok, and makes SPF check of HELO/EHLO. It does NSlookup for s2.corp.delo-company.com and gets the above DNS-records. TXT records says that s2.corp.delo-company.com should be only from IP 82.209.198.147. So it should be passed. Then our s2 server says RCPT FROM: Rcp.MX` server checks it, too. The values are the same so they should also be positive. Maybe there is also a rDNS check, but I'm not sure what is checked HELO or RCPT FROM. Our PTR record for 82.209.198.147 is: 147.198.209.82.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN PTR s2.corp.delo-company.com. To me everything looks fine, but anyway all emails are rejected by Gmail. So, I've checked MXtoolbox.com - it says everything is fine, I passed http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html Python check, I did 25port.com email test. It's fine, too: Return-Path: <[email protected]> Received: from s2.corp.delo-company.com (82.209.198.147) by verifier.port25.com id ha45na11u9cs for <[email protected]>; Fri, 2 Mar 2012 13:03:21 -0500 (envelope-from <[email protected]>) Authentication-Results: verifier.port25.com; spf=pass [email protected] Authentication-Results: verifier.port25.com; domainkeys=neutral (message not signed) [email protected] Authentication-Results: verifier.port25.com; dkim=neutral (message not signed) Authentication-Results: verifier.port25.com; sender-id=pass [email protected] Content-class: urn:content-classes:message MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01CCF89E.BE02A069" Subject: test Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 21:03:15 +0300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5 Message-ID: <[email protected]> X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: Thread-Topic: test Thread-Index: Acz4jS34oznvbyFQR4S5rXsNQFvTdg== From: =?koi8-r?B?89XQ0tXOwMsg8MHXxcw=?= <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> I also checked with [email protected], but it FAILs all the time, no matter which SPF records I make: <s2.corp.delo-company.com #5.7.1 smtp;550 5.7.1 <[email protected]>: Recipient address rejected: SPF Tests: Mail-From Result="softfail": Mail From="[email protected]" HELO name="s2.corp.delo-company.com" HELO Result="softfail" Remote IP="82.209.198.147"> I've filled Gmail form twice, but nothing happens. We do not send spam, only emails for our clients. 2 or 3 times we did mass emails (like New Year Greetings and sales promos) from corp.delo-company.com addresses, but they where all complying to Gmail Bulk Sender's Guide (I mean SPF, Open Relays, Precedence: Bulk and Unsubscribe tags). So, this should be not a problem. Please, help me. What am I doing wrong? UPD: I also tried Unlocktheinbox.com test and the server also fails this test. Here is the result: http://bit.ly/wYr39h . Here is one more http://bit.ly/ypWLjr I also tried to send email from that server manually via telnet and everything is fine. Here is what I type: 220 mx.google.com ESMTP g15si4811326anb.170 HELO s2.corp.delo-company.com 250 mx.google.com at your service MAIL FROM: <[email protected]> 250 2.1.0 OK g15si4811326anb.170 RCPT TO: <[email protected]> 250 2.1.5 OK g15si4811326anb.170 DATA 354 Go ahead g15si4811326anb.170 From: [email protected] To: Pavel <[email protected]> Subject: Test 28 This is telnet test . 250 2.0.0 OK 1330795021 g15si4811326anb.170 QUIT 221 2.0.0 closing connection g15si4811326anb.170 And this is what I get: Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: by 10.227.132.73 with SMTP id a9csp96864wbt; Sat, 3 Mar 2012 09:17:02 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.101.128.12 with SMTP id f12mr4837125ann.49.1330795021572; Sat, 03 Mar 2012 09:17:01 -0800 (PST) Return-Path: <[email protected]> Received: from s2.corp.delo-company.com (s2.corp.delo-company.com. [82.209.198.147]) by mx.google.com with SMTP id g15si4811326anb.170.2012.03.03.09.15.59; Sat, 03 Mar 2012 09:17:00 -0800 (PST) Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates 82.209.198.147 as permitted sender) client-ip=82.209.198.147; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates 82.209.198.147 as permitted sender) [email protected] Date: Sat, 03 Mar 2012 09:17:00 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <[email protected]> From: [email protected] To: Pavel <[email protected]> Subject: Test 28 This is telnet test

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• Optimize php-fpm and varnish for a powerfull server

  - by Jim

  My setup is: Intel® Core™ i7-2600 and RAM 16 GB DDR3 RAM varnish+nginx+php-fpm+apc for a not very heavy WordPress blog with W3 Total Cache and CDN My problem is that after 55 hits per second according to blitz.io varnish starts giving out timeouts. CPU usage at this time is hardly 1%. Free memory at all time remains 10GB+. I tried benchmarking php-fpm directly with result of 150hits/s without any timeouts. But after that the CPU usage goes 100% and it stops responding. Can you help me optimize it to handle more? As i understand nginx has nothing to do over here so i dont put its config. php-fpm config listen = /tmp/php5-fpm.sock listen.allowed_clients = 127.0.0.1 user = nginx group = nginx pm = dynamic pm.max_children = 150 pm.start_servers = 7 pm.min_spare_servers = 2 pm.max_spare_servers = 15 pm.max_requests = 500 slowlog = /var/log/php-fpm/www-slow.log php_admin_value[error_log] = /var/log/php-fpm/www-error.log php_admin_flag[log_errors] = on apc extension = apc.so apc.enabled=1 apc.shm_size=512MB apc.num_files_hint=0 apc.user_entries_hint=0 apc.ttl=7200 apc.use_request_time=1 apc.user_ttl=7200 apc.gc_ttl=3600 apc.cache_by_default=1 apc.filters apc.mmap_file_mask=/tmp/apc.XXXXXX apc.file_update_protection=2 apc.enable_cli=0 apc.max_file_size=1M apc.stat=1 apc.stat_ctime=0 apc.canonicalize=0 apc.write_lock=1 apc.report_autofilter=0 apc.rfc1867=0 apc.rfc1867_prefix =upload_ apc.rfc1867_name=APC_UPLOAD_PROGRESS apc.rfc1867_freq=0 apc.rfc1867_ttl=3600 apc.include_once_override=0 apc.lazy_classes=0 apc.lazy_functions=0 apc.coredump_unmap=0 apc.file_md5=0 apc.preload_path Varnish VCL backend default { .host = "127.0.0.1"; .port = "8080"; .connect_timeout = 6s; .first_byte_timeout = 6s; .between_bytes_timeout = 60s; } acl purgehosts { "localhost"; "127.0.0.1"; } # Called after a document has been successfully retrieved from the backend. sub vcl_fetch { # Uncomment to make the default cache "time to live" is 5 minutes, handy # but it may cache stale pages unless purged. (TODO) # By default Varnish will use the headers sent to it by Apache (the backend server) # to figure out the correct TTL. # WP Super Cache sends a TTL of 3 seconds, set in wp-content/cache/.htaccess set beresp.ttl = 24h; # Strip cookies for static files and set a long cache expiry time. if (req.url ~ "\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|pdf|txt|tar|wav|bmp|rtf|js|flv|swf|html|htm)$") { unset beresp.http.set-cookie; set beresp.ttl = 24h; } # If WordPress cookies found then page is not cacheable if (req.http.Cookie ~"(wp-postpass|wordpress_logged_in|comment_author_)") { # set beresp.cacheable = false;#versions less than 3 #beresp.ttl>0 is cacheable so 0 will not be cached set beresp.ttl = 0s; } else { #set beresp.cacheable = true; set beresp.ttl=24h;#cache for 24hrs } # Varnish determined the object was not cacheable #if ttl is not > 0 seconds then it is cachebale if (!beresp.ttl > 0s) { # set beresp.http.X-Cacheable = "NO:Not Cacheable"; } else if ( req.http.Cookie ~"(wp-postpass|wordpress_logged_in|comment_author_)" ) { # You don't wish to cache content for logged in users set beresp.http.X-Cacheable = "NO:Got Session"; return(hit_for_pass); #previously just pass but changed in v3+ } else if ( beresp.http.Cache-Control ~ "private") { # You are respecting the Cache-Control=private header from the backend set beresp.http.X-Cacheable = "NO:Cache-Control=private"; return(hit_for_pass); } else if ( beresp.ttl < 1s ) { # You are extending the lifetime of the object artificially set beresp.ttl = 300s; set beresp.grace = 300s; set beresp.http.X-Cacheable = "YES:Forced"; } else { # Varnish determined the object was cacheable set beresp.http.X-Cacheable = "YES"; if (beresp.status == 404 || beresp.status >= 500) { set beresp.ttl = 0s; } # Deliver the content return(deliver); } sub vcl_hash { # Each cached page has to be identified by a key that unlocks it. # Add the browser cookie only if a WordPress cookie found. if ( req.http.Cookie ~"(wp-postpass|wordpress_logged_in|comment_author_)" ) { #set req.hash += req.http.Cookie; hash_data(req.http.Cookie); } } # vcl_recv is called whenever a request is received sub vcl_recv { # remove ?ver=xxxxx strings from urls so css and js files are cached. # Watch out when upgrading WordPress, need to restart Varnish or flush cache. set req.url = regsub(req.url, "\?ver=.*$", ""); # Remove "replytocom" from requests to make caching better. set req.url = regsub(req.url, "\?replytocom=.*$", ""); remove req.http.X-Forwarded-For; set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = client.ip; # Exclude this site because it breaks if cached if ( req.http.host == "sr.ituts.gr" ) { return( pass ); } # Serve objects up to 2 minutes past their expiry if the backend is slow to respond. set req.grace = 120s; # Strip cookies for static files: if (req.url ~ "\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|pdf|txt|tar|wav|bmp|rtf|js|flv|swf|html|htm)$") { unset req.http.Cookie; return(lookup); } # Remove has_js and Google Analytics __* cookies. set req.http.Cookie = regsuball(req.http.Cookie, "(^|;\s*)(__[a-z]+|has_js)=[^;]*", ""); # Remove a ";" prefix, if present. set req.http.Cookie = regsub(req.http.Cookie, "^;\s*", ""); # Remove empty cookies. if (req.http.Cookie ~ "^\s*$") { unset req.http.Cookie; } if (req.request == "PURGE") { if (!client.ip ~ purgehosts) { error 405 "Not allowed."; } #previous version ban() was purge() ban("req.url ~ " + req.url + " && req.http.host == " + req.http.host); error 200 "Purged."; } # Pass anything other than GET and HEAD directly. if (req.request != "GET" && req.request != "HEAD") { return( pass ); } /* We only deal with GET and HEAD by default */ # remove cookies for comments cookie to make caching better. set req.http.cookie = regsub(req.http.cookie, "1231111111111111122222222333333=[^;]+(; )?", ""); # never cache the admin pages, or the server-status page, or your feed? you may want to..i don't if (req.request == "GET" && (req.url ~ "(wp-admin|bb-admin|server-status|feed)")) { return(pipe); } # don't cache authenticated sessions if (req.http.Cookie && req.http.Cookie ~ "(wordpress_|PHPSESSID)") { return(lookup); } # don't cache ajax requests if(req.http.X-Requested-With == "XMLHttpRequest" || req.url ~ "nocache" || req.url ~ "(control.php|wp-comments-post.php|wp-login.php|bb-login.php|bb-reset-password.php|register.php)") { return (pass); } return( lookup ); } Varnish Daemon options DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80 \ -T 127.0.0.1:6082 \ -f /etc/varnish/ituts.vcl \ -u varnish -g varnish \ -S /etc/varnish/secret \ -p thread_pool_add_delay=2 \ -p thread_pools=8 \ -p thread_pool_min=100 \ -p thread_pool_max=1000 \ -p session_linger=50 \ -p session_max=150000 \ -p sess_workspace=262144 \ -s malloc,5G" Im not sure where to start, should i for start optimize php-fpm and then go to varnish or php-fpm is at its max right now so i should start looking for the problem in varnish?

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• Convert a DVD Movie Directly to AVI with FairUse Wizard 2.9

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Are you looking for a way to backup your DVD movie collection to AVI?  Today we’ll show you how to rip a DVD movie directly to AVI with FairUse Wizard. About FairUse Wizard FairUse Wizard 2.9 uses the DivX, Xvid, or h.264 codec to convert DVD to an AVI file. It comes in both a free version and commercial version. The free, or “Light” version, can create files up 700MB while the commercial version can output a 1400MB file. This will allow you to back up your movies to CD, or even multiple movies on a single DVD. FairUse Wizard states that it does not work on copy protected discs, but we’ve seen it work on all but some of the most recent copy protection. For this tutorial we’re using the free Light Edition to convert a DVD to AVI. They also offer a commercial version that you can get for $29.99 and it offers even more encoding possibilities for converting video to you portable digital devices. Installation and Configuration Download and install FairUse Wizard. (Download link below). Once the install is complete, open FairUse Wizard by going to Start > All Programs >  FairUse Wizard 2 >  FairUse Wizard 2.   FairUse Wizard will open on the new project screen. Select “Create a new project” and type a project name into the text box. This will be used as the file output name.  Ex: A project name of Simpsons Movie will give you an output file of Simpsons Movie.avi.   Next, browse for a destination folder for the output file and temp files. Note that you will need a minimum of 6 GB of free disk space for the conversion process. Note: Much of that 6 GB will be used for temporary files that we will delete after the conversion process.   Click on the Options button at the bottom.   Under Preferences, choose your preferred video codec and file output size. XviD and x264 are installed by default. If you prefer to use DivX, you will have to install it separately. Also note the “Two pass” option. Checking the “Two pass” box will encode your video twice for higher quality, but will take more time. Un-checking the box will speed up the conversion process.   Under Audio track, note that English subtitles are enabled by default, so to remove the subtitles, you will need to change the dropdown list so it shows only a dash (-). You can also select “Use TV Mode” if your primary playback will be on a 4:3 TV screen. Click “Next.” Full Auto Mode vs. Manual Mode You should now be back to the initial screen. Next, we’ll need to determine whether or not we can use “Full Auto Mode” to convert the movie. The difference is that “Full Auto Mode” will automatically perform a few steps that you will otherwise have to do manually. If you choose the “Full Auto Mode” option, FairUse Wizard will look for the video on the DVD with the longest duration and assume it is the chain that it should convert to AVI. It’s possible, however, your disc may contain a few chains of similar size, such as a theatrical cut and director’s cut, and the longest chain may not be the one you wish to convert. Make sure that “Full auto mode” is not checked yet, and click “Next.”   FairUse Wizard will parse the IFO files and display all video chains longer than 60  seconds. In most cases, you will only find that the largest chain is the one closely matching the duration of the movie. In these instances, you can use “Full Auto Mode.” If you find more than one chain that are close in duration to the length of the movie, consult the literature on the DVD case, or search online, to find the actual running time of the movie. If the proper file chain is not the longest chain, you won’t be able to use “Full Auto Mode.”   Full Auto Mode To use “Full Auto Mode,” simply click the “Back” button to return to the initial screen Now, place a check in the “Full auto mode” check box. Click “Next.” You will then be prompted to chose your DVD drive, then click “OK.” FairUse Wizard will parse the IFO files… … and then prompt you to Select your drive that contains the DVD one more time before beginning the conversion process. Click “OK.”   Manual Mode If you cannot (or don’t wish to) use Full Auto Mode, choose the appropriate video chain and click “Next.” FairUse Wizard will first go through the process of indexing the video. Note: If you get a runtime error during this portion of the process, it likely means that FairUse Wizard cannot handle the copy protection, and thus cannot convert the DVD. FairUse Wizard will automatically detect a cropping region. If necessary, you can edit the cropping region by adjusting the cropping region settings to the left. Click “Next.” Next, click “Auto Detect” to choose the proper field combination. Click “OK” on the pop up window that displays your Field Mode. Then click “Next.” This next screen is mainly comprised of settings from the Options screen. You can make changes at this point such as codec or output size. Click “Next” when ready.   Video Conversion Now the video conversion process will begin. This may take a few hours depending on your system’s hardware. Note: There is a check box to “Shutdown computer when done” if you choose to run the conversion overnight or before leaving for work. The first phase will be video encoding… Then the audio… If you chose the “Two Pass” option, your video video will be encoded again on 2nd pass. Then you’re finished. Unfortunately, FairUse Wizard doesn’t clean up after itself very well. After the process is complete, you’ll want to browse to your output directory and delete all the temporary files as they take up a considerable amount of hard drive space. Now you’re ready to enjoy your movie. Conclusion FairUse Wizard is a nice way to backup your DVD movies to good quality .avi files. You can store them on your hard drive, watch them on a media PC, or burn them to disc. Many DVD players even allow for playback of DivX or XviD encoded video from a CD or DVD. For those of you with children, you can burn that AVI file to CD for your kids, and keep your original DVDs stored safely out of harms way. Download Download FairUse Wizard 2.9 LE Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Kantaris is a Unique Media Player Based on VLCHow to Make/Edit a movie with Windows Movie Maker in Windows VistaAutomatically Mount and View ISO files in Windows 7 Media CenterTune Your ClearType Font Settings in Windows VistaAdd Images and Metadata to Windows 7 Media Center Movie Library TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

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• techniques for an AI for a highly cramped turn-based tactics game

  - by Adam M.

  I'm trying to write an AI for a tactics game in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics or Vandal Hearts. I can't change the game rules in any way, only upgrade the AI. I have experience programming AI for classic board games (basically minimax and its variants), but I think the branching factor is too great for the approach to be reasonable here. I'll describe the game and some current AI flaws that I'd like to fix. I'd like to hear ideas for applicable techniques. I'm a decent enough programmer, so I only need the ideas, not an implementation (though that's always appreciated). I'd rather not expend effort chasing (too many) dead ends, so although speculation and brainstorming are good and probably helpful, I'd prefer to hear from somebody with actual experience solving this kind of problem. For those who know it, the game is the land battle mini-game in Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004) and you can skim/skip the next two paragraphs. For those who don't, here's briefly how it works. The battle is turn-based and takes place on a 16x16 grid. There are three terrain types: clear (no hindrance), forest (hinders movement, ranged attacks, and sight), and rock (impassible, but does not hinder attacks or sight). The map is randomly generated with roughly equal amounts of each type of terrain. Because there are many rock and forest tiles, movement is typically very cramped. This is tactically important. The terrain is not flat; higher terrain gives minor bonuses. The terrain is known to both sides. The player is always the attacker and the AI is always the defender, so it's perfectly valid for the AI to set up a defensive position and just wait. The player wins by killing all defenders or by getting a unit to the city gates (a tile on the other side of the map). There are very few units on each side, usually 4-8. Because of this, it's crucial not to take damage without gaining some advantage from it. Units can take multiple actions per turn. All units on one side move before any units on the other side. Order of execution is important, and interleaving of actions between units is often useful. Units have melee and ranged attacks. Melee attacks vary widely in strength; ranged attacks have the same strength but vary in range. The main challenges I face are these: Lots of useful move combinations start with a "useless" move that gains no immediate advantage, or even loses advantage, in order to set up a powerful flank attack in the future. And, since the player units are stronger and have longer range, the AI pretty much always has to take some losses before they can start to gain kills. The AI must be able to look ahead to distinguish between sacrificial actions that provide a future benefit and those that don't. Because the terrain is so cramped, most of the tactics come down to achieving good positioning with multiple units that work together to defend an area. For instance, two defenders can often dominate a narrow pass by positioning themselves so an enemy unit attempting to pass must expose itself to a flank attack. But one defender in the same pass would be useless, and three units can defend a slightly larger pass. Etc. The AI should be able to figure out where the player must go to reach the city gates and how to best position its few units to cover the approaches, shifting, splitting, or combining them appropriately as the player moves. Because flank attacks are extremely deadly (and engineering flank attacks is key to the player strategy), the AI should be competent at moving its units so that they cover each other's flanks unless the sacrifice of a unit would give a substantial benefit. They should also be able to force flank attacks on players, for instance by threatening a unit from two different directions such that responding to one threat exposes the flank to the other. The AI should attack if possible, but sometimes there are no good ways to approach the player's position. In that case, the AI should be able to recognize this and set up a defensive position of its own. But the AI shouldn't be vulnerable to a trivial exploit where the player repeatedly opens and closes a hole in his defense and shoots at the AI as it approaches and retreats. That is, the AI should ideally be able to recognize that the player is capable of establishing a solid defense of an area, even if the defense is not currently in place. (I suppose if a good unit allocation algorithm existed, as needed for the second bullet point, the AI could run it on the player units to see where they could defend.) Because it's important to choose a good order of action and interleave actions between units, it's not as simple as just finding the best move for each unit in turn. All of these can be accomplished with a minimax search in theory, but the search space is too large, so specialized techniques are needed. I thought about techniques such as influence mapping, but I don't see how to use the technique to great effect. I thought about assigning goals to the units. This can help them work together in some limited way, and the problem of "how do I accomplish this goal?" is easier to solve than "how do I win this battle?", but assigning good goals is a hard problem in itself, because it requires knowing whether the goal is achievable and whether it's a good use of resources. So, does anyone have specific ideas for techniques that can help cleverize this AI? Update: I found a related question on Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133273/ai-for-a-final-fantasy-tactics-like-game The selected answer gives a decent approach to choosing between alternative actions, but it doesn't seem to have much ability to look into the future and discern beneficial sacrifices from wasteful ones. It also focuses on a single unit at a time and it's not clear how it could be extended to support cooperation between units in defending or attacking.

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: MVC 2 Strongly Typed HTML Helper and Enhanced Validation Sample

  - by mbridge

  In lue of the off the official release of ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM, I decided I would put together a quick sample of the enhanced HTML.Helpers and validation controls. I am going to use my sample event site where I will have a form so a user can search for information about a certain events. So when the Search page loads the Search action is fired return my strongly typed model. to the view.    1: [HttpGet]    2: public ViewResult Search(): public ViewResult Search()    3: {    4:     IList<EventsModel> result = _eventsService.GetEventList();    5:     var viewModel = new EventSearchModel    6:                         {    7:                             EventList = new SelectList(result, "EventCode","EventName","Select Event")    8:                         };    9:     return View(viewModel);  10: } Nothing special here, although I did want to show how to load up a strongly typed drop down list because that hung me up for a little bit. So to that, I am going to pass back a SelectList to the view and my HTML helper should no how to load this. So lets take a look at the mark up for the view.    1: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master"    2: Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<EventsSample.Models.EventSearchModel>" %>    3:     4: <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server">    5:     Search    6: </asp:Content>    7:     8: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">    9:   10:     <h2>Search for Events</h2>  11:   12:     <% using (Html.BeginForm("Search","Events")) {%>  13:         <%= Html.ValidationSummary(true) %>  14:          15:         <fieldset>  16:             <legend>Fields</legend>  17:              18:             <div class="editor-label">  19:                 <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.EventNumber) %>  20:             </div>  21:             <div class="editor-field">  22:                 <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.EventNumber) %>  23:                 <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.EventNumber) %>  24:             </div>  25:              26:             <div class="editor-label">  27:                 <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %>  28:             </div>  29:             <div class="editor-field">  30:                 <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %>  31:                 <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %>  32:             </div>  33:              34:             <div class="editor-label">  35:                 <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.EventName) %>  36:             </div>  37:             <div class="editor-field">  38:                 <%= Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.EventName, Model.EventList,"Select Event") %>  39:                 <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.EventName) %>  40:             </div>  41:              42:             <p>  43:                 <input type="submit" value="Save" />  44:             </p>  45:         </fieldset>  46:   47:     <% } %>  48:   49:     <div>  50:         <%= Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") %>  51:     </div>  52:   53: </asp:Content> A nice feature is the scaffolding that MVC has to generate code. I simply right clicked inside my Search() action, inside the EventsController and selected “Add View” and then I selected my strongly typed object that I wanted to pass to the view and also selected that I wanted the content type be “Edit”. With that the aspx page was completely generated, although I did have to go back in and change the textbox for the Event Names to a drop down list of the names to select from. The new feature with MVC 2 are the strongly typed HTML helpers. So now, my textboxes, drop down list, and validation helpers are all strongly typed to my model.  This features gives you the benefits of intellisense and also makes it easier to debug. “The Gu” has a great post about the feature in case you want more details. The DropDownListFor function to generate the drop down list was a little tricky for me. You first need to use a Lanbda expression to pass in the property you want the selected value assigned to in your model, and then you need to pass in the list directly from the model. Validations To validate the form, you can use the strongly type validation HTML helpers which will inspect your model and return errors if the validation fails. The definitions of these rules are set directly on the Model itself so lets take a look.    1: using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations;    2: using System.Web.Mvc;    3:     4: namespace EventsSample.Models    5: {    6:     public class EventSearchModel    7:     {    8:         [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the event number.")]    9:         [RegularExpression(@"\w{6}",  10:             ErrorMessage = "The Event Number must be 6 letters and/or numbers.")]  11:         public string EventNumber { get; set; }  12:   13:         [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the guest's last name.")]  14:         [RegularExpression(@"^[A-Za-zÀ-ÖØ-öø-ÿ1-9 '\-\.]{1,22}$",  15:             ErrorMessage = "The gueest's last name must 1 to 20 characters.")]  16:         public string GuestLastName { get; set; }  17:   18:         public string EventName { get; set; }  19:         public SelectList EventList { get; set; }  20:     }  21: } Pretty cool! Okay, the only thing left to do is perform the validation in the POST action.    1: [HttpPost]    2: public ViewResult Search(EventSearchModel eventSearchModel)    3: {    4:     if (ModelState.IsValid) return View("SearchResults");    5:     else    6:     {    7:          IList<EventsModel> result = _eventsService.GetEventList();    8:         eventSearchModel.EventList = new SelectList(result, "EVentCode","EventName");   9:   10:         return View(eventSearchModel);  11:     }  12: }  13:     } If the form entries are valid, here I am simply displaying the SearchResult, but in a real world sample I would also go out get the results first. You get the idea though. In my case, when the form is not valid, I also had to reload my SelectList with the event names before I loaded the page again. Remember this is MVC, no _VieState here :) So that’s it. Now my form is validating the data and when it fails it looks like this.

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• Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario   Conventional Structures   Columnstore   Δ SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically.  The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes.  As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics.  Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible.  The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators.  As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: Error Handling and CustomErrors in ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework

  - by C. Miller

  So, what else is new in MVC 3? MVC 3 now has a GlobalFilterCollection that is automatically populated with a HandleErrorAttribute. This default FilterAttribute brings with it a new way of handling errors in your web applications. In short, you can now handle errors inside of the MVC pipeline. What does that mean? This gives you direct programmatic control over handling your 500 errors in the same way that ASP.NET and CustomErrors give you configurable control of handling your HTTP error codes. How does that work out? Think of it as a routing table specifically for your Exceptions, it's pretty sweet! Global Filters The new Global.asax file now has a RegisterGlobalFilters method that is used to add filters to the new GlobalFilterCollection, statically located at System.Web.Mvc.GlobalFilter.Filters. By default this method adds one filter, the HandleErrorAttribute. public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication {     public static void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters)     {         filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute());     } HandleErrorAttributes The HandleErrorAttribute is pretty simple in concept: MVC has already adjusted us to using Filter attributes for our AcceptVerbs and RequiresAuthorization, now we are going to use them for (as the name implies) error handling, and we are going to do so on a (also as the name implies) global scale. The HandleErrorAttribute has properties for ExceptionType, View, and Master. The ExceptionType allows you to specify what exception that attribute should handle. The View allows you to specify which error view (page) you want it to redirect to. Last but not least, the Master allows you to control which master page (or as Razor refers to them, Layout) you want to render with, even if that means overriding the default layout specified in the view itself. public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication {     public static void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters)     {         filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute         {             ExceptionType = typeof(DbException),             // DbError.cshtml is a view in the Shared folder.             View = "DbError",             Order = 2         });         filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute());     }Error Views All of your views still work like they did in the previous version of MVC (except of course that they can now use the Razor engine). However, a view that is used to render an error can not have a specified model! This is because they already have a model, and that is System.Web.Mvc.HandleErrorInfo @model System.Web.Mvc.HandleErrorInfo           @{     ViewBag.Title = "DbError"; } <h2>A Database Error Has Occurred</h2> @if (Model != null) {     <p>@Model.Exception.GetType().Name<br />     thrown in @Model.ControllerName @Model.ActionName</p> }Errors Outside of the MVC Pipeline The HandleErrorAttribute will only handle errors that happen inside of the MVC pipeline, better known as 500 errors. Errors outside of the MVC pipeline are still handled the way they have always been with ASP.NET. You turn on custom errors, specify error codes and paths to error pages, etc. It is important to remember that these will happen for anything and everything outside of what the HandleErrorAttribute handles. Also, these will happen whenever an error is not handled with the HandleErrorAttribute from inside of the pipeline. <system.web>  <customErrors mode="On" defaultRedirect="~/error">     <error statusCode="404" redirect="~/error/notfound"></error>  </customErrors>Sample Controllers public class ExampleController : Controller {     public ActionResult Exception()     {         throw new ArgumentNullException();     }     public ActionResult Db()     {         // Inherits from DbException         throw new MyDbException();     } } public class ErrorController : Controller {     public ActionResult Index()     {         return View();     }     public ActionResult NotFound()     {         return View();     } } Putting It All Together If we have all the code above included in our MVC 3 project, here is how the following scenario's will play out: 1.       A controller action throws an Exception. You will remain on the current page and the global HandleErrorAttributes will render the Error view. 2.       A controller action throws any type of DbException. You will remain on the current page and the global HandleErrorAttributes will render the DbError view. 3.       Go to a non-existent page. You will be redirect to the Error controller's NotFound action by the CustomErrors configuration for HTTP StatusCode 404. But don't take my word for it, download the sample project and try it yourself. Three Important Lessons Learned For the most part this is all pretty straight forward, but there are a few gotcha's that you should remember to watch out for: 1) Error views have models, but they must be of type HandleErrorInfo. It is confusing at first to think that you can't control the M in an MVC page, but it's for a good reason. Errors can come from any action in any controller, and no redirect is taking place, so the view engine is just going to render an error view with the only data it has: The HandleError Info model. Do not try to set the model on your error page or pass in a different object through a controller action, it will just blow up and cause a second exception after your first exception! 2) When the HandleErrorAttribute renders a page, it does not pass through a controller or an action. The standard web.config CustomErrors literally redirect a failed request to a new page. The HandleErrorAttribute is just rendering a view, so it is not going to pass through a controller action. But that's ok! Remember, a controller's job is to get the model for a view, but an error already has a model ready to give to the view, thus there is no need to pass through a controller. That being said, the normal ASP.NET custom errors still need to route through controllers. So if you want to share an error page between the HandleErrorAttribute and your web.config redirects, you will need to create a controller action and route for it. But then when you render that error view from your action, you can only use the HandlerErrorInfo model or ViewData dictionary to populate your page. 3) The HandleErrorAttribute obeys if CustomErrors are on or off, but does not use their redirects. If you turn CustomErrors off in your web.config, the HandleErrorAttributes will stop handling errors. However, that is the only configuration these two mechanisms share. The HandleErrorAttribute will not use your defaultRedirect property, or any other errors registered with customer errors. In Summary The HandleErrorAttribute is for displaying 500 errors that were caused by exceptions inside of the MVC pipeline. The custom errors are for redirecting from error pages caused by other HTTP codes.

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• how to define a field of view for the entire map for shadow?

  - by Mehdi Bugnard

  I recently added "Shadow Mapping" in my XNA games to include shadows. I followed the nice and famous tutorial from "Riemers" : http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/XNA/Csharp/Series3/Shadow_map.php . This code work nice and I can see my source of light and shadow. But the problem is that my light source does not match the field of view that I created. I want the light covers the entire map of my game. I don't know why , but the light only affect 2-3 cubes of my map. ScreenShot: (the emission of light illuminates only 2-3 blocks and not the full map) Here is my code i create the fieldOfView for LightviewProjection Matrix: Vector3 lightDir = new Vector3(10, 52, 10); lightPos = new Vector3(10, 52, 10); Matrix lightsView = Matrix.CreateLookAt(lightPos, new Vector3(105, 50, 105), new Vector3(0, 1, 0)); Matrix lightsProjection = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView(MathHelper.PiOver2, 1f, 20f, 1000f); lightsViewProjectionMatrix = lightsView * lightsProjection; As you can see , my nearPlane and FarPlane are set to 20f and 100f . So i don't know why the light stop after 2 cubes. it's should be bigger Here is set the value to my custom effect HLSL in the shader file /* SHADOW VALUE */ effectWorld.Parameters["LightDirection"].SetValue(lightDir); effectWorld.Parameters["xLightsWorldViewProjection"].SetValue(Matrix.Identity * .lightsViewProjectionMatrix); effectWorld.Parameters["xWorldViewProjection"].SetValue(Matrix.Identity * arcadia.camera.View * arcadia.camera.Projection); effectWorld.Parameters["xLightPower"].SetValue(1f); effectWorld.Parameters["xAmbient"].SetValue(0.3f); Here is my custom HLSL shader effect file "*.fx" // This sample uses a simple Lambert lighting model. float3 LightDirection = normalize(float3(-1, -1, -1)); float3 DiffuseLight = 1.25; float3 AmbientLight = 0.25; uniform const float3 DiffuseColor = 1; uniform const float Alpha = 1; uniform const float3 EmissiveColor = 0; uniform const float3 SpecularColor = 1; uniform const float SpecularPower = 16; uniform const float3 EyePosition; // FOG attribut uniform const float FogEnabled ; uniform const float FogStart ; uniform const float FogEnd ; uniform const float3 FogColor ; float3 cameraPos : CAMERAPOS; texture Texture; sampler Sampler = sampler_state { Texture = (Texture); magfilter = LINEAR; minfilter = LINEAR; mipfilter = LINEAR; AddressU = mirror; AddressV = mirror; }; texture xShadowMap; sampler ShadowMapSampler = sampler_state { Texture = <xShadowMap>; magfilter = LINEAR; minfilter = LINEAR; mipfilter = LINEAR; AddressU = clamp; AddressV = clamp; }; /* *************** */ /* SHADOW MAP CODE */ /* *************** */ struct SMapVertexToPixel { float4 Position : POSITION; float4 Position2D : TEXCOORD0; }; struct SMapPixelToFrame { float4 Color : COLOR0; }; struct SSceneVertexToPixel { float4 Position : POSITION; float4 Pos2DAsSeenByLight : TEXCOORD0; float2 TexCoords : TEXCOORD1; float3 Normal : TEXCOORD2; float4 Position3D : TEXCOORD3; }; struct SScenePixelToFrame { float4 Color : COLOR0; }; float DotProduct(float3 lightPos, float3 pos3D, float3 normal) { float3 lightDir = normalize(pos3D - lightPos); return dot(-lightDir, normal); } SSceneVertexToPixel ShadowedSceneVertexShader(float4 inPos : POSITION, float2 inTexCoords : TEXCOORD0, float3 inNormal : NORMAL) { SSceneVertexToPixel Output = (SSceneVertexToPixel)0; Output.Position = mul(inPos, xWorldViewProjection); Output.Pos2DAsSeenByLight = mul(inPos, xLightsWorldViewProjection); Output.Normal = normalize(mul(inNormal, (float3x3)World)); Output.Position3D = mul(inPos, World); Output.TexCoords = inTexCoords; return Output; } SScenePixelToFrame ShadowedScenePixelShader(SSceneVertexToPixel PSIn) { SScenePixelToFrame Output = (SScenePixelToFrame)0; float2 ProjectedTexCoords; ProjectedTexCoords[0] = PSIn.Pos2DAsSeenByLight.x / PSIn.Pos2DAsSeenByLight.w / 2.0f + 0.5f; ProjectedTexCoords[1] = -PSIn.Pos2DAsSeenByLight.y / PSIn.Pos2DAsSeenByLight.w / 2.0f + 0.5f; float diffuseLightingFactor = 0; if ((saturate(ProjectedTexCoords).x == ProjectedTexCoords.x) && (saturate(ProjectedTexCoords).y == ProjectedTexCoords.y)) { float depthStoredInShadowMap = tex2D(ShadowMapSampler, ProjectedTexCoords).r; float realDistance = PSIn.Pos2DAsSeenByLight.z / PSIn.Pos2DAsSeenByLight.w; if ((realDistance - 1.0f / 100.0f) <= depthStoredInShadowMap) { diffuseLightingFactor = DotProduct(xLightPos, PSIn.Position3D, PSIn.Normal); diffuseLightingFactor = saturate(diffuseLightingFactor); diffuseLightingFactor *= xLightPower; } } float4 baseColor = tex2D(Sampler, PSIn.TexCoords); Output.Color = baseColor*(diffuseLightingFactor + xAmbient); return Output; } SMapVertexToPixel ShadowMapVertexShader(float4 inPos : POSITION) { SMapVertexToPixel Output = (SMapVertexToPixel)0; Output.Position = mul(inPos, xLightsWorldViewProjection); Output.Position2D = Output.Position; return Output; } SMapPixelToFrame ShadowMapPixelShader(SMapVertexToPixel PSIn) { SMapPixelToFrame Output = (SMapPixelToFrame)0; Output.Color = PSIn.Position2D.z / PSIn.Position2D.w; return Output; } /* ******************* */ /* END SHADOW MAP CODE */ /* ******************* */ / For rendering without instancing. technique ShadowMap { pass Pass0 { VertexShader = compile vs_2_0 ShadowMapVertexShader(); PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 ShadowMapPixelShader(); } } technique ShadowedScene { /* pass Pass0 { VertexShader = compile vs_2_0 VSBasicTx(); PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PSBasicTx(); } */ pass Pass1 { VertexShader = compile vs_2_0 ShadowedSceneVertexShader(); PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 ShadowedScenePixelShader(); } } technique SimpleFog { pass Pass0 { VertexShader = compile vs_2_0 VSBasicTx(); PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PSBasicTx(); } } I edited my fx file , for show you only information and functions about the shadow ;-)

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• parallel_for_each from amp.h – part 1

  - by Daniel Moth

  This posts assumes that you've read my other C++ AMP posts on index<N> and extent<N>, as well as about the restrict modifier. It also assumes you are familiar with C++ lambdas (if not, follow my links to C++ documentation). Basic structure and parameters Now we are ready for part 1 of the description of the new overload for the concurrency::parallel_for_each function. The basic new parallel_for_each method signature returns void and accepts two parameters: a grid<N> (think of it as an alias to extent) a restrict(direct3d) lambda, whose signature is such that it returns void and accepts an index of the same rank as the grid So it looks something like this (with generous returns for more palatable formatting) assuming we are dealing with a 2-dimensional space: // some_code_A parallel_for_each( g, // g is of type grid<2> [ ](index<2> idx) restrict(direct3d) { // kernel code } ); // some_code_B The parallel_for_each will execute the body of the lambda (which must have the restrict modifier), on the GPU. We also call the lambda body the "kernel". The kernel will be executed multiple times, once per scheduled GPU thread. The only difference in each execution is the value of the index object (aka as the GPU thread ID in this context) that gets passed to your kernel code. The number of GPU threads (and the values of each index) is determined by the grid object you pass, as described next. You know that grid is simply a wrapper on extent. In this context, one way to think about it is that the extent generates a number of index objects. So for the example above, if your grid was setup by some_code_A as follows: extent<2> e(2,3); grid<2> g(e); ...then given that: e.size()==6, e[0]==2, and e[1]=3 ...the six index<2> objects it generates (and hence the values that your lambda would receive) are:    (0,0) (1,0) (0,1) (1,1) (0,2) (1,2) So what the above means is that the lambda body with the algorithm that you wrote will get executed 6 times and the index<2> object you receive each time will have one of the values just listed above (of course, each one will only appear once, the order is indeterminate, and they are likely to call your code at the same exact time). Obviously, in real GPU programming, you'd typically be scheduling thousands if not millions of threads, not just 6. If you've been following along you should be thinking: "that is all fine and makes sense, but what can I do in the kernel since I passed nothing else meaningful to it, and it is not returning any values out to me?" Passing data in and out It is a good question, and in data parallel algorithms indeed you typically want to pass some data in, perform some operation, and then typically return some results out. The way you pass data into the kernel, is by capturing variables in the lambda (again, if you are not familiar with them, follow the links about C++ lambdas), and the way you use data after the kernel is done executing is simply by using those same variables. In the example above, the lambda was written in a fairly useless way with an empty capture list: [ ](index<2> idx) restrict(direct3d), where the empty square brackets means that no variables were captured. If instead I write it like this [&](index<2> idx) restrict(direct3d), then all variables in the some_code_A region are made available to the lambda by reference, but as soon as I try to use any of those variables in the lambda, I will receive a compiler error. This has to do with one of the direct3d restrictions, where only one type can be capture by reference: objects of the new concurrency::array class that I'll introduce in the next post (suffice for now to think of it as a container of data). If I write the lambda line like this [=](index<2> idx) restrict(direct3d), all variables in the some_code_A region are made available to the lambda by value. This works for some types (e.g. an integer), but not for all, as per the restrictions for direct3d. In particular, no useful data classes work except for one new type we introduce with C++ AMP: objects of the new concurrency::array_view class, that I'll introduce in the post after next. Also note that if you capture some variable by value, you could use it as input to your algorithm, but you wouldn’t be able to observe changes to it after the parallel_for_each call (e.g. in some_code_B region since it was passed by value) – the exception to this rule is the array_view since (as we'll see in a future post) it is a wrapper for data, not a container. Finally, for completeness, you can write your lambda, e.g. like this [av, &ar](index<2> idx) restrict(direct3d) where av is a variable of type array_view and ar is a variable of type array - the point being you can be very specific about what variables you capture and how. So it looks like from a large data perspective you can only capture array and array_view objects in the lambda (that is how you pass data to your kernel) and then use the many threads that call your code (each with a unique index) to perform some operation. You can also capture some limited types by value, as input only. When the last thread completes execution of your lambda, the data in the array_view or array are ready to be used in the some_code_B region. We'll talk more about all this in future posts… (a)synchronous Please note that the parallel_for_each executes as if synchronous to the calling code, but in reality, it is asynchronous. I.e. once the parallel_for_each call is made and the kernel has been passed to the runtime, the some_code_B region continues to execute immediately by the CPU thread, while in parallel the kernel is executed by the GPU threads. However, if you try to access the (array or array_view) data that you captured in the lambda in the some_code_B region, your code will block until the results become available. Hence the correct statement: the parallel_for_each is as-if synchronous in terms of visible side-effects, but asynchronous in reality.   That's all for now, we'll revisit the parallel_for_each description, once we introduce properly array and array_view – coming next. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• How did my email end up in spam? Spam only filters this specific email, other email contents work

  - by mugetsu

  My website has users buy our products and when the purchase completes, it sends the user an email. However, this email always ends up in spam! When the user first registers, the site also sends an email, this email however is not filtered and goes into the normal inbox. I'm not quite sure why this is so, gmail vaguely tells me that " It's similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters." So I'm thinking that I need to reword the following email better. Can I get some tips? Or could something else be causing this? thanks! here's the unformatted email: Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: by 10.112.32.98 with SMTP id h2csp61953lbi; Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:09:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.180.79.72 with SMTP id h8mr22836827wix.1.1332302953175; Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:09:13 -0700 (PDT) Return-Path: <[email protected]> Received: from mail26.elasticemail.org (mail26.elasticemail.org. [178.32.180.26]) by mx.google.com with SMTP id 6si518487wiz.41.2012.03.20.21.09.12; Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:09:12 -0700 (PDT) Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates 178.32.180.26 as permitted sender) client-ip=178.32.180.26; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates 178.32.180.26 as permitted sender) [email protected]; dkim=pass [email protected] DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; bh=qjc8jxQuGy9pLN1YV9TR2PHQYKg=; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=website.com; s=api; h=DomainKey-Signature:MIME-Version:From:To:List-Unsubscribe:Subject:Date:Reply-To:Message-ID:Content-Type; b=Odt+nYhjntXPl7JPVHeJWjkStemt6so+FPVYY6oMKziMFzmW8YiLhN8WwSLY0faMcn/rirKsO2dOm/kvcHlqUJC7ldhaydE6bPekkBDa9kBovlGwPNm6xy9QWPP9I1fXDLDCwqqeAXv8kN0daXbh3pVyqWNUOk5cgQ35OgpQpKI= DomainKey-Signature: q=dns; a=rsa-sha1; c=simple; d=website.com; s=api; h=MIME-Version:X-Mailer:From:To:X-Priority:List-Unsubscribe:Subject:Date:Reply-To:Message-ID:Content-Type; b=F7NNZIEyEV+64uYD8pVpe91WLP19Tw2Whk4OKpkLeAfkmrNIA7AjP0XYU1JWTlEyibHQJjjbhR62I3MvVJBSGp75eWfOuwb2AqYWZ/jAlMWznnfQLVv7OlYJsErGxYP6GUNNcuJaqlTPFDanJwtaEvR+tqXZRB7xrUisMd8lq2I= MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: email.website.com From: "Website Contact" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] X-Priority: 3 (Normal) List-Unsubscribe: <http://email.website.com/tracking/unsubscribe?msgid=su6g-8kfd0s0g>, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe> Subject: Website Tickets: event Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 04:09:17 +0000 Reply-To: "Website Contact" <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_3F77_7A0DF805.A8C886C0" ------=_NextPart_000_3F77_7A0DF805.A8C886C0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 SGVsbG8hIAoKIEhlcmUgYXJlIHlvdXIgdGlja2V0KHMpIGZvciBDVEFTIGVDc1RBU3kgMjAxMjog CgpodHRwczovL2NhbXB1c2FtcC5jb20vP3RpY2tldHMvNy95aGloZ3Znd3Z3cWR3cXhtdnQKClNp bXBseSBicmluZyBpdCB3aXRoIHlvdSBvbiB5b3VyIHNtYXJ0cGhvbmUsIG9yIHByaW50IHRoZSB0 aWNrZXQgb3V0IHRvIGJlIHNjYW5uZWQgYXQgdGhlIGV2ZW50LiBFbmpveSwgYW5kIHdlIGFwcHJl Y2lhdGUgeW91ciBwdXJjaGFzZS4KClNpbmNlcmVseSwKVGhlIENhbXB1c0FtcCBUZWFt ------=_NextPart_000_3F77_7A0DF805.A8C886C0 Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 SGVsbG8hIDxici8+PGJyLz4gSGVyZSBhcmUgeW91ciB0aWNrZXQocykgZm9yIENUQVMgZUNzVEFT eSAyMDEyOjxici8+PGEgaHJlZj0iaHR0cDovL2VtYWlsLmNhbXB1c2FtcC5jb20vdHJhY2tpbmcv Y2xpY2s/bXNnaWQ9c3U2Zy04a2ZkMHMwZyZ0YXJnZXQ9aHR0cHMlM2ElMmYlMmZjYW1wdXNhbXAu Y29tJTJmJTNmdGlja2V0cyUyZjclMmZ5aGloZ3Znd3Z3cWR3cXhtdnQiPiBodHRwczovL2NhbXB1 c2FtcC5jb20vP3RpY2tldHMvNy95aGloZ3Znd3Z3cWR3cXhtdnQgIDwvYT4gPGJyLz48YnIvPlNp bXBseSBicmluZyBpdCB3aXRoIHlvdSBvbiB5b3VyIHNtYXJ0cGhvbmUsIG9yIHByaW50IHRoZSB0 aWNrZXQgb3V0IHRvIGJlIHNjYW5uZWQgYXQgdGhlIGV2ZW50LiBFbmpveSwgYW5kIHdlIGFwcHJl Y2lhdGUgeW91ciBwdXJjaGFzZS48YnIvPjxici8+U2luY2VyZWx5LDxici8+VGhlIENhbXB1c0Ft cCBUZWFtPGltZyBzcmM9Imh0dHA6Ly9lbWFpbC5jYW1wdXNhbXAuY29tL3RyYWNraW5nL29wZW4/ bXNnaWQ9c3U2Zy04a2ZkMHMwZyIgc3R5bGU9IndpZHRoOjFweDtoZWlnaHQ6MXB4IiBhbHQ9IiIg Lz4= ------=_NextPart_000_3F77_7A0DF805.A8C886C0--

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• SQL SERVER – Merge Operations – Insert, Update, Delete in Single Execution

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is written in response to T-SQL Tuesday hosted by Jorge Segarra (aka SQLChicken). I have been very active using these Merge operations in my development. However, I have found out from my consultancy work and friends that these amazing operations are not utilized by them most of the time. Here is my attempt to bring the necessity of using the Merge Operation to surface one more time. MERGE is a new feature that provides an efficient way to do multiple DML operations. In earlier versions of SQL Server, we had to write separate statements to INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE data based on certain conditions; however, at present, by using the MERGE statement, we can include the logic of such data changes in one statement that even checks when the data is matched and then just update it, and similarly, when the data is unmatched, it is inserted. One of the most important advantages of MERGE statement is that the entire data are read and processed only once. In earlier versions, three different statements had to be written to process three different activities (INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE); however, by using MERGE statement, all the update activities can be done in one pass of database table. I have written about these Merge Operations earlier in my blog post over here SQL SERVER – 2008 – Introduction to Merge Statement – One Statement for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE. I was asked by one of the readers that how do we know that this operator was doing everything in single pass and was not calling this Merge Operator multiple times. Let us run the same example which I have used earlier; I am listing the same here again for convenience. --Let’s create Student Details and StudentTotalMarks and inserted some records. USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE StudentDetails ( StudentID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, StudentName VARCHAR(15) ) GO INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(1,'SMITH') INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(2,'ALLEN') INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(3,'JONES') INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(4,'MARTIN') INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(5,'JAMES') GO CREATE TABLE StudentTotalMarks ( StudentID INTEGER REFERENCES StudentDetails, StudentMarks INTEGER ) GO INSERT INTO StudentTotalMarks VALUES(1,230) INSERT INTO StudentTotalMarks VALUES(2,255) INSERT INTO StudentTotalMarks VALUES(3,200) GO -- Select from Table SELECT * FROM StudentDetails GO SELECT * FROM StudentTotalMarks GO -- Merge Statement MERGE StudentTotalMarks AS stm USING (SELECT StudentID,StudentName FROM StudentDetails) AS sd ON stm.StudentID = sd.StudentID WHEN MATCHED AND stm.StudentMarks > 250 THEN DELETE WHEN MATCHED THEN UPDATE SET stm.StudentMarks = stm.StudentMarks + 25 WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN INSERT(StudentID,StudentMarks) VALUES(sd.StudentID,25); GO -- Select from Table SELECT * FROM StudentDetails GO SELECT * FROM StudentTotalMarks GO -- Clean up DROP TABLE StudentDetails GO DROP TABLE StudentTotalMarks GO The Merge Join performs very well and the following result is obtained. Let us check the execution plan for the merge operator. You can click on following image to enlarge it. Let us evaluate the execution plan for the Table Merge Operator only. We can clearly see that the Number of Executions property suggests value 1. Which is quite clear that in a single PASS, the Merge Operation completes the operations of Insert, Update and Delete. I strongly suggest you all to use this operation, if possible, in your development. I have seen this operation implemented in many data warehousing applications. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Joins, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Merge

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• Call Webservices&hellip;Maybe!?

  - by MOSSLover

  So I have been doing preliminary work for my iOS talk for a while, but did not get into the meat of the project until recently.  One day I envision my talk uploading pictures from a camera on an iPhone or iPad into SharePoint and telling people how I did it.  As you know with my Silverlight talk and any new technology, building new talks with new technologies always ends up with some pain points that you must jump over just to grab data.  So step 1 always starts out with how do we even access a webservice using the new technology. I started out watching every single SPC video available on oAuth and Rest Webservices in SharePoint 2013.  I also sent an email to Eric Shupps about some REST and 2013 examples.  The videos further confused me, because all the videos were on SharePoint hosted apps (provider and autohosted).  I did not want to create a SharePoint hosted app, but instead a mobile app outside of the SharePoint context altogether.  Nick Swan sent me his code and it was great for a starting point on how the JSON calls would look like on iOS, but I was still missing a piece.  Nick does a great job on showing how to use the REST/JSON calls in a non-MS tech, however his presentation uses the SharePoint context and can grab the SPAppToken.  At this point I had to ask the question how do you grab the SAML token outside of SharePoint 2013 in iOS using Objective-C?  After reading all the MSDN documentation, some documentation on Restkit and Objective-C/oAuth calls, and some SharePoint 2013 blog post my head was swimming.  I was dreaming about REST and iOS in SharePoint 2013.  SAML tokens were taunting me.  I was nowhere near understanding 2013. I started talking to my friend, Pedro Jimenez, who is also playing with Objective-C and went to SPC.  He found me a couple good MSDN posts with REST/JSON calls that basically showed the accessToken was all I needed (at this point I was still thinking iOS needed to be a provider hosted app which is wrong).  So then again I had to ask the SAML token question…How do you get a SAML token outside of SharePoint without the TokenHelper class? So then I started talking to people and thinking why do I need to completely avoid TokenHelper…The solution in concept is basically create a webservice in Azure wrapped into a Provider Hosted App in SharePoint.  Wictor Wilen created a helper webservice in the following blog post: http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/How-to-do-active-authentication-to-Office-365-and-SharePoint-Online.aspx. So now I have to basically stand up the webservice, the SharePoint app wrapper, and then use Restkit to call the first webservice to grab the token and then the second webservice to pass in the token and grab some SharePoint data.  What this means is that you can no longer just pass credentials into SharePoint webservices and get data back.  You have to pass in a SAML token with every single webservice call to SharePoint.  The theory is that this token is associated with the permissions the app can handle (read, write, whatever).  It seems like a ton of pain and a lot of work, but this is step 1 in my crusade to pull some piece of data into iOS from SharePoint and show people how to do it themselves.  In the upcoming months hopefully I can get halfway to my end goal. Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2013,REST,oAuth,Objective-C,iOS

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• glsl shader to allow color change of skydome ogre3d

  - by Tim

  I'm still very new to all this but learning a lot. I'm putting together an application using Ogre3d as the rendering engine. So far I've got it running, with a simple scene, a day/night cycle system which is working okay. I'm now moving on to looking at changing the color of the skydome material based on the time of day. What I've done so far is to create a struct to hold the ColourValues for the different aspects of the scene. struct todColors { Ogre::ColourValue sky; Ogre::ColourValue ambient; Ogre::ColourValue sun; }; I created an array to store all the colours todColors sceneColours [4]; I populated the array with the colours I want to use for the various times of the day. For instance DayTime (when the sun is high in the sky) sceneColours[2].sky = Ogre::ColourValue(135/255, 206/255, 235/255, 255); sceneColours[2].ambient = Ogre::ColourValue(135/255, 206/255, 235/255, 255); sceneColours[2].sun = Ogre::ColourValue(135/255, 206/255, 235/255, 255); I've got code to work out the time of the day using a float currentHours to store the current hour of the day 10.5 = 10:30 am. This updates constantly and updates the sun as required. I am then calculating the appropriate colours for the time of day when relevant using else if( currentHour >= 4 && currentHour < 7) { // Lerp from night to morning Ogre::ColourValue lerp = Ogre::Math::lerp<Ogre::ColourValue, float>(sceneColours[GT_TOD_NIGHT].sky , sceneColours[GT_TOD_MORNING].sky, (currentHour - 4) / (7 - 4)); } My original attempt to get this to work was to dynamically generate a material with the new colour and apply that material to the skydome. This, as you can probably guess... didn't go well. I know it's possible to use shaders where you can pass information such as colour to the shader from the code but I am unsure if there is an existing simple shader to change a colour like this or if I need to create one. What is involved in creating a shader and material definition that would allow me to change the colour of a material without the overheads of dynamically generating materials all the time? EDIT : I've created a glsl vertex and fragment shaders as follows. Vertex uniform vec4 newColor; void main() { gl_FrontColor = newColor; gl_Position = ftransform(); } Fragment void main() { gl_FragColor = gl_Color; } I can pass a colour to it using ShaderDesigner and it seems to work. I now need to investigate how to use it within Ogre as a material. EDIT : I created a material file like this : vertex_program colour_vs_test glsl { source test.vert default_params { param_named newColor float4 0.0 0.0 0.0 1 } } fragment_program colour_fs_glsl glsl { source test.frag } material Test/SkyColor { technique { pass { lighting off fragment_program_ref colour_fs_glsl { } vertex_program_ref colour_vs_test { } } } } In the code I have tried : Ogre::MaterialPtr material = Ogre::MaterialManager::getSingleton().getByName("Test/SkyColor"); Ogre::GpuProgramParametersSharedPtr params = material->getTechnique(0)->getPass(0)->getVertexProgramParameters(); params->setNamedConstant("newcolor", Ogre::Vector4(0.7, 0.5, 0.3, 1)); I've set that as the Skydome material which seems to work initially. I am doing the same with the code that is attempting to lerp between colours, but when I include it there, it all goes black. Seems like there is now a problem with my colour lerping.

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• Linq To SQL: Behaviour for table field which is NotNull and having Default value or binding

  - by kaushalparik27

  I found this something interesting while wandering over community which I would like to share. The post is whole about: DBML is not considering the table field's "Default value or Binding" setting which is a NotNull. I mean the field which can not be null but having default value set needs to be set IsDbGenerated = true in DBML file explicitly.Consider this situation: There is a simple tblEmployee table with below structure: The fields are simple. EmployeeID is a Primary Key with Identity Specification = True with Identity Seed = 1 to autogenerate numeric value for this field. EmployeeName and their EmailAddress to store in rest of 2 fields. And the last one is "DateAdded" with DateTime datatype which doesn't allow NULL but having Default Value/Binding with "GetDate()". That means if we don't pass any value to this field then SQL will insert current date in "DateAdded" field.So, I start with a new website, add a DBML file and dropped the said table to generate LINQ To SQL context class. Finally, I write a simple code snippet to insert data into the tblEmployee table; BUT, I am not passing any value to "DateAdded" field. Because I am considering SQL Server's "Default Value or Binding (GetDate())" setting to this field and understand that SQL will insert current date to this field.        using (TestDatabaseDataContext context = new TestDatabaseDataContext())        {            tblEmployee tblEmpObjet = new tblEmployee();            tblEmpObjet.EmployeeName = "KaushaL";            tblEmpObjet.EmployeeEmailAddress = "[email protected]";            context.tblEmployees.InsertOnSubmit(tblEmpObjet);            context.SubmitChanges();        }Here comes the twist when application give me below error:  This is something not expecting! From the error it clearly depicts that LINQ is passing NULL value to "DateAdded" Field while according to my understanding it should respect Sql Server's "Default value or Binding" setting for this field. A bit googling and I found very interesting related to this problem.When we set Primary Key to any field with "Identity Specification" Property set to true; DBML set one important property "IsDbGenerated=true" for this field. BUT, when we set "Default Value or Biding" property for some field; we need to explicitly tell the DBML/LINQ to let it know that this field is having default binding at DB side that needs to be respected if I don't pass any value. So, the solution is: You need to explicitly set "IsDbGenerated=true" for such field to tell the LINQ that the field is having default value or binding at Sql Server side so, please don't worry if i don't pass any value for it.You can select the field and set this property from property window in DBML Designer file or write the property in DBML.Designer.cs file directly. I have attached a working example with required table script with this post here. I hope this would be helpful for someone hunting for the same. Happy Discovery!

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• Using the RSSBus Salesforce Excel Add-In From Excel Macros (VBA)

  - by dataintegration

  The RSSBus Salesforce Excel Add-In makes it easy to retrieve and update data from Salesforce from within Microsoft Excel. In addition to the built-in wizards that make data manipulation possible without code, the full functionality of the RSSBus Excel Add-Ins is available programmatically with Excel Macros (VBA) and Excel Functions. This article shows how to write an Excel macro that can be used to perform bulk inserts into Salesforce. Although this article uses the Salesforce Excel Add-In as an example, the same process can be applied to any of the Excel Add-Ins available on our website. Step 1: Download and install the RSSBus Excel Add-In available on our website. Step 2: Open Excel and create place holder cells for the connection details that are needed from the macro. In this article, a spreadsheet will be created for batch inserts, and these cells will store the connection details, and will be used to report the job Id, the batch Id, and the batch status. Step 3: Switch to the Developer tab in Excel. Add a new button on the spreadsheet, and create a new macro associated with it. This macro will contain the code needed to insert a batch of rows into Salesforce. Step 4: Add a reference to the Excel Add-In by selecting Tools --> References --> RSSBus Excel Add-In. The macro functions of the Excel Add-In will be available once the reference has been added. The following code shows how to call a Stored Procedure. In this example, a job is created to insert Leads by calling the CreateJob stored procedure. CreateJob returns a jobId that can be used to upload a large number of Leads in one transaction. Note the use of cells B1, B2, B3, and B4 that were created in Step 2 to read the connection settings from the Excel SpreadSheet and to write out the status of the procedure. methodName = "CreateJob" module.SetProviderName ("Salesforce") nameArray = Array("ObjectName", "Action", "ConcurrencyMode") valueArray = Array("Lead", "insert", "Serial") user = Range("B1").value pass = Range("B2").value atoken = Range("B3").value If (Not user = "" And Not pass = "" And Not atoken = "") Then module.SetConnectionString ("User=" + user + ";Password=" + pass + ";Access Token=" + atoken + ";") If module.CallSP(methodName, nameArray, valueArray) Then Dim ColumnCount As Integer ColumnCount = module.GetColumnCount Dim idIndex As Integer For Count = 0 To ColumnCount - 1 Dim colName As String colName = module.GetColumnName(Count) If module.GetColumnName(Count) = "id" Then idIndex = Count End If Next While (Not module.EOF) Range("B4").value = module.GetValue(idIndex) module.MoveNext Wend Else MsgBox "The CreateJob query failed." End If Exit Sub Else MsgBox "Please specify the connection details." Exit Sub End If Error: MsgBox "ERROR: " & Err.Description Step 5: Add the code to your macro. If you use the code above, you can check the results at Salesforce.com. They can be seen at Administration Setup -> Monitoring -> Bulk Data Load Jobs. Download the attached sample file for a more complete demo. Distributing an Excel File With Macros An Excel file with macros is saved using the .xlms extension. The code for the macro remains in the Excel file, and you can distribute your Excel file to any machine where the RSSBus Salesforce Excel Add-In is already installed. Macro Sample File Please download the fully functional sample excel file that includes the code referenced here. You will also need the RSSBus Excel Add-In to make the connection. You can download a free trial here. Note: You may get an error message stating: "Can't find project or library." in Excel 2007, since this example is made using Excel 2010. To resolve this, navigate to Tools -> References and uncheck the "MISSING: RSSBus Excel Add-In", then scroll down and check the "RSSBus Excel Add-In" listed below it.

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• Url rewrite subfolder to root and forbid accessing subfolder

  - by Alessandro Pezzato

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

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• How do I use setFilmSize in panda3d to achieve the correct view?

  - by lhk

  I'm working with Panda3d and recently switched my game to isometric rendering. I moved the virtual camera accordingly and set an orthographic lens. Then I implemented the classes "Map" and "Canvas". A canvas is a dynamically generated mesh: a flat quad. I'm using it to render the ingame graphics. Since the game itself is still set in a 3d coordinate system I'm planning to rely on these canvases to draw sprites. I could have named this class "Tile" but as I'd like to use it for non-tile sketches (enemies, environment) as well I thought canvas would describe it's function better. Map does exactly what it's name suggests. Its constructor receives the number of rows and columns and then creates a standard isometric map. It uses the canvas class for tiles. I'm planning to write a map importer that reads a file to create maps on the fly. Here's the canvas implementation: class Canvas: def __init__(self, texture, vertical=False, width=1,height=1): # create the mesh format=GeomVertexFormat.getV3t2() format = GeomVertexFormat.registerFormat(format) vdata=GeomVertexData("node-vertices", format, Geom.UHStatic) vertex = GeomVertexWriter(vdata, 'vertex') texcoord = GeomVertexWriter(vdata, 'texcoord') # add the vertices for a flat quad vertex.addData3f(1, 0, 0) texcoord.addData2f(1, 0) vertex.addData3f(1, 1, 0) texcoord.addData2f(1, 1) vertex.addData3f(0, 1, 0) texcoord.addData2f(0, 1) vertex.addData3f(0, 0, 0) texcoord.addData2f(0, 0) prim = GeomTriangles(Geom.UHStatic) prim.addVertices(0, 1, 2) prim.addVertices(2, 3, 0) self.geom = Geom(vdata) self.geom.addPrimitive(prim) self.node = GeomNode('node') self.node.addGeom(self.geom) # this is the handle for the canvas self.nodePath=NodePath(self.node) self.nodePath.setSx(width) self.nodePath.setSy(height) if vertical: self.nodePath.setP(90) # the most important part: "Drawing" the image self.texture=loader.loadTexture(""+texture+".png") self.nodePath.setTexture(self.texture) Now the code for the Map class class Map: def __init__(self,rows,columns,size): self.grid=[] for i in range(rows): self.grid.append([]) for j in range(columns): # create a canvas for the tile. For testing the texture is preset tile=Canvas(texture="../assets/textures/flat_concrete",width=size,height=size) x=(i-1)*size y=(j-1)*size # set the tile up for rendering tile.nodePath.reparentTo(render) tile.nodePath.setX(x) tile.nodePath.setY(y) # and store it for later access self.grid[i].append(tile) And finally the usage def loadMap(self): self.map=Map(10, 10, 1) this function is called within the constructor of the World class. The instantiation of world is the entry point to the execution. The code is pretty straightforward and runs good. Sadly the output is not as expected: Please note: The problem is not the white rectangle, it's my player object. The problem is that although the map should have equal width and height it's stretched weirdly. With orthographic rendering I expected the map to be a perfect square. What did I do wrong ? UPDATE: I've changed the viewport. This is how I set up the orthographic camera: lens = OrthographicLens() lens.setFilmSize(40, 20) base.cam.node().setLens(lens) You can change the "aspect" by modifying the parameters of setFilmSize. I don't know exactly how they are related to window size and screen resolution but after testing a little the values above seem to work for me. Now everything is rendered correctly as long as I don't resize the window. Every change of the window's size as well as switching to fullscreen destroys the correct rendering. I know that implementing a listener for resize events is not in the scope of this question. However I wonder why I need to make the Film's height two times bigger than its width. My window is quadratic ! Can you tell me how to find out correct setting for the FilmSize ? UPDATE 2: I can imagine that it's hard to envision the behaviour of the game. At first glance the obvious solution is to pass the window's width and height in pixels to setFilmSize. There are two problems with that approach. The parameters for setFilmSize are ingame units. You'll get a way to big view if you pass the pixel size For some strange reason the image is distorted if you pass equal values for width and height. Here's the output for setFilmSize(800,800) You'll have to stress your eyes but you'll see what I mean

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• Getting the number of fragments which passed the depth test

  - by Etan

  In "modern" environments, the "NV Occlusion Query" extension provides a method to get the number of fragments which passed the depth test. However, on the iPad / iPhone using OpenGL ES, the extension is not available. What is the most performant approach to implement a similar behaviour in the fragment shader? Some of my ideas: Render the object completely in white, then count all the colors together using a two-pass shader where first a vertical line is rendered and for each fragment the shader computes the sum over the whole row. Then, a single vertex is rendered whose fragment sums all the partial sums of the first pass. Doesn't seem to be very efficient. Render the object completely in white over a black background. Downsample recursively, abusing the hardware linear interpolation between textures until being at a reasonably small resolution. This leads to fragments which have a greyscale level depending on the number of white pixels where in their corresponding region. Is this even accurate enough? Use mipmaps and simply read the pixel on the 1x1 level. Again the question of accuracy and if it is even possible using non-power-of-two textures. The problem wit these approaches is, that the pipeline gets stalled which results in major performance issues. Therefore, I'm looking for a more performant way to accomplish my goal. Using the EXT_OCCLUSION_QUERY_BOOLEAN extension Apple introduced EXT_OCCLUSION_QUERY_BOOLEAN in iOS 5.0 for iPad 2. "4.1.6 Occlusion Queries Occlusion queries use query objects to track the number of fragments or samples that pass the depth test. An occlusion query can be started and finished by calling BeginQueryEXT and EndQueryEXT, respectively, with a target of ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_EXT or ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_CONSERVATIVE_EXT. When an occlusion query is started with the target ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_EXT, the samples-boolean state maintained by the GL is set to FALSE. While that occlusion query is active, the samples-boolean state is set to TRUE if any fragment or sample passes the depth test. When the occlusion query finishes, the samples-boolean state of FALSE or TRUE is written to the corresponding query object as the query result value, and the query result for that object is marked as available. If the target of the query is ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_CONSERVATIVE_EXT, an implementation may choose to use a less precise version of the test which can additionally set the samples-boolean state to TRUE in some other implementation dependent cases." The first sentence hints on a behavior which is exactly what I'm looking for: getting the number of pixels which passed the depth test in an asynchronous manner without much performance loss. However, the rest of the document describes only how to get boolean results. Is it possible to exploit this extension to get the pixel count? Does the hardware support it so that there may be hidden API to get access to the pixel count? Other extensions which could be exploitable would be debugging features like the number of times the fragment shader was invoked (PSInvocations in DirectX - not sure if something simila is available in OpenGL ES). However, this would also result in a pipeline stall.

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• Resolving collisions between dynamic game objects

  - by TheBroodian

  I've been building a 2D platformer for some time now, I'm getting to the point where I am adding dynamic objects to the stage for testing. This has prompted me to consider how I would like my character and other objects to behave when they collide. A typical staple in many 2D platformer type games is that the player takes damage upon touching an enemy, and then essentially becomes able to pass through enemies during a period of invulnerability, and at the same time, enemies are able to pass through eachother freely. I personally don't want to take this approach, it feels strange to me that the player should receive arbitrary damage for harmless contact to an enemy, despite whether the enemy is attacking or not, and I would like my enemies' interactions between each other (and my player) to be a little more organic, so to speak. In my head I sort of have this idea where a game object (player, or non player) would be able to push other game objects around by manner of 'pushing' each other out of one anothers' bounding boxes if there is an intersection, and maybe correlate the repelling force to how much their bounding boxes are intersecting. The problem I'm experiencing is I have no idea what the math might look like for something like this? I'll show what work I've done so far, it sort of works, but it's jittery, and generally not quite what I would pass in a functional game: //Clears the anti-duplicate buffer collisionRecord.Clear(); //pick a thing foreach (GameObject entity in entities) { //pick another thing foreach (GameObject subject in entities) { //check to make sure both things aren't the same thing if (!ReferenceEquals(entity, subject)) { //check to see if thing2 is in semi-near proximity to thing1 if (entity.WideProximityArea.Intersects(subject.CollisionRectangle) || entity.WideProximityArea.Contains(subject.CollisionRectangle)) { //check to see if thing2 and thing1 are colliding. if (entity.CollisionRectangle.Intersects(subject.CollisionRectangle) || entity.CollisionRectangle.Contains(subject.CollisionRectangle) || subject.CollisionRectangle.Contains(entity.CollisionRectangle)) { //check if we've already resolved their collision or not. if (!collisionRecord.ContainsKey(entity.GetHashCode())) { //more duplicate resolution checking. if (!collisionRecord.ContainsKey(subject.GetHashCode())) { //if thing1 is traveling right... if (entity.Velocity.X > 0) { //if it isn't too far to the right... if (subject.CollisionRectangle.Contains(new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Rectangle(entity.CollisionRectangle.Right, entity.CollisionRectangle.Y, 1, entity.CollisionRectangle.Height)) || subject.CollisionRectangle.Intersects(new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Rectangle(entity.CollisionRectangle.Right, entity.CollisionRectangle.Y, 1, entity.CollisionRectangle.Height))) { //Find how deep thing1 is intersecting thing2's collision box; float offset = entity.CollisionRectangle.Right - subject.CollisionRectangle.Left; //Move both things in opposite directions half the length of the intersection, pushing thing1 to the left, and thing2 to the right. entity.Velocities.Add(new Vector2(-(((offset * 4) * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)), 0)); subject.Velocities.Add(new Vector2((((offset * 4) * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)), 0)); } } //if thing1 is traveling left... if (entity.Velocity.X < 0) { //if thing1 isn't too far left... if (entity.CollisionRectangle.Contains(new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Rectangle(subject.CollisionRectangle.Right, subject.CollisionRectangle.Y, 1, subject.CollisionRectangle.Height)) || entity.CollisionRectangle.Intersects(new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Rectangle(subject.CollisionRectangle.Right, subject.CollisionRectangle.Y, 1, subject.CollisionRectangle.Height))) { //Find how deep thing1 is intersecting thing2's collision box; float offset = subject.CollisionRectangle.Right - entity.CollisionRectangle.Left; //Move both things in opposite directions half the length of the intersection, pushing thing1 to the right, and thing2 to the left. entity.Velocities.Add(new Vector2((((offset * 4) * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)), 0)); subject.Velocities.Add(new Vector2(-(((offset * 4) * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)), 0)); } } //Make record that thing1 and thing2 have interacted and the collision has been solved, so that if thing2 is picked next in the foreach loop, it isn't checked against thing1 a second time before the next update. collisionRecord.Add(entity.GetHashCode(), subject.GetHashCode()); } } } } } } } } One of the biggest issues with my code aside from the jitteriness is that if one character were to land on top of another character, it very suddenly and abruptly resolves the collision, whereas I would like a more subtle and gradual resolution. Any thoughts or ideas are incredibly welcome and helpful.

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