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  • How to get paid and figure out if I want to keep this client [migrated]

    - by Heiner Fawkes
    I have a client who is not paying on time, but it looks like the specifics don't match similar questions on this SE site. I got a call from a client I did website work for years ago. I had not done this kind of work for many years and frankly I'm not sure I want to now, but nevertheless about a month ago I agreed to bring his website, SEO, social media, and overall marketing for his small business up to speed. Why? He has told me many times how I'm the most honest, most well-informed contractor he's had experience with. And I personally kind of like him too. So I started working on an hourly basis. I sent one very small invoice and got paid. Then we talked a whole lot about all sorts of feature he would like me to implement. I started that work, and sent a second invoice on the first of the month (one of my two stated billing days). I didn't get paid. On every invoice it states that I charge a whopping ten percent per week late. I sent many voicemails and emails asking to please let me know what's going on with payment, and didn't get replies. Then the 15th of the month rolled around (which I stated initially as one of my invoicing dates). Since I hadn't been paid for the last invoice, I simply didn't send him an invoice at that time but emailed him and said that I will combine it with the next scheduled invoice for this reason (probably a bad idea I realize). Eventually he sent a portion of the invoice payment. I emailed back to let him know that he's three weeks late and what the remaining balance is. Finally we got in touch via phone. He basically told me that he thought I hadn't done all of the work I said I did. He looked at the page source code and it didn't look complete to him. I explained why his perception would be different and what work I had done as specified. He accepted this and said that part of the reason he didn't pay in full is that he's been swamped with personal family stuff, and part of the reason is that he didn't think I did all the work. That struck me as pretty weird. He also expressed concern that he has no idea now how much all the changes he has asked for are going to cost. And once again, he told me how honest and high-quality my services are compared to others he has dealt with. He also said he would pay me more (but not all) of the now three weeks overdue invoice that day. I didn't receive any payment. Basically this is how the client relationship strikes me: He's not good at communication. He's very busy and English isn't his first language. He almost never replies to emails but phone calls are fine. He's asked me to avoid emails for communication and I've asked him to please use email. He might not have enough money to afford all the things he has asked for. But so far I have been working for an hourly fee (which is quite high). He also has started paying monthly for hosting and social media services from me. What seems very abnormal is for a client to be so overdue on payments and to actually withhold payment of an invoice without any communication because he didn't think the work was done. I told him that I will send dollar estimates of each module of remaining work so that we can decide which ones are the highest priority if he cannot afford them all. I also reiterated that in the future if he has doubts about the work or an inability to pay, he must contact me immediately to say so. I basically plan to state the following to him: I would like to work for him and help his business. I also have sympathy for his recent family difficulties. I am happy to figure out payment plans that would work better for him, but first I need to be paid in full for all outstanding invoices, especially given that I skipped one of them just to be nice. The most crucial thing I need is communication about any problems with my work or his ability to pay. Once again, he heeds to pay in full immediately before we negotiate anything else. Does the above seem like an appropriate communication? Is anything missing from it? Is anything I'm doing here really abnormal?

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  • Very slow KVM in Ubuntu 12.04

    - by Guy Fawkes
    I use Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit and KVM, my CPU is Core i5 3.3 GHz and I have 8 GB of DDR3 RAM. I run Windows 7 in KVM and it's extremely slow. My co-worker use Debian on the same PC configuration and can run Windows 7 extremely fast! Where can be my problem? sudo cat /etc/libvirt/qemu/windows.xml <!-- WARNING: THIS IS AN AUTO-GENERATED FILE. CHANGES TO IT ARE LIKELY TO BE OVERWRITTEN AND LOST. Changes to this xml configuration should be made using: virsh edit windows or other application using the libvirt API. --> <domain type='kvm'> <name>windows</name> <uuid>5c685175-baea-0ca6-591f-8269d923ffb8</uuid> <memory>2097152</memory> <currentMemory>2097152</currentMemory> <vcpu>1</vcpu> <os> <type arch='x86_64' machine='pc-1.0'>hvm</type> <boot dev='hd'/> </os> <features> <acpi/> <apic/> <pae/> </features> <clock offset='localtime'/> <on_poweroff>destroy</on_poweroff> <on_reboot>restart</on_reboot> <on_crash>restart</on_crash> <devices> <emulator>/usr/bin/kvm</emulator> <disk type='file' device='disk'> <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/> <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/windows.img'/> <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/> <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' unit='0'/> </disk> <controller type='ide' index='0'> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x1'/> </controller> <interface type='network'> <mac address='52:54:00:94:63:91'/> <source network='default'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x03' function='0x0'/> </interface> <serial type='pty'> <target port='0'/> </serial> <console type='pty'> <target type='serial' port='0'/> </console> <input type='tablet' bus='usb'/> <input type='mouse' bus='ps2'/> <graphics type='vnc' port='-1' autoport='yes'/> <sound model='ich6'> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x04' function='0x0'/> </sound> <video> <model type='vga' vram='262144' heads='1'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x0'/> </video> <memballoon model='virtio'> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x05' function='0x0'/> </memballoon> </devices> </domain>

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  • Bad HD video deinterlacing processing

    - by Guy Fawkes
    I have Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit with Unity. My system configuration is: CPU: Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4 GHz) RAM: 8192 Mb DDR2 Kingston Video: Palit GeForce GTX 260 216 SP, and my screen resolution is 1680x1050. I also have Window 7 Ulitimate installed, and I can see the same files in Media Player Classic without any horizontal lines. I've installed vdpau driver, NVIDIA drivers 304.51, and MPlayer 2 (within SMPlayer). I've disabled "Sync to VBlank" option in CCSM (because in other way, by default, MPlayer process use about 50-60 percents of my processor load), tried to swich between different deinterlace options in SMPlayer, used "-vc ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau" (without quotes) parameters for MPlayer, switched to "Ubuntu 2D", but, finally, have no results. Any suggestions? How must I to set up MPlayer?

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  • Why does Sharepoint 2010 Web Reference work, but Service Reference does not

    - by Darien Ford
    Sharepoint is setup to use NTLM authentication. When I reference http://myserver/Sites/Ops/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx?WSDL as a Web Reference, I can call the methods and get valid responses. When I reference the same url as a Service Reference, the server throws an exception when calling methods. My account is admin on the Sharepoint Farm. This is the app.config for the service reference (mostly auto generated): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <configSections> </configSections> <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="ListsSoap" closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00" allowCookies="false" bypassProxyOnLocal="false" hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard" maxBufferSize="65536" maxBufferPoolSize="524288" maxReceivedMessageSize="65536" messageEncoding="Text" textEncoding="utf-8" transferMode="Buffered" useDefaultWebProxy="true"> <readerQuotas maxDepth="32" maxStringContentLength="8192" maxArrayLength="16384" maxBytesPerRead="4096" maxNameTableCharCount="16384" /> <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly"> <transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm" /> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="http://myserver/Sites/Ops/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="ListsSoap" contract="SharepointLists.ListsSoap" name="ListsSoap" /> </client> </system.serviceModel> </configuration> Saddly, the only information the exception provides is this: "Exception of type 'Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer.SoapServerException' was thrown." No other details. The code that I'm using is: public ListClass() { _Client = new SharepointLists.ListsSoapClient(); } public System.Xml.Linq.XElement GetTaskList() { return _Client.GetList("Tasks"); } Any thoughts? I would like to use the Service Reference rather than the Web Reference. UPDATE: I tried Rob's suggestion and got this error: HTTP GET Error URI: http://myserver/Sites/Ops/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx The document at the url http://myserver/Sites/Ops/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx was not recognized as a known document type. The error message from each known type may help you fix the problem: - Report from 'http://myserver/Sites/Ops/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx' is 'The document format is not recognized (the content type is 'text/html; charset=utf-8').'. - Report from 'DISCO Document' is 'There was an error downloading 'http://myserver/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx?disco'.'. - The request failed with HTTP status 404: Not Found. - Report from 'WSDL Document' is 'The document format is not recognized (the con tent type is 'text/html; charset=utf-8').'. - Report from 'XML Schema' is 'The document format is not recognized (the conten t type is 'text/html; charset=utf-8').'.

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  • How can I make the Telerik progress bar work?

    - by Darien Fawkes
    I have a Telerik progress bar in my project: <telerik:RadProgressManager ID="RadProgressManager" Runat="server" /> <telerik:RadProgressArea ID="RadProgressArea" Runat="server"></telerik:RadProgressArea> <asp:button id="Button1" runat="server" text="Submit" /> On button click I try to run this method: private void MethodWhichUpdatesTheProgressContext(UploadedFile file, int countFile) { const int total = 100; RadProgressContext ProgressContex = RadProgressContext.Current; ProgressContex.SecondaryTotal = "100"; for (int i = 0; i < total; i++) { ProgressContex.CurrentOperationText = "Uploading zip file percentage " + i.ToString(); if (!Response.IsClientConnected) { break; } System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100); } } Project builds without any errors but progress doesn't change. How do I properly fire the progress bar animation? If I put this progress bar on control, it can effect this?

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  • How long does a MailItem.Property[myProperty] live?

    - by Darien Ford
    I'm writing a TransportAgent for Exchange and want to tag a MailItem with some identifying information. The MailItem class seems to have this functionality with the MailItem.Properties property; however, my question is to the length of time an entry would remain available. e.g. e.MailItem.Properties.Add(new KeyValuePair<string,object>("MyKey", "myValue")); After this MailItem is delivered to the correct mailbox, if someone were to reply to the email, would the newly created reply retain that set value? I think while writing this question out I have answered it for myself (which rationally would be no) but any practical experience and insight would be appreciated.

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  • Using Selenium-IDE with a rich Javascript application?

    - by Darien
    Problem At my workplace, we're trying to find the best way to create automated-tests for an almost wholly javascript-driven intranet application. Right now we're stuck trying to find a good tradeoff between: Application code in reusable and nest-able GUI components. Tests which are easily created by the testing team Tests which can be recorded once and then automated Tests which do not break after small cosmetic changes to the site XPath expressions (or other possible expressions, like jQuery selectors) naively generated from Selenium-IDE are often non-repeatable and very fragile. Conversely, having the JS code generate special unique ID values for every important DOM-element on the page... well, that is its own headache, complicated by re-usable GUI components and IDs needing to be consistent when the test is re-run. What successes have other people had with this kind of thing? How do you do automated application-level testing of a rich JS interface? Limitations We are using JavascriptMVC 2.0, hopefully 3.0 soon so that we can upgrade to jQuery 1.4.x. The test-making folks are mostly trained to use Selenium IDE to directly record things. The test leads would prefer a page-unique HTML ID on each clickable element on the page... Training the testers to write or alter special expressions (such as telling them which HTML class-names are important branching points) is a no-go. We try to make re-usable javascript components, but this means very few GUI components can treat themselves (or what they contain) as unique. Some of our components already use HTML ID values in their operation. I'd like to avoid doing this anyway, but it complicates the idea of ID-based testing. It may be possible to add custom facilities (like a locator-builder or new locator method) to the Selenium-IDE installation testers use. Almost everything that goes on occurs within a single "page load" from a conventional browser perspective, even when items are saved Current thoughts I'm considering a system where a custom locator-builder (javascript code) for Selenium-IDE will talk with our application code as the tester is recording. In this way, our application becomes partially responsible for generating a mostly-flexible expression (XPath or jQuery) for any given DOM element. While this can avoid requiring more training for testers, I worry it may be over-thinking things.

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  • C# XPath Not Finding Anything

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

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  • Stored Procedures with SSRS? Hmm… not so much

    - by Rob Farley
    Little Bobby Tables’ mother says you should always sanitise your data input. Except that I think she’s wrong. The SQL Injection aspect is for another post, where I’ll show you why I think SQL Injection is the same kind of attack as many other attacks, such as the old buffer overflow, but here I want to have a bit of a whinge about the way that some people sanitise data input, and even have a whinge about people who insist on using stored procedures for SSRS reports. Let me say that again, in case you missed it the first time: I want to have a whinge about people who insist on using stored procedures for SSRS reports. Let’s look at the data input sanitisation aspect – except that I’m going to call it ‘parameter validation’. I’m talking about code that looks like this: create procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     /* First check that @eomdate is a valid date */     if isdate(@eomdate) != 1     begin         select 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage;         return;     end     /* Then check that time has passed since @eomdate */     if datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5     begin         select 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage;         return;     end         /* If those checks have succeeded, return the data */     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)         and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     order by SalesPersonID; end Notice that the code checks that a date has been entered. Seriously??!! This must only be to check for NULL values being passed in, because anything else would have to be a valid datetime to avoid an error. The other check is maybe fair enough, but I still don’t like it. The two problems I have with this stored procedure are the result sets and the small fact that the stored procedure even exists in the first place. But let’s consider the first one of these problems for starters. I’ll get to the second one in a moment. If you read Jes Borland (@grrl_geek)’s recent post about returning multiple result sets in Reporting Services, you’ll be aware that Reporting Services doesn’t support multiple results sets from a single query. And when it says ‘single query’, it includes ‘stored procedure call’. It’ll only handle the first result set that comes back. But that’s okay – we have RETURN statements, so our stored procedure will only ever return a single result set.  Sometimes that result set might contain a single field called ErrorMessage, but it’s still only one result set. Except that it’s not okay, because Reporting Services needs to know what fields to expect. Your report needs to hook into your fields, so SSRS needs to have a way to get that information. For stored procs, it uses an option called FMTONLY. When Reporting Services tries to figure out what fields are going to be returned by a query (or stored procedure call), it doesn’t want to have to run the whole thing. That could take ages. (Maybe it’s seen some of the stored procedures I’ve had to deal with over the years!) So it turns on FMTONLY before it makes the call (and turns it off again afterwards). FMTONLY is designed to be able to figure out the shape of the output, without actually running the contents. It’s very useful, you might think. set fmtonly on exec dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson '20030401'; set fmtonly off Without the FMTONLY lines, this stored procedure returns a result set that has three columns and fourteen rows. But with FMTONLY turned on, those rows don’t come back. But what I do get back hurts Reporting Services. It doesn’t run the stored procedure at all. It just looks for anything that could be returned and pushes out a result set in that shape. Despite the fact that I’ve made sure that the logic will only ever return a single result set, the FMTONLY option kills me by returning three of them. It would have been much better to push these checks down into the query itself. alter procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     order by SalesPersonID; end Now if we run it with FMTONLY turned on, we get the single result set back. But let’s consider the execution plan when we pass in an invalid date. First let’s look at one that returns data. I’ve got a semi-useful index in place on OrderDate, which includes the SalesPersonID and TotalDue fields. It does the job, despite a hefty Sort operation. …compared to one that uses a future date: You might notice that the estimated costs are similar – the Index Seek is still 28%, the Sort is still 71%. But the size of that arrow coming out of the Index Seek is a whole bunch smaller. The coolest thing here is what’s going on with that Index Seek. Let’s look at some of the properties of it. Glance down it with me… Estimated CPU cost of 0.0005728, 387 estimated rows, estimated subtree cost of 0.0044385, ForceSeek false, Number of Executions 0. That’s right – it doesn’t run. So much for reading plans right-to-left... The key is the Filter on the left of it. It has a Startup Expression Predicate in it, which means that it doesn’t call anything further down the plan (to the right) if the predicate evaluates to false. Using this method, we can make sure that our stored procedure contains a single query, and therefore avoid any problems with multiple result sets. If we wanted, we could always use UNION ALL to make sure that we can return an appropriate error message. alter procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales, /*Placeholder: */ '' as ErrorMessage     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     /* Now include the error messages */     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage     where isdate(@eomdate) != 1     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage     where datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5     order by SalesPersonID; end But still I don’t like it, because it’s now a stored procedure with a single query. And I don’t like stored procedures that should be functions. That’s right – I think this should be a function, and SSRS should call the function. And I apologise to those of you who are now planning a bonfire for me. Guy Fawkes’ night has already passed this year, so I think you miss out. (And I’m not going to remind you about when the PASS Summit is in 2012.) create function dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) returns table as return (     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales, '' as ErrorMessage     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage     where isdate(@eomdate) != 1     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage     where datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5 ); We’ve had to lose the ORDER BY – but that’s fine, as that’s a client thing anyway. We can have our reports leverage this stored query still, but we’re recognising that it’s a query, not a procedure. A procedure is designed to DO stuff, not just return data. We even get entries in sys.columns that confirm what the shape of the result set actually is, which makes sense, because a table-valued function is the right mechanism to return data. And we get so much more flexibility with this. If you haven’t seen the simplification stuff that I’ve preached on before, jump over to http://bit.ly/SimpleRob and watch the video of when I broke a microphone and nearly fell off the stage in Wales. You’ll see the impact of being able to have a simplifiable query. You can also read the procedural functions post I wrote recently, if you didn’t follow the link from a few paragraphs ago. So if we want the list of SalesPeople that made any kind of sales in a given month, we can do something like: select SalesPersonID from dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomonth) order by SalesPersonID; This doesn’t need to look up the TotalDue field, which makes a simpler plan. select * from dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomonth) where SalesPersonID is not null order by SalesPersonID; This one can avoid having to do the work on the rows that don’t have a SalesPersonID value, pushing the predicate into the Index Seek rather than filtering the results that come back to the report. If we had joins involved, we might see some of those being simplified out. We also get the ability to include query hints in individual reports. We shift from having a single-use stored procedure to having a reusable stored query – and isn’t that one of the main points of modularisation? Stored procedures in Reporting Services are just a bit limited for my liking. They’re useful in plenty of ways, but if you insist on using stored procedures all the time rather that queries that use functions – that’s rubbish. @rob_farley

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