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• GeForce 8800GT not even giving basic output

  - by Sam

  My Dad bought a GeForce 8800GT graphics card quite a long time ago now. It has never worked in his PC. Print out from a dxdiag: System Information Time of this report: 4/13/2010, 19:52:40 Machine name: USER-PC Operating System: Windows Vista™ Home Premium (6.0, Build 6001) Service Pack 1 (6001.vistasp1_gdr.091208-0542) Language: English (Regional Setting: English) System Manufacturer: To Be Filled By O.E.M. System Model: To Be Filled By O.E.M. BIOS: Default System BIOS Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.3GHz Memory: 2046MB RAM Page File: 1045MB used, 3296MB available Windows Dir: C:\Windows DirectX Version: DirectX 10 DX Setup Parameters: Not found DxDiag Version: 6.00.6001.18000 32bit Unicode DxDiag Notes Display Tab 1: No problems found. Sound Tab 1: No problems found. Sound Tab 2: No problems found. Sound Tab 3: No problems found. Input Tab: No problems found. DirectX Debug Levels Direct3D: 0/4 (retail) DirectDraw: 0/4 (retail) DirectInput: 0/5 (retail) DirectMusic: 0/5 (retail) DirectPlay: 0/9 (retail) DirectSound: 0/5 (retail) DirectShow: 0/6 (retail) Display Devices Card name: ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO Manufacturer: ATI Technologies Inc. Chip type: ATI Radeon Graphics Processor (0x94C3) DAC type: Internal DAC(400MHz) Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_94C3&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_00 Display Memory: 1012 MB Dedicated Memory: 245 MB Shared Memory: 767 MB Current Mode: 1280 x 960 (32 bit) (75Hz) Monitor: Generic PnP Monitor Driver Name: atiumdag.dll,atiumdva.dat,atitmmxx.dll Driver Version: 7.14.0010.0523 (English) DDI Version: 10 Driver Attributes: Final Retail Driver Date/Size: 8/22/2007 02:43:14, 3021312 bytes That info is from the current card that is installed in it and has been installed since its purchase roughly 3-4 years ago. When I physically install the card I put it into a purple slot on the motherboard that the old card was in (if I go into the device manager and select properties on the current card it confirms that the slot is a "PCI Slot 16 (PCI bus 2, device 0, function 0)") and boot up the computer but get absolutely no output. The screen that we have registers that it is connected to something (by not displaying the screen it does when the cable is unplugged) but just remains blank, no output at all. I recently took the card to my University and one of my friends who is better with hardware issues than I am tried it in his system and it worked perfectly. No issues whatsoever. I do not have a spec list for his system but I could get one if you need it. If you need any more information on this issue I will be happy to supply you with it as I am starting to get very annoyed with this problem ^_^

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• How to create an EFI System Partition?

  - by Alex Popov

  TL; DR How do I create an EFI system partition from scratch? How do I put the EFI firmware on it onces it is created? Long version I hava Toshiba T430 laptop. I received it with Windows 7 installed (but I think originally it has shipped with Windows 8). I installed Ubuntu on it, but deleted some partitions on the disk so that I ended up wiping out the Windows and only having Ubuntu. Among the deleted partitions was the EFI System partition. I discovered that Ubuntu now boots in Legacy mode (and not UEFI). I am trying to follow this guide on converting my Ubuntu installation from Legacy to UEFI. The problem - since there is no EFI partition whenever I choose from BIOS to boot using UEFI I cannot boot. That counts not only for the harddrive, but usb and DVD as well. I think this is logical - it expects an EFI partition and since it can't find it, it cannot continue booting futher, be it from HDD or DVD. So how do I recreate the EFI partition? The guide above says: Creating an EFI partition If you are manually partitioning your disk in the Ubuntu installer, you need to make sure you have an EFI partition set up. If your disk already contains an EFI partition (eg if your computer had Windows8 preinstalled), it can be used for Ubuntu too. Do not format it. It is strongly recommended to have only 1 EFI partition per disk. An EFI partition can be created via a recent version of GParted (the Gparted version included in the 12.04 disk is OK), and must have the following attributes: Mount point: /boot/efi (remark: no need to set this mount point when using the manual partitioning, the Ubuntu installer will detect it automatically) Size: minimum 100Mib. 200MiB recommended. Type: FAT32 Other: needs a "boot" flag. I had some trouble creating this partition: I boot from a live Ubuntu DVD, open GParted, create a 200MB partition and format it to FAT32. In GParted I cannot set the mount point and thus cannot set the bootflag. I didn't set the mount point in /etc/fstab since it's a live CD and fstab looked quite differently from what I expected compared to a normal boot. Anyway, I just didn't know what values to set. I booted again via the live DVD and then chose to install Ubuntu. I then created a partition with the mentioned criteria - mount point, 200MB, FAT32, boot flag. However, I continue to have this problem and I suppose it's because on that partition there is no EFI firmware, it's just an empty partition, which is suitable to have EFI firmware. So again, how do I create an EFI partition, which has the EFI software, so that the laptop can once again boot in UEFI mode?

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• Windows 7 sometimes boots in VGA mode

  - by TuxRug

  I have an Asus G50VT-x5 laptop with nVidia GeForce9800M-GS graphics. Normally, Windows boots normally, but about 20% of the time (rough estimate), it will boot with the fallback VGA driver, maxing out at 800x600 with no Aero. I've checked the system logs and there is nothing indicating an error loading the nVidia driver. It even specifies in the logs that the Nvidia Display Driver service started successfully, even though it has booted in safe graphics mode. This has been happening for a while, but it's happening a little more often now than it was before. Since the first time my system exhibited this behavior, I have updated my graphics driver a handful of times. I used System Information for Windows to check for problems there, but the only thing that stood out was the following: Core Temperature 4486449 °C (8075639 °F) Shaders Temperature 1171513530 °C (2108724330 °F) I know this reading is incorrect, because my laptop is nowhere near the surface of the sun and my desk has not burst into flames. When it's opererating normally, I get a sane reading like [Core Temperature 58 °C (136 °F)] with no Shaders Temperature listed. All I have to do to resolve the issue is reboot. I have seen no stability issues with the graphics or anything else. A long time ago, I had an issue with this computer where my framerate would suddenly drop during a 3D game from 40fps to <1fps, but after looking at the temperature readout immediately after quitting a game, I removed the bottom panel and blew the dust out of the vent and heatsink. Since then I have no drops in framerate under any situation. I have uploaded a zip containing the SIW reports for when the problem is occurring and when the computer is operating normally. I don't have a paid account so it can only be downloaded 10 times, so please only download the reports if you think you can use them. If you try to download the reports and they are no longer available, please comment and I will re-upload them. If you want to look at the files, they are on Rapidshare. EDIT It happened again, and I looked a little deeper into the System logs. When this happens, there are a lot of errors about other device drivers unable to start. All of these errors are for PnP drivers. Also, my USB keyboard and mouse take a few moments before they actually start working, although this happens sometimes the first normal boot as well. I am quite sure this is related, so I am adding the pnp tag. Also, CHKDSK will not run on boot. Even if a check is scheduled or a volume is manually set as dirty, CHKDSK will be skipped entirely, not even leaving an entry in the System logs. I tried running CHKNTFS /D, which did not work. I then manually changed my HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager BootExecute value to the default listed on Microsoft's website. That did not work either. I ended up booting to repair mode and running CHKDSK there, which found a number of minor inconsistencies on my system drive, but none on my data drive. I have no idea if this is related. Some more information for those who don't download my SIW report file: Antivirus and Firewall are ESET Smart Security I have three different virutalization programs installed: VMware Player, Windows Virtual PC, and VirtualBox. The network adapters for these show up in the log of failed device starts. EDIT 2 I tried running sfc /scannow, which reported that it found corrupted files that could not be fixed. The CBS log is extremely cryptic. I tried booting to my install disk, launching repair mode, and doing an offline sfc from there, which produced the same result.

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• HAproxy roundrobin balancing does not appear to be distributing evently

  - by andrew

  Hello, I know that with loaded servers, roundrobin in HAproxy (1.4.4) does not evenly distribute, but my servers are currently getting NO traffic (test setup), and roundrobin balancing does www1,www1,www1,www1,www1,...www2,www2,www2,...,www1... I'm verifying this by having the script being run on each server cat /etc/HOSTNAME (slackware). I need to have it switch back and forth each time to test some session stuff (stored in shared memcached) but am having trouble getting it to switch between my two web servers on each request. global log 127.0.0.1 local0 warning maxconn 4096 chroot /usr/share/haproxy pidfile /var/run/haproxy.pid uid 99 gid 99 daemon defaults balance roundrobin fullconn 100 maxconn 4096 mode http option dontlognull option http-server-close option forwardfor option redispatch retries 3 timeout connect 5000 timeout client 20000 timeout server 60000 timeout queue 60000 stats enable stats uri /haproxy stats auth ***:*** frontend www *:80 log global acl is_upload hdr_dom(host) -i uploads.site.com acl is_api hdr_dom(host) -i api.site.com acl is_dev hdr_dom(host) -i dev.site.com acl is_apidev hdr_dom(host) -i apidev.site.com use_backend uploads.site.com if is_upload use_backend api.site.com if is_api use_backend dev.site.com if is_dev !is_apidev default_backend site.com backend site.com option httpchk HEAD /alive.php HTTP/1.1\r\nHost:site.com server www1 1.1.1.1:8080 weight 10 minconn 5 maxconn 25 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 2 server www2 1.1.1.2:8080 weight 10 minconn 5 maxconn 25 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 2 backend api.site.com option httpchk HEAD /alive.php HTTP/1.1\r\nHost:api.site.com server www1 1.1.1.1:8080 weight 10 minconn 5 maxconn 25 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 2 server www2 1.1.1.2:8080 weight 10 minconn 5 maxconn 25 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 2 backend dev.site.com option httpchk HEAD /alive.php HTTP/1.1\r\nHost:dev.site.com server www1 1.1.1.1:8080 weight 10 minconn 5 maxconn 25 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 2 server www2 1.1.1.2:8080 weight 10 minconn 5 maxconn 25 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 2 backend uploads.site.com option httpchk HEAD /alive.php HTTP/1.1\r\nHost:uploads.site.com server www1 1.1.1.1:8080 weight 10 minconn 5 maxconn 25 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 2 server www2 1.1.1.2:8080 backup weight 10 minconn 5 maxconn 25 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 2 So basically, I have some different back-ends (I've verified the ACLs are working), with the default option "roundrobin" selected. I've tried removing weights, removing the minconn/maxconn/fullconn attributes for all servers (not just the backend I'm testing), tried removing the ACLs, etc. I've been testing on dev.site.com BTW. Anyone see a reason why I can't get something like www1,www2,www1,www2,...? Also, this is one of my first questions on here, so please let me know if I left anything needed out of my post. Thanks!

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• Rails program is not being run on apache + passenger - only directory listing

  - by user909943

  I have successfully installed Phusion passenger + Apache 2 + Rails 3.1 program + git on a linux Debian 6. I ran passenger-install-apache2-module and followed the configuration instructions. I followed also the setup instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RubyOnRails#Configure%20Apache My program is in /var/www/myrailsproject and runs fine on webrick on my mac. When going to myhomepage.com (example) I only see directory listing. By preventing directory listing and setting Options -Indexes in < Document tag in /etc/apache2/sites-available default or myhomepage.com I get an error on my website: Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server. Apache/2.2.19 (Debian) Server at myhomepage.com Port 80 In /etc/apache2/apache.conf I added: ServerName myhomepage.com LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.8/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.8 PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8 In /etc/apache2/sites-available myhomepage.com: < VirtualHost *:80 ServerName myhomepage.com ServerAlias www.myhomepage.com DocumentRoot /var/www/myrailsproject/public ErrorLog /var/www/logs/error.log CustomLog /var/www/logs/access.log combined RailsEnv test RackEnv test RailsBaseURI /mayrailsproject < Directory /var/www/myrailsproject> Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks -MultiViews AllowOverride all Order allow,deny allow from all < /Directory> < Directory /var/www/myrailsproject/public> AllowOverride All Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks MultiViews Order allow,deny Allow from all < /Directory> RailsSpawnMethod smart PassengerPoolIdleTime 1000 RailsAppSpawnerIdleTime 0 RailsFrameworkSpawnerIdleTime 0 PassengerMaxRequests 5000 PassengerStatThrottleRate 5 < /VirtualHost I think I have tried all possible combinations of values and variables in < Directory (and < Directory /, < Directory /var/www etc.) the dafault looks like: < VirtualHost *:80 ServerName myhomepage.com RailsBaseURI /myrailsproject DocumentRoot /var/www/myrailsproject/public RackEnv test RailsEnv test < Directory /var/www/myrailsproject> Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks -MultiViews AllowOverride None Order deny,allow Deny from all < /Directory> <Directory /root/public/myrailsproject/public> Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks -MultiViews AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log LogLevel warn CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/" < Directory "/usr/share/doc/"> Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128 < /Directory> < /VirtualHost So I wonder why my rails project is not being run, only directory listing. I do not have any index file in my project, routes.rb routes to root :to = 'static_pages#home' I think all permissions are as they should be. Thanks a lot in advance Regards Íris

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• How to keep group-writeable shares on Samba with OSX clients?

  - by Oliver Salzburg

  I have a FreeNAS server on a network with OSX and Windows clients. When the OSX clients interact with SMB/CIFS shares on the server, they are causing permission problems for all other clients. Update: I can no longer verify any answers because we abandoned the project, but feel free to post any help for future visitors. The details of this behavior seem to also be dependent on the version of OSX the client is running. For this question, let's assume a client running 10.8.2. When I mount the CIFS share on an OSX client and create a new directory on it, the directory will be created with drwxr-x-rx permissions. This is undesirable because it will not allow anyone but me to write to the directory. There are other users in my group which should have write permissions as well. This behavior happens even though the following settings are present in smb.conf on the server: [global] create mask= 0666 directory mask= 0777 [share] force directory mode= 0775 force create mode= 0660 I was under the impression that these settings should make sure that directories are at least created with rwxrwxr-x permissions. But, I guess, that doesn't stop the client from changing the permissions after creating the directory. When I create a folder on the same share from a Windows client, the new folder will have the desired access permissions (rwxrwxrwx), so I'm currently assuming that the problem lies with the OSX client. I guess this wouldn't be such an issue if you could easily change the permissions of the directories you've created, but you can't. When opening the directory info in Finder, I get the old "You have custom access" notice with no ability to make any changes. I'm assuming that this is caused because we're using Windows ACLs on the share, but that's just a wild guess. Changing the write permissions for the group through the terminal works fine, but this is unpractical for the deployment and unreasonable to expect from anyone to do. This is the complete smb.conf: [global] encrypt passwords = yes dns proxy = no strict locking = no read raw = yes write raw = yes oplocks = yes max xmit = 65535 deadtime = 15 display charset = LOCALE max log size = 10 syslog only = yes syslog = 1 load printers = no printing = bsd printcap name = /dev/null disable spoolss = yes smb passwd file = /var/etc/private/smbpasswd private dir = /var/etc/private getwd cache = yes guest account = nobody map to guest = Bad Password obey pam restrictions = Yes # NOTE: read smb.conf. directory name cache size = 0 max protocol = SMB2 netbios name = freenas workgroup = COMPANY server string = FreeNAS Server store dos attributes = yes hostname lookups = yes security = user passdb backend = ldapsam:ldap://ldap.company.local ldap admin dn = cn=admin,dc=company,dc=local ldap suffix = dc=company,dc=local ldap user suffix = ou=Users ldap group suffix = ou=Groups ldap machine suffix = ou=Computers ldap ssl = off ldap replication sleep = 1000 ldap passwd sync = yes #ldap debug level = 1 #ldap debug threshold = 1 ldapsam:trusted = yes idmap uid = 10000-39999 idmap gid = 10000-39999 create mask = 0666 directory mask = 0777 client ntlmv2 auth = yes dos charset = CP437 unix charset = UTF-8 log level = 1 [share] path = /mnt/zfs0 printable = no veto files = /.snap/.windows/.zfs/ writeable = yes browseable = yes inherit owner = no inherit permissions = no vfs objects = zfsacl guest ok = no inherit acls = Yes map archive = No map readonly = no nfs4:mode = special nfs4:acedup = merge nfs4:chown = yes hide dot files force directory mode = 0775 force create mode = 0660

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• WNDR3700 Router + Cisco SG200-08 + LACP + Dual Uplink

  - by kobaltz

  Background I have a storage server that has several virtual machine images stored on them. I would store them locally, but I have limited space on my desktop (using SSD storage). I would like to increase the bandwidth between the desktop and the storage server by using two NICs on each computer. My original configuration allowed about 55MBps between the desktop and storage server. This storage server also has several TBs of documents, pictures, movies, vms, and ISO/programs. The storage server has 8 1.5TB hard drives in a RAID 10 configuration with a hardware RAID controller. The benchmarks on the RAID 10 are about 300MBps. Configuration In short, I am trying to bridge my switch and router. The switch is a small 8 port Cisco smart switch that supports 802.3ad LACP. I have two computers plugged into the switch, each with 2 Intel Gigabit NICs. The first computer is a Windows 7 machine that has the Intel ANS software installed. I have LACP configured with the computer and now show 3 NICs (2 Physical + 1 TEAM Virtual @ 2Gbps). It looks like this computer is configured correctly. I trunked the two ports that this computer is plugged into with the switch's web interface. The second computer is a homebrew storage box running debian. I also have the bonding enabled on this machine and the switch configured with LACP. Without having the WNDR3700 router in the picture yet, I am able to communicate between the Windows 7 machine and the debian box since they both have static IP addresses. With LACP enabled on both machines I am getting about 106-108MBps speeds. Issue I plug in a network cable from the switch into the router and enable DHCP on the desktop. I saw no need to have a static address on the desktop. My transfer rates are still from 106MBps-108MBps. While this is still a boost, I am trying to figure out how to get about 140-180MBps. I am thinking that I need to increase the bandwidth from the router to the switch. My switch allows 4 groups for port trunking. I plugged in a second network cable from the router to the switch. My question is, what is the proper way to fix this issue. Should I port trunk the two ports that are going from the switch to the router? Keep in mind that the router is a WNDR3700 and is unsure whether or not it supports LACP. I do have OpenWRT installed on the router, but it still wasn't clear in any documentation that I found if it supported 802.3ad LACP standards. I am also wondering if there needs to be anything changed within the Cisco settings. [Edit] - Corrected some numbers, wasn't really paying attention. It looks like the speeds though at least two NICs are bonded with LACP is still reaching the max bandwidth of one port. Is there a way to configure the switch so that I can increase this bandwidth? Also, on the storage server, I had a couple of extra NICs laying around and threw them on there as well. Another EDIT and More Findings I happened to look at the traffic of each individual NIC and think that I see the problem. I tested with a simple transfer for a 4GB file. I noticed that only one of the NICs was taking the load of the traffic. I then copied the file back to the Storage Server and noticed that the other NIC was sending out the traffic. I have 802.3ad LACP enabled on the two NICs and I see that it gets enabled dynamically on the switch's interface. Should I be using Static Link Aggregation?

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• Windows 7 disk errors after a few hours of runtime

  - by GFK

  I'm having trouble understanding what is going on with my work PC. Whenever I boot it, it runs fine for a while, then starts to randomly show disk errors. The displayed error often contains the message "not enough storage is available to process this command", although depending on the application that fails it can be different. This has happened for weeks now and is getting worse. This is what troubles me: It never seems to impact critical parts of the system (no BSOD, no freeze). Only some applications seem impacted, refusing to function correctly after a while: Outlook 2010 cannot download RSS feeds anymore, Firefox 6 or IE9 cannot download anything bigger than 3MB without failing, Windows Update fails, all msi installers fail, Visual Studio 2010 starts failing in weird manners... It only happens after a while using it (typically 3 hours, but it seems that installing a program or compiling several times makes it shorter) Rebooting solves it (temporarily). The system: The OS is Windows 7 Pro Spanish SP1, 32 bits The system is an HP Compaq 6000 Pro with 4 GB memory (only 3.4GB usable since the system is 32bit), one 500GB hard drive. Installed applications include: Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, VMWare Workstation 7, Microsoft Security Essentials, Office 2010. Shutting down all related services and processes doesn't seem to change anything. The diagnostics I've run so far: Hard drive : 465GB, 165GB free Process Explorer : physical and virtual memory seem ok (pagefile is 5.3GB, physical memory usage 70%, system commit 39%) Windows Memory diagnostic tool: OK CHKDSK returned: 488282111 KB total disk space. 281668248 KB in 265779 files. 150188 KB in 62949 indexes. 0 KB in bad sectors. 571755 KB in use by the system. The log file has occupied 65536 kilobytes. 205891920 KB available on disk. For non-spanish speakers, that means all ok. SMART diagnostic tools (DiskCheckup) report all values normal. temperatures are in the normal range (HWinfo). The event viewer doesn't seem to contain any significant message. ran CCleaner 3, without any noticeable effect. I was thinking about some file number limit (between Visual Studio projects and other applications, there are around 300.000 files on the hard drive), but I couldn't find any. It's possible there is something related with the use of the temporary folders (it's the only explanation I have for why applications fail but Windows doesn't), but I cannot confirm that. Only thing I cannot find out is if chkdsk reporting 65MB for the log is normal. It seems since Vista it always reports this. Any other cleaning/diagnostic tool you might know of? Edit: I ran several other tools since I first published the question: Seagate SeaTools (the HD manufacturer's analysis tool): complete test run OK. Intel Rapid 10.1 (the HD controller manufacturer's troubleshooting tool): the HD's ok. Microsoft Desktop Heap Monitor: Desktop Heap Information Monitor Tool (Version 8.1.2925.0) Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Session ID: 1 Total Desktop: ( 46464 KB - 11 desktops) WinStation\Desktop Heap Size(KB) Used Rate(%) WinSta0\Winlogon (s1) 128 3.6 WinSta0\Disconnect (s1) 64 3.8 WinSta0\Default (s1) 20480 3.0 msswindowstation\mssrestricteddesk (s0) 1024 0.2 __X78B95_89_IW__A8D9S1_42_ID (s0) 1024 0.2 Service-0x0-3e5$\Default (s0) 1024 0.6 Service-0x0-3e4$\Default (s0) 1024 0.3 Service-0x0-3e7$\Default (s0) 1024 2.1 WinSta0\Winlogon (s0) 128 1.9 WinSta0\Disconnect (s0) 64 3.8 WinSta0\Default (s0) 20480 0.0 All ok, desktop heap usage < 5% Edit 2: I tried totally resetting my account by creating a new one, logging under this new one and delete the first one (local rights and files), then logging back with this deleted account (it is a domain account). No luck. Also, I found out often the error is "not enough storage is available to process this command". Searching on the internet, I found an old troubleshooting tip (setting a registry key to raise the IRP stack limit, whatever it is) which did not change anything.

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• How do you backup 40+ Centos5.5 servers?

  - by John Little

  We are embarrassed to ask this question. Apologies for our lack of UNIX expertise. We have inherited 40+ centos 5.5 servers, and don't know how to back them up. We need low level clone type images so that we could restore the servers from scratch if we had to replace the HDs etc. We have used the "dd" command, but we assume this only works if you want to back up one local disk to another, not 40 servers to one server with an external USB HD attached. All 40 servers have a pair of mirrored disks (dont know if its HW or SW raid). Most only have 100MB used. SErvers are running apache, zend, tomcat, mysql etc. Ideally we dont want to have to shut them down to backup (but could). We assume that standard unix commands like tar, cpio, rsync, scp etc. are of no use as they only copy files, not partitions, all attributes, groups etc. i.e. do not produce a result which can simply be re-imaged to a new HD to get the serer back from dead. We have a large SAN, a spare windows box and spare unix boxes, but these are only visible to one layer in the network. We have an unused Dell DL2000 monster tape unit, but no sw or documentation for it. WE have a copy of symantec backup exec, but we have no budget for unix client licenses. (The company has negative amounts of money). We need to be able to initiate the backup remotely, as we can only access the servers in person in an emergency (i.e. to restore) Googling returns some applications to do this, e.g. clonezilla - looks difficult to install and invasive. Mondo, only seems to support backup if you are local to the machine. Amanda might be an option, but looks like days/weeks of work to learn and setup? Is there anything built into Centos, or do we have to go the route of installing, learning and configuring a set of backup softwares? Any ideas? This must be a pretty standard problem which goggling doesnt give an obvious answer.

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• Hard drive after PCB swap strange stuff

  - by ramyy

  I’ve done a PCB swap to my HDD. The HDD model is: WD6400AAKS-00A7B2. The original PCB PN matches the new one (first three letter groups), though the cache mismatches (16MB original, 8MB new). The Hardware store that made the swap told me it was hard to do the swap, they have done firmware adaptation. I can see that this firmware version does not match the original, (01.03B01 original, 05.04E05 new). Still I can see that the serial number and model of the drive is correct, the hard drive appeared normal in the BIOS, all the partitions show and everything appears normal. I have encountered three things though, I have left the drive non operated for 2-3 weeks after the swap to avoid corrupting the data or anything else the new PCB might cause, until I buy a new drive and backup the data. I got a drive, and when I powered the old drive manually (I have a laptop, I use a normal desktop power supply and a USB/SATA connector), I heard the motor start and I could hear ticking as if the motor’s somehow struggling to start, and then the motor sound starts again then the ticking, and so on.. I tried powering again it happened again. The third time it started normally and I could see everything normally. I took the chance and copied all the data over to the new drive. When I was done, I powered off the drive (after more than 25 hours of continuous operation), tried to power it up again and it did so normally, and so are the times I powered it up later; but I got very suspicious now. What could be the problem here? And what happened new, it used to power normally after the swap directly? The second thing that happened is that I found size differences with some files; some include movies, songs, (.iso) files for games, and programs. I could find the size is the same, but size on disk is a little more on the new drive for these files. . I’ve tried some of those files (with size differences) they worked fine. They are not too much but still make you suspicious of the integrity of the data copied; one cannot try if all files are working for about (580 GB) worth of data. I tried copying these files on the same partition they exist of the old drive; they are the same in size as when copied to the new drive (allocation unit size not the issue). I took an image of a partition (sector by sector including empty ones) and when I explore it, these file sizes are equal to the original (old drive); I copy them anywhere else their size on disk, increases, i.e becomes equal to the ones I copy from the old drive itself anywhere. Why the size difference and can one trust the integrity of the data?? The third thing is that when I connect my new external USB HDD, the partitions of the old HDD unmount and then mount again. Connected are: (USB mouse + Old HDD) then external HDD. Why that happens?? Considering the following: I compared the SMART reports from after the swap directly and after the copying, no error readings or reallocated sectors where reported. Here they are: http://www.image-share.com/ijpg-1939-219.html I later ran both WD data life guard tests and they came out passed. I’m worried for this drive since I must be sure the data is fine and safe on the new one, and I will consider it backup for the new one, since you can’t trust anything anymore. I hope you can forgive me for the length of the post, but couldn’t ignore any of the details, this hard drive contains very important data to me and I have to deal with the situation with great care.

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• The best dvd ripper software in 2014 review

  - by user328170

  The top 3 DVD Ripping Tools in 2014 Nowadays everyone may have several smart mobile devices, such as iphone, ipad air, ipad mini ,Samsung Galaxy and Sony Xperia. If you want to take your movies with your mobile devices, or sometimes just want to backup those classic physical discs on your notebook or workstation with high quality resolutions, you need a fast and stable software to rip them and convert them to the format you like. Fortunately, there are plenty of great software products designed to make the process easy and transform DVD to the files that are playable on any mobile device you choose. We have done a full review on dozens of products. Here are five of the best, based on our review. We test the software from its ripping speed, friendly use guide , reliability and ripping capability. The top one is still Winx DVD Ripper platinum. We've test its 6.1 version 2 years ago for its ability to quickly and easily rip DVDs and Blu-ray discs to high quality MKV files with a single click. It gave us deep impression in the test. This time we test it’s lastest 7.3.5 version. Besides easy use and speed, we test its capability to decrypt all kinds of discs with different protect method, for example, Disney X-project DRM , Sony ArccOS, RCE and region code. The result shows that winx dvd ripper platinum still maintain its advantages in all the area. Winx dvd ripper platinum is a more focused on DVD ripping software with the basic duty to rip and convert DVD. The color of UI is a modern technical sense. All the main functions are shown obviously while others specials are hidden for advanced users, making it more clear and convenient to make option. There are two company weisoft limited and Digiarty who can provide the software. Weisoft limited focus on USA, UK and Australia market. Digiarty focus on others. ripping speed ????? friendly use guide ????? reliability ????? ripping capability ????? The second one DVDFab DVDFab is also very robust during ripping dics. It can also decrypt most of the dics in the market. The shortage it still friendly use and speed. We'd note that the app is frequently updated to cut through the copy protection on even the latest DVDs and Blu-ray discs . The app is shareware, meaning most features are free, including decrypting and ripping to your hard drive. Many of you note that you use another app for compression and authoring, but many of you say they hey, storage is cheap, and the rips from DVDFab are easy, one-click, and work. ripping speed ??? friendly use guide ???? reliability ????? ripping capability ????? The Third one is Handbrake Handbrake is our favorite video encoder for a reason: it's simple, easy to use, easy to install, and offers a lots of options to get the high quality file as a result. If you're scared by them, you don't even have to use them—the app will compensate for you and pick some settings it thinks you'll like based on your destination device. So many of you like Handbrake that many of you use it in conjunction with another app (like VLC, which makes ripping easy)—you'll let another app do the rip and crack the DRM on your discs, and then process the file through Handbrake for encoding. The app is fast, can make the most of multi-core processors to speed up the process, and is completely open source. ripping speed ??? friendly use guide ???? reliability ???? ripping capability ????

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• WCF REST on .Net 4.0

  - by AngelEyes

  A simple and straight forward article taken from: http://christopherdeweese.com/blog2/post/drop-the-soap-wcf-rest-and-pretty-uris-in-net-4 Drop the Soap: WCF, REST, and Pretty URIs in .NET 4 Years ago I was working in libraries when the Web 2.0 revolution began.  One of the things that caught my attention about early start-ups using the AJAX/REST/Web 2.0 model was how nice the URIs were for their applications.  Those were my first impressions of REST; pretty URIs.  Turns out there is a little more to it than that. REST is an architectural style that focuses on resources and structured ways to access those resources via the web.  REST evolved as an “anti-SOAP” movement, driven by developers who did not want to deal with all the complexity SOAP introduces (which is al lot when you don’t have frameworks hiding it all).  One of the biggest benefits to REST is that browsers can talk to rest services directly because REST works using URIs, QueryStrings, Cookies, SSL, and all those HTTP verbs that we don’t have to think about anymore. If you are familiar with ASP.NET MVC then you have been exposed to rest at some level.  MVC is relies heavily on routing to generate consistent and clean URIs.  REST for WCF gives you the same type of feel for your services.  Let’s dive in. WCF REST in .NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 4 This post will cover WCF REST in .NET 4 which drew heavily from the REST Starter Kit and community feedback.  There is basic REST support in .NET 3.5 SP1 and you can also grab the REST Starter Kit to enable some of the features you’ll find in .NET 4. This post will cover REST in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Getting Started To get started we’ll create a basic WCF Rest Service Application using the new on-line templates option in VS 2010: When you first install a template you are prompted with this dialog: Dude Where’s my .Svc File? The WCF REST template shows us the new way we can simply build services.  Before we talk about what’s there, let’s look at what is not there: The .Svc File An Interface Contract Dozens of lines of configuration that you have to change to make your service work REST in .NET 4 is greatly simplified and leverages the Web Routing capabilities used in ASP.NET MVC and other parts of the web frameworks.  With REST in .NET 4 you use a global.asax to set the route to your service using the new ServiceRoute class.  From there, the WCF runtime handles dispatching service calls to the methods based on the Uri Templates. global.asax using System; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using System.Web; using System.Web.Routing; namespace Blog.WcfRest.TimeService {     public class Global : HttpApplication     {         void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)         {             RegisterRoutes();         }         private static void RegisterRoutes()         {             RouteTable.Routes.Add(new ServiceRoute("TimeService",                 new WebServiceHostFactory(), typeof(TimeService)));         }     } } The web.config contains some new structures to support a configuration free deployment.  Note that this is the default config generated with the template.  I did not make any changes to web.config. web.config <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration>   <system.web>     <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" />   </system.web>   <system.webServer>     <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">       <add name="UrlRoutingModule" type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule,            System.Web, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />     </modules>   </system.webServer>   <system.serviceModel>     <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true"/>     <standardEndpoints>       <webHttpEndpoint>         <!--             Configure the WCF REST service base address via the global.asax.cs file and the default endpoint             via the attributes on the <standardEndpoint> element below         -->         <standardEndpoint name="" helpEnabled="true" automaticFormatSelectionEnabled="true"/>       </webHttpEndpoint>     </standardEndpoints>   </system.serviceModel> </configuration> Building the Time Service We’ll create a simple “TimeService” that will return the current time.  Let’s start with the following code: using System; using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using System.ServiceModel.Web; namespace Blog.WcfRest.TimeService {     [ServiceContract]     [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)]     [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.PerCall)]     public class TimeService     {         [WebGet(UriTemplate = "CurrentTime")]         public string CurrentTime()         {             return DateTime.Now.ToString();         }     } } The endpoint for this service will be http://[machinename]:[port]/TimeService.  To get the current time http://[machinename]:[port]/TimeService/CurrentTime will do the trick. The Results Are In Remember That Route In global.asax? Turns out it is pretty important.  When you set the route name, that defines the resource name starting after the host portion of the Uri. Help Pages in WCF 4 Another feature that came from the starter kit are the help pages.  To access the help pages simply append Help to the end of the service’s base Uri. Dropping the Soap Having dabbled with REST in the past and after using Soap for the last few years, the WCF 4 REST support is certainly refreshing.  I’m currently working on some REST implementations in .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 and am looking forward to working on REST in .NET 4 and VS 2010.

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• Week in Geek: FBI Back Door in OpenBSD Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to migrate bookmarks from Delicious to Diigo, fix annoying arrows, play old-school DOS games, schedule smart computer shutdowns, use breaks in Microsoft Word to better format documents, check the condition of hard-disks using Linux disk utilities, & what the Linux fstab is and how it works. Photo by Jameson42. Random Geek Links Another week with extra news link goodness to help keep you up to date. Photo by justmakeit. Report of FBI back door roils OpenBSD community Allegations that the FBI surreptitiously placed a back door into the OpenBSD operating system have alarmed the computer security community, prompting calls for an audit of the source code and claims that the charges must be a hoax. Fortinet: Job outlook improving for cybercrooks In an ironic twist in the job market, more positions will open up for developers who can write customized malware packers, people who can break CAPTCHA codes, and distributors who can spread malicious code, according to Fortinet. Enisa: Malware for smartphones is a ’serious risk’ Businesses and consumers are at risk of data breaches through smartphone use, according to the European Network and Information Security Agency. The trick with the f: Google and Microsoft web sites distribute malware Last week, Google’s DoubleClick advertising platform and Microsoft’s rad.msn.com online ad network briefly distributed malware to other web sites in the form of advertising banners. New scam tactic: Fake disk defraggers It would appear that scammers are trying out new programs to see which might best confuse potential victims and evade detection by legitimate antivirus software. Microsoft closes IE and Stuxnet holes As previously announced, Microsoft has released 17 security updates to close 40 security holes. All four Windows holes so far disclosed in connection with Stuxnet have now been closed. Microsoft Offers H.264 Support to Firefox on Windows via Add-On The new HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in add-on from Microsoft offers users that are running Firefox on Windows 7 H.264 support for HTML5 video playback. Google proclaims Chrome business-ready Google has announced that Chrome is ready for corporate use. Microsoft Tells Exchange Customers to Think Twice Before Opting for Google Message Continuity This week, Microsoft is telling companies still running Exchange 2010’s precursors that they should carefully consider the implications of embracing Google Message Continuity. Who Google has in mind for its Chrome OS users Steven Vaughan-Nichols explains why he feels that Chrome OS will be ideal for either office-workers or people who need a computer, but do not know the first thing about how to use one safely. Oracle takes office suite to the cloud Oracle has introduced Cloud Office 1.0, a cloud-based version of its office suite, which is aimed at web and mobile users. Mozilla pays premiums for reports of vulnerabilities The Mozilla Foundation has followed Google’s example by expanding its rewards program for reports of vulnerabilities in its Web applications. Who bought those 882 Novell patents? Not just Microsoft The mysterious CPTN Holdings — the organization that bought the 882 Novell patents as part of the terms of the Attachmate acquisition of Novell – has been unmasked (Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle). Appeals court: Feds need warrants for e-mail Police must obtain search warrants before perusing Internet users’ e-mail records, a federal appeals court ruled today in a landmark decision that struck down part of a 1986 law allowing warrantless access. Geek Video of the Week What happens when someone plays a wicked prank by shoveling crazy snow paths that lead to dead ends or turn back on themselves? Watch to find out! Photo by CollegeHumor. Janitor Snow Shoveling Prank Random TinyHacker Links The Oatmeal on Cat vs Internet What lengths will our poor neglected kitty hero have to go to in order to get some attention? Guide On Using JoliCloud With Windows JoliCloud is a nifty operating system that’s made for people who need a light-weight OS that’s mostly cloud based. Check this guide on using it with Windows. Use Cameyo to Easily Create Portable Programs Here’s a nifty tool to make portable apps out of programs in Windows. Check out the guide to do it. Better Family Tech Support A nice new site by Google to help members of family understand how computers work. Track Your Stolen Mobile Phone With F-Secure A useful anti-theft tool for your mobile phone. Super User Questions Another week with great answers to popular questions from Super User. What Chrome password manager fits my requirements? What’s the best way to be able to reimage windows computers? Could you suggest feature-rich disk-based personal backup program for linux (and I’ve seen a few)? What is IPv6 and why should I care? Is there any way to find out what programs are trying to connect to Internet on windows? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Here are our hottest articles full of geeky goodness from this past week at HTG. 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 Kills Viruses Dead. Download It Now. Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? Ask the Readers: Would You Be Willing to Give Windows Up and Use a Different O.S.? The Twelve Days of Geekmas One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy reading through our latest batch of retro-geek goodness from one year ago. Macrium Reflect is a Free and Easy To Use Backup Utility How To Turn a Physical Computer Into A Virtual Machine with Disk2vhd How To Restore Windows 7 from a System Image How To Manage Hard Drive Space Used by Windows 7 Backup and Restore How To Manage Hibernate Mode in Windows 7 The Geek Note That is all we have for you this week, so see you back here again after the holidays! Got a great tip? Send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by mitjamavsar. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Deathwing the Destroyer – WoW Cataclysm Dragon Wallpaper Drag2Up Lets You Drag and Drop Files to the Web With Ease The Spam Police Parts 1 and 2 – Goodbye Spammers [Videos] Snow Angels Theme for Windows 7 Exploring the Jungle Ruins Wallpaper Protect Your Privacy When Browsing with Chrome and Iron Browser

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• Ajax Control Toolkit and Superexpert

  - by Stephen Walther

  Microsoft has asked my company, Superexpert Consulting, to take ownership of the development and maintenance of the Ajax Control Toolkit moving forward. In this blog entry, I discuss our strategy for improving the Ajax Control Toolkit. Why the Ajax Control Toolkit? The Ajax Control Toolkit is one of the most popular projects on CodePlex. In fact, some have argued that it is among the most successful open-source projects of all time. It consistently receives over 3,500 downloads a day (not weekends -- workdays). A mind-boggling number of developers use the Ajax Control Toolkit in their ASP.NET Web Forms applications. Why does the Ajax Control Toolkit continue to be such a popular project? The Ajax Control Toolkit fills a strong need in the ASP.NET Web Forms world. The Toolkit enables Web Forms developers to build richly interactive JavaScript applications without writing any JavaScript. For example, by taking advantage of the Ajax Control Toolkit, a Web Forms developer can add modal dialogs, popup calendars, and client tabs to a web application simply by dragging web controls onto a page. The Ajax Control Toolkit is not for everyone. If you are comfortable writing JavaScript then I recommend that you investigate using jQuery plugins instead of the Ajax Control Toolkit. However, if you are a Web Forms developer and you don’t want to get your hands dirty writing JavaScript, then the Ajax Control Toolkit is a great solution. The Ajax Control Toolkit is Vast The Ajax Control Toolkit consists of 40 controls. That’s a lot of controls (For the sake of comparison, jQuery UI consists of only 8 controls – those slackers J). Furthermore, developers expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on browsers both old and new. For example, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 9 and every version of Internet Explorer in between. People also expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome. And, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with different operating systems. Yikes, that is a lot of combinations. The biggest challenge which my company faces in supporting the Ajax Control Toolkit is ensuring that the Ajax Control Toolkit works across all of these different browsers and operating systems. Testing, Testing, Testing Because we wanted to ensure that we could easily test the Ajax Control Toolkit with different browsers, the very first thing that we did was to set up a dedicated testing server. The dedicated server -- named Schizo -- hosts 4 virtual machines so that we can run Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Internet Explorer 9 at the same time (We also use the virtual machines to host the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari). The five developers on our team (plus me) can each publish to a separate FTP website on the testing server. That way, we can quickly test how changes to the Ajax Control Toolkit affect different browsers. QUnit Tests for the Ajax Control Toolkit Introducing regressions – introducing new bugs when trying to fix existing bugs – is the concern which prevents me from sleeping well at night. There are so many people using the Ajax Control Toolkit in so many unique scenarios, that it is difficult to make improvements to the Ajax Control Toolkit without introducing regressions. In order to avoid regressions, we decided early on that it was extremely important to build good test coverage for the 40 controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit. We’ve been focusing a lot of energy on building automated JavaScript unit tests which we can use to help us discover regressions. We decided to write the unit tests with the QUnit test framework. We picked QUnit because it is quickly becoming the standard unit testing framework in the JavaScript world. For example, it is the unit testing framework used by the jQuery team, the jQuery UI team, and many jQuery UI plugin developers. We had to make several enhancements to the QUnit framework in order to test the Ajax Control Toolkit. For example, QUnit does not support tests which include postbacks. We modified the QUnit framework so that it works with IFrames so we could perform postbacks in our automated tests. At this point, we have written hundreds of QUnit tests. For example, we have written 135 QUnit tests for the Accordion control. The QUnit tests are included with the Ajax Control Toolkit source code in a project named AjaxControlToolkit.Tests. You can run all of the QUnit tests contained in the project by opening the Default.aspx page. Automating the QUnit Tests across Multiple Browsers Automated tests are useless if no one ever runs them. In order for the QUnit tests to be useful, we needed an easy way to run the tests automatically against a matrix of browsers. We wanted to run the unit tests against Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari automatically. Expecting a developer to run QUnit tests against every browser after every check-in is just too much to expect. It takes 20 seconds to run the Accordion QUnit tests. We are testing against 8 browsers. That would require the developer to open 8 browsers and wait for the results after each change in code. Too much work. Therefore, we built a JavaScript Test Server. Our JavaScript Test Server project was inspired by John Resig’s TestSwarm project. The JavaScript Test Server runs our QUnit tests in a swarm of browsers (running on different operating systems) automatically. Here’s how the JavaScript Test Server works: 1. We created an ASP.NET page named RunTest.aspx that constantly polls the JavaScript Test Server for a new set of QUnit tests to run. After the RunTest.aspx page runs the QUnit tests, the RunTest.aspx records the test results back to the JavaScript Test Server. 2. We opened the RunTest.aspx page on instances of Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, FireFox, Chrome, Opera, Google, and Safari. Now that we have the JavaScript Test Server setup, we can run all of our QUnit tests against all of the browsers which we need to support with a single click of a button. A New Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit Each Month The Ajax Control Toolkit Issue Tracker contains over one thousand five hundred open issues and feature requests. So we have plenty of work on our plates J At CodePlex, anyone can vote for an issue to be fixed. Originally, we planned to fix issues in order of their votes. However, we quickly discovered that this approach was inefficient. Constantly switching back and forth between different controls was too time-consuming. It takes time to re-familiarize yourself with a control. Instead, we decided to focus on two or three controls each month and really focus on fixing the issues with those controls. This way, we can fix sets of related issues and avoid the randomization caused by context switching. Our team works in monthly sprints. We plan to do another release of the Ajax Control Toolkit each and every month. So far, we have competed one release of the Ajax Control Toolkit which was released on April 1, 2011. We plan to release a new version in early May. Conclusion Fortunately, I work with a team of smart developers. We currently have 5 developers working on the Ajax Control Toolkit (not full-time, they are also building two very cool ASP.NET MVC applications). All the developers who work on our team are required to have strong JavaScript, jQuery, and ASP.NET MVC skills. In the interest of being as transparent as possible about our work on the Ajax Control Toolkit, I plan to blog frequently about our team’s ongoing work. In my next blog entry, I plan to write about the two Ajax Control Toolkit controls which are the focus of our work for next release.

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• LINQ to SQL and missing Many to Many EntityRefs

  - by Rick Strahl

  Ran into an odd behavior today with a many to many mapping of one of my tables in LINQ to SQL. Many to many mappings aren’t transparent in LINQ to SQL and it maps the link table the same way the SQL schema has it when creating one. In other words LINQ to SQL isn’t smart about many to many mappings and just treats it like the 3 underlying tables that make up the many to many relationship. Iain Galloway has a nice blog entry about Many to Many relationships in LINQ to SQL. I can live with that – it’s not really difficult to deal with this arrangement once mapped, especially when reading data back. Writing is a little more difficult as you do have to insert into two entities for new records, but nothing that can’t be handled in a small business object method with a few lines of code. When I created a database I’ve been using to experiment around with various different OR/Ms recently I found that for some reason LINQ to SQL was completely failing to map even to the linking table. As it turns out there’s a good reason why it fails, can you spot it below? (read on :-}) Here is the original database layout: There’s an items table, a category table and a link table that holds only the foreign keys to the Items and Category tables for a typical M->M relationship. When these three tables are imported into the model the *look* correct – I do get the relationships added (after modifying the entity names to strip the prefix): The relationship looks perfectly fine, both in the designer as well as in the XML document: <Table Name="dbo.wws_Item_Categories" Member="ItemCategories"> <Type Name="ItemCategory"> <Column Name="ItemId" Type="System.Guid" DbType="uniqueidentifier NOT NULL" CanBeNull="false" /> <Column Name="CategoryId" Type="System.Guid" DbType="uniqueidentifier NOT NULL" CanBeNull="false" /> <Association Name="ItemCategory_Category" Member="Categories" ThisKey="CategoryId" OtherKey="Id" Type="Category" /> <Association Name="Item_ItemCategory" Member="Item" ThisKey="ItemId" OtherKey="Id" Type="Item" IsForeignKey="true" /> </Type> </Table> <Table Name="dbo.wws_Categories" Member="Categories"> <Type Name="Category"> <Column Name="Id" Type="System.Guid" DbType="UniqueIdentifier NOT NULL" IsPrimaryKey="true" IsDbGenerated="true" CanBeNull="false" /> <Column Name="ParentId" Type="System.Guid" DbType="UniqueIdentifier" CanBeNull="true" /> <Column Name="CategoryName" Type="System.String" DbType="NVarChar(150)" CanBeNull="true" /> <Column Name="CategoryDescription" Type="System.String" DbType="NVarChar(MAX)" CanBeNull="true" /> <Column Name="tstamp" AccessModifier="Internal" Type="System.Data.Linq.Binary" DbType="rowversion" CanBeNull="true" IsVersion="true" /> <Association Name="ItemCategory_Category" Member="ItemCategory" ThisKey="Id" OtherKey="CategoryId" Type="ItemCategory" IsForeignKey="true" /> </Type> </Table> However when looking at the code generated these navigation properties (also on Item) are completely missing: [global::System.Data.Linq.Mapping.TableAttribute(Name="dbo.wws_Item_Categories")] [global::System.Runtime.Serialization.DataContractAttribute()] public partial class ItemCategory : Westwind.BusinessFramework.EntityBase { private System.Guid _ItemId; private System.Guid _CategoryId; public ItemCategory() { } [global::System.Data.Linq.Mapping.ColumnAttribute(Storage="_ItemId", DbType="uniqueidentifier NOT NULL")] [global::System.Runtime.Serialization.DataMemberAttribute(Order=1)] public System.Guid ItemId { get { return this._ItemId; } set { if ((this._ItemId != value)) { this._ItemId = value; } } } [global::System.Data.Linq.Mapping.ColumnAttribute(Storage="_CategoryId", DbType="uniqueidentifier NOT NULL")] [global::System.Runtime.Serialization.DataMemberAttribute(Order=2)] public System.Guid CategoryId { get { return this._CategoryId; } set { if ((this._CategoryId != value)) { this._CategoryId = value; } } } } Notice that the Item and Category association properties which should be EntityRef properties are completely missing. They’re there in the model, but the generated code – not so much. So what’s the problem here? The problem – it appears – is that LINQ to SQL requires primary keys on all entities it tracks. In order to support tracking – even of the link table entity – the link table requires a primary key. Real obvious ain’t it, especially since the designer happily lets you import the table and even shows the relationship and implicitly the related properties. Adding an Id field as a Pk to the database and then importing results in this model layout: which properly generates the Item and Category properties into the link entity. It’s ironic that LINQ to SQL *requires* the PK in the middle – the Entity Framework requires that a link table have *only* the two foreign key fields in a table in order to recognize a many to many relation. EF actually handles the M->M relation directly without the intermediate link entity unlike LINQ to SQL. [updated from comments – 12/24/2009] Another approach is to set up both ItemId and CategoryId in the database which shows up in LINQ to SQL like this: This also work in creating the Category and Item fields in the ItemCategory entity. Ultimately this is probably the best approach as it also guarantees uniqueness of the keys and so helps in database integrity. It took me a while to figure out WTF was going on here – lulled by the designer to think that the properties should be when they were not. It’s actually a well documented feature of L2S that each entity in the model requires a Pk but of course that’s easy to miss when the model viewer shows it to you and even the underlying XML model shows the Associations properly. This is one of the issue with L2S of course – you have to play by its rules and once you hit one of those rules there’s no way around them – you’re stuck with what it requires which in this case meant changing the database.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ADO.NET  LINQ  

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• Security Trimmed Cross Site Collection Navigation

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). This article will serve as documentation of a fully functional codeplex project that I just created. This project will give you a WebPart that will give you security trimmed navigation across site collections. The first question is, why create such a project? In every single SharePoint project you will do, one question you will always be faced with is, what should the boundaries of sites be, and what should the boundaries of site collections be? There is no good or bad answer to this, because it really really depends on your needs. There are some factors in play here. Site Collections will allow you to scale, as a Site collection is the smallest entity you can put inside a content database Site collections will allow you to offer different levels of SLAs, because you put a site collection on a separate content database, and put that database on a separate server. Site collections are a security boundary – and they can be moved around at will without affecting other site collections. Site collections are also a branding boundary. They are also a feature deployment boundary, so you can have two site collections on the same web application with completely different nature of services. But site collections break navigation, i.e. a site collection at “/”, and a site collection at “/sites/mySiteCollection”, are completely independent of each other. If you have access to both, the navigation of / won’t show you a link to /sites/mySiteCollection. Some people refer to this as a huge issue in SharePoint. Luckily, some workarounds exist. A long time ago, I had blogged about “Implementing Consistent Navigation across Site Collections”. That approach was a no-code solution, it worked – it gave you a consistent navigation across site collections. But, it didn’t work in a security trimmed fashion! i.e., if I don’t have access to Site Collection ‘X’, it would still show me a link to ‘X’. Well this project gets around that issue. Simply deploy this project, and it’ll give you a WebPart. You can use that WebPart as either a webpart or as a server control dropped via SharePoint designer, and it will give you Security Trimmed Cross Site Collection Navigation. The code has been written for SP2010, but it will work in SP2007 with the help of http://spwcfsupport.codeplex.com . What do I need to do to make it work? I’m glad you asked! Simple! Deploy the .wsp (which you can download here). This will give you a site collection feature called “Winsmarts Cross Site Collection Navigation” as shown below. Go ahead and activate it, and this will give you a WebPart called “Winsmarts Navigation Web Part” as shown below: Just drop this WebPart on your page, and it will show you all site collections that the currently logged in user has access to. Really it’s that easy! This is shown as below - In the above example, I have two site collections that I created at /sites/SiteCollection1 and /sites/SiteCollection2. The navigation shows the titles. You see some extraneous crap as well, you might want to clean that – I’ll talk about that in a minute. What? You’re running into problems? If the problem you’re running into is that you are prompted to login three times, and then it shows a blank webpart that says “Loading your applications ..” and then craps out!, then most probably you’re using a different authentication scheme. Behind the scenes I use a custom WCF service to perform this job. OOTB, I’ve set it to work with NTLM, but if you need to make it work alternate authentications such as forms based auth, or client side certs, you will need to edit the %14%\ISAPI\Winsmarts.CrossSCNav\web.config file, specifically, this section - 1: <bindings> 2: <webHttpBinding> 3: <binding name="customWebHttpBinding"> 4: <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly"> 5: <transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm"/> 6: </security> 7: </binding> 8: </webHttpBinding> 9: </bindings> For Kerberos, change the “clientCredentialType” to “Windows” For Forms auth, remove that transport line For client certs – well that’s a bit more involved, but it’s just web.config changes – hit a good book on WCF or hire me for a billion trillion $. But fair warning, I might be too busy to help immediately. If you’re running into a different problem, please leave a comment below, but the code is pretty rock solid, so .. hmm .. check what you’re doing! BTW, I don’t  make any guarantee/warranty on this – if this code makes you sterile, unpopular, bad hairstyle, anything else, that is your problem! But, there are some known issues - I wrote this as a concept – you can easily extend it to be more flexible. Example, hierarchical nav, or, horizontal nav, jazzy effects with jquery or silverlight– all those are possible very very easily. This webpart is not smart enough to co-exist with another instance of itself on the same page. I can easily extend it to do so, which I will do in my spare(!?) time! Okay good! But that’s not all! As you can see, just dropping the WebPart may show you many extraneous site collections, or maybe you want to restrict which site collections are shown, or exclude a certain site collection to be shown from the navigation. To support that, I created a property on the WebPart called “UrlMatchPattern”, which is a regex expression you specify to trim the results :). So, just edit the WebPart, and specify a string property of “http://sp2010/sites/” as shown below. Note that you can put in whatever regex expression you want! So go crazy, I don’t care! And this gives you a cleaner look.   w00t! Enjoy! Comment on the article ....

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• MVC 2 Editor Template for Radio Buttons

  - by Steve Michelotti

  A while back I blogged about how to create an HTML Helper to produce a radio button list.  In that post, my HTML helper was “wrapping” the FluentHtml library from MvcContrib to produce the following html output (given an IEnumerable list containing the items “Foo” and “Bar”): 1: <div> 2: <input id="Name_Foo" name="Name" type="radio" value="Foo" /><label for="Name_Foo" id="Name_Foo_Label">Foo</label> 3: <input id="Name_Bar" name="Name" type="radio" value="Bar" /><label for="Name_Bar" id="Name_Bar_Label">Bar</label> 4: </div> With the release of MVC 2, we now have editor templates we can use that rely on metadata to allow us to customize our views appropriately.  For example, for the radio buttons above, we want the “id” attribute to be differentiated and unique and we want the “name” attribute to be the same across radio buttons so the buttons will be grouped together and so model binding will work appropriately. We also want the “for” attribute in the <label> element being set to correctly point to the id of the corresponding radio button.  The default behavior of the RadioButtonFor() method that comes OOTB with MVC produces the same value for the “id” and “name” attributes so this isn’t exactly what I want out the the box if I’m trying to produce the HTML mark up above. If we use an EditorTemplate, the first gotcha that we run into is that, by default, the templates just work on your view model’s property. But in this case, we *also* was the list of items to populate all the radio buttons. It turns out that the EditorFor() methods do give you a way to pass in additional data. There is an overload of the EditorFor() method where the last parameter allows you to pass an anonymous object for “extra” data that you can use in your view – it gets put on the view data dictionary: 1: <%: Html.EditorFor(m => m.Name, "RadioButtonList", new { selectList = new SelectList(new[] { "Foo", "Bar" }) })%> Now we can create a file called RadioButtonList.ascx that looks like this: 1: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl" %> 2: <% 3: var list = this.ViewData["selectList"] as SelectList; 4: %> 5: <div> 6: <% foreach (var item in list) { 7: var radioId = ViewData.TemplateInfo.GetFullHtmlFieldId(item.Value); 8: var checkedAttr = item.Selected ? "checked=\"checked\"" : string.Empty; 9: %> 10: <input type="radio" id="<%: radioId %>" name="<%: ViewData.TemplateInfo.HtmlFieldPrefix %>" value="<%: item.Value %>" <%: checkedAttr %>/> 11: <label for="<%: radioId %>"><%: item.Text %></label> 12: <% } %> 13: </div> There are several things to note about the code above. First, you can see in line #3, it’s getting the SelectList out of the view data dictionary. Then on line #7 it uses the GetFullHtmlFieldId() method from the TemplateInfo class to ensure we get unique IDs. We pass the Value to this method so that it will produce IDs like “Name_Foo” and “Name_Bar” rather than just “Name” which is our property name. However, for the “name” attribute (on line #10) we can just use the normal HtmlFieldPrefix property so that we ensure all radio buttons have the same name which corresponds to the view model’s property name. We also get to leverage the fact the a SelectListItem has a Boolean Selected property so we can set the checkedAttr variable on line #8 and use it on line #10. Finally, it’s trivial to set the correct “for” attribute for the <label> on line #11 since we already produced that value. Because the TemplateInfo class provides all the metadata for our view, we’re able to produce this view that is widely re-usable across our application. In fact, we can create a couple HTML helpers to better encapsulate this call and make it more user friendly: 1: public static MvcHtmlString RadioButtonList<TModel, TProperty>(this HtmlHelper<TModel> htmlHelper, Expression<Func<TModel, TProperty>> expression, params string[] items) 2: { 3: return htmlHelper.RadioButtonList(expression, new SelectList(items)); 4: } 5:   6: public static MvcHtmlString RadioButtonList<TModel, TProperty>(this HtmlHelper<TModel> htmlHelper, Expression<Func<TModel, TProperty>> expression, IEnumerable<SelectListItem> items) 7: { 8: var func = expression.Compile(); 9: var result = func(htmlHelper.ViewData.Model); 10: var list = new SelectList(items, "Value", "Text", result); 11: return htmlHelper.EditorFor(expression, "RadioButtonList", new { selectList = list }); 12: } This allows us to simply the call like this: 1: <%: Html.RadioButtonList(m => m.Name, "Foo", "Bar" ) %> In that example, the values for the radio button are hard-coded and being passed in directly. But if you had a view model that contained a property for the collection of items you could call the second overload like this: 1: <%: Html.RadioButtonList(m => m.Name, Model.FooBarList ) %> The Editor templates introduced in MVC 2 definitely allow for much more flexible views/editors than previously available. By knowing about the features you have available to you with the TemplateInfo class, you can take these concepts and customize your editors with extreme flexibility and re-usability.

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• Session Report: What’s New in JSF: A Complete Tour of JSF 2.2

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  On Wednesday, Ed Burns, Consulting Staff Member at Oracle, presented a session, CON3870 -- “What’s New in JSF: A Complete Tour of JSF 2.2,” in which he provided an update on recent developments in JavaServer Faces 2.2. He began by emphasizing that, “JavaServer Faces 2.2 continues the evolution of the Java EE standard user interface technology. Like previous releases, this iteration is very community-driven and transparent.” He pointed out that since JSF was introduced at the 2001 JavaOne Keynote, it has had a long and successful run and has found a home in applications where the UI logic resides entirely on the server where the model and UI logic is. In such cases, the browser performs fairly simple functions. However, developers can take advantage of the power of browsers, something that Project Avatar is focused on by letting developers author their applications so the UI logic is running on the client and communicating to the back end via RESTful web services. “Most importantly,” remarked Burns, “JSF 2.2 offers a really good migration path because even in the scope of one application you could have an app written with JSF that has its UI logic on the server and, on a gradual basis, you could migrate parts of the app over to use client-side technologies. This can be done at any level of granularity – per page or per collection of pages. It all depends on what you want to do.” His presentation, which focused on the basic new features of JSF 2.2, began by restating the scope of JSF and encouraged attendees to check out Roger Kitain’s session: CON5133 “Techniques for Responsive Real-Time Web UIs.” Burns explained that JSF has endured because, “We still need web apps that are maintainable, localizable, quick to build, accessible, secure, look great and are fun to use.” It is used on every continent – the curious can go here to check out where its unofficial usage is tracked. He emphasized the significance of the UI logic being substantially on the server. This: Separates Component Semantics from Rendering, Allows components to “own” their little patch of the UI -- encode/decode, And offers a well-defined lifecycle: Inversion of Control. Burns reminded attendees that JSR-344, the spec for JSF 2.2, is now on Java Community Process 2.8, a revised version of the JCP that allows for more openness and transparency. He then offered some tools for community access to JSF 2.2:    * Public java.net projects spec http://jsf-spec.java.net/ impl http://jsf.java.net/ Open Source: GPL+Classpath Exception    * Mailing Lists [email protected]                                Public readable archive, JSPA signed member read/write [email protected]                                     Public readable archive, any java.net member read/write                         All mail sent to jsr344-experts is sent to users. * Issue Tracker spec http://jsf-spec.java.net/issues/ impl http://jsf.java.net/issues/ JSF 2.2, which is JSR 344, has a Public Review Draft planned by December 2012 with no need for a Renewal Ballot. The Early Draft Review of JSR 344 was published on December 8, 2011. Interested developers are encouraged to offer their input. Six Big Ticket Features of JSF 2.2 Burns summarized the six big ticket features of JSF 2.2:* HTML5 Friendly Markup Support Pass through attributes and elements * Faces Flows* Cross Site Request Forgery Protection* Loading Facelets via ResourceHandler* File Upload Component* Multi-Templating He explained that he called it “HTML 5 friendly” because there is really nothing HTML 5 specific about it -- it could be 4. But it enables developers to use new elements that are present in HTML5 without having a JSF component library that is written to take advantage of those specifically. It gives the page author the ability to use plain HTML5 to write their page, but to still take advantage of the server-side available in JSF. He presented a demo showing JSF 2.2’s ability to leverage the expressiveness of HTML5. Burns then explained the significance of face flows, which offer function points and quantify how much work has taken place, something of great value to JSF users. He went on to talk about JSF 2.2.’s cross-site request forgery protection (CSRF) and offered details about how it protects applications against attack. Then he talked about JSF 2.2’s File Upload Component and explained that the final specification will have Ajax and non-Ajax support. The current milestone has non-Ajax support implemented. He then went on to explain its capacity to add facelets through ResourceHandler. Previously, JSF 2.0 added Facelets and ResourceHandler as disparate units; now in JSF 2.2 the two concepts are unified. Finally, he explained the concept of multi-templating in JSF 2.2 and went on to discuss more medium-level features of the release. For an easy, low maintenance way of staying in touch with JSF developments go to JSF’s Twitter page where every month or so, important updates are offered.

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• Twitter traffic might not be what it seems

  - by Piet

  Are you using bit.ly stats to measure interest in the links you post on twitter? I’ve been hearing for a while about people claiming to get the majority of their traffic originating from twitter these days. Now, I’ve been playing with the twitter ruby gem recently, doing various experiments which I’ll not go into detail here because they could be regarded as spamming… if I’d conduct them on a large scale, that is. It’s scary to see people actually engaging with @replies crafted with some regular expressions and eliza-like trickery on status updates found using the twitter api. I’m wondering how Twitter is going to contain the coming spam-flood. When posting links I used bit.ly as url shortener, since this one seems to be the de-facto standard on twitter. A nice thing about bit.ly is that it shows some basic stats about the redirects it performs for your shortened links. To my surprise, most links posted almost immediately resulted in several visitors. Now, seeing that I was posting the links together with some information concerning what the link is about, I concluded that the people who were actually clicking the links should be very targeted visitors. This felt a bit like free adwords, and I suddenly started to understand why everyone was raving about getting traffic from twitter. How wrong I was! (and I think several 1000 online marketers with me) On the destination site I used a traffic logging solution that works by including a little javascript snippet in your pages. It seemed that somehow all visitors disappeared after the bit.ly redirect and before getting to the site, because I was hardly seeing any visitors there. So I started investigating what was happening: by looking at the logfiles of the destination site, and by making my own ’shortened’ urls by doing redirects using a very short domain name I own. This way, I could check the apache access_log before the redirects. Most user agents turned out to be bots without a doubt. Here’s an excerpt of user-agents awk’ed from apache’s access_log for a time period of about one hour, right after posting some links: AideRSS 2.0 (postrank.com) Java/1.6.0_13 Java/1.6.0_14 libwww-perl/5.816 MLBot (www.metadatalabs.com/mlbot) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows -NT 5.0 - real-url.org) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Twitturls; +http://twitturls.com) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Viralheat Bot/1.0; +http://www.viralheat.com/) Mozilla/5.0 (Danger hiptop 4.6; U; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050920 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-us; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008092313 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.5 OpenCalaisSemanticProxy PycURL/7.18.2 PycURL/7.19.3 Python-urllib/1.17 Twingly Recon twitmatic Twitturly / v0.6 Wget/1.10.2 (Red Hat modified) Wget/1.11.1 (Red Hat modified) Of the few user-agents that seem ‘real’ at first, half are originating from an ip-address used by Amazon EC2. And I doubt people are setting op proxies on there. Oh yeah, Googlebot (the real deal, from a legit google owned address) is sucking up posted links like fresh oysters. I guess google is trying to make sure in advance to never be beaten by twitter in the ‘realtime search’ department. Actually, I think it’d be almost stupid NOT to post any new pages/posts/websites on Twitter, it must be one of the fastest ways to get a Googlebot visit. Same experiment with a real, established twitter account Now, because I was posting the url’s either as ’status’ messages or directed @people, on a test-account with hardly any (human) followers, I checked again using the twitter accounts from a commercial site I’m involved with. These accounts all have between 500 and 1000 targeted (I think) followers. I checked the destination access_logs and also added ‘my’ redirect after the bit.ly redirect: same results, although seemingly a bit higher real visitor/bot ratio. Btw: one of these account was ‘punished’ with a 1 week lock recently because the same (1 one!) status update was sent that was sent right before using another account. They got an email explaining the lock because the account didn’t act according to their TOS. I can’t find anything in their TOS about it, can you? I don’t think Twitter is on the right track punishing a legit account, knowing the trickery I had been doing with it’s api went totally unpunished. I might be wrong though, I often am. On the other hand: this commercial site reported targeted traffic and actual signups from visitors coming from Twitter. The ones that are really real visitors are also very targeted. I’m just not sure if the amount of work involved could hold up against an adwords campaign. Reposting the same link over and over again helps On thing I noticed: It helps to keep on reposting the same links with regular intervals. I guess most people only look at their first page when checking out recent posts of the ones they’re following, or don’t look too far back when performing a search. Now, this probably isn’t according to the twitter TOS. Actually, it might be spamming but no-one is obligated to follow anyone else of course. This way, I was getting more real visitors and less bots. To my surprise (when my programmer’s hat is on) there were still repeated visits from the same bots coming from the same ip-addresses. Did they expect to find something else when visiting for a 2nd or 3rd time? (actually,this gave me an idea: you can’t change a link once it’s posted, but you can change where it redirects to) Most bots were smart enough not to follow the same link again though. Are you successful in getting real visitors from Twitter? Are you only relying on bit.ly to provide traffic stats?

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• Mobile HCM: It’s not the future, it is right now

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Steve Boese, Director Product Strategy, Oracle I’ll bet you reached for your iPhone or Android or BlackBerry and took a quick look at email or Facebook or last night’s text messages before you even got out of bed this morning. Come on, admit it, it’s ok, you are among friends here. See, feel better now? But seriously, the incredible growth and near-ubiquity of increasingly powerful, capable, and for many of us, essential in our daily lives mobile devices has profoundly changed the way we communicate, consume information, socialize, and more and more, conduct business and get our work done. And if you doubt that profound change has happened, just think for a moment about the last time you misplaced your iPhone.  The shivers, the cold sweats, the panic... We have all been there. And indeed your personal experiences with mobile technology echoes throughout the world - here are a few data points to consider: Market research firm IDC estimates 1.8 billion mobile phones will be shipped in 2012. A recent Pew study reports 46% of Americans own a smartphone of some kind. And finally in the USA, ownership of tablets like the iPad has doubled from 10% to 19% in the last year. So truly for the Human Resources leader, the question is no longer, ‘Should HR explore ways to exploit mobile devices and their always-on nature to better support and empower the modern workforce?’, but rather ‘How can HR best take advantage of smartphone and tablet capability to provide information, enable transactions, and enhance decision making?’. Because even though moving HCM applications to mobile devices seems inherently logical given today’s fast-moving and mobile workforces, and its promise to deliver incredible value to the organization, HR leaders also have to consider many factors before devising their Mobile HCM strategy and embarking on mobile HR technology projects. Here are just some of the important considerations for HR leaders as you build your strategies and evaluate mobile HCM solutions: Does your organization provide mobile devices to the workforce today, and if so, will the current set of deployed devices have the necessary capability and ecosystems to support your mobile HCM initiatives? Will you allow workers to use or bring their own mobile devices, (commonly abbreviated as ‘BYOD’), and if so are your IT and Security organizations in agreement and capable of supporting that strategy? Do you know which workers need access to mobile HCM applications? Often mobile HCM capability flows down in an organization, with executives and other ‘road-warrior’ types having the most immediate needs, followed by field sales staff, project managers, and even potential job candidates. But just as an organization will have to spend time understanding ‘who’ should have access to mobile HCM technology, the ‘what’ of the way the solutions should be deployed to these groups will also vary. What works and makes sense for the executive, (company-wide dashboards and analytics on an iPad), might not be as relevant for a retail store manager, (employee schedules, location-level sales and inventory data, transaction approvals, etc.). With Oracle Fusion HCM, we are taking an approach to mobile HR that encompasses not just the mobile solution needs for the various types of worker, but also incorporates the fundamental attributes of great mobile applications - the ability to support end-to-end transactions, apps that respond with lightning-fast speed, with functions that are embedded in a worker’s daily activities, and features that can be mashed-up easily with other business areas like Finance and CRM. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the Oracle Fusion HCM team, delivering mobile experiences that truly enhance, enable, and empower the mobile workforce, and deliver on the design mantras of the best-in-class consumer applications, continues to shape and drive design decisions. Mobile is no longer the future, it is right now, and the cutting-edge HR leader of today will need to consider how mobile fits her HCM technology strategy from here on out. You can learn more about our ideas and plans for Oracle Fusion HCM mobile solutions at https://fusiontap.oracle.com/.

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• SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Introduction – Day 1 of 31

  - by pinaldave

  List of all the Interview Questions and Answers Series blogs Posts covering interview questions and answers always make for interesting reading.  Some people like the subject for their helpful hints and thought provoking subject, and others dislike these posts because they feel it is nothing more than cheating.  I’d like to discuss the pros and cons of a Question and Answer format here. Interview Questions and Answers are Helpful Just like blog posts, books, and articles, interview Question and Answer discussions are learning material.  The popular Dummy’s books or Idiots Guides are not only for “dummies,” but can help everyone relearn the fundamentals.  Question and Answer discussions can serve the same purpose.  You could call this SQL Server Fundamentals or SQL Server 101. I have administrated hundreds of interviews during my career and I have noticed that sometimes an interviewee with several years of experience lacks an understanding of the fundamentals.  These individuals have been in the industry for so long, usually working on a very specific project, that the ABCs of the business have slipped their mind. Or, when a college graduate is looking to get into the industry, he is not expected to have experience since he is just graduated. However, the new grad is expected to have an understanding of fundamentals and theory.  Sometimes after the stress of final exams and graduation, it can be difficult to remember the correct answers to interview questions, though. An interview Question and Answer discussion can be very helpful to both these individuals.  It is simply a way to go back over the building blocks of a topic.  Many times a simple review like this will help “jog” your memory, and all those previously-memorized facts will come flooding back to you.  It is not a way to re-learn a topic, but a way to remind yourself of what you already know. A Question and Answer discussion can also be a way to go over old topics in a more interesting manner.  Especially if you have been working in the industry, or taking lots of classes on the topic, everything you read can sound like a repeat of what you already know.  Going over a topic in a new format can make the material seem fresh and interesting.  And an interested mind will be more engaged and remember more in the end. Interview Questions and Answers are Harmful A common argument against a Question and Answer discussion is that it will give someone a “cheat sheet.” A new guy with relatively little experience can read the interview questions and answers, and then memorize them. When an interviewer asks him the same questions, he will repeat the answers and get the job. Honestly, is he good hire because he memorized the interview questions? Wouldn’t it be better for the interviewer to hire someone with actual experience?  The answer is not as easy as it seems – there are many different factors to be considered. If the interviewer is asking fundamentals-related questions only, he gets the answers he wants to hear, and then hires this first candidate – there is a good chance that he is hiring based on personality rather than experience.  If the interviewer is smart he will ask deeper questions, have more than one person on the interview team, and interview a variety of candidates.  If one interviewee happens to memorize some answers, it usually doesn’t mean he will automatically get the job at the expense of more qualified candidates. Another argument against interview Question and Answers is that it will give candidates a false sense of confidence, and that they will appear more qualified than they are. Well, if that is true, it will not last after the first interview when the candidate is asked difficult questions and he cannot find the answers in the list of interview Questions and Answers.  Besides, confidence is one of the best things to walk into an interview with! In today’s competitive job market, there are often hundreds of candidates applying for the same position.  With so many applicants to choose from, interviewers must make decisions about who to call back and who to hire based on their gut feeling.  One drawback to reading an interview Question and Answer article is that you might sound very boring in your interview – saying the same thing as every single candidate, and parroting answers that sound like someone else wrote them for you – because they did.  However, it is definitely better to go to an interview prepared, just make sure that you give a lot of thought to your answers to make them sound like your own voice.  Remember that you will be hired based on your skills as well as your personality, so don’t think that having all the right answers will make get you hired.  A good interviewee will be prepared, confident, and know how to stand out. My Opinion A list of interview Questions and Answers is really helpful as a refresher or for beginners. To really ace an interview, one needs to have real-world, hands-on experience with SQL Server as well. Interview questions just serve as a starter or easy read for experienced professionals. When I have to learn new technology, I often search online for interview questions and get an idea about the breadth and depth of the technology. Next Action I am going to write about interview Questions and Answers for next 30 days. I have previously written a series of interview questions and answers; now I have re-written them keeping the latest version of SQL Server and current industry progress in mind. If you have faced interesting interview questions or situations, please write to me and I will publish them as a guest post. If you want me to add few more details, leave a comment and I will make sure that I do my best to accommodate. Tomorrow we will start the interview Questions and Answers series, with a few interesting stories, best practices and guest posts. We will have a prize give-away and other awards when the series ends. List of all the Interview Questions and Answers Series blogs Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Customizing the processing of ListItems for asp:RadioButtonList with "Flow" layout and "Horizontal"

  - by evovision

  Hi, recently I was asked to add an ability to pad specific elements from each other to a certain distance in RadioButtonList control. Not quite common everyday task I would say :)   Ok, let's get started!   Prerequisites: ASP.NET Page having RadioButtonList control with RepeatLayout="Flow" RepeatDirection="Horizontal" properties set.   Implementation:  The underlying data was coming from another source, so the only fast way to add meta information about padding was the text value itself (yes, not very optimal solution): Id = 1, Name = "This is first element" and for padding we agreed to use <space/> meta tag: Id = 2, Name = "<space padcount="30px"/>This is second padded element"   To handle items rendering in RadioButtonList control I've created custom class and subclassed from it:    public class CustomRadioButtonList : RadioButtonList    {        private Action<ListItem, HtmlTextWriter> _preProcess;         protected override void RenderItem(ListItemType itemType, int repeatIndex, RepeatInfo repeatInfo, HtmlTextWriter writer)        {            if (_preProcess != null)            {                _preProcess(this.Items[repeatIndex], writer);            }             base.RenderItem(itemType, repeatIndex, repeatInfo, writer);        }         public void SetPrePrenderItemFunction(Action<ListItem, HtmlTextWriter> func)        {            _preProcess = func;        }    }   It is pretty straightforward approach, the key is to override RenderItem method. Class has SetPrePrenderItemFunction method which is used to pass custom processing function that takes 2 parameters: ListItem and HtmlTextWriter objects.   Now update existing RadioButtonList control in Default.aspx: add this to beginning of the page:   <%@ Register Namespace="Sample.Controls" TagPrefix="uc1" %>   and update the control to:   <uc1:CustomRadioButtonList ID="customRbl" runat="server" DataValueField="Id" DataTextField="Name"            RepeatLayout="Flow" RepeatDirection="Horizontal"></uc1:CustomRadioButtonList>   Now, from codebehind of the page:   Add regular expression that will be used for parsing:   private Regex _regex = new Regex(@"(?:[<]space padcount\s*?=\s*?(?:'|"")(?<padcount>\d+)(?:(?:\s+)?px)?(?:'|"")\s*?/>)(?<content>.*)?", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Compiled);   and finally setup the processing function in Page_Load:   protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        customRbl.DataSource = DataObjects;         customRbl.SetPrePrenderItemFunction((listItem, writer) =>        {            Match match = _regex.Match(listItem.Text);            if (match.Success)            {                writer.Write(string.Format(@"<span style=""padding-left:{0}"">Extreme values: </span>", match.Groups["padcount"].Value + "px"));                 // if you need to pad listitem use code below                //x.Attributes.CssStyle.Add("padding-left", match.Groups["padcount"].Value + "px");                 // remove meta tag from text                listItem.Text = match.Groups["content"].Value;            }        });         customRbl.DataBind();    }   That's it! :)   Run the attached sample application:     P.S.: of course several other approaches could have been used for that purpose including events and the functionality for processing could also be embedded inside control itself. Current solution suits slightly better due some other reasons for situation where it was used, in your case consider this as a kick start for your own implementation :)   Source application: CustomRadioButtonList.zip

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• Trace File Source Adapter

  The Trace File Source adapter is a useful addition to your SSIS toolbox.  It allows you to read 2005 and 2008 profiler traces stored as .trc files and read them into the Data Flow.  From there you can perform filtering and analysis using the power of SSIS. There is no need for a SQL Server connection this just uses the trace file. Example Usages Cache warming for SQL Server Analysis Services Reading the flight recorder Find out the longest running queries on a server Analyze statements for CPU, memory by user or some other criteria you choose Properties The Trace File Source adapter has two properties, both of which combine to control the source trace file that is read at runtime. SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 trace files are supported for both the Database Engine (SQL Server) and Analysis Services. The properties are managed by the Editor form or can be set directly from the Properties Grid in Visual Studio. Property Type Description AccessMode Enumeration This property determines how the Filename property is interpreted. The values available are: DirectInput Variable Filename String This property holds the path for trace file to load (*.trc). The value is either a full path, or the name of a variable which contains the full path to the trace file, depending on the AccessMode property. Trace Column Definition Hopefully the majority of you can skip this section entirely, but if you encounter some problems processing a trace file this may explain it and allow you to fix the problem. The component is built upon the trace management API provided by Microsoft. Unfortunately API methods that expose the schema of a trace file have known issues and are unreliable, put simply the data often differs from what was specified. To overcome these limitations the component uses  some simple XML files. These files enable the trace column data types and sizing attributes to be overridden. For example SQL Server Profiler or TMO generated structures define EventClass as an integer, but the real value is a string. TraceDataColumnsSQL.xml  - SQL Server Database Engine Trace Columns TraceDataColumnsAS.xml    - SQL Server Analysis Services Trace Columns The files can be found in the %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents folder, e.g. "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsSQL.xml" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsAS.xml" If at runtime the component encounters a type conversion or sizing error it is most likely due to a discrepancy between the column definition as reported by the API and the actual value encountered. Whilst most common issues have already been fixed through these files we have implemented specific exception traps to direct you to the files to enable you to fix any further issues due to different usage or data scenarios that we have not tested. An example error that you can fix through these files is shown below. Buffer exception writing value to column 'Column Name'. The string value is 999 characters in length, the column is only 111. Columns can be overridden by the TraceDataColumns XML files in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsAS.xml". Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Finally you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Trace File Source transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations. Please note that the Microsoft Trace classes used in the component are not supported on 64-bit platforms. To use the Trace File Source on a 64-bit host you need to ensure you have the 32-bit (x86) tools available, and the way you execute your package is setup to use them, please see the help topic 64-bit Considerations for Integration Services for more details. Downloads Trace Sources for SQL Server 2005 -- Trace Sources for SQL Server 2008 Version History SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.382 - SQL Sever 2008 public release. (9 Apr 2009) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.0.0.321 - SQL Server 2005 public release. (18 Nov 2008) -- Screenshots

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• ODI 12c's Mapping Designer - Combining Flow Based and Expression Based Mapping

  - by Madhu Nair

  post by David Allan ODI is renowned for its declarative designer and minimal expression based paradigm. The new ODI 12c release has extended this even further to provide an extended declarative mapping designer. The ODI 12c mapper is a fusion of ODI's new declarative designer with the familiar flow based designer while retaining ODI’s key differentiators of: Minimal expression based definition, The ability to incrementally design an interface and to extract/load data from any combination of sources, and most importantly Backed by ODI’s extensible knowledge module framework. The declarative nature of the product has been extended to include an extensible library of common components that can be used to easily build simple to complex data integration solutions. Big usability improvements through consistent interactions of components and concepts all constructed around the familiar knowledge module framework provide the utmost flexibility. Here is a little taster: So what is a mapping? A mapping comprises of a logical design and at least one physical design, it may have many. A mapping can have many targets, of any technology and can be arbitrarily complex. You can build reusable mappings and use them in other mappings or other reusable mappings. In the example below all of the information from an Oracle bonus table and a bonus file are joined with an Oracle employees table before being written to a target. Some things that are cool include the one-click expression cross referencing so you can easily see what's used where within the design. The logical design in a mapping describes what you want to accomplish  (see the animated GIF here illustrating how the above mapping was designed) . The physical design lets you configure how it is to be accomplished. So you could have one logical design that is realized as an initial load in one physical design and as an incremental load in another. In the physical design below we can customize how the mapping is accomplished by picking Knowledge Modules, in ODI 12c you can pick multiple nodes (on logical or physical) and see common properties. This is useful as we can quickly compare property values across objects - below we can see knowledge modules settings on the access points between execution units side by side, in the example one table is retrieved via database links and the other is an external table. In the logical design I had selected an append mode for the integration type, so by default the IKM on the target will choose the most suitable/default IKM - which in this case is an in-built Oracle Insert IKM (see image below). This supports insert and select hints for the Oracle database (the ANSI SQL Insert IKM does not support these), so by default you will get direct path inserts with Oracle on this statement. In ODI 12c, the mapper is just that, a mapper. Design your mapping, write to multiple targets, the targets can be in the same data server, in different data servers or in totally different technologies - it does not matter. ODI 12c will derive and generate a plan that you can use or customize with knowledge modules. Some of the use cases which are greatly simplified include multiple heterogeneous targets, multi target inserts for Oracle and writing of XML. Let's switch it up now and look at a slightly different example to illustrate expression reuse. In ODI you can define reusable expressions using user functions. These can be reused across mappings and the implementations specialized per technology. So you can have common expressions across Oracle, SQL Server, Hive etc. shielding the design from the physical aspects of the generated language. Another way to reuse is within a mapping itself. In ODI 12c expressions can be defined and reused within a mapping. Rather than replicating the expression text in larger expressions you can decompose into smaller snippets, below you can see UNIT_TAX AMOUNT has been defined and is used in two downstream target columns - its used in the TOTAL_TAX_AMOUNT plus its used in the UNIT_TAX_AMOUNT (a recording of the calculation).  You can see the columns that the expressions depend on (upstream) and the columns the expression is used in (downstream) highlighted within the mapper. Also multi selecting attributes is a convenient way to see what's being used where, below I have selected the TOTAL_TAX_AMOUNT in the target datastore and the UNIT_TAX_AMOUNT in UNIT_CALC. You can now see many expressions at once now and understand much more at the once time without needlessly clicking around and memorizing information. Our mantra during development was to keep it simple and make the tool more powerful and do even more for the user. The development team was a fusion of many teams from Oracle Warehouse Builder, Sunopsis and BEA Aqualogic, debating and perfecting the mapper in ODI 12c. This was quite a project from supporting the capabilities of ODI in 11g to building the flow based mapping tool to support the future. I hope this was a useful insight, there is so much more to come on this topic, this is just a preview of much more that you will see of the mapper in ODI 12c.

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• Getting selected row in inputListOfValues returnPopupListener

  - by Frank Nimphius

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Model driven list-of-values in Oracle ADF are configured on the ADF Business component attribute which should be updated with the user value selection. The value lookup can be configured to be displayed as a select list, combo box, input list of values or combo box with list of values. Displaying the list in an af:inputListOfValues component shows the attribute value in an input text field and with an icon attached to it for the user to launch the list-of-values dialog. The list-of-values dialog allows users to use a search form to filter the lookup data list and to select an entry, which return value then is added as the value of the af:inputListOfValues component. Note: The model driven LOV can be configured in ADF Business Components to update multiple attributes with the user selection, though the most common use case is to update the value of a single attribute. A question on OTN was how to access the row of the selected return value on the ADF Faces front end. For this, you need to know that there is a Model property defined on the af:inputListOfValues that references the ListOfValuesModel implementation in the model. It is the value of this Model property that you need to get access to. The af:inputListOfValues has a ReturnPopupListener property that you can use to configure a managed bean method to receive notification when the user closes the LOV popup dialog by selecting the Ok button. This listener is not triggered when the cancel button is pressed. The managed bean signature can be created declaratively in Oracle JDeveloper 11g using the Edit option in the context menu next to the ReturnPopupListener field in the PropertyInspector. The empty method signature looks as shown below public void returnListener(ReturnPopupEvent returnPopupEvent) { } The ReturnPopupEvent object gives you access the RichInputListOfValues component instance, which represents the af:inputListOfValues component at runtime. From here you access the Model property of the component to then get a handle to the CollectionModel. The CollectionModel returns an instance of JUCtrlHierBinding in its getWrappedData method. Though there is no tree binding definition for the list of values dialog defined in the PageDef, it exists. Once you have access to this, you can read the row the user selected in the list of values dialog. See the following code: public void returnListener(ReturnPopupEvent returnPopupEvent) {   //access UI component instance from return event RichInputListOfValues lovField =        (RichInputListOfValues)returnPopupEvent.getSource();   //The LOVModel gives us access to the Collection Model and //ADF tree binding used to populate the lookup table ListOfValuesModel lovModel =  lovField.getModel(); CollectionModel collectionModel =          lovModel.getTableModel().getCollectionModel();     //The collection model wraps an instance of the ADF //FacesCtrlHierBinding, which is casted to JUCtrlHierBinding   JUCtrlHierBinding treeBinding =          (JUCtrlHierBinding) collectionModel.getWrappedData();     //the selected rows are defined in a RowKeySet.As the LOV table only   //supports single selections, there is only one entry in the rks RowKeySet rks = (RowKeySet) returnPopupEvent.getReturnValue();     //the ADF Faces table row key is a list. The list contains the //oracle.jbo.Key List tableRowKey = (List) rks.iterator().next();   //get the iterator binding for the LOV lookup table binding   DCIteratorBinding dciter = treeBinding.getDCIteratorBinding();   //get the selected row by its JBO key   Key key = (Key) tableRowKey.get(0); Row rw =  dciter.findRowByKeyString(key.toStringFormat(true)); //work with the row // ... }

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