Search Results

Search found 23946 results on 958 pages for 'remote computer'.

Page 317/958 | < Previous Page | 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324  | Next Page >

• Windows 7, file properties - Is "date accessed" ALWAYS 100% accurate?

  - by Robert

  Hello, Here's the situation: I went on vacation for a couple of weeks, but before I left, I took the harddrive out of my computer and hid it in a different location. Upon coming back on Monday and putting the harddrive back in my computer, I right-clicked on different files to see their properties. Interestingly enough, several files had been accessed during the time I was gone! I right-clicked different files in various locations on the harddrive, and all of these suspect files had been accessed within a certain time range (Sunday, ?January ?09, ?2011, approximately ??between 6:52:16 PM - 7:16:25 PM). Some of them had been accessed at the exact same time--down to the very second. This makes me think that someone must have done a search on my harddrive for certain types of files and then copied all those files to some other medium. The Windows 7 installation on this harddrive is password protected, but NOT encrypted, so they could have easily put the harddrive into an enclosure/toaster to access it from a different computer. Of course I did not right-click every single file on my computer, but did so in different folders. For instance, one of the folders I went through has different types of files: .mp3, ,prproj, .3gp, .mpg, .wmv, .xmp, .txt with file-sizes ranging from 2 KB to 29.7 MB (there is also a sub-folder in this folder which contains only .jpg files); however, of all these different types of files in this folder and its subfolder, all of them had been accessed (including the .jpg files from the sub-folder) EXCEPT the .mp3 files (if it makes any difference, the .mp3 files in this folder range in size from 187 KB to 4881 KB). Additionally, this sub-folder which contained only .jpg files (48 .jpg files to be exact) was not accessed during this time--only the .jpg files within it were accessed-- (between 6:57:03 PM - 6:57:08 PM). I thought that perhaps this was some kind of Windows glitch that was displaying the wrong access date, but then I looked at the "date created" and "date modified" for all of these files in question, and their created/modified dates and times were spot on correct. My first thought was that someone put the harddrive into an enclosure/toaster and viewed the files; but then I realized that this was impossible because several of the files had been accessed at the same exact time down to the second. So this made me think that the only other way the "date accessed" could have changed would have been if someone copied the files. Is there any chance at all whatsoever that this is some kind of Windows glitch or something, or is it a fact that someone was indeed accessing my files (and if someone was accessing my files, am I right about the files in question having been copied)? Is there any other possibility for what could have happened? Do I need to use any kinds of forensics tools to further investigate this matter (and if so, which tools), or is there any other way in which I can be certain of what took place in that timeframe the day before I got back? Or is what I see with Windows 7 good enough (i.e. accurate and truthful)? Thanks in advance, and please let me know if any other details are required on my part.

  Read the article

• Add keyboard languages to XP, Vista, and Windows 7

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you regularly need to type in multiple languages in Windows?  Here we’ll show you the easy way to add and change input languages to your keyboard in XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Windows Vista and 7 come preinstalled with support for viewing a wide variety of languages, so adding an input language is fairly simply.  Adding an input language is slightly more difficult in XP, and requires installing additional files if you need an Asian or Complex script language.  First we show how to add an input language in Windows Vista and 7; it’s basically the same in both versions.  Then, we show how to add a language to XP, and also how to add Complex Script support.  Please note that this is only for adding an input language, which will allow you to type in the language you select.  This does not change your user interface language. Change keyboard language in Windows 7 and Vista It is fairly simple to add or change a keyboard language in Windows 7 or Vista.  In Windows 7, enter “keyboard language” in the Start menu search box, and select “Change keyboards or other input methods”. In Windows Vista, open Control Panel and enter “input language” in the search box and select “Change keyboards or other input methods”.  This also works in Windows 7. Now, click Change Keyboards to add another keyboard language or change your default one. Our default input language is US English, and our default keyboard is the US keyboard layout.  Click Add to insert another input language while still leaving your default input language installed. Here we selected the standard Thai keyboard language (Thai Kedmanee), but you can select any language you want.  Windows offers almost any language you can imagine, so just look for the language you want, select it, and click Ok. Alternately, if you want, you can click Preview to see your layout choice before accepting it.  This is only the default characters, not ones that will be activated with Shift or other keys (many Asian languages use many more characters than English, and require the use of Shift and other keys to access them all).  Once your finished previewing, click close and then press Ok on the previous dialog. Now you will see both of your keyboard languages in the Installed services box.  You can click Add to go back and get more, or move your selected language up or down (to change its priority), or simply click Apply to add the new language. Also, you can now change the default input language from the top menu.  This is the language that your keyboard will start with when you boot your computer.  So, if you mainly use English but also use another language, usually it is best to leave English as your default input language. Once you’ve pressed Apply or Ok, you will see a new icon beside your system tray with the initials of your default input language. If you click it, you can switch between input languages.  Alternately you can switch input languages by pressing Alt+Shift on your keyboard. Some complex languages, such as Chinese, may have extra buttons to change input modes to accommodate their large alphabet. If you would like to change the keyboard shortcut for changing languages, go back to the Input Languages dialog, and select the “Advanced Key Settings” tab.  Here you can change settings for Caps Lock and change or add key sequences to change between languages. Also, the On-Screen keyboard will display the correct keyboard language (here the keyboard is displaying Thai), which can be a helpful reference if your physical keyboard doesn’t have your preferred input language printed on it.  To open this, simply enter “On-Screen keyboard” in the start menu search, or click All Programs>Accessories>On-Screen keyboard. Change keyboard language in Windows XP The process for changing the keyboard language in Windows XP is slightly different.  Open Control Panel, and select “Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options”.   Select “Add other languages”. Now, click Details to add another language.  XP does not include support for Asian and complex languages by default, so if you need to add one of those languages we have details for that below. Click Add to add an input language. Select your desired language from the list, and choose your desired keyboard layout if your language offers multiple layouts.  Here we selected Canadian French with the default layout. Now you will see both of your keyboard languages in the Installed services box.  You can click Add to go back and add more, or move your selected language up or down (to change its priority), or simply click Apply to add the new language. Once you’ve pressed Apply or Ok, you will see a new icon beside your system tray with the initials of your default input language. If you click it, you can switch between input languages.  Alternately you can switch input languages by pressing Alt+Shift on your keyboard. If you would like to change the keyboard shortcut for changing languages, go back to the Input Languages dialog, and click the “Key Settings” button on the bottom of the dialog.  Here you can change settings for Caps Lock and change or add key sequences to change between languages. Add support to XP for Asian and Complex script languages Windows XP does not include support for Asian and Complex script languages by default, but you can easily add them to your computer.  This is useful if you wish to type in one of these languages, or simply want to read text written in these languages, since XP will not display these languages correctly if they are not installed.  If you wish to install Chinese, Japanese, and/or Korean, check the “Install files for East Asian languages” box.  Or, if you need to install a complex script language (including Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, the Indic languages, Thai, and Vietnamese), check the “Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages” box.   Choosing either of these options will open a prompt reminding you that this option will take up more disk space.  Support for complex languages will require around 10Mb of hard drive space, but East Asian language support may require 230 Mb or more free disk space.  Click Ok, and click apply to install your language files. You may have to insert your XP CD into your CD drive to install these files.  Insert the disk, and then click Ok. Windows will automatically copy the files, including fonts for these languages… …and then will ask you to reboot your computer to finalize the settings.  Click Yes, and then reopen the “Add other languages” dialog when your computer is rebooted, and add a language as before.     Now you can add Complex and/or Asian languages to XP, just as above.  Here is the XP taskbar language selector with Thai installed. Conclusion Unfortunately we haven’t found a way to add Asian and complex languages in XP without having an XP disc. If you know of a way, let us know in the comments. (No downloading the XP disc from torrent site answers please) Adding an input language is very important for bilingual individuals, and can also be useful if you simply need to occasionally view Asian or Complex languages in XP.  And by following the correct instructions for your version of Windows, it should be very easy to add, change, and remove input languages. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Show Keyboard Shortcut Access Keys in Windows VistaKeyboard Ninja: 21 Keyboard Shortcut ArticlesAnother Desktop Cube for Windows XP/VistaThe "Up" Keyboard Shortcut for Windows 7 or Vista ExplorerWhat is ctfmon.exe And Why Is It Running? TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

  Read the article

• 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

  Read the article

• Week in Geek: 4chan Falls Victim to DDoS Attack Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to tweak the low battery action on a Windows 7 laptop, access an eBook collection anywhere in the world, “extend iPad battery life, batch resize photos, & sync massive music collections”, went on a reign of destruction with Snow Crusher, and had fun decorating our desktops with abstract icon collections. Photo by pasukaru76. Random Geek Links We have included extra news article goodness to help you catch up on any developments that you may have missed during the holiday break this past week. Note: The three 27C3 articles listed here represent three different presentations at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress hacker conference. 4chan victim of DDoS as FBI investigates role in PayPal attack Users of 4chan may have gotten a taste of their own medicine after the site was knocked offline by a DDoS attack from an unknown origin early Thursday morning. Report: FBI seizes server in probe of WikiLeaks attacks The FBI has seized a server in Texas as part of its hunt for the groups behind the pro-WikiLeaks denial-of-service attacks launched in December against PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and others. Mozilla exposes older user-account database Mozilla has disabled 44,000 older user accounts for its Firefox add-ons site after a security researcher found part of a database of the account information on a publicly available server. Data breach affects 4.9 million Honda customers Japanese automaker Honda has put some 2.2 million customers in the United States on a security breach alert after a database containing information on the owners and their cars was hacked. Chinese Trojan discovered in Android games An Android-based Trojan called “Geinimi” has been discovered in the wild and the Trojan is capable of sending personal information to remote servers and exhibits botnet-like behavior. 27C3 presentation claims many mobiles vulnerable to SMS attacks According to security experts, an ‘SMS of death’ threatens to disable many current Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Micromax and LG mobiles. 27C3: GSM cell phones even easier to tap Security researchers have demonstrated how open source software on a number of revamped, entry-level cell phones can decrypt and record mobile phone calls in the GSM network. 27C3: danger lurks in PDF documents Security researcher Julia Wolf has pointed out numerous, previously hardly known, security problems in connection with Adobe’s PDF standard. Critical update for WordPress A critical update has been made available for WordPress in the form of version 3.0.4. The update fixes a security bug in WordPress’s KSES library. McAfee Labs Predicts Geolocation, Mobile Devices and Apple Will Top the List of Targets for Emerging Threats in 2011 The list comprises 2010’s most buzzed about platforms and services, including Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, foursquare, Google TV and the Mac OS X platform, which are all expected to become major targets for cybercriminals. McAfee Labs also predicts that politically motivated attacks will be on the rise. Windows Phone 7 piracy materializes with FreeMarketplace A proof-of-concept application, FreeMarketplace, that allows any Windows Phone 7 application to be downloaded and installed free of charge has been developed. Empty email accounts, and some bad buzz for Hotmail In the past few days, a number of Hotmail users have been complaining about a rather disconcerting issue: their Hotmail accounts, some up to 10 years old, appear completely empty.  No emails, no folders, nothing, just what appears to be a new account. Reports: Nintendo warns of 3DS risk for kids Nintendo has reportedly issued a warning that the 3DS, its eagerly awaited glasses-free 3D portable gaming device, should not be used by children under 6 when the gadget is in 3D-viewing mode. Google eyes ‘cloaking’ as next antispam target Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of “cloaking,” or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one’s site while presenting another look to users. Facebook, Twitter stock trading drawing SEC eye? The high degree of investor interest in shares of hot Silicon Valley companies that aren’t yet publicly traded–like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Zynga–may be leading to scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Random TinyHacker Links Photo by jcraveiro. Exciting Software Set for Release in 2011 A few bloggers from great websites such as How-To Geek, Guiding Tech and 7 Tutorials took the time to sit down and talk about their software wishes for 2011. Take the time to read it and share… Wikileaks Infopr0n An infographic detailing the quest to plug WikiLeaks. The New York Times Guide to Mobile Apps A growing collection of all mobile app coverage by the New York Times as well as lists of favorite apps from Times writers. 7,000,000,000 (Video) A fascinating look at the world’s population via National Geographic Magazine. Super User Questions Check out the great answers to these hot questions from Super User. How to use a Personal computer as a Linux web server for development purposes? How to link processing power of old computers together? Free virtualization tool for testing suspicious files? Why do some actions not work with Remote Desktop? What is the simplest way to send a large batch of pictures to a distant friend or colleague? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Had a busy week and need to get caught up on your HTG reading? Then sit back and relax while enjoying these hot posts full of how-to roundup goodness. The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 How to Search Just the Site You’re Viewing Using Google Search Ask the Readers: Backing Your Files Up – Local Storage versus the Cloud One Year Ago on How-To Geek Need more how-to geekiness for your weekend? Then look through this great batch of articles from one year ago that focus on dual-booting and O.S. installation goodness. Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Vista Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with XP How To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7 Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Ubuntu Easily Install Ubuntu Linux with Windows Using the Wubi Installer The Geek Note We hope that you and your families have had a terrific holiday break as everyone prepares to return to work and school this week. Remember to keep those great tips coming in to us at [email protected]! Photo by pjbeardsley. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Tune Pop Enhances Android Music Notifications Another Busy Night in Gotham City Wallpaper Classic Super Mario Brothers Theme for Chrome and Iron Experimental Firefox Builds Put Tabs on the Title Bar (Available for Download) Android Trojan Found in the Wild Chaos, Panic, and Disorder Wallpaper

  Read the article

• Turn A Flash Drive Into a Portable Web Server

  - by Matthew Guay

  Portable applications are very useful for getting work done on the go, but how about portable servers?  Here’s how you can turn your flash drive into a portable web server. Getting Started To put a full web server on our flash drive, we’re going to use XAMPP Lite.  This lightweight, preconfigured server includes recent versions of Apache, MySQL, and PHP so you can run most websites and webapps directly from it.  You could use the full XAMPP, which includes more features such as a FileZilla FTP server and OpenSSL, but for most purposes, the light version is plenty for a portable server. Download the latest version of XAMPP Lite (link below).  In this tutorial, we used the self-extracting EXE version; you could choose the ZIP file and extract the files yourself, but we found it easier to use the executable. Run the installer, and click Browse choose where to install your server. Select your flash drive, or a folder in it, and click Ok.  Make sure your flash drive has at least 250MB of available storage space.  XAMPP will create an xampplite folder and store all the files in it during the installation.   Click Install, and all of the files will be extracted to your flash drive.  This may take a few moments depending on your flash drive’s speed. When the extraction process is finished, a Command Prompt window will open to finish the installation.  The first prompt will ask if you want to add shortcuts to the start menu and desktop; enter “n” since we don’t want to create start menu links to our portable server. Now enter “y” to configure XAMPP’s directories automatically. Finally, enter “y” to make XAMPP fully portable.  It will set up the servers to run without specific drive letters so your server will run from any computer. XAMPP will finalize your changes; press Enter when everything is completed. Setup will automatically launch the command line version of XAMPP.  On first run, confirm that your time zone is correct. And that’s it!  You can now run XAMPP’s control panel by entering 1, or you can exit and run XAMPP from any other computer with your flash drive. To complete your portable webserver kit, you may want to install Portable Firefox or Iron Browser on your flash drive so you always have your favorite browser ready to use. Running your portable server Using your portable server is very simple.  Open the xampplite folder on your flash drive and launch xampp-control.exe. Click Start beside Apache and MySql to get your webserver running. Please note: Do not check the Svc box, as this will run the server as a Windows service.  To keep XAMPP portable, you do not want it running as a service! Windows Firewall may prompt you that it blocked the server; click Allow access to let your server run. Once they’re running, you can click Admin to open the default XAMPP admin page running from your local webserver.  Or, you can view it by browsing to http://localhost/ or http://127.0.0.1/ in your browser. If everything is working correctly, you should see this page in your browser.  Choose your default language… And then you’ll see the default XAMPP admin page.   Click the Status link on the left sidebar to make sure everything is running correctly. If you click the Admin button for MySql in the XAMPP Control Panel, it will open phpMyAdmin in your default browser.  Alternately, you can open the MySql admin page by entering http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ or http://127.0.0.1/phpmyadmin/ in your favorite browser. Now you can add your own webpages to your webserver.  Save all of your web files in the \xampplight\htdocs\ folder on your flash drive. Install WordPress in your portable server Since XAMPP Lite includes MySql and PHP, you can even run webapps such as WordPress, the popular CMS and blogging platform.  Download WordPress (link below), and extract the files to the \xampplite\htdocs folder on your flash drive. Now all of the WordPress files are stored in \xampplite\htdocs\wordpress on your flash drive. We still need to setup WordPress on our portable server.  Open your MySql admin page http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ to create a new database for WordPress.  Enter a name for your database in the “Create new database” box, and click Create. Click the Privileges tab on the top, and the select “Add a new User”.   Enter a username and password for the database, and then click the Go button on the bottom of the page. Using WordPress Now, in your browser, enter http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php.  Click Create a Configuration File to continue. Make sure you have your Database name, username, and password we created previously, and click “Let’s Go!” Enter your WordPress database name, username, and password, leave the other two entries as default, and click Submit. You should now have the database all ready to go.  Click “Run the install” to finish installing WordPress. Enter a title, username, and password for your test blog, as well as your email address, and then click “Install WordPress”. You now have a portable install of WordPress.  Click “Log In” to  access your WordPress admin page. Enter your username and password, and click Log In. Here you can add pages, posts, themes, extensions, and anything else just like you would on a normal WordPress site.  This is a great way to experiment with WordPress without messing up your real website. You can view your portable WordPress site by entering http://localhost/wordpress/ in your address bar. Closing your server When you’re done running your test server, click the Stop button on each of the services and then click the Exit button in the XAMPP control panel.  If you press the exit button on the top of the window, it will just minimize the control panel to the tray.   Alternately, you can shutdown your server by running xampp_stop.exe from your xampplite folder. Conclusion XAMPP Lite gives you a great way to run a full webserver directly from your flash drive.  Now, anywhere you go, you can test and tweak your webpages and webapps from any Windows computer.  Links Download XAMPP Lite Download WordPress Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips BitLocker To Go Encrypts Portable Flash Drives in Windows 7How To Use BitLocker on Drives without TPMSpeed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoostView and Manage Flash Cookies the Easy WayInstall and Run Applications from Your iPod, Flash Drive or Mp3 Player TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error

  Read the article

• Monitor your Hard Drive’s Health with Acronis Drive Monitor

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you worried that your computer’s hard drive could die without any warning?  Here’s how you can keep tabs on it and get the first warning signs of potential problems before you actually lose your critical data. Hard drive failures are one of the most common ways people lose important data from their computers.  As more of our memories and important documents are stored digitally, a hard drive failure can mean the loss of years of work.  Acronis Drive Monitor helps you avert these disasters by warning you at the first signs your hard drive may be having trouble.  It monitors many indicators, including heat, read/write errors, total lifespan, and more. It then notifies you via a taskbar popup or email that problems have been detected.  This early warning lets you know ahead of time that you may need to purchase a new hard drive and migrate your data before it’s too late. Getting Started Head over to the Acronis site to download Drive Monitor (link below).  You’ll need to enter your name and email, and then you can download this free tool. Also, note that the download page may ask if you want to include a trial of their for-pay backup program.  If you wish to simply install the Drive Monitor utility, click Continue without adding. Run the installer when the download is finished.  Follow the prompts and install as normal. Once it’s installed, you can quickly get an overview of your hard drives’ health.  Note that it shows 3 categories: Disk problems, Acronis backup, and Critical Events.  On our computer, we had Seagate DiskWizard, an image backup utility based on Acronis Backup, installed, and Acronis detected it. Drive Monitor stays running in your tray even when the application window is closed.  It will keep monitoring your hard drives, and will alert you if there’s a problem. Find Detailed Information About Your Hard Drives Acronis’ simple interface lets you quickly see an overview of how the drives on your computer are performing.  If you’d like more information, click the link under the description.  Here we see that one of our drives have overheated, so click Show disks to get more information. Now you can select each of your drives and see more information about them.  From the Disk overview tab that opens by default, we see that our drive is being monitored, has been running for a total of 368 days, and that it’s health is good.  However, it is running at 113F, which is over the recommended max of 107F.   The S.M.A.R.T. parameters tab gives us more detailed information about our drive.  Most users wouldn’t know what an accepted value would be, so it also shows the status.  If the value is within the accepted parameters, it will report OK; otherwise, it will show that has a problem in this area. One very interesting piece of information we can see is the total number of Power-On Hours, Start/Stop Count, and Power Cycle Count.  These could be useful indicators to check if you’re considering purchasing a second hand computer.  Simply load this program, and you’ll get a better view of how long it’s been in use. Finally, the Events tab shows each time the program gave a warning.  We can see that our drive, which had been acting flaky already, is routinely overheating even when our other hard drive was running in normal temperature ranges. Monitor Acronis Backups And Critical Errors In addition to monitoring critical stats of your hard drives, Acronis Drive Monitor also keeps up with the status of your backup software and critical events reported by Windows.  You can access these from the front page, or via the links on the left hand sidebar.  If you have any edition of any Acronis Backup product installed, it will show that it was detected.  Note that it can only monitor the backup status of the newest versions of Acronis Backup and True Image. If no Acronis backup software was installed, it will show a warning that the drive may be unprotected and will give you a link to download Acronis backup software.   If you have another backup utility installed that you wish to monitor yourself, click Configure backup monitoring, and then disable monitoring on the drives you’re monitoring yourself. Finally, you can view any detected Critical events from the Critical events tab on the left. Get Emailed When There’s a Problem One of Drive Monitor’s best features is the ability to send you an email whenever there’s a problem.  Since this program can run on any version of Windows, including the Server and Home Server editions, you can use this feature to stay on top of your hard drives’ health even when you’re not nearby.  To set this up, click Options in the top left corner. Select Alerts on the left, and then click the Change settings link to setup your email account. Enter the email address which you wish to receive alerts, and a name for the program.  Then, enter the outgoing mail server settings for your email.  If you have a Gmail account, enter the following information: Outgoing mail server (SMTP): smtp.gmail.com Port: 587 Username and Password: Your gmail address and password Check the Use encryption box, and then select TLS from the encryption options.   It will now send a test message to your email account, so check and make sure it sent ok. Now you can choose to have the program automatically email you when warnings and critical alerts appear, and also to have it send regular disk status reports.   Conclusion Whether you’ve got a brand new hard drive or one that’s seen better days, knowing the real health of your it is one of the best ways to be prepared before disaster strikes.  It’s no substitute for regular backups, but can help you avert problems.  Acronis Drive Monitor is a nice tool for this, and although we wish it wasn’t so centered around their backup offerings, we still found it a nice tool. Link Download Acronis Drive Monitor (registration required) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Change Monitor Timeout From Command LineAnalyze and Manage Hard Drive Space with WinDirStatMonitor CPU, Memory, and Disk IO In Windows 7 with Taskbar MetersDefrag Multiple Hard Drives At Once In WindowsFind Your Missing USB Drive on Windows XP TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good Greate Image Viewing and Management with Zoner Photo Studio Free Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer

  Read the article

• The 20 Most Important Keyboard Shortcuts For Windows PCs

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Keyboard shortcuts are practically essential for using any type of PC. They’ll speed up almost everything you do. But long lists of keyboard shortcuts can quickly become overwhelming if you’re just getting started. This list will cover the most useful keyboard shortcuts that every Windows user should know. If you haven’t used keyboard shortcuts much, these will show you just how useful keyboard shortcuts can be. Windows Key + Search The Windows key is particularly important on Windows 8 — especially before Windows 8.1 — because it allows you to quickly return to the Start screen. On Windows 7, it opens the Start menu. Either way, you can start typing immediately after you press the Windows key to search for programs, settings, and files. For example, if you want to launch Firefox, you can press the Windows key, start typing the word Firefox, and press Enter when the Firefox shortcut appears. It’s a quick way to launch programs, open files, and locate Control Panel options without even touching your mouse and without digging through a cluttered Start menu. You can also use the arrow keys to select the shortcut you want to launch before pressing Enter. Copy, Cut, Paste Copy, Cut, and Paste are extremely important keyboard shortcuts for text-editing. If you do any typing on your computer, you probably use them. These options can be accessed using the mouse, either by right-clicking on selected text or opening the application’s Edit menu, but this is the slowest way to do it. After selecting some text, press Ctrl+C to copy it or Ctrl+X to cut it. Position the cursor where you want the text and use Ctrl+V to paste it. These shortcuts can save you a huge amount of time over using the mouse. Search the Current Page or File To quickly perform a search in the current application — whether you’re in a web browser, PDF viewer, document editor, or almost any other type of application — press Ctrl+F. The application’s search (or “Find”) feature will pop up, and you can instantly start typing a phrase you want to search for. You can generally press Enter to  go to the next appearance of the word or phrase in the document, quickly searching through it for what you’re interested in. Switch Between Applications and Tabs Rather than clicking buttons on your taskbar, Alt+Tab is a very quick way to switch between running applications. Windows orders the list of open windows by the order you accessed them, so if you’re only using two different applications, you can just press Alt+Tab to quickly switch between them. If switching between more than two windows, you’ll have to hold the Alt key and press Tab repeatedly to toggle through the list of open windows. If you miss the window you want, you can always press Alt+Shift+Tab to move through the list in reverse. To move between tabs in an application — such as the browser tabs in your web browser — press Ctrl+Tab. Ctrl+Shift+Tab will move through tabs in reverse. Quickly Print If you’re the kind of person who still prints things, you can quickly open the print window by pressing Ctrl+P. This can be faster than hunting down the Print option in every program you want to print something from. Basic Browser Shortcuts Web browser shortcuts can save you tons of time, too. Ctrl+T is a very useful one, as it will open a new tab with the address bar focused, so you can quickly press Ctrl +T, type a search phrase or web address, and press Enter to go there. To go back or forward while browsing, hold the Ctrl key and press the left or right arrow keys. If you’d just like to focus your web browser’s address bar so you can type a new web address or search without opening a new tab, press Ctrl + L. You can then start typing something and press Enter. Close Tabs and Windows To quickly close the current application, press Alt+F4. This works on the desktop and even in new Windows 8-style applications. To quickly close the current browser tab or document, press Ctrl+W. This will often close the current window if there are no other tabs open. Lock Your Computer When you’re done using your computer and want to step away, you may want to lock it. People won’t be able to log in and access your desktop unless they know your password. You can do this from the Start menu or Start screen, but the fastest way to lock your screen is by quickly pressing Windows Key + L before you get up. Access the Task Manager Ctrl+Alt+Delete will take you to a screen that allows you to quickly launch the Task Manager or perform other operations, such as signing out. This is particularly useful because if can be used to recover from situations where your computer doesn’t appear responsive or isn’t accepting input. For example, if a full-screen game becomes unresponsive, Ctrl+Alt+Delete will often allow you to escape from it and end it via the Task Manager. Windows 8 Shortcuts On Windows 8 PCs, there are other very important keyboard shortcuts. Windows Key + C will open your Charms bar, while Windows Key + Tab will open the new App Switcher. These keyboard shortcuts will allow you to avoid the hot corners, which can be tedious to use with a mouse. On the desktop side, Windows Key + D will take you back to the desktop from anywhere. Windows Key + X will open a special “power user menu” that gives you quick access to options that are hidden in the new Windows 8 interface, including Shut Down, Restart, and Control Panel. If you’re interested in learning more keyboard shortcuts, be sure to check our longer lists of 47 keyboard shortcuts that work in all web browsers and 42+ keyboard shortcuts to speed up text-editing. Image Credit: Jeroen Bennink on Flickr     

  Read the article

• Why Is Vertical Resolution Monitor Resolution so Often a Multiple of 360?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Stare at a list of monitor resolutions long enough and you might notice a pattern: many of the vertical resolutions, especially those of gaming or multimedia displays, are multiples of 360 (720, 1080, 1440, etc.) But why exactly is this the case? Is it arbitrary or is there something more at work? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Trojandestroy recently noticed something about his display interface and needs answers: YouTube recently added 1440p functionality, and for the first time I realized that all (most?) vertical resolutions are multiples of 360. Is this just because the smallest common resolution is 480×360, and it’s convenient to use multiples? (Not doubting that multiples are convenient.) And/or was that the first viewable/conveniently sized resolution, so hardware (TVs, monitors, etc) grew with 360 in mind? Taking it further, why not have a square resolution? Or something else unusual? (Assuming it’s usual enough that it’s viewable). Is it merely a pleasing-the-eye situation? So why have the display be a multiple of 360? The Answer SuperUser contributor User26129 offers us not just an answer as to why the numerical pattern exists but a history of screen design in the process: Alright, there are a couple of questions and a lot of factors here. Resolutions are a really interesting field of psychooptics meeting marketing. First of all, why are the vertical resolutions on youtube multiples of 360. This is of course just arbitrary, there is no real reason this is the case. The reason is that resolution here is not the limiting factor for Youtube videos – bandwidth is. Youtube has to re-encode every video that is uploaded a couple of times, and tries to use as little re-encoding formats/bitrates/resolutions as possible to cover all the different use cases. For low-res mobile devices they have 360×240, for higher res mobile there’s 480p, and for the computer crowd there is 360p for 2xISDN/multiuser landlines, 720p for DSL and 1080p for higher speed internet. For a while there were some other codecs than h.264, but these are slowly being phased out with h.264 having essentially ‘won’ the format war and all computers being outfitted with hardware codecs for this. Now, there is some interesting psychooptics going on as well. As I said: resolution isn’t everything. 720p with really strong compression can and will look worse than 240p at a very high bitrate. But on the other side of the spectrum: throwing more bits at a certain resolution doesn’t magically make it better beyond some point. There is an optimum here, which of course depends on both resolution and codec. In general: the optimal bitrate is actually proportional to the resolution. So the next question is: what kind of resolution steps make sense? Apparently, people need about a 2x increase in resolution to really see (and prefer) a marked difference. Anything less than that and many people will simply not bother with the higher bitrates, they’d rather use their bandwidth for other stuff. This has been researched quite a long time ago and is the big reason why we went from 720×576 (415kpix) to 1280×720 (922kpix), and then again from 1280×720 to 1920×1080 (2MP). Stuff in between is not a viable optimization target. And again, 1440P is about 3.7MP, another ~2x increase over HD. You will see a difference there. 4K is the next step after that. Next up is that magical number of 360 vertical pixels. Actually, the magic number is 120 or 128. All resolutions are some kind of multiple of 120 pixels nowadays, back in the day they used to be multiples of 128. This is something that just grew out of LCD panel industry. LCD panels use what are called line drivers, little chips that sit on the sides of your LCD screen that control how bright each subpixel is. Because historically, for reasons I don’t really know for sure, probably memory constraints, these multiple-of-128 or multiple-of-120 resolutions already existed, the industry standard line drivers became drivers with 360 line outputs (1 per subpixel). If you would tear down your 1920×1080 screen, I would be putting money on there being 16 line drivers on the top/bottom and 9 on one of the sides. Oh hey, that’s 16:9. Guess how obvious that resolution choice was back when 16:9 was ‘invented’. Then there’s the issue of aspect ratio. This is really a completely different field of psychology, but it boils down to: historically, people have believed and measured that we have a sort of wide-screen view of the world. Naturally, people believed that the most natural representation of data on a screen would be in a wide-screen view, and this is where the great anamorphic revolution of the ’60s came from when films were shot in ever wider aspect ratios. Since then, this kind of knowledge has been refined and mostly debunked. Yes, we do have a wide-angle view, but the area where we can actually see sharply – the center of our vision – is fairly round. Slightly elliptical and squashed, but not really more than about 4:3 or 3:2. So for detailed viewing, for instance for reading text on a screen, you can utilize most of your detail vision by employing an almost-square screen, a bit like the screens up to the mid-2000s. However, again this is not how marketing took it. Computers in ye olden days were used mostly for productivity and detailed work, but as they commoditized and as the computer as media consumption device evolved, people didn’t necessarily use their computer for work most of the time. They used it to watch media content: movies, television series and photos. And for that kind of viewing, you get the most ‘immersion factor’ if the screen fills as much of your vision (including your peripheral vision) as possible. Which means widescreen. But there’s more marketing still. When detail work was still an important factor, people cared about resolution. As many pixels as possible on the screen. SGI was selling almost-4K CRTs! The most optimal way to get the maximum amount of pixels out of a glass substrate is to cut it as square as possible. 1:1 or 4:3 screens have the most pixels per diagonal inch. But with displays becoming more consumery, inch-size became more important, not amount of pixels. And this is a completely different optimization target. To get the most diagonal inches out of a substrate, you want to make the screen as wide as possible. First we got 16:10, then 16:9 and there have been moderately successful panel manufacturers making 22:9 and 2:1 screens (like Philips). Even though pixel density and absolute resolution went down for a couple of years, inch-sizes went up and that’s what sold. Why buy a 19″ 1280×1024 when you can buy a 21″ 1366×768? Eh… I think that about covers all the major aspects here. There’s more of course; bandwidth limits of HDMI, DVI, DP and of course VGA played a role, and if you go back to the pre-2000s, graphics memory, in-computer bandwdith and simply the limits of commercially available RAMDACs played an important role. But for today’s considerations, this is about all you need to know. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

  Read the article

• A Simple Collapsible Menu with jQuery

  - by Vincent Maverick Durano

  In this post I'll demonstrate how to make a simple collapsible menu using jQuery. To get started let's go ahead and fire up Visual Studio and create a new WebForm.  Now let's build our menu by adding some div, p and anchor tags. Since I'm using a masterpage then the ASPX mark-up should look something like this:   1: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> 2: <div id="Menu"> 3: <p>CARS</p> 4: <div class="section"> 5: <a href="#">Car 1</a> 6: <a href="#">Car 2</a> 7: <a href="#">Car 3</a> 8: <a href="#">Car 4</a> 9: </div> 10: <p>BIKES</p> 11: <div class="section"> 12: <a href="#">Bike 1</a> 13: <a href="#">Bike 2</a> 14: <a href="#">Bike 3</a> 15: <a href="#">Bike 4</a> 16: <a href="#">Bike 5</a> 17: <a href="#">Bike 6</a> 18: <a href="#">Bike 7</a> 19: <a href="#">Bike 8</a> 20: </div> 21: <p>COMPUTERS</p> 22: <div class="section"> 23: <a href="#">Computer 1</a> 24: <a href="#">Computer 2</a> 25: <a href="#">Computer 3</a> 26: <a href="#">Computer 4</a> 27: </div> 28: <p>OTHERS</p> 29: <div class="section"> 30: <a href="#">Other 1</a> 31: <a href="#">Other 2</a> 32: <a href="#">Other 3</a> 33: <a href="#">Other 4</a> 34: </div> 35: </div> 36: </asp:Content>   As you can see there's nothing fancy about the mark up above.. Now lets go ahead create a simple CSS to set the look and feel our our Menu. Just for for the simplicity of this demo, add the following CSS below under the <head> section of the page or if you are using master page then add it a the content head. Here's the CSS below:   1: <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="HeadContent" runat="server"> 2: <style type="text/css"> 3: #Menu{ 4: width:300px; 5: } 6: #Menu > p{ 7: background-color:#104D9E; 8: color:#F5F7FA; 9: margin:0; 10: padding:0; 11: border-bottom-style: solid; 12: border-bottom-width: medium; 13: border-bottom-color:#000000; 14: cursor:pointer; 15: } 16: #Menu .section{ 17: padding-left:5px; 18: background-color:#C0D9FA; 19: } 20: a{ 21: display:block; 22: color:#0A0A07; 23: } 24: </style> 25: </asp:Content>   Now let's add the collapsible effects on our menu using jQuery. To start using jQuery then register the following script at the very top of the <head> section of the page or if you are using master page then add it the very top of  the content head section.   <script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js" ></script>   As you can see I'm using Google AJAX API CDN to host the jQuery file. You can also download the jQuery here and host it in your server if you'd like. Okay here's the the jQuery script below for adding the collapsible effects:   1: <script type="text/javascript"> 2: $(function () { 3: $("a").mouseover(function () { $(this).addClass("highlightRow"); }) 4: .mouseout(function () { $(this).removeClass("highlightRow"); }); 5:   6: $(".section").hide(); 7: $("#Menu > p").click(function () { 8: $(this).next().slideToggle("Slow"); 9: }); 10: }); 11: </script>   Okay to give you a little bit of explaination, at line 3.. what it does is it looks for all the "<a>" anchor elements on the page and attach the mouseover and mouseout event. On mouseover, the highlightRow css class is added to <a> element and on mouse out we remove the css class to revert the style to its default look. at line 6 we will hide all the elements that has a class name set as "section" and if you look at the mark up above it is refering to the <div> elements right after each <p> element. At line 7.. what it does is it looks for a <p> element that is a direct child of the element that has an ID of "Menu" and then attach the click event to toggle the visibilty of the section. Here's how it looks in the page: On Initial Load: After Clicking the Section Header:   That's it! I hope someone find this post usefu!   Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,JQuery,Master Page,JavaScript

  Read the article

• IPsec tunnel to Android device not created even though there is an IKE SA

  - by Quentin Swain

  I'm trying to configure a VPN tunnel between an Android device running 4.1 and a Fedora 17 Linux box running strongSwan 5.0. The device reports that it is connected and strongSwan statusall returns that there is an IKE SA, but doesn't display a tunnel. I used the instructions for iOS in the wiki to generate certificates and configure strongSwan. Since Android uses a modified version of racoon this should work and since the connection is partly established I think I am on the right track. I don't see any errors about not being able to create the tunnel. This is the configuration for the strongSwan connection conn android2 keyexchange=ikev1 authby=xauthrsasig xauth=server left=96.244.142.28 leftsubnet=0.0.0.0/0 leftfirewall=yes leftcert=serverCert.pem right=%any rightsubnet=10.0.0.0/24 rightsourceip=10.0.0.2 rightcert=clientCert.pem ike=aes256-sha1-modp1024 auto=add This is the output of strongswan statusall Status of IKE charon daemon (strongSwan 5.0.0, Linux 3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64, x86_64): uptime: 20 minutes, since Oct 31 10:27:31 2012 malloc: sbrk 270336, mmap 0, used 198144, free 72192 worker threads: 8 of 16 idle, 7/1/0/0 working, job queue: 0/0/0/0, scheduled: 7 loaded plugins: charon aes des sha1 sha2 md5 random nonce x509 revocation constraints pubkey pkcs1 pkcs8 pgp dnskey pem openssl fips-prf gmp xcbc cmac hmac attr kernel-netlink resolve socket-default stroke updown xauth-generic Virtual IP pools (size/online/offline): android-hybrid: 1/0/0 android2: 1/1/0 Listening IP addresses: 96.244.142.28 Connections: android-hybrid: %any...%any IKEv1 android-hybrid: local: [C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org] uses public key authentication android-hybrid: cert: "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org" android-hybrid: remote: [%any] uses XAuth authentication: any android-hybrid: child: dynamic === dynamic TUNNEL android2: 96.244.142.28...%any IKEv1 android2: local: [C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org] uses public key authentication android2: cert: "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org" android2: remote: [C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client] uses public key authentication android2: cert: "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client" android2: remote: [%any] uses XAuth authentication: any android2: child: 0.0.0.0/0 === 10.0.0.0/24 TUNNEL Security Associations (1 up, 0 connecting): android2[3]: ESTABLISHED 10 seconds ago, 96.244.142.28[C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org]...208.54.35.241[C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client] android2[3]: Remote XAuth identity: android android2[3]: IKEv1 SPIs: 4151e371ad46b20d_i 59a56390d74792d2_r*, public key reauthentication in 56 minutes android2[3]: IKE proposal: AES_CBC_256/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024 The output of ip -s xfrm policy src ::/0 dst ::/0 uid 0 socket in action allow index 3851 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use - src ::/0 dst ::/0 uid 0 socket out action allow index 3844 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use - src ::/0 dst ::/0 uid 0 socket in action allow index 3835 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use - src ::/0 dst ::/0 uid 0 socket out action allow index 3828 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use - src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 socket in action allow index 3819 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use 2012-10-31 13:29:39 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 socket out action allow index 3812 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use 2012-10-31 13:29:22 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 socket in action allow index 3803 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use 2012-10-31 13:29:20 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 socket out action allow index 3796 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use 2012-10-31 13:29:20 So a xfrm policy isn't being created for the connection, even though there is an SA between device and strongswan. Executing ip -s xfrm policy on the android device results in the following output: src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 10.0.0.2/32 uid 0 dir in action allow index 40 priority 2147483648 share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft (INF)(bytes), hard (INF)(bytes) limit: soft (INF)(packets), hard (INF)(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:42:08 use - tmpl src 96.244.142.28 dst 25.239.33.30 proto esp spi 0x00000000(0) reqid 0(0x00000000) mode tunnel level required share any enc-mask 00000000 auth-mask 00000000 comp-mask 00000000 src 10.0.0.2/32 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 dir out action allow index 33 priority 2147483648 share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft (INF)(bytes), hard (INF)(bytes) limit: soft (INF)(packets), hard (INF)(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:42:08 use - tmpl src 25.239.33.30 dst 96.244.142.28 proto esp spi 0x00000000(0) reqid 0(0x00000000) mode tunnel level required share any enc-mask 00000000 auth-mask 00000000 comp-mask 00000000 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 dir 4 action allow index 28 priority 0 share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft (INF)(bytes), hard (INF)(bytes) limit: soft (INF)(packets), hard (INF)(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:42:04 use 2012-10-31 13:42:08 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 dir 3 action allow index 19 priority 0 share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft (INF)(bytes), hard (INF)(bytes) limit: soft (INF)(packets), hard (INF)(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:42:04 use 2012-10-31 13:42:08 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 dir 4 action allow index 12 priority 0 share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft (INF)(bytes), hard (INF)(bytes) limit: soft (INF)(packets), hard (INF)(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:42:04 use 2012-10-31 13:42:06 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 dir 3 action allow index 3 priority 0 share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft (INF)(bytes), hard (INF)(bytes) limit: soft (INF)(packets), hard (INF)(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:42:04 use 2012-10-31 13:42:07 Logs from charon: 00[DMN] Starting IKE charon daemon (strongSwan 5.0.0, Linux 3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64, x86_64) 00[KNL] listening on interfaces: 00[KNL] em1 00[KNL] 96.244.142.28 00[KNL] fe80::224:e8ff:fed2:18b2 00[CFG] loading ca certificates from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/cacerts' 00[CFG] loaded ca certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=strongSwan CA" from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/cacerts/caCert.pem' 00[CFG] loading aa certificates from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/aacerts' 00[CFG] loading ocsp signer certificates from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/ocspcerts' 00[CFG] loading attribute certificates from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/acerts' 00[CFG] loading crls from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/crls' 00[CFG] loading secrets from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.secrets' 00[CFG] loaded RSA private key from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/private/clientKey.pem' 00[CFG] loaded IKE secret for %any 00[CFG] loaded EAP secret for android 00[CFG] loaded EAP secret for android 00[DMN] loaded plugins: charon aes des sha1 sha2 md5 random nonce x509 revocation constraints pubkey pkcs1 pkcs8 pgp dnskey pem openssl fips-prf gmp xcbc cmac hmac attr kernel-netlink resolve socket-default stroke updown xauth-generic 08[NET] waiting for data on sockets 16[LIB] created thread 16 [15338] 16[JOB] started worker thread 16 11[CFG] received stroke: add connection 'android-hybrid' 11[CFG] conn android-hybrid 11[CFG] left=%any 11[CFG] leftsubnet=(null) 11[CFG] leftsourceip=(null) 11[CFG] leftauth=pubkey 11[CFG] leftauth2=(null) 11[CFG] leftid=(null) 11[CFG] leftid2=(null) 11[CFG] leftrsakey=(null) 11[CFG] leftcert=serverCert.pem 11[CFG] leftcert2=(null) 11[CFG] leftca=(null) 11[CFG] leftca2=(null) 11[CFG] leftgroups=(null) 11[CFG] leftupdown=ipsec _updown iptables 11[CFG] right=%any 11[CFG] rightsubnet=(null) 11[CFG] rightsourceip=96.244.142.3 11[CFG] rightauth=xauth 11[CFG] rightauth2=(null) 11[CFG] rightid=%any 11[CFG] rightid2=(null) 11[CFG] rightrsakey=(null) 11[CFG] rightcert=(null) 11[CFG] rightcert2=(null) 11[CFG] rightca=(null) 11[CFG] rightca2=(null) 11[CFG] rightgroups=(null) 11[CFG] rightupdown=(null) 11[CFG] eap_identity=(null) 11[CFG] aaa_identity=(null) 11[CFG] xauth_identity=(null) 11[CFG] ike=aes256-sha1-modp1024 11[CFG] esp=aes128-sha1-modp2048,3des-sha1-modp1536 11[CFG] dpddelay=30 11[CFG] dpdtimeout=150 11[CFG] dpdaction=0 11[CFG] closeaction=0 11[CFG] mediation=no 11[CFG] mediated_by=(null) 11[CFG] me_peerid=(null) 11[CFG] keyexchange=ikev1 11[KNL] getting interface name for %any 11[KNL] %any is not a local address 11[KNL] getting interface name for %any 11[KNL] %any is not a local address 11[CFG] left nor right host is our side, assuming left=local 11[CFG] loaded certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org" from 'serverCert.pem' 11[CFG] id '%any' not confirmed by certificate, defaulting to 'C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org' 11[CFG] added configuration 'android-hybrid' 11[CFG] adding virtual IP address pool 'android-hybrid': 96.244.142.3/32 13[CFG] received stroke: add connection 'android2' 13[CFG] conn android2 13[CFG] left=96.244.142.28 13[CFG] leftsubnet=0.0.0.0/0 13[CFG] leftsourceip=(null) 13[CFG] leftauth=pubkey 13[CFG] leftauth2=(null) 13[CFG] leftid=(null) 13[CFG] leftid2=(null) 13[CFG] leftrsakey=(null) 13[CFG] leftcert=serverCert.pem 13[CFG] leftcert2=(null) 13[CFG] leftca=(null) 13[CFG] leftca2=(null) 13[CFG] leftgroups=(null) 13[CFG] leftupdown=ipsec _updown iptables 13[CFG] right=%any 13[CFG] rightsubnet=10.0.0.0/24 13[CFG] rightsourceip=10.0.0.2 13[CFG] rightauth=pubkey 13[CFG] rightauth2=xauth 13[CFG] rightid=(null) 13[CFG] rightid2=(null) 13[CFG] rightrsakey=(null) 13[CFG] rightcert=clientCert.pem 13[CFG] rightcert2=(null) 13[CFG] rightca=(null) 13[CFG] rightca2=(null) 13[CFG] rightgroups=(null) 13[CFG] rightupdown=(null) 13[CFG] eap_identity=(null) 13[CFG] aaa_identity=(null) 13[CFG] xauth_identity=(null) 13[CFG] ike=aes256-sha1-modp1024 13[CFG] esp=aes128-sha1-modp2048,3des-sha1-modp1536 13[CFG] dpddelay=30 13[CFG] dpdtimeout=150 13[CFG] dpdaction=0 13[CFG] closeaction=0 13[CFG] mediation=no 13[CFG] mediated_by=(null) 13[CFG] me_peerid=(null) 13[CFG] keyexchange=ikev0 13[KNL] getting interface name for %any 13[KNL] %any is not a local address 13[KNL] getting interface name for 96.244.142.28 13[KNL] 96.244.142.28 is on interface em1 13[CFG] loaded certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org" from 'serverCert.pem' 13[CFG] id '96.244.142.28' not confirmed by certificate, defaulting to 'C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org' 13[CFG] loaded certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client" from 'clientCert.pem' 13[CFG] id '%any' not confirmed by certificate, defaulting to 'C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client' 13[CFG] added configuration 'android2' 13[CFG] adding virtual IP address pool 'android2': 10.0.0.2/32 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[32235] to 96.244.142.28[500] 15[CFG] looking for an ike config for 96.244.142.28...208.54.35.241 15[CFG] candidate: %any...%any, prio 2 15[CFG] candidate: 96.244.142.28...%any, prio 5 15[CFG] found matching ike config: 96.244.142.28...%any with prio 5 01[JOB] next event in 29s 999ms, waiting 15[IKE] received NAT-T (RFC 3947) vendor ID 15[IKE] received draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-02 vendor ID 15[IKE] received draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-02\n vendor ID 15[IKE] received draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-00 vendor ID 15[IKE] received XAuth vendor ID 15[IKE] received Cisco Unity vendor ID 15[IKE] received DPD vendor ID 15[IKE] 208.54.35.241 is initiating a Main Mode IKE_SA 15[IKE] IKE_SA (unnamed)[1] state change: CREATED => CONNECTING 15[CFG] selecting proposal: 15[CFG] proposal matches 15[CFG] received proposals: IKE:AES_CBC_256/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024, IKE:AES_CBC_256/HMAC_MD5_96/PRF_HMAC_MD5/MODP_1024, IKE:AES_CBC_128/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024, IKE:AES_CBC_128/HMAC_MD5_96/PRF_HMAC_MD5/MODP_1024, IKE:3DES_CBC/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024, IKE:3DES_CBC/HMAC_MD5_96/PRF_HMAC_MD5/MODP_1024, IKE:DES_CBC/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024, IKE:DES_CBC/HMAC_MD5_96/PRF_HMAC_MD5/MODP_1024 15[CFG] configured proposals: IKE:AES_CBC_256/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024, IKE:AES_CBC_128/AES_CBC_192/AES_CBC_256/3DES_CBC/CAMELLIA_CBC_128/CAMELLIA_CBC_192/CAMELLIA_CBC_256/HMAC_MD5_96/HMAC_SHA1_96/HMAC_SHA2_256_128/HMAC_SHA2_384_192/HMAC_SHA2_512_256/AES_XCBC_96/AES_CMAC_96/PRF_HMAC_MD5/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/PRF_HMAC_SHA2_256/PRF_HMAC_SHA2_384/PRF_HMAC_SHA2_512/PRF_AES128_XCBC/PRF_AES128_CMAC/MODP_2048/MODP_2048_224/MODP_2048_256/MODP_1536/MODP_4096/MODP_8192/MODP_1024/MODP_1024_160 15[CFG] selected proposal: IKE:AES_CBC_256/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024 15[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[500] to 208.54.35.241[32235] 04[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[500] to 208.54.35.241[32235] 15[MGR] checkin IKE_SA (unnamed)[1] 15[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[32235] to 96.244.142.28[500] 08[NET] waiting for data on sockets 07[MGR] checkout IKE_SA by message 07[MGR] IKE_SA (unnamed)[1] successfully checked out 07[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[32235] to 96.244.142.28[500] 07[LIB] size of DH secret exponent: 1023 bits 07[IKE] remote host is behind NAT 07[IKE] sending cert request for "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=strongSwan CA" 07[ENC] generating NAT_D_V1 payload finished 07[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[500] to 208.54.35.241[32235] 07[MGR] checkin IKE_SA (unnamed)[1] 07[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 04[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[500] to 208.54.35.241[32235] 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 10[IKE] ignoring certificate request without data 10[IKE] received end entity cert "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client" 10[CFG] looking for XAuthInitRSA peer configs matching 96.244.142.28...208.54.35.241[C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client] 10[CFG] candidate "android-hybrid", match: 1/1/2/2 (me/other/ike/version) 10[CFG] candidate "android2", match: 1/20/5/1 (me/other/ike/version) 10[CFG] selected peer config "android2" 10[CFG] certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client" key: 2048 bit RSA 10[CFG] using trusted ca certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=strongSwan CA" 10[CFG] checking certificate status of "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client" 10[CFG] ocsp check skipped, no ocsp found 10[CFG] certificate status is not available 10[CFG] certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=strongSwan CA" key: 2048 bit RSA 10[CFG] reached self-signed root ca with a path length of 0 10[CFG] using trusted certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client" 10[IKE] authentication of 'C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client' with RSA successful 10[ENC] added payload of type ID_V1 to message 10[ENC] added payload of type SIGNATURE_V1 to message 10[IKE] authentication of 'C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org' (myself) successful 10[IKE] queueing XAUTH task 10[IKE] sending end entity cert "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org" 10[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 04[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 10[IKE] activating new tasks 10[IKE] activating XAUTH task 10[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 04[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 01[JOB] next event in 3s 999ms, waiting 10[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 10[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 08[NET] waiting for data on sockets 12[MGR] checkout IKE_SA by message 12[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 12[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 12[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 12[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 16[MGR] checkout IKE_SA by message 16[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 16[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 08[NET] waiting for data on sockets 16[IKE] XAuth authentication of 'android' successful 16[IKE] reinitiating already active tasks 16[IKE] XAUTH task 16[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 04[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 16[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 01[JOB] next event in 3s 907ms, waiting 16[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 09[MGR] checkout IKE_SA by message 09[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 09[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] .8rS 09[IKE] IKE_SA android2[1] established between 96.244.142.28[C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org]...208.54.35.241[C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client] 09[IKE] IKE_SA android2[1] state change: CONNECTING => ESTABLISHED 09[IKE] scheduling reauthentication in 3409s 09[IKE] maximum IKE_SA lifetime 3589s 09[IKE] activating new tasks 09[IKE] nothing to initiate 09[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 09[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 09[MGR] checkout IKE_SA 09[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 09[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 09[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 01[JOB] next event in 3s 854ms, waiting 08[NET] waiting for data on sockets 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 14[MGR] checkout IKE_SA by message 14[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 14[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 14[IKE] processing INTERNAL_IP4_ADDRESS attribute 14[IKE] processing INTERNAL_IP4_NETMASK attribute 14[IKE] processing INTERNAL_IP4_DNS attribute 14[IKE] processing INTERNAL_IP4_NBNS attribute 14[IKE] processing UNITY_BANNER attribute 14[IKE] processing UNITY_DEF_DOMAIN attribute 14[IKE] processing UNITY_SPLITDNS_NAME attribute 14[IKE] processing UNITY_SPLIT_INCLUDE attribute 14[IKE] processing UNITY_LOCAL_LAN attribute 14[IKE] processing APPLICATION_VERSION attribute 14[IKE] peer requested virtual IP %any 14[CFG] assigning new lease to 'android' 14[IKE] assigning virtual IP 10.0.0.2 to peer 'android' 14[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 14[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 14[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 04[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 08[NET] waiting for data on sockets 01[JOB] got event, queuing job for execution 01[JOB] next event in 91ms, waiting 13[MGR] checkout IKE_SA 13[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 13[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 13[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 01[JOB] got event, queuing job for execution 01[JOB] next event in 24s 136ms, waiting 15[MGR] checkout IKE_SA 15[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 15[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 15[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful.

  Read the article

• PowerShell Control over Nikon D3000 Camera

  My wife got me a Nikon D3000 camera for Christmas last year, and Im loving it but still trying to wrap my head around some of its features.  For instance, when you plug it into a computer via USB, it doesnt show up as a drive like most cameras Ive used to, but rather it shows up as Computer\D3000.  After a bit of research, Ive learned that this is because it implements the MTP/PTP protocol, and thus doesnt actually let Windows mount the cameras storage as a drive letter.  Nikon describes the use of the MTP and PTP protocols in their cameras here. What Im really trying to do is gain access to the cameras file system via PowerShell.  Ive been using a very handy PowerShell script to pull pictures off of my cameras and organize them into folders by date.  Id love to be able to do the same thing with my Nikon D3000, but so far I havent been able to figure out how to get access to the files in PowerShell.  If you know, Id appreciate any links/tips you can provide.  All I could find is a shareware product called PTPdrive, which Im not prepared to shell out money for (yet).  (and yes you can do much the same thing with Windows 7s Import Pictures and Videos wizard, which is pretty good too) However, in my searching, I did find some really cool stuff you can do with PowerShell and one of these cameras, like actually taking pictures via PowerShell commands.  Credit for this goes to James ONeill and Mark Wilson.  Heres what I was able to do: Taking Pictures via PowerShell with D3000 First, connect your camera, turn it on, and launch PowerShell.  Execute the following commands to see what commands your device supports.  $dialog = New-Object -ComObject "WIA.CommonDialog" $device = $dialog.ShowSelectDevice() $device.Commands You should see something like this: Now, to take a picture, simply point your camera at something and then execute this command: $device.ExecuteCommand("{AF933CAC-ACAD-11D2-A093-00C04F72DC3C}") .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Imagine my surprise when this actually took a picture (with auto-focus): Imagine what you could do with a camera completely under the control of your computer  Time-lapse photography would be pretty simple, for instance, with a very simple loop that takes a picture and then sleeps for a minute (or whatever time period).  Hooked up to a laptop for portability (and an A/C power supply), this would be pretty trivial to implement.  I may have to give it a shot and report back. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• This Week in Geek History: Gmail Goes Public, Deep Blue Wins at Chess, and the Birth of Thomas Edison

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Every week we bring you a snapshot of the week in Geek History. This week we’re taking a peek at the public release of Gmail, the first time a computer won against a chess champion, and the birth of prolific inventor Thomas Edison. Gmail Goes Public It’s hard to believe that Gmail has only been around for seven years and that for the first three years of its life it was invite only. In 2007 Gmail dropped the invite only requirement (although they would hold onto the “beta” tag for another two years) and opened its doors for anyone to grab a username @gmail. For what seemed like an entire epoch in internet history Gmail had the slickest web-based email around with constant innovations and features rolling out from Gmail Labs. Only in the last year or so have major overhauls at competitors like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail brought other services up to speed. Can’t stand reading a Week in Geek History entry without a random fact? Here you go: gmail.com was originally owned by the Garfield franchise and ran a service that delivered Garfield comics to your email inbox. No, we’re not kidding. Deep Blue Proves Itself a Chess Master Deep Blue was a super computer constructed by IBM with the sole purpose of winning chess matches. In 2011 with the all seeing eye of Google and the amazing computational abilities of engines like Wolfram Alpha we simply take powerful computers immersed in our daily lives for granted. The 1996 match against reigning world chest champion Garry Kasparov where in Deep Blue held its own, but ultimately lost, in a  4-2 match shook a lot of people up. What did it mean if something that was considered such an elegant and quintessentially human endeavor such as chess was so easy for a machine? A series of upgrades helped Deep Blue outright win a match against Kasparov in 1997 (seen in the photo above). After the win Deep Blue was retired and disassembled. Parts of Deep Blue are housed in the National Museum of History and the Computer History Museum. Birth of Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most prolific inventors in history and holds an astounding 1,093 US Patents. He is responsible for outright inventing or greatly refining major innovations in the history of world culture including the phonograph, the movie camera, the carbon microphone used in nearly every telephone well into the 1980s, batteries for electric cars (a notion we’d take over a century to take seriously), voting machines, and of course his enormous contribution to electric distribution systems. Despite the role of scientist and inventor being largely unglamorous, Thomas Edison and his tumultuous relationship with fellow inventor Nikola Tesla have been fodder for everything from books, to comics, to movies, and video games. Other Notable Moments from This Week in Geek History Although we only shine the spotlight on three interesting facts a week in our Geek History column, that doesn’t mean we don’t have space to highlight a few more in passing. This week in Geek History: 1971 – Apollo 14 returns to Earth after third Lunar mission. 1974 – Birth of Robot Chicken creator Seth Green. 1986 – Death of Dune creator Frank Herbert. Goodnight Dune. 1997 – Simpsons becomes longest running animated show on television. Have an interesting bit of geek trivia to share? Shoot us an email to [email protected] with “history” in the subject line and we’ll be sure to add it to our list of trivia. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines RGB? CMYK? Alpha? What Are Image Channels and What Do They Mean? Clean Up Google Calendar’s Interface in Chrome and Iron The Rise and Fall of Kramerica? [Seinfeld Video] GNOME Shell 3 Live CDs for OpenSUSE and Fedora Available for Testing Picplz Offers Special FX, Sharing, and Backup of Your Smartphone Pics BUILD! An Epic LEGO Stop Motion Film [VIDEO] The Lingering Glow of Sunset over a Winter Landscape Wallpaper

  Read the article

• Metro, Authentication, and the ASP.NET Web API

  - by Stephen.Walther

  Imagine that you want to create a Metro style app written with JavaScript and you want to communicate with a remote web service. For example, you are creating a movie app which retrieves a list of movies from a movies service. In this situation, how do you authenticate your Metro app and the Metro user so not just anyone can call the movies service? How can you identify the user making the request so you can return user specific data from the service? The Windows Live SDK supports a feature named Single Sign-On. When a user logs into a Windows 8 machine using their Live ID, you can authenticate the user’s identity automatically. Even better, when the Metro app performs a call to a remote web service, you can pass an authentication token to the remote service and prevent unauthorized access to the service. The documentation for Single Sign-On is located here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826544.aspx In this blog entry, I describe the steps that you need to follow to use Single Sign-On with a (very) simple movie app. We build a Metro app which communicates with a web service created using the ASP.NET Web API. Creating the Visual Studio Solution Let’s start by creating a Visual Studio solution which contains two projects: a Windows Metro style Blank App project and an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application project. Name the Metro app MovieApp and the ASP.NET MVC application MovieApp.Services. When you create the ASP.NET MVC application, select the Web API template: After you create the two projects, your Visual Studio Solution Explorer window should look like this: Configuring the Live SDK You need to get your hands on the Live SDK and register your Metro app. You can download the latest version of the SDK (version 5.2) from the following address: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29938 After you download the Live SDK, you need to visit the following website to register your Metro app: https://manage.dev.live.com/build Don’t let the title of the website — Windows Push Notifications & Live Connect – confuse you, this is the right place. Follow the instructions at the website to register your Metro app. Don’t forget to follow the instructions in Step 3 for updating the information in your Metro app’s manifest. After you register, your client secret is displayed. Record this client secret because you will need it later (we use it with the web service): You need to configure one more thing. You must enter your Redirect Domain by visiting the following website: https://manage.dev.live.com/Applications/Index Click on your application name, click Edit Settings, click the API Settings tab, and enter a value for the Redirect Domain field. You can enter any domain that you please just as long as the domain has not already been taken: For the Redirect Domain, I entered http://superexpertmovieapp.com. Create the Metro MovieApp Next, we need to create the MovieApp. The MovieApp will: 1. Use Single Sign-On to log the current user into Live 2. Call the MoviesService web service 3. Display the results in a ListView control Because we use the Live SDK in the MovieApp, we need to add a reference to it. Right-click your References folder in the Solution Explorer window and add the reference: Here’s the HTML page for the Metro App: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title>MovieApp</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet" /> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- Live SDK --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/LiveSDKHTML/js/wl.js"></script> <!-- WebServices references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet" /> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> </head> <body> <div id="tmplMovie" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="movieItem"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> <br /><span data-win-bind="innerText:director"></span> </div> </div> <div id="lvMovies" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemTemplate: select('#tmplMovie') }"> </div> </body> </html> The HTML page above contains a Template and ListView control. These controls are used to display the movies when the movies are returned from the movies service. Notice that the page includes a reference to the Live script that we registered earlier: <!-- Live SDK --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/LiveSDKHTML/js/wl.js"></script> The JavaScript code looks like this: (function () { "use strict"; var REDIRECT_DOMAIN = "http://superexpertmovieapp.com"; var WEBSERVICE_URL = "http://localhost:49743/api/movies"; function init() { WinJS.UI.processAll().done(function () { // Get element and control references var lvMovies = document.getElementById("lvMovies").winControl; // Login to Windows Live var scopes = ["wl.signin"]; WL.init({ scope: scopes, redirect_uri: REDIRECT_DOMAIN }); WL.login().then( function(response) { // Get the authentication token var authenticationToken = response.session.authentication_token; // Call the web service var options = { url: WEBSERVICE_URL, headers: { authenticationToken: authenticationToken } }; WinJS.xhr(options).done( function (xhr) { var movies = JSON.parse(xhr.response); var listMovies = new WinJS.Binding.List(movies); lvMovies.itemDataSource = listMovies.dataSource; }, function (xhr) { console.log(xhr.statusText); } ); }, function(response) { throw WinJS.ErrorFromName("Failed to login!"); } ); }); } document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", init); })(); There are two constants which you need to set to get the code above to work: REDIRECT_DOMAIN and WEBSERVICE_URL. The REDIRECT_DOMAIN is the domain that you entered when registering your app with Live. The WEBSERVICE_URL is the path to your web service. You can get the correct value for WEBSERVICE_URL by opening the Project Properties for the MovieApp.Services project, clicking the Web tab, and getting the correct URL. The port number is randomly generated. In my code, I used the URL  “http://localhost:49743/api/movies”. Assuming that the user is logged into Windows 8 with a Live account, when the user runs the MovieApp, the user is logged into Live automatically. The user is logged in with the following code: // Login to Windows Live var scopes = ["wl.signin"]; WL.init({ scope: scopes, redirect_uri: REDIRECT_DOMAIN }); WL.login().then(function(response) { // Do something }); The scopes setting determines what the user has permission to do. For example, access the user’s SkyDrive or access the user’s calendar or contacts. The available scopes are listed here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh243646.aspx In our case, we only need the wl.signin scope which enables Single Sign-On. After the user signs in, you can retrieve the user’s Live authentication token. The authentication token is passed to the movies service to authenticate the user. Creating the Movies Service The Movies Service is implemented as an API controller in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web API project. Here’s what the MoviesController looks like: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Net; using System.Net.Http; using System.Web.Http; using JWTSample; using MovieApp.Services.Models; namespace MovieApp.Services.Controllers { public class MoviesController : ApiController { const string CLIENT_SECRET = "NtxjF2wu7JeY1unvVN-lb0hoeWOMUFoR"; // GET api/values public HttpResponseMessage Get() { // Authenticate // Get authenticationToken var authenticationToken = Request.Headers.GetValues("authenticationToken").FirstOrDefault(); if (authenticationToken == null) { return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized); } // Validate token var d = new Dictionary<int, string>(); d.Add(0, CLIENT_SECRET); try { var myJWT = new JsonWebToken(authenticationToken, d); } catch { return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized); } // Return results return Request.CreateResponse( HttpStatusCode.OK, new List<Movie> { new Movie {Title="Star Wars", Director="Lucas"}, new Movie {Title="King Kong", Director="Jackson"}, new Movie {Title="Memento", Director="Nolan"} } ); } } } Because the Metro app performs an HTTP GET request, the MovieController Get() action is invoked. This action returns a set of three movies when, and only when, the authentication token is validated. The Movie class looks like this: using Newtonsoft.Json; namespace MovieApp.Services.Models { public class Movie { [JsonProperty(PropertyName="title")] public string Title { get; set; } [JsonProperty(PropertyName="director")] public string Director { get; set; } } } Notice that the Movie class uses the JsonProperty attribute to change Title to title and Director to director to make JavaScript developers happy. The Get() method validates the authentication token before returning the movies to the Metro app. To get authentication to work, you need to provide the client secret which you created at the Live management site. If you forgot to write down the secret, you can get it again here: https://manage.dev.live.com/Applications/Index The client secret is assigned to a constant at the top of the MoviesController class. The MoviesController class uses a helper class named JsonWebToken to validate the authentication token. This class was created by the Windows Live team. You can get the source code for the JsonWebToken class from the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/liveservices/LiveSDK/blob/master/Samples/Asp.net/AuthenticationTokenSample/JsonWebToken.cs You need to add an additional reference to your MVC project to use the JsonWebToken class: System.Runtime.Serialization. You can use the JsonWebToken class to get a unique and validated user ID like this: var user = myJWT.Claims.UserId; If you need to store user specific information then you can use the UserId property to uniquely identify the user making the web service call. Running the MovieApp When you first run the Metro MovieApp, you get a screen which asks whether the app should have permission to use Single Sign-On. This screen never appears again after you give permission once. Actually, when I first ran the app, I get the following error: According to the error, the app is blocked because “We detected some suspicious activity with your Online Id account. To help protect you, we’ve temporarily blocked your account.” This appears to be a bug in the current preview release of the Live SDK and there is more information about this bug here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/messengerconnect/thread/866c495f-2127-429d-ab07-842ef84f16ae/ If you click continue, and continue running the app, the error message does not appear again.  Summary The goal of this blog entry was to describe how you can validate Metro apps and Metro users when performing a call to a remote web service. First, I explained how you can create a Metro app which takes advantage of Single Sign-On to authenticate the current user against Live automatically. You learned how to register your Metro app with Live and how to include an authentication token in an Ajax call. Next, I explained how you can validate the authentication token – retrieved from the request header – in a web service. I discussed how you can use the JsonWebToken class to validate the authentication token and retrieve the unique user ID.

  Read the article

• Collation errors in business

  - by Rob Farley

  At the PASS Summit last month, I did a set (Lightning Talk) about collation, and in particular, the difference between the “English” spoken by people from the US, Australia and the UK. One of the examples I gave was that in the US drivers might stop for gas, whereas in Australia, they just open the window a little. This is what’s known as a paraprosdokian, where you suddenly realise you misunderstood the first part of the sentence, based on what was said in the second. My current favourite is Emo Phillip’s line “I like to play chess with old men in the park, but it can be hard to find thirty-two of them.” Essentially, this a collation error, one that good comedians can get mileage from. Unfortunately, collation is at its worst when we have a computer comparing two things in different collations. They might look the same, and sound the same, but if one of the things is in SQL English, and the other one is in Windows English, the poor database server (with no sense of humour) will get suspicious of developers (who all have senses of humour, obviously), and declare a collation error, worried that it might not realise some nuance of the language. One example is the common scenario of a case-sensitive collation and a case-insensitive one. One may think that “Rob” and “rob” are the same, but the other might not. Clearly one of them is my name, and the other is a verb which means to steal (people called “Nick” have the same problem, of course), but I have no idea whether “Rob” and “rob” should be considered the same or not – it depends on the collation. I told a lie before – collation isn’t at its worst in the computer world, because the computer has the sense to complain about the collation issue. People don’t. People will say something, with their own understanding of what they mean. Other people will listen, and apply their own collation to it. I remember when someone was asking me about a situation which had annoyed me. They asked if I was ‘pissed’, and I said yes. I meant that I was annoyed, but they were asking if I’d been drinking. It took a moment for us to realise the misunderstanding. In business, the problem is escalated. A business user may explain something in a particular way, using terminology that they understand, but using words that mean something else to a technical person. I remember a situation with a checkbox on a form (back in VB6 days from memory). It was used to indicate that something was approved, and indicated whether a particular database field should store True or False – nothing more. However, the client understood it to mean that an entire workflow system would be implemented, with different users have permission to approve items and more. The project manager I’d just taken over from clearly hadn’t appreciated that, and I faced a situation of explaining the misunderstanding to the client. Lots of fun... Collation errors aren’t just a database setting that you can ignore. You need to remember that Americans speak a different type of English to Aussies and Poms, and techies speak a different language to their clients.

  Read the article

• Calling Web Services in classic ASP

  - by cabhilash

    Last day my colleague asked me the provide her a solution to call the Web service from classic ASP. (Yes Classic ASP. still people are using this :D ) We can call web service SOAP toolkit also. But invoking the service using the XMLHTTP object was more easier & fast. To create the Service I used the normal Web Service in .Net 2.0 with [Webmethod] public class WebService1 : System.Web.Services.WebService { [WebMethod] public string HelloWorld(string name){return name + " Pay my dues :) "; // a reminder to pay my consultation fee :D} } In Web.config add the following entry in System.web<webServices><protocols><add name="HttpGet"/><add name="HttpPost"/></protocols></webServices> Alternatively, you can enable these protocols for all Web services on the computer by editing the <protocols> section in Machine.config. The following example enables HTTP GET, HTTP POST, and also SOAP and HTTP POST from localhost: <protocols> <add name="HttpSoap"/> <add name="HttpPost"/> <add name="HttpGet"/> <add name="HttpPostLocalhost"/> <!-- Documentation enables the documentation/test pages --> <add name="Documentation"/> </protocols> By adding these entries I am enabling the HTTPGET & HTTPPOST (After .Net 1.1 by default HTTPGET & HTTPPOST is disabled because of security concerns)The .NET Framework 1.1 defines a new protocol that is named HttpPostLocalhost. By default, this new protocol is enabled. This protocol permits invoking Web services that use HTTP POST requests from applications on the same computer. This is true provided the POST URL uses http://localhost, not http://hostname. This permits Web service developers to use the HTML-based test form to invoke the Web service from the same computer where the Web service resides. Classic ASP Code to call Web service <%Option Explicit Dim objRequest, objXMLDoc, objXmlNode Dim strRet, strError, strNome Dim strName strName= "deepa" Set objRequest = Server.createobject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP") With objRequest .open "GET", "http://localhost:3106/WebService1.asmx/HelloWorld?name=" & strName, False .setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "text/xml" .setRequestHeader "SOAPAction", "http://localhost:3106/WebService1.asmx/HelloWorld" .send End With Set objXMLDoc = Server.createobject("MSXML2.DOMDocument") objXmlDoc.async = false Response.ContentType = "text/xml" Response.Write(objRequest.ResponseText) %> In Line 6 I created an MSXML XMLHTTP object. Line 9 Using the HTTPGET protocol I am openinig connection to WebService Line 10:11 – setting the Header for the service In line 15, I am getting the output from the webservice in XML Doc format & reading the responseText(line 18). In line 9 if you observe I am passing the parameter strName to the Webservice You can pass multiple parameters to the Web service by just like any other QueryString Parameters. In similar fashion you can invoke the Web service using HTTPPost. Only you have to ensure that the form contains all th required parameters for webmethod.  Happy coding !!!!!!!

  Read the article

• Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Simon Ritter

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Oracle’s Java Technology Evangelist Simon Ritter is well known at JavaOne for his quirky and fun-loving sessions, which, this year include: CON4644 -- “JavaFX Extreme GUI Makeover” (with Angela Caicedo on how to improve UIs in JavaFX) CON5352 -- “Building JavaFX Interfaces for the Real World” (Kinect gesture tracking and mind reading) CON5348 -- “Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert?” (Some cool demos of Java of the Raspberry Pi) CON6375 -- “Custom JavaFX Charts: (How to extend JavaFX Chart controls with some interesting things) I recently asked Ritter about the significance of the Raspberry Pi, the topic of one of his sessions that consists of a credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. “I don't think there's one definitive thing that makes the RP significant,” observed Ritter, “but a combination of things that really makes it stand out. First, it's the cost: $35 for what is effectively a completely usable computer. OK, so you have to add a power supply, SD card for storage and maybe a screen, keyboard and mouse, but this is still way cheaper than a typical PC. The choice of an ARM processor is also significant, as it avoids problems like cooling (no heat sink or fan) and can use a USB power brick.  Combine these two things with the immense groundswell of community support and it provides a fantastic platform for teaching young and old alike about computing, which is the real goal of the project.”He informed me that he’ll be at the Raspberry Pi meetup on Saturday (not part of JavaOne). Check out the details here.JavaFX InterfacesWhen I asked about how JavaFX can interface with the real world, he said that there are many ways. “JavaFX provides you with a simple set of programming interfaces that can create complex, cool and compelling user interfaces,” explained Ritter. “Because it's just Java code you can combine JavaFX with any other Java library to provide data to display and control the interface. What I've done for my session is look at some of the possible ways of doing this using some of the amazing hardware that's available today at very low cost. The Kinect sensor has added a new dimension to gaming in terms of interaction; there's a Java API to access this so you can easily collect skeleton tracking data from it. Some clever people have also written libraries that can track gestures like swipes, circles, pushes, and so on. We use these to control parts of the UI. I've also experimented with a Neurosky EEG sensor that can in some ways ‘read your mind’ (well, at least measure some of the brain functions like attention and meditation).  I've written a Java library for this that I include as a way of controlling the UI. We're not quite at the stage of just thinking a command though!” Here Comes Java EmbeddedAnd what, from Ritter’s perspective, is the most exciting thing happening in the world of Java today? “I think it's seeing just how Java continues to become more and more pervasive,” he said. “One of the areas that is growing rapidly is embedded systems.  We've talked about the ‘Internet of things’ for many years; now it's finally becoming a reality. With the ability of more and more devices to include processing, storage and networking we need an easy way to write code for them that's reliable, has high performance, and is secure. Java fits all these requirements. With Java Embedded being a conference within a conference, I'm very excited about the possibilities of Java in this space.”Check out Ritter’s sessions or say hi if you run into him. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

  Read the article

• Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Simon Ritter

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Oracle’s Java Technology Evangelist Simon Ritter is well known at JavaOne for his quirky and fun-loving sessions, which, this year include: CON4644 -- “JavaFX Extreme GUI Makeover” (with Angela Caicedo on how to improve UIs in JavaFX) CON5352 -- “Building JavaFX Interfaces for the Real World” (Kinect gesture tracking and mind reading) CON5348 -- “Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert?” (Some cool demos of Java of the Raspberry Pi) CON6375 -- “Custom JavaFX Charts: (How to extend JavaFX Chart controls with some interesting things) I recently asked Ritter about the significance of the Raspberry Pi, the topic of one of his sessions that consists of a credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. “I don't think there's one definitive thing that makes the RP significant,” observed Ritter, “but a combination of things that really makes it stand out. First, it's the cost: $35 for what is effectively a completely usable computer. OK, so you have to add a power supply, SD card for storage and maybe a screen, keyboard and mouse, but this is still way cheaper than a typical PC. The choice of an ARM processor is also significant, as it avoids problems like cooling (no heat sink or fan) and can use a USB power brick.  Combine these two things with the immense groundswell of community support and it provides a fantastic platform for teaching young and old alike about computing, which is the real goal of the project.”He informed me that he’ll be at the Raspberry Pi meetup on Saturday (not part of JavaOne). Check out the details here.JavaFX InterfacesWhen I asked about how JavaFX can interface with the real world, he said that there are many ways. “JavaFX provides you with a simple set of programming interfaces that can create complex, cool and compelling user interfaces,” explained Ritter. “Because it's just Java code you can combine JavaFX with any other Java library to provide data to display and control the interface. What I've done for my session is look at some of the possible ways of doing this using some of the amazing hardware that's available today at very low cost. The Kinect sensor has added a new dimension to gaming in terms of interaction; there's a Java API to access this so you can easily collect skeleton tracking data from it. Some clever people have also written libraries that can track gestures like swipes, circles, pushes, and so on. We use these to control parts of the UI. I've also experimented with a Neurosky EEG sensor that can in some ways ‘read your mind’ (well, at least measure some of the brain functions like attention and meditation).  I've written a Java library for this that I include as a way of controlling the UI. We're not quite at the stage of just thinking a command though!” Here Comes Java EmbeddedAnd what, from Ritter’s perspective, is the most exciting thing happening in the world of Java today? “I think it's seeing just how Java continues to become more and more pervasive,” he said. “One of the areas that is growing rapidly is embedded systems.  We've talked about the ‘Internet of things’ for many years; now it's finally becoming a reality. With the ability of more and more devices to include processing, storage and networking we need an easy way to write code for them that's reliable, has high performance, and is secure. Java fits all these requirements. With Java Embedded being a conference within a conference, I'm very excited about the possibilities of Java in this space.”Check out Ritter’s sessions or say hi if you run into him.

  Read the article

• help: cannot make ubuntu 64-bit v12.04 install work

  - by honestann

  I decided it was time to update my ubuntu (single boot) computer from 64-bit v10.04 to 64-bit v12.04. Unfortunately, for some reason (or reasons) I just can't make it work. Note that I am attempting a fresh install of 64-bit v12.04 onto a new 3TB hard disk, not an upgrade of the 1TB hard disk that has contained my 64-bit v10.04 installation. To perform the attempted install of v12.04 I unplug the SATA cable from the 1TB drive and plug it into the 3TB drive (to avoid risking damage to my working v10.04 installation). I downloaded the ubuntu 64-bit v12.04 install DVD ISO file (~1.6 GB) from the ubuntu releases webpage and burned it onto a DVD. I have downloaded the DVD ISO file 3 times and burned 3 of these installation DVDs (twice with v10.04 and once with my winxp64 system), but none of them work. I run the "check disk" on the DVDs at the beginning of the installation process to assure the DVD is valid. I also tried to install on two older 250GB seagate drives in the same computer. During every attempt I plug the same SATA cable (sda) into only one disk drive (the 3TB or one of the 250GB drives) and leave the other disk drives unconnected (for simplicity). Installation takes about 30 minutes on the 250GB drives, and about 60 minutes on the 3TB drive - not sure why. When I install on the 250GB drives, the install process finishes, the computer reboots (after the install DVD is removed), but I get a grub error 15. It is my understanding that 64-bit ubuntu (and 64-bit linux in general) has no problem with 3TB disk drives. In the BIOS I have tried having EFI set to "enabled" and "auto" with no apparent difference (no success). I have tried partitioning the drive in a few ways to see if that makes a difference, but so far it has not mattered. Typically I manually create partitions something like this: 8GB swap 8GB /boot ext4 3TB / ext4 But I've also tried the following, just in case it matters: 100MB boot efi 8GB swap 8GB /boot ext4 3TB / ext4 Note: In the partition dialog I specify bootup on the same drive I am partitioning and installing ubuntu v12.04 onto. It is a VERY DANGEROUS FACT that the default for this always comes up with the wrong drive (some other drive, generally the external drive). Unless I'm stupid or misunderstanding something, this is very wrong and very dangerous default behavior. Note: If I connect the SATA cable to the 1TB drive that has been my ubuntu 64-bit v10.04 system drive for the past 2 years, it boots up and runs fine. I guess there must be a log file somewhere, and maybe it gives some hints as to what the problem is. I should be able to boot off the 1TB drive with the 3TB drive connected as a secondary (non-boot) drive and get the log file, assuming there is one and someone tells me the name (and where to find it if the name is very generic). After installation on the 3TB drive completes and the system reboots, the following prints out on a black screen: Loading Operating System ... Boot from CD/DVD : Boot from CD/DVD : error: unknown filesystem grub rescue Note: I have two DVD burners in the system, hence the duplicate line above. The same install and reboot on the 250GB drives generates "grub error 15". Sigh. Any ideas? ========== motherboard == gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 CPU == AMD FX-8150 8-core bulldozer @ 3.6 GHz RAM == 8GB of DDR3 in 2 sticks (matched pair) HDD == seagate 3TB SATA3 @ 7200 rpm (new install 64-bit v12.04) HDD == seagate 1TB SATA3 @ 7200 rpm (current install 64-bit v10.04) GPU == nvidia GTX-285 ??? == no overclocking or other funky business USB == external seagate 2TB HDD for making backups DVD == one bluray burner (SATA) DVD == one DVD burner (SATA) The current ubuntu 64-bit v10.04 system boots and runs fine on a seagate 1TB.

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Why Do We Need Data Quality Services – Importance and Significance of Data Quality Services (DQS)

  - by pinaldave

  Databases are awesome.  I’m sure my readers know my opinion about this – I have made SQL Server my life’s work after all!  I love technology and all things computer-related.  Of course, even with my love for technology, I have to admit that it has its limits.  For example, it takes a human brain to notice that data has been input incorrectly.  Computer “brains” might be faster than humans, but human brains are still better at pattern recognition.  For example, a human brain will notice that “300” is a ridiculous age for a human to be, but to a computer it is just a number.  A human will also notice similarities between “P. Dave” and “Pinal Dave,” but this would stump most computers. In a database, these sorts of anomalies are incredibly important.  Databases are often used by multiple people who rely on this data to be true and accurate, so data quality is key.  That is why the improved SQL Server features Master Data Management talks about Data Quality Services.  This service has the ability to recognize and flag anomalies like out of range numbers and similarities between data.  This allows a human brain with its pattern recognition abilities to double-check and ensure that P. Dave is the same as Pinal Dave. A nice feature of Data Quality Services is that once you set the rules for the program to follow, it will not only keep your data organized in the future, but go to the past and “fix up” any data that has already been entered.  It also allows you do combine data from multiple places and it will apply these rules across the board, so that you don’t have any weird issues that crop up when trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. There are two parts of Data Quality Services that help you accomplish all these neat things.  The first part is DQL Server, which you can think of as the hardware component of the system.  It is installed on the side of (it needs to install separately after SQL Server is installed) SQL Server and runs quietly in the background, performing all its cleanup services. DQS Client is the user interface that you can interact with to set the rules and check over your data.  There are three main aspects of Client: knowledge base management, data quality projects and administration.  Knowledge base management is the part of the system that allows you to set the rules, or program the “knowledge base,” so that your database is clean and consistent. Data Quality projects are what run in the background and clean up the data that is already present.  The administration allows you to check out what DQS Client is doing, change rules, and generally oversee the entire process.  The whole process is user-friendly and a pleasure to use.  I highly recommend implementing Data Quality Services in your database. Here are few of my blog posts which are related to Data Quality Services and I encourage you to try this out. SQL SERVER – Installing Data Quality Services (DQS) on SQL Server 2012 SQL SERVER – Step by Step Guide to Beginning Data Quality Services in SQL Server 2012 – Introduction to DQS SQL SERVER – DQS Error – Cannot connect to server – A .NET Framework error occurred during execution of user-defined routine or aggregate “SetDataQualitySessions” – SetDataQualitySessionPhaseTwo SQL SERVER – Configuring Interactive Cleansing Suggestion Min Score for Suggestions in Data Quality Services (DQS) – Sensitivity of Suggestion SQL SERVER – Unable to DELETE Project in Data Quality Projects (DQS) Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Data Quality Services, DQS

  Read the article

• Brainless Backups

  - by Jesse

  I’m a software developer by trade which means to my friends and family I’m just a “computer guy”. It’s assumed that I know everything about every facet of computing from removing spyware to replacing hardware. I also can do all of this blindly over the phone or after hearing a five to ten word description of the problem over dinner ;-) In my position as CIO of my friends and families I’ve been in the unfortunate position of trying to recover music, pictures, or documents off of failed hard drives on more than one occasion. It’s not a great situation for anyone, and it’s always at these times that the importance of backups becomes so clear. Several months back a friend of mine found himself in this situation. The hard drive on his 8 year old laptop failed and took a good number of his digital photos with it. I think most folks can deal with losing some of their music and even some of their documents, but it really stings to lose pictures of past events and loved ones. After ordering a new laptop, my friend went out and bought an external hard drive so that he could start keeping a backup of his data. As fate would have it, several months later the drive in his new laptop failed and he learned the hard way that simply buying the external hard drive isn’t enough… you actually have to copy your stuff over every once in awhile! The importance of backup and recovery plans is (hopefully) well known in IT organizations. Well executed backup plans are in place, and hopefully the backup and recovery process is tested regularly. When you’re talking about users at home, however, the need for these backups is often understood far too late. Most typical users can’t be expected to remember to backup their data regularly and also don’t always have the know-how to setup automated backups. For my friends and family members in this situation I recommend tools like Dropbox, Carbonite, and Mozy. Here’s why I like them: They’re affordable: Dropbox and Mozy both have free offerings, though most people with lots of music and/or photos to backup will probably exceed the storage limitations of those free plans pretty quickly. Still, all three offer pretty affordable monthly or yearly plans. In my opinion, Carbonite’s unlimited storage plan for $50-$60 per year is the best value around. They’re easy to setup: Both Dropbox and Carbonite are very easy to get setup and start using. I’ve never used Mozy, but I imagine it’s similarly painless to get up and running. Backups are automatically “off-site”: A backup that is sitting on an external hard drive right next to your computer is great, but might not protect against flood damage, a power surge, or other disasters in that single location. These services exist “in the cloud” so to speak, helping mitigate those concerns. Granted, this kind of backup scheme requires some trust in the 3rd party to protect your data from both malicious people and disastrous events. This truly is a bit of a double edged sword, but I sleep well at night knowing that my data is being backed up and secured by a company made up of engineers that focus on the business of doing backups right. Backups are “brainless”: What I like most about services like these is that they work “automagically” in the background, watching for files to be updated and automatically backing up those changes. There’s no need to remember to plug in that external drive and copy your data over. Since starting to recommend these services to my friends and family I find myself wearing my “data recovery” hat far less often. The only way backups are effective for your standard computer user is if they’re completely automatic. Backups need to be brainless, or they just won’t work.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 05, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 05, 2012Popular ReleasesConfiguration Manager 2012 Automation: Beta Code (v0.1): Beta codefastJSON: v2.0.7: 2.0.7 - bug fix missing comma with single property and extension enabledWinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.2: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...Snoop, the WPF Spy Utility: Snoop 2.8.0: Snoop 2.8.0Announcing Snoop 2.8.0! It's been exactly six months since the last release, and this one has a bunch of goodies in it. In particular, there is now a PowerShell scripting tab, compliments of Bailey Ling. With this tab, the possibilities are limitless. It basically lets you automate/script the application that you are Snooping. Bailey has a couple blog posts (one and two) on his tab already, and I am sure more is to come. Please note that if you do not have PowerShell installed, y....NET Micro Framework: .NET MF 4.3 (Beta): This is the 4.3 Beta version of the .NET Micro Framework. Feature List for v4.3 Support for Visual Studio 2012 (including the Windows Desktop Express version) All v4.2 QFEs features and bug fixes (PWM enhancements, lwIP and network driver reliability improvements, Analog Output, WinUSB and latest GCC support) Improved diagnostic information for deployment Decreased boot time Bug fixes Work Item 1736 - Create link for MFDeploy under start menu Work Item 1504 - Customizing lwIP o...MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.1: 2.3.1All new Remote Client Server architecture. Reccomended Download. The Remote Client Installation is OPTIONAL, you can extract the files from the zip archive into a local folder and run MCEBuddy.GUI directly. 2.2.15 was the last standalone release. Changelog for 2.3.1 (32bit and 64bit) 1. All remote MCEBuddy Client Server architecture (GUI runs remotely/independently from engine now) 2. Fixed bug in Audio Offset 3. Added support for remote MediaInfo (right click on file in queue to get ...D3 Loot Tracker: 1.5: Support for session upload to website. Support for theme change through general settings. Time played counter will now also display a count for days. Tome of secrets are no longer logged as items.NTCPMSG: V1.2.0.0: Allocate an identify cableid for each single connection cable. * Server can asend to specified cableid directly.Team Foundation Server Word Add-in: Version 1.0.12.0622: Welcome to the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Word Add-in Supported Environments Microsoft Office Word 2007 and 2010 X86 (32-bit) Team Foundation Server 2010 Object Model TFS 2010, 2012 and TFS Service supported, using TFS OM / Explorer 2010. Quality-Bar Details Tool has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Tool has been through an independent technical and quality review All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issues / Bugs WI#43553 - The Acceptance criteria is not pu...Korean String Extension for .NET: ?? ??? ??? ????(v0.2.3.0): ? ?? ?? ?? ???? - string.KExtract() ?? ???? - string.AppendJosa(...) AppendJosa(...)? ?? ???? KAppendJosa(...)? ??? ?????UMD????? - PC?: UMDEditor?????V2.7: ??：http://jianyun.org/archives/948.html =============================================================================== UMD??? ???? =============================================================================== 2.7.0 (2012-10-3) ???????“UMD???.exe”??“UMDEditor.exe” ?????????；????????，??????。??????，????！ ??64????，??????????????bug ?????????????，???? ???????????????? ???????????????，??????????bug ------------------------------------------------------- ?? reg.bat ????????????。 ????，??????txt/u...SharePoint Column & View Permission: SharePoint Column and View Permission v1.5: Version 1.5 of this project. If you will find any bugs please let me know at enti@zoznam.sk or post your findings in Issue TrackerUntangler: Untangler 1.0.0: Add a missing file from first releaseDirectX Tool Kit: October 2012: October 2, 2012 Added ScreenGrab module Added CreateGeoSphere for drawing a geodesic sphere Put DDSTextureLoader and WICTextureLoader into the DirectX C++ namespace Renamed project files for better naming consistency Updated WICTextureLoader for Windows 8 96bpp floating-point formats Win32 desktop projects updated to use Windows Vista (0x0600) rather than Windows 7 (0x0601) APIs Tweaked SpriteBatch.cpp to workaround ARM NEON compiler codegen bugHome Access Plus+: v8.1: HAP+ Web v8.1.1003.000079318 Fixed: Issue with the Help Desk and updating a ticket as an admin 79319 Fixed: formatting issue with the booking system admin header 79321 Moved to using the arrow with a circle symbol on the homepage instead of the > and < 79541 Added: 480px wide mobile theme to login page 79541 Added: 480px wide mobile theme to home page 79541 Added: slide events for homepage 79553 Fixed: Booking System Multiple Lesson Bug 79553 Fixed: IE Error Message 79684 Fixed: jQuery issue ...CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.3.1002.3): Visual Ribbon Editor 1.3.1002.3 What's New: Multi-language support for Labels/Tooltips for custom buttons and groups Support for base language other than English (1033) Connect dialog will not require organization name for ADFS / IFD connections Automatic creation of missing labels for all provisioned languages Minor connection issues fixed Notes: Before saving the ribbon to CRM server, editor will check Ribbon XML for any missing <Title> elements inside existing <LocLabel> elements...SubExtractor: Release 1029: Feature: Added option to make i and ¡ characters movie-specific for improved OCR on Spanish subs (Special Characters tab in Options) Feature: Allow switch to Word Spacing dialog directly from Spell Check dialog Fix: Added more default word spacings for accented characters Fix: Changed Word Spacing dialog to show all OCR'd characters in current sub Fix: Removed application focus grab during OCR Fix: Tightened HD subs fuzzy logic to reduce false matches in small characters Fix: Improved Arrow k...WallSwitch: WallSwitch 1.0.6: Version 1.0.6 Changes: Added hotkeys to perform a variety of operations (next/previous image, pause, clear history, etc.) Added color effects for grayscale, sepia and intense color. Various fixes.Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.1: See the KeePass Plugin Step By Step Guide for instructions on how to install the plugin. Changes Built against KeePass 2.20Windows 8 Toolkit - Charts and More: Beta 1.0: The First Compiled Version of my LibraryNew Projects3DGL: Bot de liga con comandos basicos para un pvpgn, necesita ser refactorizado y pasado en limpio pero esta totalmente funcional. Actualmente se usa OmbuServerADCMS: oneAptech.eProject.Batch59B - Online Book Store: eProject of Batch59B (SOFTECH - APTECH)AutoconsultaUB: this is a testAzure Active Directory Expense Demo Application: This application has been written to provide you with a quick and easy way to set up your first application that connects seamlessly to Azure Active DirectoryCentral: This a WPF project that implements PRISM with MEF as the IoC. This is an IDE with a modern UI where developers can run and centralize all their different apps.DataWay Connectors: ?????????? DataWay ??? ?????????? ?????????? ??? ????????? DataWay, ?????????? ?? ?????????????? ? ?????????? ??????-????????DLock - Open source distributed lock: DLock is a open source project based on .net framework that can provide the distributed lock. DoubleKeyDictionary: Project is just a single file, tests to be added as we go.Embedded Excel OLE Orphan Preventer: Prevents orphaned instances of embedded Excel workbooks from handing around even after the parent container document has been closed.File Duplicate Utility: This project will quickly detect duplicate files in a directory, then allow some minimal post processing on those duplicate files (i.e. move them to a new dir).Geoprocessing: A set of tools for processing Sea ice concentrations Google oAuth2 Service Account .NET: Google oAuth2 Service Account .NETHelperStart: NotingiDeal: C# library for connecting with iDealJCI-System: This project doesn't have a summaryLayoutting a long string: Takes a long string and splits it according a displacing enum layoutMicrosoft Dynamics CRM VB.Net SoapLogger: The VB.NET SoapLogger for VB.NET makes it easy to see what the SOAP looks like behind a Dynamics CRM 2011 call. Similiary to the C# version included in the SDKMinecraftRepository: Minecraft data repositoryModBUSLib.NET: TestMood Tracker - Decisions: A application to help you track your mood changes.Relying Party Federation Metadata Editor: This is a federation metadata editor for relying party trust applications. RPs can be created on any platform (as long as it's based on the oasis standart).Rest MVC: Personal project to play around with MVC APISharepoint 2010 Image carousel Sandboxed: This is a Image Slider Sandboxed solution web part for SharePoint 2010. Hope this helps. Cheers!Synapse - Micro Framework for: IoCC, AoP, Messages, Pipe and Filter Pattern: Micro Framework for: Inversion of Control Container, Aspect oriented Programming, Messages Pattern, Pipe and Filter Pattern.testdd10042012tfs01: b testnewgit1004201201: cWikimentation: A very simple Wiki to integrate in existing Asp.Net MVC4-Sites, implemented as an Area. Use it for a simple OnePage-Project-Documentation.Windows 8 AppBox: Este aplicativo vai ajuda-los a começar a desenvolver Aplicativos para a Windows 8 Store, comece desenvolvendo uma App simples, baseada somente em conteúdo :)Windows Phone Stateful Framework: A framework to correctly implement the Windows Phone tombstoned state.

  Read the article

• Motorola Droid App Recommendations

  - by Brian Jackett

  Just as a disclaimer, the views and opinions expressed in this post are solely my own and I’m not getting paid or compensated for anything.     Ok, so I’m one of the crazy few who went out and bought a Droid the week it was released a few months back.  The Motorola Droid was a MAJOR upgrade in phone capabilities for me as my previous phone had no GPS, no web access, limited apps, etc.  I now use my Droid for so much of my life from work to personal to community based events.  Since I’ve been using my Droid for awhile, a number of friends (@toddklindt, @spmcdonough, @jfroushiii, and many more) who later got a Droid asked me which apps I recommended.  While there are a few sites on the web listing out useful Android apps, here’s my quick list (with a few updates since first put together.) Note: * denotes a highly recommended app     Android App Recommendations for Motorola Droid (Updated after 2.1 update) RemoteDroid – install a thin client on another computer and Droid becomes mouse pad / keyboard, control computer remotely PdaNet – free version allows tethering (only to HTTP, no HTTPS) without paying extra monthly charge.  A paid version allows HTTPS access. SportsTap – keep track of about a dozen sports, favorite teams, etc *Movies – setup favorite theaters, find movie times, buy tickets, etc WeatherBug elite – paid app, but gives weather alerts, 4 day forecast, etc.  Free version also exists.  (Update: Android 2.1 offers free weather app, but I still prefer WeatherBug.) *Advanced Task Killer – manually free up memory and kill apps not needed Google Voice – have to have a Google Voice account to really use, but allows visual voice mail, sending calls to specific phones, and too many other things to list AndroZip – access your phone memory like a file system Twidroid – best Twitter client I’ve found so far, but personal preference varies.  I’m using free version and suits me just fine. Skype (beta) – I only use this to send chat messages, not sure how/if phone calls works on this. (Update: Skype Mobile app just released, but uninstalled after few days as it kept launching in background and using up memory when not wanted.) *NewsRob – RSS reader syncs to Google Reader.  I use this multiple times a day, excellent app. (Update: this app does ask for your Google username and password, so security minded folks be cautioned.) ConnectBot – don’t use often myself, but allows SSH into remote computer.  Great if you have a need for remote manage server. Speed Test – same as the online website, allows finding upload/download speeds. WiFinder – store wifi preferences and find wifi spots in area. TagReader – simple Microsoft Tag Reader, works great. *Google Listen – audible podcast catcher that allows putting items into a queue, sync with Google Reader RSS, etc. I personally love this app which has now replaced the iPod I used to use in my car, but have heard mixed reviews from others. Robo Defense – (paid app) tower defense game but with RPG elements to upgrade towers over lifetime playing. I’ve never played FieldRunners but I’m told very similar in offering. Nice distraction when in airport or have some time to burn. Phit Droid 3rd Edition – drag and drop block shapes into a rectangle box, simple game to pass the time with literally 1000s of levels. Note this game has been updated dozens of times with numerous editions so unsure exactly which are still on the market. Google Sky Map – impress your friends by holding Droid up to sky and viewing constellations using Droid screen. wootCheck Lite – check up on daily offerings on Woot.com and affiliated wine, sellout, shirt, and kids sites.   Side notes: I’ve seen that Glympse and TripIt have recently come out with Android apps.  I’ve installed but haven’t gotten to use either yet, but I hear good things.  Will try out on 2 upcoming trips in May and update with impressions.         -Frog Out   Image linked from http://images.tolmol.com/images/grpimages/200910191814100_motorola-droid.gif

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 14, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 14, 2011Popular ReleasesWeapsy: 0.4.1 Alpha: Edit Text bug fixedDesktop Google Reader: 1.4.2: This release remove the like and the broadcast buttons as Google Reader stopped supporting them (no, we don't like this decission...) Additionally and to have at least a small plus: the login window now automaitcally logs you in if you stored username and passwort (no more extra click needed) Finally added WebKit .NET to the about window and removed AwesomiumZombsquare: Solución inicial: Código fuente de la solución. Versión 7099 Tambien puedes descargar de aquí los snippets de código que utilizamos en la demostración.RDRemote: Remote Desktop remote configurator V 1.0.0: Remote Desktop remote configurator V 1.0.0SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQLMon 4.1 alpha1: 1. improved version compare, now support comparing two text files. right click on object script text box and choose "Compare" or create new query window and right click and choose "Compare" 2. improved version compare, now automatically sync two text boxes. 3. fixed problem with activities (process/job) when refreshing while current activities have less count than previous one. 4. better start up by automatically shows create connection window when there is no connection defined.Rawr: Rawr 4.2.7: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...VidCoder: 1.2.2: Updated Handbrake core to svn 4344. Fixed the 6-channel discrete mixdown option not appearing for AAC encoders. Added handling for possible exceptions when copying to the clipboard, added retries and message when it fails. Fixed issue with audio bitrate UI not appearing sometimes when switching audio encoders. Added extra checks to protect against reported crashes. Added code to upgrade encoding profiles on old queued items.Dynamic PagedCollection (Silverlight / WPF Pagination): PagedCollection: All classes which facilitate your dynamic pagination in Silverlight or WPF !Media Companion: MC 3.422b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) TV Show Resolutions... Made the TV Shows folder list sorted. Re-visibled 'Manually Add Path' in Root Folders. Sorted list to process during new tv episode search Rebuild Movies now processes thru folders alphabetically Fix for issue #208 - Display Missing Episodes is not popu...DotSpatial: DotSpatial Release Candidate 1 (1.0.823): Supports loading extensions using System.ComponentModel.Composition. DemoMap compiled as x86 so that GDAL runs on x64 machines. How to: Use an Assembly from the WebBe aware that your browser may add an identifier to downloaded files which results in "blocked" dll files. You can follow the following link to learn how to "Unblock" files. Right click on the zip file before unzipping, choose properties, go to the general tab and click the unblock button. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library...XPath Visualizer: XPathVisualizer v1.3 Latest: This is v1.3.0.6 of XpathVisualizer. This is an update release for v1.3. These workitems have been fixed since v1.3.0.5: 7429 7432 7427MSBuild Extension Pack: November 2011: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack November 2011 release provides a collection of over 415 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GU...CODE Framework: 4.0.11110.0: Various minor fixes and tweaks.Extensions for Reactive Extensions (Rxx): Rxx 1.2: What's NewRelated Work Items Please read the latest release notes for details about what's new. Content SummaryRxx provides the following features. See the Documentation for details. Many IObservable<T> extension methods and IEnumerable<T> extension methods. Many useful types such as ViewModel, CommandSubject, ListSubject, DictionarySubject, ObservableDynamicObject, Either<TLeft, TRight>, Maybe<T> and others. Various interactive labs that illustrate the runtime behavior of the extensio...Player Framework by Microsoft: HTML5 Player Framework 1.0: Additional DownloadsHTML5 Player Framework Examples - This is a set of examples showing how to setup and initialize the HTML5 Player Framework. This includes examples of how to use the Player Framework with both the HTML5 video tag and Silverlight player. Note: Be sure to unblock the zip file before using. Note: In order to test Silverlight fallback in the included sample app, you need to run the html and xap files over http (e.g. over localhost). Silverlight Players - Visit the Silverlig...MapWindow 4: MapWindow GIS v4.8.6 - Final release - 64Bit: What’s New in 4.8.6 (Final release)A few minor issues have been fixed What’s New in 4.8.5 (Beta release)Assign projection tool. (Sergei Leschinsky) Projection dialects. (Sergei Leschinsky) Projections database converted to SQLite format. (Sergei Leschinsky) Basic code for database support - will be developed further (ShapefileDataClient class, IDataProvider interface). (Sergei Leschinsky) 'Export shapefile to database' tool. (Sergei Leschinsky) Made the GEOS library static. geos.dl...Facebook C# SDK: v5.3.2: This is a RTW release which adds new features and bug fixes to v5.2.1. Query/QueryAsync methods uses graph api instead of legacy rest api. removed dependency from Code Contracts enabled Task Parallel Support in .NET 4.0+ (experimental) added support for early preview for .NET 4.5 (binaries not distributed in codeplex nor nuget.org, will need to manually build from Facebook-Net45.sln) added additional method overloads for .NET 4.5 to support IProgress<T> for upload progress added ne...Delete Inactive TS Ports: List and delete the Inactive TS Ports: UPDATEAdded support for windows 2003 servers and removed some null reference errors when the registry key was not present List and delete the Inactive TS Ports - The InactiveTSPortList.EXE accepts command line arguments The InactiveTSPortList.Standalone.WithoutPrompt.exe runs as a standalone exe without the need for any command line arguments.ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.60.0: Added almost full support for auto filters (missing custom date filters). See examples Filter Values, Custom Filters Fixed issues 7016, 7391, 7388, 7389, 7198, 7196, 7194, 7186, 7067, 7115, 7144Microsoft Research Boogie: Nightly builds: This download category contains automatically released nightly builds, reflecting the current state of Boogie's development. We try to make sure each nightly build passes the test suite. If you suspect that was not the case, please try the previous nightly build to see if that really is the problem. Also, please see the installation instructions.New ProjectsAwpAdmin: AwpAdmin (name tentative) is a powerful BF3 admin tool. This admin tool is being designed to be easy to setup and maintain while having a great deal of customizability and power. This is written in C# and is being designed to be Mono-compatible.ChainReaction.Net: Extension library that aims to allow method chains to be attached to code statements, allowing them to be read more fluently , allowing extra logic to effectively be bolted on in a fluid wayCodeigniter SQL Azure/SQL Server Unicode supported driver.: Codeigniter?SQL Server 2005/2008 SQLAzure????????????。 NPrefix???????、Unicode???（??????）?????????????。 Active record / ???????????、N?????????????????????????。 ???????????????、N???????????????????、?????????N???????????????????。 ????????????????。 See http://msdn.microsoft.com/ja-jp/library/ms191313.aspx ??、????????????????????。 (Codeplex?Apache????????????、Ellislab license????????。) --- SQL Server 2005 / 2008 / SQL Azure driver class for Codeigniter. this driver N prefix uni...EZ-NFC: EZ-NFC is a .NET library, written in C#, aimed at simplifying the use of NFC in applications.Farigola: A library to organize and manage dynamic data. It's developed in C#/.NET language. Forca_adrikei: Forca implementada para o curso de C# da ufscar sorocaba.GemTD: Gem Tower Defense starcraft 2 map simulator implemented via C# and XNA. Components needed: Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Microsoft XNAGSISWebServiceMVC: This is a sample of an MVC application using the Greek GSIS Web Service at http://www.gsis.gr/wsnp.html (in Greek).Ini4Net: Ini4Net is a simple INI class for parsing INI files in your application. There are many INI solutions available around but non of them met my simplicity so I rolled-my-own. I have been using this since 2008 in several applications that are being used in the enterprise.Jogo da Memória: Projeto de C# - Jogo da memóriaJson DataContract Builder - Create JsonAPI SDK from samples & xmls: Yeah, you can access json with dynamic & Json.Net. But why can't we have the old static way? Is there no one miss the happiness of working with intellisense? There must be a easy way.K-Vizinhos: K-VizinhosLie to Me Windows Phone 7 App: Lie to me - application on WindowsPhone7 platform for testing face expressions, basend on popular serial "Lie To Me".Localization Project: Localization project is C# library to simplify localizing .NET applications and websites. Primary purpose of this project is support instant language switching on the fly.Luminji.wp: luminji's melearning windows phone soft.mergemania - pdf merging .net library based on iTextSharp: Merge PDF documents from different source documents into several destination documents. Set the page ranges to merge from and the page ranges to merge into. Everything is configured via an single XML file. You access all elements through strongly typed classes generated from XSD.Metro Pandora: Metro Pandora aims to ship a Pandora SDK and apps for XAML .net platforms.MiniState: MiniState is an attempt to provide simple abstraction layer to reading and writing state information like HTTP cookies to minimise cookie size and increase the quality of code and security.Mocklet: Mocklet is a suite of PowerShell cmdlets designed to help system administrator generate sample or mock data for testing or building test environments.nethelper: silverlight extend libraryNeverForget: NeverForget is a simple KB projectOpenCV examples: Sample project for interprocess image sharing. Using OpenCV and Boost. Server : Capture image from webcam and write image to shared memory region. Client : Read image from shared memory and imshow the image.Portable Class Libraries Contrib: Portable Class Libraries Contrib provides portable adapters and APIs that help bridge the gap between different platforms when using the new Portable Class Library feature. This makes it easier to convert existing platform-specific libraries over to use portable APIs.sbfa: sbfaShortcut Manager: Shortcut Manager (SM) is solution for everyone who is looking for creating keyboard shortcuts in .NET Winforms applications. SM uses Win32 API to create keyboard hook and fires supplied handler after required shortcut is pressed.SIGEMdispro: Proyecto de un curso de la universidadSimpleMvcCaptcha: Captcha HtmlHelper for ASP.NET MVC 3 with simple ariphmetic expression. No WCF required, neither any other communications. Written in C#.Traveling salesman problem solver using google maps: This application provides a solution for the traveling salesman problem using Google maps, developed in C# and ASP.net.WebPALTT: A Web performance and load test tool for testing web sites / applications. Features include easy to use scenario builder and powerful scripting for high customisability. Developed in .Net C#.WriteMyName: Código para escrever o nome do autor no começo de código fonte.zenSQLcompare: Compare SQL

  Read the article

• Change The Windows 7 Start Orb the Easy Way

  - by Matthew Guay

  Want to make your Windows 7 PC even more unique and personalized?  Then check out this easy guide on how to change your start orb in Windows 7. Getting Started First, download the free Windows 7 Start Button Changer (link below), and extract the contents of the folder.  It contains the app along with a selection of alternate start button orbs you can try out.   Before changing the start button, we advise creating a system restore point in case anything goes wrong.  Enter System Restore in your Start menu search, and select “Create a restore point”. Please note:  We tested this on both the 32 bit and 64 bit editions of Windows 7, and didn’t encounter any problems or stability issues.  That said, it is always prudent to make a restore point just in case a problem did happen. Click the Create button… Then enter a name for the restore point, and click Create. Changing the Start Orb. Once this is finished, run the Windows 7 Start Button Changer as administrator by right-clicking on it and selecting “Run as administrator”.  Accept the UAC prompt that will appear. If you don’t run it as an administrator, you may see the following warning.  Click Quit, and then run again as administrator. You should now see the Windows 7 Start Button Changer.  On the left it shows what your current (default) start orb looks like inactive, when hovered over, and when selected.  Click the orb on the right to select a new start button. Here we browsed to the sample orbs folder, and selected one of them.  Let’s give Windows the Media Center orb for a start orb.  Click the orb you want, and then select open. When you click Open, your screen will momentarily freeze and your taskbar will disappear.  When it reappears, your computer will have gone from having the old, default Start orb style… …to your new, exciting Start orb!  Here it is default, and glowing when hovered over. Now, the Windows 7 Start Orb Changer will change, and show your new Start orb on the left side.  If you would like to revert to the default orb, simply click the folder icon to restore it.  Or, if you would like to change the orb again, restore the original first and then select a new one. The orbs don’t have to be round; here’s a fancy Windows 7 logo as the start button. The start orb change will work in the Aero and Aero basic (which Windows 7 Start uses) themes, but will not show up in the classic, Windows 2000 style themes.  Here’s how the new start button looks with the Aero Classic theme: There are tons of orbs available, including this cute smiley, so choose one that you like to make your computer uniquely yours. Conclusion This is a cute way to make your desktop unique, and can be a great way to make a truly personalized theme.  Let us know your favorite Start orb! Link Download the Windows 7 Start Button Changer Find more Start orbs at deviantART Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change the Windows 7 or Vista Power Buttons to Shut Down/Sleep/HibernateQuick Tip: Change the Registered Owner in WindowsSpeed up Windows Vista Start Menu Search By Limiting ResultsWhy Does My Password Expire in Windows?Change Your Computer Name in Windows 7 or Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Quickly Schedule Meetings With NeedtoMeet Share Flickr Photos On Facebook Automatically Are You Blocked On Gtalk? Find out Discover Latest Android Apps On AppBrain The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers Will it Blend? iPad Edition

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 06, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 06, 2012Popular ReleasesVidCoder: 1.4.2 Beta: Added Modulus dropdown to Loose anamorphic choice. Fixed a problem where the incorrect scaling would be chosen and pick the wrong aspect ratio. Fixed issue where old window objects would stick around and continue to respond to property change events We now clear locked width/height values when switching to loose or strict anamorphic. Fixed problems with Custom Anamorphic and display width specification. Fixed text in number box incorrectly being shown in gray in some circumstances.RiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.02: changes NEW: Added Support Big Naturals Only forum NEW: Added Setting to enable/disable "Show last download image"patterns & practices: Prism: Prism for .NET 4.5: This is a release does not include any functionality changes over Prism 4.1 Desktop. These assemblies target .NET 4.5. These assemblies also were compiled against updated dependencies: Unity 3.0 and Common Service Locator (Portable Class Library).Configuration Manager 2012 Automation: Beta Code (v0.1): Beta codeWinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.2: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...Snoop, the WPF Spy Utility: Snoop 2.8.0: Snoop 2.8.0Announcing Snoop 2.8.0! It's been exactly six months since the last release, and this one has a bunch of goodies in it. In particular, there is now a PowerShell scripting tab, compliments of Bailey Ling. With this tab, the possibilities are limitless. It basically lets you automate/script the application that you are Snooping. Bailey has a couple blog posts (one and two) on his tab already, and I am sure more is to come. Please note that if you do not have PowerShell installed, y....NET Micro Framework: .NET MF 4.3 (Beta) -- warning for SDK below: WARNING!!! There is a known issue with the SDK installer that may prevent you from installing. We are working on the issue and will update the SDK as soon as we have a fix. Thank you. This is the 4.3 Beta version of the .NET Micro Framework. Feature List for v4.3 Support for Visual Studio 2012 (including the Windows Desktop Express version) All v4.2 QFEs features and bug fixes (PWM enhancements, lwIP and network driver reliability improvements, Analog Output, WinUSB and latest GCC suppo...MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.1: 2.3.1All new Remote Client Server architecture. Reccomended Download. The Remote Client Installation is OPTIONAL, you can extract the files from the zip archive into a local folder and run MCEBuddy.GUI directly. 2.2.15 was the last standalone release. Changelog for 2.3.1 (32bit and 64bit) 1. All remote MCEBuddy Client Server architecture (GUI runs remotely/independently from engine now) 2. Fixed bug in Audio Offset 3. Added support for remote MediaInfo (right click on file in queue to get ...D3 Loot Tracker: 1.5: Support for session upload to website. Support for theme change through general settings. Time played counter will now also display a count for days. Tome of secrets are no longer logged as items.NTCPMSG: V1.2.0.0: Allocate an identify cableid for each single connection cable. * Server can asend to specified cableid directly.Team Foundation Server Word Add-in: Version 1.0.12.0622: Welcome to the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Word Add-in Supported Environments Microsoft Office Word 2007 and 2010 X86 (32-bit) Team Foundation Server 2010 Object Model TFS 2010, 2012 and TFS Service supported, using TFS OM / Explorer 2010. Quality-Bar Details Tool has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Tool has been through an independent technical and quality review All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issues / Bugs WI#43553 - The Acceptance criteria is not pu...Viva Music Player: Viva Music Player v0.6.7: Initial release.Korean String Extension for .NET: ?? ??? ??? ????(v0.2.3.0): ? ?? ?? ?? ???? - string.KExtract() ?? ???? - string.AppendJosa(...) AppendJosa(...)? ?? ???? KAppendJosa(...)? ??? ?????UMD????? - PC?: UMDEditor?????V2.7: ??：http://jianyun.org/archives/948.html =============================================================================== UMD??? ???? =============================================================================== 2.7.0 (2012-10-3) ???????“UMD???.exe”??“UMDEditor.exe” ?????????；????????，??????。??????，????！ ??64????，??????????????bug ?????????????，???? ???????????????? ???????????????，??????????bug ------------------------------------------------------- ?? reg.bat ????????????。 ????，??????txt/u...Untangler: Untangler 1.0.0: Add a missing file from first releaseDirectX Tool Kit: October 2012: October 2, 2012 Added ScreenGrab module Added CreateGeoSphere for drawing a geodesic sphere Put DDSTextureLoader and WICTextureLoader into the DirectX C++ namespace Renamed project files for better naming consistency Updated WICTextureLoader for Windows 8 96bpp floating-point formats Win32 desktop projects updated to use Windows Vista (0x0600) rather than Windows 7 (0x0601) APIs Tweaked SpriteBatch.cpp to workaround ARM NEON compiler codegen bugCRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.3.1002.3): Visual Ribbon Editor 1.3.1002.3 What's New: Multi-language support for Labels/Tooltips for custom buttons and groups Support for base language other than English (1033) Connect dialog will not require organization name for ADFS / IFD connections Automatic creation of missing labels for all provisioned languages Minor connection issues fixed Notes: Before saving the ribbon to CRM server, editor will check Ribbon XML for any missing <Title> elements inside existing <LocLabel> elements...SubExtractor: Release 1029: Feature: Added option to make i and ¡ characters movie-specific for improved OCR on Spanish subs (Special Characters tab in Options) Feature: Allow switch to Word Spacing dialog directly from Spell Check dialog Fix: Added more default word spacings for accented characters Fix: Changed Word Spacing dialog to show all OCR'd characters in current sub Fix: Removed application focus grab during OCR Fix: Tightened HD subs fuzzy logic to reduce false matches in small characters Fix: Improved Arrow k...WallSwitch: WallSwitch 1.0.6: Version 1.0.6 Changes: Added hotkeys to perform a variety of operations (next/previous image, pause, clear history, etc.) Added color effects for grayscale, sepia and intense color. Various fixes.Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.1: See the KeePass Plugin Step By Step Guide for instructions on how to install the plugin. Changes Built against KeePass 2.20New ProjectsBackup Mirth To TFS: You're a developer managing a handful of Mirth Connect HL7 integration servers. You want to ensure that your servers are under change control.Capability Mapping Tool: Capability Mapping Tool provides an intuitive interface to input and prepare reports about the capabilities in university programs and their development also prCRM 2011 Global Quick Search: This CRM 2011 Silverlight WebResource will facilitate User to do Quick Search on multiple CRM Entities and results will be shown on single pageDatabaseUtil: Useful database utilities. Currently only for Entity Framework 4.DevTxt Blog Engine: The blog engine I use.Distrib(uted) Processing Grid: Distrib is a simple yet powerful distributed processing system.Download Organizer: Download Organizer is a Windows service developed in C# on .NET 4 to monitor your downloads folder and move inbound files to various locations on your PC.Example for Tutorial: Lorem IpsumExternal scripts plugin for nopCommerce: This plugin allows you to add any script to any page of your nopCommerce websiteGLMET Next Generation: A user of GLMET/MLT and want to use again? This is right for YOU! A great Folder Locker just for only you!Håvard Fjær: Code I make that might be useful to others. Mostly C#, .NET, NETMF and Gadgeteer stuff. IdentifyUI - An automation tool to identify objects: IdentifyUI - An automation tool to identify objects It works only on windows operating system. It has been tested on Windows XP. iFinity Google Analytics for DotNetNuke: The iFinity Google Analytics module is a simple way to implement Google Analytics tracking for your DotNetNuke website, but also contains advanced features.Labmodel: Modelling of flow around islandMachineSLATStatusCheck: This helps to check the SLAT capability of a machine, so that it can run hyper-v client or not.OneNote HTML Export: The OneNote HTML Export tool allows HTML export of an entire OneNote notebookPreactor Power Tools: The Preactor Power Tools are a collection of tools to enhance the functionality of Preactor.qlevel: sadasdasdroucheng: C# Hello worldSBB - Serial Browser Bridge: Stelle eingehende Daten von einer seriellen Schnittstellen in einem Browser zur Verfügung.Sendine Net: - Sendine.NET ??????????? Socket ???? - ???????????????? - ????(Router)???? - ??????????（IProtocolParser） - ????（Multi-Core）?? - ????????? - ???????Service Sheet for SharePoint: Creates ServiceSheet for each employee and customer that contains the data from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 in relation to the done Services by each Consultant.SharePoint Bulk Uploader: This is client SharePoint tool that can upload a bulk of files to SharePoint document library using SharePoint Client Object Model. sharepoint foundation 2013 persian language pack: SharePoint 2013 Persian Language Pack . this project started for create a language pack for SharePoint 2013 for supporting Persian Language Pack , this project SharePoint Managed Metadata Navigator: Use SharePoint Managed Metadata Navigator to browse, explore, create, update, delete, export and import MMD Groups, Termsets, and Terms for SharePoint 2010.SharePoint Site template for PRINCE2: PRINCE2 is a Project Management Guidance from UK OGC. This project aims to provide a SharePoint site template for SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013Simple Code Gen: This project will generate c# generated files from SQL server databaseTiwanaku Book Builder: Web application for the development and construction of publication formats, including ePub, docBook, etc.Tris: The all new Tris 2.0 appWalkingGraph: Test

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324  | Next Page >