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• Passed: Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3

  First off: Mission accomplished successfully. And it was fun! Using the resources listed in my previous article about Learning Content, I'd like to thank Microsoft Technical Evangelists Jeremy Foster and Michael Palermo for their excellent jump start videos on Channel 9, and the various authors at Pluralsight. Local Prometric testing centre Back in November I chose a local testing centre which was the easiest to access from my office despite the horrible traffic you might experience here on the island. Actually, it was not the closest one. But due to their website, their awards as Microsoft Learning Center, and my general curiosity about the premises, I gave FRCI my priority. Boy, how should I regret this decision this morning... The official Prometric exam guide asks any attendee to show up at least 30 minutes prior to the scheduled time of the test. Well, this should have been the easier part but unfortunately due to heavier traffic than usual I arrived only 20 minutes before time. Not too bad but more to come. The building called 'le Hub' is nicely renovated and provides the right environment for an IT group of companies like FRCI. I think they have currently 5 independent IT departments over there. Even the handling at the reception was straight forward, welcoming and at my ease. But then... first shock: "We don't have any exam registration for today." - Hm, that's nice... Here's my mail confirmation from Prometric. First attack successfully handled and the lady went off again to check their records. Next shock: A couple of minutes later, another guy tries to explain me that "the staff of the testing centre is already on vacation and the centre is officially closed." - Are you kidding me? Here's the official confirmation by Prometric, and I don't find it funny that I take a day off today only to hear this kind of blubbering nonsense. I thought that I'll be on the safe side choosing a company with a good reputation here on the island. Another 40 (!) minutes later, they finally come back to the waiting area with a pre-filled form about the test appointment. And finally, after an hour of waiting, discussing, restarting the testing PC, and lots of talk, I am allowed to sit down and take the exam. Exam details Well, you know the rules. Signing an NDA doesn't allow me to provide you any details about the questions or topics that have been covered. Please check out the official exam description, and you're on the right way. Sorry, guys... ;-) The result "Congratulations! You have passed this Microsoft Certification exam." - In general, I have to admit that the parts on HTML5 and CSS3 were the easiest after all, and that I have to get myself a little bit more familiar with certain Javascript features like class definitions, inheritance and data security. Anyway, exam passed - who cares about the details? Next goal Of course, the journey to Microsoft Certifications continues and my next goal is to pass exams 70-481 - Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps using HTML5 and JavaScript and 70-482 - Advanced Windows Store App Development using HTML5 and JavaScript. This would allow me to achieve the certification of MCSD: Windows Store Apps using HTML5. I guess, during 2013 I'll be busy with various learning and teaching lessons.

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• SR Activity Summaries Via Direct Email? You Bet!

  - by PCat

  Courtesy of Ken Walker. I’m a “bottom line” kind of guy.  My friends and co-workers will tell you that I’m a “Direct Communicator” when it comes to work or my social life.  For example, if I were to come up with a fantastic new recipe for a low-fat pan fried chicken, I’d Tweet, email, or find a way to blast the recipe directly to you so that you could enjoy it immediately.  My friends would see the subject, “Awesome New Fried Chicken” and they’d click and see the recipe there before them.Others are “Indirect Communicators.”  My friend Joel is like this.  He would post the recipe in his blog, and then Tweet or email a link back to his blog with a subject, “Fried Chicken.”  Then Joel would sit back and expect his friends to read the email, AND click the link to his blog, and then read the recipe.  As a fan of the “Direct” method, I wish there was a way for me to “Opt-in” for immediate updates from Joel so I could see the recipe without having to click over to his blog to search for it.The same is true for MOS.  If you’ve ever opened a Service Request through My Oracle Support (MOS), you know that most of the communication between you and the Oracle Support Engineer with respect to the issue in the SR, is done via email.  Which type of email would you rather receive in your email account? Example1:Your SR has been updated.  Click HERE to see the update. Or Example2:Your SR has been updated.  Here is the update:  “Hi John, Oracle Development has completed the patch we’ve been waiting for!  Here’s a direct “LINK” to the patch that should resolve your issue.  Please download and install the patch via the instructions (included with the link) and let me know if it does, in fact, resolve your issue!”Example2 is available to you!  All you need to do is to “Opt-In” for the direct email updates.  The default is for the indirect update as seen in Example1.  To turn on “Service Request Details in Email” simply follow these instructions (aided by the screenshot below):1.    Log into MOS, and click on your name in the upper right corner.  Select “My Account.”2.    Make sure “My Account” is highlighted in bold on the left.3.    Turn ON, “Service Request Details in Email” That’s it!  You will now receive the SR Updates, directly in your email account without having to log into MOS, click the SR, scroll down to the updates, etc.  That’s better than Fried Chicken!  (Well; almost better....).

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• Deploying Oracle ADF Essentials Applications to Glassfish

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  With the new Oracle ADF Essentials offering you can now deploy applications that leverage Oracle ADF on the open source Glassfish 3.1 server. Deployment is documented in the official JDeveloper and ADF documentation (here) but below is a summary of the steps and a video of the steps you'll need to take to get a basic Oracle ADF Essentials application to work on GlassFish. Note - to make starting/stopping GlassFish easier for my demo I used my GlassFish extension that you can get here. First we'll install some ADF Runtime libraries on GlassFish Download and install Glassfish (Note - if you also have an Oracle DB on the same machine, you'll want to switch GlassFish's HTTP port to something else instead of 8080). Download the Oracle ADF Essentials packaging - this will get you an adf_essentials.zip file. Copy the adf_essentials.zip to the lib directory of your Glassfish domain - on a default windows install this would be: C:\glassfish3\glassfish\domains\domain1\lib Go the the above lib directory and issue a unzip -j adf_essentials.zip This will extract the ADF libraries to the directory. Now you can start the Glassfish server. Now let's configure Glassfish to handle applications of the ADF type: Invoke the admin console of glassfish (http://localhost:4848) and log into your admin account. Go to Configurations->Server-config->JVM Settings and choose the JVM Options tab Add the following entries: -XX:MaxPermSize=512m (note this entry should already exist so just make sure it has a big enough value) -Doracle.mds.cache=simple While we are in the admin console, we can also define JDBC connections that will be used by our application. Go into Resources->JDBC->JDBC Connection Pools and click to create a New one Give it a name and choose the resource type to be javax.sql.XADataSource and choose Oracle as the Database Driver vendor. Click Next Scroll down to the Additional Properties section and start filling in the information for your database. The values for an Oracle XE will be (user=hr, databaseName = XE, Password=hr, ServerName=localhost, DriverType=thin, PortNumber=1521) Click Finish Click Ping to check your connection works. Now define a new JDBC Resource that will use the pool you just defined. In my example I called the resource jdbc/HRDS You will need this name to match the name in your Application Module connection configuraiton.Now you can re-start the Glassfish server for the changes to take effect. Get an ADF application going (you can use the regular Fusion Application template for this) Go into the project properties of your viewController project, under the deployment section click to edit the deployment profile that is defined there. Go to Platform and choose Glassfish 3.1 from the drop down list. Click ok to go back to your project. Go to Application -> Application Properties-> Deployment Go to Platform and choose Glassfish 3.1 from the drop down list. Click ok to go back to your project. This step will make sure that JDeveloper will autoamtically add the necessary ADF libraries to the EAR file that is being generated for deployment on Glassfish  Go to your Application->Deploy and deploy either to an EAR file or directly to a Glassfish server connection that you created. Things should just work, but if they don't then look up the server.log in the log directory and check out what error is in there. Here is a video demo of the various steps: Note - right now the deployment of an ADF application takes about 2 minutes on my machine we are hoping to be able to improve this timing in the future. People who are more familiar with Glassfish might want to explore using exploded directory deployment and see if they can get it to work.

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• Don't Forget To Enjoy Life

  - by Justin

  I have a pretty clear stance on posting personal information in my blogs. I tend to avoid it almost instinctively. Part of that is because I am a somewhat private person. And the other is because I know how easy it is for personal information to be gathered and collected from sources such as blogs. So, this has remained a tech only blog for me. I've only posted topics mostly related to issues I have encountered at work. In a way this blog is a 'bookmark' for me. If I post something here and run into the issue again it allows me to refer back to a convenient place where the 'fix' is documented in a way that I understand. But today, I am posting something that speaks to everyone. Something PERSONAL. Honestly, I expect this entry to receive zero views. But if nothing else, I can come back to this blog one day when I'm having a bad day or something and run across this post. And I will be reminded... DON'T FORGET TO ENJOY LIFE. Say this to yourself out loud, right now. People, we can get caught up in some rather mundane details as we trek through life. It's so easy to lose track of what really matters that it should be no surprise to find yourself reading something like this and thinking to yourself 'Yeah. You are right, man. Some of this crap I'm clinging on to right now is so small in the grand scheme of things'. I have no reservation, no shame, in saying that I am more often than not caught up in the ever evolving world of 'shit that does not matter'. When you work in technology, you are surrounded by deadlines, upgrades, new versions, support 'end of life', etc. And by time you get done with your 8 hours you go home and put in a few more because you are STILL CAUGHT UP in the things you dealt with at work all day. DO YOURSELF A FAVOR. DO YOUR FAMILY AND FRIEND A FAVOR. When you are done for the day, and you drive home, get those work-related things out of your head before you pull into the driveway. If you are still thinking on them when you park the car, leave the engine running, close your eyes and take a deep breath. If you believe in God, pray. If you don't then meditate for a second with the INTENTION of letting go of the day and becoming the 'real you'. You may have forgotten who the real you is so I'll remind you.... THE REAL YOU IS THAT GUY OR GAL THAT LAUGHS, LOVES, AND LIVES. Be the real you as often as possible. If you can't do it during your 9 - 5, do it at home. YOUR RELATIONSHIPS AND YOUR PERSONAL HAPPINESS DEPEND ON IT. I am going to make you a promise right now. If you do what I've just said, your days will be longer and your joy will be exponential. I can't explain why I know this to be true. But I do know it. And if you are there reading this right now, you know it is true too. We both know it is true because it COMES FROM WITHIN EVERY MAN, WOMAN and CHILD. We are born into love and happiness. Lets not fade away into the darkness so easily found in this world. Lets keep the flame burning. The flame of passion. Passion for LIFE. Peace be with you.

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• Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 Announcement

  - by Tim Murphy

  Today Nokia and Microsoft had an event to officially introduce the Lumia 920.  Below is a rundown of some of the things I found interesting. As a person who likes photography there was a lot to drool over.  The main feature that caught my attention was PureView with its optical stabilization.  This alone should improve the majority of you pictures.  Add to that the SmartShoot Object remover that uses multiple images to remove unwanted people or objects that move through your picture and you never have to accept reality again. For the most part the lenses concept introduced in Windows Phone 8 just makes the usability of leveraging camera better.  Of course that is Microsoft’s selling point.  One lens that caught my attention was the Bing lens.  I have to say it is about time that we can take pictures and use them to search for answers using Bing. There were a couple of features shown that involved augmented reality.  One was similar to the yapf application that is already in the market which overlays restaurants and other destination over live camera views.  The other was using the navigation directions with a live view. Then you get down to some of the physical features of the Lumia 920.  The one that got the most stage time is that it has a great 2000mah battery which can be charged wirelessly.  They also pointed out the improved glare reduction of the 4.5 in. curved glass screen.  This hardware improvement is improved further with software that detects glare conditions and adjusts the display attributes to enhance viewing ease. Adding to the wireless cool factor of the Lumia 920 is the general NFC capabilities.  This was demonstrated with NFC docking stations as well as JBL speakers and headphones. There was one more hardware feature that I applauded.  The super sensitive touch screen did away with one of my pet peeves with capacitive touch screens.  You will never have to remove you gloves to operate your phone again.  The mittens that they did the demo with looked more like boxing gloves. I was disappointed with Joe Belfiore said that they were only going to show a couple of new features of the Windows Phone 8 and would hear more at future events.  One of the things he did show is the ability to customize which buttons you preferred as defaults in IE10.  For example you could have the folders button where the refresh button normally is.  He also showed that at long last you can natively take screenshots on your phone.  Hopefully he will be back quickly to give us the rest of the features. The most disappointing part of the event was that we never found out when they would be released or how much they would cost.  Let’s hope this comes soon.  Even with these couple of items still left on my wish list I can’t wait to get my hands on a Lumia 920.  del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Windows Phone 8,Nokia,Lumia,Lumia 920,Microsoft

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• Converting .docx to pdf (or .doc to pdf, or .doc to odt, etc.) with libreoffice on a webserver on the fly using php

  - by robertphyatt

  Ok, so I needed to convert .docx files to .pdf files on the fly, but none of the free php libraries that were available let me do it on my server (a webservice was not good enough). Basically either I needed to pay for a library (and have it maybe suck) or just deal with the free ones that didn't convert the formatting well enough. Not good enough! I found that LibreOffice (OpenOffice's successor) allows command line conversion using the LibreOffice conversion engine (which DID preserve the formatting like I wanted and generally worked great). I loaded the latest version of Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download) onto my Virtual Box (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) on my computer and found that I was able to easily convert files using the commandline like this: libreoffice --headless -convert-to pdf fileToConvert.docx -outdir output/path/for/pdf I thought: sweet...but I don't have admin rights on my host's web server. I tried to use a "portable" version of LibreOffice that I obtained from http://portablelinuxapps.org/ but I was unable to get it to work on my host's webserver, because my host's webserver didn't have all the dependencies (Dependency Hell! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell) I was at a loss of how to make it work, until I ran across a cool project made by a Ph.D. student (Philip J. Guo) at Stanford called CDE: http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/cde.html I will let you look at his explanations of how it works (I followed what he did in http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6XdwHo1BWwY, starting at about 32:00 as well as the directions on his site), but in short, it allows one to avoid dependency hell by copying all the files used when you run certain commands, recreating the linux environment where the command worked. I was able to use this to run LibreOffice without having to resort to someone's portable version of it, and it worked just like it did when I did it on Ubuntu with the command above, with a tweak: I needed to run the wrapper of LibreOffice the CDE generated. So, below is my PHP code that calls it. In this code snippet, the filename to be copied is passed in as $_POST["filename"]. I copy the file to the same spot where I originally converted the file, convert it, copy it back and then delete all the files (so that it doesn't start growing exponentially). I did it this way because I wasn't able to make it work otherwise on the webserver. If there is a linux + webserver ninja out there that can figure out how to make it work without doing this, I would be interested to know what you did. Please post a comment or something if you did that. <?php //first copy the file to the magic place where we can convert it to a pdf on the fly copy($time.$_POST["filename"], "../LibreOffice/cde-package/cde-root/home/robert/Desktop/".$_POST["filename"]); //change to that directory chdir('../LibreOffice/cde-package/cde-root/home/robert'); //the magic command that does the conversion $myCommand = "./libreoffice.cde --headless -convert-to pdf Desktop/".$_POST["filename"]." -outdir Desktop/"; exec ($myCommand); //copy the file back copy("Desktop/".str_replace(".docx", ".pdf", $_POST["filename"]), "../../../../../documents/".str_replace(".docx", ".pdf", $_POST["filename"])); //delete all the files out of the magic place where we can convert it to a pdf on the fly $files1 = scandir('Desktop'); //my files that I generated all happened to start with a number. $pattern = '/^[0-9]/'; foreach ($files1 as $value) { preg_match($pattern, $value, $matches); if(count($matches) ?> 0) { unlink("Desktop/".$value); } } //changing the header to the location of the file makes it work well on androids header( 'Location: '.str_replace(".docx", ".pdf", $_POST["filename"]) ); ?> And here is the tar.gz file I generated I generated with CDE. To duplicate what I did exactly, put the tar.gz file in a folder somewhere. I will call that folder the "root". Make a new folder called "documents" in the "root" folder. Unpack the tar.gz and run the php script above from the "documents" folder. Success! I made a truly portable version of LibreOffice that can convert files on the fly on a webserver using 100% free, open source software!

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• What 5 things should SQL Server get rid of?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been “tagged” by my friend Paul Randal. It’s a high-tech way of making someone else do what you want, but since it’s Paul, well, I guess I’m OK with that. He’s asked in his recent blog entry “What five things would you get rid of in SQL Server if you were in charge?” This is, of course, a delicate issue. After all, I work at Microsoft, so anything I say here might be taken as a criticism that would require action – but of course it really doesn’t. Interestingly, you may have more to do with what goes in to SQL Server than I did even as a Program Manager where I “owned” a feature. Unlike many places I’ve worked, Microsoft really does drive its products by what its users want – not every time, and not every user request, mind you, but overall I think we hit the mark pretty well. So, with all of that said, and of course the obligatory statement of “these are my own opinions, and have nothing to do with any official Microsoft position in any way, and do not reflect the opinions of other Microsoft employees or management”, here goes. 1. Get rid of SQL Server Management Studio Does that surprise you? After all, when I was a Program Manager, I actually owned the general architecture for SSMS. But those on my team probably would have been able to guess this one for you. I think that SSMS is a fine development tool. But I think that it does less of a good job for managing a system. It’s based on Visual Studio, probably one of the best development IDE’s around. And when I develop code, I really like it. But for a monitoring/management tool, I prefer a snap-in to the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). I know, the old one (prior to 3.0) was kludgy, difficult to use and program in. But that’s changed. Of course, when I bring this up, you’ll probably immediately say “But I don’t have that in XP.” And that’s one of the reasons we didn’t go there. (But I still don’t like SSMS for management.) 2. ShrinkDB I think this discussion has been done to death, so I’ll leave it at that. 3. SQL Server Agent Does that one surprise you as well? In my mind, since we ALWAYS ride on Windows, just use the task scheduler there, along with PowerShell. You could log the results in Windows logs, files, back into SQL Server, whatever. It’s just a complexity we don’t need in SQL Server. 4. SQL Server Error Logs We have a full logging setup in Windows. They’re well done, easy to understand and ubiquitous. We should just use that. 5. Several SKU’s I won’t say which, but we have a few SKU’s of SQL Server that need to go. And we need to figure out how to help you understand clearly where you need to go to Enterprise or Data Center.  Most folks are trying to push Standard edition to do things it isn’t designed to do, and then they think SQL Server won’t scale. I think we can do a better job of showing you where Standard Edition will hit the wall, and I think with fewer choices it would be pretty simple for you to pick the right one. Well, once again I’ve probably puzzled some folks and angered others. I think my work here is done. :) Back to you, Paul. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Virtualized data centre&ndash;Part three: Architecture

  - by marc dekeyser

  Having the basics (like discussed in the previous articles) is all good and well, but how do we get started on this?! It can be quite daunting after all!   From my own point of view I can absolutely confirm your worries and concerns, but also tell you that it is not as hard as it seems! Deciding on what kind of motherboard to buy, processor and how much memory is an activity you will spend quite some time doing research on. And that is not even mentioning storage! All in all it comes down to setting you expectations and your budget. Probably adjusting your expectations according to your budget :). Processors As a rule of thumb you want VT-D (virtualization) technology built in to the processor allowing you to have 64 bit machines running on your host. Memory The more the better! If you are building a home lab don’t bother with ECC unless you are going to run machines that absolutely should be on all the time and your comfort depends on it! Motherboard Depends on what you are going to do with storage: If you are going the NAS way then the number of SATA port/RAID capabilities do not really matter. If you decide to have a single server with lots of dedicated storage it obviously matters how much SATA ports you will have, alternatively you could use a RAID controller (but these set you back a pretty penny if you want one. DELL 6i’s are usually available for a good bargain if you can find one!). Easiest is to get one with a built-in graphics card (on-board) as you are just adding more heat, power usage and possible points of failure. Networking Just like your choice of motherboard the networking side tends to depend on how you want to go. A single virtualization  host with local storage can usually get away with having a single network card, a cluster or server which uses iSCSI storage tends to have more than one teamed up :). Storage The dreaded beast from the dark! The horror which lives in the forest! The most difficult decision you are going to make in the building of your lab. Why you might ask? Simple my friend, having the right choice of storage can make or break your virtualization solution. The performance of you storage choice will have an important impact on the responsiveness of your virtual machines and the deployment of new machines. It also makes a run with your budget! If you decide to go the NAS route you will be dropping a lot more money than if you would be having just a bunch of disks sitting in a server and manually distributing the virtual machines over the disks. Platform I’m a Microsoftee so Hyper-V is a dead giveaway for me. If you are interested in using VMware I won’t stop you but the rest of my posts will be oriented on Server 2012 Hyper-V (aka 3.0)! What did I use? Before someone asks me this in the comments I’ll give you a quick run down of what I am using. - Intel 2.4 quad core processors (i something something) - 24 GB DDR3 Memory - Single disk in each server (might look at this as I move the servers to 2012) - Synology DS1812+ NAS - 3 network interfaces where possible - HP1800 procurve managed switch I decided to spring for the NAS as I will also be using it for backups and media storage (which is working out quite nicely with my Xbox 360 I must say). At the time of building my 2 boxes (over a year and a half ago) these set me back about 900 euros each so I can image you can build the same or better for a lower price. Next article will be diagramming what I want to achieve and starting a build on the Hyper V 3.0 cluster!

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• Running Powershell from within SharePoint

  - by Norgean

  Just because something is a daft idea, doesn't mean it can't be done. We sometimes need to do some housekeeping - like delete old files or list items or… yes, well, whatever you use Powershell for in a SharePoint world. Or it could be that your solution has "issues" for which you have Powershell solutions, but not the budget to transform into proper bug fixes. So you create a "how to" for the ITPro guys. Idea: What if we keep the scripts in a list, and have SharePoint execute the scripts on demand? An announcements list (because of the multiline body field). Warning! Let us be clear. This list needs to be locked down; if somebody creates a malicious script and you run it, I cannot help you. First; we need to figure out how to start Powershell scripts from C#. Hit teh interwebs and the Googlie, and you may find jpmik's post: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/18229/How-to-run-PowerShell-scripts-from-C. (Or MS' official answer at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee706563(v=vs.85).aspx) public string RunPowershell(string powershellText, SPWeb web, string param1, string param2) { // Powershell ~= RunspaceFactory - i.e. Create a powershell context var runspace = RunspaceFactory.CreateRunspace(); var resultString = new StringBuilder(); try { // load the SharePoint snapin - Note: you cannot do this in the script itself (i.e. add-pssnapin etc does not work) PSSnapInException snapInError; runspace.RunspaceConfiguration.AddPSSnapIn("Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell", out snapInError); runspace.Open(); // set a web variable. runspace.SessionStateProxy.SetVariable("webContext", web); // and some user defined parameters runspace.SessionStateProxy.SetVariable("param1", param1); runspace.SessionStateProxy.SetVariable("param2", param2); var pipeline = runspace.CreatePipeline(); pipeline.Commands.AddScript(powershellText); // add a "return" variable pipeline.Commands.Add("Out-String"); // execute! var results = pipeline.Invoke(); // convert the script result into a single string foreach (PSObject obj in results) { resultString.AppendLine(obj.ToString()); } } finally { // close the runspace runspace.Close(); } // consider logging the result. Or something. return resultString.ToString(); } Ok. We've written some code. Let us test it. var runner = new PowershellRunner(); runner.RunPowershellScript(@" $web = Get-SPWeb 'http://server/web' # or $webContext $web.Title = $param1 $web.Update() $web.Dispose() ", null, "New title", "not used"); Next step: Connect the code to the list, or more specifically, have the code execute on one (or several) list items. As there are more options than readers, I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader. Some alternatives: Create a ribbon button that calls RunPowershell with the body of the selected itemsAdd a layout pageSpecify list item from query string (possibly coupled with content editor webpart with html that links directly to this page with querystring)WebpartListing with an "execute" columnList with multiselect and an execute button Etc!Now that you have the code for executing powershell scripts, you can easily expand this into a timer job, which executes scripts at regular intervals. But if the previous solution was dangerous, this is even worse - the scripts will usually be run with one of the admin accounts, and can do pretty much anything...One more thing... Note that as this is running "consoleless" calls to Write-Host will fail. Two solutions; remove all output, or check if the script is run in a console-window or not.  if ($host.Name -eq "ConsoleHost") { Write-Host 'If I agreed with you we'd both be wrong' }

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• Need help partitioning when reinstalling Ubuntu 14.04

  - by Chris M.

  I upgraded to 14.04 about a month ago on my HP Mini netbook (about 16 GB hard disk). A few days ago the system crashed (I don't know why but I was using internet at the time). When I restarted the computer, Ubuntu would not load. Instead, I got a message from the BIOS saying Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key I took this to mean that I needed to reinstall 14.04. When I try to reinstall Ubuntu from the USB stick, I choose "Erase disk and install Ubuntu" but then I get a message: Some of the partitions you created are too small. Please make the following partitions at least this large: / 3.3 GB If you do not go back to the partitioner and increase the size of these partitions, the installation may fail. At first I hit Continue to see if it would install anyway, and it gave the message: The attempt to mount a file system with type ext4 in SCSI1 (0,0,0), partition # 1 (sda) at / failed. You may resume partitioning from the partitioning menu. The second time I hit Go Back, and it took me to the following partitioning table: Device Type Mount Point Format Size Used System /dev/sda /dev/sda1 ext4 (checked) 3228 MB Unknown /dev/sda5 swap (not checked) 1063 MB Unknown + - Change New Partition Table... Revert Device for boot loader installation: /dev/sda ATA JM Loader 001 (4.3 GB) At this point I'm not sure what to do. I've never partitioned my hard drive before and I don't want to screw things up. (I'm not particularly tech savvy.) Can you instruct me what I should do. (P.S. I'm afraid the table might not appear as I typed it in.) Results from fdisk: ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 4294 MB, 4294967296 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 522 cylinders, total 8388608 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/sda doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/sdb: 7860 MB, 7860125696 bytes 155 heads, 31 sectors/track, 3194 cylinders, total 15351808 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0009a565 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2768 15351807 7674520 b W95 FAT32 ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ Here is what it displays when I open the Disks utility (I tried the screenshot terminal command you suggested but it didn't seem to do anything): 4.3 GB Hard Disk /dev/sda Model: JM Loader 001 (01000001) Size: 4.3 GB (4,294,967,296 bytes) Serial Number: 01234123412341234 Assessment: SMART is not supported Volumes Size: 4.3 GB (4,294,967,296 bytes) Device: /dev/sda Contents: Unknown (There is a button in the utility that when you click it gives the following options: Format... Create Disk Image... Restore Disk Image... Benchmark but SMART Data & Self-Tests... is dimmed out) When I hit F9 Change Boot Device Order, it shows the hard drive as: SATA:PM-JM Loader 001 When I hit F10 to get me into the BIOS Setup Utility, under Diagnostic it shows: Primary Hard Disk Self Test Not Support NetworkManager Tool State: disconnected Device: eth0 Type: Wired Driver: atl1c State: unavailable Default: no HW Address: 00:26:55:B0:7F:0C Capabilities: Carrier Detect: yes Wired Properties Carrier: off When I run command lshw -C network, I get: WARNING: you should run this program as super-user. *-network description: Network controller product: BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: 01 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=b43-pci-bridge latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:feafc000-feafffff *-network description: Ethernet interface product: AR8132 Fast Ethernet vendor: Qualcomm Atheros physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: c0 serial: 00:26:55:b0:7f:0c capacity: 100Mbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=atl1c driverversion=1.0.1.1-NAPI latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=twisted pair resources: irq:43 memory:febc0000-febfffff ioport:ec80(size=128) WARNING: output may be incomplete or inaccurate, you should run this program as super-user.

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• User password rejected on login screen but accepted on text console login

  - by MadsirR

  I had to force shutdown my Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit, after which I restarted and tried to log in as a normal user, which was rejected several times. I then logged in as guest and tty to my regular account with use of my normal password, which succeeded. (So the password is still valid.) How can I gain access again via the normal login procedure (welcome screen)? Update: When I tried to log on with my new password, it again was denied. When I deliberately tried to log on with a faulty password, an error message came back, saying: Access denied - wrong password. I suppose, the first time the password was not rejected, but the procedure was aborted for some reason. Some additional info after trying to find a solution: I am conviced it is a Compiz-issue. Why? before this happened, all sessions came to a grinding halt, regardless of being logged on in a 2D or 3d environment. I found a link saying that I should remove Compiz and proceed in a 2D environment, which initiall worked without a glitch, until my system went into a state of total obivium. Only after that, the above mentioned troubles appeared. In the meantime I have happened to find a thread with reference 17381, describing exactly what I have experienced. For now, I will try to cure this situation (later this week) and revert with the results, hopefully to close this post. In the meantime I cordially thank you all, even if you didn't kill the problem; you gave me the inspiration to look further and find a possible cure. Update2: After 15 hrs of trial-and-error I callled it quits (When I decided to tackle this problem, I've given myself 12 hrs, to avoid massive loss of time.) I decided to re-install Precise, since the "point 1" version has become availabe. Log-in is back to normal, as is the graphic environment. Response to mouse input is stil appalling, especially when I have a series of screens open as "children"of a "parent" screen. It still completely locks up. I have installed Enlightenment, Gnome classic, Gnome 3, Cinnamon and they all behave in a similar fashion. FOR THOSE WHO NEED A WAY-OUT IN SITUATIONS OF THE LIKE: Open a terminal with [Ctrl+Alt+F2]. Type [sudo killall Firefox] (or whatever application you wish to terminate). Key in your password. Return to your graphical screen with [Ctrl+Alt+F7], and Bob's your uncle. Just re-open Firefox like nothing happened. Next time you are stuck: [Ctrl+Alt+F2], upward arrow till you meet the command of your desire, [Ctrl+Alt+F7], etcetera. Hope this is of help. My next move will be to upgrade the kernel to 3.4 from the repositories for 12.10. However, since this entails a totally new situation, I will start a new thread on this site to avoid topic pollution I will keep you posted. Still.

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• Notes - Part II - Play with JavaFX

  - by Silviu Turuga

  Open the project from last lesson Double click on NotesUI.fmxl, this will open the JavaFX Scene Builder On the left side you have a area called Hierarchy, from there press Del or Shift+Backspace on Mac to delete the Button and the Label. You'll receive a warning, that some components have been assigned an fx:id, click Delete as we don't need them anymore. Resize the AnchorPane to have enough room for our design, eg. 820x550px From the top left pick the Container called Accordion and drag over the AnchorPane design Chose then from Controls a List View and drag inside the Accordion. You'll notice that by default the Accordion has 2 TitledPane, and you can switch between them by clicking on their name. I'll let you the pleasure to do the rest in order to get the following result  Here is the list of objects used Save it and then return to NetBeans Run the application and it should be run without any issue. If you click on buttons they all are functional, but nothing happens as we didn't link them with any action. We'll see this in the next episode. Now, let's play a little bit with the application and try to resize it… Have you notice the behavior? If the form is too small, some objects aren't visible, if it is too large there is too much space . That's for sure something that your users won't like and you as a programmer have to care about this. From NetBeans double click NotesUI.fmxl so to return back to JavaFX Scene Builder Select the TextField from bottom left of Notes, the one where I put the text Category and then from the right part of JavaFX Scene Builder you'll notice a panel called Inspector. Chose Layout and then click on the dotted lines from left and bottom of the square, like you see in the below image This will make the textfield to have always the same distance from left and bottom no matter the size of the form. Save and run the application. Note that whenever the form is changing the Height, the Category TextField has the same distance from the bottom. Select Accordion and do the same steps but also check the top dotted line, because we want the Accordion to have the same height as the main form has. I'll let you the pleasure to do the same for the rest of components. It's very important to design an application that can be resize by user and in the same time, all the buttons are on place. Last step is to make sure our application is not getting smaller then a certain size, as this will hide parts of our layout. So select the AnchorPane and from Inspector go to Layout and note down the Width and Height. Go back to NetBeans and open the file Main.java and add the following code just after stage.setScene(scene); (around line 26) stage.setMinWidth(820); stage.setMinHeight(550); Use your own width and height. This will prevent user to reduce the width or height of your application to a value that will hide parts of your layout. So now you should have done most of the design part and next time we'll see how can we enter some data into our newly created application… Note: in case you miss something, here are the source files of the project till this point. 

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• Find Knowledge Quickly

  - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

  Untitled Document Get to relevant knowledge on the Oracle products you use in a few quick steps! Customers tell us that the volume of search results returned can make it difficult to find the information they need, especially when similar Oracle products exist. These simple tips show you how to filter, browse, search, and refine your results to get relevant answers faster. Filter first: PowerView is your best friend Powerview is an often ignored feature of My Oracle Support that enables you to control the information displayed on the Dashboard, the Knowledge tab and regions, and the Service Request tab based on one or more parameters. You can define a PowerView to limit information based on product, product line, support ID, platform, hostname, system name and others. Using PowerView allows you to restrict: Your search results to the filters you have set The product list when selecting your products in Search & Browse and when creating service requests   The PowerView menu is at the top of My Oracle Support, near the title You turn PowerView on by clicking PowerView is Off, which is a button. When PowerView is On, and filters are active, clicking the button again will toggle Powerview off. Click the arrow to the right to create new filters, edit filters, remove a filter, or choose from the list of previously created filters. You can create a PowerView in 3 simple steps! Turn PowerView on and select New from the PowerView menu. Select your filter from the Select Filter Type dropdown list and make selections from the other two menus. Hint: While there are many filter options, selecting your product line or your list of products will provide you with an effective filter. Click the plus sign (+) to add more filters. Click the minus sign (-) to remove a filter. Click Create to save and activated the filter(s) You’ll notice that PowerView is On displays along with the active filters. For more information about the PowerView capabilities, click the Learn more about PowerView… menu item or view a short video. Browse & Refine: Access the Best Match Fast For Your Product and Task In the Knowledge Browse region of the Knowledge or Dashboard tabs, pick your product, pick your task, select a version, if applicable. A best match document – a collection of knowledge articles and resources specific to your selections - may display, offering you a one-stop shop. The best match document, called an “information center,” is an aggregate of dynamically updated links to information pertinent to the product, task, and version (if applicable) you chose. These documents are refreshed every 24 hours to ensure that you have the most current information at your fingertips. Note: Not all products have “information centers.” If no information center appears as a best match, click Search to see a list of search results. From the information center, you can access topics from a product overview to security information, as shown in the left menu. Just want to search? That’s easy too! Again, pick your product, pick your task, select a version, if applicable, enter a keyword term, and click Search. Hint: In this example, you’ll notice that PowerView is on and set to PeopleSoft Enterprise. When PowerView is on and you select a product from the Knowledge Base product list, the listed products are limited to the active PowerView filter. (Products you’ve previously picked are also listed at the top of the dropdown list.) Your search results are displayed based on the parameters you entered. It’s that simple! Related Information: My Oracle Support - User Resource Center [ID 873313.1] My Oracle Support Community For more tips on using My Oracle Support, check out these short video training modules. My Oracle Support Speed Video Training [ID 603505.1]

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• Get Fanatical About Your Followers

  - by Mike Stiles

  In the fourth of our series of discussions with Aberdeen’s Trip Kucera, we touch on what fans of your brand have come to expect in exchange for their fandom. Spotlight: Around the Oracle Social office, we live for football. So when we think of a true “fan” of a brand, something on the level of a football fan is what comes to mind. But are brands trying to invest fans on that same level? Trip: Yeah, if you’re a football fan, this is definitely your time of year. And if you’ve been to any NFL games recently, especially if you hadn’t been for a few years previously, you may have noticed that from the cup holders to in-stadium Wi-Fi, there’s an increasing emphasis being placed on “fan-focused” accommodations. That’s what they’re known as in the stadium business. Spotlight: How are brands doing in that fan-focused arena? Trip: Remember fan is short for “fanatical.” Brands can definitely learn from the way teams have become fanatical about their fans, or in the social media world, their followers. Many companies consider a segment of their addressable social audience as true fans; I’ve even heard the term “super-fans” used. So just as fans know and can tell you nearly everything about their favorite team, our research shows that there’s a lot value from getting to know your social audience—your followers—at a deeper level. Spotlight: So did your research show there’s a lot to be gained by making fandom a two-way street? Trip: Aberdeen’s new social relationship management research suggests that companies should develop capabilities to better analyze their social audience at a more granular level. Countless “ripped from the headlines” examples, from “United Breaks Guitars” to the most recent British Airways social fiasco we talked about a few weeks ago show how social can magnify the impact of a single customer voice. Spotlight: So how do the companies who are executing social most successfully do that? Trip: Leaders, which are the top-performing companies in Aberdeen’s study, are showing the value of identifying and categorizing your social audience. You should certainly treat every customer as if they have 10,000 followers, because they just might, but you can also proactively engage with high-value customer and high-value influencers. Getting back to the football analogy, it’s like how teams strive to give every guest a great experience, but they really roll out the red carpet for those season ticket and luxury box holders. Spotlight: I’m not allowed in luxury boxes, so you’ll have to tell me what that’s like. But what is the brand equivalent of rolling out the red carpet? Trip: Leaders are nearly three times more likely than Followers to have a process in place that identifies key social influencers for engagement, and more than twice as likely to identify customer advocates for social outreach. This is the kind of knowledge that gives companies the ability to better target social messaging and promotions like we talked about in our last discussion, as well as a basis for understanding how to measure the impact of their social media programs. I’ll give you an example. I hosted an event at one of my favorite restaurants recently. I had mentioned them in a Tweet several weeks before the event, and on the day of the event, they Tweeted out that they were looking forward to seeing me that evening for the event. It’s a small thing, but it had a big impact and I’d certainly go back as a result. Spotlight: So what specifically can brands use and look at to determine where their potential super-fans are? Trip: Social graph analysis, which looks at both the demographic/psychographic trends as well as the behavioral connections, can surface important brand value. Aberdeen’s PR and Brand Management research indicated that top-performing companies are more than three times more likely than Followers to both determine demographic trends through social listening (44% vs. 13%), and to identify meaningful customer segments through social (44% vs. 12%). This kind of brand-level insight can complement and enrich traditional market research. But perhaps even more importantly, it can serve as an early warning system for customer experience failures. @mikestilesPhoto: freedigitalphotos.net

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• Creating a voxel world with 3D arrays using threads

  - by Sean M.

  I am making a voxel game (a bit like Minecraft) in C++(11), and I've come across an issue with creating a world efficiently. In my program, I have a World class, which holds a 3D array of Region class pointers. When I initialize the world, I give it a width, height, and depth so it knows how large of a world to create. Each Region is split up into a 32x32x32 area of blocks, so as you may guess, it takes a while to initialize the world once the world gets to be above 8x4x8 Regions. In order to alleviate this issue, I thought that using threads to generate different levels of the world concurrently would make it go faster. Having not used threads much before this, and being still relatively new to C++, I'm not entirely sure how to go about implementing one thread per level (level being a xz plane with a height of 1), when there is a variable number of levels. I tried this: for(int i = 0; i < height; i++) { std::thread th(std::bind(&World::load, this, width, height, depth)); th.join(); } Where load() just loads all Regions at height "height". But that executes the threads one at a time (which makes sense, looking back), and that of course takes as long as generating all Regions in one loop. I then tried: std::thread t1(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h1, h2 - 1, d)); std::thread t2(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h2, h3 - 1, d)); std::thread t3(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h3, h4 - 1, d)); std::thread t4(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h4, h - 1, d)); t1.join(); t2.join(); t3.join(); t4.join(); This works in that the world loads about 3-3.5 times faster, but this forces the height to be a multiple of 4, and it also gives the same exact VAO object to every single Region, which need individual VAOs in order to render properly. The VAO of each Region is set in the constructor, so I'm assuming that somehow the VAO number is not thread safe or something (again, unfamiliar with threads). So basically, my question is two one-part: How to I implement a variable number of threads that all execute at the same time, and force the main thread to wait for them using join() without stopping the other threads? How do I make the VAO objects thread safe, so when a bunch of Regions are being created at the same time across multiple threads, they don't all get the exact same VAO? Turns out it has to do with GL contexts not working across multiple threads. I moved the VAO/VBO creation back to the main thread. Fixed! Here is the code for block.h/.cpp, region.h/.cpp, and CVBObject.h/.cpp which controls VBOs and VAOs, in case you need it. If you need to see anything else just ask. EDIT: Also, I'd prefer not to have answers that are like "you should have used boost". I'm trying to do this without boost to get used to threads before moving onto other libraries.

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• Move on and look elsewhere, or confront the boss?

  - by Meister

  Background: I have my Associates in Applied Science (Comp/Info Tech) with a strong focus in programming, and I'm taking University classes to get my Bachelors. I was recently hired at a local company to be a Software Engineer I on a team of about 8, and I've been told they're looking to hire more. This is my first job, and I was offered what I feel to be an extremely generous starting salary ($30/hr essentially + benefits and yearly bonus). What got me hired was my passion for programming and a strong set of personal projects. Problem: I had no prior experience when I interviewed, so I didn't know exactly what to ask them about the company when I was hired. I've spotted a number of warning signs and annoyances since then, such as: Four developers when I started, with everyone talking about "Ben" or "Ryan" leaving. One engineer hired thirty days before me, one hired two weeks after me. Most of the department has been hiring a large number of people since I started. Extremely limited internet access. I understand the idea from an IT point of view, but not only is Facebook blocked, but so it Youtube, Twitter, and Pandora. I've also figured out that they block all access to non-DNS websites (http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/) and strangely enough Miranda-IM. Low cubicles. Which is fine because I like my immediate coworkers, but they put the developers with the customer service, customer training, and QA department in a huge open room. Noise, noise, noise, and people stop to chitchat all day long. Headphones only go so far. Several emails have been sent out by my boss since I started telling us programmers to not talk about non-work-related-things like Video Games at our cubicles, despite us only spending maybe five minutes every few hours doing so. Further digging tells me that this is because someone keeps complaining that the programmers are "slacking off". People are looking over my shoulder all day. I was in the Freenode webchat to get help with a programming issue, and within minutes I had an email from my boss (to all the developers) telling us that we should NOT be connected to any outside chat servers at work. Version control system from 2005 that we must access with IE and keep the Java 1.4 JRE installed to be able to use. I accidentally updated to Java 6 one day and spent the next two days fighting with my PC to undo this "problem". No source control, no comments on anything, no standards, no code review, no unit testing, no common sense. I literally found a problem in how they handle string resource translations that stems from the simple fact that they don't trim excess white spaces, leading to developers doing: getResource("Date: ") instead of: getResource("Date") + ": ", and I was told to just add the excess white spaces back to the database instead of dealing with the issue directly. Some of these things I'd like to try to understand, but I like having IRC open to talk in a few different rooms during the day and keep in touch with friends/family over IM. They don't break my concentration (not NEARLY as much as the lady from QA stopping by to talk about her son), but because people are looking over my shoulder all day as they walk by they complain when they see something that's not "programmer-looking work". I've been told by my boss and QA that I do good, fast work. I should be judged on my work output and quality, not what I have up on my screen for the five seconds you're walking by So, my question is, even though I'm just barely at my 90 days: How do you decide to move on from a job and looking elsewhere, or when you should start working with your boss to resolve these issues? Is it even possible to get the boss to work with me in many of these things? This is the only place I heard back from even though I sent out several resume's a day for several months, and this place does pay well for putting up with their many flaws, but I'm just starting to get so miserable working here already. Should I just put up with it?

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• Intermittent internet connectivity

  - by Rob Oplawar

  UPDATED: I recently built a new computer and set it up to dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.10. In Windows, using the same hardware, my LAN connectivity is solid. In Ubuntu, however, my network interface periodically dies and resets itself; I'll have a solid connection for 30 seconds, and then it will go out for 30 seconds. When I tail the log: tail -f /var/log/kern.log I see "eth0 link up" messages appear periodically, corresponding with the return of connectivity. I posted the original question months ago, and misinterpreted what was going on. With a working Internet connection in Windows, I ignored the problem for some months. See my answer below for the solution (drivers). ORIGINAL POST In Ubuntu, although I maintain a solid connection to my LAN (pinging the router IP address consistently returns a good result), my internet connectivity drops in and out. When I continuously ping 74.125.227.18 (a google.com server), I get responses for a while, then I start getting "Destination Host Unreachable" for a while, then I get responses again. This happens consistently, dropping the connection for about 30 seconds out of every minute or two. Whether I configure my network via the network manager or via /etc/network/interfaces seems to make no difference. I configure with the following settings: address 192.168.1.101 network 192.168.1.0 gateway 192.168.1.99 (my router's IP address) netmask 255.255.255.0 (confirmed as the right netmask for the router) broadcast 192.168.1.255 (also confirmed with the router). ifconfig confirms that these settings are working: eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 50:e5:49:40:da:a6 inet addr:192.168.1.101 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::52e5:49ff:fe40:daa6/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:11557 errors:0 dropped:11557 overruns:0 frame:11557 TX packets:13117 errors:0 dropped:211 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:9551488 (9.5 MB) TX bytes:1930952 (1.9 MB) Interrupt:41 Base address:0xa000 I get the same issue when I use automatic DHCP address settings, although I did confirm that there is no other machine on the network with the static IP address I want to use. As I said, the connection to the local network stays solid - I never have any trouble pinging 192.168.1.* - it's internet addresses that I intermittently cannot reach. It's not a DNS issue because pinging known IP addresses directly shows the same behavior. Also, I don't think it's a hardware issue, as I never have any internet connectivity problems on the same machine in Windows. The network hardware is built into the motherboard: Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3P. I managed to bring the OS fully up to date, according to the update manager, but it didn't fix the issue, and with my limited understanding of network architecture I'm at my wit's end. The only clue I can see is that ifconfig is reporting a lot of dropped packets, but I'm not sure what to do about it. UPDATE: It seems my problem is a little more generic than I described; now when I try pinging my router and google simultaneously, they both go unreachable at the same time. Running ifdown eth0 and then ifup eth0 brings it back temporarily; if I just wait it comes back after a couple of minutes. I'll broaden my search through intermittent network connectivity problems.

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• Blind As a Bat in Multi-Monitor Hell &ndash; Free Program Inside!

  - by ToStringTheory

  If you know me personally, then you probably know that I am going blind thanks to a rare genetic eye disease.  My eye disease has already been a huge detriment to my eyesight.  One of the big things to suffer is my ability to see small things moving fast right in front of me.  On a multi-monitor setup, this makes finding the cursor absolute hell. The Problem I’ll keep this short, as I’ve basically already told you what the problem is.  On my three monitor development computer, I am constantly losing the mouse during the day.  I had used the Microsoft accessibility mousefinder (press CTRL, and it pings around the mouse).  The problem with this is, there is only an effect around 50-100 PX around the mouse, and it is a very light gray, almost unnoticeable.. For someone like me, if I am not looking at the monitor when I click the CTRL button, I have to click it multiple times and dart my eyes back and forth in a futile attempt to catch a glimpse of the action…  I had tried other cursor finders, but none I liked… The Solution So what’s a guy to do when he doesn’t like his options?  MAKE A NEW OPTION…  What else should we as developers do, am I right?  So, I went ahead and made a mousefinder of my own, with 6 separate settings to change the effect.  I am releasing it here for anyone else that may also have problems finding their mouse at times. Some of its features include: Multiple options to change to achieve the exact effect you want. If your mouse moves while it is honing in, it will hone in on its current position. Many times, I would press the button and move my mouse at the same time, and many times, the mouse happened to be at a screen edge, so I would miss it. This program will restart its animation on a new screen if the mouse changes its screen while playing. Tested on Windows 7 x64 Stylish color changing from green to red. Deployed as a ClickOnce, so easy to remove if you don't like it. Press Right CTRL to trigger effect Application lives in notification area so that you can easily reach configuration or close it. To get it to run on startup, copy its application shortcut from its startmenu directory to the “Startup” folder in your startmenu. Conclusion I understand if you don’t download this…  You don’t know me and I don’t know you.  I can only say that I have honestly NOT added any virus’ or malware to the package. Yeah, I know it’s weird Download: ‘ToString(theory) Mousefinder.zip’ CRC32: EEBCE300 MD5: 0394DA581BE6F3371B5BA11A8B24BC91 SHA-1: 2080C4930A2E7D98B81787BB5E19BB24E118991C Finally, if you do use this application - please leave a comment, or email me and tell me what you think of it. Encounter a bug or hashes no longer match? I want to know that too! <warning type=”BadPun”>Now, stop messing around and start mousing around!</warning>

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• Profiling Silverlight Applications after installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1

  - by mbcrump

  Introduction Now that the dust has settled and everyone has downloaded and installed Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1, its time to talk about a new feature included that will help Silverlight Developers profile their applications. Let’s take a look at what the official documentation says about it: Performance Wizard for Silverlight – taken from VS2010 SP1 KB. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 enables you to tune the Silverlight application performance by profiling the code. A traditional code profiler cannot tune the rendering performance for Silverlight applications. Many higher-level profilers are added to Visual Studio 2010 SP1 so that you can better determine which parts of the application consume time. So, how do you do it? After you finish installing VS2010 SP1, make sure it took by going to Help –> About. You should see SP1Rel under Visual Studio 2010 as shown below. Now, that we have verified you are on the most current release, let’s load up a Silverlight Application. I’m going to take my hobby Silverlight project that I created a month or so ago. The reason that I’m picking this project is that I didn’t focus so much on performance as it was just built for fun and to see what I could do with Silverlight. I believe this makes the perfect application to profile.  After the project is loaded, click on Analyze then Launch Performance Wizard. Go ahead and click on CPU Sampling (recommended). You will notice that it ask which application to target. By Default, it will select the .Web project in an Silverlight Application. Go ahead and leave the default Web Project checked. We are going to leave the client as Internet Explorer. Now, go ahead and click finish. Now your Silverlight Application will launch. While your application is running, you will see the following inside of Visual Studio 2010. Here is where you will need to attach your Silverlight Application to the web application that is current being profiled. Simply click on the  Attach/Detach button below and find your application to attach to the profiler. In my case, I am using IE8 and could find it by the title. After you close your browser, you will notice it generated a report: These files will end with a .VSP If you click on the .VSP you will it generated the following report: We could turn off “Just My Code” but it may pick up things that we didn’t want to profile as shown below: One other feature to note is that you may want to export the data to a CSV or XML. You can do that by looking at the toolbar and clicking the button highlighted below. Conclusion The profiler for Silverlight is a great addition to an already great product. So before you ship a Silverlight Application run it through the profile and see what comes up. Since its included and free I can’t see a reason not to do this. Thanks again for reading and I hope you subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter for more Silverlight/WP7 fun.  Subscribe to my feed

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• Perfect End to a Bad Day

  - by TehGrumpyCoder

  Yesterday's post about A Bad Day at Work actually had an addendum to it. There were apparently a bunch of guys on ice skates last night competing in some sport way the hell and gone over on the other side of the valley, and enough people couldn't live without seeing them that they had all major arteries heading west honked. I mean honked... the traffic guy reported the 101 had 16 miles of backup... yikes. Since I worked downtown for a number of years, my fallback is to cut across the city on surface streets to get to one of my old 'haunts' and just drive it home from there. Of course with the 101 backed up, then I17 would logically be as well, so I kept the news on rather than my Zune and heard where the bad stuff was going North. I popped out on the freeway about 7 miles south of my exit. Got to the exit which is about a mile from the house without killing or maiming me or anyone else. Waited patiently at the light in the inside lane to make a left and go under the freeway proceeding West. The light changed, I had full green, I started through and whoa... I've got someone in a little rat car crossing my bow! A little explanation... I drive a 3/4 ton pickup with a V-10, extended cab and shell on the back. It's not jacked up, but it sits up pretty good and is longer than any parking place I've ever tried to put it into. I consider this truck to be the consolation prize for paying uninsured motorist coverage for 45 years and having Pilar Martinez totally destroy a 3/4 ton Silverado on March 1, 2007 by plowing into me at traffic speed while I was stopped at a light. If you pay for uninsured motorist coverage, ask your insurance agent *exactly* what that means... I bet it's different than what you think it means. But I digress, sorry... So here I am with a car that is shorter from top to road than the hood on my truck, and the driver thought it would be safe to run a red light and see if they could get past me before I got into the lane. The right side of my front bumper was almost into the driver's window when I hit the brakes and wheeled it left. Fortunately for all involved, I saw it soon enough, and pulled into the 2nd lane for making a left to go back South. I looked in my mirror, signalled a move, then moved over behind the yuck in the rat car. I then punched it, and the future hood ornament and I both made it through the next light. I pulled alongside to let her know that she was DEFINITELY Number 1 in my book, and it's a middle-age woman looking at me with a "sorry, it was an accident" show of pouty face and arms held up. Tough $hit lady... that may have worked when you were 18, but it's not working anymore, and it wasn't an accident... you ran a freakin' red light and almost got yourself killed. That just about put a bow on the day... I was home later than usual, pissed off about work stuff, pissed off at traffic, and now that. I ate dinner, watched a little TV, and was asleep about 9:30 exhausted. Hope today is better.

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• Why Are We Here?

  - by Jonathan Mills

  Back in the early 2000s, Toyota had a vision of building the number one best selling minivan in North America. Their current minivan, the Sienna, was small, underpowered, and badly needed help.  Yuji Yokoya was given the job of re-engineering the Sienna. There was just one problem, Yuji, lived in Japan. He did not know the people or places that he would be engineering for. Believe it or not, Japan is nothing like North America. So, what does a chief engineer do in a situation like that? He packed up his team and flew halfway around the world. He made a commitment to drive through every state in the US, every province in Canada, and Mexico. He met the people and drove the roads that the Sienna would be driving. And guess what, what he learned on that trip revolutionized the Sienna. The innovations he made, sent the Sienna to number one. Why? Because he knew who he was building his product for. He knew, why he was there.Let me ask you this, do you know why you are building what you are building? As a member of a product team, can you tell me how your product will be used in the real world? As you are writing code, building test plans, writing stories, or any of the other project tasks, can you picture the face of a person who will be using what you are building? All to often, the answer to those questions is, no. Why is it important? Because, every day, project team members make assumptions. Over a given project, it is safe to say project team members will make thousands of assumptions about what they are doing. And all to often, those assumptions are not quite right. Its not that they are not good at their job, its just that they don’t really know why they are there.So, what to do? First and foremost, stop doing what you are doing. Yes, really. Schedule some time to go visit the people who will be using your product. Don’t invite them to you, go to them. Watch them work. Interact with them. Ask them questions. Maybe even try it out yourself. This serves two purposes. One, It shows them that you care about them. They will be far more engaged in your project if they feel like you care. And nothing says you care more that spending some time. Second, if gives you the proper frame of reference for you work. It gives you something tangible to go back to as you are building your product. As you make the thousands of assumptions that you will make over the life of your project, it gives you something to see in your mind that makes it real to you.Ultimately, setting a proper frame of reference is critical to the overall success of a project. The funny thing is, it really does not even take that long. In most cases, a 2-3 hour session will give you most of what you need to get the right insight. For the project, it will be the best 2 hours you could spend.

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• Review: Windows 8 - Initial Experience

  - by Tim Murphy

  I originally started this post when I had the Windows 8 preview setup on VirtualBox image.  I have since put the RTM bits on a Dell E6530 that is my new work laptop.  It isn’t a table so I am not getting the touch experience, but as a developer this makes the most sense for the moment. This is the first Windows OS that I have had to spend much time exploring to even get started.  The first thing I ran into was when I clicked on the desktop icon I was lost.  Where is the Start menu? Where are my programs?  How do I get back to the Metro environment?  I finally tried hitting the Windows button and it popped back out to the Metro screen. Once I got past that I found that the look of the Metro interface is clean and well organized.  It should be familiar to anyone who is already using a Zune or Windows Phone 7.  In the Desktop, aside from the lack of the Start button to bring up programs the desktop is just like the Windows 7 environment we are all used to.  I do have to say though that I don’t like popping out to the Metro screen to find program.  I think installers for programs like ones that developers usually work in for a desktop mode will need to give an option for creating a desktop icon and pinning to the task bar of the desktop. One of the things I do really enjoy is having live tiles in the Metro environment.  It is a nice way of feeding my need for constant information.  The one drawback though is that the task bar at the bottom of my screen used to be where I got this information without leaving what I was working on.  It allowed me to see current temperatures and when there were messages waiting.  I have since found that these still work as expected in the Desktop and Toast message keep you up on what is going on in the Metro apps. Thankfully familiar functionality like Alt-Tab and Windows-Tab still work regardless of if apps are in the Metro or the Desktop environment.  Add to this the ability to find any application on the Metro screen by simply typing and things get very comfortable. I also started exploring some of the apps.  If you want see a ton of stats on your team at a glance check out the Sports app.  What games are coming up? Who are the leaders in a number of stats?  The Weather and Finance apps have good features as well and I am sure they will improve as users supply feedback. I have had to install Visual Studio 2010 side-by-side with VS2012 because the Windows Phone 7 SDK would only install on VS2010.  This isn’t a Windows 8 issue per se, but something that you need to be aware of if you are a developer moving to the new ecosystem. The overall experience is a joy despite a few hiccups.  For anyone moving to Windows 8 in on a non-touch laptop or desktop I do suggest this list of keyboard shortcuts.  Enjoy. del.icio.us Tags: Windows 8,Win8,Metro,Review

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• Patterns for a tree of persistent data with multiple storage options?

  - by Robin Winslow

  I have a real-world problem which I'll try to abstract into an illustrative example. So imagine I have data objects in a tree, where parent objects can access children, and children can access parents: // Interfaces interface IParent<TChild> { List<TChild> Children; } interface IChild<TParent> { TParent Parent; } // Classes class Top : IParent<Middle> {} class Middle : IParent<Bottom>, IChild<Top> {} class Bottom : IChild<Middle> {} // Usage var top = new Top(); var middles = top.Children; // List<Middle> foreach (var middle in middles) { var bottoms = middle.Children; // List<Bottom> foreach (var bottom in bottoms) { var middle = bottom.Parent; // Access the parent var top = middle.Parent; // Access the grandparent } } All three data objects have properties that are persisted in two data stores (e.g. a database and a web service), and they need to reflect and synchronise with the stores. Some objects only request from the web service, some only write to it. Data Mapper My favourite pattern for data access is Data Mapper, because it completely separates the data objects themselves from the communication with the data store: class TopMapper { public Top FetchById(int id) { var top = new Top(DataStore.TopDataById(id)); top.Children = MiddleMapper.FetchForTop(Top); return Top; } } class MiddleMapper { public Middle FetchById(int id) { var middle = new Middle(DataStore.MiddleDataById(id)); middle.Parent = TopMapper.FetchForMiddle(middle); middle.Children = BottomMapper.FetchForMiddle(bottom); return middle; } } This way I can have one mapper per data store, and build the object from the mapper I want, and then save it back using the mapper I want. There is a circular reference here, but I guess that's not a problem because most languages can just store memory references to the objects, so there won't actually be infinite data. The problem with this is that every time I want to construct a new Top, Middle or Bottom, it needs to build the entire object tree within that object's Parent or Children property, with all the data store requests and memory usage that that entails. And in real life my tree is much bigger than the one represented here, so that's a problem. Requests in the object In this the objects request their Parents and Children themselves: class Middle { private List<Bottom> _children = null; // cache public List<Bottom> Children { get { _children = _children ?? BottomMapper.FetchForMiddle(this); return _children; } set { BottomMapper.UpdateForMiddle(this, value); _children = value; } } } I think this is an example of the repository pattern. Is that correct? This solution seems neat - the data only gets requested from the data store when you need it, and thereafter it's stored in the object if you want to request it again, avoiding a further request. However, I have two different data sources. There's a database, but there's also a web service, and I need to be able to create an object from the web service and save it back to the database and then request it again from the database and update the web service. This also makes me uneasy because the data objects themselves are no longer ignorant of the data source. We've introduced a new dependency, not to mention a circular dependency, making it harder to test. And the objects now mask their communication with the database. Other solutions Are there any other solutions which could take care of the multiple stores problem but also mean that I don't need to build / request all the data every time?

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• Inside Red Gate - Exercising Externally

  - by simonc

  Over the next few weeks, we'll be performing experiments on SmartAssembly to confirm or refute various hypotheses we have about how people use the product, what is stopping them from using it to its full extent, and what we can change to make it more useful and easier to use. Some of these experiments can be done within the team, some within Red Gate, and some need to be done on external users. External testing Some external testing can be done by standard usability tests and surveys, however, there are some hypotheses that can only be tested by building a version of SmartAssembly with some things in the UI or implementation changed. We'll then be able to look at how the experimental build is used compared to the 'mainline' build, which forms our baseline or control group, and use this data to confirm or refute the relevant hypotheses. However, there are several issues we need to consider before running experiments using separate builds: Ideally, the user wouldn't know they're running an experimental SmartAssembly. We don't want users to use the experimental build like it's an experimental build, we want them to use it like it's the real mainline build. Only then will we get valid, useful, and informative data concerning our hypotheses. There's no point running the experiments if we can't find out what happens after the download. To confirm or refute some of our hypotheses, we need to find out how the tool is used once it is installed. Fortunately, we've applied feature usage reporting to the SmartAssembly codebase itself to provide us with that information. Of course, this then makes the experimental data conditional on the user agreeing to send that data back to us in the first place. Unfortunately, even though this does limit the amount of useful data we'll be getting back, and possibly skew the data, there's not much we can do about this; we don't collect feature usage data without the user's consent. Looks like we'll simply have to live with this. What if the user tries to buy the experiment? This is something that isn't really covered by the Lean Startup book; how do you support users who give you money for an experiment? If the experiment is a new feature, and the user buys a license for SmartAssembly based on that feature, then what do we do if we later decide to pivot & scrap that feature? We've either got to spend time and money bringing that feature up to production quality and into the mainline anyway, or we've got disgruntled customers. Either way is bad. Again, there's not really any good solution to this. Similarly, what if we've removed some features for an experiment and a potential new user downloads the experimental build? (As I said above, there's no indication the build is an experimental build, as we want to see what users really do with it). The crucial feature they need is missing, causing a bad trial experience, a lost potential customer, and a lost chance to help the customer with their problem. Again, this is something not really covered by the Lean Startup book, and something that doesn't have a good solution. So, some tricky issues there, not all of them with nice easy answers. Turns out the practicalities of running Lean Startup experiments are more complicated than they first seem! Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• Framework for Everything - Where to begin? [Longer post]

  - by SquaredSoft

  Back story of this question, feel free to skip down for the specific question Hello, I've been very interested in the idea of abstract programming the last few years. I've made about 30 attempts at creating a piece of software that is capable of almost anything you throw at it. I've undertook some attempts at this that have taken upwards of a year, while getting close, never releasing it beyond my compiler. This has been something I've always tried wrapping my head around, and something is always missing. With the title, I'm sure you're assuming, "Yes of course you noob! You can't account for everything!" To which I have to reply, "Why not?" To give you some background into what I'm talking about, this all started with doing maybe a shade of gray hat SEO software. I found myself constantly having to create similar, but slightly different sets of code. I've gone through as many iterations of way to communicate on http as the universe has particles. "How many times am I going to have to write this multi-threaded class?" is something I found myself asking a lot. Sure, I could create a class library, and just work with that, but I always felt I could optimize what I had, which often was a large undertaking and typically involved frequent use of the CRTL+A keyboard shortcut, mixed with the delete button. It dawned on me that it was time to invest in a plugin system. This would allow me to simply add snippets of code. as time went on, and I could subversion stuff out, and distribute small chunks of code, rather than something that encompasses only a specific function or design. This comes with its own complexity, of course, and by the time I had finished the software scope for this addition, it hit me that I would want to add to everything in the software, not just a new http method, or automation code for a specific website. Great, we're getting more abstract. However, the software that I have in my mind comes down to a quite a few questions regarding its execution. I have to have some parameters to what I am going to do. After writing what the perfect software would do in my mind, I came up with this as a list of requirements: Should be able to use networking A "Macro" or "Expression system" which would allow people to do something like : =First(=ParseToList(=GetUrl("http://www.google.com?q=helloworld!"), Template.Google)) Multithreaded Able to add UI elements through some type of XML -- People can make their own addons etc. Can use third party API through the plugins, such as Microsoft CRM, Exchange, etc. This would allow the software to essentially be used for everything. Really, any task you wish to automate, in a simple way. Making the UI was as also extremely hard. How do you do all of this? Its very difficult. So my question: With so many attempts at this, I'm out of ideas how to successfully complete this. I have a very specific idea in my mind, but I keep failing to execute it. I'm a self taught programmer. I've been doing it for years, and work professionally in it, but I've never encountered something that would be as complex and in-depth as a system which essentially does everything. Where would you start? What are the best practices for design? How can I avoid constantly having to go back and optimize my software. What can I do to generalize this and draw everything out to completion. These are things I struggle with. P.s., I'm using c# as my main language. I feel like in this example, I might be hitting the outer limit of the language, although, I don't know if that is the case, or if I'm just a bad programmer. Thanks for your time.

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