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• How does the Cloud compare to Colocation? And development too

  - by David

  Currently I/we run a SaaS web application where each subscriber has their own physical instance of the application in addition to their own database. The setup has each web application instance deployed on two different IIS boxes both for load-balancing and redundancy (the machines have their Windows Update install times 12 hours apart, for example). Databases are mirrored on two different SQL Server 2012 machines with AlwaysOn for uptime. I don't make use of SQL Server clustering (as it doesn't provide storage-level failover: we don't have a shared storage box). Because it's a Windows setup it means there are two Domain Controllers (we cheat: they're both Mac Minis, 17W each, which keeps our colo power costs low). Finally there's also an Exchange server (Mailbox, Hub Transport and Client Access). One of the SQL Servers also doubles-up as an Exchange Hub Transport. Running costs are about $700 a month for our quarter-rack colocation (which includes power and peering/transfer), then there's about $150 a month for SPLA licensing, so $850 a month in total. Then there's the hard-to-quantify cost of administration, but I reckon I spend a couple of hours a week checking-in on the servers: reviewing event logs, etc. I keep getting bombarded by ads and manufactured news stories about how great "the cloud" is. Back in 2008 when the cloud was taking off I was reading up about the proper "cloud" services like Google AppEngine, where you write in Python against Google's API and that's how they scale your application across servers and also use their database provider for scaling storage. Simple enough to understand. Then came along Amazon, and I understand how Amazon Storage works, but I'm not sure how Amazon Compute works: web application pages don't take much CPU time to compute, how do you even quantify usage anyway? Finally, RackSpace gets in the act and now I'm really confused. RackSpace advertise "Cloud" SQL Server 2012 available for about "$0.70 per hour", going by how they advertise it I thought the "hour" meant the sum of CPU time, IO blocking time, maybe time spent transferring data, so for a low-intensity application that works out pretty cheap then? Nope. I went on to a Sales Chat window and spoke to one of their advisors. They told me the $0.70/hour was actually for every hour the SQL Server is running... but who wants a SQL Server for only a few hours? You're going to need it available 24 hours a day for months on end. $0.70 * 24 * 31 works out at $520 a month, which is rediculously expensive for SQL Server. An SPLA license for SQL Server is only $50 a month or so. That $520 a month does not include "fanatical support", and you also need to stack on top the costs of the host Windows server instance too. From what I can tell, Rackspace's "Cloud" products seem like like an cynical rebranding of an overpriced VPS service, but priced by the hour. I have the same confusion about Windows Azure which uses similar terms to describe the products available, but I think that's because Azure offers both traditional shared webhosting in addition to their own APIs you can target for scalable applications.

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• Creating a multi-tenant application using PostgreSQL's schemas and Rails

  - by ramon.tayag

  Stuff I've already figured out I'm learning how to create a multi-tenant application in Rails that serves data from different schemas based on what domain or subdomain is used to view the application. I already have a few concerns answered: How can you get subdomain-fu to work with domains as well? Here's someone that asked the same question which leads you to this blog. What database, and how will it be structured? Here's an excellent talk by Guy Naor, and good question about PostgreSQL and schemas. I already know my schemas will all have the same structure. They will differ in the data they hold. So, how can you run migrations for all schemas? Here's an answer. Those three points cover a lot of the general stuff I need to know. However, in the next steps I seem to have many ways of implementing things. I'm hoping that there's a better, easier way. Finally, to my question When a new user signs up, I can easily create the schema. However, what would be the best and easiest way to load the structure that the rest of the schemas already have? Here are some questions/scenarios that might give you a better idea. Should I pass it on to a shell script that dumps the public schema into a temporary one, and imports it back to my main database (pretty much like what Guy Naor says in his video)? Here's a quick summary/script I got from the helpful #postgres on freenode. While this will probably work, I'm gonna have to do a lot of stuff outside of Rails, which makes me a bit uncomfortable.. which also brings me to the next question. Is there a way to do this straight from Ruby on Rails? Like create a PostgreSQL schema, then just load the Rails database schema (schema.rb - I know, it's confusing) into that PostgreSQL schema. Is there a gem/plugin that has these things already? Methods like "create_pg_schema_and_load_rails_schema(the_new_schema_name)". If there's none, I'll probably work at making one, but I'm doubtful about how well tested it'll be with all the moving parts (especially if I end up using a shell script to create and manage new PostgreSQL schemas). Thanks, and I hope that wasn't too long! UPDATE May 11, 2010 11:26 GMT+8 Since last night I've been able to get a method to work that creates a new schema and loads schema.rb into it. Not sure if what I'm doing is correct (seems to work fine, so far) but it's a step closer at least. If there's a better way please let me know. module SchemaUtils def self.add_schema_to_path(schema) conn = ActiveRecord::Base.connection conn.execute "SET search_path TO #{schema}, #{conn.schema_search_path}" end def self.reset_search_path conn = ActiveRecord::Base.connection conn.execute "SET search_path TO #{conn.schema_search_path}" end def self.create_and_migrate_schema(schema_name) conn = ActiveRecord::Base.connection schemas = conn.select_values("select * from pg_namespace where nspname != 'information_schema' AND nspname NOT LIKE 'pg%'") if schemas.include?(schema_name) tables = conn.tables Rails.logger.info "#{schema_name} exists already with these tables #{tables.inspect}" else Rails.logger.info "About to create #{schema_name}" conn.execute "create schema #{schema_name}" end # Save the old search path so we can set it back at the end of this method old_search_path = conn.schema_search_path # Tried to set the search path like in the methods above (from Guy Naor) # conn.execute "SET search_path TO #{schema_name}" # But the connection itself seems to remember the old search path. # If set this way, it works. conn.schema_search_path = schema_name # Directly from databases.rake. # In Rails 2.3.5 databases.rake can be found in railties/lib/tasks/databases.rake file = "#{Rails.root}/db/schema.rb" if File.exists?(file) Rails.logger.info "About to load the schema #{file}" load(file) else abort %{#{file} doesn't exist yet. It's possible that you just ran a migration!} end Rails.logger.info "About to set search path back to #{old_search_path}." conn.schema_search_path = old_search_path end end

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• Doing CRUD on XML using id attributes in C# ASP.NET

  - by Brandon G

  I'm a LAMP guy and ended up working this small news module for an asp.net site, which I am having some difficulty with. I basically am adding and deleting elements via AJAX based on the id. Before, I had it working based on the the index of a set of elements, but would have issues deleting, since the index would change in the xml file and not on the page (since I am using ajax). Here is the rundown news.xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <news> <article id="1"> <title>Red Shield Environmental implements the PARCSuite system</title> <story>Add stuff here</story> </article> <article id="2"> <title>Catalyst Paper selects PARCSuite for its Mill-Wide Process...</title> <story>Add stuff here</story> </article> <article id="3"> <title>Weyerhaeuser uses Capstone Technology to provide Control...</title> <story>Add stuff here</story> </article> </news> Page sending del request: <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $('.del').click(function () { var obj = $(this); var id = obj.attr('rel'); $.post('add-news-item.aspx', { id: id }, function () { obj.parent().next().remove(); obj.parent().remove(); } ); }); }); </script> <a class="del" rel="1">...</a> <a class="del" rel="1">...</a> <a class="del" rel="1">...</a> My functions protected void addEntry(string title, string story) { XmlDocument news = new XmlDocument(); news.Load(Server.MapPath("../news.xml")); XmlAttributeCollection ids = news.Attributes; //Create a new node XmlElement newelement = news.CreateElement("article"); XmlElement xmlTitle = news.CreateElement("title"); XmlElement xmlStory = news.CreateElement("story"); XmlAttribute id = ids[0]; int myId = int.Parse(id.Value + 1); id.Value = ""+myId; newelement.SetAttributeNode(id); xmlTitle.InnerText = this.TitleBox.Text.Trim(); xmlStory.InnerText = this.StoryBox.Text.Trim(); newelement.AppendChild(xmlTitle); newelement.AppendChild(xmlStory); news.DocumentElement.AppendChild(newelement); news.Save(Server.MapPath("../news.xml")); } protected void deleteEntry(int selectIndex) { XmlDocument news = new XmlDocument(); news.Load(Server.MapPath("../news.xml")); XmlNode xmlnode = news.DocumentElement.ChildNodes.Item(selectIndex); xmlnode.ParentNode.RemoveChild(xmlnode); news.Save(Server.MapPath("../news.xml")); } I haven't updated deleteEntry() and you can see, I was using the array index but need to delete the article element based on the article id being passed. And when adding an entry, I need to set the id to the last elements id + 1. Yes, I know SQL would be 100 times easier, but I don't have access so... help?

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• Partial view links not working in Fire Fox

  - by user329540

  I have a MVC4 asp.net application, I have two layouts a main layout for the main page and a second layout for the nested pages. The problem I have is with the second layout, on this layout I call a partial view which has my navigation links. In IE the navigation menu displays fine and when each item is clicked it navigates as expected. However in FF when the page renders the navigation bar is displayed but it has no 'click functionality' if you will its as if its simply text. My layout of nested page: <header> <img src="../../Images/fronttop.png" id="nestedPageheader" alt="Background Img"/> <div class="content-wrapper"> <section > <nav> <div id="navcontainer"> </div> </nav> </section> <div> </header> The script to retreive partial view and information for dynamic links on layout page. <script type="text/javascript"> var menuLoaded = false; $(document).ready(function () { if($('#navcontainer')[0].innerHTML.trim() == "") { $.ajax({ url: "@Url.Content("~/Home/MenuLayout")", type: "GET", success: function (response, status, xhr) { var nvContainer = $('#navcontainer'); nvContainer.html(response); menuLoaded = true; }, error: function (XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) { var nvContainer = $('#navcontainer'); nvContainer.html(errorThrown); } }); } }); </script> May partial view: @model Mscl.OpCost.Web.Models.stuffmodel <div class="menu"> <ul> <li><a>@Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")</a></li> <li><a>@Html.ActionLink("some stuff", "stuffs", "stuff")</a></li> <li> <h5><a><span>somestuff</span></a></h5> <ul> <li><a>stuffs1s</a> <ul> @foreach (var image in Model.stuffs.Where(g => g.Grouping == 1)) { <li> <a>@Html.ActionLink(image.Title, "stuffs", "stuff", new { Id = image.CategoryId }, null)</a> </li> } </ul> </li> </ul> </il> </ul> </div> I need to know why this works fine in IE but why its not working in FF(all versions). Any assistance would be appreciated.

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• Getting a Temporary Table Returned from from Dynamic SQL in SQL Server 05, and parsing

  - by gloomy.penguin

  So I was requested to make a few things.... (it is Monday morning and for some reason this whole thing is turning out to be really hard for me to explain so I am just going to try and post a lot of my code; sorry) First, I needed a table: CREATE TABLE TICKET_INFORMATION ( TICKET_INFO_ID INT IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, TICKET_TYPE INT, TARGET_ID INT, TARGET_NAME VARCHAR(100), INFORMATION VARCHAR(MAX), TIME_STAMP DATETIME DEFAULT GETUTCDATE() ) -- insert this row for testing... INSERT INTO TICKET_INFORMATION (TICKET_TYPE, TARGET_ID, TARGET_NAME, INFORMATION) VALUES (1,1,'RT_ID','IF_ID,int=1&IF_ID,int=2&OTHER,varchar(10)=val,ue3&OTHER,varchar(10)=val,ue4') The Information column holds data that needs to be parsed into a table. This is where I am having problems. In the resulting table, Target_Name needs to become a column that holds Target_ID as a value for each row in the resulting table. The string that needs to be parsed is in this format: @var_name1,@var_datatype1=@var_value1&@var_name2,@var_datatype2=@var_value2&@var_name3,@var_datatype3=@var_value3 And what I ultimately need as a result (in a table or table variable): RT_ID IF_ID OTHER 1 1 val,ue3 1 2 val,ue3 1 1 val,ue4 1 2 val,ue4 And I need to be able to join on the result. Initially, I was just going to make this a function that returns a table variable but for some reason I can't figure out how to get it into an actual table variable. Whatever parses the string needs to be able to be used directly in queries so I don't think a stored procedure is really the right thing to be using. This is the code that parses the Information string... it returns in a temporary table. -- create/empty temp table for var_name, var_type and var_value fields if OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#temp') is not null drop table #temp create table #temp (row int identity(1,1), var_name varchar(max), var_type varchar(30), var_value varchar(max)) -- just setting stuff up declare @target_name varchar(max), @target_id varchar(max), @info varchar(max) set @target_name = (select target_name from ticket_information where ticket_info_id = 1) set @target_id = (select target_id from ticket_information where ticket_info_id = 1) set @info = (select information from ticket_information where ticket_info_id = 1) --print @info -- some of these variables are re-used later declare @col_type varchar(20), @query varchar(max), @select as varchar(max) set @query = 'select ' + @target_id + ' as ' + @target_name + ' into #target; ' set @select = 'select * into ##global_temp from #target' declare @var_name varchar(100), @var_type varchar(100), @var_value varchar(100) declare @comma_pos int, @equal_pos int, @amp_pos int set @comma_pos = 1 set @equal_pos = 1 set @amp_pos = 0 -- while loop to parse the string into a table while @amp_pos < len(@info) begin -- get new comma position set @comma_pos = charindex(',',@info,@amp_pos+1) -- get new equal position set @equal_pos = charindex('=',@info,@amp_pos+1) -- set stuff that is going into the table set @var_name = substring(@info,@amp_pos+1,@comma_pos-@amp_pos-1) set @var_type = substring(@info,@comma_pos+1,@equal_pos-@comma_pos-1) -- get new ampersand position set @amp_pos = charindex('&',@info,@amp_pos+1) if @amp_pos=0 or @amp_pos<@equal_pos set @amp_pos = len(@info)+1 -- set last variable for insert into table set @var_value = substring(@info,@equal_pos+1,@amp_pos-@equal_pos-1) -- put stuff into the temp table insert into #temp (var_name, var_type, var_value) values (@var_name, @var_type, @var_value) -- is this a new field? if ((select count(*) from #temp where var_name = (@var_name)) = 1) begin set @query = @query + ' create table #' + @var_name + '_temp (' + @var_name + ' ' + @var_type + '); ' set @select = @select + ', #' + @var_name + '_temp ' end set @query = @query + ' insert into #' + @var_name + '_temp values (''' + @var_value + '''); ' end if OBJECT_ID('tempdb..##global_temp') is not null drop table ##global_temp exec (@query + @select) --select @query --select @select select * from ##global_temp Okay. So, the result I want and need is now in ##global_temp. How do I put all of that into something that can be returned from a function (or something)? Or can I get something more useful returned from the exec statement? In the end, the results of the parsed string need to be in a table that can be joined on and used... Ideally this would have been a view but I guess it can't with all the processing that needs to be done on that information string. Ideas? Thanks!

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• Is it possible to embed Cockburn style textual UML Use Case content in the code base to improve code

  - by fooledbyprimes

  experimenting with Cockburn use cases in code I was writing some complicated UI code. I decided to employ Cockburn use cases with fish,kite,and sea levels (discussed by Martin Fowler in his book 'UML Distilled'). I wrapped Cockburn use cases in static C# objects so that I could test logical conditions against static constants which represented steps in a UI workflow. The idea was that you could read the code and know what it was doing because the wrapped objects and their public contants gave you ENGLISH use cases via namespaces. Also, I was going to use reflection to pump out error messages that included the described use cases. The idea is that the stack trace could include some UI use case steps IN ENGLISH.... It turned out to be a fun way to achieve a mini,psuedo light-weight Domain Language but without having to write a DSL compiler. So my question is whether or not this is a good way to do this? Has anyone out there ever done something similar? c# example snippets follow Assume we have some aspx page which has 3 user controls (with lots of clickable stuff). User must click on stuff in one particular user control (possibly making some kind of selection) and then the UI must visually cue the user that the selection was successful. Now, while that item is selected, the user must browse through a gridview to find an item within one of the other user controls and then select something. This sounds like an easy thing to manage but the code can get ugly. In my case, the user controls all sent event messages which were captured by the main page. This way, the page acted like a central processor of UI events and could keep track of what happens when the user is clicking around. So, in the main aspx page, we capture the first user control's event. using MyCompany.MyApp.Web.UseCases; protected void MyFirstUserControl_SomeUIWorkflowRequestCommingIn(object sender, EventArgs e) { // some code here to respond and make "state" changes or whatever // // blah blah blah // finally we have this (how did we know to call fish level method?? because we knew when we wrote the code to send the event in the user control) UpdateUserInterfaceOnFishLevelUseCaseGoalSuccess(FishLevel.SomeNamedUIWorkflow.SelectedItemForPurchase) } protected void UpdateUserInterfaceOnFishLevelGoalSuccess(FishLevel.SomeNamedUIWorkflow goal) { switch (goal) { case FishLevel.SomeNamedUIWorkflow.NewMasterItemSelected: //call some UI related methods here including methods for the other user controls if necessary.... break; case FishLevel.SomeNamedUIWorkFlow.DrillDownOnDetails: //call some UI related methods here including methods for the other user controls if necessary.... break; case FishLevel.SomeNamedUIWorkFlow.CancelMultiSelect: //call some UI related methods here including methods for the other user controls if necessary.... break; // more cases... } } } //also we have protected void UpdateUserInterfaceOnSeaLevelGoalSuccess(SeaLevel.SomeNamedUIWorkflow goal) { switch (goal) { case SeaLevel.CheckOutWorkflow.ChangedCreditCard: // do stuff // more cases... } } } So, in the MyCompany.MyApp.Web.UseCases namespace we might have code like this: class SeaLevel... class FishLevel... class KiteLevel... The workflow use cases embedded in the classes could be inner classes or static methods or enumerations or whatever gives you the cleanest namespace. I can't remember what I did originally but you get the picture.

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• urllib2 misbehaving with dynamically loaded content

  - by Sheena

  Some Code headers = {} headers['user-agent'] = 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0' headers['Accept'] = 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' headers['Accept-Language'] = 'en-gb,en;q=0.5' #headers['Accept-Encoding'] = 'gzip, deflate' request = urllib.request.Request(sURL, headers = headers) try: response = urllib.request.urlopen(request) except error.HTTPError as e: print('The server couldn\'t fulfill the request.') print('Error code: {0}'.format(e.code)) except error.URLError as e: print('We failed to reach a server.') print('Reason: {0}'.format(e.reason)) else: f = open('output/{0}.html'.format(sFileName),'w') f.write(response.read().decode('utf-8')) A url http://groupon.cl/descuentos/santiago-centro The situation Here's what I did: enable javascript in browser open url above and keep an eye on the console disable javascript repeat step 2 use urllib2 to grab the webpage and save it to a file enable javascript open the file with browser and observe console repeat 7 with javascript off results In step 2 I saw that a whole lot of the page content was loaded dynamically using ajax. So the HTML that arrived was a sort of skeleton and ajax was used to fill in the gaps. This is fine and not at all surprising Since the page should be seo friendly it should work fine without js. in step 4 nothing happens in the console and the skeleton page loads pre-populated rendering the ajax unnecessary. This is also completely not confusing in step 7 the ajax calls are made but fail. this is also ok since the urls they are using are not local, the calls are thus broken. The page looks like the skeleton. This is also great and expected. in step 8: no ajax calls are made and the skeleton is just a skeleton. I would have thought that this should behave very much like in step 4 question What I want to do is use urllib2 to grab the html from step 4 but I cant figure out how. What am I missing and how could I pull this off? To paraphrase If I was writing a spider I would want to be able to grab plain ol' HTML (as in that which resulted in step 4). I dont want to execute ajax stuff or any javascript at all. I don't want to populate anything dynamically. I just want HTML. The seo friendly site wants me to get what I want because that's what seo is all about. How would one go about getting plain HTML content given the situation I outlined? To do it manually I would turn off js, navigate to the page and copy the html. I want to automate this. stuff I've tried I used wireshark to look at packet headers and the GETs sent off from my pc in steps 2 and 4 have the same headers. Reading about SEO stuff makes me think that this is pretty normal otherwise techniques such as hijax wouldn't be used. Here are the headers my browser sends: Host: groupon.cl User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Connection: keep-alive Here are the headers my script sends: Accept-Encoding: identity Host: groupon.cl Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5 Connection: close Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 User-Agent: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0 The differences are: my script has Connection = close instead of keep-alive. I can't see how this would cause a problem my script has Accept-encoding = identity. This might be the cause of the problem. I can't really see why the host would use this field to determine the user-agent though. If I change encoding to match the browser request headers then I have trouble decoding it. I'm working on this now... watch this space, I'll update the question as new info comes up

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• Facelet components layouts and javascript

  - by Java Drinker

  Hi all, I have a question regarding the placement of javascript within facelet components. This is more regarding best practice/style than a programming issue, but I feel like all the solutions I have thought of have been hacks at best. Ok here is my scenario: I have a facelet template like so (my faces, and apache Trinidad)... <ui:composition> <f:view locale="#{myLocale}"> <ui:insert name="messageBundles" /><!--Here we add load bundle tags--> <tr:document mode="strict" styleClass="coolStyleDoc"> <f:facet name="metaContainer"> <!--This trinidad defined facet is added to HTML head--> <tr:group> <!-- blah bal my own styles and js common to all --> <ui:insert name="metaData" /> </tr:group> </f:facet> <tr:form usesUpload="#{empty usesUpload ? 'false' : usesUpload}"> <div id="formTemplateHeader"> <ui:insert name="contentHeader" /> </div> <div id="formTemplateContentContainer"> <div id="formTemplateContent"> <ui:insert name="contentBody" /> </div> </div> <div id="formTemplateFooter"> <ui:insert name="contentFooter"> </ui:insert> </div> </tr:form> <!-- etc...---> Now, a facelet that wants to use this template would look like the following: <ui:composition template="/path/to/my/template.jspx"> <ui:define name="bundles"> <custom:loadBundle basename="messagesStuff" var="bundle" /> </ui:define> <ui:define name="metaData"> <script> <!-- cool javascript stuff goes here--> </script> </ui:define> <ui:define name="contentHeader"> <!-- MY HEADING!--> </ui:define> <ui:define name="contentBody"> <!-- MY Body!--> </ui:define> <ui:define name="contentFooter"> <!-- Copyright/footer stuff!--> </ui:define> </ui:composition> All this works quite well, but the problem I have is when I want to use a facelet component inside this page. If the facelet component has its own javascript code (jQuery stuff etc), how can I make it so that that javascript code is included in the header section of the generated html? Any help would be appreciated. Please let me know if this is not clear or something... thanks in advance

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• How can I hit my database with an AJAX call using javascript?

  - by tmedge

  I am pretty new at this stuff, so bear with me. I am using ASP.NET MVC. I have created an overlay to cover the page when someone clicks a button corresponding to a certain database entry. Because of this, ALL of my code for this functionality is in a .js file contained within my project. What I need to do is pull the info corresponding to my entry from the database itself using an AJAX call, and place that into my textboxes. Then, after the end-user has made the desired changes, I need to update that entry's values to match the input. I've been surfing the web for a while, and have failed to find an example that fits my needs effectively. Here is my code in my javascript file thus far: function editOverlay(picId) { //pull up an overlay $('body').append('<div class="overlay" />'); var $overlayClass = $('.overlay'); $overlayClass.append('<div class="dataModal" />'); var $data = $('.dataModal'); overlaySetup($overlayClass, $data); //set up form $data.append('<h1>Edit Picture</h1><br /><br />'); $data.append('Picture name: &nbsp;'); $data.append('<input class="picName" /> <br /><br /><br />'); $data.append('Relative url: &nbsp;'); $data.append('<input class="picRelURL" /> <br /><br /><br />'); $data.append('Description: &nbsp;'); $data.append('<textarea class="picDescription" /> <br /><br /><br />'); var $nameBox = $('.picName'); var $urlBox = $('.picRelURL'); var $descBox = $('.picDescription'); var pic = null; //this is where I need to pull the actual object from the db //var imgList = for (var temp in imgList) { if (temp.Id == picId) { pic= temp; } } /* $nameBox.attr('value', pic.Name); $urlBox.attr('value', pic.RelativeURL); $descBox.attr('value', pic.Description); */ //close buttons $data.append('<input type="button" value="Save Changes" class="saveButton" />'); $data.append('<input type="button" value="Cancel" class="cancelButton" />'); $('.saveButton').click(function() { /* pic.Name = $nameBox.attr('value'); pic.RelativeURL = $urlBox.attr('value'); pic.Description = $descBox.attr('value'); */ //make a call to my Save() method in my repository CloseOverlay(); }); $('.cancelButton').click(function() { CloseOverlay(); }); } The stuff I have commented out is what I need to accomplish and/or is not available until prior issues are resolved. Any and all advice is appreciated! Remember, I am VERY new to this stuff (two weeks, to be exact) and will probably need highly explicit instructions. BTW: overlaySetup() and CloseOverlay() are functions I have living someplace else. Thanks!

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• Cart coding help

  - by user228390

  I've made a simple Javascript code for a shopping basket but now I have realised that I have made a error with making it and don't know how to fix it. What I have is Javascript file but I have also included the images source and the addtocart button as well, but What I am trying to do now is make 2 files one a .HTML file and another .JS file, but I can't get it to because when I make a button in the HTML file to call the function from the .JS file it won't work at all. <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <HTML> <HEAD><TITLE>shopping</TITLE> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <STYLE type=text/CSS> fieldset{width:300px} legend{font-size:24px;font-family:comic sans ms;color:#004455} </STYLE> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2963" name=GENERATOR></HEAD> <BODY scroll="auto"> <div id="products"></div><hr> <div id="inCart"></div> <SCRIPT type="text/javascript"> var items=['Xbox~149.99','StuffedGizmo~19.98','GadgetyGoop~9.97']; var M='?'; var product=[]; var price=[]; var stuff=''; function wpf(product,price){var pf='<form><FIELDSET><LEGEND>'+product+'</LEGEND>'; pf+='<img src="../images/'+product+'.jpg" alt="'+product+'" ><p>price '+M+''+price+'</p> <b>Qty</b><SELECT>'; for(i=0;i<6;i++){pf+='<option value="'+i+'">'+i+'</option>'} pf+='</SELECT>'; pf+='<input type="button" value="Add to cart" onclick="cart()" /></FIELDSET></form>'; return pf } for(j=0;j<items.length;j++){ product[j]=items[j].substring(0,items[j].indexOf('~')); price[j]=items[j].substring(items[j].indexOf('~')+1,items[j].length); stuff+=''+wpf(product[j],price[j])+''; } document.getElementById('products').innerHTML=stuff; function cart(){ var order=[]; var tot=0 for(o=0,k=0;o<document.forms.length;o++){ if(document.forms[o].elements[1].value!=0){ qnty=document.forms[o].elements[1].value; order[k]=''+product[o]+'_'+qnty+'*'+price[o]+''; tot+=qnty*price[o];k++ } } document.getElementById('inCart').innerHTML=order.join('<br>')+'<h3>Total '+tot+'</h3>'; } </SCRIPT> <input type="button" value="Add to cart" onclick="cart()" /></FIELDSET></form> </BODY></HTML>

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• Nested loop traversing arrays

  - by alecco

  There are 2 very big series of elements, the second 100 times bigger than the first. For each element of the first series, there are 0 or more elements on the second series. This can be traversed and processed with 2 nested loops. But the unpredictability of the amount of matching elements for each member of the first array makes things very, very slow. The actual processing of the 2nd series of elements involves logical and (&) and a population count. I couldn't find good optimizations using C but I am considering doing inline asm, doing rep* mov* or similar for each element of the first series and then doing the batch processing of the matching bytes of the second series, perhaps in buffers of 1MB or something. But the code would be get quite messy. Does anybody know of a better way? C preferred but x86 ASM OK too. Many thanks! Sample/demo code with simplified problem, first series are "people" and second series are "events", for clarity's sake. (the original problem is actually 100m and 10,000m entries!) #include <stdio.h> #include <stdint.h> #define PEOPLE 1000000 // 1m struct Person { uint8_t age; // Filtering condition uint8_t cnt; // Number of events for this person in E } P[PEOPLE]; // Each has 0 or more bytes with bit flags #define EVENTS 100000000 // 100m uint8_t P1[EVENTS]; // Property 1 flags uint8_t P2[EVENTS]; // Property 2 flags void init_arrays() { for (int i = 0; i < PEOPLE; i++) { // just some stuff P[i].age = i & 0x07; P[i].cnt = i % 220; // assert( sum < EVENTS ); } for (int i = 0; i < EVENTS; i++) { P1[i] = i % 7; // just some stuff P2[i] = i % 9; // just some other stuff } } int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { uint64_t sum = 0, fcur = 0; int age_filter = 7; // just some init_arrays(); // Init P, P1, P2 for (int64_t p = 0; p < PEOPLE ; p++) if (P[p].age < age_filter) for (int64_t e = 0; e < P[p].cnt ; e++, fcur++) sum += __builtin_popcount( P1[fcur] & P2[fcur] ); else fcur += P[p].cnt; // skip this person's events printf("(dummy %ld %ld)\n", sum, fcur ); return 0; } gcc -O5 -march=native -std=c99 test.c -o test

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• Real Excel Templates I

  - by Tim Dexter

  As promised, I'm starting to document the new Excel templates that I teased you all with a few weeks back. Leslie is buried in 11g documentation and will not get to officially documenting the templates for a while. I'll do my best to be professional and not ramble on about this and that, although the weather here has finally turned and its 'scorchio' here in Colorado today. Maybe our stand of Aspen will finally come into leaf ... but I digress. Preamble These templates are not actually that new, I helped in a small way to develop them a few years back with Excel 'meistress' Shirley for a company that was trying to use the Report Manager(RR) Excel FSG outputs under EBS 12. The functionality they needed was just not there in the RR FSG templates, the templates are actually XSL that is created from the the RR Excel template builder and fed to BIP for processing. Think of Excel from our RTF templates and you'll be there ie not really Excel but HTML masquerading as Excel. Although still under controlled release in EBS they have now made their way to the standlone release and are willing to share their Excel goodness. You get everything you have with hte Excel Analyzer Excel templates plus so much more. Therein lies a question, what will happen to the Analyzer templates? My understanding is that both will come together into a single Excel template format some time in the post-11g release world. The new XLSX format for Exce 2007/10 is also in the mix too so watch this space. What more do these templates offer? Well, you can structure data in the Excel output. Similar to RTF templates you can create sheets of data that have master-detail n relationships. Although the analyzer templates can do this, you have to get into macros whereas BIP will do this all for you. You can also use native XSL functions in your data to manipulate it prior to rendering. BP functions are not currently supported. The most impressive, for me at least, is the sheet 'bursting'. You can split your hierarchical data across multiple sheets and dynamically name those sheets. Finally, you of course, still get all the native Excel functionality. Pre-reqs You must be on 10.1.3.4.1 plus the latest rollup patch, 9546699. You can patch upa BIP instance running with OBIEE, no problem You need Excel 2000 or above to build the templates Some patience - there is no Excel template builder for these new templates. So its all going to have to be done by hand. Its not that tough but can get a little 'fiddly'. You can not test the template from Excel , it has to be deployed and then run. Limitations The new templates are definitely superior to the Analyzer templates but there are a few limitations. Re-grouping is not supported. You can only follow a data hierarchy not bend it to your will unless you want to get into macros. No support for BIP functions. The templates support native XSL functions only. No template builder Getting Started The templates make the use of named cells and groups of cells to allow BIP to find the insertion point for data points. It also uses a hidden sheet to store calculation mappings from named cells to XML data elements. To start with, in the great BIP tradition, we need some sample XML data. Becasue I wanted to show the master-detail output we need some hierarchical data. If you have not yet gotten into the data templates, now is a good time, I wrote a post a while back starting from the simple to more complex. They generate ideal data sets for these templates. Im working with the following data set: <EMPLOYEES> <LIST_G_DEPT> <G_DEPT> <DEPARTMENT_ID>10</DEPARTMENT_ID> <DEPARTMENT_NAME>Administration</DEPARTMENT_NAME> <LIST_G_EMP> <G_EMP> <EMPLOYEE_ID>200</EMPLOYEE_ID> <EMP_NAME>Jennifer Whalen</EMP_NAME> <EMAIL>JWHALEN</EMAIL> <PHONE_NUMBER>515.123.4444</PHONE_NUMBER> <HIRE_DATE>1987-09-17T00:00:00.000-06:00</HIRE_DATE> <SALARY>4400</SALARY> </G_EMP> </LIST_G_EMP> <TOTAL_EMPS>1</TOTAL_EMPS> <TOTAL_SALARY>4400</TOTAL_SALARY> <AVG_SALARY>4400</AVG_SALARY> <MAX_SALARY>4400</MAX_SALARY> <MIN_SALARY>4400</MIN_SALARY> </G_DEPT> ... <LIST_G_DEPT> <EMPLOYEES> Simple enough to follow and bread and butter stuff for an RTF template. Building the Template For an Excel template we need to start by thinking about how we want to render the data. Come up with a sample output in Excel. Its all dummy data, nothing marked up yet with one row of data for each level. I have the department name and then a repeating row for the employees. You can apply Excel formatting to the layout. The total is going to be derived from a data element. We'll get to Excel functions later. Marking Up Cells Next we need to start marking up the cells with custom names to map them to data elements. The cell names need to follow a specific format: For data grouping, XDO_GROUP_?group_name? For data elements, XDO_?element_name? Notice the question mark delimter, the group_name and element_name are case sensitive. The next step is to find how to name cells; the easiest method is to highlight the cell and then type in the name. You can also find the Name Manager dialog. I use 2007 and its available on the ribbon under the Formulas section Go thorugh the process of naming all the cells for the element values you have. Using my data set from above.You should end up with something like this in your 'Name Manager' dialog. You can update any mistakes you might have made through this dialog. Creating Groups In the image above you can see there are a couple of named group cells. To create these its a simple case of highlighting the cells that make up the group and then naming them. For the EMP group, highlight the employee row and then type in the name, XDO_GROUP?G_EMP? Notice the 10,000 total is outside of the G_EMP group. Its actually named, XDO_?TOTAL_SALARY?, a query calculated value. For the department group, we need to include the department name cell and the sub EMP grouping and name it, XDO_GROUP?G_DEPT? Notice, the 10,000 total is included in the G_DEPT group. This will ensure it repeats at the department level. Lastly, we do need to include a special sheet in the workbook. We will not have anything meaningful in there for now, but it needs to be present. Create a new sheet and name it XDO_METADATA. The name is important as the BIP rendering engine will looking for it. For our current example we do not need anything other than the required stuff in our XDO_METADATA sheet but, it must be present. Easy enough to hide it. Here's what I have: The only cell that is important is the 'Data Constraints:' cell. The rest is optional. To save curious users getting distracted, hide the metadata sheet. Deploying & Running Templates We should now have a usable Excel template. Loading it into a report is easy enough using the browser UI, just like an RTF template. Set the template type to Excel. You will now be able to run the report and hopefully get something like this. You will not get the red highlighting, thats just some conditional formatting I added to the template using Excel functionality. Your dates are probably going to look raw too. I got around this for now using an Excel function on the cell: =--REPLACE(SUBSTITUTE(E8,"T"," "),LEN(E8)-6,6,"") Google to the rescue on that one. Try some other stuff out. To avoid constantly loading the template through the UI. If you have BIP running locally or you can access the reports repository, once you have loaded the template the first time. Just save the template directly into the report folder. I have put together a sample report using a sample data set, available here. Just drop the xml data file, EmpbyDeptExcelData.xml into 'demo files' folder and you should be good to go. Thats the basics, next we'll start using some XSL functions in the template and move onto the 'bursting' across sheets.

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• Ajax Control Toolkit and Superexpert

  - by Stephen Walther

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

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• Make your CHM Help Files show HTML5 and CSS3 content

  - by Rick Strahl

  The HTML Help 1.0 specification aka CHM files, is pretty old. In fact, it's practically ancient as it was introduced in 1997 when Internet Explorer 4 was introduced. Html Help 1.0 is basically a completely HTML based Help system that uses a Help Viewer that internally uses Internet Explorer to render the HTML Help content. Because of its use of the Internet Explorer shell for rendering there were many security issues in the past, which resulted in locking down of the Web Browser control in Windows and also the Help Engine which caused some unfortunate side effects. Even so, CHM continues to be a popular help format because it is very easy to produce content for it, using plain HTML and because it works with many Windows application platforms out of the box. While there have been various attempts to replace CHM help files CHM files still seem to be a popular choice for many applications to display their help systems. The biggest alternative these days is no system based help at all, but links to online documentation. For Windows apps though it's still very common to see CHM help files and there are still a ton of CHM help out there and lots of tools (including our own West Wind Html Help Builder) that produce output for CHM files as well as Web output. Image is Everything and you ain't got it! One problem with the CHM engine is that it's stuck with an ancient Internet Explorer version for rendering. For example if you have help content that uses HTML5 or CSS3 content you might have an HTML Help topic like the following shown here in a full Web Browser instance of Internet Explorer: The page clearly uses some CSS3 features like rounded corners and box shadows that are rendered using plain CSS 3 features. Note that I used Internet Explorer on purpose here to demonstrate that IE9 on Windows 7 can properly render this content using some of the new features of CSS, but the same is true for all other recent versions of the major browsers (FireFox 3.1+, Safari 4.5+, WebKit 9+ etc.). Unfortunately if you take this nice and simple CSS3 content and run it through the HTML Help compiler to produce a CHM file the resulting output on the same machine looks a bit less flashy: All the CSS3 styling is gone and although the page display and functionality still works, but all the extra styling features are gone. This even though I am running this on a Windows 7 machine that has IE9 that should be able to render these CSS features. Bummer. Web Browser Control - perpetually stuck in IE 7 Mode The problem is the Web Browser/Shell Components in Windows. This component is and has been part of Windows for as long as Internet Explorer has been around, but the Web Browser control hasn't kept up with the latest versions of IE. In a nutshell the control is stuck in IE7 rendering mode for engine compatibility reasons by default. However, there is at least one way to fix this explicitly using Registry keys on a per application basis. The key point from that blog article is that you can override the IE rendering engine for a particular executable by setting one (or more) registry flags that tell the Windows Shell which version of the Internet Explorer rendering engine to load. An application that wishes to use a more recent version of Internet Explorer can then register itself during installation for the specific IE version desired and from then on the application will use that version of the Web Browser component. If the application is older than the specified version it falls back to the default version (IE 7 rendering). Forcing CHM files to display with IE9 (or later) Rendering Knowing that we can force the IE usage for a given process it's also possible to affect the CHM rendering by setting same keys on the executable that's hosting the CHM file. What that executable file is depends on the type of application as there are a number of ways that can launch the help engine. hh.exeThe standalone Windows CHM Help Viewer that launches when you launch a CHM from Windows Explorer. You can manually add hh.exe to the registry keys. YourApplication.exeIf you're using .NET or any tool that internally uses the hhControl ActiveX control to launch help content your application is your host. You should add your application's exe to the registry during application startup. foxhhelp9.exeIf you're building a FoxPro application that uses the built-in help features, foxhhelp9.exe is used to actually host the help controls. Make sure to add this executable to the registry. What to set You can configure the Internet Explorer version used for an application in the registry by specifying the executable file name and a value that specifies the IE version desired. There are two different sets of keys for 32 bit and 64 bit applications. 32 bit only or 64 bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION Value Key: hh.exe 32 bit on 64 bit machine: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION Value Key: hh.exe Note that it's best to always set both values ideally when you install your application so it works regardless of which platform you run on. The value specified is a DWORD value and the interesting values are decimal 9000 for IE9 rendering mode depending on !DOCTYPE settings or 9999 for IE 9 standards mode always. You can use the same logic for 8000 and 8888 for IE8 and the final value of 7000 for IE7 (one has to wonder what they're going todo for version 10 to perpetuate that pattern). I think 9000 is the value you'd most likely want to use. 9000 means that IE9 will be used for rendering but unless the right doctypes are used (XHTML and HTML5 specifically) IE will still fall back into quirks mode as needed. This should allow existing pages to continue to use the fallback engine while new pages that have the proper HTML doctype set can take advantage of the newest features. Here's an example of how I set the registry keys in my Tarma Installmate registry configuration: Note that I set all three values both under the Software and Wow6432Node keys so that this works regardless of where these EXEs are launched from. Even though all apps are 32 bit apps, the 64 bit (the default one shown selected) key is often used. So, now once I've set the registry key for hh.exe I can now launch my CHM help file from Explorer and see the following CSS3 IE9 rendered display: Summary It sucks that we have to go through all these hoops to get what should be natural behavior for an application to support the latest features available on a system. But it shouldn't be a surprise - the Windows Help team (if there even is such a thing) has not been known for forward looking technologies. It's a pretty big hassle that we have to resort to setting registry keys in order to get the Web Browser control and the internal CHM engine to render itself properly but at least it's possible to make it work after all. Using this technique it's possible to ship an application with a help file and allow your CHM help to display with richer CSS markup and correct rendering using the stricter and more consistent XHTML or HTML5 doctypes. If you provide both Web help and in-application help (and why not if you're building from a single source) you now can side step the issue of your customers asking: Why does my help file look so much shittier than the online help… No more!© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in HTML5  Help  Html Help Builder  Internet Explorer  Windows   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• [GEEK SCHOOL] Network Security 4: Windows Firewall: Your System’s Best Defense

  - by Ciprian Rusen

  If you have your computer connected to a network, or directly to your Internet connection, then having a firewall is an absolute necessity. In this lesson we will discuss the Windows Firewall – one of the best security features available in Windows! The Windows Firewall made its debut in Windows XP. Prior to that, Windows system needed to rely on third-party solutions or dedicated hardware to protect them from network-based attacks. Over the years, Microsoft has done a great job with it and it is one of the best firewalls you will ever find for Windows operating systems. Seriously, it is so good that some commercial vendors have decided to piggyback on it! Let’s talk about what you will learn in this lesson. First, you will learn about what the Windows Firewall is, what it does, and how it works. Afterward, you will start to get your hands dirty and edit the list of apps, programs, and features that are allowed to communicate through the Windows Firewall depending on the type of network you are connected to. Moving on from there, you will learn how to add new apps or programs to the list of allowed items and how to remove the apps and programs that you want to block. Last but not least, you will learn how to enable or disable the Windows Firewall, for only one type of networks or for all network connections. By the end of this lesson, you should know enough about the Windows Firewall to use and manage it effectively. What is the Windows Firewall? Windows Firewall is an important security application that’s built into Windows. One of its roles is to block unauthorized access to your computer. The second role is to permit authorized data communications to and from your computer. Windows Firewall does these things with the help of rules and exceptions that are applied both to inbound and outbound traffic. They are applied depending on the type of network you are connected to and the location you have set for it in Windows, when connecting to the network. Based on your choice, the Windows Firewall automatically adjusts the rules and exceptions applied to that network. This makes the Windows Firewall a product that’s silent and easy to use. It bothers you only when it doesn’t have any rules and exceptions for what you are trying to do or what the programs running on your computer are trying to do. If you need a refresher on the concept of network locations, we recommend you to read our How-To Geek School class on Windows Networking. Another benefit of the Windows Firewall is that it is so tightly and nicely integrated into Windows and all its networking features, that some commercial vendors decided to piggyback onto it and use it in their security products. For example, products from companies like Trend Micro or F-Secure no longer provide their proprietary firewall modules but use the Windows Firewall instead. Except for a few wording differences, the Windows Firewall works the same in Windows 7 and Windows 8.x. The only notable difference is that in Windows 8.x you will see the word “app” being used instead of “program”. Where to Find the Windows Firewall By default, the Windows Firewall is turned on and you don’t need to do anything special in order for it work. You will see it displaying some prompts once in a while but they show up so rarely that you might forget that is even working. If you want to access it and configure the way it works, go to the Control Panel, then go to “System and Security” and select “Windows Firewall”. Now you will see the Windows Firewall window where you can get a quick glimpse on whether it is turned on and the type of network you are connected to: private networks or public network. For the network type that you are connected to, you will see additional information like: The state of the Windows Firewall How the Windows Firewall deals with incoming connections The active network When the Windows Firewall will notify you You can easily expand the other section and view the default settings that apply when connecting to networks of that type. If you have installed a third-party security application that also includes a firewall module, chances are that the Windows Firewall has been disabled, in order to avoid performance issues and conflicts between the two security products. If that is the case for your computer or device, you won’t be able to view any information in the Windows Firewall window and you won’t be able to configure the way it works. Instead, you will see a warning that says: “These settings are being managed by vendor application – Application Name”. In the screenshot below you can see an example of how this looks. How to Allow Desktop Applications Through the Windows Firewall Windows Firewall has a very comprehensive set of rules and most Windows programs that you install add their own exceptions to the Windows Firewall so that they receive network and Internet access. This means that you will see prompts from the Windows Firewall on occasion, generally when you install programs that do not add their own exceptions to the Windows Firewall’s list. In a Windows Firewall prompt, you are asked to select the network locations to which you allow access for that program: private networks or public networks. By default, Windows Firewall selects the checkbox that’s appropriate for the network you are currently using. You can decide to allow access for both types of network locations or just to one of them. To apply your setting press “Allow access”. If you want to block network access for that program, press “Cancel” and the program will be set as blocked for both network locations. At this step you should note that only administrators can set exceptions in the Windows Firewall. If you are using a standard account without administrator permissions, the programs that do not comply with the Windows Firewall rules and exceptions are automatically blocked, without any prompts being shown. You should note that in Windows 8.x you will never see any Windows Firewall prompts related to apps from the Windows Store. They are automatically given access to the network and the Internet based on the assumption that you are aware of the permissions they require based on the information displayed by the Windows Store. Windows Firewall rules and exceptions are automatically created for each app that you install from the Windows Store. However, you can easily block access to the network and the Internet for any app, using the instructions in the next section. How to Customize the Rules for Allowed Apps Windows Firewall allows any user with an administrator account to change the list of rules and exceptions applied for apps and desktop programs. In order to do this, first start the Windows Firewall. On the column on the left, click or tap “Allow an app or feature through Windows Firewall” (in Windows 8.x) or “Allow a program or feature through Windows Firewall” (in Windows 7). Now you see the list of apps and programs that are allowed to communicate through the Windows Firewall. At this point, the list is grayed out and you can only view which apps, features, and programs have rules that are enabled in the Windows Firewall.

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• Hey, Google: It’s Time to Add Multi-Window Multitasking To Android

  - by Chris Hoffman

  In 2012, Google’s Dianne Hackborn threatened to revoke CyanogenMod’s access to the Android Market if they moved forward with adding “Cornerstone” multitasking to their custom ROM. Samsung has since created their own multi-window multitasking feature. Dianne Hackborn said this “is something that needs to be done at the mainline platform level” so apps wouldn’t break. She was right — Android needs this as a standard feature and it’s time for Google to provide it. Doesn’t Android Have Multitasking? Android originally stood out from Apple’s iOS with its powerful multitasking. Applications can continue running in the background while you’re using another application. This makes Android powerful — you can even have BitTorrent clients downloading files in the background while using another app. Android still kept the design of a single app on screen at a time. This made a lot of sense when Android only ran on smartphones with small screens. Today, Android runs on everything from smaller smartphones all the way up to huge “phablets” like the Galaxy Note. Android has gone beyond phones and runs on 12-inch tablets, convertibles with keyboard docks, laptops, and even Android desktops. Android isn’t just a phone operating system. Samsung’s Multi-Window Isn’t Good Enough Samsung has tried to add value to Android by adding a multi-window feature. When you’re using a high-end phone like the Galaxy Note or Galaxy S, or a Galaxy tablet, you have the ability to run certain apps side-by-side with each other. There are big problems here. This only works on Samsung devices, and only on specific Samsung devices. To add support for this feature in a way that doesn’t break other apps, Samsung’s multi-window feature also only works with specific apps. You can’t just run any app in multi-window view, only the apps on the Multi Window bar Samsung provides. This prevents third-party apps from breaking, which is what Google was worried about with CyanogenMod’s Cornerstone feature. A feature that only works with a handful of apps on specific devices from a single manufacturer isn’t good enough. This feature needs to work on every Android device — or at least ones with suitably large screens and powerful enough internals. It needs to be an Android platform feature so application developers can ensure their apps will work properly with it on every device. Android developers shouldn’t have to add support for each manufacturer’s own multi-window feature if other manufacturers decide to copy Samsung. Floating Apps Are a Dirty Hack Floating apps also enable real multitasking. Remember that Android allows apps to run in the background while you’re using an app in the foreground. These apps can present interfaces that appear floating above the current app — think of it like using “always on top” to make a window always appear over every other app on a desktop operating system. You can install floating apps to browse the web, take notes, chat, and watch videos while using any app. Only apps specifically designed to run as floating apps will work, so you have to seek them out. Floating apps are also awkward to use because they float over the app you’re using, blocking parts of its interface. Microsoft added floating-window support to Skype for Android. You can have a video conversation and the other person’s face will always appear on your screen, even when you leave the Skype app. Microsoft is using more of Android’s multi-window multitasking power than Google is. Custom ROMs and Root-Only Tweaks Aren’t Acceptable Some custom ROMs are adding this feature to Android. Google threatened to revoke CyanogenMod’s access to the Android Market (now known as Google Play) if they added this feature because it could potentially break third-party apps. Today, other custom ROMs are working on split-screen multitasking. Samsung added their own version to their own devices. You can also get this feature by using a root-only Xposed Framework tweak known as XMultiWindow. If you have root access, you can get multi-window multitasking or any app on your device. This shouldn’t require rooting your device or installing a custom ROM. These third-party solutions often have awkward interfaces and bugs. We need an integrated, supported solution that works the same on every device. Why Multi-Window is Important Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 stands out among tablet operating systems for its powerful multitasking support, allowing you to view several apps side-by-side at the same time. Apple is also reported to be working on adding side-by-side apps to the iPad with iOS 8. On every competitor’s operating system, you’ll be able to view a web page while you write an email, watch a video while you browse the web, or chat with someone while you do anything else. But Android’s still remained frozen in time. Despite all Android’s underlying power — and despite the way Android allows apps to adapt to different screen sizes — Google is resisting adding this feature. Large-screen Android tablets like the Nexus 10 (remember that tablet Google hasn’t updated in over 18 months?) need this feature. So do huge phones, convertibles, laptops, and Android desktops. If tablets are the future of personal computing, we should be able to do more than one thing at a time on our tablets’ big screens. Microsoft, Samsung, and even Apple are realizing this — now it’s Google’s turn. Image Credit: Sergey Galyonkin on Flickr, Karlis Dambrans on Flickr

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• How did I get here? My route to Android, iPhone, Windows Phone 7, and interest in Mobile Devices

  - by Wallym

  I get asked all the time how/why I got interested in mobile and jumped on this fairly early.  I tend to give half answers because it wasn't just one thing that took me to mobile, but a whole host of separate ivents culminating in a specific event where I wasdoing market research in May/June 2008.  Let me throw out the events and the facts about me: I tend to like new, different, cool stuff.  I jumped on .NET early on.  I jumped on Ajax early on.  I don't jump on every new technology that comes down the road, I'm probably the only person on the planet that doesn't "get" MVC, though I acknowledge that a lot of people do and it solves a number of problems in the default settings of ASP.NET WebForms. I remember buying an early Windows CE device. It was interesting, but dang, this stylus thing sucks. After I lost my third stylus, i just gave up.  I got my first mobile phone in early 1999.  Reception was crappy, but I could see the value in being mobile. In 1999, I worked on a manufacturing systems project.  One piece of the projects was a set of handheld devices on the shop floor.  While the UI was a crappy DOS based, yes I said DOS as in Disk Operating System Version 6.22, I could see that the wireless world was a direction I wanted to be in. In 2000, Microsoft released the first public alpha of .NET.  Very cool stuff indeed.  One piece of the puzzle was a set of mobile controls for ASP.NET.  I build numerous test apps as well as mobile version using these mobile controls.  Now, the mobile UIs of the time were based on WML, which was crap. I could real all the analysis of mobile and read all about growth rates.  Now, you have to realize that growth rates can be impressive when dealing with small numbers, but I knew it was a comer. In our first book, I got talked out of mobile because of the line from the publisher "Wally, mobile doesn't sell." Blackberry was the dominant device of the mid 2000s.  Its users were referred to as "Crackberry addicts."  Unfortunately, the mobile development experience for native apps was crap and the web experience was fairly rough as well, but if they could get the ecosystem started, other phones and better blackberryies would come out.  I finally jumped into using a blackberry. Sometime around 2006, I heard "Wally, mobile doesn't sell" again.  Now, anyone that knows me knows that someone saying something like this to me means I'll keep trying it. The phones of the mid 2000s were moving to be more graphical, but there were too many that had this idea that they had to use a stylus.  Stylus suck.  They get lost too easily. I worked on a project in 2007 and 2008 for a startup trying to answer the question of "What is there to do where I am at?"  For some reason, they wanted to be tied to PCs.  As it became obvious that they were having problems, their investor asked us to do some market research and to figure out what the marketplace did want.  One of the important things that I figured out was the we lived in a mobile world and if you had a mobile app, it need to be on a mobile device, not tied to a desktop/laptop/netbook device.  If there was any single event, this was it - I was doing some market research and sat and talked to people in a bar/restaurant in Atlanta called "The Grove" on Lavista.  The consensus of the people that I talked to was that they wanted their data where ever they were at, laptop, pc, mobile, whereever. In 2007, Apple released the iPhone.  Wow, what an impressive device, even with all the problems of a 1st generation device.  I bought an iPod Touch 1st generation to understand touch better, one of the best decisions I ever made. I decided in late 2008, to make a move into cloud, for a number of reasons.  I was working on an example app.  In April, 2009, one of my friends at Microsoft said "don't mention my name with this, but you need an iPhone front end for this app."  How do you get on the iPhone.  Well, there are a number of ways including: ObjectiveC.  Its hard to teach an old dog new tricks, and this dog knows .NET, not ObjectiveC. HTML, web, javascript optimized interface.  yeah, this is possible. PhoneGap.  Now, this is interesting, take an html interface and get it to run on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and other platforms.  I thought that this way made the most sense for me until......... MonoTouch.  In May/June 2009, Novell announced a way for .NET/c# developers to write apps for the iPhone.  This is the way that made the most sense to me. Titanium by Appcelerator.  This is similar in concept to PhoneGap.  I haven't played with this much but do want to learn more about it. In July, 2009, I emailed one of my contacts at Wrox to see if they would be interested in a short MonoTouch ebook in their Wrox Blox format.  I fully expected another  response along the lines of "Wally, mobile doesn't sell."  The response I got was "Wally, iPhone is H O T, get started immediately, can you have this to me before Labor Day."  Not quite the response I expected.  Thankfully, we didn't make the Labor Day, first draft date. I kept pushing back because I had a feeling that things were not going to be quite as polished and feature rich as necessary.  After all, Novell doesn't have the resouces of Microsoft's developer division. The ebook shipped on November 30, 2009. On about December, 15, 2009, my editor emailed and said "Your ebook is selling really well, lets do a full book and it by March 1 so get started."  Thankfully, guys like Craig Dunn and Chris Hardy were interested along with Martin and Ror joinged us later on. I bought my wife an iPhone 3Gs in early 2010 to go along with all my iPod Touch devices. I tried to pretend in 2010 that I wasn't that interested in mobile and still had interest in the desktop technologies.  I love the technologies and continue to use them today, but that isn't where my interest is right now.  I'm just about all mobile all the time with my energies.  Our book shipped in the beginning of July, 2010 right in the middle of the Apple FUD.I've been looking at Mobile Web as a way around the AppStores and Apple FUD problems of 2010. With all the Apple self FUD, we became interested in Android.I went up to Dino Esposito at DevConnections in Las Vegas at introduced myself. I've always tried to keep up with what Dino has been doing. I was shocked, he wanted to meet me.  We must have talked for 1.5 hours. It was way more time than I deserved. If you get a chance, go and introduce yourself to Dino. He's a great guy. Microsoft released Windows Phone 7 in the Fall of 2010.  I'm not doing development on that platform at this time.  I think they have a very interesting user interface.  The devices are being positively reviewed.  For my purposes, the devices are limited at this point in time.  We'll see what 2011 brings as far as updates to the operating system.  I need multitasking/background processing and html5 in the browser. Add that as well as acceptance in the marketplace and I'll be more interested in the device. Obviosuly, I'm now working on a MonoDroid book . I own Android and iPhone/iOS devices.  I am currently working on some startup ideas and am exploring as much in that area as I can. For 2011, I'm planning on speaking at Android Developer's Conference (AnDevCon) and Mobile Connections.  I'm really excited about this. I have a couple of magazine articles coming out in 2011 on Android and iPhone development with the Mono technologies.is Mono "The Answer"? What's "The Question?" I think it will work for me.  It might work for you, it might not.  it depends on your situation.  Its the current horse that I am riding. I might find a better horse tomorrow. So, that's how I got here.  I'm in love with mobile.  Mobile native apps on the device as well as mobile web.  I'm into all this cool stuff.  Where are you at?

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Fun With Enum Methods

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again lets dive into the Little Wonders of .NET, those small things in the .NET languages and BCL classes that make development easier by increasing readability, maintainability, and/or performance. So probably every one of us has used an enumerated type at one time or another in a C# program.  The enumerated types we create are a great way to represent that a value can be one of a set of discrete values (or a combination of those values in the case of bit flags). But the power of enum types go far beyond simple assignment and comparison, there are many methods in the Enum class (that all enum types “inherit” from) that can give you even more power when dealing with them. IsDefined() – check if a given value exists in the enum Are you reading a value for an enum from a data source, but are unsure if it is actually a valid value or not?  Casting won’t tell you this, and Parse() isn’t guaranteed to balk either if you give it an int or a combination of flags.  So what can we do? Let’s assume we have a small enum like this for result codes we want to return back from our business logic layer: 1: public enum ResultCode 2: { 3: Success, 4: Warning, 5: Error 6: } In this enum, Success will be zero (unless given another value explicitly), Warning will be one, and Error will be two. So what happens if we have code like this where perhaps we’re getting the result code from another data source (could be database, could be web service, etc)? 1: public ResultCode PerformAction() 2: { 3: // set up and call some method that returns an int. 4: int result = ResultCodeFromDataSource(); 5:  6: // this will suceed even if result is < 0 or > 2. 7: return (ResultCode) result; 8: } So what happens if result is –1 or 4?  Well, the cast does not fail, so what we end up with would be an instance of a ResultCode that would have a value that’s outside of the bounds of the enum constants we defined. This means if you had a block of code like: 1: switch (result) 2: { 3: case ResultType.Success: 4: // do success stuff 5: break; 6:  7: case ResultType.Warning: 8: // do warning stuff 9: break; 10:  11: case ResultType.Error: 12: // do error stuff 13: break; 14: } That you would hit none of these blocks (which is a good argument for always having a default in a switch by the way). So what can you do?  Well, there is a handy static method called IsDefined() on the Enum class which will tell you if an enum value is defined.  1: public ResultCode PerformAction() 2: { 3: int result = ResultCodeFromDataSource(); 4:  5: if (!Enum.IsDefined(typeof(ResultCode), result)) 6: { 7: throw new InvalidOperationException("Enum out of range."); 8: } 9:  10: return (ResultCode) result; 11: } In fact, this is often recommended after you Parse() or cast a value to an enum as there are ways for values to get past these methods that may not be defined. If you don’t like the syntax of passing in the type of the enum, you could clean it up a bit by creating an extension method instead that would allow you to call IsDefined() off any isntance of the enum: 1: public static class EnumExtensions 2: { 3: // helper method that tells you if an enum value is defined for it's enumeration 4: public static bool IsDefined(this Enum value) 5: { 6: return Enum.IsDefined(value.GetType(), value); 7: } 8: }   HasFlag() – an easier way to see if a bit (or bits) are set Most of us who came from the land of C programming have had to deal extensively with bit flags many times in our lives.  As such, using bit flags may be almost second nature (for a quick refresher on bit flags in enum types see one of my old posts here). However, in higher-level languages like C#, the need to manipulate individual bit flags is somewhat diminished, and the code to check for bit flag enum values may be obvious to an advanced developer but cryptic to a novice developer. For example, let’s say you have an enum for a messaging platform that contains bit flags: 1: // usually, we pluralize flags enum type names 2: [Flags] 3: public enum MessagingOptions 4: { 5: None = 0, 6: Buffered = 0x01, 7: Persistent = 0x02, 8: Durable = 0x04, 9: Broadcast = 0x08 10: } We can combine these bit flags using the bitwise OR operator (the ‘|’ pipe character): 1: // combine bit flags using 2: var myMessenger = new Messenger(MessagingOptions.Buffered | MessagingOptions.Broadcast); Now, if we wanted to check the flags, we’d have to test then using the bit-wise AND operator (the ‘&’ character): 1: if ((options & MessagingOptions.Buffered) == MessagingOptions.Buffered) 2: { 3: // do code to set up buffering... 4: // ... 5: } While the ‘|’ for combining flags is easy enough to read for advanced developers, the ‘&’ test tends to be easy for novice developers to get wrong.  First of all you have to AND the flag combination with the value, and then typically you should test against the flag combination itself (and not just for a non-zero)!  This is because the flag combination you are testing with may combine multiple bits, in which case if only one bit is set, the result will be non-zero but not necessarily all desired bits! Thanks goodness in .NET 4.0 they gave us the HasFlag() method.  This method can be called from an enum instance to test to see if a flag is set, and best of all you can avoid writing the bit wise logic yourself.  Not to mention it will be more readable to a novice developer as well: 1: if (options.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Buffered)) 2: { 3: // do code to set up buffering... 4: // ... 5: } It is much more concise and unambiguous, thus increasing your maintainability and readability. It would be nice to have a corresponding SetFlag() method, but unfortunately generic types don’t allow you to specialize on Enum, which makes it a bit more difficult.  It can be done but you have to do some conversions to numeric and then back to the enum which makes it less of a payoff than having the HasFlag() method.  But if you want to create it for symmetry, it would look something like this: 1: public static T SetFlag<T>(this Enum value, T flags) 2: { 3: if (!value.GetType().IsEquivalentTo(typeof(T))) 4: { 5: throw new ArgumentException("Enum value and flags types don't match."); 6: } 7:  8: // yes this is ugly, but unfortunately we need to use an intermediate boxing cast 9: return (T)Enum.ToObject(typeof (T), Convert.ToUInt64(value) | Convert.ToUInt64(flags)); 10: } Note that since the enum types are value types, we need to assign the result to something (much like string.Trim()).  Also, you could chain several SetFlag() operations together or create one that takes a variable arg list if desired. Parse() and ToString() – transitioning from string to enum and back Sometimes, you may want to be able to parse an enum from a string or convert it to a string - Enum has methods built in to let you do this.  Now, many may already know this, but may not appreciate how much power are in these two methods. For example, if you want to parse a string as an enum, it’s easy and works just like you’d expect from the numeric types: 1: string optionsString = "Persistent"; 2:  3: // can use Enum.Parse, which throws if finds something it doesn't like... 4: var result = (MessagingOptions)Enum.Parse(typeof (MessagingOptions), optionsString); 5:  6: if (result == MessagingOptions.Persistent) 7: { 8: Console.WriteLine("It worked!"); 9: } Note that Enum.Parse() will throw if it finds a value it doesn’t like.  But the values it likes are fairly flexible!  You can pass in a single value, or a comma separated list of values for flags and it will parse them all and set all bits: 1: // for string values, can have one, or comma separated. 2: string optionsString = "Persistent, Buffered"; 3:  4: var result = (MessagingOptions)Enum.Parse(typeof (MessagingOptions), optionsString); 5:  6: if (result.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Persistent) && result.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Buffered)) 7: { 8: Console.WriteLine("It worked!"); 9: } Or you can parse in a string containing a number that represents a single value or combination of values to set: 1: // 3 is the combination of Buffered (0x01) and Persistent (0x02) 2: var optionsString = "3"; 3:  4: var result = (MessagingOptions) Enum.Parse(typeof (MessagingOptions), optionsString); 5:  6: if (result.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Persistent) && result.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Buffered)) 7: { 8: Console.WriteLine("It worked again!"); 9: } And, if you really aren’t sure if the parse will work, and don’t want to handle an exception, you can use TryParse() instead: 1: string optionsString = "Persistent, Buffered"; 2: MessagingOptions result; 3:  4: // try parse returns true if successful, and takes an out parm for the result 5: if (Enum.TryParse(optionsString, out result)) 6: { 7: if (result.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Persistent) && result.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Buffered)) 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine("It worked!"); 10: } 11: } So we covered parsing a string to an enum, what about reversing that and converting an enum to a string?  The ToString() method is the obvious and most basic choice for most of us, but did you know you can pass a format string for enum types that dictate how they are written as a string?: 1: MessagingOptions value = MessagingOptions.Buffered | MessagingOptions.Persistent; 2:  3: // general format, which is the default, 4: Console.WriteLine("Default : " + value); 5: Console.WriteLine("G (default): " + value.ToString("G")); 6:  7: // Flags format, even if type does not have Flags attribute. 8: Console.WriteLine("F (flags) : " + value.ToString("F")); 9:  10: // integer format, value as number. 11: Console.WriteLine("D (num) : " + value.ToString("D")); 12:  13: // hex format, value as hex 14: Console.WriteLine("X (hex) : " + value.ToString("X")); Which displays: 1: Default : Buffered, Persistent 2: G (default): Buffered, Persistent 3: F (flags) : Buffered, Persistent 4: D (num) : 3 5: X (hex) : 00000003 Now, you may not really see a difference here between G and F because I used a [Flags] enum, the difference is that the “F” option treats the enum as if it were flags even if the [Flags] attribute is not present.  Let’s take a non-flags enum like the ResultCode used earlier: 1: // yes, we can do this even if it is not [Flags] enum. 2: ResultCode value = ResultCode.Warning | ResultCode.Error; And if we run that through the same formats again we get: 1: Default : 3 2: G (default): 3 3: F (flags) : Warning, Error 4: D (num) : 3 5: X (hex) : 00000003 Notice that since we had multiple values combined, but it was not a [Flags] marked enum, the G and default format gave us a number instead of a value name.  This is because the value was not a valid single-value constant of the enum.  However, using the F flags format string, it broke out the value into its component flags even though it wasn’t marked [Flags]. So, if you want to get an enum to display appropriately for whether or not it has the [Flags] attribute, use G which is the default.  If you always want it to attempt to break down the flags, use F.  For numeric output, obviously D or  X are the best choice depending on whether you want decimal or hex. Summary Hopefully, you learned a couple of new tricks with using the Enum class today!  I’ll add more little wonders as I think of them and thanks for all the invaluable input!   Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Little Wonders,Enum,BlackRabbitCoder

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• GWT Query fails second time -only.

  - by Koran

  HI, I have a visualization function in GWT which calls for two instances of the same panels - two queries. Now, suppose one url is A and the other url is B. Here, I am facing an issue in that if A is called first, then both A and B works. If B is called first, then only B works, A - times out. If I call both times A, only the first time A works, second time it times out. If I call B twice, it works both times without a hitch. Even though the error comes at timed out, it actually is not timing out - in FF status bar, it shows till - transferring data from A, and then it gets stuck. This doesnt even show up in the first time query. The only difference between A and B is that B returns very fast, while A returns comparitively slow. The sample code is given below: public Panel(){ Runnable onLoadCallback = new Runnable() { public void run() { Query query = Query.create(dataUrl); query.setTimeout(60); query.send(new Callback() { public void onResponse(QueryResponse response) { if (response.isError()){ Window.alert(response.getMessage()); } } } } VisualizationUtils.loadVisualizationApi(onLoadCallback, PieChart.PACKAGE); } What could be the reason for this? I cannot think of any reason why this should happen? Why is this happening only for A and not for B? EDIT: More research. The query which works all the time (i.e. B is the example URL given in GWT visualization site: see comment [1]). So, I tried in my app engine to reproduce it - the following way s = "google.visualization.Query.setResponse({version:'0.6',status:'ok',sig:'106459472',table:{cols:[{id:'A',label:'Source',type:'string',pattern:''},{id:'B',label:'Percent',type:'number',pattern:'#0.01%'}],rows:[{c:[{v:'Oil'},{v:0.37,f:'37.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Coal'},{v:0.25,f:'25.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Natural Gas'},{v:0.23,f:'23.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Nuclear'},{v:0.06,f:'6.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Biomass'},{v:0.04,f:'4.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Hydro'},{v:0.03,f:'3.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Solar Heat'},{v:0.005,f:'0.50%'}]},{c:[{v:'Wind'},{v:0.003,f:'0.30%'}]},{c:[{v:'Geothermal'},{v:0.002,f:'0.20%'}]},{c:[{v:'Biofuels'},{v:0.002,f:'0.20%'}]},{c:[{v:'Solar photovoltaic'},{v:4.0E-4,f:'0.04%'}]}]}});"; response = HttpResponse(s, content_type="text/plain; charset=utf-8") response['Expires'] = time.strftime('%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT', time.gmtime()) return response Where s is the data when we run the query for B. I tried to add Expires etc too, since that seems to be the only header which has the difference, but now, the query fails all the time. For more info - I am now sending the difference between my server response vs the working server response. They seems to be pretty similar. HTTP/1.0 200 OK Content-Type: text/plain Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:07:12 GMT Server: Google Frontend Cache-Control: private, x-gzip-ok="" google.visualization.Query.setResponse({version:'0.6',status:'ok',sig:'106459472',table:{cols:[{id:'A',label:'Source',type:'string',pattern:''},{id:'B',label:'Percent',type:'number',pattern:'#0.01%'}],rows:[{c:[{v:'Oil'},{v:0.37,f:'37.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Coal'},{v:0.25,f:'25.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Natural Gas'},{v:0.23,f:'23.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Nuclear'},{v:0.06,f:'6.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Biomass'},{v:0.04,f:'4.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Hydro'},{v:0.03,f:'3.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Solar Heat'},{v:0.005,f:'0.50%'}]},{c:[{v:'Wind'},{v:0.003,f:'0.30%'}]},{c:[{v:'Geothermal'},{v:0.002,f:'0.20%'}]},{c:[{v:'Biofuels'},{v:0.002,f:'0.20%'}]},{c:[{v:'Solar photovoltaic'},{v:4.0E-4,f:'0.04%'}]}]}});Connection closed by foreign host. Mac$ telnet spreadsheets.google.com 80 Trying 209.85.231.100... Connected to spreadsheets.l.google.com. Escape character is '^]'. GET http://spreadsheets.google.com/tq?key=pWiorx-0l9mwIuwX5CbEALA&range=A1:B12&gid=0&headers=-1 HTTP/1.0 200 OK Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:07:58 GMT Expires: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:07:58 GMT Cache-Control: private, max-age=0 X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block Server: GSE google.visualization.Query.setResponse({version:'0.6',status:'ok',sig:'106459472',table:{cols:[{id:'A',label:'Source',type:'string',pattern:''},{id:'B',label:'Percent',type:'number',pattern:'#0.01%'}],rows:[{c:[{v:'Oil'},{v:0.37,f:'37.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Coal'},{v:0.25,f:'25.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Natural Gas'},{v:0.23,f:'23.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Nuclear'},{v:0.06,f:'6.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Biomass'},{v:0.04,f:'4.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Hydro'},{v:0.03,f:'3.00%'}]},{c:[{v:'Solar Heat'},{v:0.005,f:'0.50%'}]},{c:[{v:'Wind'},{v:0.003,f:'0.30%'}]},{c:[{v:'Geothermal'},{v:0.002,f:'0.20%'}]},{c:[{v:'Biofuels'},{v:0.002,f:'0.20%'}]},{c:[{v:'Solar photovoltaic'},{v:4.0E-4,f:'0.04%'}]}]}});Connection closed by foreign host. Also, please note that App engine did not allow the Expires header to go through - can that be the reason? But if that is the reason, then it should not fail if B is sent first and then A. Comment [1] : http://spreadsheets.google.com/tq?key=pWiorx-0l9mwIuwX5CbEALA&range=A1:B12&gid=0&headers=-1

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• Advanced Continuous Delivery to Azure from TFS, Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great

  - by jasont

  The folks over on the TFS / Visual Studio team have been working hard at releasing a steady stream of new features for their new hosted Team Foundation Service in the cloud. One of the most significant features released was simple continuous delivery of your solution into your Azure deployments. The original announcement from Brian Harry can be found here. Team Foundation Service is a great platform for .Net developers who are used to working with TFS on-premises. I’ve been using it since it became available at the //BUILD conference in 2011, and when I recently came to work at Stackify, it was one of the first changes I made. Managing work items is much easier than the tool we were using previously, although there are some limitations (more on that in another blog post). However, when continuous deployment was made available, it blew my mind. It was the killer feature I didn’t know I needed. Not to say that I wasn’t previously an advocate for continuous delivery; just that it was always a pain to set up and configure. Having it hosted - and a one-click setup – well, that’s just the best thing since sliced bread. It made perfect sense: my source code is in the cloud, and my deployment is in the cloud. Great! I can queue up a build from my iPad or phone and just let it go! I quickly tore through the quick setup and saw it all work… sort of. This will be the first in a three part series on how to take the building block of Team Foundation Service continuous delivery and build a CD model that will actually work for any team deploying something more advanced than a “Hello World” example. Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great Part 2: A Model That Works: Branching and Multiple Deployment Environments Part 3: Other Considerations: SQL, Custom Tasks, Etc Good Enough Is Not Great There. I’ve said it. I certainly hope no one on the TFS team is offended, but it’s the truth. Let’s take a look under the hood and understand how it works, and then why it’s not enough to handle real world CD as-is. How it works. (note that I’ve skipped a couple of steps; I already have my accounts set up and something deployed to Azure) The first step is to establish some oAuth magic between your Azure management portal and your TFS Instance. You do this via the management portal. Once it’s done, you have a new build process template in your TFS instance. (Image lifted from the documentation) From here, you’ll get the usual prompts for security, allowing access, etc. But you’ll also get to pick which Solution in your source control to build. Here’s what the bulk of the build definition looks like. All I’ve had to do is add in the solution to build (notice that mine is from a specific branch – Release – more on that later) and I’ve changed the configuration. I trigger the build, and voila! I have an Azure deployment a few minutes later. The beauty of this is that it’s all in the cloud and I’m not waiting for my machine to compile and upload the package. (I also had to enable the build definition first – by default it is created in disabled state, probably a good thing since it will trigger on every.single.checkin by default.) I get to see a history of deployments from the Azure portal, and can link into TFS to see the associated changesets and work items. You’ll notice also that this build definition also automatically put my code in the Staging slot of my Azure deployment – more on this soon. For now, I can VIP swap and be in production. (P.S. I hate VIP swap and “production” and “staging” in Azure. More on that later too.) That’s it. That’s the default out-of-box experience. Easy, right? But it’s full of room for improvement, so let’s get into that….   The Problems Nothing is perfect (except my code – it’s always perfect), and neither is Continuous Deployment without a bit of work to help it fit your dev team’s process. So what are the issues? Issue 1: Staging vs QA vs Prod vs whatever other environments your team may have. This, for me, is the big hairy one. Remember how this automatically deployed to staging rather than prod for us? There are a couple of issues with this model: If I want to deliver to prod, it requires intervention on my part after deployment (via a VIP swap). If I truly want to promote between environments (i.e. Nightly Build –> Stable QA –> Production) I likely have configuration changes between each environment such as database connection strings and this process (and the VIP swap) doesn’t account for this. Yet. Issue 2: Branching and delivering on every check-in. As I mentioned above, I have set this up to target a specific branch – Release – of my code. For the purposes of this example, I have adopted the “basic” branching strategy as defined by the ALM Rangers. This basically establishes a “Main” trunk where you branch off Dev and Release branches. Granted, the Release branch is usually the only thing you will deploy to production, but you certainly don’t want to roll to production automatically when you merge to the Release branch and check-in (unless you like the thrill of it, and in that case, I like your style, cowboy….). Rather, you have nightly build and QA environments, or if you’ve adopted the feature-branch model you have environments for those. Those are the environments you want to continuously deploy to. But that takes us back to Issue 1: we currently have a 1:1 solution to Azure deployment target. Issue 3: SQL and other custom tasks. Let’s be honest and address the elephant in the room: I need to get some sleep because I see an elephant in the room. But seriously, I can’t think of an application I have touched in the last 10 years that doesn’t need to consider SQL changes when deploying code and upgrading an environment. Microsoft seems perfectly content to ignore this elephant for now: yes, they’ve added Data Tier Applications. But let’s be honest with ourselves again: no one really uses it, and it’s not suitable for anything more complex than a Hello World sample project database. Why? Because it doesn’t fit well into a great source control story. Developers make stored procedure and table changes all day long while coding complex applications, and if someone forgets to go update the DACPAC before the automated deployment, you have a broken build until it’s completed. Developers – not just DBAs – also like to work with SQL in SQL tools, not in Visual Studio. I’m really picking on SQL because that’s generally the biggest concern that I hear. But we need to account for any custom tasks as well in the build process.   The Solutions… ? We’ve taken a look at how this all works, and addressed the shortcomings. In my next post (which I promise will be very, very soon), I will detail how I’ve overcome these shortcomings and used this foundation to create a mature, flexible model for deploying my app – any version, any time, to any environment.

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• Ubuntu 12.04 does not see windows already install on my computer (dual installation)

  - by jacinta

  I was trying to install the ubuntu 12.4 along side windows 7 on my new HP Pavilion 64k desktop with windows 7 computer but Ubuntu said that ( This computer has no detected operating system) and some one said (I suggest you chkdsk your Windows partition. I also suggest you resize the NTFS in WIndows then install Ubuntu to the free space.) Therefore I did (To shrink a simple or spanned volume using the Windows interface In Disk Management, right-click the simple or spanned volume you want to shrink. Click Shrink Volume…. Follow the instructions on your screen.) Then When I try to install ubuntu 12.4 after doing this, I received the same error. I was going to undo what I did but I see that I lose 1g when I do that so now what do I do? it says I can do a new simple volume and maybe then the space will no longer be unallocated. Please help me. I think I have a bad cd (ubuntu 12.4) cause from my research I see that I am not suppose to get a screen saying that (The computer has no detected operating system) I think this is a bad cd and I hope I did not mess up my computer. Please help. .................................................................................... O k I think I am following what you said about how to edit my question irrational john. I did chkdsk as you and actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) told me to AND ALSO did a lot of other things before I found out how to chkdsk. No problems. Thank you. Then I put back the space (extended) I took from system. I still was only able to put back 15 and not 16 so it is up to 99mb not back to 100mb. Then I shrank HP (C) as you told me, to 10 13,240 mb which is (12.93gb Unallocated). I did not change it into NTSF by doing the (New Simple Volume Action) I just left it. Then I tried to install UBUNTU 12.04 live CD amd64 and it gave me the results it was sometimes giving me before which is result (THAT Ubuntu) does not tell me weather I have or have not an already installed windows7. It just goes to a window that would have showed me information on what I have and on the bottom (DEVICE FOR BOOT LOADER INSTALLATION /dev/sda ) and the option to go BACK, QUIT, or INSTALL. (I think it is the INSTALLATION TYPE window). Therefore I do what I have been doing and I QUIT. What do I do now? Sorry that it seems like I cannot do anything on my own. On the Youtube video how to install ubuntu dual-boot alongside windows UBUNTU is installed so easy. The installation option page gives 3 options including dual instillation and the disk even lets you use a slider to slide to the size of the partition size you want. Yet my UBUNTU live cd is a mess and I checked it as one of you guys told me and got back information that it is good. Oh well this guy says you should press a control key to tell which device you are using to install ubuntu before the screen comes up. I guess cause it is old. This page also shows you easy stuff that do not show up on my cd. how to dual-boot UBUNTU and windows 7 P.S.. I saw this on the windows 7 website windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Formatting-disks-and-drives-frequently-asked-questions CREATE A BOOT PARTITION I HAD TO LEAVE OUT THE HTTP STUFF CAUSE I AM ONLY ALLOWED 2 ON A PAGE IT SAID To create a boot partition Warning Warning If you are installing different versions of Windows, you must install the earliest version first. If you don't do this, your computer may become inoperable. Open Computer Management by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Security, clicking Administrative Tools, and then double-clicking Computer Management.? Administrator permission required If you're prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. In the left pane, under Storage, click Disk Management. Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk, and then click New Simple Volume. In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click Next. Type the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes (MB) or accept the maximum default size, and then click Next. Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter to identify the volume, and then click Next. In the Format Partition dialog box, do one of the following: If you don't want to format the volume right now, click Do not format this volume, and then click Next. To format the volume with the default settings, click Next. For more information about formatting, see Formatting disks and drives: frequently asked questions. Review your choices, and then click Finish. AND THIS ON ANOTHER PAGE. Formatting disks and drives: frequently asked questions Hard disks, the primary storage devices on your computer, need to be formatted before you can use them. When you format a disk, you configure it with a file system so that Windows can store information on the disk. Hard disks in new computers running Windows are already formatted. If you buy an additional hard disk to expand the storage of your computer, you might need to format it. Storage devices such as USB flash drives and flash memory cards usually come preformatted by the manufacturer, so you probably won't need to format them. CDs and DVDs, on the other hand, use different formats from hard disks and removable storage devices. For information about formatting CDs and DVDs, see Which CD or DVD format should I use? Warning Warning Formatting erases any existing files on a hard disk. If you format a hard disk that has files on it, the files will be deleted. WHAT I DID WAS I GOT TO COMPUTER MANAGEMENT SECTION THEN I CLICKED ON DRIVE HP(C) (it put stripes on to show it is selected) Then I click on ACTION selected ALL TASKS AND THEN selected SHRINK VOLUME and then chose how much space from what it was giving me that I wanted. (12.93gb) AND THAT WAS ALL I DID. THEN I TRIED TO INSTALL UBUNTU i NEVER GOT THE 3RD SCREEN THAT IS IN THE VIDEO I INCLUDED (THE YOUTUBE WITH THE ENGLISH GUY) INSTALLATION TYPE I ALSO DID NOT GET THE 4TH SCREEN THAT ALLOWS YOU TO SELECT PARTITION SIZE what i got next was the 2nd INSTILLATION TYPE window shown on the (LINUX BS DOS.COM) PAGE THAT I INCLUDED and it showed no information about any drives (no drives /partition or stuff was shown) only the Boot Loader statement and the dev/sda bar and that's why i did not press install but chose to QUIT. SORRY I JUST NOW SAW YOUR ANSWER IRRATIONAL JOHN. I SHRANK HP(C) BY 12.93GB MY UNALLOCATED SPACE IS NOW 12.93GB HP(C) = 907.17gb NTSF...YOU ARE CORRECT WITH EVERYTHING YOU SAID This is what i read on (http://)windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Create-a-boot-partition I am only allowed 2 links Create a boot partition You must be logged on as an administrator to perform these steps. A boot partition is a partition that contains the files for the Windows operating system. If you want to install a second operating system on your computer (called a dual-boot or multiboot configuration), you need to create another partition on the hard disk, and then install the additional operating system on the new partition. Your hard disk would then have one system partition and two boot partitions. (A system partition is the partition that contains the hardware-related files. These tell the computer where to look to start Windows.) To create a partition on a basic disk, there must be unallocated disk space on your hard disk. With Disk Management, you can create a maximum of three primary partitions on a hard disk. You can create extended partitions, which include logical drives within them, if you need more partitions on the disk. Picture of disk space in Computer ManagementUnallocated disk space If there is no unallocated space, you will either need to create space by shrinking or deleting an existing partition or by using a third-party partitioning tool to repartition your hard disk. For more information, see Can I repartition my hard disk? To create a boot partition Warning Warning If you are installing different versions of Windows, you must install the earliest version first. If you don't do this, your computer may become inoperable. Open Computer Management by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Security, clicking Administrative Tools, and then double-clicking Computer Management.? Administrator permission required If you're prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. In the left pane, under Storage, click Disk Management. Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk, and then click New Simple Volume. In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click Next. Type the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes (MB) or accept the maximum default size, and then click Next. Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter to identify the volume, and then click Next. In the Format Partition dialog box, do one of the following: If you don't want to format the volume right now, click Do not format this volume, and then click Next. To format the volume with the default settings, click Next. For more information about formatting, see Formatting disks and drives: frequently asked questions. Review your choices, and then click Finish. I did what you told me @irrational john and this is the screen shot. I ENTERED ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo os-prober computer did not respond so I entered ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get -y remove dmraid computer responded with Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: dmraid 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded. After this operation, 141 kB disk space will be freed. (Reading database ... 147515 files and directories currently installed.) Removing dmraid ... update-initramfs is disabled since running on read-only media Processing triggers for man-db ... I entered ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo os-prober Computer Responded with /dev/sda1:Windows 7 (loader):Windows:chain /dev/sda3:Windows Recovery Environment (loader):Windows1:chain ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ ............... @obsessiveFOSS I don't know what is a Grub menu and I do not know what is the Ubuntu boot option The answer you gave to me was correct. This one {This apparently removes the dmraid metadata. After doing that, you can use the desktop icon Install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to start the Ubuntu installer. This time the Installation Type window should contain the option to Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 7.} This is what I decided to do. I did not see the rest of your help 'till now. Never the less. I think the best thing for me to do now is to get a cheap used laptop and either do a dual installation or just install Ubuntu on to it. This way if I have any issues that I cannot solve like the one I had here, at least I will still have a usable computer to work on and to use to get answers with because I am not an expert like the people on this forum. Thanks a lot I will try to keep learning and do research enough to some day help someone else.

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• Our winners- and some BBQ for everyone

  - by Steve Tunstall

  Congrats to our two winners for the first two comments on my last entry. Steve from Australia and John Lemon. Steve won since he was the first person over the International Date Line to see the post I made so late after a workday on Friday. So not only does he get to live in a country with the 2nd most beautiful women in the world, but now he gets some cool Oracle Swag, too. (Yes, I live on the beach in southern California, so you can guess where 1st place is for that other contest…Now if Steve happens to live in Manly, we may actually have a tie going…) OK, ok, for everyone else, you can be winners, too. How you ask? I will make you the envy of every guy and gal in your neighborhood or campsite. What follows is the way to smoke the best ribs you or anyone you know have ever tasted. Follow my instructions and give it a try. People at your party/cookout/campsite will tell you that they’re the best ribs they’ve ever had, and I will let you take all the credit. Yes, I fully realize this post is going to be longer than any post I’ve done yet. But let’s get serious here. Smoking meat is much more important, agreed? J In all honesty, this is a repeat of another blog I did, so I’m just copying and pasting. Step 1. Get some ribs. I actually really like Costco’s pack. They have both St. Louis and Baby Back. (They are the same ribs, but cut in half down the sides. St. Louis style is the ‘front’ of the ribs closest to the stomach, and ‘Baby back’ is the part of the ribs where is connects to the backbone). I like them both, so here you see I got one pack of each. About 4 racks to a pack. So these two packs for $25 each will feed about 16-20 of my guests. So around 3 bucks a person is a pretty good deal for the best ribs you’ll ever have. Step 2. Prep the ribs the night before you’re going to smoke. You need to trim them to fit your smoker racks, and also take off the membrane and add your rub. Then cover and set in fridge overnight. Here’s how to take off the membrane, which will not break down with heat and smoke like the rest of the meat, so must be removed. Use a butter knife to work in a ways between the membrane and the white bone. Just enough to make room for your finger. Try really hard not to poke through the membrane, you want to keep it whole. See how my gloved fingers can now start to lift up and pull off the membrane? This is what you are trying to do. It’s awesome when the whole thing can come off at once. This one is going great, maybe the best one I’ve ever done. Sometime, it falls apart and doesn't come off in one nice piece. I hate when that happens. Now, add your rub and pat it down once into the meat with your other hand. My rub is not secret. I got it from my mentor, a BBQ competitive chef who is currently ranked #1 in California and #3 in the nation on the BBQ circuit. He does full-day classes in southern California if anyone is interested in taking his class. Go to www.slapyodaddybbq.com to check him out. I tweaked his run recipe a tad and made my own. It’s one part Lawry’s, one part sugar, one part Montreal Steak Seasoning, one part garlic powder, one-half part red chili powder, one-half part paprika, and then 1/20th part cayenne. You can adjust that last ingredient, or leave it out. Real cheap stuff you can get at Costco. This lets you make enough rub to last about a year or two. Don’t make it all at once, make a shaker’s worth and use it up before you make more. Place it all in a bowl, mix well, and then add to a shaker like you see here. You can get a shaker with medium sized holes on it at any restaurant supply store or Smart & Final. The kind you see at pizza places for their red pepper flakes works best. Now cover and place in fridge overnight. Step 3. The next day. Ok, I’m ready to go. Get your stuff together. You will need your smoker, some good foil, a can of peach nectar, a bottle of Agave syrup, and a package of brown sugar. You will need this stuff later. I also use a clean spray bottle, and apple juice. Step 4. Make your fire, or turn on your electric smoker. In this example I’m using my portable charcoal smoker. I got this for only $40. I then modified it to be useful. Once modified, these guys actually work very well. Trust me, your food DOES NOT KNOW how expensive your smoker is. Someone who tells you that you need to spend a bunch of money on a smoker is an idiot. I also have an electric smoker that stays in my backyard. It’s cleaner and larger so I can smoke more food. But this little $40 one works great for going camping. Here is what my fire-bowl looks like. I leave a space in the middle open, and place cold charcoal and wood chucks in a circle going outwards. This makes it so when I dump the hot coals down the middle, they will slowly burn outwards, hitting different wood chucks at different times, allowing me to go 4-5 hours without having to even touch my fire. For ribs, I use apple and pecan wood. Pecan works for anything. Apple or any fruit wood is excellent for pork. So now I make my hot charcoal with a chimney only about half-full. I found a great use for that side-burner on my grill that I never use. It makes a fantastic chimney starter. You never use fluids of any kind, nor ever use that stupid charcoal that has lighter fluid built into it. Never, ever, ever. Step 5. Smoke. Add your ribs in the racks and stack them up in your smoker. I have a digital thermometer on a probe that I use to keep track of the temp in the smoker. I just lay the probe on the top rack and shut the lid. This cheap guy is a little harder to maintain the right temperature of around 225 F, so I do have to keep my eye on it more than my electric one or a more expensive charcoal one with the cool gadgets that regulate your temp for you. Every hour, spray apple juice all over your ribs using that spray bottle. After about 3 hours, you should have a very good crust (called the Bark) on your ribs. Once you have the Bark where you want it, carefully remove your ribs and place them in a tray. We are now ready for a very important part to make the flavor. Get a large piece of foil and place one rib section on it. Splash some of the peach nectar on it, and then a drizzle of the Agave syrup. Then, use your gloved hand to pack on some brown sugar. Do this on BOTH sides, and then completely wrap it up TIGHT in the foil. Do this for each rib section, and then place all the wrapped sections back into the smoker for another 4 to 6 hours. This is where the meat will get tender and flavorful. The first three hours is only to make the smoke bark. You don’t need smoke anymore, since the ribs are wrapped, you only need to keep the heat around 225 for the next 4-6 hours. Obviously you don’t spray anymore. Just time and slow heat. Be patient. It’s actually really hard to overdo it. You can let them go longer, and all that will happen is they will get even MORE tender!!! If you take them out too soon, they will be tough. How do you know? Take out one package (use long tongs) and open it up. If you grab a bone with your tongs and it just falls apart and breaks away from the rest of the meat, you are done!!! Enjoy!!! Step 6. Eat. It pulls apart like this when it’s done. By the way, smoking tri-tip is way easier. Just rub it with the same rub, and put in your smoker for about 2.5 hours at 250 F. That’s it. Low-maintenance. It comes out like this, with a fantastic smoke ring and amazing flavor. Thanks, and I will put up another good tip, about the ZFSSA, around the end of November. Steve 

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• Top 10 Browser Productivity Tips

  - by Renso

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/renso/archive/2013/10/14/top-10-browser-productivity-tips.aspxYou don’t have to be a geek to be a productive browser user. The tips below have been selected by actions users take most of the time to navigate a web-site but use long-standing keyboard or mouse actions to get them done, when there are keyboard short-cuts you can use instead. Since you hands are already on the keyboard it is almost always faster to sue a keyboard shortcut to get something done that you usually used the mouse for. For example right-clicking on something to copy it and then doing to same for pasting something is very time consuming, keyboard shortcuts have been created that simplify the task. All it takes are a few memory brain cells to remember them. Here are the tips, in no particular order:   Tip 1 Hold down the spacebar on your keyboard to page to the end of your web page rather than using your mouse. This is really a slow way of doing it. If you want to page one page at a time, hit the spacebar once, and again to page again. But if you want to page all the way to the end of the web page simply hit Ctrl+End (that is hold down the Ctrl key and hit the End button on your keyboard). To get to the top of your web page, simply hit Ctrl + Home to go all the way to the top of your web page. Tip 2 Where are my downloads? Some folks run downloads again-and-again because they do not know where the last one went and they do not see the popup, or browser note on their web page in the footer, etc. Simply hit Ctrl+J. Works in most browsers. Tip 3 Selecting a US state from a drop down box. Don’t use the mouse, takes just way too long to scroll. When you tab to the drop down box or click on it with your mouse, simply hit the first character of the state and it will be selected. For Texas for example hit the letter “T” twice on your keyboard to get to it. The same concept can be applied to any drop down box that is alphabetical or numerically sorted. Tip 4 Fixing spelling errors. All modern-day browsers support this now. You see the red wavy lines underscoring a word, yes it is a spelling error. How do you fix it? Don’t overtype it or try and fix it manually, fist right-click on it and a list of suggestions comes up. If it does not show up, like my name “Renso” and you know how to spell your name as in this example, look further down the list of options (the little window popup that appears when you right click) and you should see an option to “Add to Dictionary”. Be warned, when you add it, it only adds it to the browser you’re using’s dictionary. If you use Google Chrome, Firefox and IE, each one will have their own list. Tip 5 So you have trouble seeing the text on the screen. Or you are looking at a photo, for example in Facebook. You want to zoom in to read better or zoom into a photo a bit more. Hit Ctrl++ (hold down Ctrl key and hit the plus key – actually it’s the equal key but it is easier to remember that it is plus for bigger). Hit the minus to zoom out. Now you can’t remember what the original size was since you were so excited to hit it 20 times, or was that 21… Simply hit Ctrl+0 (that is zero) and it will reset it to the default. Tip 6 So you closed a couple of tabs in your browser. Suddenly you remember something you wanted to double-check something on one of the tabs, you cannot remember the URL ad the tab is gone forever, or is it? Simply hit Ctrl+Shift+t and it will bring back your tabs one by one each time you click the T. This has also been a great way for me to quickly close some tabs because I don’t want my boss to see I’m shopping and then hitting Ctrl+Shift+t to quickly get it back and complete my check-put and purchase. Or, for parents, when you walk into your daughter’s room and you see she quickly clicks and closes a window/tab in here browser. Not to worry my little darling, daddy will Ctrl+Shift+t and see what boys on Facebook you were talking too… Tip 7 The web browser is frozen on your PC/Laptop/Whatever, in this example it may be your Internet Explorer browser. I don’t mention Firefox or Chrome here because it probably never happens in their world. You cannot close it, it won’t respond to anything you have done s far except for the next step you are about to take, which is throw your two-day old coffee on your keyboard. This happens especially on sites that want to force you to complete a purchase order. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del on your keyboard on any version of windows, select TASK MANAGER. In the  First Tab, which is the Process Tab, look for the item in question. In this example you should see Internet Explorer. Right-click it and select “End Task”. It will force the thread out of memory and terminate that process. You can of course do this with any program running under your account. Tip 8 This is a personal favorite of mine. To select words in the paragraph without using the mouse. You don’t want to select one character at a time like when you use the Ctrl+arrows as it can be very slow if you want to select a lot of text. You also want to select whole words. Simply use the Ctrl+Shift_arrow (right or left depending which direction you want to go. Tip 9 I was a bit reluctant to add this one, but being in the professional services industry still come across many-a-folk that simply can’t copy-and-paste them-all text or images that reside on them screens, y’all. Ctrl+c to copy and Ctrl+v to paste it. Works a lot faster than using the mouse. You may be asking: “Well why in the devil did they not use Ctrl+p for paste…. because that is for printing. This is of course not limited to the browser world, it applies to almost any piece of software running on PC or Mac. Go try it on an image on your browser, right-click it and select copy. Open a word document and Ctrl+v to paste the image in there. Please consider copyright laws. Tip 10 Getting rid of annoying ads. Now this only works when you load a web page, meaning when you get back to the same page later you will have to do this again and you will need to learn a tool to do it, WELL WORTH IT. For example, I use GrooveShark to listen to music but I don’t like the ads they show. Install a tool like Firebug for Firefox or use the Ctrl+Shift+I on Chrome to bring up the developer toolbar. Shows at the bottom of the page. With Firefox, once you have installed Firebug as an add-on, a yellow bug should appear on the top right-hand-side of your browser, click on it to display the developer toolbar. You will need to learn how to use it, but once you know how to select an item/section on the window (usually just right-click the add you don’t want to see and select “Inspect Element”, the developer toolbar will appear (if not already there)) and then simply hit delete and it will remove the add from the screen. If you don’t know HTML you may need to play with it a bit, but once you understand how it works can open up a whole new world for you on how web pages actually work. If you can think of any others that have saved you a ton of time please let me know so I can add them to a top 99 list.

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• [ebp + 6] instead of +8 in a JIT compiler

  - by David Titarenco

  I'm implementing a simplistic JIT compiler in a VM I'm writing for fun (mostly to learn more about language design) and I'm getting some weird behavior, maybe someone can tell me why. First I define a JIT "prototype" both for C and C++: #ifdef __cplusplus typedef void* (*_JIT_METHOD) (...); #else typedef (*_JIT_METHOD) (); #endif I have a compile() function that will compile stuff into ASM and stick it somewhere in memory: void* compile (void* something) { // grab some memory unsigned char* buffer = (unsigned char*) malloc (1024); // xor eax, eax // inc eax // inc eax // inc eax // ret -> eax should be 3 /* WORKS! buffer[0] = 0x67; buffer[1] = 0x31; buffer[2] = 0xC0; buffer[3] = 0x67; buffer[4] = 0x40; buffer[5] = 0x67; buffer[6] = 0x40; buffer[7] = 0x67; buffer[8] = 0x40; buffer[9] = 0xC3; */ // xor eax, eax // mov eax, 9 // ret 4 -> eax should be 9 /* WORKS! buffer[0] = 0x67; buffer[1] = 0x31; buffer[2] = 0xC0; buffer[3] = 0x67; buffer[4] = 0xB8; buffer[5] = 0x09; buffer[6] = 0x00; buffer[7] = 0x00; buffer[8] = 0x00; buffer[9] = 0xC3; */ // push ebp // mov ebp, esp // mov eax, [ebp + 6] ; wtf? shouldn't this be [ebp + 8]!? // mov esp, ebp // pop ebp // ret -> eax should be the first value sent to the function /* WORKS! */ buffer[0] = 0x66; buffer[1] = 0x55; buffer[2] = 0x66; buffer[3] = 0x89; buffer[4] = 0xE5; buffer[5] = 0x66; buffer[6] = 0x66; buffer[7] = 0x8B; buffer[8] = 0x45; buffer[9] = 0x06; buffer[10] = 0x66; buffer[11] = 0x89; buffer[12] = 0xEC; buffer[13] = 0x66; buffer[14] = 0x5D; buffer[15] = 0xC3; // mov eax, 5 // add eax, ecx // ret -> eax should be 50 /* WORKS! buffer[0] = 0x67; buffer[1] = 0xB8; buffer[2] = 0x05; buffer[3] = 0x00; buffer[4] = 0x00; buffer[5] = 0x00; buffer[6] = 0x66; buffer[7] = 0x01; buffer[8] = 0xC8; buffer[9] = 0xC3; */ return buffer; } And finally I have the main chunk of the program: void main (int argc, char **args) { DWORD oldProtect = (DWORD) NULL; int i = 667, j = 1, k = 5, l = 0; // generate some arbitrary function _JIT_METHOD someFunc = (_JIT_METHOD) compile(NULL); // windows only #if defined _WIN64 || defined _WIN32 // set memory permissions and flush CPU code cache VirtualProtect(someFunc,1024,PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE, &oldProtect); FlushInstructionCache(GetCurrentProcess(), someFunc, 1024); #endif // this asm just for some debugging/testing purposes __asm mov ecx, i // run compiled function (from wherever *someFunc is pointing to) l = (int)someFunc(i, k); // did it work? printf("result: %d", l); free (someFunc); _getch(); } As you can see, the compile() function has a couple of tests I ran to make sure I get expected results, and pretty much everything works but I have a question... On most tutorials or documentation resources, to get the first value of a function passed (in the case of ints) you do [ebp+8], the second [ebp+12] and so forth. For some reason, I have to do [ebp+6] then [ebp+10] and so forth. Could anyone tell me why?

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• Why wont this sort in Solr work?

  - by Camran

  I need to sort on a date-field type, which name is "mod_date". It works like this in the browser adress-bar: http://localhost:8983/solr/select/?&q=bmw&sort=mod_date+desc But I am using a phpSolr client which sends an URL to Solr, and the url sent is this: fq=+category%3A%22Bilar%22+%2B+car_action%3AS%C3%A4ljes&version=1.2&wt=json&json.nl=map&q=%2A%3A%2A&start=0&rows=5&sort=mod_date+desc // This wont work and is echoed after this in php: $queryString = http_build_query($params, null, $this->_queryStringDelimiter); $queryString = preg_replace('/%5B(?:[0-9]|[1-9][0-9]+)%5D=/', '=', $queryString); This wont work, I dont know why! Everything else works fine, all right fields are returned. But the sort doesn't work. Any ideas? Thanks BTW: The field "mod_date" contains something like: 2010-03-04T19:37:22.5Z EDIT: First I use PHP to send this to a SolrPhpClient which is another php-file called service.php: require_once('../SolrPhpClient/Apache/Solr/Service.php'); $solr = new Apache_Solr_Service('localhost', 8983, '/solr/'); $results = $solr->search($querystring, $p, $limit, $solr_params); $solr_params is an array which contains the solr-parameters (q, fq, etc). Now, in service.php: $params['version'] = self::SOLR_VERSION; // common parameters in this interface $params['wt'] = self::SOLR_WRITER; $params['json.nl'] = $this->_namedListTreatment; $params['q'] = $query; $params['sort'] = 'mod_date desc'; // HERE IS THE SORT I HAVE PROBLEM WITH $params['start'] = $offset; $params['rows'] = $limit; $queryString = http_build_query($params, null, $this->_queryStringDelimiter); $queryString = preg_replace('/%5B(?:[0-9]|[1-9][0-9]+)%5D=/', '=', $queryString); if ($method == self::METHOD_GET) { return $this->_sendRawGet($this->_searchUrl . $this->_queryDelimiter . $queryString); } else if ($method == self::METHOD_POST) { return $this->_sendRawPost($this->_searchUrl, $queryString, FALSE, 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'); } The $results contain the results from Solr... So this is the way I need to get to work (via php). This code below (also on top of this Q) works but thats because I paste it into the adress bar manually, not via the PHPclient. But thats just for debugging, I need to get it to work via the PHPclient: http://localhost:8983/solr/select/?&q=bmw&sort=mod_date+des // Not via phpclient, but works UPDATE (2010-03-08): I have tried Donovans codes (the urls) and they work fine. Now, I have noticed that it is one of the parameters causing the 'SORT' not to work. This parameter is the "wt" parameter. If we take the url from top of this Q, (fq=+category%3A%22Bilar%22+%2B+car_action%3AS%C3%A4ljes&version=1.2&wt=json&json.nl=map&q=%2A%3A%2A&start=0&rows=5&sort=mod_date+desc), and just simply remove the "wt" parameter, then the sort works. BUT the results appear differently, thus making my php code not able to recognize the results I believe. Donovan would know this I think. I am guessing in order for the PHPClient to work, the results must be in a specific structure, which gets messed up as soon as I remove the wt parameter. Donovan, help me please... Here is some background what I use your SolrPhpClient for: I have a classifieds website, which uses MySql. But for the searching I am using Solr to search some indexed fields. Then Solr returns an array of ID:numbers (for all matches of the search criteria). Then I use those ID:numbers to find everything in a MySql db and fetch all other information (example is not searchable information). So simplified: Search - Solr returns all matches in an array of ID:nrs - Id:numbers from Solr are the same as the Id numbers in the MySql db, so I can just make a simple match agains every record with the ID matching the ID from the Solr results array. I don't use Faceting, no boosting, no relevancy or other fancy stuff. I only sort by the latest classified put, and give the option to users to also sort on the cheapest price. Nothing more. Then I use the "fq" parameter to do queries on different fields in Solr depending on category chosen by users (example "cars" in this case which in my language is "Bilar"). I am really stuck with this problem here... Thanks for all help

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