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• 5 Ways Android Still Disappoints (Me)

  - by TStewartDev

  Let me make this clear: I'm annoyed with Apple. I don't like their current policies and I don't like where Steve Jobs is taking the company. In general, I don't like it when any one company gets too much control in a market. When that happens, the leading company dictates the game and as consumers, our options all but disappear. That said, I'm still going to buy a new iPhone next week. My Apple-hating friends seem to desperately want me to go Android instead, but frankly, it's not good enough for me, and here are the reasons why. The Modern WinMo One of the reasons that Microsoft has identified for Windows Mobile's rapid decline is the breadth of hardware. They exercised little control over manufacturer's implementations. In theory, that sounds great. We as consumers have lots of choice. In practice, though, it meant among other things that updates to the devices were left up to the manufacturers. As a result, that rarely happened. (I'm still bitter at Toshiba for leaving me hanging back in 2002.) And now, Google is doing the same thing with Android. Case in point: my wife has a Motorola Backflip that we bought in April. It was released in March. Motorola says it will get Android 2.1 "sometime in Q3". Great. Meanwhile, I pull down the latest version of iPhone OS (now iOS) and install it the same day it's released. You may say that I can't judge Android by one lazy manufacturer. Yup, I sure can. With Apple, my original iPhone has been supported perfectly for 3 years. With Android, I will have to wait for upgrades after Google releases them, possibly indefinitely. Not cool. AT&T We signed a new contract with AT&T in April to get my wife's phone. I've had a reasonable experience with them. I don't imagine my experience with Verizon would be any better, and I'm relatively confident that Sprint doesn't have the coverage it takes to work well for us. The fact is, AT&T, for whatever reason, doesn't have jack for Android phones. May not be Android's fault, but it's still a shortcoming that prevents me from having it just like the iPhone's exclusivity keeps some folks on other networks from having it. Innovation? What Innovation? Android has a nice dashboard and a great notification system and… nothing else original. I keep reading about how disappointing the iPhone is nowadays. "It has no innovation," people say. Who does? Android has modeled its behavior after the iPhone. That's fine, but if all you've got is a similar product and I'm invested both skill-wise and app-wise in my current platform, why should I change? Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 looks somewhat innovative, and I'm pretty excited to see what they'll bring to the table, but that's another six months away, at least. I've got a 3 year old phone that has some annoying issues now (thanks to recent encounters with water). I need a new phone now. Is This Going to Work? There's no shortage of criticism of Apple over its App Store policies, and I've vented my own anger about it. However, I will give them credit: their screening of apps has done a great job of weeding out the crap and gives an excellent indication that the app will work on my device. How about Android? Nope. It might work on your phone. Maybe. You'll have to try it to see. Get burned by it? Well, write a nasty review to try to keep others from making the mistake you did. If you don't mind doing that stuff, then Android is the platform for you. Personally, I'd rather have a receptionist screening out the telemarketing and survey calls than hang up on them myself, but that's your call. Slow, Slowing, Slower All this yapping about multitasking. This is an area I've been on Apple's side from the beginning. Sorry folks, but this is the number one reason I hated Windows Mobile: the longer you use it, the slower it gets because it doesn't kill apps. I'm with Steve Jobs on this one: if you see a task manager, we're doing it wrong. I don't want to have to manually kill apps. I hate doing that on Windows let alone on a mobile device. To me, priority one should be keeping the device speedy. Waiting for your device to respond is unacceptable. Bonus! Taken from iPhone Letdown? 8 Things Apple Didn't Announce, here are my responses: 4G Yeah, let me know if your area actually has it. I live in Lincoln, Nebraska. No carrier is going to have 4G here for at least 3 years. Meanwhile, you still get to pay for it. Yay! Cloud iTunes/OTA Sync You got me here. Of course, whether or not your Android device will be able to do it is always a good question. 3G Video Chat You got me here, too. I'm sure you spent countless hours in front of your phone with video chat. Also, I can't wait for the "No Video Chat While Driving" laws. Mobile Hotspot This is a neat feature, but as the author points out, it's left up to the carrier whether to implement it or not. Pretty sure any Android phones that come to AT&T won't have this enabled in the foreseeable future. Is Verizon even allowing this? I just figured Sprint was because they're failing so hard at keeping customers. Free MobileMe I use Google's services with my iPhone. The only people I know who use MobileMe are Apple fanboys and fangirls. If you choose to pay for a service that you can get for free, that's your decision, not Apple's. Voice Input Voice input has been available on phones (even "dumb" phones) for years now. iPhone does have the ability, though limited. Why don't I hear people telling their phones what to do? Maybe because it's still easier to use your fingers than talk to it. Get back to me when this becomes an important feature. Free Navigation Maybe this will be a bigger deal to me now that I'm getting a phone with GPS, but when using my buddy's 3gs, Google maps has worked just fine. Maybe I just don't trust turn-by-turn navigation enough to want it. Dashboard The only legitimate complaint on this list, to me. iPhone's home screen is pathetic, doubly so for the iPad. What a waste of perfectly usable space. I also want to add notifications to this list. Android's notification panel is far superior to the iPhone's. I don't want to hunt all over my screen to find little red dots. Put 'em in one place, Apple.

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• Protecting Cookies: Once and For All

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  Every once in a while you run into a situation where you need to temporarily store data for a user in a web app. You typically have two options here – either store server-side or put the data into a cookie (if size permits). When you need web farm compatibility in addition – things become a little bit more complicated because the data needs to be available on all nodes. In my case I went for a cookie – but I had some requirements Cookie must be protected from eavesdropping (sent only over SSL) and client script Cookie must be encrypted and signed to be protected from tampering with Cookie might become bigger than 4KB – some sort of overflow mechanism would be nice I really didn’t want to implement another cookie protection mechanism – this feels wrong and btw can go wrong as well. WIF to the rescue. The session management feature already implements the above requirements but is built around de/serializing IClaimsPrincipals into cookies and back. But if you go one level deeper you will find the CookieHandler and CookieTransform classes which contain all the needed functionality. public class ProtectedCookie {     private List<CookieTransform> _transforms;     private ChunkedCookieHandler _handler = new ChunkedCookieHandler();     // DPAPI protection (single server)     public ProtectedCookie()     {         _transforms = new List<CookieTransform>             {                 new DeflateCookieTransform(),                 new ProtectedDataCookieTransform()             };     }     // RSA protection (load balanced)     public ProtectedCookie(X509Certificate2 protectionCertificate)     {         _transforms = new List<CookieTransform>             {                 new DeflateCookieTransform(),                 new RsaSignatureCookieTransform(protectionCertificate),                 new RsaEncryptionCookieTransform(protectionCertificate)             };     }     // custom transform pipeline     public ProtectedCookie(List<CookieTransform> transforms)     {         _transforms = transforms;     }     public void Write(string name, string value, DateTime expirationTime)     {         byte[] encodedBytes = EncodeCookieValue(value);         _handler.Write(encodedBytes, name, expirationTime);     }     public void Write(string name, string value, DateTime expirationTime, string domain, string path)     {         byte[] encodedBytes = EncodeCookieValue(value);         _handler.Write(encodedBytes, name, path, domain, expirationTime, true, true, HttpContext.Current);     }     public string Read(string name)     {         var bytes = _handler.Read(name);         if (bytes == null || bytes.Length == 0)         {             return null;         }         return DecodeCookieValue(bytes);     }     public void Delete(string name)     {         _handler.Delete(name);     }     protected virtual byte[] EncodeCookieValue(string value)     {         var bytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(value);         byte[] buffer = bytes;         foreach (var transform in _transforms)         {             buffer = transform.Encode(buffer);         }         return buffer;     }     protected virtual string DecodeCookieValue(byte[] bytes)     {         var buffer = bytes;         for (int i = _transforms.Count; i > 0; i—)         {             buffer = _transforms[i - 1].Decode(buffer);         }         return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(buffer);     } } HTH

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• Code Contracts: How they look after compiling?

  - by DigiMortal

  When you are using new tools that make also something at code level then it is good idea to check out what additions are made to code during compilation. Code contracts have simple syntax when we are writing code at Visual Studio but what happens after compilation? Are our methods same as they look in code or are they different after compilation? In this posting I will show you how code contracts look after compiling. In my previous examples about code contracts I used randomizer class with method called GetRandomFromRangeContracted. public int GetRandomFromRangeContracted(int min, int max) {     Contract.Requires<ArgumentOutOfRangeException>(         min < max,         "Min must be less than max"     );       Contract.Ensures(         Contract.Result<int>() >= min &&         Contract.Result<int>() <= max,         "Return value is out of range"     );       return _generator.Next(min, max); } Okay, it is nice to dream about similar code when we open our assembly with Reflector and disassemble it. But… this time we have something interesting. While reading this code don’t feel uncomfortable about the names of variables. This is disassembled code. .NET Framework internally allows these names. It is our compilators that doesn’t accept them when we are building our code. public int GetRandomFromRangeContracted(int min, int max) {     int Contract.Old(min);     int Contract.Old(max);     if (__ContractsRuntime.insideContractEvaluation <= 4)     {         try         {             __ContractsRuntime.insideContractEvaluation++;             __ContractsRuntime.Requires<ArgumentOutOfRangeException>(                min < max,                "Min must be less than max", "min < max");         }         finally         {             __ContractsRuntime.insideContractEvaluation--;         }     }     try     {         Contract.Old(min) = min;     }     catch (Exception exception1)     {         if (exception1 == null)         {             throw;         }     }     try     {         Contract.Old(max) = max;         catch (Exception exception2)     {         if (exception2 == null)         {             throw;         }     }     int CS$1$0000 = this._generator.Next(min, max);     int Contract.Result<int>() = CS$1$0000;     if (__ContractsRuntime.insideContractEvaluation <= 4)     {         try         {             __ContractsRuntime.insideContractEvaluation++;             __ContractsRuntime.Ensures(                (Contract.Result<int>() >= Contract.Old(min)) &&                (Contract.Result<int>() <= Contract.Old(max)),                "Return value is out of range",                "Contract.Result<int>() >= min && Contract.Result<int>() <= max");         }         finally         {             __ContractsRuntime.insideContractEvaluation--;         }     }     return Contract.Result<int>(); } As we can see then contracts are not simply if-then-else checks and exceptions throwing. We can see that there is counter that is incremented before checks and decremented after these whatever the result of check was. One thing that is annoying for me are null checks for exception1 and exception2. Is there really some situation possible when null is thrown instead of some instance that is Exception or that inherits from exception? Conclusion Code contracts are more complex mechanism that it seems when we look at it on our code level. Internally there are done more things than we know. I don’t say it is wrong, it is just good to know how our code looks after compiling. Looking at this example it is sure we need also performance tests for contracted code to see how heavy is their impact to system performance when we run code that makes heavy use of code contracts.

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• Ubuntu 12.04 + Wifi not working

  - by user171154

  i'm having problems connecting over wireless. At the moment, I'm using wicd. It seems to get stuck on "Verifying AP association...". Without wicd I can get the connection up and ping the Net - but if I take eth0 down (ifconfig eth0 down), my wireless goes away too (same result if I unplug the wire instead). wicd is the only way I can bring eth0 back (which is the main reason I'm using it) - ifconfig eth0 and/or ifup eth0 do not re-enable the connection (I just discovered it leaves out the gateway. Adding the gateway back in re-enables the connection including wifi; I didn't want to delete the info about wicd above in case it gives someone an idea.) Doing it manually, despite the errors (which it would be nice to also resolve) - allows me to ping the outside world: ifup wlan0 ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: Invalid argument ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: Invalid argument ssh stop/waiting ssh start/running, process 17336 ping -I wlan0 -c 4 8.8.8.8 PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) from 192.168.0.12 wlan0: 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_req=1 ttl=43 time=48.8 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_req=2 ttl=43 time=47.9 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_req=3 ttl=43 time=48.7 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_req=4 ttl=43 time=53.2 ms --- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics --- 4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3003ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 47.975/49.711/53.235/2.063 ms # iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"TPLINK" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.427 GHz Access Point: 64:66:xx:xx:xx:22 Bit Rate=108 Mb/s Tx-Power=27 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality=70/70 Signal level=-39 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:3 Missed beacon:0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: wlan0 version: 01 serial: f0:7d:68:c1:b4:13 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k driverversion=3.2.0-67-generic-pae firmware=N/A latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn resources: irq:17 memory:dfbf0000-dfbfffff ip route default via 192.168.0.1 dev eth0 default via 192.168.0.1 dev wlan0 metric 100 169.254.0.0/16 dev wlan0 scope link metric 1000 192.168.0.0/24 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.0.102 192.168.0.0/24 dev wlan0 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.0.12 (For the record, I have no idea what the 169.254.0.0 address is doing there.) uname -a 3.2.0-67-generic-pae #101-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 15 18:04:54 UTC 2014 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux lshw -C network *-network description: Ethernet interface product: NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 01 serial: 00:11:11:59:fc:09 size: 100Mbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm vpd msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=tg3 driverversion=3.121 duplex=full firmware=5751-v3.23a ip=192.168.0.102 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=twisted pair speed=100Mbit/s resources: irq:16 memory:dfcf0000-dfcfffff *-network description: Wireless interface product: AR5418 Wireless Network Adapter [AR5008E 802.11(a)bgn] (PCI-Express) vendor: Qualcomm Atheros physical id: 0 /etc/network/interfaces # interfaces(5) file used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8) auto lo iface lo inet loopback source /etc/network/interfaces.eth0 source /etc/network/interfaces.wlan0 /etc/network/interfaces.eth0 #Main Interface auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.0.102 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.0.1 /etc/network/interfaces.wlan0 auto wlan0 iface wlan0 inet static address 192.168.0.12 gateway 192.168.0.1 dns-nameservers 192.168.0.1 8.8.8.8 netmask 255.255.255.0 wpa-driver wext wpa-ssid TPLINK wpa-ap-scan 1 wpa-proto RSN wpa-pairwise CCMP wpa-group CCMP wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK wpa-psk dca1badb5fd4e9axxx4xxdaaxxfa91xx610bxx6a7d57ef67af9809dxx6af42e39 /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant network={ ssid="TPLINK" psk="my password" key_mgmt=WPA-PSK proto=RSN pairwise=CCMP group=CCMP } ifdown eth0 ifdown: interface eth0 not configured ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:11:xx:xx:xx:09 inet addr:192.168.0.102 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::211:11ff:fe59:fc09/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:213690 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:155266 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:220057808 (220.0 MB) TX bytes:21137696 (21.1 MB) Interrupt:16 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:196412 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:196412 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:153270697 (153.2 MB) TX bytes:153270697 (153.2 MB) wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr f0:7d:xx:xx:xx:13 inet addr:192.168.0.12 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::f27d:68ff:fec1:b413/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:11335 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:7287 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:2563290 (2.5 MB) TX bytes:855746 (855.7 KB) ifconfig eth0 down ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:09 inet addr:192.168.0.102 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::211:11ff:fe59:fc09/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:192 (192.0 B) TX bytes:94 (94.0 B) Interrupt:16 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:196418 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:196418 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:153270871 (153.2 MB) TX bytes:153270871 (153.2 MB) wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr f0:7d:xx:xx:xx:13 inet addr:192.168.0.12 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::f27d:68ff:fec1:b413/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:11359 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:7293 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:2565482 (2.5 MB) TX bytes:856363 (856.3 KB) ip route default via 192.168.0.1 dev wlan0 metric 100 169.254.0.0/16 dev wlan0 scope link metric 1000 192.168.0.0/24 dev wlan0 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.0.12 192.168.0.0/24 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.0.102 ping -I wlan0 -c 4 8.8.8.8 PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) from 192.168.0.12 wlan0: 56(84) bytes of data. --- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics --- 4 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 3024ms ping -I eth0 -c 3 router PING router (192.168.0.1) from 192.168.0.102 eth0: 56(84) bytes of data. --- router ping statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 2015ms ping -I wlan0 -c 3 router PING router (192.168.0.1) from 192.168.0.12 wlan0: 56(84) bytes of data. --- router ping statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 2014ms Let me know if you need more info. Thank you in advance.

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• Metrics - A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing (or 'Why you're not clever enough to interpret metrics data')

  - by Jason Crease

  At RedGate Software, I work on a .NET obfuscator  called SmartAssembly.  Various features of it use a database to store various things (exception reports, name-mappings, etc.) The user is given the option of using either a SQL-Server database (which requires them to have Microsoft SQL Server), or a Microsoft Access MDB file (which requires nothing). MDB is the default option, but power-users soon switch to using a SQL Server database because it offers better performance and data-sharing. In the fashionable spirit of optimization and metrics, an obvious product-management question is 'Which is the most popular? SQL Server or MDB?' We've collected data about this fact, using our 'Feature-Usage-Reporting' technology (available as part of SmartAssembly) and more recently our 'Application Metrics' technology: Parameter Number of users % of total users Number of sessions Number of usages SQL Server 28 19.0 8115 8115 MDB 114 77.6 1449 1449 (As a disclaimer, please note than SmartAssembly has far more than 132 users . This data is just a selection of one build) So, it would appear that SQL-Server is used by fewer users, but more often. Great. But here's why these numbers are useless to me: Only the original developers understand the data What does a single 'usage' of 'MDB' mean? Does this happen once per run? Once per option change? On clicking the 'Obfuscate Now' button? When running the command-line version or just from the UI version? Each question could skew the data 10-fold either way, and the answers only known by the developer that instrumented the application in the first place. In other words, only the original developer can interpret the data - product-managers cannot interpret the data unaided. Most of the data is from uninterested users About half of people who download and run a free-trial from the internet quit it almost immediately. Only a small fraction use it sufficiently to make informed choices. Since the MDB option is the default one, we don't know how many of those 114 were people CHOOSING to use the MDB, or how many were JUST HAPPENING to use this MDB default for their 20-second trial. This is a problem we see across all our metrics: Are people are using X because it's the default or are they using X because they want to use X? We need to segment the data further - asking what percentage of each percentage meet our criteria for an 'established user' or 'informed user'. You end up spending hours writing sophisticated and dubious SQL queries to segment the data further. Not fun. You can't find out why they used this feature Metrics can answer the when and what, but not the why. Why did people use feature X? If you're anything like me, you often click on random buttons in unfamiliar applications just to explore the feature-set. If we listened uncritically to metrics at RedGate, we would eliminate the most-important and more-complex features which people actually buy the software for, leaving just big buttons on the main page and the About-Box. "Ah, that's interesting!" rather than "Ah, that's actionable!" People do love data. Did you know you eat 1201 chickens in a lifetime? But just 4 cows? Interesting, but useless. Often metrics give you a nice number: '5.8% of users have 3 or more monitors' . But unless the statistic is both SUPRISING and ACTIONABLE, it's useless. Most metrics are collected, reviewed with lots of cooing. and then forgotten. Unless a piece-of-data could change things, it's useless collecting it. People get obsessed with significance levels The first things that lots of people do with this data is do a t-test to get a significance level ("Hey! We know with 99.64% confidence that people prefer SQL Server to MDBs!") Believe me: other causes of error/misinterpretation in your data are FAR more significant than your t-test could ever comprehend. Confirmation bias prevents objectivity If the data appears to match our instinct, we feel satisfied and move on. If it doesn't, we suspect the data and dig deeper, plummeting down a rabbit-hole of segmentation and filtering until we give-up and move-on. Data is only useful if it can change our preconceptions. Do you trust this dodgy data more than your own understanding, knowledge and intelligence?  I don't. There's always multiple plausible ways to interpret/action any data Let's say we segment the above data, and get this data: Post-trial users (i.e. those using a paid version after the 14-day free-trial is over): Parameter Number of users % of total users Number of sessions Number of usages SQL Server 13 9.0 1115 1115 MDB 5 4.2 449 449 Trial users: Parameter Number of users % of total users Number of sessions Number of usages SQL Server 15 10.0 7000 7000 MDB 114 77.6 1000 1000 How do you interpret this data? It's one of: Mostly SQL Server users buy our software. People who can't afford SQL Server tend to be unable to afford or unwilling to buy our software. Therefore, ditch MDB-support. Our MDB support is so poor and buggy that our massive MDB user-base doesn't buy it.  Therefore, spend loads of money improving it, and think about ditching SQL-Server support. People 'graduate' naturally from MDB to SQL Server as they use the software more. Things are fine the way they are. We're marketing the tool wrong. The large number of MDB users represent uninformed downloaders. Tell marketing to aggressively target SQL Server users. To choose an interpretation you need to segment again. And again. And again, and again. Opting-out is correlated with feature-usage Metrics tends to be opt-in. This skews the data even further. Between 5% and 30% of people choose to opt-in to metrics (often called 'customer improvement program' or something like that). Casual trial-users who are uninterested in your product or company are less likely to opt-in. This group is probably also likely to be MDB users. How much does this skew your data by? Who knows? It's not all doom and gloom. There are some things metrics can answer well. Environment facts. How many people have 3 monitors? Have Windows 7? Have .NET 4 installed? Have Japanese Windows? Minor optimizations.  Is the text-box big enough for average user-input? Performance data. How long does our app take to start? How many databases does the average user have on their server? As you can see, questions about who-the-user-is rather than what-the-user-does are easier to answer and action. Conclusion Use SmartAssembly. If not for the metrics (called 'Feature-Usage-Reporting'), then at least for the obfuscation/error-reporting. Data raises more questions than it answers. Questions about environment are the easiest to answer.

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• Screenshot Tour: Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on a Nexus 7

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will “form the basis of the first commercially available Ubuntu tablets,” according to Canonical. We installed Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on our own hardware to see what those tablets will be like. We don’t recommend installing this yourself, as it’s still not a polished, complete experience. We’re using “Ubuntu Touch” as shorthand here — apparently this project’s new name is “Ubuntu For Devices.” The Welcome Screen Ubuntu’s touch interface is all about edge swipes and hidden interface elements — it has a lot in common with Windows 8, actually. You’ll see the welcome screen when you boot up or unlock a Ubuntu tablet or phone. If you have new emails, text messages, or other information, it will appear on this screen along with the time and date. If you don’t, you’ll just see a message saying “No data sources available.” The Dash Swipe in from the right edge of the welcome screen to access the Dash, or home screen. This is actually very similar to the Dash on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. This isn’t a surprise — Canonical wants the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu to use the same code. In the future, the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu will use the same version of Unity and Unity will adjust its interface depending on what type of device your’e using. Here you’ll find apps you have installed and apps available to install. Tap an installed app to launch it or tap an available app to view more details and install it. Tap the My apps or Available headings to view a complete list of apps you have installed or apps you can install. Tap the Search box at the top of the screen to start searching — this is how you’d search for new apps to install. As you’d expect, a touch keyboard appears when you tap in the Search field or any other text field. The launcher isn’t just for apps. Tap the Apps heading at the top of the screen and you’ll see hidden text appear — Music, Video, and Scopes. This hidden navigation is used throughout Ubuntu’s different apps and can be easy to miss at first. Swipe to the left or right to move between these screens. These screens are also similar to the different panels in Unity on the desktop. The Scopes section allows you to view different search scopes you have installed. These are used to search different sources when you start a search from the Dash. Search from the Music or Videos scopes to search for local media files on your device or media files online. For example, searching in the Music scope will show you music results from Grooveshark by default. Navigating Ubuntu Touch Swipe in from the left edge anywhere on the system to open the launcher, a bar with shortcuts to apps. This launcher is very similar to the launcher on the left of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop — that’s the whole idea, after all. Once you’ve opened an app, you can leave the app by swiping in from the left. The launcher will appear — keep moving your finger towards the right edge of teh screen. This will swipe the current app off the screen, taking you back to the Dash. Once back on the Dash, you’ll see your open apps represented as thumbnails under Recent. Tap a thumbnail here to go back to a running app. To remove an app from here, long-press it and tap the X button that appears. Swipe in from the right edge in any app to quickly switch between recent apps. Swipe in from the right edge and hold your finger down to reveal an application switcher that shows all your recent apps and lets you choose between them. Swipe down from the top of the screen to access the indicator panel. Here you can connect to Wi-Fi networks, view upcoming events, control GPS and Bluetooth hardware, adjust sound settings, see incoming messages, and more. This panel is for quick access to hardware settings and notifications, just like the indicators on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. The Apps System settings not included in the pull-down panel are available in the System Settings app. To access it, tap My apps on the Dash and tap System Settings, search for the System Settings app, or open the launcher bar and tap the settings icon. The settings here a bit limited compared to other operating systems, but many of the important options are available here. You can add Evernote, Ubuntu One, Twitter, Facebook, and Google accounts from here. A free Ubuntu One account is mandatory for downloading and updating apps. A Google account can be used to sync contacts and calendar events. Some apps on Ubuntu are native apps, while many are web apps. For example, the Twitter, Gmail, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay apps included by default are all web apps that open each service’s mobile website as an app. Other applications, such as the Weather, Calendar, Dialer, Calculator, and Notes apps are native applications. Theoretically, both types of apps will be able to scale to different screen resolutions. Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu desktop may one day share the same apps, which will adapt to different display sizes and input methods. Like Windows 8 apps, Ubuntu apps hide interface elements by default, providing you with a full-screen view of the content. Swipe up from the bottom of an app’s screen to view its interface elements. For example, swiping up from the bottom of the Web Browser app reveals Back, Forward, and Refresh buttons, along with an address bar and Activity button so you can view current and recent web pages. Swipe up even more from the bottom and you’ll see a button hovering in the middle of the app. Tap the button and you’ll see many more settings. This is an overflow area for application options and functions that can’t fit on the navigation bar. The Terminal app has a few surprising Easter eggs in this panel, including a “Hack into the NSA” option. Tap it and the following text will appear in the terminal: That’s not very nice, now tracing your location . . . . . . . . . . . .Trace failed You got away this time, but don’t try again. We’d expect to see such Easter eggs disappear before Ubuntu Touch actually ships on real devices. Ubuntu Touch has come a long way, but it’s still not something you want to use today. For example, it doesn’t even have a built-in email client — you’ll have to us your email service’s mobile website. Few apps are available, and many of the ones that are are just mobile websites. It’s not a polished operating system intended for normal users yet — it’s more of a preview for developers and device manufacturers. If you really want to try it yourself, you can install it on a Wi-Fi Nexus 7 (2013), Nexus 10, or Nexus 4 device. Follow Ubuntu’s installation instructions here.

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Interlocked Read() and Exchange()

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Last time we discussed the Interlocked class and its Add(), Increment(), and Decrement() methods which are all useful for updating a value atomically by adding (or subtracting).  However, this begs the question of how do we set and read those values atomically as well? Read() – Read a value atomically Let’s begin by examining the following code: 1: public class Incrementor 2: { 3: private long _value = 0; 4:  5: public long Value { get { return _value; } } 6:  7: public void Increment() 8: { 9: Interlocked.Increment(ref _value); 10: } 11: } 12:  It uses an interlocked increment, as we discuss in my previous post (here), so we know that the increment will be thread-safe.  But, to realize what’s potentially wrong we have to know a bit about how atomic reads are in 32 bit and 64 bit .NET environments. When you are dealing with an item smaller or equal to the system word size (such as an int on a 32 bit system or a long on a 64 bit system) then the read is generally atomic, because it can grab all of the bits needed at once.  However, when dealing with something larger than the system word size (reading a long on a 32 bit system for example), it cannot grab the whole value at once, which can lead to some problems since this read isn’t atomic. For example, this means that on a 32 bit system we may read one half of the long before another thread increments the value, and the other half of it after the increment.  To protect us from reading an invalid value in this manner, we can do an Interlocked.Read() to force the read to be atomic (of course, you’d want to make sure any writes or increments are atomic also): 1: public class Incrementor 2: { 3: private long _value = 0; 4:  5: public long Value 6: { 7: get { return Interlocked.Read(ref _value); } 8: } 9:  10: public void Increment() 11: { 12: Interlocked.Increment(ref _value); 13: } 14: } Now we are guaranteed that we will read the 64 bit value atomically on a 32 bit system, thus ensuring our thread safety (assuming all other reads, writes, increments, etc. are likewise protected).  Note that as stated before, and according to the MSDN (here), it isn’t strictly necessary to use Interlocked.Read() for reading 64 bit values on 64 bit systems, but for those still working in 32 bit environments, it comes in handy when dealing with long atomically. Exchange() – Exchanges two values atomically Exchange() lets us store a new value in the given location (the ref parameter) and return the old value as a result. So just as Read() allows us to read atomically, one use of Exchange() is to write values atomically.  For example, if we wanted to add a Reset() method to our Incrementor, we could do something like this: 1: public void Reset() 2: { 3: _value = 0; 4: } But the assignment wouldn’t be atomic on 32 bit systems, since the word size is 32 bits and the variable is a long (64 bits).  Thus our assignment could have only set half the value when a threaded read or increment happens, which would put us in a bad state. So instead, we could write Reset() like this: 1: public void Reset() 2: { 3: Interlocked.Exchange(ref _value, 0); 4: } And we’d be safe again on a 32 bit system. But this isn’t the only reason Exchange() is valuable.  The key comes in realizing that Exchange() doesn’t just set a new value, it returns the old as well in an atomic step.  Hence the name “exchange”: you are swapping the value to set with the stored value. So why would we want to do this?  Well, anytime you want to set a value and take action based on the previous value.  An example of this might be a scheme where you have several tasks, and during every so often, each of the tasks may nominate themselves to do some administrative chore.  Perhaps you don’t want to make this thread dedicated for whatever reason, but want to be robust enough to let any of the threads that isn’t currently occupied nominate itself for the job.  An easy and lightweight way to do this would be to have a long representing whether someone has acquired the “election” or not.  So a 0 would indicate no one has been elected and 1 would indicate someone has been elected. We could then base our nomination strategy as follows: every so often, a thread will attempt an Interlocked.Exchange() on the long and with a value of 1.  The first thread to do so will set it to a 1 and return back the old value of 0.  We can use this to show that they were the first to nominate and be chosen are thus “in charge”.  Anyone who nominates after that will attempt the same Exchange() but will get back a value of 1, which indicates that someone already had set it to a 1 before them, thus they are not elected. Then, the only other step we need take is to remember to release the election flag once the elected thread accomplishes its task, which we’d do by setting the value back to 0.  In this way, the next thread to nominate with Exchange() will get back the 0 letting them know they are the new elected nominee. Such code might look like this: 1: public class Nominator 2: { 3: private long _nomination = 0; 4: public bool Elect() 5: { 6: return Interlocked.Exchange(ref _nomination, 1) == 0; 7: } 8: public bool Release() 9: { 10: return Interlocked.Exchange(ref _nomination, 0) == 1; 11: } 12: } There’s many ways to do this, of course, but you get the idea.  Running 5 threads doing some “sleep” work might look like this: 1: var nominator = new Nominator(); 2: var random = new Random(); 3: Parallel.For(0, 5, i => 4: { 5:  6: for (int j = 0; j < _iterations; ++j) 7: { 8: if (nominator.Elect()) 9: { 10: // elected 11: Console.WriteLine("Elected nominee " + i); 12: Thread.Sleep(random.Next(100, 5000)); 13: nominator.Release(); 14: } 15: else 16: { 17: // not elected 18: Console.WriteLine("Did not elect nominee " + i); 19: } 20: // sleep before check again 21: Thread.Sleep(1000); 22: } 23: }); And would spit out results like: 1: Elected nominee 0 2: Did not elect nominee 2 3: Did not elect nominee 1 4: Did not elect nominee 4 5: Did not elect nominee 3 6: Did not elect nominee 3 7: Did not elect nominee 1 8: Did not elect nominee 2 9: Did not elect nominee 4 10: Elected nominee 3 11: Did not elect nominee 2 12: Did not elect nominee 1 13: Did not elect nominee 4 14: Elected nominee 0 15: Did not elect nominee 2 16: Did not elect nominee 4 17: ... Another nice thing about the Interlocked.Exchange() is it can be used to thread-safely set pretty much anything 64 bits or less in size including references, pointers (in unsafe mode), floats, doubles, etc.  Summary So, now we’ve seen two more things we can do with Interlocked: reading and exchanging a value atomically.  Read() and Exchange() are especially valuable for reading/writing 64 bit values atomically in a 32 bit system.  Exchange() has value even beyond simply atomic writes by using the Exchange() to your advantage, since it reads and set the value atomically, which allows you to do lightweight nomination systems. There’s still a few more goodies in the Interlocked class which we’ll explore next time! Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Interlocked

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• SharePoint logging to a list

  - by Norgean

  I recently worked in an environment with several servers. Locating the correct SharePoint log file for error messages, or development trace calls, is cumbersome. And once the solution hit the cloud, it got even worse, as we had no access to the log files at all. Obviously we are not the only ones with this problem, and the current trend seems to be to log to a list. This had become an off-hour project, so rather than do the sensible thing and find a ready-made solution, I decided to do it the hard way. So! Fire up Visual Studio, create yet another empty SharePoint solution, and start to think of some requirements. Easy on/offI want to be able to turn list-logging on and off.Easy loggingFor me, this means being able to use string.Format.Easy filteringLet's have the possibility to add some filtering columns; category and severity, where severity can be "verbose", "warning" or "error". Easy on/off Well, that's easy. Create a new web feature. Add an event receiver, and create the list on activation of the feature. Tear the list down on de-activation. I chose not to create a new content type; I did not feel that it would give me anything extra. I based the list on the generic list - I think a better choice would have been the announcement type. Approximately: public void CreateLog(SPWeb web)         {             var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListName);             if (list == null)             {                 var listGuid = web.Lists.Add(LogListName, "Logging for the masses", SPListTemplateType.GenericList);                 list = web.Lists[listGuid];                 list.Title = LogListTitle;                 list.Update();                 list.Fields.Add(Category, SPFieldType.Text, false);                 var stringColl = new StringCollection();                 stringColl.AddRange(new[]{Error, Information, Verbose});                 list.Fields.Add(Severity, SPFieldType.Choice, true, false, stringColl);                 ModifyDefaultView(list);             }         }Should be self explanatory, but: only create the list if it does not already exist (d'oh). Best practice: create it with a Url-friendly name, and, if necessary, give it a better title. ...because otherwise you'll have to look for a list with a name like "Simple_x0020_Log". I've added a couple of fields; a field for category, and a 'severity'. Both to make it easier to find relevant log messages. Notice that I don't have to call list.Update() after adding the fields - this would cause a nasty error (something along the lines of "List locked by another user"). The function for deleting the log is exactly as onerous as you'd expect:         public void DeleteLog(SPWeb web)         {             var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle);             if (list != null)             {                 list.Delete();             }         } So! "All" that remains is to log. Also known as adding items to a list. Lots of different methods with different signatures end up calling the same function. For example, LogVerbose(web, message) calls LogVerbose(web, null, message) which again calls another method which calls: private static void Log(SPWeb web, string category, string severity, string textformat, params object[] texts)         {             if (web != null)             {                 var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle);                 if (list != null)                 {                     var item = list.AddItem(); // NOTE! NOT list.Items.Add… just don't, mkay?                     var text = string.Format(textformat, texts);                     if (text.Length > 255) // because the title field only holds so many chars. Sigh.                         text = text.Substring(0, 254);                     item[SPBuiltInFieldId.Title] = text;                     item[Degree] = severity;                     item[Category] = category;                     item.Update();                 }             } // omitted: Also log to SharePoint log.         } By adding a params parameter I can call it as if I was doing a Console.WriteLine: LogVerbose(web, "demo", "{0} {1}{2}", "hello", "world", '!'); Ok, that was a silly example, a better one might be: LogError(web, LogCategory, "Exception caught when updating {0}. exception: {1}", listItem.Title, ex); For performance reasons I use list.AddItem rather than list.Items.Add. For completeness' sake, let us include the "ModifyDefaultView" function that I deliberately skipped earlier.         private void ModifyDefaultView(SPList list)         {             // Add fields to default view             var defaultView = list.DefaultView;             var exists = defaultView.ViewFields.Cast<string>().Any(field => String.CompareOrdinal(field, Severity) == 0);               if (!exists)             {                 var field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Severity);                 if (field != null)                     defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field);                 field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Category);                 if (field != null)                     defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field);                 defaultView.Update();                   var sortDoc = new XmlDocument();                 sortDoc.LoadXml(string.Format("<Query>{0}</Query>", defaultView.Query));                 var orderBy = (XmlElement) sortDoc.SelectSingleNode("//OrderBy");                 if (orderBy != null && sortDoc.DocumentElement != null)                     sortDoc.DocumentElement.RemoveChild(orderBy);                 orderBy = sortDoc.CreateElement("OrderBy");                 sortDoc.DocumentElement.AppendChild(orderBy);                 field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.Modified];                 var fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef");                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName);                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE");                 orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef);                   fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef");                 field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.ID];                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName);                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE");                 orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef);                 defaultView.Query = sortDoc.DocumentElement.InnerXml;                 //defaultView.Query = "<OrderBy><FieldRef Name='Modified' Ascending='FALSE' /><FieldRef Name='ID' Ascending='FALSE' /></OrderBy>";                 defaultView.Update();             }         } First two lines are easy - see if the default view includes the "Severity" column. If it does - quit; our job here is done.Adding "severity" and "Category" to the view is not exactly rocket science. But then? Then we build the sort order query. Through XML. The lines are numerous, but boring. All to achieve the CAML query which is commented out. The major benefit of using the dom to build XML, is that you may get compile time errors for spelling mistakes. I say 'may', because although the compiler will not let you forget to close a tag, it will cheerfully let you spell "Name" as "Naem". Whichever you prefer, at the end of the day the view will sort by modified date and ID, both descending. I added the ID as there may be several items with the same time stamp. So! Simple logging to a list, with sensible a view, and with normal functionality for creating your own filterings. I should probably have added some more views in code, ready filtered for "only errors", "errors and warnings" etc. And it would be nice to block verbose logging completely, but I'm not happy with the alternatives. (yetanotherfeature or an admin page seem like overkill - perhaps just removing it as one of the choices, and not log if it isn't there?) Before you comment - yes, try-catches have been removed for clarity. There is nothing worse than having a logging function that breaks your site!

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• Nokia Windows Phone 8 App Collection

  - by Tim Murphy

  I recently upgraded to a Nokia Lumia 920.  Along with it came the availability of a number of Nokia developed apps or apps that Nokia has made available from other developers.  Below is a summary of some of the ones that I have used to this point.  There are quite a few of them so I won’t be covering everything that is available. Nokia Maps I am quite pleased with the accuracy of Nokia Maps and not having to tap the screen for each turn any more.  The information on the screen is quite good as well.  The couple of improvements I would like to see are for the voice directions to include which street or exit you need to use and improve the search accuracy.  Bing maps had much better search results in my opinion. Nokia Drive This one really had me confused when I first setup the phone.  I was driving down the road and suddenly I am getting notification tones, but there were no visual notifications on the phone.  It seems that in their infinite wisdom Nokia thinks I don’t know when I am going over the speed limit and need to be told. ESPN I really liked my ESPN app on Windows Phone 7.5, but I am not getting the type of experience I was looking for out of this app.  While it allows me to pick my favorite teams, but there isn’t a pivot page or panorama page that shows a summary of my favorite teams.  I have also found that the live tile don’t update very often.  Over all I am rather disappointed compared app produced by ESPN. Smart Shoot I really need to get the kids to let me use this on.  I like the concept, but I need to spend more time with it.  The idea how running the camera through a continuous shooting mode and then picking the best is something that I have done with my DSLR and am glad to see it available here. Cinemagraph Here is a fun filter.  It doesn’t have the most accurate editing features, but it is fun to stop certain parts of a scene and let other parts move.  As a test I stopped the traffic on the highway and let the traffic on the frontage road flow.  It makes for a fun effect.  If nothing else it could be great for sending prank animations to your friends. YouSendIt I have only briefly touched this application.  What I don’t understand is why it is needed.  Most of the functionality seems to be similar to SkyDrive and it gives you less storage.  They only feature that seems to differentiate the app is the signature capability. Creative Studio This app has some nice quick edits, but it is not very comprehensive.  I am also not to thrilled with the user experience.  It puts you though an initial color cast series that I’m not sure why it is there.  Discovery of the remaining adjustments isn’t that great.  In the end I found myself wanting Thumbia back. Panorama This is one of the apps that I like.  I found it easy to use as it guides you with a target circle that you center for it to take the next pictures.  It also stitches the images with amazing speed.  The one thing I wish it had was the capability to turn the phone into portrait orientation and do a taller panorama.  Perhaps we will see this in the future. Nokia Music After getting over the missing album art I found that there were a number of missing features with this app as well.  I have a Zune HD and I am used to being able to go through my collection and adding songs, albums or artists to my now playing.  There also doesn’t seem to be a way to manage playlists that I have seen yet.  Other than that the UI is familiar and it give Nokia City Lens Augmented reality is a cool concept, but I still haven’t seen it implemented in a compelling fashion beyond a demo at TED a couple of years ago.  The app still leaves me wanting as well.  It does give an interesting toy.  It gives you the ability to look for general categories and see general direction and clusters of locations.  I think as this concept is better thought out it will become more compelling. Nokia Trailers I don’t know how often I will use this app, but I do like being able to see what movies are being promoted.  I can’t wait for The Hobbit to come out and the trailer was just what the doctor ordered.  I can see coming back to this app from time to time. PhotoBeamer PhotoBeamer is a strange beast that needs a better instruction manual.  It seems a lot like magic but very confusing.  I need some more testing, but I don’t think this is something that most people are going to understand quickly and may give up before getting it to work.  I may put an update here after playing with it further. Ringtone Maker The app was just published and it didn’t work very well for me. It couldn’t find 95% of the songs that Nokia Music was playing for me and crashed several times.  It also had songs named wrong that when I checked them in Nokia Music they were fine.  This app looks like it has a long way to go. Summary In all I think that Nokia is offering a well rounded set of initial applications that can get any new owner started.  There is definitely room for improvement in all of these apps.  The main need is usability upgrades.  I would guess that with feedback from users they will come up to acceptable levels.  Try them out and see if you agree. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Nokia,Lumia,Nokia Apps,ESPN,PhotoBeamer,City Lens,YouSendIt,Drive,Maps

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• Entity Framework 6: Alpha2 Now Available

  - by ScottGu

  The Entity Framework team recently announced the 2nd alpha release of EF6.   The alpha 2 package is available for download from NuGet. Since this is a pre-release package make sure to select “Include Prereleases” in the NuGet package manager, or execute the following from the package manager console to install it: PM> Install-Package EntityFramework -Pre This week’s alpha release includes a bunch of great improvements in the following areas: Async language support is now available for queries and updates when running on .NET 4.5. Custom conventions now provide the ability to override the default conventions that Code First uses for mapping types, properties, etc. to your database. Multi-tenant migrations allow the same database to be used by multiple contexts with full Code First Migrations support for independently evolving the model backing each context. Using Enumerable.Contains in a LINQ query is now handled much more efficiently by EF and the SQL Server provider resulting greatly improved performance. All features of EF6 (except async) are available on both .NET 4 and .NET 4.5. This includes support for enums and spatial types and the performance improvements that were previously only available when using .NET 4.5. Start-up time for many large models has been dramatically improved thanks to improved view generation performance. Below are some additional details about a few of the improvements above: Async Support .NET 4.5 introduced the Task-Based Asynchronous Pattern that uses the async and await keywords to help make writing asynchronous code easier. EF 6 now supports this pattern. This is great for ASP.NET applications as database calls made through EF can now be processed asynchronously – avoiding any blocking of worker threads. This can increase scalability on the server by allowing more requests to be processed while waiting for the database to respond. The following code shows an MVC controller that is querying a database for a list of location entities:     public class HomeController : Controller     {         LocationContext db = new LocationContext();           public async Task<ActionResult> Index()         {             var locations = await db.Locations.ToListAsync();               return View(locations);         }     } Notice above the call to the new ToListAsync method with the await keyword. When the web server reaches this code it initiates the database request, but rather than blocking while waiting for the results to come back, the thread that is processing the request returns to the thread pool, allowing ASP.NET to process another incoming request with the same thread. In other words, a thread is only consumed when there is actual processing work to do, allowing the web server to handle more concurrent requests with the same resources. A more detailed walkthrough covering async in EF is available with additional information and examples. Also a walkthrough is available showing how to use async in an ASP.NET MVC application. Custom Conventions When working with EF Code First, the default behavior is to map .NET classes to tables using a set of conventions baked into EF. For example, Code First will detect properties that end with “ID” and configure them automatically as primary keys. However, sometimes you cannot or do not want to follow those conventions and would rather provide your own. For example, maybe your primary key properties all end in “Key” instead of “Id”. Custom conventions allow the default conventions to be overridden or new conventions to be added so that Code First can map by convention using whatever rules make sense for your project. The following code demonstrates using custom conventions to set the precision of all decimals to 5. As with other Code First configuration, this code is placed in the OnModelCreating method which is overridden on your derived DbContext class:         protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)         {             modelBuilder.Properties<decimal>()                 .Configure(x => x.HasPrecision(5));           } But what if there are a couple of places where a decimal property should have a different precision? Just as with all the existing Code First conventions, this new convention can be overridden for a particular property simply by explicitly configuring that property using either the fluent API or a data annotation. A more detailed description of custom code first conventions is available here. Community Involvement I blogged a while ago about EF being released under an open source license.  Since then a number of community members have made contributions and these are included in EF6 alpha 2. Two examples of community contributions are: AlirezaHaghshenas contributed a change that increases the startup performance of EF for larger models by improving the performance of view generation. The change means that it is less often necessary to use of pre-generated views. UnaiZorrilla contributed the first community feature to EF: the ability to load all Code First configuration classes in an assembly with a single method call like the following: protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) {        modelBuilder.Configurations            .AddFromAssembly(typeof(LocationContext).Assembly); } This code will find and load all the classes that inherit from EntityTypeConfiguration<T> or ComplexTypeConfiguration<T> in the assembly where LocationContext is defined. This reduces the amount of coupling between the context and Code First configuration classes, and is also a very convenient shortcut for large models. Other upcoming features coming in EF 6 Lots of information about the development of EF6 can be found on the EF CodePlex site, including a roadmap showing the other features that are planned for EF6. One of of the nice upcoming features is connection resiliency, which will automate the process of retying database operations on transient failures common in cloud environments and with databases such as the Windows Azure SQL Database. Another often requested feature that will be included in EF6 is the ability to map stored procedures to query and update operations on entities when using Code First. Summary EF6 is the first open source release of Entity Framework being developed in CodePlex. The alpha 2 preview release of EF6 is now available on NuGet, and contains some really great features for you to try. The EF team are always looking for feedback from developers - especially on the new features such as custom Code First conventions and async support. To provide feedback you can post a comment on the EF6 alpha 2 announcement post, start a discussion or file a bug on the CodePlex site. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• I'm a contract developer and I think I'm about to get screwed [closed]

  - by kagaku

  I do contract development on the side. You could say that I'm a contract developer? Considering I've only ever had one client I'd say that's not exactly the truth - more like I took a side job and needed some extra cash. It started out as a "rebuild our website and we'll pay you $10k" type project. Once that was complete (a bit over schedule, but certainly not over budget), the company hired me on as a "long term support" contractor. The contract is to go from March of this year, expiring on December 31st of this year - 10 months. Over which a payment is to be paid on the 30th of each month for a set amount. I've been fulfilling my end of the contract on all points - doing server maintenence, application and database changes, doing huge rush changes and pretty much just going above and beyond. Currently I'm in the middle of development of an iPhone mobile application (PhoneGap based) which is nearing completion (probably 3-4 weeks from submission). It has not been all peaches and flowers though. Each and every month when my paycheck comes due, there always seems to be an issue of sorts. These issues did not occur during the initial project, only during the support contract. The actual contract states that my check should be mailed out on the 30th of the month. I have received my check on time approximately once (on time being about 2-3 days within the 30th). I've received my paycheck as late as the 15th of the next month - over two weeks late. I've put up with it because I need the paycheck. There have been promises and promises of "we'll send it out on time next time! I promise" - only to receive it just as late the next month. When I ask about payment they give me a vibe like "why are you only worried about money?" - unfortunately I don't have the luxury of not worrying about money. The last straw was with my August payment, which should have been mailed on August 30th. I received it on September 12th. The reason for the delay? "USPS is delaying it man! we sent it out on the 1st!" is the reason I got. When I finally got the check in the mail, the postage on the envelope was marked September 10th - the date it was run through the postage machine. I've been outright lied to, at this point. I carry on working, because again - I need a paycheck. I orchestrated the move of our application to a new server, developed a bunch of new changes and continued work on the iPhone app. All told I probably went over my hourly allotment (I'm paid for 40 hours a month, I probably put in at least 50). On Saturday, the 1st, I gave the main contact at the company (a company of 3, by the way - this is not some big corporation) a ring and filled him in on the status of my work for the past two weeks. Unusually I hadn't heard from him since the middle of September. His response was "oh... well, that is nice and uh.. good job. well, we've been talking within the company about things and we've certainly got some decisions ahead of us..." - not verbatim but you get the idea (I hope?). I got out of this conversation that the site is not doing very well (which it's not) and they're considering pulling the plug. Crap, this contract is going to end early - there goes Christmas! Fine, that's alright, no problem. I'll get paid for the last months work and call it a day. Unfortunately I still haven't gotten last months check, and I'm getting dicked around now. "Oh.. we had problems transferring funds, we'll try and mail it out tomorrow" and "I left a VM with the finance guy, but I can't get ahold of him". So I'm getting the feeling I'm not getting paid for all the work I put in for September. This is obviously breach of contract, and I am pissed. Thinking irrationally, I considered changing all their passwords and holding their stuff hostage. Before I think it through (by the way, I am NOT going to do this, realized it would probably get me in trouble), I go and try some passwords for our various accounts. Google Apps? Oh, I'm no longer administrator here. Godaddy? Whoops, invalid password. Disqus? Nope, invalid password here too. Google Adsense / Analytics? Invalid password. Dedicated server account manager? Invalid password. Now, I have the servers root password - I just built the box last week and haven't had a chance to send the guy the root password. Wasn't in a rush, I manage the server and they never touch it. Now all of a sudden all the passwords except this one are changed; the writing is on the wall - I am out. Here's the conundrum. I have the root password, they do not. If I give them this password all the leverage I have is gone, out the door and out of my hands. During this argument of why am I not getting paid the guy sends me an email saying "oh by the way, what's the root username and password to the server?". Considering he knows absolutely nothing, I gave him an "admin" account which really has almost no rights. I still have exclusive access to the server, I just don't know where to go. I can hold their data hostage, but I'm almost positive this is the wrong thing to do. I'd consider it blackmail, regardless of whether or not I have gotten paid yet. I can "break" something on the server and give them the whole "well, if you were paying me I could fix it!" spiel. This works from a "well he's not holding their stuff hostage" point of view, but what stops them from hiring some one else to just fix the issue at hand? For all I know the guys nephew is a "l33t hax0r" and can figure it out for free. I can give in, document as much as I can and take him to small claims court. This is breach of contract, I'm not getting paid. I have a case, right? ???? Does anyone have any experience in this? What can I do? What are my options? I'm broke, I can't afford a lawyer and I can barely afford not getting this paycheck. My wife doesn't work (I work two jobs so she doesn't have to work - we have a 1 year old) and is already looking at getting a part time job to cover the bills. Long term we'll be fine, but this has pissed me off beyond belief! Help me out, I'm about to get screwed.

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• Adding multiple data importers support to web applications

  - by DigiMortal

  I’m building web application for customer and there is requirement that users must be able to import data in different formats. Today we will support XLSX and ODF as import formats and some other formats are waiting. I wanted to be able to add new importers on the fly so I don’t have to deploy web application again when I add new importer or change some existing one. In this posting I will show you how to build generic importers support to your web application. Importer interface All importers we use must have something in common so we can easily detect them. To keep things simple I will use interface here. public interface IMyImporter {     string[] SupportedFileExtensions { get; }     ImportResult Import(Stream fileStream, string fileExtension); } Our interface has the following members: SupportedFileExtensions – string array of file extensions that importer supports. This property helps us find out what import formats are available and which importer to use with given format. Import – method that does the actual importing work. Besides file we give in as stream we also give file extension so importer can decide how to handle the file. It is enough to get started. When building real importers I am sure you will switch over to abstract base class. Importer class Here is sample importer that imports data from Excel and Word documents. Importer class with no implementation details looks like this: public class MyOpenXmlImporter : IMyImporter {     public string[] SupportedFileExtensions     {         get { return new[] { "xlsx", "docx" }; }     }     public ImportResult Import(Stream fileStream, string extension)     {         // ...     } } Finding supported import formats in web application Now we have importers created and it’s time to add them to web application. Usually we have one page or ASP.NET MVC controller where we need importers. To this page or controller we add the following method that uses reflection to find all classes that implement our IMyImporter interface. private static string[] GetImporterFileExtensions() {     var types = from a in AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies()                 from t in a.GetTypes()                 where t.GetInterfaces().Contains(typeof(IMyImporter))                 select t;       var extensions = new Collection<string>();     foreach (var type in types)     {         var instance = (IMyImporter)type.InvokeMember(null,                        BindingFlags.CreateInstance, null, null, null);           foreach (var extension in instance.SupportedFileExtensions)         {             if (extensions.Contains(extension))                 continue;               extensions.Add(extension);         }     }       return extensions.ToArray(); } This code doesn’t look nice and is far from optimal but it works for us now. It is possible to improve performance of web application if we cache extensions and their corresponding types to some static dictionary. We have to fill it only once because our application is restarted when something changes in bin folder. Finding importer by extension When user uploads file we need to detect the extension of file and find the importer that supports given extension. We add another method to our page or controller that uses reflection to return us importer instance or null if extension is not supported. private static IMyImporter GetImporterForExtension(string extensionToFind) {     var types = from a in AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies()                 from t in a.GetTypes()                 where t.GetInterfaces().Contains(typeof(IMyImporter))                 select t;     foreach (var type in types)     {         var instance = (IMyImporter)type.InvokeMember(null,                        BindingFlags.CreateInstance, null, null, null);           if (instance.SupportedFileExtensions.Contains(extensionToFind))         {             return instance;         }     }       return null; } Here is example ASP.NET MVC controller action that accepts uploaded file, finds importer that can handle file and imports data. Again, this is sample code I kept minimal to better illustrate how things work. public ActionResult Import(MyImporterModel model) {     var file = Request.Files[0];     var extension = Path.GetExtension(file.FileName).ToLower();     var importer = GetImporterForExtension(extension.Substring(1));     var result = importer.Import(file.InputStream, extension);     if (result.Errors.Count > 0)     {         foreach (var error in result.Errors)             ModelState.AddModelError("file", error);           return Import();     }     return RedirectToAction("Index"); } Conclusion That’s it. Using couple of ugly methods and one simple interface we were able to add importers support to our web application. Example code here is not perfect but it works. It is possible to cache mappings between file extensions and importer types to some static variable because changing of these mappings means that something is changed in bin folder of web application and web application is restarted in this case anyway.

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• Part 3 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers.

  - by mbcrump

  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 I wanted to create a series of blog post that gets right to the point and is aimed specifically at Silverlight Developers. The most important things I want this series to answer is : What is it?  Why do I care? How do I do it? I hope that you enjoy this series. Let’s get started: Tip/Trick #11) What is it? Underline Text in a TextBlock. Why do I care? I’ve seen people do some crazy things to get underlined text in a Silverlight Application. In case you didn’t know there is a property for that. How do I do it: On a TextBlock you have a property called TextDecorations. You can easily set this property in XAML or CodeBehind with the following snippet: <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication19.MainPage" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="400"> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <TextBlock Name="txtTB" Text="MichaelCrump.NET" TextDecorations="Underline" /> </Grid> </UserControl> or you can do it in CodeBehind… txtTB.TextDecorations = TextDecorations.Underline;   Tip/Trick #12) What is it? Get the browser information from a Silverlight Application. Why do I care? This will allow you to program around certain browser conditions that otherwise may not be aware of. How do I do it: It is very easy to extract Browser Information out a Silverlight Application by using the BrowserInformation class. You can copy/paste this code snippet to have access to all of them. string strBrowserName = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.Name; string strBrowserMinorVersion = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.BrowserVersion.Minor.ToString(); string strIsCookiesEnabled = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.CookiesEnabled.ToString(); string strPlatform = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.Platform; string strProductName = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.ProductName; string strProductVersion = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.ProductVersion; string strUserAgent = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.UserAgent; string strBrowserVersion = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.BrowserVersion.ToString(); string strBrowserMajorVersion = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.BrowserVersion.Major.ToString(); Tip/Trick #13) What is it? Always check the minRuntimeVersion after creating a new Silverlight Application. Why do I care? Whenever you create a new Silverlight Application and host it inside of an ASP.net website you will notice Visual Studio generates some code for you as shown below. The minRuntimeVersion value is set by the SDK installed on your system. Be careful, if you are playing with beta’s like “Lightswitch” because you will have a higher version of the SDK installed. So when you create a new Silverlight 4 project and deploy it your customers they will get a prompt telling them they need to upgrade Silverlight. They also will not be able to upgrade to your version because its not released to the public yet. How do I do it: Open up the .aspx or .html file Visual Studio generated and look for the line below. Make sure it matches whatever version you are actually targeting. Tip/Trick #14) What is it? The VisualTreeHelper class provides useful methods for involving nodes in a visual tree. Why do I care? It’s nice to have the ability to “walk” a visual tree or to get the rendered elements of a ListBox. I have it very useful for debugging my Silverlight application. How do I do it: Many examples exist on the web, but say that you have a huge Silverlight application and want to find the parent object of a control.  In the code snippet below, we would get 3 MessageBoxes with (StackPanel first, Grid second and UserControl Third). This is a tiny application, but imagine how helpful this would be on a large project. <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication18.MainPage" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="400"> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <StackPanel> <Button Content="Button" Height="23" Name="button1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="75" Click="button1_Click" /> </StackPanel> </Grid> </UserControl> private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { DependencyObject obj = button1; while ((obj = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(obj)) != null) { MessageBox.Show(obj.GetType().ToString()); } } Tip/Trick #15) What is it? Add ChildWindows to your Silverlight Application. Why do I care? ChildWindows are a great way to direct a user attention to a particular part of your application. This could be used when saving or entering data. How do I do it: Right click your Silverlight Application and click Add then New Item. Select Silverlight Child Window as shown below. Add an event and call the ChildWindow with the following snippet below: private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { ChildWindow1 cw = new ChildWindow1(); cw.Show(); } Your main application can still process information but this screen forces the user to select an action before proceeding. The code behind of the ChildWindow will look like the following: namespace SilverlightApplication18 { public partial class ChildWindow1 : ChildWindow { public ChildWindow1() { InitializeComponent(); } private void OKButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { this.DialogResult = true; //TODO: Add logic to save what the user entered. } private void CancelButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { this.DialogResult = false; } } } Thanks for reading and please come back for Part 4.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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• Silverlight 4 Twitter Client &ndash; Part 3

  - by Max

  Finally Silverlight 4 RC is released and also that Windows 7 Phone Series will rely heavily on Silverlight platform for apps platform. its a really good news for Silverlight developers and designers. More information on this here. You can use SL 4 RC with VS 2010. SL 4 RC does not come with VS 2010, you need to download it separately and install it. So for the next part, be ready with VS 2010 and SL4 RC, we will start using them and not With this momentum, let us go to the next part of our twitter client tutorial. This tutorial will cover setting your status in Twitter and also retrieving your 1) As everything in Silverlight is asynchronous, we need to have some visual representation showing that something is going on in the background. So what I did was to create a progress bar with indeterminate animation. The XAML is here below. <ProgressBar Maximum="100" Width="300" Height="50" Margin="20" Visibility="Collapsed" IsIndeterminate="True" Name="progressBar1" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center" /> 2) I will be toggling this progress bar to show the background work. So I thought of writing this small method, which I use to toggle the visibility of this progress bar. Just pass a bool to this method and this will toggle it based on its current visibility status. public void toggleProgressBar(bool Option){ if (Option) { if (progressBar1.Visibility == System.Windows.Visibility.Collapsed) progressBar1.Visibility = System.Windows.Visibility.Visible; } else { if (progressBar1.Visibility == System.Windows.Visibility.Visible) progressBar1.Visibility = System.Windows.Visibility.Collapsed; }} 3) Now let us create a grid to hold a textbox and a update button. The XAML will look like something below <Grid HorizontalAlignment="Center"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="50"></RowDefinition> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="400"></ColumnDefinition> <ColumnDefinition Width="200"></ColumnDefinition> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <TextBox Name="TwitterStatus" Width="380" Height="50"></TextBox> <Button Name="UpdateStatus" Content="Update" Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="2" Width="200" Height="50" Click="UpdateStatus_Click"></Button></Grid> 4) The click handler for this update button will be again using the Web Client to post values. Posting values using Web Client. The code is: private void UpdateStatus_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e){ toggleProgressBar(true); string statusupdate = "status=" + TwitterStatus.Text; WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("https://", System.Net.Browser.WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp);  WebClient myService = new WebClient(); myService.AllowReadStreamBuffering = true; myService.UseDefaultCredentials = false; myService.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(GlobalVariable.getUserName(), GlobalVariable.getPassword());  myService.UploadStringCompleted += new UploadStringCompletedEventHandler(myService_UploadStringCompleted); myService.UploadStringAsync(new Uri("https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"), statusupdate);  this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => ClearTextBoxValue());} 5) In the above code, we have a event handler which will be fired on this request is completed – !! Remember SL is Asynch !! So in the myService_UploadStringCompleted, we will just toggle the progress bar and change some status text to say that its done. The code for this will be StatusMessage is just another textblock conveniently positioned in the page.  void myService_UploadStringCompleted(object sender, UploadStringCompletedEventArgs e){ if (e.Error != null) { StatusMessage.Text = "Status Update Failed: " + e.Error.Message.ToString(); } else { toggleProgressBar(false); TwitterCredentialsSubmit(); }} 6) Now let us look at fetching the friends updates of the logged in user and displaying it in a datagrid. So just define a data grid and set its autogenerate columns as true. 7) Let us first create a data structure for use with fetching the friends timeline. The code is something like below: namespace MaxTwitter.Classes{ public class Status { public Status() {} public string ID { get; set; } public string Text { get; set; } public string Source { get; set; } public string UserID { get; set; } public string UserName { get; set; } }} You can add as many fields as you want, for the list of fields, have a look at here. It will ask for your Twitter username and password, just provide them and this will display the xml file. Go through them pick and choose your desired fields and include in your Data Structure. 8) Now the web client request for this is similar to the one we saw in step 4. Just change the uri in the last but one step to https://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml Be sure to change the event handler to something else and within that we will use XLINQ to fetch the required details for us. Now let us how this event handler fetches details. public void parseXML(string text){ XDocument xdoc; if(text.Length> 0) xdoc = XDocument.Parse(text); else xdoc = XDocument.Parse(@"I USED MY OWN LOCAL COPY OF XML FILE HERE FOR OFFLINE TESTING"); statusList = new List<Status>(); statusList = (from status in xdoc.Descendants("status") select new Status { ID = status.Element("id").Value, Text = status.Element("text").Value, Source = status.Element("source").Value, UserID = status.Element("user").Element("id").Value, UserName = status.Element("user").Element("screen_name").Value, }).ToList(); //MessageBox.Show(text); //this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => CallDatabindMethod(StatusCollection)); //MessageBox.Show(statusList.Count.ToString()); DataGridStatus.ItemsSource = statusList; StatusMessage.Text = "Datagrid refreshed."; toggleProgressBar(false);} in the event handler, we call this method with e.Result.ToString() Parsing XML files using LINQ is super cool, I love it.   I am stopping it here for  this post. Will post the completed files in next post, as I’ve worked on a few more features in this page and don’t want to confuse you. See you soon in my next post where will play with Twitter lists. Have a nice day! Technorati Tags: Silverlight,LINQ,XLINQ,Twitter API,Twitter,Network Credentials

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• Sensible Way to Pass Web Data in XML to a SQL Server Database

  - by Emtucifor

  After exploring several different ways to pass web data to a database for update purposes, I'm wondering if XML might be a good strategy. The database is currently SQL 2000. In a few months it will move to SQL 2005 and I will be able to change things if needed, but I need a SQL 2000 solution now. First of all, the database in question uses the EAV model. I know that this kind of database is generally highly frowned on, so for the purposes of this question, please just accept that this is not going to change. The current update method has the web server inserting values (that have all been converted first to their correct underlying types, then to sql_variant) to a temp table. A stored procedure is then run which expects the temp table to exist and it takes care of updating, inserting, or deleting things as needed. So far, only a single element has needed to be updated at a time. But now, there is a requirement to be able to edit multiple elements at once, and also to support hierarchical elements, each of which can have its own list of attributes. Here's some example XML I hand-typed to demonstrate what I'm thinking of. Note that in this database the Entity is Element and an ID of 0 signifies "create" aka an insert of a new item. <Elements> <Element ID="1234"> <Attr ID="221">Value</Attr> <Attr ID="225">287</Attr> <Attr ID="234"> <Element ID="99825"> <Attr ID="7">Value1</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value2</Attr> <Attr ID="9" Action="delete" /> </Element> <Element ID="99826" Action="delete" /> <Element ID="0" Type="24"> <Attr ID="7">Value4</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value5</Attr> <Attr ID="9">Value6</Attr> </Element> <Element ID="0" Type="24"> <Attr ID="7">Value7</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value8</Attr> <Attr ID="9">Value9</Attr> </Element> </Attr> <Rel ID="3827" Action="delete" /> <Rel ID="2284" Role="parent"> <Element ID="3827" /> <Element ID="3829" /> <Attr ID="665">1</Attr> </Rel> <Rel ID="0" Type="23" Role="child"> <Element ID="3830" /> <Attr ID="67" </Rel> </Element> <Element ID="0" Type="87"> <Attr ID="221">Value</Attr> <Attr ID="225">569</Attr> <Attr ID="234"> <Element ID="0" Type="24"> <Attr ID="7">Value10</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value11</Attr> <Attr ID="9">Value12</Attr> </Element> </Attr> </Element> <Element ID="1235" Action="delete" /> </Elements> Some Attributes are straight value types, such as AttrID 221. But AttrID 234 is a special "multi-value" type that can have a list of elements underneath it, and each one can have one or more values. Types only need to be presented when a new item is created, since the ElementID fully implies the type if it already exists. I'll probably support only passing in changed items (as detected by javascript). And there may be an Action="Delete" on Attr elements as well, since NULLs are treated as "unselected"--sometimes it's very important to know if a Yes/No question has intentionally been answered No or if no one's bothered to say Yes yet. There is also a different kind of data, a Relationship. At this time, those are updated through individual AJAX calls as things are edited in the UI, but I'd like to include those so that changes to relationships can be canceled (right now, once you change it, it's done). So those are really elements, too, but they are called Rel instead of Element. Relationships are implemented as ElementID1 and ElementID2, so the RelID 2284 in the XML above is in the database as: ElementID 2284 ElementID1 1234 ElementID2 3827 Having multiple children in one relationship isn't currently supported, but it would be nice later. Does this strategy and the example XML make sense? Is there a more sensible way? I'm just looking for some broad critique to help save me from going down a bad path. Any aspect that you'd like to comment on would be helpful. The web language happens to be Classic ASP, but that could change to ASP.Net at some point. A persistence engine like Linq or nHibernate is probably not acceptable right now--I just want to get this already working application enhanced without a huge amount of development time. I'll choose the answer that shows experience and has a balance of good warnings about what not to do, confirmations of what I'm planning to do, and recommendations about something else to do. I'll make it as objective as possible. P.S. I'd like to handle unicode characters as well as very long strings (10k +). UPDATE I have had this working for some time and I used the ADO Recordset Save-To-Stream trick to make creating the XML really easy. The result seems to be fairly fast, though if speed ever becomes a problem I may revisit this. In the meantime, my code works to handle any number of elements and attributes on the page at once, including updating, deleting, and creating new items all in one go. I settled on a scheme like so for all my elements: Existing data elements Example: input name e12345_a678 (element 12345, attribute 678), the input value is the value of the attribute. New elements Javascript copies a hidden template of the set of HTML elements needed for the type into the correct location on the page, increments a counter to get a new ID for this item, and prepends the number to the names of the form items. var newid = 0; function metadataAdd(reference, nameid, value) { var t = document.createElement('input'); t.setAttribute('name', nameid); t.setAttribute('id', nameid); t.setAttribute('type', 'hidden'); t.setAttribute('value', value); reference.appendChild(t); } function multiAdd(target, parentelementid, attrid, elementtypeid) { var proto = document.getElementById('a' + attrid + '_proto'); var instance = document.createElement('p'); target.parentNode.parentNode.insertBefore(instance, target.parentNode); var thisid = ++newid; instance.innerHTML = proto.innerHTML.replace(/{prefix}/g, 'n' + thisid + '_'); instance.id = 'n' + thisid; instance.className += ' new'; metadataAdd(instance, 'n' + thisid + '_p', parentelementid); metadataAdd(instance, 'n' + thisid + '_c', attrid); metadataAdd(instance, 'n' + thisid + '_t', elementtypeid); return false; } Example: Template input name _a678 becomes n1_a678 (a new element, the first one on the page, attribute 678). all attributes of this new element are tagged with the same prefix of n1. The next new item will be n2, and so on. Some hidden form inputs are created: n1_t, value is the elementtype of the element to be created n1_p, value is the parent id of the element (if it is a relationship) n1_c, value is the child id of the element (if it is a relationship) Deleting elements A hidden input is created in the form e12345_t with value set to 0. The existing controls displaying that attribute's values are disabled so they are not included in the form post. So "set type to 0" is treated as delete. With this scheme, every item on the page has a unique name and can be distinguished properly, and every action can be represented properly. When the form is posted, here's a sample of building one of the two recordsets used (classic ASP code): Set Data = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset") Data.Fields.Append "ElementID", adInteger, 4, adFldKeyColumn Data.Fields.Append "AttrID", adInteger, 4, adFldKeyColumn Data.Fields.Append "Value", adLongVarWChar, 2147483647, adFldIsNullable Or adFldMayBeNull Data.CursorLocation = adUseClient Data.CursorType = adOpenDynamic Data.Open This is the recordset for values, the other is for the elements themselves. I step through the posted form and for the element recordset use a Scripting.Dictionary populated with instances of a custom Class that has the properties I need, so that I can add the values piecemeal, since they don't always come in order. New elements are added as negative to distinguish them from regular elements (rather than requiring a separate column to indicate if it is new or addresses an existing element). I use regular expression to tear apart the form keys: "^(e|n)([0-9]{1,10})_(a|p|t|c)([0-9]{0,10})$" Then, adding an attribute looks like this. Data.AddNew ElementID.Value = DataID AttrID.Value = Integerize(Matches(0).SubMatches(3)) AttrValue.Value = Request.Form(Key) Data.Update ElementID, AttrID, and AttrValue are references to the fields of the recordset. This method is hugely faster than using Data.Fields("ElementID").Value each time. I loop through the Dictionary of element updates and ignore any that don't have all the proper information, adding the good ones to the recordset. Then I call my data-updating stored procedure like so: Set Cmd = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Command") With Cmd Set .ActiveConnection = MyDBConn .CommandType = adCmdStoredProc .CommandText = "DataPost" .Prepared = False .Parameters.Append .CreateParameter("@ElementMetadata", adLongVarWChar, adParamInput, 2147483647, XMLFromRecordset(Element)) .Parameters.Append .CreateParameter("@ElementData", adLongVarWChar, adParamInput, 2147483647, XMLFromRecordset(Data)) End With Result.Open Cmd ' previously created recordset object with options set Here's the function that does the xml conversion: Private Function XMLFromRecordset(Recordset) Dim Stream Set Stream = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Stream") Stream.Open Recordset.Save Stream, adPersistXML Stream.Position = 0 XMLFromRecordset = Stream.ReadText End Function Just in case the web page needs to know, the SP returns a recordset of any new elements, showing their page value and their created value (so I can see that n1 is now e12346 for example). Here are some key snippets from the stored procedure. Note this is SQL 2000 for now, though I'll be able to switch to 2005 soon: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[DataPost] @ElementMetaData ntext, @ElementData ntext AS DECLARE @hdoc int --- snip --- EXEC sp_xml_preparedocument @hdoc OUTPUT, @ElementMetaData, '<xml xmlns:s="uuid:BDC6E3F0-6DA3-11d1-A2A3-00AA00C14882" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C14882" xmlns:rs="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:rowset" xmlns:z="#RowsetSchema" />' INSERT #ElementMetadata (ElementID, ElementTypeID, ElementID1, ElementID2) SELECT * FROM OPENXML(@hdoc, '/xml/rs:data/rs:insert/z:row', 0) WITH ( ElementID int, ElementTypeID int, ElementID1 int, ElementID2 int ) ORDER BY ElementID -- orders negative items (new elements) first so they begin counting at 1 for later ID calculation EXEC sp_xml_removedocument @hdoc --- snip --- UPDATE E SET E.ElementTypeID = M.ElementTypeID FROM Element E INNER JOIN #ElementMetadata M ON E.ElementID = M.ElementID WHERE E.ElementID >= 1 AND M.ElementTypeID >= 1 The following query does the correlation of the negative new element ids to the newly inserted ones: UPDATE #ElementMetadata -- Correlate the new ElementIDs with the input rows SET NewElementID = Scope_Identity() - @@RowCount + DataID WHERE ElementID < 0 Other set-based queries do all the other work of validating that the attributes are allowed, are the correct data type, and inserting, updating, and deleting elements and attributes. I hope this brief run-down is useful to others some day! Converting ADO Recordsets to an XML stream was a huge winner for me as it saved all sorts of time and had a namespace and schema already defined that made the results come out correctly. Using a flatter XML format with 2 inputs was also much easier than sticking to some ideal about having everything in a single XML stream.

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• Sensible Way to Pass Web Data to Sql Server Database

  - by Emtucifor

  After exploring several different ways to pass web data to a database for update purposes, I'm wondering if XML might be a good strategy. The database is currently SQL 2000. In a few months it will move to SQL 2005 and I will be able to change things if needed, but I need a SQL 2000 solution now. First of all, the database in question uses the EAV model. I know that this kind of database is generally highly frowned on, so for the purposes of this question, please just accept that this is not going to change. The current update method has the web server inserting values (that have all been converted first to their correct underlying types, then to sql_variant) to a temp table. A stored procedure is then run which expects the temp table to exist and it takes care of updating, inserting, or deleting things as needed. So far, only a single element has needed to be updated at a time. But now, there is a requirement to be able to edit multiple elements at once, and also to support hierarchical elements, each of which can have its own list of attributes. Here's some example XML I hand-typed to demonstrate what I'm thinking of. Note that in this database the Entity is Element and an ID of 0 signifies "create" aka an insert of a new item. <Elements> <Element ID="1234"> <Attr ID="221">Value</Attr> <Attr ID="225">287</Attr> <Attr ID="234"> <Element ID="99825"> <Attr ID="7">Value1</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value2</Attr> <Attr ID="9" Action="delete" /> </Element> <Element ID="99826" Action="delete" /> <Element ID="0" Type="24"> <Attr ID="7">Value4</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value5</Attr> <Attr ID="9">Value6</Attr> </Element> <Element ID="0" Type="24"> <Attr ID="7">Value7</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value8</Attr> <Attr ID="9">Value9</Attr> </Element> </Attr> <Rel ID="3827" Action="delete" /> <Rel ID="2284" Role="parent"> <Element ID="3827" /> <Element ID="3829" /> <Attr ID="665">1</Attr> </Rel> <Rel ID="0" Type="23" Role="child"> <Element ID="3830" /> <Attr ID="67" </Rel> </Element> <Element ID="0" Type="87"> <Attr ID="221">Value</Attr> <Attr ID="225">569</Attr> <Attr ID="234"> <Element ID="0" Type="24"> <Attr ID="7">Value10</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value11</Attr> <Attr ID="9">Value12</Attr> </Element> </Attr> </Element> <Element ID="1235" Action="delete" /> </Elements> Some Attributes are straight value types, such as AttrID 221. But AttrID 234 is a special "multi-value" type that can have a list of elements underneath it, and each one can have one or more values. Types only need to be presented when a new item is created, since the ElementID fully implies the type if it already exists. I'll probably support only passing in changed items (as detected by javascript). And there may be an Action="Delete" on Attr elements as well, since NULLs are treated as "unselected"--sometimes it's very important to know if a Yes/No question has intentionally been answered No or if no one's bothered to say Yes yet. There is also a different kind of data, a Relationship. At this time, those are updated through individual AJAX calls as things are edited in the UI, but I'd like to include those so that changes to relationships can be canceled (right now, once you change it, it's done). So those are really elements, too, but they are called Rel instead of Element. Relationships are implemented as ElementID1 and ElementID2, so the RelID 2284 in the XML above is in the database as: ElementID 2284 ElementID1 1234 ElementID2 3827 Having multiple children in one relationship isn't currently supported, but it would be nice later. Does this strategy and the example XML make sense? Is there a more sensible way? I'm just looking for some broad critique to help save me from going down a bad path. Any aspect that you'd like to comment on would be helpful. The web language happens to be Classic ASP, but that could change to ASP.Net at some point. A persistence engine like Linq or nHibernate is probably not acceptable right now--I just want to get this already working application enhanced without a huge amount of development time. I'll choose the answer that shows experience and has a balance of good warnings about what not to do, confirmations of what I'm planning to do, and recommendations about something else to do. I'll make it as objective as possible. P.S. I'd like to handle unicode characters as well as very long strings (10k +). UPDATE I have had this working for some time and I used the ADO Recordset Save-To-Stream trick to make creating the XML really easy. The result seems to be fairly fast, though if speed ever becomes a problem I may revisit this. In the meantime, my code works to handle any number of elements and attributes on the page at once, including updating, deleting, and creating new items all in one go. I settled on a scheme like so for all my elements: Existing data elements Example: input name e12345_a678 (element 12345, attribute 678), the input value is the value of the attribute. New elements Javascript copies a hidden template of the set of HTML elements needed for the type into the correct location on the page, increments a counter to get a new ID for this item, and prepends the number to the names of the form items. var newid = 0; function metadataAdd(reference, nameid, value) { var t = document.createElement('input'); t.setAttribute('name', nameid); t.setAttribute('id', nameid); t.setAttribute('type', 'hidden'); t.setAttribute('value', value); reference.appendChild(t); } function multiAdd(target, parentelementid, attrid, elementtypeid) { var proto = document.getElementById('a' + attrid + '_proto'); var instance = document.createElement('p'); target.parentNode.parentNode.insertBefore(instance, target.parentNode); var thisid = ++newid; instance.innerHTML = proto.innerHTML.replace(/{prefix}/g, 'n' + thisid + '_'); instance.id = 'n' + thisid; instance.className += ' new'; metadataAdd(instance, 'n' + thisid + '_p', parentelementid); metadataAdd(instance, 'n' + thisid + '_c', attrid); metadataAdd(instance, 'n' + thisid + '_t', elementtypeid); return false; } Example: Template input name _a678 becomes n1_a678 (a new element, the first one on the page, attribute 678). all attributes of this new element are tagged with the same prefix of n1. The next new item will be n2, and so on. Some hidden form inputs are created: n1_t, value is the elementtype of the element to be created n1_p, value is the parent id of the element (if it is a relationship) n1_c, value is the child id of the element (if it is a relationship) Deleting elements A hidden input is created in the form e12345_t with value set to 0. The existing controls displaying that attribute's values are disabled so they are not included in the form post. So "set type to 0" is treated as delete. With this scheme, every item on the page has a unique name and can be distinguished properly, and every action can be represented properly. When the form is posted, here's a sample of building one of the two recordsets used (classic ASP code): Set Data = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset") Data.Fields.Append "ElementID", adInteger, 4, adFldKeyColumn Data.Fields.Append "AttrID", adInteger, 4, adFldKeyColumn Data.Fields.Append "Value", adLongVarWChar, 2147483647, adFldIsNullable Or adFldMayBeNull Data.CursorLocation = adUseClient Data.CursorType = adOpenDynamic Data.Open This is the recordset for values, the other is for the elements themselves. I step through the posted form and for the element recordset use a Scripting.Dictionary populated with instances of a custom Class that has the properties I need, so that I can add the values piecemeal, since they don't always come in order. New elements are added as negative to distinguish them from regular elements (rather than requiring a separate column to indicate if it is new or addresses an existing element). I use regular expression to tear apart the form keys: "^(e|n)([0-9]{1,10})_(a|p|t|c)([0-9]{0,10})$" Then, adding an attribute looks like this. Data.AddNew ElementID.Value = DataID AttrID.Value = Integerize(Matches(0).SubMatches(3)) AttrValue.Value = Request.Form(Key) Data.Update ElementID, AttrID, and AttrValue are references to the fields of the recordset. This method is hugely faster than using Data.Fields("ElementID").Value each time. I loop through the Dictionary of element updates and ignore any that don't have all the proper information, adding the good ones to the recordset. Then I call my data-updating stored procedure like so: Set Cmd = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Command") With Cmd Set .ActiveConnection = MyDBConn .CommandType = adCmdStoredProc .CommandText = "DataPost" .Prepared = False .Parameters.Append .CreateParameter("@ElementMetadata", adLongVarWChar, adParamInput, 2147483647, XMLFromRecordset(Element)) .Parameters.Append .CreateParameter("@ElementData", adLongVarWChar, adParamInput, 2147483647, XMLFromRecordset(Data)) End With Result.Open Cmd ' previously created recordset object with options set Here's the function that does the xml conversion: Private Function XMLFromRecordset(Recordset) Dim Stream Set Stream = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Stream") Stream.Open Recordset.Save Stream, adPersistXML Stream.Position = 0 XMLFromRecordset = Stream.ReadText End Function Just in case the web page needs to know, the SP returns a recordset of any new elements, showing their page value and their created value (so I can see that n1 is now e12346 for example). Here are some key snippets from the stored procedure. Note this is SQL 2000 for now, though I'll be able to switch to 2005 soon: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[DataPost] @ElementMetaData ntext, @ElementData ntext AS DECLARE @hdoc int --- snip --- EXEC sp_xml_preparedocument @hdoc OUTPUT, @ElementMetaData, '<xml xmlns:s="uuid:BDC6E3F0-6DA3-11d1-A2A3-00AA00C14882" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C14882" xmlns:rs="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:rowset" xmlns:z="#RowsetSchema" />' INSERT #ElementMetadata (ElementID, ElementTypeID, ElementID1, ElementID2) SELECT * FROM OPENXML(@hdoc, '/xml/rs:data/rs:insert/z:row', 0) WITH ( ElementID int, ElementTypeID int, ElementID1 int, ElementID2 int ) ORDER BY ElementID -- orders negative items (new elements) first so they begin counting at 1 for later ID calculation EXEC sp_xml_removedocument @hdoc --- snip --- UPDATE E SET E.ElementTypeID = M.ElementTypeID FROM Element E INNER JOIN #ElementMetadata M ON E.ElementID = M.ElementID WHERE E.ElementID >= 1 AND M.ElementTypeID >= 1 The following query does the correlation of the negative new element ids to the newly inserted ones: UPDATE #ElementMetadata -- Correlate the new ElementIDs with the input rows SET NewElementID = Scope_Identity() - @@RowCount + DataID WHERE ElementID < 0 Other set-based queries do all the other work of validating that the attributes are allowed, are the correct data type, and inserting, updating, and deleting elements and attributes. I hope this brief run-down is useful to others some day! Converting ADO Recordsets to an XML stream was a huge winner for me as it saved all sorts of time and had a namespace and schema already defined that made the results come out correctly. Using a flatter XML format with 2 inputs was also much easier than sticking to some ideal about having everything in a single XML stream.

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• trouble running smooth animation in thread only when using key listener

  - by heysuse renard

  first time using a forum for coding help so sorry if i post this all wrong. i have more than a few classes i don't think screenManger or core holds the problem but i included them just incase. i got most of this code working through a set of tutorials. but a certain point started trying to do more on my own. i want to play the animation only when i'm moving my sprite. in my KeyTest class i am using threads to run the animation it used to work (poorly) but now not at all pluss it really gunks up my computer. i think it's because of the thread. im new to threads so i'm not to sure if i should even be using one in this situation or if its dangerous for my computer. the animation worked smoothly when i had the sprite bouce around the screen forever. the animation loop played with out stopping. i think the main problem is between the animationThread, Sprite, and keyTest classes, but itcould be more indepth. if someone could point me in the right direction for making the animation run smoothly when i push down a key and stop runing when i let off it would be greatly apriciated. i already looked at this Java a moving animation (sprite) obviously we were doing the same tutorial. but i feel my problem is slightly different. p.s. sorry for the typos. import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.KeyEvent; import java.awt.event.KeyListener; import java.awt.image.BufferStrategy; import java.awt.image.BufferedImage; import java.util.ArrayList; import javax.swing.ImageIcon; import javax.swing.JFrame; public class KeyTest extends Core implements KeyListener { public static void main(String[] args) { new KeyTest().run(); } Sprite player1; Image hobo; Image background; animation hoboRun; animationThread t1; //init also calls init form superclass public void init() { super.init(); loadImages(); Window w = s.getFullScreenWindow(); w.setFocusTraversalKeysEnabled(false); w.addKeyListener(this); } //load method will go here. //load all pics need for animation and sprite public void loadImages() { background = new ImageIcon("\\\\STUART-PC\\Users\\Stuart\\workspace\\Gaming\\yellow square.jpg").getImage(); Image face1 = new ImageIcon("\\\\STUART-PC\\Users\\Stuart\\workspace\\Gaming\\circle.png").getImage(); Image face2 = new ImageIcon("\\\\STUART-PC\\Users\\Stuart\\workspace\\Gaming\\one eye.png").getImage(); hoboRun = new animation(); hoboRun.addScene(face1, 250); hoboRun.addScene(face2, 250); player1 = new Sprite(hoboRun); this.t1 = new animationThread(); this.t1.setAnimation(player1); } //key pressed public void keyPressed(KeyEvent e) { int keyCode = e.getKeyCode(); if (keyCode == KeyEvent.VK_ESCAPE) { stop(); } if (keyCode == KeyEvent.VK_RIGHT) { player1.setVelocityX(0.3f); try { this.t1.setRunning(true); Thread th1 = new Thread(this.t1); th1.start(); } catch (Exception ex) { System.out.println("noooo"); } } if (keyCode == KeyEvent.VK_LEFT) { player1.setVelocityX(-0.3f); try { this.t1.setRunning(true); Thread th1 = new Thread(this.t1); th1.start(); } catch (Exception ex) { System.out.println("noooo"); } } if (keyCode == KeyEvent.VK_DOWN) { player1.setVelocityY(0.3f); try { this.t1.setRunning(true); Thread th1 = new Thread(this.t1); th1.start(); } catch (Exception ex) { System.out.println("noooo"); } } if (keyCode == KeyEvent.VK_UP) { player1.setVelocityY(-0.3f); try { this.t1.setRunning(true); Thread th1 = new Thread(this.t1);; th1.start(); } catch (Exception ex) { System.out.println("noooo"); } } else { e.consume(); } } //keyReleased @SuppressWarnings("static-access") public void keyReleased(KeyEvent e) { int keyCode = e.getKeyCode(); if (keyCode == KeyEvent.VK_RIGHT || keyCode == KeyEvent.VK_LEFT) { player1.setVelocityX(0); try { this.t1.setRunning(false); } catch (Exception ex) { } } if (keyCode == KeyEvent.VK_UP || keyCode == KeyEvent.VK_DOWN) { player1.setVelocityY(0); try { this.t1.setRunning(false); } catch (Exception ex) { } } else { e.consume(); } } //last method from interface public void keyTyped(KeyEvent e) { e.consume(); } //draw public void draw(Graphics2D g) { Window w = s.getFullScreenWindow(); g.setColor(w.getBackground()); g.fillRect(0, 0, s.getWidth(), s.getHieght()); g.setColor(w.getForeground()); g.drawImage(player1.getImage(), Math.round(player1.getX()), Math.round(player1.getY()), null); } public void update(long timePassed) { player1.update(timePassed); } } abstract class Core { private static DisplayMode modes[] = { new DisplayMode(1600, 900, 64, 0), new DisplayMode(800, 600, 32, 0), new DisplayMode(800, 600, 24, 0), new DisplayMode(800, 600, 16, 0), new DisplayMode(800, 480, 32, 0), new DisplayMode(800, 480, 24, 0), new DisplayMode(800, 480, 16, 0),}; private boolean running; protected ScreenManager s; //stop method public void stop() { running = false; } public void run() { try { init(); gameLoop(); } finally { s.restoreScreen(); } } //set to full screen //set current background here public void init() { s = new ScreenManager(); DisplayMode dm = s.findFirstCompatibleMode(modes); s.setFullScreen(dm); Window w = s.getFullScreenWindow(); w.setFont(new Font("Arial", Font.PLAIN, 20)); w.setBackground(Color.GREEN); w.setForeground(Color.WHITE); running = true; } //main gameLoop public void gameLoop() { long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); long cumTime = startTime; while (running) { long timePassed = System.currentTimeMillis() - cumTime; cumTime += timePassed; update(timePassed); Graphics2D g = s.getGraphics(); draw(g); g.dispose(); s.update(); try { Thread.sleep(20); } catch (Exception ex) { } } } //update animation public void update(long timePassed) { } //draws to screen abstract void draw(Graphics2D g); } class animationThread implements Runnable { String name; boolean playing; Sprite a; //constructor takes input from keyboard public animationThread() { } //The run method for animation public void run() { long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); long cumTime = startTime; boolean test = getRunning(); while (test) { long timePassed = System.currentTimeMillis() - cumTime; cumTime += timePassed; test = getRunning(); } } public String getName() { return name; } public void setAnimation(Sprite a) { this.a = a; } public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; } public void setRunning(boolean running) { this.playing = running; } public boolean getRunning() { return playing; } } class animation { private ArrayList scenes; private int sceneIndex; private long movieTime; private long totalTime; //constructor public animation() { scenes = new ArrayList(); totalTime = 0; start(); } //add scene to ArrayLisy and set time for each scene public synchronized void addScene(Image i, long t) { totalTime += t; scenes.add(new OneScene(i, totalTime)); } public synchronized void start() { movieTime = 0; sceneIndex = 0; } //change scenes public synchronized void update(long timePassed) { if (scenes.size() > 1) { movieTime += timePassed; if (movieTime >= totalTime) { movieTime = 0; sceneIndex = 0; } while (movieTime > getScene(sceneIndex).endTime) { sceneIndex++; } } } //get animations current scene(aka image) public synchronized Image getImage() { if (scenes.size() == 0) { return null; } else { return getScene(sceneIndex).pic; } } //get scene private OneScene getScene(int x) { return (OneScene) scenes.get(x); } //Private Inner CLASS////////////// private class OneScene { Image pic; long endTime; public OneScene(Image pic, long endTime) { this.pic = pic; this.endTime = endTime; } } } class Sprite { private animation a; private float x; private float y; private float vx; private float vy; //Constructor public Sprite(animation a) { this.a = a; } //change position public void update(long timePassed) { x += vx * timePassed; y += vy * timePassed; } public void startAnimation(long timePassed) { a.update(timePassed); } //get x position public float getX() { return x; } //get y position public float getY() { return y; } //set x public void setX(float x) { this.x = x; } //set y public void setY(float y) { this.y = y; } //get sprite width public int getWidth() { return a.getImage().getWidth(null); } //get sprite height public int getHeight() { return a.getImage().getHeight(null); } //get horizontal velocity public float getVelocityX() { return vx; } //get vertical velocity public float getVelocityY() { return vx; } //set horizontal velocity public void setVelocityX(float vx) { this.vx = vx; } //set vertical velocity public void setVelocityY(float vy) { this.vy = vy; } //get sprite / image public Image getImage() { return a.getImage(); } } class ScreenManager { private GraphicsDevice vc; public ScreenManager() { GraphicsEnvironment e = GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment(); vc = e.getDefaultScreenDevice(); } //get all compatible DM public DisplayMode[] getCompatibleDisplayModes() { return vc.getDisplayModes(); } //compares DM passed into vc DM and see if they match public DisplayMode findFirstCompatibleMode(DisplayMode modes[]) { DisplayMode goodModes[] = vc.getDisplayModes(); for (int x = 0; x < modes.length; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < goodModes.length; y++) { if (displayModesMatch(modes[x], goodModes[y])) { return modes[x]; } } } return null; } //get current DM public DisplayMode getCurrentDisplayMode() { return vc.getDisplayMode(); } //checks if two modes match each other public boolean displayModesMatch(DisplayMode m1, DisplayMode m2) { if (m1.getWidth() != m2.getWidth() || m1.getHeight() != m2.getHeight()) { return false; } if (m1.getBitDepth() != DisplayMode.BIT_DEPTH_MULTI && m2.getBitDepth() != DisplayMode.BIT_DEPTH_MULTI && m1.getBitDepth() != m2.getBitDepth()) { return false; } if (m1.getRefreshRate() != DisplayMode.REFRESH_RATE_UNKNOWN && m2.getRefreshRate() != DisplayMode.REFRESH_RATE_UNKNOWN && m1.getRefreshRate() != m2.getRefreshRate()) { return false; } return true; } //make frame full screen public void setFullScreen(DisplayMode dm) { JFrame f = new JFrame(); f.setUndecorated(true); f.setIgnoreRepaint(true); f.setResizable(false); vc.setFullScreenWindow(f); if (dm != null && vc.isDisplayChangeSupported()) { try { vc.setDisplayMode(dm); } catch (Exception ex) { } } f.createBufferStrategy(2); } //sets graphics object = this return public Graphics2D getGraphics() { Window w = vc.getFullScreenWindow(); if (w != null) { BufferStrategy s = w.getBufferStrategy(); return (Graphics2D) s.getDrawGraphics(); } else { return null; } } //updates display public void update() { Window w = vc.getFullScreenWindow(); if (w != null) { BufferStrategy s = w.getBufferStrategy(); if (!s.contentsLost()) { s.show(); } } } //returns full screen window public Window getFullScreenWindow() { return vc.getFullScreenWindow(); } //get width of window public int getWidth() { Window w = vc.getFullScreenWindow(); if (w != null) { return w.getWidth(); } else { return 0; } } //get height of window public int getHieght() { Window w = vc.getFullScreenWindow(); if (w != null) { return w.getHeight(); } else { return 0; } } //get out of full screen public void restoreScreen() { Window w = vc.getFullScreenWindow(); if (w != null) { w.dispose(); } vc.setFullScreenWindow(null); } //create image compatible with monitor public BufferedImage createCopatibleImage(int w, int h, int t) { Window win = vc.getFullScreenWindow(); if (win != null) { GraphicsConfiguration gc = win.getGraphicsConfiguration(); return gc.createCompatibleImage(w, h, t); } return null; } }

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• update jframe in java or revalidate/repaint/ panel

  - by user1516251

  How to update a java frame with changed content I want to update a frame or just the panel with updated content. What do I use for this Here is where i want to revalidate the frame or repaint mainpanel or whatever will work I have tried a number of things, but none of them have worked. public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { //System.out.println(e.getActionCommand()); if (e.getActionCommand().equals("advance")) { multi--; // Revalidate update repaint here <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< } else if (e.getActionCommand().equals("reverse")) { multi++; // Revalidate update repaint here <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< } else { openURL(e.getActionCommand()); } } Here is the whole java file /* * * */ package build; import java.lang.reflect.Method; import javax.swing.JOptionPane; import java.util.Arrays; import java.util.*; import java.util.ArrayList; import javax.swing.*; import javax.swing.AbstractButton; import javax.swing.JScrollPane; import javax.swing.JButton; import javax.swing.JPanel; import javax.swing.JFrame; import javax.swing.ImageIcon; import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.ActionEvent; import java.awt.event.ActionListener; import java.awt.event.KeyEvent; /* * ButtonDemo.java requires the following files: * images/right.gif * images/middle.gif * images/left.gif */ public class StockTable extends JPanel implements ActionListener { static int multi = 1; int roll = 0; static TextVars textvars = new TextVars(); static final String[] browsers = { "firefox", "opera", "konqueror", "epiphany", "seamonkey", "galeon", "kazehakase", "mozilla", "netscape" }; JFrame frame; JPanel mainpanel, panel1, panel2, panel3, panel4, panel2left, panel2center, panel2right; JButton stknames_btn[] = new JButton[textvars.getNumberOfStocks()]; JLabel label[] = new JLabel[textvars.getNumberOfStocks()]; JLabel headlabel, dayspan, namelabel; JRadioButton radioButton; JButton button; JScrollPane scrollpane; int wid = 825; public JPanel createContentPane() { mainpanel = new JPanel(); mainpanel.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(wid, 800)); mainpanel.setLayout(new GridBagLayout()); GridBagConstraints c = new GridBagConstraints(); panel1 = new JPanel(); panel1.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(wid, 25)); c.gridx = 0; c.gridy = 0; c.insets = new Insets(0,0,0,0); mainpanel.add(panel1, c); // Panel 2------------ panel2 = new JPanel(); panel2.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(wid, 51)); c.gridx = 0; c.gridy = 1; c.insets = new Insets(0,0,0,0); mainpanel.add(panel2, c); panel2left = new JPanel(); panel2left.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(270, 51)); c.gridx = 0; c.gridy = 1; c.insets = new Insets(0,0,0,0); panel2.add(panel2left, c); panel2center = new JPanel(); panel2center.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(258, 51)); c.gridx = 1; c.gridy = 1; c.insets = new Insets(0,0,0,0); panel2.add(panel2center, c); panel2right = new JPanel(); panel2right.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(270, 51)); c.gridx = 2; c.gridy = 1; c.insets = new Insets(0,0,0,0); panel2.add(panel2right, c); // ------------------ panel3 = new JPanel(); panel3.setLayout(new GridBagLayout()); scrollpane = new JScrollPane(panel3); scrollpane.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(wid, 675)); c.gridx = 0; c.gridy = 2; c.insets = new Insets(0,0,0,0); mainpanel.add(scrollpane, c); ImageIcon leftButtonIcon = createImageIcon("images/right.gif"); //b1 = new JButton("Disable middle button", leftButtonIcon); //b1.setVerticalTextPosition(AbstractButton.CENTER); //b1.setHorizontalTextPosition(AbstractButton.LEADING); //aka LEFT, for left-to-right locales //b1.setMnemonic(KeyEvent.VK_D); //b1.setActionCommand("disable"); //Listen for actions on buttons 1 //b1.addActionListener(this); //b1.setToolTipText("Click this button to disable the middle button."); //Add Components to this container, using the default FlowLayout. //add(b1); headlabel = new JLabel("hellorow1"); c.gridx = 0; c.gridy = 0; c.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 0, 0); panel1.add(headlabel, c); radioButton = new JRadioButton("Percentage"); c.gridx = 2; c.gridy = 0; c.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 0, 0); panel1.add(radioButton, c); radioButton = new JRadioButton("Days Range"); c.gridx = 3; c.gridy = 0; c.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 0, 0); panel1.add(radioButton, c); radioButton = new JRadioButton("Open / Close"); c.gridx = 4; c.gridy = 0; c.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 0,0 ); panel1.add(radioButton, c); button = new JButton("<<"); button.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(50, 50)); button.setActionCommand("reverse"); button.addActionListener(this); c.gridx = 0; c.gridy = 1; c.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 0, 0); panel2left.add(button, c); dayspan = new JLabel("hellorow2"); dayspan.setHorizontalAlignment(JLabel.CENTER); dayspan.setVerticalAlignment(JLabel.CENTER); dayspan.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(270, 50)); c.gridx = 1; c.gridy = 1; c.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 0, 0); panel2center.add(dayspan, c); button = new JButton(">>"); button.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(50, 50)); button.setActionCommand("advance"); button.addActionListener(this); if (multi == 0) { button.setEnabled(false); } else { button.setEnabled(true); } c.gridx = 2; c.gridy = 1; c.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 0, 0); panel2right.add(button, c); int availSpace_int = textvars.getStocks().size()-textvars.getNumberOfStocks()*7; ArrayList<String[]> stocknames = textvars.getStockNames(); ArrayList<String[]> stocks = textvars.getStocks(); for (int column = 0; column < 8; column++) { for (int row = 0; row < textvars.getNumberOfStocks(); row++) { if (column==0) { if (row==0) { namelabel = new JLabel(stocknames.get(0)[0]); namelabel.setVerticalAlignment(JLabel.CENTER); namelabel.setHorizontalAlignment(JLabel.CENTER); namelabel.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(100, 25)); c.gridx = column; c.gridy = row; c.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 0, 0); panel3.add(namelabel, c); } else { stknames_btn[row] = new JButton(stocknames.get(row)[0], leftButtonIcon); stknames_btn[row].setVerticalTextPosition(AbstractButton.CENTER); stknames_btn[row].setActionCommand(stocknames.get(row)[1]); stknames_btn[row].addActionListener(this); stknames_btn[row].setToolTipText("go to Google Finance "+stocknames.get(row)[0]); stknames_btn[row].setPreferredSize(new Dimension(100, 25)); c.gridx = column; c.gridy = row; c.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 0, 0); //scrollpane.add(stknames[row], c); panel3.add(stknames_btn[row], c); } } else { label[row]= new JLabel(textvars.getStocks().get(columnMulti(multi))[1]); label[row].setBorder(BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.black)); label[row].setVerticalAlignment(JLabel.CENTER); label[row].setHorizontalAlignment(JLabel.CENTER); label[row].setPreferredSize(new Dimension(100, 25)); c.gridx = column; c.gridy = row; c.insets = new Insets(0,0,0,0); panel3.add(label[row], c); } } } return mainpanel; } public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { //System.out.println(e.getActionCommand()); if (e.getActionCommand().equals("advance")) { multi--; } else if (e.getActionCommand().equals("reverse")) { multi++; } else { openURL(e.getActionCommand()); } } /** Returns an ImageIcon, or null if the path was invalid. */ protected static ImageIcon createImageIcon(String path) { java.net.URL imgURL = StockTable.class.getResource(path); if (imgURL != null) { return new ImageIcon(imgURL); } else { System.err.println("Couldn't find file: " + path); return null; } } public static void openURL(String url) { String osName = System.getProperty("os.name"); try { if (osName.startsWith("Mac OS")) { Class<?> fileMgr = Class.forName("com.apple.eio.FileManager"); Method openURL = fileMgr.getDeclaredMethod("openURL", new Class[] {String.class}); openURL.invoke(null, new Object[] {url}); } else if (osName.startsWith("Windows")) { Runtime.getRuntime().exec("rundll32 url.dll,FileProtocolHandler " + url); } else { //assume Unix or Linux boolean found = false; for (String browser : browsers) if (!found) { found = Runtime.getRuntime().exec( new String[] {"which", browser}).waitFor() == 0; if (found) Runtime.getRuntime().exec(new String[] {browser, url}); } if (!found) throw new Exception(Arrays.toString(browsers)); } } catch (Exception e) { JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Error attempting to launch web browser\n" + e.toString()); } } int reit = 0; int start = textvars.getStocks().size()-((textvars.getNumberOfStocks()*5)*7)-1; public int columnMulti(int multi) { reit++; start++; if (reit == textvars.getNumberOfStocks()) { reit = 0; start=start+64; } //start = start - (multi*(textvars.getNumberOfStocks())); return start; } /** * Create the GUI and show it. For thread safety, * this method should be invoked from the * event-dispatching thread. */ private static void createAndShowGUI() { //Create and set up the window. JFrame frame = new JFrame("Stock Table"); frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); //Create and set up the content pane. StockTable newContentPane = new StockTable(); //newContentPane.setOpaque(true); //content panes must be opaque //frame.setContentPane(newContentPane); frame.setContentPane(newContentPane.createContentPane()); frame.setSize(800, 800); //Display the window. frame.pack(); frame.setVisible(true); } public static void main(String[] args) { //Schedule a job for the event-dispatching thread: //creating and showing this application's GUI. javax.swing.SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() { public void run() { createAndShowGUI(); } }); } }

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• Load-balancing between a Procurve switch and a server

  - by vlad

  Hello I've been searching around the web for this problem i've been having. It's similar in a way to this question: How exactly & specifically does layer 3 LACP destination address hashing work? My setup is as follows: I have a central switch, a Procurve 2510G-24, image version Y.11.16. It's the center of a star topology, there are four switches connected to it via a single gigabit link. Those switches service the users. On the central switch, I have a server with two gigabit interfaces that I want to bond together in order to achieve higher throughput, and two other servers that have single gigabit connections to the switch. The topology looks as follows: sw1 sw2 sw3 sw4 | | | | --------------------- | sw0 | --------------------- || | | srv1 srv2 srv3 The servers were running FreeBSD 8.1. On srv1 I set up a lagg interface using the lacp protocol, and on the switch I set up a trunk for the two ports using lacp as well. The switch showed that the server was a lacp partner, I could ping the server from another computer, and the server could ping other computers. If I unplugged one of the cables, the connection would keep working, so everything looked fine. Until I tested throughput. There was only one link used between srv1 and sw0. All testing was conducted with iperf, and load distribution was checked with systat -ifstat. I was looking to test the load balancing for both receive and send operations, as I want this server to be a file server. There were therefore two scenarios: iperf -s on srv1 and iperf -c on the other servers iperf -s on the other servers and iperf -c on srv1 connected to all the other servers. Every time only one link was used. If one cable was unplugged, the connections would keep going. However, once the cable was plugged back in, the load was not distributed. Each and every server is able to fill the gigabit link. In one-to-one test scenarios, iperf was reporting around 940Mbps. The CPU usage was around 20%, which means that the servers could withstand a doubling of the throughput. srv1 is a dell poweredge sc1425 with onboard intel 82541GI nics (em driver on freebsd). After troubleshooting a previous problem with vlan tagging on top of a lagg interface, it turned out that the em could not support this. So I figured that maybe something else is wrong with the em drivers and / or lagg stack, so I started up backtrack 4r2 on this same server. So srv1 now uses linux kernel 2.6.35.8. I set up a bonding interface bond0. The kernel module was loaded with option mode=4 in order to get lacp. The switch was happy with the link, I could ping to and from the server. I could even put vlans on top of the bonding interface. However, only half the problem was solved: if I used srv1 as a client to the other servers, iperf was reporting around 940Mbps for each connection, and bwm-ng showed, of course, a nice distribution of the load between the two nics; if I run the iperf server on srv1 and tried to connect with the other servers, there was no load balancing. I thought that maybe I was out of luck and the hashes for the two mac addresses of the clients were the same, so I brought in two new servers and tested with the four of them at the same time, and still nothing changed. I tried disabling and reenabling one of the links, and all that happened was the traffic switched from one link to the other and back to the first again. I also tried setting the trunk to "plain trunk mode" on the switch, and experimented with other bonding modes (roundrobin, xor, alb, tlb) but I never saw any traffic distribution. One interesting thing, though: one of the four switches is a Cisco 2950, image version 12.1(22)EA7. It has 48 10/100 ports and 2 gigabit uplinks. I have a server (call it srv4) with a 4 channel trunk connected to it (4x100), FreeBSD 8.0 release. The switch is connected to sw0 via gigabit. If I set up an iperf server on one of the servers connected to sw0 and a client on srv4, ALL 4 links are used, and iperf reports around 330Mbps. systat -ifstat shows all four interfaces are used. The cisco port-channel uses src-mac to balance the load. The HP should use both the source and destination according to the manual, so it should work as well. Could this mean there is some bug in the HP firmware? Am I doing something wrong?

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• Understanding Windows 8 Recovery options

  - by stuffe

  Background: I am preparing a PC that I am sending to a relative abroad, who has little or no internet access, and next to no sensible options for getting IT support should anything go wrong. As such I am trying to provide a full set of recovery options such that they are able to reinstall the OS with minimum fuss or assistance if required. The PC is a brand new Acer laptop that came with Windows 7 pre-installed (and an associated recovery partition) and a free upgrade to Windows 8. I have installed Windows 8 from scratch performing a format and clean install from media I burned from the official download. The existing Windows 7 recovery partition is still there, and I can still boot from it. I have created recovery DVDs of that in case it is ever lost. Here are my recovery options so far. I can perform a factory reset of Win 7 via the recovery partition I can perform a factory reset of Win 7 via burned recovery DVDs I can re-install Windows 8 cleanly from a DVD All of these are useful, but not what I want, because the first 2 methods use Win 7, and still fill the machine with crapware, and the latter doesn't provide for any post-install customisation and software installation. So, I am looking to see what other options are available to perform a Windows 8 recovery that will be more than a simple install. I am aware that Win8 comes with some useful refresh tools: Refresh your PC - Re-install Win 8 over the top of your existing installation, recovering from any Windows corruption etc. I can run this from my current install, although it says some files are missing that will be provided by me install or recovery media, which seems to be code for stick your install DVD in, and it starts after I do that - unfortunately for this particular laptop you need to specify a particular WIFI driver or the install bombs out part way through with IRQL errors, and this refresh method skips the part where you can load a driver, so it's no use to me. I think I can fix this by creating a custom recovery image using the recimg.exe command but it takes hours to complete so I haven't tried it yet. Reset your PC - Perform a full install and lose all your files. Again it needs my Install media inserting before it will do anything, but then it provides an error (will include later when I recreate it...) Now, these recovery options look useful (in principal, although both are fail for me) but they rely on having a working system to access the tools, which leads me to the last option, of making a Recovery USB drive. I have made a recovery drive, and it should perform loads of useful things, including copying my WIN7 recovery partition to the drive, providing the above refresh and reset options, providing other troubleshooting options and also the ability to restore from a custom image, only none of them seem to work for me. Creating the Recovery Drive - the option to include my recovery partition is greyed out. The partition exists and works fine, why will it not copy it? Refresh - I imagine this would have the same issues as I described before, but this is moot because when I try it says that the "drive where Windows is installed is locked, please unlock the drive and try again" with no info on what that means and how to do it. Restore - Again, probably pointless as I can just use the DVD, but it also errors: "unable to reset your PC. A required drive partition is missing" System Restore - should let me roll back a bad driver etc as per normal in Windows, only it simply says "To use system restore you must specify which windows installation to restore. Restart this computer, select an operating system, and select system restore" ?!?! System Image Recovery - this seems to be offering to restore from a Windows system image, but this is deprecated in Windows 8, although you can still make one if you use the Windows 7 Backup tools, however the resultant file is too large to put on the USB stick as it's FAT formatted, and would be a massive stack of DVDs anyway. So useless. It would be nice it it would work with the custom recovery image you can use with the refresh command, but there seems no option to do this. Automatic Repair - some diagnostics, which seem useless as it happily tells me it can't fix my problem, even though I have none. Command Prompt - yay, this works! What on earth do I want to use it for... Had any of the above worked, it might be useful, but as any form of install still requires you to have the DVD, and any form of custom recovery image also requires you to have either a massive stack of DVDs or an NTFS formatted backup device in addition to the recovery drive, it sort of ruins the point. It doesn't seem rocket science. I want to create a bootable USB drive that I can refresh Windows over an existing install with, perform a clean reinstall to a bare system, or recovery a customised image with existing apps installed. If anyone can point me in a direction that allows me to make a single recovery drive do these all these things, I would appreciate it. I have a 32Gb USB3 thumb drive that I bought for this very purpose, but it's seems to be fighting to let me do anything useful. At this rate I will be making a DriveImageXML recovery stick and dumping the OS with that, which I know works, but isn't so elegant as using the proper tools..

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• LDAP query on linux against AD returns groups with no members

  - by SethG

  I am using LDAP+kerberos to authenticate against Active Directory on Windows 2003 R2. My krb5.conf and ldap.conf appear to be correct (according to pretty much every sample I found on the 'net). I can login to the host with both password and ssh keys. When I run getent passwd, all my ldap user accounts are listed with all the important attributes. When I run getent group, all the ldap groups and their gid's are listed, but no group members. If I run ldapsearch and filter on any group, the members are all listed with the "member" attribute. So the data is there for the taking, it's just not being parsed properly. It would appear that I simply am using an incorrect mapping in ldap.conf, but I can't see it. I've tried several variations and all give the same result. Here is my current ldap.conf: host <ad-host1-ip> <ad-host2-ip> base dc=my,dc=full,dc=dn uri ldap://<ad-host1> ldap://<ad-host2> ldap_version 3 binddn <mybinddn> bindpw <mybindpw> scope sub bind_policy hard nss_reconnect_tries 3 nss_reconnect_sleeptime 1 nss_reconnect_maxsleeptime 8 nss_reconnect_maxconntries 3 nss_map_objectclass posixAccount User nss_map_objectclass posixGroup Group nss_map_attribute uid sAMAccountName nss_map_attribute gidNumber msSFU30GidNumber nss_map_attribute uidNumber msSFU30UidNumber nss_map_attribute cn cn nss_map_attribute gecos displayName nss_map_attribute homeDirectory msSFU30HomeDirectory nss_map_attribute loginShell msSFU30LoginShell nss_map_attribute uniqueMember member pam_filter objectcategory=User pam_login_attribute sAMAccountName pam_member_attribute member pam_password ad Here's the kicker: this config works 100% fine on a different linux box with a different distro. It does not work on the distro I am planning on switching to. I have installed from source the versions of pam_ldap and nss_ldap on the new box to match the old box, which fixed another problem I was having with this setup. Other relevant info is the original AD box was Windows 2003. It's mirror died a horrible hardware death so I'm trying to add two more 2003-R2 servers to the mirror tree and ultimately drop the old 2003 box. The new R2 boxes appear to have joined the DC forest properly. What do I need to do to get groups working? I've exhausted all the resources I could find and need a different angle. Any input is appreciated. Status update, 7/31/09 I have managed to tweak my config file to get full info from the AD and performance is nice and snappy. I replaced the back-rev'd copies of pam_ldap and nss_ldap with the current ones for the distro I'm using, so it's back to a standard out-of-the-box install. Here's my current config: host <ad-host1-ip> <ad-host2-ip> base dc=my,dc=full,dc=dn uri ldap://<ad-host1> ldap://<ad-host2> ldap_version 3 binddn <mybinddn> bindpw <mybindpw> scope sub bind_policy soft nss_reconnect_tries 3 nss_reconnect_sleeptime 1 nss_reconnect_maxsleeptime 8 nss_reconnect_maxconntries 3 nss_connect_policy oneshot referrals no nss_map_objectclass posixAccount User nss_map_objectclass posixGroup Group nss_map_attribute uid sAMAccountName nss_map_attribute gidNumber msSFU30GidNumber nss_map_attribute uidNumber msSFU30UidNumber nss_map_attribute cn cn nss_map_attribute gecos displayName nss_map_attribute homeDirectory msSFU30HomeDirectory nss_map_attribute loginShell msSFU30LoginShell nss_map_attribute uniqueMember member pam_filter objectcategory=CN=Person,CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=w2k,DC=cis,DC=ksu,DC=edu pam_login_attribute sAMAccountName pam_member_attribute member pam_password ad ssl off tls_checkpeer no sasl_secprops maxssf=0 The remaining problem now is when you run the groups command, not all subscribed groups are listed. Some are (one or two), but not all. Group memberships are still honored, such as file and printer access. getent group foo still shows that the user is a member of group foo. So it appears to be a presentation bug, and does not interfere with normal operation. It also appears that some (I have not determined exactly how many) group searches do not resolve correctly, even though the group is listed. eg, when you run "getent group bar", nothing is returned, but if you run "getent group|grep bar" or "getent group|grep <bar_gid>" you can see that it indeed listed and your group name and gid are correct. This still seems like an LDAP search or mapping error, but I can't figure out what it is. I'm a heckuva lot closer than earlier in the week, but I'd really like to get this last detail ironed out.

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• Strategy for using snapshots to back up Ubuntu Linux server?

  - by MountainX

  I need some backup advice for my home file server. Here are the mount points, volume groups, logical volumes and used/total space of all the volumes on my Ubuntu 8.10 home file server. / vgA/lvRoot [7.5G/50G] /tmp vgB/lvTmp [195M/30G] /var vgB/lvVar [780M/30G] swap vgB/lvSwap [16.00 GB] /media1 vgC/lvMedia1 [400G/975G] /media2 vgC/lvMedia2 [75G/295G] /boot partition (no volume group) [95M/200M] /video partition (no volume group) [450G/950G] /backups vgD/lvBackupTarget [800G/925G] /home vgE/lvHome [85G/200G] I have just added a 2.0 TB external USB drive that I would like to use to backup everything. (It will be a close fit to get it all on one 2.0 TB drive. I actually have a 2nd external USB drive if needed.) I'd like to backup "/", var, /media1, media2 and /home. I'll deal with /boot and /video separately since they are not logical volumes. For all the logical volumes I'm anticipating taking snapshots and then copying those snapshots to the 2.0 TB external USB drive. I have never done a task like that before. If I do that, I could use the tutorial I found here: http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_lvm_snapshots My questions are: What is the best overall strategy? Is it LVM snapshots, as I'm assuming? How should I prepare, subdivide and mount the 2.0 TB external USB drive? 2.a. Should I create one or more regular partitions or should I create a physical volume with one or more logical volumes? 2.b. Would it be advisable to extactly mirror the source pv/lv layout on the external drive, and if so, is this a good strategy? What's the best way to get the snapshots onto the external drive? dd? Even though this is a strategy question, feedback with actual commands is appreciated. I need step-by-step cookbook-style help because I don't do much server admin work. (Background: This is a home file server that I have rarely had to touch in about 2 years. It has done its job without much intervention. The really old PC that I used to back everything up recently failed, so I'm replacing that with the external USB drive(s) and I'd like to upgrade my backup strategy at the same time. Previously, I just copied stuff from /backups over to the other computer and that would not have made things very easy in a real restore situation. The /backups mount point contains backup copies of "most" of the important data on a file by file basis, but it does not contain copies of /boot, etc. BTW, the actual internal HDD that holds /backups is separate from the other storage devices.) EDIT: I'll propose a strategy... The idea came from a comment here: LVM mirroring VS RAID1 "LVM mirrors are for replication of a logical volume to a different physical volume. It's essentially meant to "move the data to a different disk". The mirror is then broken..." That would fit my requirements well. Here is an ideal situation: establish the LV mirror on the external drive break the link with the mirror create a (persistent) snapshot on the mirror after a week, resync the mirror with the original source and update the mirror break the link and create another snapshot on the mirror. Obviously, the mirror will be like a weekly full backup. And the snapshots on the mirror will represent earlier points in time. If this would work and if it would be time efficient, it would give a nice full & differential type backup on the external drive based on LVM. I have not heard of a strategy like this before. Will it work? Could it be scripted? Thoughts? EDIT 2: Creating Portable DiskSafes With LoopbackFS And LVM Snapshots This article seems intriguing: http://www.howtoforge.com/creating-portable-disksafes-with-loopbackfs-and-lvm-snapshots Unfortunately, I don't understand exactly how to map those ideas to the strategy I'm proposing above. I'm going to ask this last bit as a separate question. I will leave my original question in place because I still desire feedback on the overall best strategy. At this moment I'm assuming it is LVM mirroring in the style of "Creating Portable DiskSafes with LVM Snapshots" but that might be wrong.

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• MySQL 5.1.49 freezing every two days

  - by maximus

  Hi all, our mysql system is "freezing" every two days. By "freezing" i mean the following: it doesn't respond to ping we can't login with SSH we don't get any answer from MySQL there is no entry in the error logs! neither from linux neither from MySQL. we have already changed to a completely new hardware, we have the same problem, so it's definitely not a hardware problem. we do not have any other software installed except a firewall (iptables rule) we can restart the server from another server using rsyslog (www.rsyslog.com)(software reset) Could someone help me, by giving me some pointers what could i do to figure out the problem? I have included every detail about our settings. Thank you in advance for your help. Max. Our system parameters and settings: System-Memory: 12GB Processor: Intel 7-920 Quadcore Operating system: Debian 5 (lenny) 64bit MySQL 5.1.49 Databases: (a) a small phpbb forum (b) a 6GB database 3 tables with about 15 million rows my.cnf # # The MySQL database server configuration file. # # You can copy this to one of: # - "/etc/mysql/my.cnf" to set global options, # - "~/.my.cnf" to set user-specific options. # # One can use all long options that the program supports. # Run program with --help to get a list of available options and with # --print-defaults to see which it would actually understand and use. # # For explanations see # http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/server-system-variables.html # This will be passed to all mysql clients # It has been reported that passwords should be enclosed with ticks/quotes # escpecially if they contain "#" chars... # Remember to edit /etc/mysql/debian.cnf when changing the socket location. [client] port = 3306 socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock # Here is entries for some specific programs # The following values assume you have at least 32M ram # This was formally known as [safe_mysqld]. Both versions are currently parsed. [mysqld_safe] socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock nice = 0 [mysqld] # # * Basic Settings # user = mysql pid-file = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock port = 3306 basedir = /usr datadir = /var/lib/mysql tmpdir = /tmp language = /usr/share/mysql/english skip-external-locking # # Instead of skip-networking the default is now to listen only on # localhost which is more compatible and is not less secure. bind-address = our-ip-address # # * Fine Tuning # key_buffer = 16M max_allowed_packet = 16M thread_stack = 256K thread_cache_size = 32 max_connections = 300 table_cache = 2048 #thread_concurrency = 4 # Used for InnoDB tables recommended to 50%-80% available memory innodb_buffer_pool_size = 6G # 20MB sometimes larger innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 20M # 8M-16M is good for most situations innodb_log_buffer_size = 8M # Disable XA support because we do not use it innodb-support-xa = 0 # 1 is default wich is 100% secure but 2 offers better performance innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT #innodb_thread_concurency = 8 # Recommended 64M - 512M depending on server size innodb_log_file_size = 512M # One file per table innodb_file_per_table # # * Query Cache Configuration # query_cache_limit = 1M query_cache_size = 16M #query_cache_type = 1 #query_cache_min_res_unit= 2K #join_buffer_size = 1M # # * Logging and Replication # # Both location gets rotated by the cronjob. # Be aware that this log type is a performance killer. # As of 5.1 you can enable the log at runtime! #general_log_file = /var/log/mysql/mysql.log #general_log = 1 # # Error logging goes to syslog. This is a Debian improvement :) # # Here you can see queries with especially long duration log_slow_queries = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log long_query_time = 2 log-queries-not-using-indexes # # The following can be used as easy to replay backup logs or for replication. #server-id = 1 log_bin = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log # WARNING: Using expire_logs_days without bin_log crashes the server! See README.Debian! expire_logs_days = 10 max_binlog_size = 100M #binlog_do_db = include_database_name #binlog_ignore_db = include_database_name # # InnoDB is enabled by default with a 10MB datafile in /var/lib/mysql/. # Read the manual for more InnoDB related options. There are many! # * InnoDB plugin # As of MySQL 5.1.38, the InnoDB plugin from Oracle is included in the MySQL source code. # It has many improvements and better performances than the built-in InnoDB storage engine. # Please read http://www.innodb.com/products/innodb_plugin/ for more information. # Uncommenting the two following lines to use the InnoDB plugin. ignore_builtin_innodb plugin-load=innodb=ha_innodb_plugin.so # # * Security Features # # Read the manual, too, if you want chroot! # chroot = /var/lib/mysql/ # # For generating SSL certificates I recommend the OpenSSL GUI "tinyca". # # ssl-ca=/etc/mysql/cacert.pem # ssl-cert=/etc/mysql/server-cert.pem # ssl-key=/etc/mysql/server-key.pem [mysqldump] quick quote-names max_allowed_packet = 16M [mysql] #no-auto-rehash # faster start of mysql but no tab completition [isamchk] key_buffer = 16M # # * NDB Cluster # # See /usr/share/doc/mysql-server-*/README.Debian for more information. # # The following configuration is read by the NDB Data Nodes (ndbd processes) # not from the NDB Management Nodes (ndb_mgmd processes). # # [MYSQL_CLUSTER] # ndb-connectstring=127.0.0.1 # # * IMPORTANT: Additional settings that can override those from this file! # !includedir /etc/mysql/conf.d/ UPDATE After installing sysstat and configuring it to collect data after every minute i have the following datas. I used sar to generate the following output: The log-file is too big so coudn't enter it here but uploaded to box.net. The link is http://www.box.net/shared/xc6rh7qqob SECOND UPDATE We started a ping command in the background, and that solved the problem. Now the server does work since more then a week. We still don't know what's the problem.

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• Optimizing MySQL for small VPS

  - by Chris M

  I'm trying to optimize my MySQL config for a verrry small VPS. The VPS is also running NGINX/PHP-FPM and Magento; all with a limit of 250MB of RAM. This is an output of MySQL Tuner... -------- General Statistics -------------------------------------------------- [--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.8 [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: -Archive -BDB -Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster [--] Data in MyISAM tables: 1M (Tables: 14) [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 29M (Tables: 301) [--] Data in MEMORY tables: 1M (Tables: 17) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 301 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- [OK] All database users have passwords assigned -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 2d 11h 14m 58s (1M q [8.038 qps], 33K conn, TX: 2B, RX: 618M) [--] Reads / Writes: 83% / 17% [--] Total buffers: 122.0M global + 8.6M per thread (100 max threads) [!!] Maximum possible memory usage: 978.2M (404% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (37/1M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 6% (6/100) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 32.0M/282.0K [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 99.7% (358K cached / 1K reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 83.4% (1M cached / 1M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 48301 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (0 temp sorts / 144K sorts) [OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 13% (27K on disk / 203K total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 99% (6 created / 33K connections) [!!] Table cache hit rate: 0% (32 open / 51K opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 1% (20/1K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 99% (1M immediate / 1M locks) [!!] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 29.2M/8.0M -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance Reduce your overall MySQL memory footprint for system stability Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries Increase table_cache gradually to avoid file descriptor limits Variables to adjust: *** MySQL's maximum memory usage is dangerously high *** *** Add RAM before increasing MySQL buffer variables *** query_cache_size (> 64M) table_cache (> 32) innodb_buffer_pool_size (>= 29M) and this is the config. # # The MySQL database server configuration file. # # You can copy this to one of: # - "/etc/mysql/my.cnf" to set global options, # - "~/.my.cnf" to set user-specific options. # # One can use all long options that the program supports. # Run program with --help to get a list of available options and with # --print-defaults to see which it would actually understand and use. # # For explanations see # http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/server-system-variables.html # This will be passed to all mysql clients # It has been reported that passwords should be enclosed with ticks/quotes # escpecially if they contain "#" chars... # Remember to edit /etc/mysql/debian.cnf when changing the socket location. [client] port = 3306 socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock # Here is entries for some specific programs # The following values assume you have at least 32M ram # This was formally known as [safe_mysqld]. Both versions are currently parsed. [mysqld_safe] socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock nice = 0 [mysqld] # # * Basic Settings # # # * IMPORTANT # If you make changes to these settings and your system uses apparmor, you may # also need to also adjust /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld. # user = mysql socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock port = 3306 basedir = /usr datadir = /var/lib/mysql tmpdir = /tmp skip-external-locking # # Instead of skip-networking the default is now to listen only on # localhost which is more compatible and is not less secure. bind-address = 127.0.0.1 # # * Fine Tuning # key_buffer = 32M max_allowed_packet = 16M thread_stack = 192K thread_cache_size = 8 sort_buffer_size = 4M read_buffer_size = 4M myisam_sort_buffer_size = 16M # This replaces the startup script and checks MyISAM tables if needed # the first time they are touched myisam-recover = BACKUP max_connections = 100 table_cache = 32 tmp_table_size = 128M #thread_concurrency = 10 # # * Query Cache Configuration # #query_cache_limit = 1M query_cache_type = 1 query_cache_size = 64M # # * Logging and Replication # # Both location gets rotated by the cronjob. # Be aware that this log type is a performance killer. # As of 5.1 you can enable the log at runtime! #general_log_file = /var/log/mysql/mysql.log #general_log = 1 log_error = /var/log/mysql/error.log # Here you can see queries with especially long duration #log_slow_queries = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log #long_query_time = 2 #log-queries-not-using-indexes # # The following can be used as easy to replay backup logs or for replication. # note: if you are setting up a replication slave, see README.Debian about # other settings you may need to change. #server-id = 1 #log_bin = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log expire_logs_days = 10 max_binlog_size = 100M #binlog_do_db = include_database_name #binlog_ignore_db = include_database_name # # * InnoDB # # InnoDB is enabled by default with a 10MB datafile in /var/lib/mysql/. # Read the manual for more InnoDB related options. There are many! # # * Security Features # # Read the manual, too, if you want chroot! # chroot = /var/lib/mysql/ # # For generating SSL certificates I recommend the OpenSSL GUI "tinyca". # # ssl-ca=/etc/mysql/cacert.pem # ssl-cert=/etc/mysql/server-cert.pem # ssl-key=/etc/mysql/server-key.pem [mysqldump] quick quote-names max_allowed_packet = 16M [mysql] #no-auto-rehash # faster start of mysql but no tab completition [isamchk] key_buffer = 16M # # * IMPORTANT: Additional settings that can override those from this file! # The files must end with '.cnf', otherwise they'll be ignored. # !includedir /etc/mysql/conf.d/ The site contains 1 wordpress site,so lots of MYISAM but mostly static content as its not changing all that often (A wordpress cache plugin deals with this). And the Magento Site which consists of a lot of InnoDB tables, some MyISAM and some INMEMORY. The "read" side seems to be running pretty well with a mass of optimizations I've used on Magento, the NGINX setup and PHP-FPM + XCACHE. I'd love to have a kick in the right direction with the MySQL config so I'm not blindly altering it based on the MySQLTuner without understanding what I'm changing. Thanks

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• Launching mysql server: same permissions for root and for user

  - by toinbis

  Hi folks, have been directed here from stackoverflow here, am reposting the question and adding my.cnf at the end of a post. so far in my 10+ years experience with linux, all the permission problems I've ever encountered, have been successfully solved with chmod -R 777 /path/where/the/problem/has/occured (every lie has a grain of truth in it :) This time the trick doesn't work, so I'm turning to you for help. I'm compiling mysql server from scratch with zc.buildout (www . buildout . org). I do launch it by executing /home/toinbis/.../parts/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe, this works. The thing is that i'll be launching this from within supervisor (supervisord . org) script, and when used on the deployment server, it'll need it to be launched with root permissions(so that nginx server, launched with the same script, would have access to 80 port). The problem is that sudo /home/toinbis/.../parts/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe, fails, generating the error, posted bellow, in mysql error log (apache and nginx works as expected). http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/216045 suggests, that "there are two errors: A missing table and a file system that mysqld doesn't have access to". Mysqldatadir and all the mysql server binary files has 777 permissions, talbe mysql.plugin does exist and has 777 permissions (why Can't open the mysql.plugin table?), "sudo touch mysql_datadir/tmp/file" does create file (why Can't create/write to file /home/toinbis/.../runtime/mysql_datadir/tmp/ib4e9Huz?). chgrp -R mysql mysql_datadir and adding "root, toinbis, mysql" users to mysql group ( cat /etc/group | grep mysql outputs mysql:x:124:root,toinbis,mysql) has no effect - when i launch it as a casual user, it starts, when as a root - it fails. Does mysql server, even started as root, tries to operate as other, let's say, 'mysql' user? but even in that case, adding mysql user to mysql group and making all the mysql_datadirs files belong to mysql group should make things work smoothly. I do know that it might be a better idea to simply to launch one the nginx as root and mysql - as just a user, but this error irritated me enough so to devote enough energy so not to only "make things work", but to also make things work exactly as i wanted it initially, so to have a proof of concept that it's possible. and this is the generated error: 091213 20:02:55 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /home/toinbis/.../runtime/mysql_datadir /home/toinbis/.../parts/mysql/libexec/mysqld: Table 'plugin' is read only 091213 20:02:55 [ERROR] Can't open the mysql.plugin table. Please run mysql_upgrade to create it. /home/toinbis/.../parts/mysql/libexec/mysqld: Can't create/write to file '/home/toinbis/.../runtime/mysql_datadir/tmp/ib4e9Huz' (Errcode: 13) 091213 20:02:55 InnoDB: Error: unable to create temporary file; errno: 13 091213 20:02:55 [ERROR] Plugin 'InnoDB' init function returned error. 091213 20:02:55 [ERROR] Plugin 'InnoDB' registration as a STORAGE ENGINE failed. 091213 20:02:55 [ERROR] Can't start server : Bind on unix socket: Permission denied 091213 20:02:55 [ERROR] Do you already have another mysqld server running on socket: /home/toinbis/.../runtime/var/pids/mysql.sock ? 091213 20:02:55 [ERROR] Aborting 091213 20:02:55 [Note] /home/toinbis/.../parts/mysql/libexec/mysqld: Shutdown complete 091213 20:02:55 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /home/toinbis/.../runtime/var/pids/mysql.pid ended My my.cnf (the basedir and datadir(including tempdir) have chmod -R 777 permissions) : [client] socket = /home/toinbis/.../runtime/var/pids/mysql.sock port = 8002 [mysqld_safe] socket = /home/toinbis/.../runtime/var/pids/mysql.sock nice = 0 [mysqld] # # * Basic Settings # socket = /home/toinbis/.../runtime/var/pids/mysql.sock port = 8002 pid-file = /home/toinbis/.../runtime/var/pids/mysql.pid basedir = /home/toinbis/.../parts/mysql datadir = /home/toinbis/.../runtime/mysql_datadir tmpdir = /home/toinbis/.../runtime/mysql_datadir/tmp skip-external-locking bind-address = 127.0.0.1 log-error =/home/toinbis/.../runtime/logs/mysql_errorlog # # * Fine Tuning # key_buffer = 16M max_allowed_packet = 32M thread_stack = 128K thread_cache_size = 8 myisam-recover = BACKUP #max_connections = 100 #table_cache = 64 #thread_concurrency = 10 # # * Query Cache Configuration # query_cache_limit = 1M query_cache_size = 16M # # * Logging and Replication # # Both location gets rotated by the cronjob. # Be aware that this log type is a performance killer. #log = /home/toinbis/.../runtime/logs/mysql_logs/mysql.log # # Error logging goes to syslog. This is a Debian improvement :) # # Here you can see queries with especially long duration #log_slow_queries = /home/toinbis/.../runtime/logs/mysql_logs/mysql-slow.log #long_query_time = 2 #log-queries-not-using-indexes # # The following can be used as easy to replay backup logs or for replication. #server-id = 1 #log_bin = /home/toinbis/.../runtime/mysql_datadir/mysql-bin.log #binlog_format = ROW #read_only = 0 #expire_logs_days = 10 #max_binlog_size = 100M #sync_binlog = 1 #binlog_do_db = include_database_name #binlog_ignore_db = include_database_name # # * InnoDB # innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend innodb_buffer_pool_size=64M innodb_log_file_size=16M innodb_log_buffer_size=8M innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 innodb_file_per_table innodb_locks_unsafe_for_binlog=1 [mysqldump] quick quote-names max_allowed_packet = 32M [mysql] #no-auto-rehash # faster start of mysql but no tab completion [isamchk] key_buffer = 16M Any ideas much appreciated! regards, to P.S. sorry for messy hyperlinks, it's my first post and anti-spam feature of SF doesn't allow to post them properly :)

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