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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 11, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 11, 2014Popular ReleasesGMare: GMare Beta 1.0: Features Added: Overhauled interface Re-wrote most controls and forms Automatic room creation on application open Room properties bar to change various room properties Now able to use a background from a supported Game Maker project file Block instances implemented More instance editing features like multi-Select, cherry pick select, replace, and set position More instance options on the instance list Flexible XML based .gmpx human readable project file format Game...Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.13.0: Version 0.13.0 Added "mutators" which add uppercase and numbers to passphrases (to help complying with upper, lower, number complexity rules). Additional API methods which help consuming the generator from 3rd party c# projects. 13,160 words in the default dictionary (~600 more than previous release).CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.25.0: Release v1.0.25.0 MemberInfo/MethodInfo popup is now positioned properly to fit the screen In MethodInfo popup method signatures are word-wrapped Implemented Debug text value visualizer Pining sub-values from Watch PanelxFunc: xFunc 2.15.3: Added #53TerraMap (Terraria World Map Viewer): TerraMap 1.0.3.14652: Added support for the new Terraria v1.2.4 update. New items, walls, and tiles The setup file will make sure .NET 4 is installed, install TerraMap, create desktop and start menu shortcuts, add a .wld file association, and launch TerraMap. If you prefer the zip file, make sure you have .NET Framework v4.5 installed, then just download and extract the ZIP file, and run TerraMap.exe.R.NET: R.NET 1.5.12: R.NET 1.5.12 is a beta release towards R.NET 1.6. You are encouraged to use 1.5.12 now and give feedback. See the documentation for setup and usage instructions. Main changes for R.NET 1.5.12: The C stack limit was not disabled on Windows. For reasons possibly peculiar to R, this means that non-concurrent access to R from multiple threads was not stable. This is now fixed, with the fix validated with a unit test. Thanks to Odugen, skyguy94, and previously others (evolvedmicrobe, tomasp) fo...CTI Text Encryption: CTI Text Encryption 5.2: Change log: 5.2 - Remove Cut button. - Fixed Reset All button does not reset encrypted text column. - Switch button location between Copy and Paste. - Enable users to use local fonts to display characters of their language correctly. (A font settings file will be saved at the same folder of this program.) 5.1 - Improve encryption process. - Minor UI update. - Version 5.1 is not compatible with older version. 5.0 - Improve encryption algorithm. - Simply inner non-encryption related mec...Aspose for Apache POI: Missing Features of Apache POI SS - v 1.1: Release contain the Missing Features in Apache POI SS SDK in comparison with Aspose.Cells What's New ?Following Examples: Set Print Titles Create Pivot Table Convert Charts to images Formula Calculation Engine Import Data to Worksheets Export Data from Worksheets Tracing Precedents and Dependents Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are yet to come here. Keep visiting us. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.029.006 Release 1: Fix to allow keyboard search on load dialog. (type the first few letters of your save) Fixed check for new release. Changed the way ship details are loaded to alleviate load time for worlds with very large ships (100,000+ blocks). Fixed Image importer, was incorrectly listing 'Asteroid' as import option. Minor changes to menus (text and appearance) for clarity and OS consistency. Added in reading of world palette for color dialog editor. WIP on subsystem editor. Can now multiselec...Danmu2Ass —— ??xml/json?Ass: Danmu2Ass 1.1: ????Danmu2Ass?????????xml/json???????ASS????????。?????????????。 ?????.NET Framework 4.0??，??????Niconvert??，????????IronPython 2.7。 1.1????????python????，?????????。 ??????python?????????????，?????”niconvert.py“????exe???????，?????????。 ?????????????????????”niconvert.py“??，??ASS HEADER TPL????????。 ??????.NET 4.0!QuickMon: Version 3.9: First official release of the PowerShell script Collector. Corrective script can now also be PowerShell scripts! There are a couple of internal bugfixes to the core components as well. e.g. Overriding remote host setting now applies to ALL child collectors Main UI app now indicates (in Window title) if there are changes that needs to be saved. Polling frequency can be adjusted by 'slide bar' Note: If you have issues with the new PowerShell script collector please see my post about issu...Tiny Wifi Host: Tiny Wifi Host 3.0.0.0: Tiny Wifi Hotspot Creator (Portable) v3 size: 50KB-140KB New Features: Friendly name for connected devices instead of Mac-Address (Double click selected device to enter friendly name) Saves device names to devices.xml Better error reporting+solutions Warning sound when number of connected devices exceed a certain number. (useful when only certain number of devices must be connected at a time) Many Bug Fixes. NoAudio files does not include connect, disconnect and warning audio to dec...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.597b: Thank you for being patient, againThere are a number of fixes in place with this release. and some new features added. Most are self explanatory, so check out the options in Preferences. Couple of new Features:* Movie - Allow save Title and Sort Title in Title Case format. * Movie - Allow save fanart.jpg if movie in folder. * TV - display episode source. Get episode source from episode filename. Fixed:* Movie - Added Fill Tags from plot keywords to Batch Rescraper. * Movie - Fixed TMDB s...SimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.3.0.0: Contains several bugfixes, newly identified properties and some UI improvements. Main new features UI overhaul for the main index list: Icons for each different index, including icons for different property files Tooltips for all relevant fields Removed clutter Identified hundreds of additional properties (thanks to MaxisGuillaume) - this should make modding gameplay easierMagick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.9.002: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.9.0.VidCoder: 1.5.22 Beta: Added ability to burn SRT subtitles. Updated to HandBrake SVN 6169. Added checks to prevent VidCoder from running with a database version newer than it expects. Tooltips in the Advanced Video panel now trigger on the field labels as well as the fields themselves. Fixed updating preset/profile/tune/level settings on changing video encoder. This should resolve some problems with QSV encoding. Fixed tunes and profiles getting set to blank when switching between x264 and x265. Fixed co...NuGet: NuGet 2.8.2: We will be releasing a 2.8.2 version of our own NuGet packages and the NuGet.exe command-line tool. The 2.8.2 release will not include updated VS or WebMatrix extensions. NuGet.Server.Extensions.dll needs to be used alongside NuGet-Signed.exe to provide the NuGet.exe mirror functionality.SmartStore.NET - Free ASP.NET MVC Ecommerce Shopping Cart Solution: SmartStore.NET 2.0.2: SmartStore.NET 2.0.2 is primarily a maintenance release for version 2.0.0, which has been released on April 04 2014. It contains several improvements & important fixes. BugfixesIMPORTANT FIX: Memory leak leads to OutOfMemoryException in application after a while Installation fix: some varchar(MAX) columns get created as varchar(4000). Added a migration to fix the column specs. Installation fix: Setup fails with exception Value cannot be null. Parameter name: stream Bugfix for stock iss...Channel9's Absolute Beginner Series: Windows Phone 8.1: Entire source code for Windows Phone 8.1 Absolute Beginner Series.BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6.6: This BIDS Helper beta release brings support for SQL Server 2014 and SSDTBI for Visual Studio 2013. (Note that SSDTBI for Visual Studio 2013 is currently unavailable to download from Microsoft. We are releasing BIDS Helper support to help those who downloaded it before it became unavailable, and we will recheck BIDS Helper 2014 is compatible after SSDTBI becomes available to download again.) BIDS Helper 2014 Beta Limitations: SQL Server 2014 support for Biml is still in progress, so this bet...New ProjectsAcutype: Simple program that enables you to practice typing by copying out passages from books.Bass Guitar Trainer: Bass Guitar Trainer is a free application for mastering a bass guitar. Application contains also metronome and drum machineCareer Tools: Career Tools - Track your contacts when searching for a new job A simple tool built in ASP.Net MVC 5EmptyWallGallery: Test EmptyWallGalleryGames Case Project: Final year project at Northumbria University. LINQ To OWIN: LINQ to OWIN is middleware that allows you to code your Katana/OWIN web applications as a set of reactive queries using Rx (Reactive Extensions) for .NET.Orchard ContentExtension: The ContentExtension module, extends the core of the Orchard framework in order to provide a better performance. P4 Compiler: P4 ftwRevolioReader: Browse, read and download books and magazines from Revolio.Sync Email to SharePoint list: This use to sync the exchange mail box to SharePoint listVirtual Radar Server: A .NET/Mono web server that decodes Mode-S & ADS-B messages and displays the location of aircraft on a Google Maps map.??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????????,????,????,????,???????,?????,?????.??????。 ?????-?????【??】???????: ???????????????、??,??,??,??,??? ?,??,,??,??,??,??,??,??,????????,??????！ ?????-?????【??】?????????: ???????????????????????????:???????,??????,????,????,????,?????！ ???????-???????【??】???????????: ??????????,??????????????????????,???????????????,?????????????！ ???????-???????【??】???????????: ???????????????????????,?????, ... ????????????,????,????,?????,???????。 ?????-?????【??】?????????: ?????????????,????????,?????,???,???????????,???????????,?????,??????！??????-??????【??】????????: ???????????????????，?????????/?,,???????????,??????????????!??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????????,?????????、??、??、????,??????????,?????????????！??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????、????、????、??????????,???,?????,???????????????. ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????、?????,????????????????????,????,????,??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,?????????????? ??。??????????、????、????、?????????? ???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,???、???!???????,????????????????,????????????,???! ????-????【??】????????: ?????????????,????,???????、???????????,???????????,????,?????,???????。 ?????-?????【??】?????????: ?????????????????、?????、?????、?????、?????、????,???????????,?????,??????！

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• Applications: The mathematics of movement, Part 1

  - by TechTwaddle

  Before you continue reading this post, a suggestion; if you haven’t read “Programming Windows Phone 7 Series” by Charles Petzold, go read it. Now. If you find 150+ pages a little too long, at least go through Chapter 5, Principles of Movement, especially the section “A Brief Review of Vectors”. This post is largely inspired from this chapter. At this point I assume you know what vectors are, how they are represented using the pair (x, y), what a unit vector is, and given a vector how you would normalize the vector to get a unit vector. Our task in this post is simple, a marble is drawn at a point on the screen, the user clicks at a random point on the device, say (destX, destY), and our program makes the marble move towards that point and stop when it is reached. The tricky part of this task is the word “towards”, it adds a direction to our problem. Making a marble bounce around the screen is simple, all you have to do is keep incrementing the X and Y co-ordinates by a certain amount and handle the boundary conditions. Here, however, we need to find out exactly how to increment the X and Y values, so that the marble appears to move towards the point where the user clicked. And this is where vectors can be so helpful. The code I’ll show you here is not ideal, we’ll be working with C# on Windows Mobile 6.x, so there is no built-in vector class that I can use, though I could have written one and done all the math inside the class. I think it is trivial to the actual problem that we are trying to solve and can be done pretty easily once you know what’s going on behind the scenes. In other words, this is an excuse for me being lazy. The first approach, uses the function Atan2() to solve the “towards” part of the problem. Atan2() takes a point (x, y) as input, Atan2(y, x), note that y goes first, and then it returns an angle in radians. What angle you ask. Imagine a line from the origin (0, 0), to the point (x, y). The angle which Atan2 returns is the angle the positive X-axis makes with that line, measured clockwise. The figure below makes it clear, wiki has good details about Atan2(), give it a read. The pair (x, y) also denotes a vector. A vector whose magnitude is the length of that line, which is Sqrt(x*x + y*y), and a direction ?, as measured from positive X axis clockwise. If you’ve read that chapter from Charles Petzold’s book, this much should be clear. Now Sine and Cosine of the angle ? are special. Cosine(?) divides x by the vectors length (adjacent by hypotenuse), thus giving us a unit vector along the X direction. And Sine(?) divides y by the vectors length (opposite by hypotenuse), thus giving us a unit vector along the Y direction. Therefore the vector represented by the pair (cos(?), sin(?)), is the unit vector (or normalization) of the vector (x, y). This unit vector has a length of 1 (remember sin2(?) + cos2(?) = 1 ?), and a direction which is the same as vector (x, y). Now if I multiply this unit vector by some amount, then I will always get a point which is a certain distance away from the origin, but, more importantly, the point will always be on that line. For example, if I multiply the unit vector with the length of the line, I get the point (x, y). Thus, all we have to do to move the marble towards our destination point, is to multiply the unit vector by a certain amount each time and draw the marble, and the marble will magically move towards the click point. Now time for some code. The application, uses a timer based frame draw method to draw the marble on the screen. The timer is disabled initially and whenever the user clicks on the screen, the timer is enabled. The callback function for the timer follows the standard Update and Draw cycle. private double totLenToTravelSqrd = 0; private double startPosX = 0, startPosY = 0; private double destX = 0, destY = 0; private void Form1_MouseUp(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) {     destX = e.X;     destY = e.Y;     double x = marble1.x - destX;     double y = marble1.y - destY;     //calculate the total length to be travelled     totLenToTravelSqrd = x * x + y * y;     //store the start position of the marble     startPosX = marble1.x;     startPosY = marble1.y;     timer1.Enabled = true; } private void timer1_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e) {     UpdatePosition();     DrawMarble(); } Form1_MouseUp() method is called when ever the user touches and releases the screen. In this function we save the click point in destX and destY, this is the destination point for the marble and we also enable the timer. We store a few more values which we will use in the UpdatePosition() method to detect when the marble has reached the destination and stop the timer. So we store the start position of the marble and the square of the total length to be travelled. I’ll leave out the term ‘sqrd’ when speaking of lengths from now on. The time out interval of the timer is set to 40ms, thus giving us a frame rate of about ~25fps. In the timer callback, we update the marble position and draw the marble. We know what DrawMarble() does, so here, we’ll only look at how UpdatePosition() is implemented; private void UpdatePosition() {     //the vector (x, y)     double x = destX - marble1.x;     double y = destY - marble1.y;     double incrX=0, incrY=0;     double distanceSqrd=0;     double speed = 6;     //distance between destination and current position, before updating marble position     distanceSqrd = x * x + y * y;     double angle = Math.Atan2(y, x);     //Cos and Sin give us the unit vector, 6 is the value we use to magnify the unit vector along the same direction     incrX = speed * Math.Cos(angle);     incrY = speed * Math.Sin(angle);     marble1.x += incrX;     marble1.y += incrY;     //check for bounds     if ((int)marble1.x < MinX + marbleWidth / 2)     {         marble1.x = MinX + marbleWidth / 2;     }     else if ((int)marble1.x > (MaxX - marbleWidth / 2))     {         marble1.x = MaxX - marbleWidth / 2;     }     if ((int)marble1.y < MinY + marbleHeight / 2)     {         marble1.y = MinY + marbleHeight / 2;     }     else if ((int)marble1.y > (MaxY - marbleHeight / 2))     {         marble1.y = MaxY - marbleHeight / 2;     }     //distance between destination and current point, after updating marble position     x = destX - marble1.x;     y = destY - marble1.y;     double newDistanceSqrd = x * x + y * y;     //length from start point to current marble position     x = startPosX - (marble1.x);     y = startPosY - (marble1.y);     double lenTraveledSqrd = x * x + y * y;     //check for end conditions     if ((int)lenTraveledSqrd >= (int)totLenToTravelSqrd)     {         System.Console.WriteLine("Stopping because destination reached");         timer1.Enabled = false;     }     else if (Math.Abs((int)distanceSqrd - (int)newDistanceSqrd) < 4)     {         System.Console.WriteLine("Stopping because no change in Old and New position");         timer1.Enabled = false;     } } Ok, so in this function, first we subtract the current marble position from the destination point to give us a vector. The first three lines of the function construct this vector (x, y). The vector (x, y) has the same length as the line from (marble1.x, marble1.y) to (destX, destY) and is in the direction pointing from (marble1.x, marble1.y) to (destX, destY). Note that marble1.x and marble1.y denote the center point of the marble. Then we use Atan2() to get the angle which this vector makes with the positive X axis and use Cosine() and Sine() of that angle to get the unit vector along that same direction. We multiply this unit vector with 6, to get the values which the position of the marble should be incremented by. This variable, speed, can be experimented with and determines how fast the marble moves towards the destination. After this, we check for bounds to make sure that the marble stays within the screen limits and finally we check for the end condition and stop the timer. The end condition has two parts to it. The first case is the normal case, where the user clicks well inside the screen. Here, we stop when the total length travelled by the marble is greater than or equal to the total length to be travelled. Simple enough. The second case is when the user clicks on the very corners of the screen. Like I said before, the values marble1.x and marble1.y denote the center point of the marble. When the user clicks on the corner, the marble moves towards the point, and after some time tries to go outside of the screen, this is when the bounds checking comes into play and corrects the marble position so that the marble stays inside the screen. In this case the marble will never travel a distance of totLenToTravelSqrd, because of the correction is its position. So here we detect the end condition when there is not much change in marbles position. I use the value 4 in the second condition above. After experimenting with a few values, 4 seemed to work okay. There is a small thing missing in the code above. In the normal case, case 1, when the update method runs for the last time, marble position over shoots the destination point. This happens because the position is incremented in steps (which are not small enough), so in this case too, we should have corrected the marble position, so that the center point of the marble sits exactly on top of the destination point. I’ll add this later and update the post. This has been a pretty long post already, so I’ll leave you with a video of how this program looks while running. Notice in the video that the marble moves like a bot, without any grace what so ever. And that is because the speed of the marble is fixed at 6. In the next post we will see how to make the marble move a little more elegantly. And also, if Atan2(), Sine() and Cosine() are a little too much to digest, we’ll see how to achieve the same effect without using them, in the next to next post maybe. Ciao!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 05, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 05, 2012Popular ReleasesCatel ReSharper plugin: Catel.Resharper 1.3 RC 1: (+) Added support for R# 7.1 (+) Added support to Catel 3.4 for to convert auto properties into catel properties from ModelBase. (*) PropertyConverter now generates a the members name (property and notification method) to avoid the usage of existing member name. (x) Fixed reference to Actions.xml resource file.Dyanamic Reports (RDLC) - SharePoint 2010 Visual WebPart: Initial Release: This is a Initial Release.HTML Renderer: HTML Renderer 1.0.0.0 (3): Major performance improvement (http://theartofdev.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/how-i-optimized-html-renderer-and-fell-in-love-with-vs-profiler/) Minor fixes raised in issue tracker and discussions.ZXMAK2: Version 2.7.0.1: fix Spectrum+3 ULA timing if Direct3D is not available, draw warning on black background add Keyboard Help window fix kempston mouse (swap left/right buttons) add Pentagon 1024 memory module add shadow rom support for Pentagon 512/1024 fix to avoid NMI conflict between memory/BDI (Scorpion, Pentagon 512/1024) project structure and namespace refactoring NOTE: this version uses new device namespaces, so if you have VMZ file from previous version, please delete it!CodeGen Code Generator: CodeGen 4.2.2: IMPORTANT: This release replaces the previous 4.2.1 release from 28th October 2012, which has been removed. There was an error in the setup program for 4.2.1 which caused some dependent assemblies (for example the Synergy .NET runtime and other Synergy .NET assemblies) to be distributed as part of the CodeGen installation. This can cause problems when attempting to upgrade to later versions of Synergy. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT ALL 4.2.1 INSTALLATIONS BE UNINSTALLED AND UPGRADED TO 4.2.2 AS ...ProDinner - ASP.NET MVC Sample (EF4.4, N-Tier, jQuery): 8: update to ASP.net MVC Awesome 3.0 udpate to EntityFramework 4.4 update to MVC 4 added dinners grid on homepageASP.net MVC Awesome - jQuery Ajax Helpers: 3.0: added Grid helper added XML Documentation added textbox helper added Client Side API for AjaxList removed .SearchButton from AjaxList AjaxForm and Confirm helpers have been merged into the Form helper optimized html output for AjaxDropdown, AjaxList, Autocomplete works on MVC 3 and 4BlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.7: Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here!! Click Here for More Info Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.7 instructions. If you looking for Web Application Project, ...Launchbar: Launchbar 4.2.2.0: This release is the first step in cleaning up the code and using all the latest features of .NET 4.5 Changes 4.2.2 (2012-11-02) Improved handling of left clicks 4.1.0 (2012-10-17) Removed tray icon Assembly renamed and signed with strong name Note When you upgrade, Launchbar will start with the default settings. You can import your previous settings by following these steps: Run Launchbar and just save the settings without configuring anything Shutdown Launchbar Go to the folder %LOCA...CommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8.8: Releases notes for FluentScript located at http://fluentscript.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Release%20Notes&referringTitle=Documentation Fluentscript - 0.9.8.8 - Final ReleaseApplication: FluentScript Version: 0.9.8.8 Build: 0.9.8.8 Changeset: 77368 ( CommonLibrary.NET ) Release date: November 2nd, 2012 Binaries: CommonLibrary.dll Namespace: ComLib.Lang Project site: http://fluentscript.codeplex.com/ Download: http://commonlibrarynet.codeplex.com/releases/view/90426 Source code: http://common...Mouse Jiggler: MouseJiggle-1.3: This adds the much-requested minimize-to-tray feature to Mouse Jiggler.Piwik for Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework: WP7 and WP8: First release with basic Piwik support. Supported Systems: WP7 and WP8PCAPMerger: 2.1.0.0: Archive contains three folders: x86 - 32-bit version of application x64 - 64-bit version of application test - two testing PCAP files to be merged (both contain scrambled order of packets)Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.10.0 Release Candidate: This is a Release Candidate, which means that if we do not find any major issues in the next week, we will release this version as the final release of 4.10.0 on November 9th, 2012. The documentation for the MVC bits still lives in the Github version of the docs for now and will be updated on our.umbraco.org with the final release of 4.10.0. Browse the documentation here: https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco4Docs/tree/4.8.0/Documentation/Reference/Mvc If you want to do only MVC then make sur...Skype Auto Recorder: SkypeAutoRecorder 1.3.4: New icon and images. Reworked settings window. Implemented high-quality sound encoding. Implemented a possibility to produce stereo records. Added buttons with system-wide hot keys for manual starting and canceling of recording. Added buttons for opening folder with records. Added Help button. Fixed an issue when recording is continuing after call end. Fixed an issue when recording doesn't start. Fixed several bugs and improved stability. Major refactoring and optimization...Python Tools for Visual Studio: Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 RTM. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, etc. support. For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this video There are a number of exciting improvement in this release comp...AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.5: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we try to package for those OSes. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) Changelog: Fixed potential bot bugs: Map change, OpenAL...DirectX Tool Kit: October 30, 2012 (add WP8 support): October 30, 2012 Added project files for Windows Phone 8MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.6: Changelog for 2.3.6 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Fixed a bug in multichannel audio conversion failure. AAC does not support 6 channel audio, MCEBuddy now checks for it and force the output to 2 channel if AAC codec is specified 2. Fixed a bug in Original Broadcast Date and Time. Original Broadcast Date and Time is reported in UTC timezone in WTV metadata. TVDB and MovieDB dates are reported in network timezone. It is assumed the video is recorded and converted on the same machine, i.e. local timezone...MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V4.1 for Visual Studio 2012: This version only supports Visual Studio 2012 (and all Express editions too). If you use Visual Studio 2010, please stay tuned, we will publish an update in a few days with support for VS10. V4.1 supports: Windows Phone 8 Windows 8 (Windows RT) Silverlight 5 Silverlight 4 WPF 4.5 WPF 4 WPF 3.5 And the following development environments: Visual Studio 2012 (Pro, Premium, Ultimate) Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows 8 Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Phone 8 Visual...New Projects3dTalk: Web 2.0 site for 3d projection mapping artists, to have a forum for showing work, getting advice or comments, and giving details of forthcoming shows/exhibition8media: a student project for Windows 8ActiveWorlds Managed Wrapper: HeyAsyncLoggers: AsyncLoggers strives to provide high-quality asynchronous wrappers for all well-known logging frameworks.CapsBeep: CapsBeep is a Windows utility application that causes an audible beep and a notification to appear whenever a key is pressed while the Caps Lock is active.CUDA Tuning with CUDAfy: A step-by-step guide to tuning performance of a CUDA- and CUDAfy-enabled GPU algorithm, using a brute-force Travelling Salesman algorithm as example.DDarkSEngine: New 2D game engine for .netFoxyXLS: Visual FoxPro class to geneate pure XLS files using the BIFF3 file format.JsApi: The purpose of this project is to demonstrate aspects of both the DialectSoftware.Web.UI.CustomControls and the DialectSoftware.Web.JsAPI LF Spec: Add simple test extensions to your MS Test projects for BDD-style unit tests.Liubaobao Website Starter Kit: When it comes to developing a new website - big or small, we all need something to start with. We are putting together a bunch of frequently used system parts.metropress: A feature-rich and easy to customize framework for developer/designer who want to turn any wordpress site into Windows 8 AppMobile Device: Include this in your .NET applications to allow them to easily get information from a connected iDevice.Mouse Trapper: Mouse Trapper is a program that will keep your mouse pointer inside one display, unless the chosen key is being pressed.My WCF Project: Learning projectNetworkFileWatcher: Watch changes to Files and Folders on a remote computer using NetworkFileWatcher. Overcomes the network-path limitation of System.IO.FileSystemWatcher.Quentin: Blog de QuentinQuickbooks Repair Pro: QuickBooks Repair ProSAIN: SAIN es un sistema administrativo integral basado en web que permite la administración de pequeños negocios.SQLCE with Windows Phone 7.1: This project is create on Initial understanding of SQL CE with windows phone. You will get more useful code with this codeplex link in fututre. SSDD Campero: kikhjuiojolipompmlkmlkmTileTool: Work in progress 2D tile based editor.Time Limiter: Set of Windows services used to limit times per day and per session of computer users. Meant for child computer use control. C# WCF Windows Services WMI.Window Manager: Position windows easilyYet Another Regex Tester: Write a regular expression (regex) and test it on real text.

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• Passing Strings by Ref

  - by SGWellens

  Humbled yet again…DOH! No matter how much experience you acquire, no matter how smart you may be, no matter how hard you study, it is impossible to keep fully up to date on all the nuances of the technology we are exposed to. There will always be gaps in our knowledge: Little 'dead zones' of uncertainty. For me, this time, it was about passing string parameters to functions. I thought I knew this stuff cold. First, a little review... Value Types and Ref Integers and structs are value types (as opposed to reference types). When declared locally, their memory storage is on the stack; not on the heap. When passed to a function, the function gets a copy of the data and works on the copy. If a function needs to change a value type, you need to use the ref keyword.  Here's an example:     // ---- declaration -----------------     public struct MyStruct    {        public string StrTag;    }     // ---- functions -----------------------     void SetMyStruct(MyStruct myStruct)     // pass by value    {        myStruct.StrTag = "BBB";    }     void SetMyStruct(ref MyStruct myStruct)  // pass by ref    {        myStruct.StrTag = "CCC";    }     // ---- Usage -----------------------     protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        MyStruct Data;        Data.StrTag = "AAA";         SetMyStruct(Data);        // Data.StrTag is still "AAA"         SetMyStruct(ref Data);        // Data.StrTag is now "CCC"    } No surprises here. All value types like ints, floats, datetimes, enums, structs, etc. work the same way. And now on to... Class Types and Ref     // ---- Declaration -----------------------------     public class MyClass    {        public string StrTag;    }     // ---- Functions ----------------------------     void SetMyClass(MyClass myClass)  // pass by 'value'    {        myClass.StrTag = "BBB";    }     void SetMyClass(ref MyClass myClass)   // pass by ref    {        myClass.StrTag = "CCC";    }     // ---- Usage ---------------------------------------     protected void Button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        MyClass Data = new MyClass();        Data.StrTag = "AAA";         SetMyClass(Data);          // Data.StrTag is now "BBB"         SetMyClass(ref Data);        // Data.StrTag is now "CCC"    }  No surprises here either. Since Classes are reference types, you do not need the ref keyword to modify an object. What may seem a little strange is that with or without the ref keyword, the results are the same: The compiler knows what to do. So, why would you need to use the ref keyword when passing an object to a function? Because then you can change the reference itself…ie you can make it refer to a completely different object. Inside the function you can do: myClass = new MyClass() and the old object will be garbage collected and the new object will be returned to the caller. That ends the review. Now let's look at passing strings as parameters. The String Type and Ref Strings are reference types. So when you pass a String to a function, you do not need the ref keyword to change the string. Right? Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. When I saw this, I was so surprised that I fell out of my chair. Getting up, I bumped my head on my desk (which really hurt). My bumping the desk caused a large speaker to fall off of a bookshelf and land squarely on my big toe. I was screaming in pain and hopping on one foot when I lost my balance and fell. I struck my head on the side of the desk (once again) and knocked myself out cold. When I woke up, I was in the hospital where due to a database error (thanks Oracle) the doctors had put casts on both my hands. I'm typing this ever so slowly with just my ton..tong ..tongu…tongue. But I digress. Okay, the only true part of that story is that I was a bit surprised. Here is what happens passing a String to a function.     // ---- Functions ----------------------------     void SetMyString(String myString)   // pass by 'value'    {        myString = "BBB";    }     void SetMyString(ref String myString)  // pass by ref    {        myString = "CCC";    }     // ---- Usage ---------------------------------     protected void Button3_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        String MyString = "AAA";         SetMyString(MyString);        // MyString is still "AAA"  What!!!!         SetMyString(ref MyString);        // MyString is now "CCC"    } What the heck. We should not have to use the ref keyword when passing a String because Strings are reference types. Why didn't the string change? What is going on?   I spent hours unssuccessfully researching this anomaly until finally, I had a Eureka moment: This code: String MyString = "AAA"; Is semantically equivalent to this code (note this code doesn't actually compile): String MyString = new String(); MyString = "AAA"; Key Point: In the function, the copy of the reference is pointed to a new object and THAT object is modified. The original reference and what it points to is unchanged. You can simulate this behavior by modifying the class example code to look like this:      void SetMyClass(MyClass myClass)  // call by 'value'    {        //myClass.StrTag = "BBB";        myClass = new MyClass();        myClass.StrTag = "BBB";    } Now when you call the SetMyClass function without using ref, the parameter is unchanged...just like the string example.  I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens

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• Webcast Q&A: ING on How to Scale Role Management and Compliance

  - by Tanu Sood

  Thanks to all who attended the live webcast we hosted on ING: Scaling Role Management and Access Certifications to Thousands of Applications on Wed, April 11th. Those of you who couldn’t join us, the webcast replay is now available. Many thanks to our guest speaker, Mark Robison, Enterprise Architect at ING for walking us through ING’s drivers and rationale for the platform approach, the phased implementation strategy, results & metrics, roadmap and recommendations. We greatly appreciate the insight he shared with us all on the deployment synergies between Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) and Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) to enforce streamlined user and role management and scalable compliance. Mark was also kind enough to walk us through specific solutions features that helped ING manage the problem of role explosion and implement closed loop remediation. Our host speaker, Neil Gandhi, Principal Product Manager, Oracle rounded off the presentation by discussing common use cases and deployment scenarios we see organizations implement to automate user/identity administration and enforce closed-loop scalable compliance. Neil also called out the specific features in Oracle Identity Analytics 11gR1 that cater to expediting and streamlining compliance processes such as access certifications. While we tackled a few questions during the webcast, we have captured the responses to those that we weren’t able to get to here; our sincere thanks to Mark Robison for taking the time to respond to questions specific to ING’s implementation and strategy. Q. Did you include business friendly entitlment descriptions, or is the business seeing application descriptors A. We include very business friendly descriptions.  The OIA tool has the facility to allow this. Q. When doing attestation on job change, who is in the workflow to review and confirm that the employee should continue to have access? Is that a best practice?   A. The new and old manager  are in the workflow.  The tool can check for any Separation of Duties (SOD) violations with both having similiar accesses.  It may not be a best practice, but it is a reality of doing your old and new job for a transition period on a transfer. Q. What versions of OIM and OIA are being used at ING?   A. OIM 11gR1 and OIA 11gR1; the very latest versions available. Q. Are you using an entitlements / role catalog?   A. Yes. We use both roles and entitlements. Q. What specific unexpected benefits did the Identity Warehouse provide ING?   A. The most unanticipated was to help Legal Hold identify user ID's in the various applications.   Other benefits included providing a one stop shop for all aggregated ID information. Q. How fine grained are your application and entitlements? Did OIA, OIM support that level of granularity?   A. We have some very fine grained entitlements, but we role this up into approved Roles to allow for easier management.   For managing very fine grained entitlements, Oracle offers the Oracle Entitlement Server.  We currently do not own this software but are considering it. Q. Do you allow any individual access or is everything truly role based?   A. We are a hybrid environment with roles and individual positive and negative entitlements Q. Did you use an Agile methodology like scrum to deliver functionality during your project? A. We started with waterfall, but used an agile approach to provide benefits after the initial implementation Q. How did you handle rolling out the standard ID format to existing users? A. We just used the standard IDs for new users.  We have not taken on a project to address the existing nonstandard IDs. Q. To avoid role explosion, how do you deal with apps that require more than a couple of entitlement TYPES? For example, an app may have different levels of access and it may need to know the user's country/state to associate them with particular customers.   A. We focus on the functional user and craft the role around their daily job requirements.  The role captures the required application entitlements.  To keep role explosion down, we use role mining in OIA and also meet and interview the business.  It is an iterative process to get role consensus. Q. Great presentation! How many rounds of Certifications has ING performed so far?  A. Around 7 quarters and constant certifications on transfer. Q. Did you have executive support from the top down   A. Yes  The executive support was key to our success. Q. For your cloud instance are you using OIA or OIM as SaaS?  A. No.  We are just provisioning and deprovisioning to various Cloud providers.  (Service Now is an example) Q. How do you ensure a role owner does not get more priviliges as are intended and thus violates another role, e,g, a DBA Roles should not get tor rigt to run somethings as root, as this would affect the root role? A. We have SOD  checks.  Also all Roles are initially approved by external audit and the role owners have to certify the roles and any changes Q. What is your ratio of employees to roles?   A. We are still in process going through our various lines of business, so I do not have a final ratio.  From what we have seen, the ratio varies greatly depending on the Line of Business and the diversity of Job Functions.  For standardized lines of business such as call centers, the ratio is very good where we can have a single role that covers many employees.  For specialized lines of business like treasury, it can be one or two people per role. Q. Is ING using Oracle On Demand service ?   A. No Q. Do you have to implement or migrate to OIM in order to get the Identity Warehouse, or can OIA provide the identity warehouse as well if you haven't reached OIM yet? A. No, OIM deployment is not required to implement OIA’s Identity Warehouse but as you heard during the webcast, there are tremendous deployment synergies in deploying both OIA and OIM together. Q. When is the Security Governor product coming out? A. Oracle Security Governor for Healthcare is available today. Hope you enjoyed the webcast and we look forward to having you join us for the next webcast in the Customers Talk: Identity as a Platform webcast series: Toyota: Putting Customers First – Identity Platform as a Business Enabler Wednesday, May 16th at 10 am PST/ 1 pm EST Register Today You can also register for a live event at a city near you where Aberdeen’s Derek Brink will discuss the survey results from the recently published report “Analyzing Platform vs. Point Solution Approach in Identity”. And, you can do a quick (& free)  online assessment of your identity programs by benchmarking it against the 160 organizations surveyed  in the Aberdeen report, compliments of Oracle. Here’s the slide deck from our ING webcast: ING webcast platform View more presentations from OracleIDM

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• Clean Code Development & Flexible work environment - MSCC 26.10.2013

  Finally, some spare time to summarize my impressions and experiences of the recent meetup of Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community. I already posted my comment on the event and on our social media networks: Professional - It's getting better with our meetups and I really appreciated that 'seniors' and 'juniors' were present today. Despite running a little bit out of time it was really great to see more students coming to the gathering. This time we changed location for our Saturday meetup and it worked out very well. A big thank you to Ebene Accelerator, namely Mrs Poonum, for the ability to use their meeting rooms for our community get-together. Already some weeks ago I had a very pleasant conversation with her about the MSCC aims, 'mission' and how we organise things. Additionally, I think that an environment like the Ebene Accelerator is a good choice as it acts as an incubator for young developers and start-ups. Reactions from other craftsmen Before I put my thoughts about our recent meeting down, I'd like to mention and cross-link to some of the other craftsmen that were present: "MSCC meet up is a massive knowledge gaining strategies for students, future entrepreneurs, or for geeks all around. Knowledge sharing becomes a fun. For those who have not been able to made it do subscribe on our MSCC meet up group at meetup.com." -- Nitin on Learning is fun with #MSCC #Ebene Accelerator "We then talked about the IT industry in Mauritius, salary issues in various field like system administration, software development etc. We analysed the reasons why people tend to hop from one company to another. That was a fun debate." -- Ish on MSCC meetup - Gang of Geeks "Flexible Learning Environment was quite interesting since these lines struck cords : "You're not a secretary....9 to 5 shouldn't suit you"....This allowed reflection...deep reflection....especially regarding the local mindset...which should be changed in a way which would promote creativity rather than choking it till death..." -- Yannick on 2nd MSCC Monthly Meet-up And others on Facebook... ;-) Visual impressions are available on our Meetup event page. More first time attendees We great pleasure I noticed that we have once again more first time visitors. A quick overlook showed that we had a majority of UoM students in first, second or last year. Some of them are already participating in the UoM Computer Club or are nominated as members of the Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) programme. Personally, I really appreciate the fact that the MSCC is able to gather such a broad audience. And as I wrote initially, the MSCC is technology-agnostic; we want IT people from any segment of this business. Of course, students which are about to delve into the 'real world' of working are highly welcome, and I hope that they might get one or other glimpse of experience or advice from employees. Sticking to the schedule? No, not really... And honestly, it was a good choice to go a little bit of the beaten tracks. I mean, yes we have a 'rough' agenda of topics that we would like to talk about or having a presentation about. But we keep it 'agile'. Due to the high number of new faces, we initiated another quick round of introductions and I gave a really brief overview of the MSCC. Next, we started to reflect on the Clean Code Developer (CCD) - Red Grade which we introduced on the last meetup. Nirvan was the lucky one and he did a good job on summarizing the various abbreviations of the first level of being a CCD. Actually, more interesting, we exchanged experience about the principles and practices of Red Grade, and it was very informative to get to know that Yann actually 'interviewed' a couple of friends, other students, local guys working in IT companies as well as some IT friends from India in order to counter-check on what he learned first-hand about Clean Code. Currently, he is reading the book of Robert C. Martin on that topic and I'm looking forward to his review soon. More output generates more input What seems to be like a personal mantra is working out pretty well for me since the beginning of this year. Being more active on social media networks, writing more article on my blog, starting the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community, and contributing more to other online communities has helped me to receive more project requests, job offers and possibilities to expand my business at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. Actually, it is not a coincidence that one of the questions new craftsmen should answer during registration asks about having a personal blog. Whether you are just curious about IT, right in the middle of your Computer Studies, or already working in software development or system administration since a while you should consider to advertise and market yourself online. Easiest way to resolve this are to have online profiles on professional social media networks like LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, and Google+ (no Facebook should be considered for private only), and considering to have a personal blog. Why? -- Be yourself, be proud of your work, and let other people know that you're passionate about your profession. Trust me, this is going to open up opportunities you might not have dreamt about... Exchanging ideas about having a professional online presence - MSCC meetup on the 26th October 2013 Furthermore, consider to put your Curriculum Vitae online, too. There are quite a number of service providers like 1ClickCV, Stack Overflow Careers 2.0, etc. which give you the ability to have an up to date CV online. At least put it on your site, next to your personal blog. Similar to what you would be able to see on my site here. Cyber Island Mauritius - are we there? A couple of weeks ago I got a 'cold' message on LinkedIn from someone living in the U.S. asking about the circumstances and conditions of the IT world of Mauritius. He has a great business idea, venture capital and is currently looking for a team of software developers (mainly mobile - iOS) for a new startup here in Mauritius. Since then we exchanged quite some details through private messages and Skype conversations, and I suggested that it might be a good chance to join our meetup through a conference call and see for yourself about potential candidates. During approximately 30 to 40 minutes the brief idea of the new startup was presented - very promising state-of-the-art technology aspects and integration of various public APIs -, and we had a good Q&A session about it. Also thanks to the excellent bandwidth provided by the Ebene Accelerator the video conference between three parties went absolutely well. Clean Code Developer - Orange Grade Hahaha - nice one... Being at the Orange Tower at Ebene and then talking about an Orange Grade as CCD. Well, once again I provided an overview of the principles and practices in that rank of Clean Code, and similar to our last meetup we discussed on the various aspect of each principle, whether someone already got in touch with it during studies or work, and how it could affect their future view on their source code. Following are the principles and practices of Clean Code Developer - Orange Grade: CCD Orange Grade - Principles Single Level of Abstraction (SLA) Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) Separation of Concerns (SoC) Source Code conventions CCD Orange Grade - Practices Issue Tracking Automated Integration Tests Reading, Reading, Reading Reviews Especially the part on reading technical books got some extra attention. We quickly gathered our views on that and came up with a result that ranges between Zero (0) and up to Fifteen (15) book titles per year. Personally, I'm keeping my progress between Six (6) and Eight (8) titles per year, but at least One (1) per quarter of a year. Which is also connected to the fact that I'm participating in the O'Reilly Reader Review Program and have a another benefit to get access to free books only by writing and publishing a review afterwards. We also had a good exchange on the extended topic of 'Reviews' - which to my opinion is abnormal difficult here in Mauritius for various reasons. As far as I can tell from my experience working with Mauritian software developers, either as colleagues, employees or during consulting services there are unfortunately two dominant pattern on that topic: Keeping quiet Running away Honestly, I have no evidence about why these are the two 'solutions' on reviews but that's the situation that I had to face over the last couple of years. Sitting together and talking about problematic issues, tackling down root causes of de-motivational activities and working on general improvements doesn't seem to have a ground within the IT world of Mauritius. Are you a typist or a creative software craftsman? - MSCC meetup on the 26th October 2013 One very good example that we talked about was the fact of 'job hoppers' as you can easily observe it on someone's CV - those people change job every single year; for no obvious reason! Frankly speaking, I wouldn't even consider an IT person like to for an interview. As a company you're investing money and effort into the abilities of your employees. Hiring someone that won't stay for a longer period is out of question. And sorry to say, these kind of IT guys smell fishy about their capabilities and more likely to cause problems than actually produce productive results. One of the reasons why there is a probation period on an employment contract is to give you the liberty to leave as early as possible in case that you don't like your new position. Don't fool yourself or waste other people's time and money by hanging around a full year only to snatch off the bonus payment... Future outlook: Developer's Conference Even though it is not official yet I already mentioned it several times during our weekly Code & Coffee sessions. The MSCC is looking forward to be able to organise or to contribute to an upcoming IT event. Currently, the rough schedule is set for April 2014 but this mainly depends on availability of location(s), a decent time frame for preparations, and the underlying procedures with public bodies to have it approved and so on. As soon as the information about date and location has been fixed there will be a 'Call for Papers' period in order to attract local IT enthusiasts to apply for a session slot and talk about their field of work and their passion in IT. More to come for sure... My resume of the day It was a great gathering and I am very pleased about the fact that we had another 15 craftsmen (plus 2 businessmen on conference call plus 2 young apprentices) in the same room, talking about IT related topics and sharing their experience as employees and students. Personally, I really appreciated the feedback from the students about their current view on their future career, and I really hope that some of them are going to pursue their dreams. Start promoting yourself and it will happen... Looking forward to your blogs! And last but not least our numbers on Meetup and Facebook have been increased as a direct consequence of this meetup. Please, spread the word about the MSCC and get your friends and colleagues to join our official site. The higher the number of craftsmen we have the better chances we have t achieve something great! Thanks!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 08, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 08, 2014Popular ReleasesGFramework: GFramework V1.0: GFramework V1.0SFDL.NET: SFDL.NET (2.2.9.3): Changelog: Retry Bugfix (Error Counter wurde nicht korrekt zurückgesetzt) Neue Einstellung: Retry Wartezeit ist nun EinstellbarAspose for Apache POI: Aspose.Words vs Apache POI WP - v 1.1: Release contain the Code Comparison for Features in Apache POI WP SDK and Aspose.Words What's New ?Following Examples: Working with Headers Working with Footers Access Ranges in Document Delete Ranges in Document Insert Before and After Ranges Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are yet to come here. Keep visiting us. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.babelua: 1.5.7.0: V1.5.7.0 - 2014.6.6Stability improvement: use "lua scripts folder" as lua search path when debugging;MyBB: MyBB 1.6.13 Türkçe Kurulum Paketi: MyBB 1.6.13 - Resmi Tam Türkçe UTF-8 Sifir Kurulum Paketi Rar Pass - Sifresi: mybb.com.tr Yayinci site: http://www.mybb.com.tr Orjinal indirme adresi: http://download.mybb.com.tr Destek 1: http://destek.mybb.com.tr/showthread.php?tid=12326 Destek 2: http://tr.mybbdepo.com/mybb-1-6-13-turkce-sifir-kurulum-paketi-konusu.html Dosya: MyBB1613KurulumPaketiTR.rar MD5: d2745b79aa8cc5f8cc09e8a91b50d3cc SHA-1: 6fbb8e611e6d78f8cd3d88d7a773edc67ecc2a3e Ekleyen: XpSerkan MCTR TEAM - Gururla Sunar.SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.033.007 Release 1: Fixed breaking changes in Space Engineers in latest update. Installation of this version will replace older version.PlaySly: GetDirectLink 1.0.1.0: ConfiguraciónNuevo sistema de configuración Nuevo formulario de configuración Añadidas configuraciones visuales Fuente principal, fuente secundaria, fuente menus, fuente botones grandes, fuente botones pequeños Color fondo, color fondo menus, color fondo botones y colores de fuentes Ahora las fuentes soportan estilo (irregular, negrita, tachado y subrayado) Añadidas configuraciones de reproductor Pausar al iniciar para que el vídeo cargue (buffering) Añadidas configuraciones sobre...Virto Commerce Enterprise Open Source eCommerce Platform (asp.net mvc): Virto Commerce 1.10: Virto Commerce Community Edition version 1.10. To install the SDK package, please refer to SDK getting started documentation To configure source code package, please refer to Source code getting started documentation This release includes bug fixes and improvements (including Commerce Manager localization and https support). More details about this release can be found on our blog at http://blog.virtocommerce.com.NPOI: NPOI 2.1: Assembly Version: 2.1.0 New Features a. XSSFSheet.CopySheet b. Excel2Html for XSSF c. insert picture in word 2007 d. Implement IfError function in formula engine Bug Fixes a. fix conditional formatting issue b. fix ctFont order issue c. fix vertical alignment issue in XSSF d. add IndexedColors to NPOI.SS.UserModel e. fix decimal point issue in non-English culture f. fix SetMargin issue in XSSF g.fix multiple images insert issue in XSSF h.fix rich text style missing issue in XSSF i. fix cell...Media Player (Technology Area): Media Player 0.3 (Codname Kalo): Themes are included, along with a picture viewer. This does not require 0.2 to be installed51Degrees - Device Detection and Redirection: 3.1.2.3: Version 3.1 HighlightsDevice detection algorithm is over 100 times faster. Regular expressions and levenshtein distance calculations are no longer used. The device detection algorithm performance is no longer limited by the number of device combinations contained in the dataset. Two modes of operation are available: Memory – the detection data set is loaded into memory and there is no continuous connection to the source data file. Slower initialisation time but faster detection performanc...CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.27.0: CodeMap now indicates the type name for all members Implemented running scripts 'as administrator'. Just add '//css_npp asadmin' to the script and run it as usual. 'Prepare script for distribution' now aggregates script dependency assemblies. Various improvements in CodeSnipptet, Autcompletion and MethodInfo interactions with each other. Added printing line number for the entries in CodeMap (subject of configuration value) Improved debugging step indication for classless scripts ...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.72.3: 70426e13c415 ClosedXML for .Net 4.0 now uses Open XML SDK 2.5 b9ef53a6654f Merge branch 'master' of https://git01.codeplex.com/forks/vbjay/closedxml 727714e86416 Fix range.Merge(Boolean) for .Net 3.5 eb1ed478e50e Make public range.Merge(Boolean checkIntersects) 6284cf3c3991 More performance improvements when saving.DNN Blog: 06.00.07: Highlights: Enhancement: Option to show management panel on child modules Fix: Changed SPROC and code to ensure the right people are notified of pending comments. (CP-24018) Fix: Fix to have notification actions authentication assume the right module id so these will work from the messaging center (CP-24019) Fix: Fix to issue in categories in a post that will not save when no categories and no tags selectedTEncoder: 4.0.0: --4.0.0 -Added: Video downloader -Added: Total progress will be updated more smoothly -Added: MP4Box progress will be shown -Added: A tool to create gif image from video -Added: An option to disable trimming -Added: Audio track option won't be used for mpeg sources as default -Fixed: Subtitle position wasn't used -Fixed: Duration info in the file list wasn't updated after trimming -Updated: FFMpegVeraCrypt: VeraCrypt version 1.0d: Changes between 1.0c and 1.0d (03 June 2014) : Correct issue while creating hidden operating system. Minor fixes (look at git history for more details).Z SqlBulkCopy Extensions: SqlBulkCopy Extensions 1.0.0: SqlBulkCopy Extensions provide MUST-HAVE methods with outstanding performance missing from the SqlBulkCopy class like Delete, Update, Merge, Upsert. Compatible with .NET 2.0, SQL Server 2000, SQL Azure and more! Bulk MethodsBulkDelete BulkInsert BulkMerge BulkUpdate BulkUpsert Utility MethodsGetSqlConnection GetSqlTransaction You like this library? Find out how and why you should support Z Project Become a Memberhttp://zzzproject.com/resources/images/all/become-a-member.png|ht...Tweetinvi a friendly Twitter C# API: Tweetinvi 0.9.3.x: Timelines- Added all the parameters available from the Timeline Endpoints in Tweetinvi. - This is available for HomeTimeline, UserTimeline, MentionsTimeline // Simple query var tweets = Timeline.GetHomeTimeline(); // Create a parameter for queries with specific parameters var timelineParameter = Timeline.CreateHomeTimelineRequestParameter(); timelineParameter.ExcludeReplies = true; timelineParameter.TrimUser = true; var tweets = Timeline.GetHomeTimeline(timelineParameter); Tweetinvi 0.9.3.1...Pong: Pong_v1.0: Folder Content + the exe file.MudRoom: Parser Test 0.01a: Binary build of proof of concept code that supports a few verbs and can act on a few objects. Shows the basics of compound verb actions, adjective support, and the ignoring of filler words.New Projects2112110162: 2112110162 nguyen do datASP.NET Identity 2.0 AWS DynamoDb: This project provides a high performance cloud solution for ASP.NET Identity 2.0 using AWS DynamoDb replacing the Entity Framework / MSSQL provider.Eye tracking | Accessibility version.: Este projeto tem o objetivo de oferecer de forma barata uma ferramenta para se comunicar com pessoas que só podem mexer os olhos.HCRM: House CRMhuynhtanphat1995: cfzxJJ94_HelloWorld: Hello World Hello World C++ Hello World Ckbvault-mysql: KBVault MySQL is a free knowledge base web application.Khue's project: helloNDataTable: Similar to the DataSet and DataTable Class. using XML to support cross platform data transmission. Suitable for network data transmission. Net Slate: An app that learns users interest and becomes smarter, by providing news according to your interest. NR comes with highly customizable User interface, with dynaPA kece: Edugra is one of android-based applicationPowerCLI Navigator: PowerCLI Navigator is a PowerShell host application meant to improve system administrators' experience with VMware PowerCLI and vSphere management automation.project1: sdczxproject1-kimquyendang: chuoiproject1-vannghia: jghjghjRandom Katas: Random Code Kata implementations in a variety of languages. For personal edification, but if others are interested, have at it.TestWeb: TestWebTimelapse Camera Archive: An ASP.NET web application that organizes, archives, and makes available photos from FTP-capable IP cameras.Ubnt Discovery: This tool allows you to discovery Ubiquiti devices in your network.Website Practice: The aim of this project is to learn team foundation service using codeplex on a website project.Z3_SMC: testzDocumentationHelper: Custom Documentation Helper

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• SQL Server Developer Tools &ndash; Codename Juneau vs. Red-Gate SQL Source Control

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  So how do the new SQL Server Developer Tools (previously code-named Juneau) stack up against SQL Source Control?  Read on to find out. At the PASS Community Summit a couple of weeks ago, it was announced that the previously code-named Juneau software would be released under the name of SQL Server Developer Tools with the release of SQL Server 2012.  This replacement for Database Projects in Visual Studio (also known in a former life as Data Dude) has some great new features.  I won’t attempt to describe them all here, but I will applaud Microsoft for making major improvements.  One of my favorite changes is the way database elements are broken down.  Previously every little thing was in its own file.  For example, indexes were each in their own file.  I always hated that.  Now, SSDT uses a pattern similar to Red-Gate’s and puts the indexes and keys into the same file as the overall table definition. Of course there are really cool features to keep your database model in sync with the actual source scripts, and the rename refactoring feature is now touted as being more than just a search and replace, but rather a “semantic-aware” search and replace.  Funny, it reminds me of SQL Prompt’s Smart Rename feature.  But I’m not writing this just to criticize Microsoft and argue that they are late to the party with this feature set.  Instead, I do see it as a viable alternative for folks who want all of their source code to be version controlled, but there are a couple of key trade-offs that you need to know about when you choose which tool set to use. First, the basics Both tool sets integrate with a wide variety of source control systems including the most popular: Subversion, GIT, Vault, and Team Foundation Server.  Both tools have integrated functionality to produce objects to upgrade your target database when you are ready (DACPACs in SSDT, integration with SQL Compare for SQL Source Control).  If you regularly live in Visual Studio or the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) then SSDT will likely be comfortable for you.  Like BIDS, SSDT is a Visual Studio Project Type that comes with SQL Server, and if you don’t already have Visual Studio installed, it will install the shell for you.  If you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed, then it will just add this as an available project type.  On the other hand, if you regularly live in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) then you will really enjoy the SQL Source Control integration from within SSMS.  Both tool sets store their database model in script files.  In SSDT, these are on your file system like other source files; in SQL Source Control, these are stored in the folder structure in your source control system, and you can always GET them to your file system if you want to browse them directly. For me, the key differentiating factors are 1) a single, unified check-in, and 2) migration scripts.  How you value those two features will likely make your decision for you. Unified Check-In If you do a continuous-integration (CI) style of development that triggers an automated build with unit testing on every check-in of source code, and you use Visual Studio for the rest of your development, then you will want to really consider SSDT.  Because it is just another project in Visual Studio, it can be added to your existing Solution, and you can then do a complete, or unified single check-in of all changes whether they are application or database changes.  This is simply not possible with SQL Source Control because it is in a different development tool (SSMS instead of Visual Studio) and there is no way to do one unified check-in between the two.  You CAN do really fast back-to-back check-ins, but there is the possibility that the automated build that is triggered from the first check-in will cause your unit tests to fail and the CI tool to report that you broke the build.  Of course, the automated build that is triggered from the second check-in which contains the “other half” of your changes should pass and so the amount of time that the build was broken may be very, very short, but if that is very, very important to you, then SQL Source Control just won’t work; you’ll have to use SSDT. Refactoring and Migrations If you work on a mature system, or on a not-so-mature but also not-so-well-designed system, where you want to refactor the database schema as you go along, but you can’t have data suddenly disappearing from your target system, then you’ll probably want to go with SQL Source Control.  As I wrote previously, there are a number of changes which you can make to your database that the comparison tools (both from Microsoft and Red Gate) simply cannot handle without the possibility (or probability) of data loss.  Currently, SSDT only offers you the ability to inject PRE and POST custom deployment scripts.  There is no way to insert your own script in the middle to override the default behavior of the tool.  In version 3.0 of SQL Source Control (Early Access version now available) you have that ability to create your own custom migration script to take the place of the commands that the tool would have done, and ensure the preservation of your data.  Or, even if the default tool behavior would have worked, but you simply know a better way then you can take control and do things your way instead of theirs. You Decide In the environment I work in, our automated builds are not triggered off of check-ins, but off of the clock (currently once per night) and so there is no point at which the automated build and unit tests will be triggered without having both sides of the development effort already checked-in.  Therefore having a unified check-in, while handy, is not critical for us.  As for migration scripts, these are critically important to us.  We do a lot of new development on systems that have already been in production for years, and it is not uncommon for us to need to do a refactoring of the database.  Because of the maturity of the existing system, that often involves data migrations or other additional SQL tasks that the comparison tools just can’t detect on their own.  Therefore, the ability to create a custom migration script to override the tool’s default behavior is very important to us.  And so, you can see why we will continue to use Red Gate SQL Source Control for the foreseeable future.

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• Advice for a distracted, unhappy, recently graduated programmer? [closed]

  - by Re-Invent

  I graduated 4 months ago. I had offers from a few good places to work at. At the same time I wanted to stick to building a small software business of my own, still have some ideas with good potential, some half done projects frozen in my github. But due to social pressures, I chose a job, the pay is great, but I am half-passionate about it. A small team of smart folks building useful product, working out contracts across the world. I've started finding it extremely boring. Boring to the extent that I skip 2-3 days a week together not doing work. Neither do I spend that time progressing any of my own projects. Yes, I feel stupid at the way I'm wasting time, but I don't understand exactly why is it happening. It's as if all the excitement has been drained. What can I do about it? Long version: School - I was in third standard. Only students, 6th grade had access to computer labs. I once peeked into the lab from the little door opening. No hard-disks, MS DOS on 5 1/2 inch floppies. I asked a senior student to play some sound in BASIC. He used PLAY to compose a tune. Boy! I was so excited, I was jumping from within. Back home, asked my brother to teach me some programming. We bought a book "MODERN All About GW-BASIC for Schools & Colleges". The book had everything, right from printing, to taking input, file i/o, game programming, machine level support, etc. I was in 6th standard, wrote my first game - a wheel of fortune, rotated the wheel by manipulating 16 color palette's definition. Got internet soon, got hooked to QuickBasic programming community. Made some more games "007 in Danger", "Car Crush 2" for submission to allbasiccode archives. I was extremely excited about all this. My interests now swayed into "hacking" (computer security). Taught myself some perl, found it annoying, learnt PHP and a bit of SQL. Also taught myself Visual Basic one of the winters and wrote a pacman clone with Direct X. By the time I was in 10th standard, I created some evil tools using visual basic, php and mysql and eventually landed myself into an unpaid side-job at a government facility, building evil tools for them. It was a dream come true for crackers of that time. And so was I, still very excited. Things changed soon, last two years of school were not so great as I was balancing preps for college, work at govt. and studies for school at same time. College - College was opposite of all I had wished it to be. I imagined it to be a place where I'd spend my 4 years building something awesome. It was rather an epitome of rote learning, attendance, rules, busy schedules, ban on personal laptops, hardly any hackers surrounding you and shit like that. We had to take permissions to even introduce some cultural/creative activities in our annual schedule. The labs won't be open on weekends because the lab employees had to have their leaves. Yes, a horrible place for someone like me. I still managed to pull out a project with a friend over 2 months. Showed it to people high in the academia hierarchy. They were immensely impressed, we proposed to allow personal computers for students. They made up half-assed reasons and didn't agree. We felt frustrated. And so on, I still managed to teach myself new languages, do new projects of my own, do an intern at the same govt. facility, start a small business for sometime, give a talk at a conference I'm passionate about, win game-dev and hacking contest at most respected colleges, solve good deal of programming contest problems, etc. At the same time I was not content with all these restrictions, great emphasis on rote learning, and sheer wastage of time due to college. I never felt I was overdoing, but now I feel I burnt myself out. During my last days at college, I did an intern at a bigco. While I spent my time building prototypes for certain LBS, the other interns around me, even a good friend, was just skipping time. I thought maybe, in a few weeks he would put in some serious efforts at work assigned to him, but all he did was to find creative ways to skip work, hide his face from manager, engage people in talks if they try to question his progress, etc. I tried a few time to get him on track, but it seems all he wanted was to "not to work hard at all and still reap the fruits". I don't know how others take such people, but I find their vicinity very very poisonous to one's own motivation and productivity. Over that, the place where I come from, HRs don't give much value to what have you done past 4 years. So towards the end of out intern, we all were offered work at the bigco, but the slacker, even after not writing more than 200 lines of code was made a much better offer. I felt enraged instantly - "Is this how the corp world treats someone who does fruitful, if not extra-ordinary work form them for past 6 months?". Yes, I did try to negotiate and debate. The bigcos seem blind due to departmentalization of responsibilities and many layers of management. I decided not to be in touch with any characters of that depressing play. Probably the busy time I had at college, ignoring friends, ignoring fun and squeezing every bit of free time for myself is also responsible. Probably this is what has drained all my willingness to work for anyone. I find my day job boring, at the same time I with to maintain it for financial reasons. I feel a bit burnt out, unsatisfied and at the same time an urge to quit working for someone else and start finishing my frozen side-projects (which may be profitable). Though I haven't got much to support myself with food, office, internet bills, etc in savings. I still have my day job, but I don't find it very interesting, even though the pay is higher than the slacker, I don't find money to be a great motivator here. I keep comparing myself to my past version. I wonder how to get rid of this and reboot myself back to the way I was in school days - excited about it, tinkering, building, learning new things daily, and NOT BORED?

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• Testing Workflows &ndash; Test-First

  - by Timothy Klenke

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TimothyK/archive/2014/05/30/testing-workflows-ndash-test-first.aspxThis is the second of two posts on some common strategies for approaching the job of writing tests.  The previous post covered test-after workflows where as this will focus on test-first.  Each workflow presented is a method of attack for adding tests to a project.  The more tools in your tool belt the better.  So here is a partial list of some test-first methodologies. Ping Pong Ping Pong is a methodology commonly used in pair programing.  One developer will write a new failing test.  Then they hand the keyboard to their partner.  The partner writes the production code to get the test passing.  The partner then writes the next test before passing the keyboard back to the original developer. The reasoning behind this testing methodology is to facilitate pair programming.  That is to say that this testing methodology shares all the benefits of pair programming, including ensuring multiple team members are familiar with the code base (i.e. low bus number). Test Blazer Test Blazing, in some respects, is also a pairing strategy.  The developers don’t work side by side on the same task at the same time.  Instead one developer is dedicated to writing tests at their own desk.  They write failing test after failing test, never touching the production code.  With these tests they are defining the specification for the system.  The developer most familiar with the specifications would be assigned this task. The next day or later in the same day another developer fetches the latest test suite.  Their job is to write the production code to get those tests passing.  Once all the tests pass they fetch from source control the latest version of the test project to get the newer tests. This methodology has some of the benefits of pair programming, namely lowering the bus number.  This can be good way adding an extra developer to a project without slowing it down too much.  The production coder isn’t slowed down writing tests.  The tests are in another project from the production code, so there shouldn’t be any merge conflicts despite two developers working on the same solution. This methodology is also a good test for the tests.  Can another developer figure out what system should do just by reading the tests?  This question will be answered as the production coder works there way through the test blazer’s tests. Test Driven Development (TDD) TDD is a highly disciplined practice that calls for a new test and an new production code to be written every few minutes.  There are strict rules for when you should be writing test or production code.  You start by writing a failing (red) test, then write the simplest production code possible to get the code working (green), then you clean up the code (refactor).  This is known as the red-green-refactor cycle. The goal of TDD isn’t the creation of a suite of tests, however that is an advantageous side effect.  The real goal of TDD is to follow a practice that yields a better design.  The practice is meant to push the design toward small, decoupled, modularized components.  This is generally considered a better design that large, highly coupled ball of mud. TDD accomplishes this through the refactoring cycle.  Refactoring is only possible to do safely when tests are in place.  In order to use TDD developers must be trained in how to look for and repair code smells in the system.  Through repairing these sections of smelly code (i.e. a refactoring) the design of the system emerges. For further information on TDD, I highly recommend the series “Is TDD Dead?”.  It discusses its pros and cons and when it is best used. Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) Whereas TDD focuses on small unit tests that concentrate on a small piece of the system, Acceptance Tests focuses on the larger integrated environment.  Acceptance Tests usually correspond to user stories, which come directly from the customer. The unit tests focus on the inputs and outputs of smaller parts of the system, which are too low level to be of interest to the customer. ATDD generally uses the same tools as TDD.  However, ATDD uses fewer mocks and test doubles than TDD. ATDD often complements TDD; they aren’t competing methods.  A full test suite will usually consist of a large number of unit (created via TDD) tests and a smaller number of acceptance tests. Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) BDD is more about audience than workflow.  BDD pushes the testing realm out towards the client.  Developers, managers and the client all work together to define the tests. Typically different tooling is used for BDD than acceptance and unit testing.  This is done because the audience is not just developers.  Tools using the Gherkin family of languages allow for test scenarios to be described in an English format.  Other tools such as MSpec or FitNesse also strive for highly readable behaviour driven test suites. Because these tests are public facing (viewable by people outside the development team), the terminology usually changes.  You can’t get away with the same technobabble you can with unit tests written in a programming language that only developers understand.  For starters, they usually aren’t called tests.  Usually they’re called “examples”, “behaviours”, “scenarios”, or “specifications”. This may seem like a very subtle difference, but I’ve seen this small terminology change have a huge impact on the acceptance of the process.  Many people have a bias that testing is something that comes at the end of a project.  When you say we need to define the tests at the start of the project many people will immediately give that a lower priority on the project schedule.  But if you say we need to define the specification or behaviour of the system before we can start, you’ll get more cooperation.   Keep these test-first and test-after workflows in your tool belt.  With them you’ll be able to find new opportunities to apply them.

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• Applications: The Mathematics of Movement, Part 2

  - by TechTwaddle

  In part 1 of this series we saw how we can make the marble move towards the click point, with a fixed speed. In this post we’ll see, first, how to get rid of Atan2(), sine() and cosine() in our calculations, and, second, reducing the speed of the marble as it approaches the destination, so it looks like the marble is easing into it’s final position. As I mentioned in one of the previous posts, this is achieved by making the speed of the marble a function of the distance between the marble and the destination point. Getting rid of Atan2(), sine() and cosine() Ok, to be fair we are not exactly getting rid of these trigonometric functions, rather, replacing one form with another. So instead of writing sin(?), we write y/length. You see the point. So instead of using the trig functions as below, double x = destX - marble1.x; double y = destY - marble1.y; //distance between destination and current position, before updating marble position distanceSqrd = x * x + y * y; double angle = Math.Atan2(y, x); //Cos and Sin give us the unit vector, 6 is the value we use to magnify the unit vector along the same direction incrX = speed * Math.Cos(angle); incrY = speed * Math.Sin(angle); marble1.x += incrX; marble1.y += incrY; we use the following, double x = destX - marble1.x; double y = destY - marble1.y; //distance between destination and marble (before updating marble position) lengthSqrd = x * x + y * y; length = Math.Sqrt(lengthSqrd); //unit vector along the same direction as vector(x, y) unitX = x / length; unitY = y / length; //update marble position incrX = speed * unitX; incrY = speed * unitY; marble1.x += incrX; marble1.y += incrY; so we replaced cos(?) with x/length and sin(?) with y/length. The result is the same.   Adding oomph to the way it moves In the last post we had the speed of the marble fixed at 6, double speed = 6; to make the marble decelerate as it moves, we have to keep updating the speed of the marble in every frame such that the speed is calculated as a function of the length. So we may have, speed = length/12; ‘length’ keeps decreasing as the marble moves and so does speed. The Form1_MouseUp() function remains the same as before, here is the UpdatePosition() method, private void UpdatePosition() {     double incrX = 0, incrY = 0;     double lengthSqrd = 0, length = 0, lengthSqrdNew = 0;     double unitX = 0, unitY = 0;     double speed = 0;     double x = destX - marble1.x;     double y = destY - marble1.y;     //distance between destination and marble (before updating marble position)     lengthSqrd = x * x + y * y;     length = Math.Sqrt(lengthSqrd);     //unit vector along the same direction as vector(x, y)     unitX = x / length;     unitY = y / length;     //speed as a function of length     speed = length / 12;     //update marble position     incrX = speed * unitX;     incrY = speed * unitY;     marble1.x += incrX;     marble1.y += incrY;     //check for bounds     if ((int)marble1.x < MinX + marbleWidth / 2)     {         marble1.x = MinX + marbleWidth / 2;     }     else if ((int)marble1.x > (MaxX - marbleWidth / 2))     {         marble1.x = MaxX - marbleWidth / 2;     }     if ((int)marble1.y < MinY + marbleHeight / 2)     {         marble1.y = MinY + marbleHeight / 2;     }     else if ((int)marble1.y > (MaxY - marbleHeight / 2))     {         marble1.y = MaxY - marbleHeight / 2;     }     //distance between destination and marble (after updating marble position)     x = destX - (marble1.x);     y = destY - (marble1.y);     lengthSqrdNew = x * x + y * y;     /*      * End Condition:      * 1. If there is not much difference between lengthSqrd and lengthSqrdNew      * 2. If the marble has moved more than or equal to a distance of totLenToTravel (see Form1_MouseUp)      */     x = startPosX - marble1.x;     y = startPosY - marble1.y;     double totLenTraveledSqrd = x * x + y * y;     if ((int)totLenTraveledSqrd >= (int)totLenToTravelSqrd)     {         System.Console.WriteLine("Stopping because Total Len has been traveled");         timer1.Enabled = false;     }     else if (Math.Abs((int)lengthSqrd - (int)lengthSqrdNew) < 4)     {         System.Console.WriteLine("Stopping because no change in Old and New");         timer1.Enabled = false;     } } A point to note here is that, in this implementation, the marble never stops because it travelled a distance of totLenToTravelSqrd (first if condition). This happens because speed is a function of the length. During the final few frames length becomes very small and so does speed; and so the amount by which the marble shifts is quite small, and the second if condition always hits true first. I’ll end this series with a third post. In part 3 we will cover two things, one, when the user clicks, the marble keeps moving in that direction, rebounding off the screen edges and keeps moving forever. Two, when the user clicks on the screen, the marble moves towards it, with it’s speed reducing by every frame. It doesn’t come to a halt when the destination point is reached, instead, it continues to move, rebounds off the screen edges and slowly comes to halt. The amount of time that the marble keeps moving depends on how far the user clicks from the marble. I had mentioned this second situation here. Finally, here’s a video of this program running,

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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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• Navigation in Win8 Metro Style applications

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  In Windows 8, Touch is, as they say, a first class citizen. Now, to be honest: they also said that in Windows 7. However in Win8 this is actually true. Applications are meant to be used by touch. Yes, you can still use mouse, keyboard and pen and your apps should take that into account but touch is where you should focus on initially. Will all users have touch enabled devices? No, not in the first place. I don’t think touchscreens will be on every device sold next year. But in 5 years? Who knows? Don’t forget: if your app is successful it will be around for a long time and by that time touchscreens will be everywhere. Another reason to embrace touch is that it’s easier to develop a touch-oriented app and then to make sure that keyboard, nouse and pen work as doing it the other way around. Porting a mouse-based application to a touch based application almost never works. The reverse gives you much more chances for success. That being said, there are some things that you need to think about. Most people have more than one finger, while most users only use one mouse at the time. Still, most touch-developers translate their mouse-knowledge to the touch and think they did a good job. Martin Tirion from Microsoft said that since Touch is a new language people face the same challenges they do when learning a new real spoken language. The first thing people try when learning a new language is simply replace the words in their native language to the newly learned words. At first they don’t care about grammar. To a native speaker of that other language this sounds all wrong but they still will be able to understand what the intention was. If you don’t believe me: try Google translate to translate something for you from your language to another and then back and see what happens. The same thing happens with Touch. Most developers translate a mouse-click into a tap-event and think they’re done. Well matey, you’re not done. Not by far. There are things you can do with a mouse that you cannot do with touch. Think hover. A mouse has the ability to ‘slide’ over UI elements. Touch doesn’t (I know: with Pen you can do this but I’m talking about actual fingers here). A touch is either there or it isn’t. And right-click? Forget about it. A click is a click.  Yes, you have more than one finger but the machine doesn’t know which finger you use… The other way around is also true. Like I said: most users only have one mouse but they are likely to have more than one finger. So how do we take that into account? Thinking about this is really worth the time: you might come up with some surprisingly good ideas! Still: don’t forget that not every user has touch-enabled hardware so make sure your app is useable for both groups. Keep this in mind: we’re going to need it later on! Now. Apps should be easy to use. You don’t want your user to read through pages and pages of documentation before they can use the app. Imagine that spotter next to an airfield suddenly seeing a prototype of a Concorde 2 landing on the nearby runway. He probably wants to enter that information in our app NOW and not after he’s taken a 3 day course. Even if he still has to download the app, install it for the first time and then run it he should be on his way immediately. At least, fast enough to note down the details of that unique, rare and possibly exciting sighting he just did. So.. How do we do this? Well, I am not talking about games here. Games are in a league of their own. They fall outside the scope of the apps I am describing. But all the others can roughly be characterized as being one of two flavors: the navigation is either flat or hierarchical. That’s it. And if it’s hierarchical it’s no more than three levels deep. Not more. Your users will get lost otherwise and we don’t want that. Flat is simple. Just imagine we have one screen that is as high as our physical screen is and as wide as you need it to be. Don’t worry if it doesn’t fit on the screen: people can scroll to the right and left. Don’t combine up/down and left/right scrolling: it’s confusing. Next to that, since most users will hold their device in landscape mode it’s very natural to scroll horizontal. So let’s use that when we have a flat model. The same applies to the hierarchical model. Try to have at most three levels. If you need more space, find a way to group the items in such a way that you can fit it in three, very wide lanes. At the highest level we have the so called hub level. This is the entry point of the app and as such it should give the user an immediate feeling of what the app is all about. If your app has categories if items then you might show these categories here. And while you’re at it: also show 2 or 3 of the items itself here to give the user a taste of what lies beneath. If the user selects a category you go to the section part. Here you show several sections (again, go as wide as you need) with again some detail examples. After that: the details layer shows each item. By giving some samples of the underlaying layer you achieve several things: you make the layer attractive by showing several different things, you show some highlights so the user sees actual content and you provide a shortcut to the layers underneath. The image below is borrowed from the http://design.windows.com website which has tons and tons of examples: For our app we’ll use this layout. So what will we show? Well, let’s see what sorts of features our app has to offer. I’ll repeat them here: Note planes Add pictures of that plane Notify friends of new spots Share new spots on social media Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down the runway they take I am sure you can think of some more items but for now we'll use these. In the hub we’ll show something that represents “Spots”, “Friends”, “Social”. Apparently we have an inner list of spotter-friends that are in the app, while we also have to whole world in social. In the layer below we show something else, depending on what the user choose. When they choose “Spots” we’ll display the last spots, last spots by our friends (so we can actually jump from this category to the one next to it) and so on. When they choose a “spot” (or press the + icon in the App bar, which I’ll talk about next time) they go to the lowest and final level that shows details about that spot, including a picture, date and time and the notes belonging to that entry. You’d be amazed at how easy it is to organize your app this way. If you don’t have enough room in these three layers you probably could easily get away with grouping items. Take a look at our hub: we have three completely different things in one place. If you still can’t fit it all in in a logical and consistent way, chances are you are trying to do too much in this app. Go back to your mission statement, determine if it is specific enough and if your feature list helps that statement or makes it unclear. Go ahead. Give it a go! Next time we’ll talk about the look and feel, the charms and the app-bar….

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• Portable class libraries and fetching JSON

  - by Jeff

  After much delay, we finally have the Windows Phone 8 SDK to go along with the Windows 8 Store SDK, or whatever ridiculous name they’re giving it these days. (Seriously… that no one could come up with a suitable replacement for “metro” is disappointing in an otherwise exciting set of product launches.) One of the neat-o things is the potential for code reuse, particularly across Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 apps. This is accomplished in part with portable class libraries, which allow you to share code between different types of projects. With some other techniques and quasi-hacks, you can share some amount of code, and I saw it mentioned in one of the Build videos that they’re seeing as much as 70% code reuse. Not bad. However, I’ve already hit a super annoying snag. It appears that the HttpClient class, with its idiot-proof async goodness, is not included in the Windows Phone 8 class libraries. Shock, gasp, horror, disappointment, etc. The delay in releasing it already caused dismay among developers, and I’m sure this won’t help. So I started refactoring some code I already had for a Windows 8 Store app (ugh) to accommodate the use of HttpWebRequest instead. I haven’t tried it in a Windows Phone 8 project beyond compiling, but it appears to work. I used this StackOverflow answer as a starting point since it’s been a long time since I used HttpWebRequest, and keep in mind that it has no exception handling. It needs refinement. The goal here is to new up the client, and call a method that returns some deserialized JSON objects from the Intertubes. Adding facilities for headers or cookies is probably a good next step. You need to use NuGet for a Json.NET reference. So here’s the start: using System.Net; using System.Threading.Tasks; using Newtonsoft.Json; using System.IO; namespace MahProject {     public class ServiceClient<T> where T : class     {         public ServiceClient(string url)         {             _url = url;         }         private readonly string _url;         public async Task<T> GetResult()         {             var response = await MakeAsyncRequest(_url);             var result = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<T>(response);             return result;         }         public static Task<string> MakeAsyncRequest(string url)         {             var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);             request.ContentType = "application/json";             Task<WebResponse> task = Task.Factory.FromAsync(                 request.BeginGetResponse,                 asyncResult => request.EndGetResponse(asyncResult),                 null);             return task.ContinueWith(t => ReadStreamFromResponse(t.Result));         }         private static string ReadStreamFromResponse(WebResponse response)         {             using (var responseStream = response.GetResponseStream())                 using (var reader = new StreamReader(responseStream))                 {                     var content = reader.ReadToEnd();                     return content;                 }         }     } } Calling it in some kind of repository class may look like this, if you wanted to return an array of Park objects (Park model class omitted because it doesn’t matter): public class ParkRepo {     public async Task<Park[]> GetAllParks()     {         var client = new ServiceClient<Park[]>(http://superfoo/endpoint);         return await client.GetResult();     } } And then from inside your WP8 or W8S app (see what I did there?), when you load state or do some kind of UI event handler (making sure the method uses the async keyword): var parkRepo = new ParkRepo(); var results = await parkRepo.GetAllParks(); // bind results to some UI or observable collection or something Hopefully this saves you a little time.

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• Delight and Excite

  - by Applications User Experience

  Mick McGee, CEO & President, EchoUser Editor’s Note: EchoUser is a User Experience design firm in San Francisco and a member of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Mick and his staff regularly consult on Oracle Applications UX projects. Being part of a user experience design firm, we have the luxury of working with a lot of great people across many great companies. We get to help people solve their problems.  At least we used to. The basic design challenge is still the same; however, the goal is not necessarily to solve “problems” anymore; it is, “I want our products to delight and excite!” The question for us as UX professionals is how to design to those goals, and then how to assess them from a usability perspective. I’m not sure where I first heard “delight and excite” (A book? blog post? Facebook  status? Steve Jobs quote?), but now I hear these listed as user experience goals all the time. In particular, somewhat paradoxically, I routinely hear them in enterprise software conversations. And when asking these same enterprise companies what will make the project successful, we very often hear, “Make it like Apple.” In past days, it was “make it like Yahoo (or Amazon or Google“) but now Apple is the common benchmark. Steve Jobs and Apple were not secrets, but with Jobs’ passing and Apple becoming the world’s most valuable company in the last year, the impact of great design and experience is suddenly very widespread. In particular, users’ expectations have gone way up. Being an enterprise company is no shield to the general expectations that users now have, for all products. Designing a “Minimum Viable Product” The user experience challenge has historically been, to echo the words of Eric Ries (author of Lean Startup) , to create a “minimum viable product”: the proverbial, “make it good enough”. But, in our profession, the “minimum viable” part of that phrase has oftentimes, unfortunately, referred to the design and user experience. Technology typically dominated the focus of the biggest, most successful companies. Few have had the laser focus of Apple to also create and sell design and user experience alongside great technology. But now that Apple is the most valuable company in the world, copying their success is a common undertaking. Great design is now a premium offering that everyone wants, from the one-person startup to the largest companies, consumer and enterprise. This emerging business paradigm will have significant impact across the user experience design process and profession. One area that particularly interests me is, how are we going to evaluate these new emerging “delight and excite” experiences, which are further customized to each particular domain? How to Measure “Delight and Excite” Traditional usability measures of task completion rate, assists, time, and errors are still extremely useful in many situations; however, they are too blunt to offer much insight into emerging experiences “Satisfaction” is usually assessed in user testing, in roughly equivalent importance to the above objective metrics. Various surveys and scales have provided ways to measure satisfying UX, with whatever questions they include. However, to meet the demands of new business goals and keep users at the center of design and development processes, we have to explore new methods to better capture custom-experience goals and emotion-driven user responses. We have had success assessing custom experiences, including “delight and excite”, by employing a variety of user testing methods that tend to combine formative and summative techniques (formative being focused more on identifying usability issues and ways to improve design, and summative focused more on metrics). Our most successful tool has been one we’ve been using for a long time, Magnitude Estimation Technique (MET). But it’s not necessarily about MET as a measure, rather how it is created. Caption: For one client, EchoUser did two rounds of testing.  Each test was a mix of performing representative tasks and gathering qualitative impressions. Each user participated in an in-person moderated 1-on-1 session for 1 hour, using a testing set-up where they held the phone. The primary goal was to identify usability issues and recommend design improvements. MET is based on a definition of the desired experience, which users will then use to rate items of interest (usually tasks in a usability test). In other words, a custom experience definition needs to be created. This can then be used to measure satisfaction in accomplishing tasks; “delight and excite”; or anything else from strategic goals, user demands, or elsewhere. For reference, our standard MET definition in usability testing is: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well designed and productive an interface is to complete tasks.” Articulating the User Experience We’ve helped construct experience definitions for several clients to better match their business goals. One example is a modification of the above that was needed for a company that makes medical-related products: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well-designed, productive and safe an interface is for conducting tasks. ‘Safe’ is how free an environment (including devices, software, facilities, people, etc.) is from danger, risk, and injury.” Another example is from a company that is pushing hard to incorporate “delight” into their enterprise business line: “User experience is your perception of a product’s ease of use and learning, satisfaction and delight in design, and ability to accomplish objectives.” I find the last one particularly compelling in that there is little that identifies the experience as being for a highly technical enterprise application. That definition could easily be applied to any number of consumer products. We have gone further than the above, including “sexy” and “cool” where decision-makers insisted they were part of the desired experience. We also applied it to completely different experiences where the “interface” was, for example, riding public transit, the “tasks” were train rides, and we followed the participants through the train-riding journey and rated various aspects accordingly: “A good public transportation experience is a cost-effective way of reliably, conveniently, and safely getting me to my intended destination on time.” To construct these definitions, we’ve employed both bottom-up and top-down approaches, depending on circumstances. For bottom-up, user inputs help dictate the terms that best fit the desired experience (usually by way of cluster and factor analysis). Top-down depends on strategic, visionary goals expressed by upper management that we then attempt to integrate into product development (e.g., “delight and excite”). We like a combination of both approaches to push the innovation envelope, but still be mindful of current user concerns. Hopefully the idea of crafting your own custom experience, and a way to measure it, can provide you with some ideas how you can adapt your user experience needs to whatever company you are in. Whether product-development or service-oriented, nearly every company is ultimately providing a user experience. The Bottom Line Creating great experiences may have been popularized by Steve Jobs and Apple, but I’ll be honest, it’s a good feeling to be moving from “good enough” to “delight and excite,” despite the challenge that entails. In fact, it’s because of that challenge that we will expand what we do as UX professionals to help deliver and assess those experiences. I’m excited to see how we, Oracle, and the rest of the industry will live up to that challenge.

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• Web browsing is fast, but downloads are slow

  - by Ricket

  I work for a company on my university's campus, helping with general IT problems and some web development. But lately there has been a problem that has me and my boss completely stumped. We, plus one contractor, make up the entire IT department, so I'm reaching out to you for help. All around the office, we have wall jacks. These collect in a closet down the hall and all plug into a switch. This switch, along with our individual server jacks, plugs into another switch, and that switch plugs into our firewall hardware. Then the firewall is connected out to our campus network. Our campus internet is, well, very fast. I don't know exactly the terms, tiers, etc., but we have thousands of students and downloads can run as fast as 10 MB/s at night; uploads are sometimes even faster. I think we're practically ISP level. In short, I have a lot of faith that it is not the campus side of things that is causing a problem, combined with other evidence I'll mention in a moment. So our symptoms: web browsing is fast. Web pages, images, etc. load instantly. No problems there. But then when I go to download something, the download starts fast but very quickly (a matter of seconds) drops to nearly 0. Often it will actually drop to 0 and time out. This happens with even very small files, 1 MB or less. It smells to me like a QoS sort of thing. I'm not entirely sure, and I wanted to get your opinions first. My boss is hesitant to touch our firewall, much less let me touch it, and it was set up and is managed by a consultant remotely. These problems don't seem tied to a time of the day. I've tried downloads after 5:00 and still the same thing happens. From my desk, I can turn on my wireless adapter and pick up the campus wireless access point. If I unplug ethernet and connect to it, downloads are fast. This adds to my suspicion that it's limited to our company network. Also, a number of weeks ago the consultant upgraded our firewall firmware. Suddenly everything was very fast. I tested with downloads from Sun and speedtest.net and things were blazing fast, as they should be with our campus internet! It was wonderful, and I figured the slow speeds were an old firmware bug. In a matter of days, things steadily declined until they were back to the old symptoms. Oh, and we have antivirus installed on every computer, and we keep it up to date. Though I suppose the possibility is still there that someone could have spyware which is bogging down our internet, in which case what is the easiest/best way to find this out? (maybe this should go in a separate question) Thank you for your patience in reading all of this. Do you have any ideas as to what I can try? Is this something that you've experienced before? What sort of tools or methods can I use to try and diagnose the problem? P.S. everything here is Windows. Windows Server 2003 and 2008 on our servers, and Windows XP on employees' machines. Update: We are submitting a ticket to the university to just take a look and see if they see anything unusual and/or can suggestion methods for us to try and pinpoint our problem. Hopefully they'll be helpful! I'll update this to let you know what goes on. Update again: We found a hub (yes, a HUB) right between our campus connection and our firewall. It had only those two ethernet cables plugged into it, nothing else. After removing the hub, our speeds have jumped up to several mbps. However in talking with the campus, we got them to run a gigabit line to our firewall in place of the 100mbps line. As of friday, we are at about 65 mbps up and down (according to speedtest.net at 8am)!! Go NC State!!

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• How to Control Screen Layouts in LightSwitch

  - by ChrisD

  Visual Studio LightSwitch has a bunch of screen templates that you can use to quickly generate screens. They give you good starting points that you can customize further. When you add a new screen to your project you see a set of screen templates that you can choose from. These templates lay out all the related data you choose to put on a screen automatically for you. And don’t under estimate them; they do a great job of laying out controls in a smart way. For instance, a tab control will be used when you select more than one related set of data to display on a screen. However, you’re not limited to taking the layout as is. In fact, the screen designer is pretty flexible and allows you to create stacks of controls in a variety of configurations. You just need to visualize your screen as a series of containers that you can lay out in rows and columns. You then place controls or stacks of controls into these areas to align the screen exactly how you want. If you’re new in Visual Studio LightSwitch, you can see this tutorial. OK, Let’s start with a simple example. I have already designed my data entities for a simple order tracking system similar to the Northwind database. I also have added a Search Data  Screen to search my Products already. Now I will add a new Details Screen for my Products and make it the default screen via the “Add New Screen” dialog: The screen designer picks a simple layout for me based on the single entity I chose, in this case Product. Hit F5 to run the application, select a Product on the search screen to open the Product Details Screen. Notice that it’s pretty simple because my entity is simple. Click the “Customize” button in the top right of the screen so we can start tweaking it. The left side of the screen shows the containership of controls and data bindings (called the content tree) and the right side shows the live preview with data. Notice that we have a simple layout of two rows but only one row is populated (with a vertical stack of controls in this case). The bottom row is empty. You can envision the screen like this: Each container will display a group of data that you select. For instance in the above screen, the top row is set to a vertical stack control and the group of data to display is coming from Product. So when laying out screens you need to think in terms of containers of controls bound to groups of data. To change the data to which a container is bound, select the data item next to the container: You can select the “New Group” item in order to create more containers (or controls) within the current container. For instance to totally control the layout, select the Product in the top row and hit the delete key. This will delete the vertical stack and therefore all the controls on the screen. The content tree will still have two rows, but the rows are now both empty. If you want a layout of four containers (two rows and two columns) then select “New Group” for the data item and then change the vertical stack control to “Two Columns” for both of the rows as shown here: You can keep going on and on by selecting new groups and choosing between rows or columns. Here’s a layout with 8 containers, 4 rows and 2 columns: And here is a layout with 7 content areas; one row across the top of the screen and three rows with two columns below that: When you select Choose Content and select a data item like Product it will populate all the controls within the container (row or column in a vertical stack) however you have complete control on what to display within each group. You can delete fields you don’t want to display and/or change their controls. You can also change the size of controls and how they display by changing the settings in the properties window. If you are in the Screen Designer (and not the customization mode like we are here) you can also drag-drop data items from the left-hand side of the screen to the content tree. Note, however, that not all areas of the tree will allow you to drop a data item if there is a binding already set to a different set of data. For instance you can’t drop a Customer ID into the same group as a Product if they originate from different entities. To get around this, all you need to do is create a new group and content area as shown above. Let’s take a more complex example that deals with more than just product. I want to design a complex screen that displays Products and their Category, as well as all the OrderDetails for which that product is selected. This time I will create a new screen and select List and Details, select the Products screen data, and include the related OrderDetails. However I’m going to totally change the layout so that a Product grid is at the top left and below that is the selected Product detail. Below that will be the Category text fields and image in two columns below. On the right side I want the OrderDetails grid to take up the whole right side of the screen. All this can be done in customization mode while you’re debugging the application. To do this, I first deleted all the content items in the tree and then re-created the content tree as shown in the image below. I also set the image to be larger and the description textbox to be 5 rows using the property window below the live preview. I added the green lines to indicate the containers and show how it maps to the content tree (click to enlarge): I hope this demystifies the screen designer a little bit. Remember that screen templates are excellent starting points – you can take them as-is or customize them further. It takes a little fooling around with customizing screens to get them to do exactly what you want but there are a ton of possibilities once you get the hang of it. Stay tuned for more information on how to create your own screen templates that show up in the “Add New Screen” dialog. Enjoy! The tutorial that might be interested: Adding Custom Control In LightSwitch

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• Data Source Connection Pool Sizing

  - by Steve Felts

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} One of the most time-consuming procedures of a database application is establishing a connection. The connection pooling of the data source can be used to minimize this overhead.  That argues for using the data source instead of accessing the database driver directly. Configuring the size of the pool in the data source is somewhere between an art and science – this article will try to move it closer to science.  From the beginning, WLS data source has had an initial capacity and a maximum capacity configuration values.  When the system starts up and when it shrinks, initial capacity is used.  The pool can grow to maximum capacity.  Customers found that they might want to set the initial capacity to 0 (more on that later) but didn’t want the pool to shrink to 0.  In WLS 10.3.6, we added minimum capacity to specify the lower limit to which a pool will shrink.  If minimum capacity is not set, it defaults to the initial capacity for upward compatibility.   We also did some work on the shrinking in release 10.3.4 to reduce thrashing; the algorithm that used to shrink to the maximum of the currently used connections or the initial capacity (basically the unused connections were all released) was changed to shrink by half of the unused connections. The simple approach to sizing the pool is to set the initial/minimum capacity to the maximum capacity.  Doing this creates all connections at startup, avoiding creating connections on demand and the pool is stable.  However, there are a number of reasons not to take this simple approach. When WLS is booted, the deployment of the data source includes synchronously creating the connections.  The more connections that are configured in initial capacity, the longer the boot time for WLS (there have been several projects for parallel boot in WLS but none that are available).  Related to creating a lot of connections at boot time is the problem of logon storms (the database gets too much work at one time).   WLS has a solution for that by setting the login delay seconds on the pool but that also increases the boot time. There are a number of cases where it is desirable to set the initial capacity to 0.  By doing that, the overhead of creating connections is deferred out of the boot and the database doesn’t need to be available.  An application may not want WLS to automatically connect to the database until it is actually needed, such as for some code/warm failover configurations. There are a number of cases where minimum capacity should be less than maximum capacity.  Connections are generally expensive to keep around.  They cause state to be kept on both the client and the server, and the state on the backend may be heavy (for example, a process).  Depending on the vendor, connection usage may cost money.  If work load is not constant, then database connections can be freed up by shrinking the pool when connections are not in use.  When using Active GridLink, connections can be created as needed according to runtime load balancing (RLB) percentages instead of by connection load balancing (CLB) during data source deployment. Shrinking is an effective technique for clearing the pool when connections are not in use.  In addition to the obvious reason that there times where the workload is lighter,  there are some configurations where the database and/or firewall conspire to make long-unused or too-old connections no longer viable.  There are also some data source features where the connection has state and cannot be used again unless the state matches the request.  Examples of this are identity based pooling where the connection has a particular owner and XA affinity where the connection is associated with a particular RAC node.  At this point, WLS does not re-purpose (discard/replace) connections and shrinking is a way to get rid of the unused existing connection and get a new one with the correct state when needed. So far, the discussion has focused on the relationship of initial, minimum, and maximum capacity.  Computing the maximum size requires some knowledge about the application and the current number of simultaneously active users, web sessions, batch programs, or whatever access patterns are common.  The applications should be written to only reserve and close connections as needed but multiple statements, if needed, should be done in one reservation (don’t get/close more often than necessary).  This means that the size of the pool is likely to be significantly smaller then the number of users.   If possible, you can pick a size and see how it performs under simulated or real load.  There is a high-water mark statistic (ActiveConnectionsHighCount) that tracks the maximum connections concurrently used.  In general, you want the size to be big enough so that you never run out of connections but no bigger.   It will need to deal with spikes in usage, which is where shrinking after the spike is important.  Of course, the database capacity also has a big influence on the decision since it’s important not to overload the database machine.  Planning also needs to happen if you are running in a Multi-Data Source or Active GridLink configuration and expect that the remaining nodes will take over the connections when one of the nodes in the cluster goes down.  For XA affinity, additional headroom is also recommended.  In summary, setting initial and maximum capacity to be the same may be simple but there are many other factors that may be important in making the decision about sizing.

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• Clouds Everywhere But not a Drop of Rain – Part 3

  - by sxkumar

  I was sharing with you how a broad-based transformation such as cloud will increase agility and efficiency of an organization if process re-engineering is part of the plan.  I have also stressed on the key enterprise requirements such as “broad and deep solutions, “running your mission critical applications” and “automated and integrated set of capabilities”. Let me walk you through some key cloud attributes such as “elasticity” and “self-service” and what they mean for an enterprise class cloud. I will also talk about how we at Oracle have taken a very enterprise centric view to developing cloud solutions and how our products have been specifically engineered to address enterprise cloud needs. Cloud Elasticity and Enterprise Applications Requirements Easy and quick scalability for a short-period of time is the signature of cloud based solutions. It is this elasticity that allows you to dynamically redistribute your resources according to business priorities, helps increase your overall resource utilization, and reduces operational costs by allowing you to get the most out of your existing investment. Most public clouds are offering a instant provisioning mechanism of compute power (CPU, RAM, Disk), customer pay for the instance-hours(and bandwidth) they use, adding computing resources at peak times and removing them when they are no longer needed. This type of “just-in-time” serving of compute resources is well known for mid-tiers “state less” servers such as web application servers and web servers that just need another machine to start and run on it but what does it really mean for an enterprise application and its underlying data? Most enterprise applications are not as quite as “state less” and justifiably so. As such, how do you take advantage of cloud elasticity and make it relevant for your enterprise apps? This is where Cloud meets Grid Computing. At Oracle, we have invested enormous amount of time, energy and resources in creating enterprise grid solutions. All our technology products offer built-in elasticity via clustering and dynamic scaling. With products like Real Application Clusters (RAC), Automatic Storage Management, WebLogic Clustering, and Coherence In-Memory Grid, we allow all your enterprise applications to benefit from Cloud elasticity –both vertically and horizontally - without requiring any application changes. A number of technology vendors take a rather simplistic route of starting up additional or removing unneeded VM as the "Cloud Scale-Out" solution. While this may work for stateless mid-tier servers where load balancers can handle the addition and remove of instances transparently but following a similar approach for the database tier - often called as "database sharding" - requires significant application modification and typically does not work with off the shelf packaged applications. Technologies like Oracle Database Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, etc. on the other hand bring the benefits of incremental scalability and on-demand elasticity to ANY application by providing a simplified abstraction layers where the application does not need deal with data spread over multiple database instances. Rather they just talk to a single database and the database software takes care of aggregating resources across multiple hardware components. It is the technologies like these that truly make a cloud solution relevant for enterprises.  For customers who are looking for a next generation hardware consolidation platform, our engineered systems (e.g. Exadata, Exalogic) not only provide incredible amount of performance and capacity, they also reduce the data center complexity and simplify operations. Assemble, Deploy and Manage Enterprise Applications for Cloud Products like Oracle Virtual assembly builder (OVAB) resolve the complex problem of bringing the cloud speed to complex multi-tier applications. With assemblies, you can not only provision all components of a multi-tier application and wire them together by push of a button, other aspects of application lifecycle, such as real-time application testing, scale-up/scale-down, performance and availability monitoring, etc., are also automated using Oracle Enterprise Manager.  An essential criteria for an enterprise cloud to succeed is the ability to ensure business service levels especially when business users have either full visibility on the usage cost with a “show back” or a “charge back”. With Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, we have created the most comprehensive cloud management solution in the industry that is capable of managing business service levels “applications-to-disk” in a enterprise private cloud – all from a single console. It is the only cloud management platform in the industry that allows you to deliver infrastructure, platform and application cloud services out of the box. Moreover, it offers integrated and complete lifecycle management of the cloud - including planning and set up, service delivery, operations management, metering and chargeback, etc .  Sounds unbelievable? Well, just watch this space for more details on how Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is the nerve center of Oracle Cloud! Our cloud solution portfolio is also the broadest and most deep in the industry  - covering public, private, hybrid, Infrastructure, platform and applications clouds. It is no coincidence therefore that the Oracle Cloud today offers the most comprehensive set of public cloud services in the industry.  And to a large part, this has been made possible thanks to our years on investment in creating cloud enabling technologies.  Summary  But the intent of this blog post isn't to dwell on how great our solutions are (these are just some examples to illustrate how we at Oracle have approached this problem space). Rather it is to help you ask the right questions before you embark on your cloud journey.  So to summarize, here are the key takeaways.       It is critical that you are clear on why you are building the cloud. Successful organizations keep business benefits as the first and foremost cloud objective. On the other hand, those who approach this purely as a technology project are more likely to fail. Think about where you want to be in 3-5 years before you get started. Your long terms objectives should determine what your first step ought to be. As obvious as it may seem, more people than not make the first move without knowing where they are headed.  Don’t make the mistake of equating cloud to virtualization and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Spinning a VM on-demand will give some short term relief to your IT staff but is unlikely to solve your larger business problems. As such, even if IaaS is your first step towards a more comprehensive cloud, plan the roadmap around those higher level services before you begin. And ask your vendors on how they are going to be your partners in this journey. Capabilities like self-service access and chargeback/showback are absolutely critical if you really expect your cloud to be transformational. Your business won't see the full benefits of the cloud until it empowers them with same kind of control and transparency that they are used to while using a public cloud service.  Evaluate the benefits of integration, as opposed to blindly following the best-of-breed strategy. Integration is a huge challenge and more so in a cloud environment. There are enormous costs associated with stitching a solution out of disparate components and even more in maintaining it. Hope you found these ideas helpful. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences.

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• Towards Ultra-Reusability for ADF - Adaptive Bindings

  - by Duncan Mills

  The task flow mechanism embodies one of the key value propositions of the ADF Framework, it's primary contribution being the componentization of your applications and implicitly the introduction of a re-use culture, particularly in large applications. However, what if we could do more? How could we make task flows even more re-usable than they are today? Well one great technique is to take advantage of a feature that is already present in the framework, a feature which I will call, for want of a better name, "adaptive bindings". What's an adaptive binding? well consider a simple use case.  I have several screens within my application which display tabular data which are all essentially identical, the only difference is that they happen to be based on different data collections (View Objects, Bean collections, whatever) , and have a different set of columns. Apart from that, however, they happen to be identical; same toolbar, same key functions and so on. So wouldn't it be nice if I could have a single parametrized task flow to represent that type of UI and reuse it? Hold on you say, great idea, however, to do that we'd run into problems. Each different collection that I want to display needs different entries in the pageDef file and: I want to continue to use the ADF Bindings mechanism rather than dropping back to passing the whole collection into the taskflow   If I do use bindings, there is no way I want to have to declare iterators and tree bindings for every possible collection that I might want the flow to handle  Ah, joy! I reply, no need to panic, you can just use adaptive bindings. Defining an Adaptive Binding  It's easiest to explain with a simple before and after use case.  Here's a basic pageDef definition for our familiar Departments table.  <executables> <iterator Binds="DepartmentsView1" DataControl="HRAppModuleDataControl" RangeSize="25"             id="DepartmentsView1Iterator"/> </executables> <bindings> <tree IterBinding="DepartmentsView1Iterator" id="DepartmentsView1">   <nodeDefinition DefName="oracle.demo.model.vo.DepartmentsView" Name="DepartmentsView10">     <AttrNames>       <Item Value="DepartmentId"/>         <Item Value="DepartmentName"/>         <Item Value="ManagerId"/>         <Item Value="LocationId"/>       </AttrNames>     </nodeDefinition> </tree> </bindings>  Here's the adaptive version: <executables> <iterator Binds="${pageFlowScope.voName}" DataControl="HRAppModuleDataControl" RangeSize="25"             id="TableSourceIterator"/> </executables> <bindings> <tree IterBinding="TableSourceIterator" id="GenericView"> <nodeDefinition Name="GenericViewNode"/> </tree> </bindings>  You'll notice three changes here.   Most importantly, you'll see that the hard-coded View Object name  that formally populated the iterator Binds attribute is gone and has been replaced by an expression (${pageFlowScope.voName}). This of course, is key, you can see that we can pass a parameter to the task flow, telling it exactly what VO to instantiate to populate this table! I've changed the IDs of the iterator and the tree binding, simply to reflect that they are now re-usable The tree binding itself has simplified and the node definition is now empty.  Now what this effectively means is that the #{node} map exposed through the tree binding will expose every attribute of the underlying iterator's collection - neat! (kudos to Eugene Fedorenko at this point who reminded me that this was even possible in his excellent "deep dive" session at OpenWorld  this year) Using the adaptive binding in the UI Now we have a parametrized  binding we have to make changes in the UI as well, first of all to reflect the new ID that we've assigned to the binding (of course) but also to change the column list from being a fixed known list to being a generic metadata driven set: <af:table value="#{bindings.GenericView.collectionModel}" rows="#{bindings.GenericView.rangeSize}"         fetchSize="#{bindings.GenericView.rangeSize}"           emptyText="#{bindings.GenericView.viewable ? 'No data to display.' : 'Access Denied.'}"           var="row" rowBandingInterval="0"           selectedRowKeys="#{bindings.GenericView.collectionModel.selectedRow}"           selectionListener="#{bindings.GenericView.collectionModel.makeCurrent}"           rowSelection="single" id="t1"> <af:forEach items="#{bindings.GenericView.attributeDefs}" var="def">   <af:column headerText="#{bindings.GenericView.labels[def.name]}" sortable="true"            sortProperty="#{def.name}" id="c1">     <af:outputText value="#{row[def.name]}" id="ot1"/>     </af:column>   </af:forEach> </af:table> Of course you are not constrained to a simple read only table here.  It's a normal tree binding and iterator that you are using behind the scenes so you can do all the usual things, but you can see the value of using ADFBC as the back end model as you have the rich pantheon of UI hints to use to derive things like labels (and validators and converters...)  One Final Twist  To finish on a high note I wanted to point out that you can take this even further and achieve the ultra-reusability I promised. Here's the new version of the pageDef iterator, see if you can notice the subtle change? <iterator Binds="{pageFlowScope.voName}"  DataControl="${pageFlowScope.dataControlName}" RangeSize="25"           id="TableSourceIterator"/>  Yes, as well as parametrizing the collection (VO) name, we can also parametrize the name of the data control. So your task flow can graduate from being re-usable within an application to being truly generic. So if you have some really common patterns within your app you can wrap them up and reuse then across multiple developments without having to dictate data control names, or connection names. This also demonstrates the importance of interacting with data only via the binding layer APIs. If you keep any code in the task flow generic in that way you can deal with data from multiple types of data controls, not just one flavour. Enjoy!

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• How to add addtional disks to a Windows 2008 KVM based Guest?

  - by taazaa

  I have a Win 2008 KVM based guest VM running on a Ubuntu 10 host. It is a raw image of 22G. I want to add a "data" drive which would show up as "D:\" drive on the guest. I first created a raw image using: qemu-img create -f raw ~/vmdisk2.img 50G Then, tried attaching it using virsh attach-disk. When that did not work, I tried editing the xml file of the VM directly. Both did not seem to work. I would greatly appreciate any help on how to do this and what the best practice is. I want to keep the base image small, so that I can clone it (hopefully) and then attach necessary storage based on the application at hand. Update: The xml of the vm before adding the second drive: <domain type='kvm'> <name>win08e-vm1</name> <uuid>183a4ba0-1c0b-0b04-ad01-aa7c3a4cb390</uuid> <memory>1048576</memory> <currentMemory>1048576</currentMemory> <vcpu>2</vcpu> <os> <type arch='x86_64' machine='pc-0.12'>hvm</type> <boot dev='hd'/> </os> <features> <acpi/> <apic/> <pae/> </features> <clock offset='localtime'/> <on_poweroff>destroy</on_poweroff> <on_reboot>restart</on_reboot> <on_crash>restart</on_crash> <devices> <emulator>/usr/bin/kvm</emulator> <disk type='file' device='disk'> <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/> <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/win08e-vm1.img'/> <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/> <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' unit='0'/> </disk> <disk type='file' device='cdrom'> <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/> <source file='/home/taazaa/iso/Win08ER264.iso'/> <target dev='hdc' bus='ide'/> <readonly/> <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='1' unit='0'/> </disk> <controller type='ide' index='0'> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x1'/> </controller> <interface type='bridge'> <mac address='52:54:00:7f:a7:ae'/> <source bridge='br0'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x03' function='0x0'/> </interface> <serial type='pty'> <target port='0'/> </serial> <console type='pty'> <target type='serial' port='0'/> </console> <input type='tablet' bus='usb'/> <input type='mouse' bus='ps2'/> <graphics type='vnc' port='-1' autoport='yes' keymap='en-us'/> <video> <model type='vga' vram='9216' heads='1'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x0'/> </video> <memballoon model='virtio'> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x04' function='0x0'/> </memballoon> </devices> </domain> Thanks!

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• Why are my USB 2.0 devices crashing Windows XP?

  - by BenAlabaster

  Background on the machine I'm having a problem with: The machine was inherited and appears to be circa 2003 (there's a date stamp on the power supply which leads me to this conclusion). I've got it set up as a Skype terminal for my 2 year old to keep in touch with her grandparents and other members of the family - which everyone loves. It has a generic ATX motherboard with no identifying markings other than one stamp that says "Rev.B". CPU-Z identifies the motherboard model as VT8601 but doesn't provide me with any manufacturer name. On board it has 1 x 10/100 LAN, 2 x USB 1.0, VGA, PS/2 for KB and mouse, parallel port, 2 x serial ports, 2 x IDE, 1 x floppy, 2 x SDRAM slots, 1 x CPU housing that is seating a 1.3GHz Intel Celeron CPU, 3 x PCI, 1 x AGP - although you can only use 2 of the PCI slots if you use the AGP slot due to the physical layout of the board. It's got 768Mb PC133 SDRAM - 1 x 512Mb & 1 x 256Mb installed as well as a D-LINK WDA-2320 54G Wi-Fi network card and a generic USB 2.0 expansion board containing 3 x external + 1 x internal USB connectors. It has a DVD+/-RW running as master on IDE1 and a 1.44Mb 3.5" floppy drive connected to the floppy connector. It has an 80Gb Western Digital hard drive running as master on IDE0. All this is sitting in a slimline case. I don't know the wattage of the PSU, but can post this later if this proves to be helpful. The motherboard is running a version of Award BIOS for which I don't have the version number to hand but can again post this later if it would be helpful. The hard disk is freshly formatted and built with Windows XP Professional/Service Pack 3 and is up to date with all current patches. In addition to Windows XP, the only other software it's running is Skype 4.1 (4.2 hangs the whole machine as soon as it starts up, requiring a hard boot to recover). It's got a Daytek MV150 15" touch screen hooked up to the on board VGA and COM1 sockets with the most current drivers from the Daytek website and the most current version of ELO-Touchsystems drivers for the touch component. The webcam is a Logitech Webcam C200 with the latest drivers from the Logitech website. The problem: If I hook any devices to the USB 2.0 sockets, it hangs the whole machine and I have to hard boot it to get it back up. If I have any devices attached to the USB 2.0 sockets when I boot up, it hangs before Windows gets to the login prompt and I have to hard boot it to recover. Workarounds found: I can plug the same devices into the on board USB 1.0 sockets and everything works fine, albeit at reduced performance. I've tried 3 different kinds of USB thumb drives, 3 different makes/models of webcams and my iPhone all with the same effect. They're recognized and don't hang the machine when I hook them to the USB 1.0 but if I hook them to the USB 2.0 ports, the machine hangs within a couple of seconds of recognizing the devices were connected. Attempted solutions: I've seen suggestions that this could be a power problem - that the PSU just doesn't have the wattage to drive these ports. While I'm doubtful this is the problem [after all the motherboard has the same standard connector regardless of the PSU wattage], I tried disabling all the on board devices that I'm not using - on board LAN, the second COM port, the AGP connector etc. through the BIOS in what I'm sure is a futile attempt to reduce the power consumption... I also modified the ACPI and power management settings. It didn't have any noticeable affect, although it didn't do any harm either. Could the wattage of the PSU really cause this problem? If it can, is there anything I need to be aware of when replacing it or do I just need to make sure it's got a higher wattage than the current one? My interpretation was that the wattage only affected the number of drives you could hook up to the power connectors, is that right? I've installed the USB card in another machine and it works without issue, so it's not a problem with the USB card itself, and Windows says the card is installed and working correctly... right up until I connect a device to it. The only thing I haven't done which I only just thought of while writing this essay is trying the USB 2.0 card in a different PCI slot, or re-ordering the wi-fi and USB cards in the slots... although I'm not sure if this will make any difference - does anyone have any experience that would suggest this might work? Other thoughts/questions: Perhaps this is an incompatibility between the USB 2.0 card and the BIOS, would re-flashing the BIOS with a newer version help? Do I need to be able to identify the manufacturer of the motherboard in order to be able to find a BIOS edition specific for this motherboard or will any version of Award BIOS function in its place? Question: Does anyone have any ideas that could help me get my USB 2.0 devices hooked up to this machine?

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• OpenVPN (HideMyAss) client on Ubuntu: Route only HTTP traffic

  - by Andersmith

  I want to use HideMyAss VPN (hidemyass.com) on Ubuntu Linux to route only HTTP (ports 80 & 443) traffic to the HideMyAss VPN server, and leave all the other traffic (MySQL, SSH, etc.) alone. I'm running Ubuntu on AWS EC2 instances. The problem is that when I try and run the default HMA script, I suddenly can't SSH into the Ubuntu instance anymore and have to reboot it from the AWS console. I suspect the Ubuntu instance will also have trouble connecting to the RDS MySQL database, but haven't confirmed it. HMA uses OpenVPN like this: sudo openvpn client.cfg The client configuration file (client.cfg) looks like this: ############################################## # Sample client-side OpenVPN 2.0 config file # # for connecting to multi-client server. # # # # This configuration can be used by multiple # # clients, however each client should have # # its own cert and key files. # # # # On Windows, you might want to rename this # # file so it has a .ovpn extension # ############################################## # Specify that we are a client and that we # will be pulling certain config file directives # from the server. client auth-user-pass #management-query-passwords #management-hold # Disable management port for debugging port issues #management 127.0.0.1 13010 ping 5 ping-exit 30 # Use the same setting as you are using on # the server. # On most systems, the VPN will not function # unless you partially or fully disable # the firewall for the TUN/TAP interface. #;dev tap dev tun # Windows needs the TAP-Win32 adapter name # from the Network Connections panel # if you have more than one. On XP SP2, # you may need to disable the firewall # for the TAP adapter. ;dev-node MyTap # Are we connecting to a TCP or # UDP server? Use the same setting as # on the server. proto tcp ;proto udp # The hostname/IP and port of the server. # You can have multiple remote entries # to load balance between the servers. # All VPN Servers are added at the very end ;remote my-server-2 1194 # Choose a random host from the remote # list for load-balancing. Otherwise # try hosts in the order specified. # We order the hosts according to number of connections. # So no need to randomize the list # remote-random # Keep trying indefinitely to resolve the # host name of the OpenVPN server. Very useful # on machines which are not permanently connected # to the internet such as laptops. resolv-retry infinite # Most clients don't need to bind to # a specific local port number. nobind # Downgrade privileges after initialization (non-Windows only) ;user nobody ;group nobody # Try to preserve some state across restarts. persist-key persist-tun # If you are connecting through an # HTTP proxy to reach the actual OpenVPN # server, put the proxy server/IP and # port number here. See the man page # if your proxy server requires # authentication. ;http-proxy-retry # retry on connection failures ;http-proxy [proxy server] [proxy port #] # Wireless networks often produce a lot # of duplicate packets. Set this flag # to silence duplicate packet warnings. ;mute-replay-warnings # SSL/TLS parms. # See the server config file for more # description. It's best to use # a separate .crt/.key file pair # for each client. A single ca # file can be used for all clients. ca ./keys/ca.crt cert ./keys/hmauser.crt key ./keys/hmauser.key # Verify server certificate by checking # that the certicate has the nsCertType # field set to "server". This is an # important precaution to protect against # a potential attack discussed here: # http://openvpn.net/howto.html#mitm # # To use this feature, you will need to generate # your server certificates with the nsCertType # field set to "server". The build-key-server # script in the easy-rsa folder will do this. ;ns-cert-type server # If a tls-auth key is used on the server # then every client must also have the key. ;tls-auth ta.key 1 # Select a cryptographic cipher. # If the cipher option is used on the server # then you must also specify it here. ;cipher x # Enable compression on the VPN link. # Don't enable this unless it is also # enabled in the server config file. #comp-lzo # Set log file verbosity. verb 3 # Silence repeating messages ;mute 20 # Detect proxy auto matically #auto-proxy # Need this for Vista connection issue route-metric 1 # Get rid of the cached password warning #auth-nocache #show-net-up #dhcp-renew #dhcp-release #route-delay 0 120 # added to prevent MITM attack ns-cert-type server # # Remote servers added dynamically by the master server # DO NOT CHANGE below this line # remote-random remote 173.242.116.200 443 # 0 remote 38.121.77.74 443 # 0 # etc... remote 67.23.177.5 443 # 0 remote 46.19.136.130 443 # 0 remote 173.254.207.2 443 # 0 # END

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• GitLab on a fresh Ubuntu 13 EC2 instance

  - by Polly

  I've spun up a fresh Amazon EC2 instance for a micro Ubuntu 13 server to be used as a GitLab server. I know the specs are a little low, but it should serve well for my purposes. It has an elastic (static) IP address that I have created an A record for git.mydomain.com. The first thing I did to the instance was add 1GB of swap to keep it happy from a memory perspective. I then set the hostname of the box to be git.mydomain.com and followed https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/6-2-stable/doc/install/installation.md to the letter. Everything seems to have worked, except for the web server side of things. Doing a gitlab:check shows the following: Checking Environment ... Git configured for git user? ... yes Has python2? ... yes python2 is supported version? ... yes Checking Environment ... Finished Checking GitLab Shell ... GitLab Shell version >= 1.7.4 ? ... OK (1.7.4) Repo base directory exists? ... yes Repo base directory is a symlink? ... no Repo base owned by git:git? ... yes Repo base access is drwxrws---? ... yes update hook up-to-date? ... yes update hooks in repos are links: ... can't check, you have no projects Running /home/git/gitlab-shell/bin/check Check GitLab API access: /usr/local/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/http.rb:878:in `initialize': Connection refused - connect(2) (Errno::ECONNREFUSED) from /usr/local/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/http.rb:878:in `open' from /usr/local/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/http.rb:878:in `block in connect' from /usr/local/lib/ruby/2.0.0/timeout.rb:52:in `timeout' from /usr/local/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/http.rb:877:in `connect' from /usr/local/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/http.rb:862:in `do_start' from /usr/local/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/http.rb:851:in `start' from /home/git/gitlab-shell/lib/gitlab_net.rb:62:in `get' from /home/git/gitlab-shell/lib/gitlab_net.rb:29:in `check' from /home/git/gitlab-shell/bin/check:11:in `<main>' gitlab-shell self-check failed Try fixing it: Make sure GitLab is running; Check the gitlab-shell configuration file: sudo -u git -H editor /home/git/gitlab-shell/config.yml Please fix the error above and rerun the checks. Checking GitLab Shell ... Finished Checking Sidekiq ... Running? ... yes Number of Sidekiq processes ... 1 Checking Sidekiq ... Finished Checking GitLab ... Database config exists? ... yes Database is SQLite ... no All migrations up? ... yes GitLab config exists? ... yes GitLab config outdated? ... no Log directory writable? ... yes Tmp directory writable? ... yes Init script exists? ... yes Init script up-to-date? ... yes projects have namespace: ... can't check, you have no projects Projects have satellites? ... can't check, you have no projects Redis version >= 2.0.0? ... yes Your git bin path is "/usr/bin/git" Git version >= 1.7.10 ? ... yes (1.8.3) Checking GitLab ... Finished It seems like I'm very nearly there. Searching on this error I have only found advice that unfortunately hasn't helped. I'm not using any kind of SSL setup, which a lot of the posts I found were about. I have tried appending 127.0.0.1 git.mydomain.com to /etc/hosts and giving the instance a reboot but there was no change. My config/gitlab.yml file has host: git.mydomain.com in it, and my gitlab-shell/config.yml has gitlab_url: "http://git.mydomain.com/" in it. I'm sure I'm missing something simple, but I've been through every relevant link I can find and have had no positive results; thank you in advance for any help!

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• Why are my USB 2.0 devices hanging Windows XP?

  - by BenAlabaster

  Background on the machine I'm having a problem with: The machine was inherited and appears to be circa 2003 (there's a date stamp on the power supply which leads me to this conclusion). I've got it set up as a Skype terminal for my 2 year old to keep in touch with her grandparents and other members of the family - which everyone loves. It has a generic ATX motherboard with no identifying markings other than one stamp that says "Rev.B". CPU-Z identifies the motherboard model as VT8601 but doesn't provide me with any manufacturer name. On board it has 1 x 10/100 LAN, 2 x USB 1.0, VGA, PS/2 for KB and mouse, parallel port, 2 x serial ports, 2 x IDE, 1 x floppy, 2 x SDRAM slots, 1 x CPU housing that is seating a 1.3GHz Intel Celeron CPU, 3 x PCI, 1 x AGP - although you can only use 2 of the PCI slots if you use the AGP slot due to the physical layout of the board. It's got 768Mb PC133 SDRAM - 1 x 512Mb & 1 x 256Mb installed as well as a D-LINK WDA-2320 54G Wi-Fi network card and a generic USB 2.0 expansion board containing 3 x external + 1 x internal USB connectors - it has a NEC uPD720102 chipset. It has a DVD+/-RW running as master on IDE1 and a 1.44Mb 3.5" floppy drive connected to the floppy connector. It has an 80Gb Western Digital hard drive running as master on IDE0. All this is sitting in a slimline case. I don't know the wattage of the PSU, but can post this later if this proves to be helpful. The motherboard is running a version of Award BIOS for which I don't have the version number to hand but can again post this later if it would be helpful. The hard disk is freshly formatted and built with Windows XP Professional/Service Pack 3 and is up to date with all current patches. In addition to Windows XP, the only other software it's running is Skype 4.1 (4.2 hangs the whole machine as soon as it starts up, requiring a hard boot to recover). It's got a Daytek MV150 15" touch screen hooked up to the on board VGA and COM1 sockets with the most current drivers from the Daytek website and the most current version of ELO-Touchsystems drivers for the touch component. The webcam is a Logitech Webcam C200 with the latest drivers from the Logitech website. The problem: If I hook any devices to the USB 2.0 sockets, it hangs the whole machine and I have to hard boot it to get it back up. If I have any devices attached to the USB 2.0 sockets when I boot up, it hangs before Windows gets to the login prompt and I have to hard boot it to recover. Workarounds found: I can plug the same devices into the on board USB 1.0 sockets and everything works fine, albeit at reduced performance. I've tried 3 different kinds of USB thumb drives, 3 different makes/models of webcams and my iPhone all with the same effect. They're recognized and don't hang the machine when I hook them to the USB 1.0 but if I hook them to the USB 2.0 ports, the machine hangs within a couple of seconds of recognizing the devices were connected. Attempted solutions: I've seen suggestions that this could be a power problem - that the PSU just doesn't have the wattage to drive these ports. While I'm doubtful this is the problem [after all the motherboard has the same standard connector regardless of the PSU wattage], I tried disabling all the on board devices that I'm not using - on board LAN, the second COM port, the AGP connector etc. through the BIOS in what I'm sure is a futile attempt to reduce the power consumption... I also modified the ACPI and power management settings. It didn't have any noticeable affect, although it didn't do any harm either. Could the wattage of the PSU really cause this problem? If it can, is there anything I need to be aware of when replacing it or do I just need to make sure it's got a higher wattage than the current one? My interpretation was that the wattage only affected the number of drives you could hook up to the power connectors, is that right? I've installed the USB card in another machine and it works without issue, so it's not a problem with the USB card itself, and Windows says the card is installed and working correctly... right up until I connect a device to it. The only thing I haven't done which I only just thought of while writing this essay is trying the USB 2.0 card in a different PCI slot, or re-ordering the wi-fi and USB cards in the slots... although I'm not sure if this will make any difference - does anyone have any experience that would suggest this might work? Other thoughts/questions: Perhaps this is an incompatibility between the USB 2.0 card and the BIOS, would re-flashing the BIOS with a newer version help? Do I need to be able to identify the manufacturer of the motherboard in order to be able to find a BIOS edition specific for this motherboard or will any version of Award BIOS function in its place? Question: Does anyone have any ideas that could help me get my USB 2.0 devices hooked up to this machine? Edit: Updated the USB 2.0 info with reference to actual card - http://www.xpcgear.com/lpnec4u.html

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