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• Bring Office 2003 Menus Back to 2010 with UBitMenu

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you having trouble getting used to the Ribbon interface in Office 2010?  Here’s how you can roll back the clock a bit and bring back the familiar menus and toolbars from 2003. The Office 2007 Ribbon was both praised and criticized.  While many users felt they were more productive with the new interface, others felt frustrated searching for commands they had memorized in older versions of Office.  Now, with Office 2010, the ribbon interface has been brought to every app in the Office suite, and is integrated into many newer programs from Microsoft. If you’re moving from Office 2003, using UBitMenu allows you to add the old familiar menus back along with the new Ribbon interface for an easier learning curve. Also, with the customizability of Office 2010, we can strip away the extra Ribbon tabs to make it more like 2003. Get the 2003 Menus and Toolbars Back in Office 2010 Download UBitMenu (link below), and install as normal.  Make sure all of your Office programs are closed during the installation.  This handy utility is very small, and installed amazingly quick. Open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint and there’s now a new Menu tab beside Home in the Ribbon.  Now you can access all of your favorite old Office commands in the familiar menus, and access many of the newer Office features such as SmartArt.   Here’s a close-up of the toolbar.  Notice that the layout is very similar to that of Word 2003. You can access all of the new Transitions in PowerPoint 2010 from the menu bar.   The menu in Excel even included support for the new PivotTable and PivotCharts Wizard. One problem we noticed was that the toolbars were condensed to a drop-down menu if the Office window was less than 870px wide.  This may be a frustration to users with low-resolution displays, and you might want to use the Office Apps maximized. Get Rid of the Ribbon Now that you’ve got the old menus back, you can get rid of the extra ribbon tabs if you’d like.  Office 2010 lets you customize your ribbon and remove tabs, so let’s get rid of all the other tabs except for our new Menu tab.  In our example we’re using Word, but you can do it in Excel or PowerPoint the same way. Click the File tab and select Options. Alternately, in the Menu tab, select Tools and then Word Options. Select Customize Ribbon on the left sidebar, then uncheck the boxes beside all the ribbon tabs you want to hide on the right.  Click Ok when you’re finished. While you’re at it, you can change the default color scheme as well. Note: The color change will automatically change the color scheme in all of the Office apps, so you’ll only need to do that once. Now the ribbon only has 2 tabs…the File tab for the new Backstage View, and the UBitMenu tab we just installed.  It almost has the appearance Word 2003, but with the new features of Word 2010!  You’ll need to repeat these steps in Excel and PowerPoint if you want to customize their ribbon the same.   Conclusion If you’ve been having a hard time getting used to Office 2010, UBitMenu is a great way to get familiar with the new interface, or simply stay productive with your old tricks.  We do wish it supported the other Office applications like OneNote and Outlook. That doesn’t make it a deal breaker though, it can make the learning curve easier in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. UBitMenu is free for personal use, and available at a very reasonable price for businesses. If you’re using Office 2007 and not a fan of the Ribbon, UBitMenu works for it as well. Download UBitMenu Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Bring Back the Old Menus in Office 2007Upgrade Office 2003 to 2010 on XP or Run them Side by SideHow to Find Office 2003 Commands in Office 2010Make Word 2007 Always Save in Word 2003 FormatMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Speed Up Windows With ReadyBoost Awesome World Cup Soccer Calendar Nice Websites To Watch TV Shows Online 24 Million Sites Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets

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• Superpower Your Touchpad Computer with Scrybe

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you looking for a way to help your Touchpad computer make you more productive?  Here’s a quick look at Scrybe, a new application from Synaptics that lets you superpower it. Touchpad devices have become increasingly more interesting as they’ve included support for multi-touch gestures.  Scrybe takes it to the next level and lets you use your touchpad as an application launcher.  You can launch any application, website, or complete many common commands on your computer with a simple gesture.  Scrybe works with most modern Synaptics touchpads, which are standard on most laptops and netbooks.  It is optimized for newer multi-touch touchpads, but can also work with standard single-touch touchpads.  It works on Windows 7, Vista, and XP, so chances are it will work with your laptop or netbook. Get Started With Scrybe Head over to the Scrybe website and download the latest version (link below).  You are asked to enter your email address, name, and information about your computer…but you actually only have to enter your email address.  Click Download when finished. Run the installer when it’s download.  It will automatically download the latest Synaptics driver for your touchpad and any other components needed for Scrybe.  Note that the Scrybe installer will ask to install the Yahoo! toolbar, so uncheck this to avoid adding this worthless browser toolbar. Using Scrybe To open an application or website with a gesture, press 3 fingers on your touchpad at once, or if your touchpad doesn’t support multi-touch gestures, then press Ctrl+Alt and press 1 finger on your touchpad.  This will open the Scrype input pane; start drawing a gesture, and you’ll see it on the grey square.  The input pane shows some default gestures you can try. Here we drew an “M”, which opens our default Music player.  As soon as you finish the gesture and lift up your finger, Scrybe will open the application or website you selected. A notification balloon will let you know what gesture was preformed. When you’re entering your gesture, the input pane will show white “ink”.  The “ink” will turn blue if the command is recognized, but will turn red if it isn’t.  If Scrybe doesn’t recognize your command, press 3 fingers and try again. Scrybe Control Panel You can open the Scrybe Control panel to enter or change commands by entering a box-like gesture, or right-clicking the Scrybe icon in your system tray and selecting “Scrybe Control Panel”. Scrybe has many pre-configured gestures that you can preview and even practice. All of the gestures in the Popular tab are preset and cannot be changed.  However, the ones in the favorites tab can be edited.  Select the gesture you wish to edit, and click the gear icon to change it.  Here we changed the email gesture to open Hotmail instead of the default Yahoo Mail. Scrybe can also help you perform many common Windows commands such as Copy and Undo.  Select the Tools tab to see all of these commands.   Scrybe has many settings you may wish to change.  Select the Preferences button in the Control Panel to change these.  Here’s some of the settings we changed. Uncheck “Display a message” to turn off the tooltip notifications when you enter a gesture Uncheck “Show symbol hints” to turn off the sidebar on the input pane Select the search engine you want to open with the Search Gesture.  The default is Yahoo, but you can choose your favorite. Adding a new Scrybe Gesture The default Scrybe options are useful, but the best part is that you can assign gestures to your own programs or websites.  Open the Scrybe control panel, and click the plus sign on the bottom left corner.  Enter a name for your gesture, and then choose if it is for a website or an application. If you want the gesture to open a website, enter the address in the box. Alternately, if you want your gesture to open an application, select Launch Application and then either enter the path to the application, or click the button beside the Launch field and browse to it. Now click the down arrow on the blue box and choose one of the gestures for your application or website. Your new gesture will show up under the Favorites tab in the Scrybe control panel, and you can use it whenever you want from Scrybe, or practice the gesture by selecting the Practice button. Conclusion If you enjoy multi-touch gestures, you may find Scrybe very useful on your laptop or netbook.  Scrybe recognizes gestures fairly easily, even if you don’t enter them perfectly correctly.  Just like pinch-to-zoom and two-finger scroll, Scrybe can quickly become something you miss on other laptops. Download Scrybe (registration required) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fixing Firefox Scrolling Problems with Dell Synaptics TouchpadRemove Synaptics Touchpad Icon from System TrayRoll Back Troublesome Device Drivers in Windows VistaChange Your Computer Name in Windows 7 or VistaLet Somebody Use Your Computer Without Logging Off in Ubuntu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott

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• Elegance, thy Name is jQuery

  - by SGWellens

  So, I'm browsing though some questions over on the Stack Overflow website and I found a good jQuery question just a few minutes old. Here is a link to it. It was a tough question; I knew that by answering it, I could learn new stuff and reinforce what I already knew: Reading is good, doing is better. Maybe I could help someone in the process too. I cut and pasted the HTML from the question into my Visual Studio IDE and went back to Stack Overflow to reread the question. Dang, someone had already answered it! And it was a great answer. I never even had a chance to start analyzing the issue. Now I know what a one-legged man feels like in an ass-kicking contest. Nevertheless, since the question and answer were so interesting, I decided to dissect them and learn as much as possible. The HTML consisted of some divs separated by h3 headings.  Note the elements are laid out sequentially with no programmatic grouping: <h3 class="heading">Heading 1</h3> <div>Content</div> <div>More content</div> <div>Even more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 2</h3> <div>some content</div> <div>some more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 3</h3> <div>other content</div></form></body>  The requirement was to wrap a div around each h3 heading and the subsequent divs grouping them into sections. Why? I don't know, I suppose if you screen-scrapped some HTML from another site, you might want to reformat it before displaying it on your own. Anyways… Here is the marvelously, succinct posted answer: $('.heading').each(function(){ $(this).nextUntil('.heading').andSelf().wrapAll('<div class="section">');}); I was familiar with all the parts except for nextUntil and andSelf. But, I'll analyze the whole answer for completeness. I'll do this by rewriting the posted answer in a different style and adding a boat-load of comments: function Test(){ // $Sections is a jQuery object and it will contain three elements var $Sections = $('.heading'); // use each to iterate over each of the three elements $Sections.each(function () { // $this is a jquery object containing the current element // being iterated var $this = $(this); // nextUntil gets the following sibling elements until it reaches // an element with the CSS class 'heading' // andSelf adds in the source element (this) to the collection $this = $this.nextUntil('.heading').andSelf(); // wrap the elements with a div $this.wrapAll('<div class="section" >'); });}  The code here doesn't look nearly as concise and elegant as the original answer. However, unless you and your staff are jQuery masters, during development it really helps to work through algorithms step by step. You can step through this code in the debugger and examine the jQuery objects to make sure one step is working before proceeding on to the next. It's much easier to debug and troubleshoot when each logical coding step is a separate line of code. Note: You may think the original code runs much faster than this version. However, the time difference is trivial: Not enough to worry about: Less than 1 millisecond (tested in IE and FF). Note: You may want to jam everything into one line because it results in less traffic being sent to the client. That is true. However, most Internet servers now compress HTML and JavaScript by stripping out comments and white space (go to Bing or Google and view the source). This feature should be enabled on your server: Let the server compress your code, you don't need to do it. Free Career Advice: Creating maintainable code is Job One—Maximum Priority—The Prime Directive. If you find yourself suddenly transferred to customer support, it may be that the code you are writing is not as readable as it could be and not as readable as it should be. Moving on… I created a CSS class to enhance the results: .section{ background-color: yellow; border: 2px solid black; margin: 5px;} Here is the rendered output before:   …and after the jQuery code runs.   Pretty Cool! But, while playing with this code, the logic of nextUntil began to bother me: What happens in the last section? What stops elements from being collected since there are no more elements with the .heading class? The answer is nothing.  In this case it stopped collecting elements because it was at the end of the page.  But what if there were additional HTML elements? I added an anchor tag and another div to the HTML: <h3 class="heading">Heading 1</h3> <div>Content</div> <div>More content</div> <div>Even more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 2</h3> <div>some content</div> <div>some more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 3</h3> <div>other content</div><a>this is a link</a><div>unrelated div</div> </form></body> The code as-is will include both the anchor and the unrelated div. This isn't what we want.   My first attempt to correct this used the filter parameter of the nextUntil function: nextUntil('.heading', 'div')  This will only collect div elements. But it merely skipped the anchor tag and it still collected the unrelated div:   The problem is we need a way to tell the nextUntil function when to stop. CSS selectors to the rescue! nextUntil('.heading, a')  This tells nextUntil to stop collecting elements when it gets to an element with a .heading class OR when it gets to an anchor tag. In this case it solved the problem. FYI: The comma operator in a CSS selector allows multiple criteria.   Bingo! One final note, we could have broken the code down even more: We could have replaced the andSelf function here: $this = $this.nextUntil('.heading, a').andSelf(); With this: // get all the following siblings and then add the current item$this = $this.nextUntil('.heading, a');$this.add(this);  But in this case, the andSelf function reads real nice. In my opinion. Here's a link to a jsFiddle if you want to play with it. I hope someone finds this useful Steve Wellens CodeProject

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• Record Screen Activity with CamStudio

  - by Asian Angel

  Sometimes a visual demonstration works much better than a list of instructions. If you need to make a demo video for family and/or friends then you might want to have a look at CamStudio. Using CamStudio To get properly set up you will need to install two different files (the main program followed by the codec). Once that is done you are ready to get started. When you start the program you will see a surprisingly small window. Notice the highlighted Record to text…it serves as a visual indicator for the video type selected for recording. Before you start creating a video it would be a good idea to look through some of the settings. The first one to look at is the region or area that you want to record. Next you will want to look through the video options since these will affect the quality and final size of your video files. The default setting for quality is 70…adjust that to the level that best suits your needs. Note: For our example we maxed out the various video settings for best quality. On our system Microsoft Video 1 was listed as the default compressor but as you can see there were other options available. You can configure the settings for the compressor you want to use if desired. Keep in mind that each compressor will have unique settings of their own, so if you change it, be certain to go back and check. We decided to use the CamStudio Lossless Codec for our example (it gave the best results while trying the software). Going back to the main window you can toggle back and forth between .avi and .swf output using the last button. Once you are satisfied with the settings click on the red record button to start. If you need to pause while recording or stop recording click on the system tray icon and select the appropriate command. When you are finished recording, you will be presented with the save file window. Browse for the desired save location and name your new file. Once you have saved the file the movie player window will automatically open so that you view your new video. Our sample video shown here is at 50% of original size so may look slightly “gritty”. The detail was much better at 100%. If you decide to record and save as .swf the process will be identical to recording in .avi format until the movie player window opens. At that time the conversion process from .avi to .swf will begin. When complete you will have a new flash video and html file that goes with it. Depending on which browser you have set as default, you may run into a small problem when the preview for your new .swf file tries to open. There is a small bug in the generated html file. You can use this work-around or… Just open the .swf file directly in your favorite browser. Conclusion CamStudio may not produce the highest quality videos, but it’s free and does a very nice job nonetheless. If you are working on a tight budget or only need to make an occasional video then CamStudio is a very sensible choice. Links Download CamStudio Stable Version & CamStudio Codec *Download links are approximately half-way down the page. Download CamStudio Stable Version & CamStudio Codec at SourceForge *Beta version also available here. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Get the Classic Style Network Activity Indicator Back in Windows 7How To Copy a DVD with VLC 1.0ALLCapture 3.0 [Review]Listen and Record Over 12,000 Online Radio Stations with RadioSureGeek Reviews: Play And Record Internet Radio With Screamer Radio TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool Easily Create More Bookmark Toolbars in Firefox Filevo is a Cool File Hosting & Sharing Site Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate

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• SSAS Maestro Training in July 2012 #ssasmaestro #ssas

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  A few hours ago Chris Webb blogged about SSAS Maestro and I’d like to propagate the news, adding also some background info. SSAS Maestro is the premier certification on Analysis Services that selects the best experts in Analysis Services around the world. In 2011 Microsoft organized two rounds of training/exams for SSAS Maestros and up to now only 11 people from the first wave have been announced – around 10% of attendees of the course! In the next few days the new Maestros from the second round should be announced and this long process is caused by many factors that I’m going to explain. First, the course is just a step in the process. Before the course you receive a list of topics to study, including the slides of the course. During the course, students receive a lot of information that might not have been included in the slides and the best part of the course is class interaction. Students are expected to bring their experience to the table and comparing case studies, experiences and having long debates is an important part of the learning process. And it is also a part of the evaluation: good questions might be also more important than good answers! Finally, after the course, students have their homework and this may require one or two months to be completed. After that, a long (very long) evaluation process begins, taking into account homework, labs, participation… And for this reason the final evaluation may arrive months later after the course. We are going to improve and shorten this process with the next courses. The first wave of SSAS Maestro had been made by invitation only and now the program is opening, requiring a fee to participate in order to cover the cost of preparation, training and exam. The number of attendees will be limited and candidates will have to send their CV in order to be admitted to the course. Only experienced Analysis Services developers will be able to participate to this challenging program. So why you should do that? Well, only 10% of students passed the exam until now. So if you need 100% guarantee to pass the exam, you need to study a lot, before, during and after the course. But the course by itself is a precious opportunity to share experience, create networking and learn mission-critical enterprise-level best practices that it’s hard to find written on books. Oh, well, many existing white papers are a required reading *before* the course! The course is now 5 days long, and every day can be *very* long. We’ll have lectures and discussions in the morning and labs in the afternoon/evening. Plus some more lectures in one or two afternoons. A heavy part of the course is about performance optimization, capacity planning, monitoring. This edition will introduce also Tabular models, and don’t expect something you might find in the SSAS Tabular Workshop – only performance, scalability monitoring and optimization will be covered, knowing Analysis Services is a requirement just to be accepted! I and Chris Webb will be the teachers for this edition. The course is expensive. Applying for SSAS Maestro will cost around 7000€ plus taxes (reduced to 5000€ for students of a previous SSAS Maestro edition). And you will be locked in a training room for the large part of the week. So why you should do that? Well, as I said, this is a challenging course. You will not find the time to check your email – the content is just too much interesting to think you can be distracted by something else. Another good reason is that this course will take place in Italy. Well, the course will take place in the brand new Microsoft Innovation Campus, but in general we’ll be able to provide you hints to get great food and, if you are willing to attach one week-end to your trip, there are plenty of places to visit (and I’m not talking about the classic Rome-Florence-Venice) – you might really need to relax after such a week! Finally, the marking process after the course will be faster – we’d like to complete the evaluation within three months after the course, considering that 1-2 months might be required to complete the homework. If at this point you are not scared: registration will open in mid-April, but you can already write to [email protected] sending your CV/resume and a short description of your level of SSAS knowledge and experience. The selection process will start early and you may want to put your admission form on top of the FIFO queue!

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• In Case You Weren’t There: Blogwell NYC

  - by Mike Stiles

  0 0 1 1009 5755 Vitrue 47 13 6751 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* 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-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:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} Your roving reporter roved out to another one of Socialmedia.org’s fantastic Blogwell events, this time in NYC. As Central Park and incredible weather beckoned, some of the biggest brand names in the world gathered to talk about how they’re incorporating social into marketing and CRM, as well as extending social across their entire organizations internally. Below we present a collection of the live tweets from many of the key sessions GE @generalelectricJon Lombardo, Leader of Social Media COE How GE builds and extends emotional connections with consumers around health and reaps the benefits of increased brand equity in the process. GE has a social platform around Healthyimagination to create better health for people. If you and a friend are trying to get healthy together, you’ll do better. Health is inherently. Get health challenges via Facebook and share with friends to achieve goals together. They’re creating an emotional connection around the health context. You don’t influence people at large. Your sphere of real influence is around 5-10 people. They find relevant conversations about health on Twitter and engage sounding like a friend, not a brand. Why would people share on behalf of a brand? Because you tapped into an activity and emotion they’re already having. To create better habits in health, GE gave away inexpensive, relevant gifts related to their goals. Create the context, give the relevant gift, get social acknowledgment for giving it. What you get when you get acknowledgment for your engagement and gift is user generated microcontent. GE got 12,000 unique users engaged and 1400 organic posts with the healthy gift campaign. The Dow Chemical Company @DowChemicalAbby Klanecky, Director of Digital & Social Media Learn how Dow Chemical is finding, training, and empowering their scientists to be their storytellers in social media. There are 1m jobs coming open in science. Only 200k are qualified for them. Dow Chemical wanted to use social to attract and talk to scientists. Dow Chemical decided to use real scientists as their storytellers. Scientists are incredibly passionate, the key ingredient of a great storyteller. Step 1 was getting scientists to focus on a few platforms, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn. Dow Chemical social flow is Core Digital Team - #CMs – ambassadors – advocates. The scientists were trained in social etiquette via practice scenarios. It’s not just about sales. It’s about growing influence and the business. Dow Chemical trained about 100 scientists, 55 are active and there’s a waiting list for the next sessions. In person social training produced faster results and better participation. Sometimes you have to tell pieces of the story instead of selling your execs on the whole vision. Social Media Ethics Briefing: Staying Out of TroubleAndy Sernovitz, CEO @SocialMediaOrg How do we get people to share our message for us? We have to have their trust. The difference between being honest and being sleazy is disclosure. Disclosure does not hurt the effectiveness of your marketing. No one will get mad if you tell them up front you’re a paid spokesperson for a company. It’s a legal requirement by the FTC, it’s the law, to disclose if you’re being paid for an endorsement. Require disclosure and truthfulness in all your social media outreach. Don’t lie to people. Monitor the conversation and correct misstatements. Create social media policies and training programs. If you want to stay safe, never pay cash for social media. Money changes everything. As soon as you pay, it’s not social media, it’s advertising. Disclosure, to the feds, means clear, conspicuous, and understandable to the average reader. This phrase will keep you in the clear, “I work for ___ and this is my personal opinion.” Who are you? Were you paid? Are you giving an honest opinion based on a real experience? You as a brand are responsible for what an agency or employee or contactor does in your behalf. SocialMedia.org makes available a Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit. Socialmedia.org/disclosure. The point is to not ethically mess up and taint social media as happened to e-mail. Not only is the FTC cracking down, so is Google and Facebook. Visa @VisaNewsLucas Mast, Senior Business Leader, Global Corporate Social Media Visa built a mobile studio for the Olympics for execs and athletes. They wanted to do postcard style real time coverage of Visa’s Olympics sponsorships, and on a shoestring. Challenges included Olympic rules, difficulty getting interviews, time zone trouble, and resourcing. Another problem was they got bogged down with their own internal approval processes. Despite all the restrictions, they created and published a variety of and fair amount of content. They amassed 1000+ views of videos posted to the Visa Communication YouTube channel. Less corporate content yields more interest from media outlets and bloggers. They did real world video demos of how their products work in the field vs. an exec doing a demo in a studio. Don’t make exec interview videos dull and corporate. Keep answers short, shoot it in an interesting place, do takes until they’re comfortable and natural. Not everything will work. Not everything will get a retweet. But like the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play. Promoting content is as important as creating it. McGraw-Hill Companies @McGrawHillCosPatrick Durando, Senior Director of Global New Media McGraw-Hill has 26,000 employees. McGraw-Hill created a social intranet called Buzz. Intranets create operational efficiency, help product dev, facilitate crowdsourcing, and breaks down geo silos. Intranets help with talent development, acquisition, retention. They replaced the corporate directory with their own version of LinkedIn. The company intranet has really cut down on the use of email. Long email threats become organized, permanent social discussions. The intranet is particularly useful in HR for researching and getting answers surrounding benefits and policies. Using a profile on your company intranet can establish and promote your internal professional brand. If you’re going to make an intranet, it has to look great, work great, and employees are going have to want to go there. You can’t order them to like it. 

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• Tip #13 java.io.File Surprises

  - by ByronNevins

  There is an assumption that I've seen in code many times that is totally wrong.  And this assumption can easily bite you.  The assumption is: File.getAbsolutePath and getAbsoluteFile return paths that are not relative.  Not true!  Sort of.  At least not in the way many people would assume.  All they do is make sure that the beginning of the path is absolute.  The rest of the path can be loaded with relative path elements.  What do you think the following code will print? public class Main {    public static void main(String[] args) {        try {            File f = new File("/temp/../temp/../temp/../");            File abs  = f.getAbsoluteFile();            File parent = abs.getParentFile();            System.out.println("Exists: " + f.exists());            System.out.println("Absolute Path: " + abs);            System.out.println("FileName: " + abs.getName());            System.out.printf("The Parent Directory of %s is %s\n", abs, parent);            System.out.printf("The CANONICAL Parent Directory of CANONICAL %s is %s\n",                        abs, abs.getCanonicalFile().getParent());            System.out.printf("The CANONICAL Parent Directory of ABSOLUTE %s is %s\n",                        abs, parent.getCanonicalFile());            System.out.println("Canonical Path: " + f.getCanonicalPath());        }        catch (IOException ex) {            System.out.println("Got an exception: " + ex);        }    }} Output: Exists: trueAbsolute Path: D:\temp\..\temp\..\temp\..FileName: ..The Parent Directory of D:\temp\..\temp\..\temp\.. is D:\temp\..\temp\..\tempThe CANONICAL Parent Directory of CANONICAL D:\temp\..\temp\..\temp\.. is nullThe CANONICAL Parent Directory of ABSOLUTE D:\temp\..\temp\..\temp\.. is D:\tempCanonical Path: D:\ Notice how it says that the parent of d:\ is d:\temp !!!The file, f, is really the root directory.  The parent is supposed to be null. I learned about this the hard way! getParentXXX simply hacks off the final item in the path. You can get totally unexpected results like the above. Easily. I filed a bug on this behavior a few years ago[1].   Recommendations: (1) Use getCanonical instead of getAbsolute.  There is a 1:1 mapping of files and canonical filenames.  I.e each file has one and only one canonical filename and it will definitely not have relative path elements in it.  There are an infinite number of absolute paths for each file. (2) To get the parent file for File f do the following instead of getParentFile: File parent = new File(f, ".."); [1] http://bt2ws.central.sun.com/CrPrint?id=6687287

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• How do I consistently re-size my game window and elements?

  - by Milo

  In my 2D game, I have a flow layout. Inside the flow layout are tables. I have a slider that lets the user make the tables larger or smaller. This makes the background larger or smaller too. Everything should scale proportionally which means the background should stay at the same position when I make things larger, and it almost does. When the scrollbar is at 0, it does exactly this. As the scrollbar gets further down problems arise. I'll toggle the slider maybe 3 times and on the fourth time, the background jumps a little lower on the Y axis. In order to be efficient, I only start rendering the background near the parent of the flow layout. Here it is: void LobbyTableManager::renderBG( GraphicsContext* g, agui::Rectangle& absRect, agui::Rectangle& childRect ) { int cx, cy, cw, ch; g->getClippingRect(cx,cy,cw,ch); g->setClippingRect(absRect.getX(),absRect.getY(),absRect.getWidth(),absRect.getHeight()); float scale = 0.35f; int w = m_bgSprite->getWidth() * getTableScale() * scale; int h = m_bgSprite->getHeight() * getTableScale() * scale; int numX = ceil(absRect.getWidth() / (float)w) + 2; int numY = ceil(absRect.getHeight() / (float)h) + 2; float offsetX = m_activeTables[0]->getLocation().getX() - w; float offsetY = m_activeTables[0]->getLocation().getY() - h; int startY = childRect.getY(); if(moo) { std::cout << "S=" << startY << ","; } int numAttempts = 0; while(startY + h < absRect.getY() && numAttempts < 1000) { startY += h; if(moo) { std::cout << startY << ","; } numAttempts++; } if(moo) { std::cout << "\n"; moo = false; } g->holdDrawing(); for(int i = 0; i < numX; ++i) { for(int j = 0; j < numY; ++j) { g->drawScaledSprite(m_bgSprite,0,0,m_bgSprite->getWidth(),m_bgSprite->getHeight(), absRect.getX() + (i * w) + (offsetX),absRect.getY() + (j * h) + startY,w,h,0); } } g->unholdDrawing(); g->setClippingRect(cx,cy,cw,ch); } The numeric problem seems to be in the value of startY. I outputted startY figuring out its value: As you can see here, this is me only zooming in, pay attention to the final number before the next s=. You'll notice that, what should happen is, the numbers should be linear, ex: -40, -38, -36, -34, -32, -30, etc. As you'll notice, the start numbers linearly correlate ex: 62k, 64k, 66k, 68k, 70k etc.. but the end result is wrong every third or 4th time. Here is most of the resize code: void LobbyTableManager::setTableScale( float scale ) { scale += 0.3f; scale *= 2.0f; agui::Gui* gotGui = getGui(); float scrollRel = m_vScroll->getRelativeValue(); setScale(scale); rescaleTables(); resizeFlow(); if(gotGui) { gotGui->toggleWidgetLocationChanged(false); } updateScrollBars(); float newVal = scrollRel * m_vScroll->getMaxValue(); if((int)(newVal + 0.5f) > (int)newVal) { newVal++; } m_vScroll->setValue(newVal); static int x = 0; x++; moo = true; //std::cout << m_vScroll->getValue() << std::endl; if(gotGui) { gotGui->toggleWidgetLocationChanged(true); } if(gotGui) { gotGui->_widgetLocationChanged(); } } void LobbyTableManager::valueChanged( agui::VScrollBar* source,int val ) { if(getGui()) { getGui()->toggleWidgetLocationChanged(false); } m_flow->setLocation(0,-val); if(getGui()) { getGui()->toggleWidgetLocationChanged(true); getGui()->_widgetLocationChanged(); } }

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• Backup Your Windows Home Server Off-Site with Asus Webstorage

  - by Mysticgeek

  Windows Home Server lets you backup machines on your network easily. But what about backing up the server data? Today we take a look at ASUS WebStorage for Windows Home Server, which provides you with secure off-site backup for WHS. To use the ASUS WebStorage service you’ll need to sign up for a free account. It offers 1GB of free storage, then you can purchase an unlimited backup package for $39.99 for a year subscription. Note: They also offer online storage for individual PCs as well. Install ASUS WebStorage for WHS Browse to your shared folders on the server and open the Add-Ins folder and copy over the WHSConnectorSetup2.2.4.088.msi file (link below) then close out of the folder. Now launch Windows Home Server Console from one of the computers on your network, click Settings, then Add-ins. Under Available Add-ins click the Available tab and you’ll see the Asus WebStorage installer file we just copied over. Click the Install button. Installation kicks off and when it’s complete, you’ll need to close out of the console and reconnect. Using ASUS WebStorage WHS Connector  When you reconnect to WHS Console, scroll over to the ASUS WebStorage icon and click on Settings. Now log into your ASUS account… Now select the folders you want to backup to the WebStorage service. Select the radio button next to Enable to initialize the backup process… The backup process begins. You can change which folders are backed up simply by disabling the backup process, uncheck the folder(s), then enable the backup again. ASUS WebStorage Site After you have files backed up to the ASUS site, log into your account, and your presented with an overview of the amount of storage you’re using. It also shows what type of files are taking certain amounts of space.   You can browse through your backed up files and folders. It allows you to share and sync backed up data as well. Navigate to the file you want and you can easily download it by clicking on it, or share it out by clicking the share link below it. If you choose to share it, you’re provided with a link to the file to send out to other users.   Conclusion Users of Windows Home Server have been looking for an inexpensive cloud backup solution for quite some time. There are services such as JungleDisk, KeepVault, Wuala…etc. These services probably do a better job, but can start getting expensive once you start uploading a GBs of data. Another disappointment of ASUS WebStorage is you can only backup your WHS shares (from what we’ve been able to determine), it’s an “all or nothing” type of thing. You cannot go in and select individual files and folders. The initial upload speeds can be a bit slow as well, although that might have something to do with limited upload speeds on the DSL connection we used to test it. Retrieving your data from the ASUS site is a breeze though, and all the data files are organized quite well. The WHS Addin is very easy to install and use. If you’re looking for an off-site solution to backup your WHS data, you can test out ASUS WebStorage for free with a 1GB limit. This is good for testing the service and it might be exactly what you’re looking for. Other users may want a more advanced solution like KeepVault or CloudBerry…which is a front end for Amazon S3 storage. Download ASUS WebStorage WHS Addin Other WHS Offsite Backup Solutions CloudBerry, JungleDisk, KeepVault, Wuala Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Restore Files from Backups on Windows Home ServerGMedia Blog: Setting Up a Windows Home ServerCreate A Windows Home Server Home Computer Restore DiscRemove a Network Computer from Windows Home ServerShare Ubuntu Home Directories using Samba TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow

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• How to Use RDA to Generate WLS Thread Dumps At Specified Intervals?

  - by Daniel Mortimer

  Introduction There are many ways to generate a thread dump of a WebLogic Managed Server. For example, take a look at: Taking Thread Dumps - [an excellent blog post on the Middleware Magic site]or  Different ways to take thread dumps in WebLogic Server (Document 1098691.1) There is another method - use Remote Diagnostic Agent! The solution described below is not documented, but it is relatively straightforward to execute. One advantage of using RDA to collect the thread dumps is RDA will also collect configuration, log files, network, system, performance information at the same time. Instructions 1. Not familiar with Remote Diagnostic Agent? Take a look at my previous blog "Resolve SRs Faster Using RDA - Find the Right Profile" 2. Choose a profile, which includes the WebLogic Server data collection modules (for example the profile "WebLogicServer"). At RDA setup time you should see the prompt below: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- S301WLS: Collects Oracle WebLogic Server Information ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Enter the location of the directory where the domains to analyze are located (For example in UNIX, <BEA Home>/user_projects/domains or <Middleware Home>/user_projects/domains) Hit 'Return' to accept the default (/oracle/11AS/Middleware/user_projects/domains) > For a successful WLS connection, ensure that the domain Admin Server is up and running. Data Collection Type:   1  Collect for a single server (offline mode)   2  Collect for a single server (using WLS connection)   3  Collect for multiple servers (using WLS connection) Enter the item number Hit 'Return' to accept the default (1) > 2 Choose option 2 or 3. Note: Collect for a single server or multiple servers using WLS connection means that RDA will attempt to connect to execute online WLST commands against the targeted server(s). The thread dumps are collected using the WLST function - "threadDumps()". If WLST cannot connect to the managed server, RDA will proceed to collect other data and ignore the request to collect thread dumps. If in the final output you see no Thread Dump menu item, then it's likely that the managed server is in a state which prevents new connections to it. If faced with this scenario, you would have to employ alternative methods for collecting thread dumps. 3. The RDA setup will create a setup.cfg file in the RDA_HOME directory. Open this file in an editor. You will find the following parameters which govern the number of thread dumps and thread dump interval. #N.Number of thread dumps to capture WREQ_THREAD_DUMP=10 #N.Thread dump interval WREQ_THREAD_DUMP_INTERVAL=5000 The example lines above show the default settings. In other words, RDA will collect 10 thread dumps at 5000 millisecond (5 second) intervals. You may want to change this to something like: #N.Number of thread dumps to capture WREQ_THREAD_DUMP=10 #N.Thread dump interval WREQ_THREAD_DUMP_INTERVAL=30000 However, bear in mind, that such change will increase the total amount of time it takes for RDA to complete its run. 4. Once you are happy with the setup.cfg, run RDA. RDA will collect, render, generate and package all files in the output directory. 5. For ease of viewing, open up the RDA Start html file - "xxxx__start.htm". The thread dumps can be found under the WLST Collections for the target managed server(s). See screenshots belowScreenshot 1:RDA Start Page - Main Index Screenshot 2: Managed Server Sub Index Screenshot 3: WLST Collections Screenshot 4: Thread Dump Page - List of dump file links Screenshot 5: Thread Dump Dat File Link Additional Comment: A) You can view the thread dump files within the RDA Start Page framework, but most likely you will want to download the dat files for in-depth analysis via thread dump analysis tools such as: Thread Dump Analyzer -  Samurai - a GUI based tail , thread dump analysis tool If you are new to thread dump analysis - take a look at this recorded Support Advisor Webcast  Oracle WebLogic Server: Diagnosing Performance Issues through Java Thread Dumps[Slidedeck from webcast in PDF format]B) I have logged a couple of enhancement requests for the RDA Development Team to consider: Add timestamp to dump file links, dat filename and at the top of the body of the dat file Package the individual thread dumps in a zip so all dump files can be conveniently downloaded in one go.

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• SOA Suite 11g Dynamic Payload Testing with soapUI Free Edition

  - by Greg Mally

  Overview Many web service developers use soapUI for various tests like: smoke test, unit test, and load testing because you can get a free edition that is fairly robust. However, if you need to venture into more complex testing that requires a dynamic payload, then the free edition doesn't necessarily make it easy. This feature does exist in soapUI, but for obvious reasons it is in the Pro version. In this blog I will show you how to use soapUI free edition for dynamic payloads in a simplified example. Hopefully this will open the doors for you to expand into more complex scenarios. The following assumes that you have a working knowledge of soapUI and will not go into concepts like setting up a project etc. For the basics, please review the documentation for soapUI: http://www.soapui.org/Getting-Started/. Additionally, we will be using asynchronous web services and you can review the setup for this in my blog: SOA Suite 11g Asynchronous Testing with soapUI. Features in soapUI Free Edition Relating to this Topic The soapUI test tool provides a very feature rich environment that can do many things provided you are willing to go beyond point and click. For this example, we will be leveraging just a couple features for our dynamic payload example: Test Case Properties Scripting with Groovy Basically, we will be using a property as a global variable and we will manipulate that property using a Groovy script. Setting Up Our Property Properties are available throughout soapUI and here is a snippet from the soapUI website defining the locations: Projects : for handling Project scope values, for example a subscription ID TestSuite : for handling TestSuite scoped values, can be seen as "arguments" to a TestSuite TestCases : for handling TestCase scoped values, can be seen as "arguments" to a TestCase Properties TestStep : for providing local values/state within a TestCase Local TestStep properties : several TestStep types maintain their own list of properties specific to their functionality : DataSource, DataSink, Run TestCase MockServices : for handling MockService scoped values/arguments MockResponses : for handling MockResponse scoped values Global Properties : for handling Global properties, optionally from an external source For our example, we will be defining a custom property in a TestCase called SimpleAsyncPayload. The property can be created in either the Custom Properties tab located at the bottom of the Navigator panel when the TestCase is selected in the Navigator or the Properties label in the TestCase editor: Navigator Panel TestCase Editor You will notice that I set a value of “0” for the custom property. For this simplified example, we will need to retrieve that value and manipulate it prior to making the web service request invocation. In order to accomplish this, we will need to get Groovy ;) Let's Get Groovy We will now add a new Groovy Script step to the TestCase called Manipulate Payload: TestCase Editor > Append Step > Groovy Script Once we have added the Groovy Script step to our TestCase, we can open the Groovy Script editor to add the code to: Get the current value of the property we created called SimpleAsyncPayload. Convert the value of the property to an integer. Increment the value. Store the incremented value back into the TestCase property called SimpleAsyncPayload. The script should look something like the following: Groovy Script Editor – Manipulate Payload At this point we can test the script to see if it is working by simply running the TestCase (left-click on the green triangle in the upper left-hand corner of the TestCase editor). To verify if it ran correctly, we can look at the value of the SimpleAsyncPayload property which should now be 1: TestCase Editor – Run Results All that is left to complete the TestCase is to append another step of type Test Request. The information required to append the request is a name and an operation to invoke. In this example we will use the default name and select the SimpleAsyncBPELProcessBingd -> process as the operation (any other information being requested, simply use the defaults unless you are calling an asynchronous operation then do not add any assertions). We are now in familiar ground with the Test Request editor. Depending upon the type of operation you are invoking (synchronous or asynchronous), please update the request with the necessary information (e.g., callback information for asynchronous operations). We will now tweak the Test Request payload to retrieve the value of the SimpleAsyncPayload property. The soapUI editor makes this very simple: right-click in the payload and navigate to the property (e.g., right-click > Get Data.. > TestCase: [Groovy TestCase] > Property [SimpleAsyncPayload]): Test Request Editor – Insert Property Value Your payload should now look something like the following: Test Request Editor – Inserted Property Value Just like before, we are now ready to run the TestCase. If everything goes as expected we should see a response like the following: Message Viewer – Results of TestCase Run We are now setup to be able to run a stress test where the payload will change for each request. This simple example can be expanded to include multiple payload values, complex calculations in the scripts, or whatever can be done via the soapUI scripting. Hopefully you have found this useful and happy testing to you :)

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• Reg Gets a Job at Red Gate (and what happens behind the scenes)

  - by red(at)work

  Mr Reg Gater works at one of Cambridge’s many high-tech companies. He doesn’t love his job, but he puts up with it because... well, it could be worse. Every day he drives to work around the Red Gate roundabout, wondering what his boss is going to blame him for today, and wondering if there could be a better job out there for him. By late morning he already feels like handing his notice in. He got the hacky look from his boss for being 5 minutes late, and then they ran out of tea. Again. He goes to the local sandwich shop for lunch, and picks up a Red Gate job menu and a Book of Red Gate while he’s waiting for his order. That night, he goes along to Cambridge Geek Nights and sees some very enthusiastic Red Gaters talking about the work they do; it sounds interesting and, of all things, fun. He takes a quick look at the job vacancies on the Red Gate website, and an hour later realises he’s still there – looking at videos, photos and people profiles. He especially likes the Red Gate’s Got Talent page, and is very impressed with Simon Johnson’s marathon time. He thinks that he’d quite like to work with such awesome people. It just so happens that Red Gate recently decided that they wanted to hire another hot shot team member. Behind the scenes, the wheels were set in motion: the recruitment team met with the hiring manager to understand exactly what they’re looking for, and to decide what interview tests to do, who will do the interviews, and to kick-start any interview training those people might need. Next up, a job description and job advert were written, and the job was put on the market. Reg applies, and his CV lands in the Recruitment team’s inbox and they open it up with eager anticipation that Reg could be the next awesome new starter. He looks good, and in a jiffy they’ve arranged an interview. Reg arrives for his interview, and is greeted by a smiley receptionist. She offers him a selection of drinks and he feels instantly relaxed. A couple of interviews and an assessment later, he gets a job offer. We make his day and he makes ours by accepting, and becoming one of the 60 new starters so far this year. Behind the scenes, things start moving all over again. The HR team arranges for a “Welcome” goodie box to be whisked out to him, prepares his contract, sends an email to Information Services (Or IS for short - we’ll come back to them), keeps in touch with Reg to make sure he knows what to expect on his first day, and of course asks him to fill in the all-important wiki questionnaire so his new colleagues can start to get to know him before he even joins. Meanwhile, the IS team see an email in SupportWorks from HR. They see that Reg will be starting in the sales team in a few days’ time, and they know exactly what to do. They pull out a new machine, and within minutes have used their automated deployment software to install every piece of software that a new recruit could ever need. They also check with Reg’s new manager to see if he has any special requirements that they could help with. Reg starts and is amazed to find a fully configured machine sitting on his desk, complete with stationery and all the other tools he’ll need to do his job. He feels even more cared for after he gets a workstation assessment, and realises he’d be comfier with an ergonomic keyboard and a footstool. They arrive minutes later, just like that. His manager starts him off on his induction and sales training. Along with job-specific training, he’ll also have a buddy to help him find his feet, and loads of pre-arranged demos and introductions. Reg settles in nicely, and is great at his job. He enjoys the canteen, and regularly eats one of the 40,000 meals provided each year. He gets used to the selection of teas that are available, develops a taste for champagne launch parties, and has his fair share of the 25,000 cups of coffee downed at Red Gate towers each year. He goes along to some Feel Good Fund events, and donates a little something to charity in exchange for a turn on the chocolate fountain. He’s looking a little scruffy, so he decides to get his hair cut in between meetings, just in time for the Red Gate birthday company photo. Reg starts a new project: identifying existing customers to up-sell to new bundles. He talks with the web team to generate lists of qualifying customers who haven’t recently been sent marketing emails, and sends emails out, using a new in-house developed tool to schedule follow-up calls in CRM for the same group. The customer responds, saying they’d like to upgrade but are having a licensing problem – Reg sends the issue to Support, and it gets routed to the web team. The team identifies a workaround, and the bug gets scheduled into the next maintenance release in a fortnight’s time (hey; they got lucky). With all the new stuff Reg is working on, he realises that he’d be way more efficient if he had a third monitor. He speaks to IS and they get him one - no argument. He also needs a test machine and then some extra memory. Done. He then thinks he needs an iPad, and goes to ask for one. He gets told to stop pushing his luck. Some time later, Reg’s wife has a baby, so Reg gets 2 weeks of paid paternity leave and a bunch of flowers sent to his house. He signs up to the childcare scheme so that he doesn’t have to pay National Insurance on the first £243 of his childcare. The accounts team makes it all happen seamlessly, as they did with his Give As You Earn payments, which come out of his wages and go straight to his favorite charity. Reg’s sales career is going well. He’s grateful for the help that he gets from the product support team. How do they answer all those 900-ish support calls so effortlessly each month? He’s impressed with the patches that are sent out to customers who find “interesting behavior” in their tools, and to the customers who just must have that new feature. A little later in his career at Red Gate, Reg decides that he’d like to learn about management. He goes on some management training specially customised for Red Gate, joins the Management Book Club, and gets together with other new managers to brainstorm how to get the most out of one to one meetings with his team. Reg decides to go for a game of Foosball to celebrate his good fortune with his team, and has to wait for Finance to finish. While he’s waiting, he reflects on the wonderful time he’s had at Red Gate. He can’t put his finger on what it is exactly, but he knows he’s on to a good thing. All of the stuff that happened to Reg didn’t just happen magically. We’ve got teams of people working relentlessly behind the scenes to make sure that everyone here is comfortable, safe, well fed and caffeinated to the max.

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• Creating a Training Lab on Windows Azure

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/06/17/153149.aspxThis week we are preparing for a training course that Alan Smith will be running for the support teams at one of my customers around Windows Azure. In order to facilitate the training lab we have a few prerequisites we need to handle. One of the biggest ones is that although the support team all have MSDN accounts the local desktops they work on are not ideal for running most of the labs as we want to give them some additional developer background training around Azure. Some recent Azure announcements really help us in this area: MSDN software can now be used on Azure VM You don't pay for Azure VM's when they are no longer used  Since the support team only have limited experience of Windows Azure and the organisation also have an Enterprise Agreement we decided it would be best value for money to spin up a training lab in a subscription on the EA and then we can turn the machines off when we are done. At the same time we would be able to spin them back up when the users need to do some additional lab work once the training course is completed. In order to achieve this I wanted to create a powershell script which would setup my training lab. The aim was to create 18 VM's which would be based on a prebuilt template with Visual Studio and the Azure development tools. The script I used is described below The Start & Variables The below text will setup the powershell environment and some variables which I will use elsewhere in the script. It will also import the Azure Powershell cmdlets. You can see below that I will need to download my publisher settings file and know some details from my Azure account. At this point I will assume you have a basic understanding of Azure & Powershell so already know how to do this. Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestrictedcls $startTime = get-dateImport-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\PowerShell\Azure\Azure.psd1"# Azure Publisher Settings $azurePublisherSettings = '<Your settings file>.publishsettings'  # Subscription Details $subscriptionName = "<Your subscription name>" $defaultStorageAccount = "<Your default storage account>"  # Affinity Group Details $affinityGroup = '<Your affinity group>' $dataCenter = 'West Europe' # From Get-AzureLocation  # VM Details $baseVMName = 'TRN' $adminUserName = '<Your admin username>' $password = '<Your admin password>' $size = 'Medium' $vmTemplate = '<The name of your VM template image>' $rdpFilePath = '<File path to save RDP files to>' $machineSettingsPath = '<File path to save machine info to>'    Functions In the next section of the script I have some functions which are used to perform certain actions. The first is called CreateVM. This will do the following actions: If the VM already exists it will be deleted Create the cloud service Create the VM from the template I have created Add an endpoint so we can RDP to them all over the same port Download the RDP file so there is a short cut the trainees can easily access the machine via Write settings for the machine to a log file  function CreateVM($machineNo) { # Specify a name for the new VM $machineName = "$baseVMName-$machineNo" Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName"       # Get the Azure VM Image      $myImage = Get-AzureVMImage $vmTemplate   #If the VM already exists delete and re-create it $existingVm = Get-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName if($existingVm -ne $null) { Write-Host "VM already exists so deleting it" Remove-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName }   "Creating Service" $serviceName = "bupa-azure-train-$machineName" Remove-AzureService -Force -ServiceName $serviceName New-AzureService -Location $dataCenter -ServiceName $serviceName   Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName" New-AzureQuickVM -Windows -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -ImageName $myImage.ImageName -InstanceSize $size -AdminUsername $adminUserName -Password $password  Write-Host "Updating the RDP endpoint for $machineName" Get-AzureVM -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName ` | Add-AzureEndpoint -Name RDP -Protocol TCP -LocalPort 3389 -PublicPort 550 ` | Update-AzureVM    Write-Host "Get the RDP File for machine $machineName" $machineRDPFilePath = "$rdpFilePath\$machineName.rdp" Get-AzureRemoteDesktopFile -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -LocalPath "$machineRDPFilePath"   WriteMachineSettings "$machineName" "$serviceName" }    The delete machine settings function is used to delete the log file before we start re-running the process.  function DeleteMachineSettings() { Write-Host "Deleting the machine settings output file" [System.IO.File]::Delete("$machineSettingsPath"); }    The write machine settings function will get the VM and then record its details to the log file. The importance of the log file is that I can easily provide the information for all of the VM's to our infrastructure team to be able to configure access to all of the VM's    function WriteMachineSettings([string]$vmName, [string]$vmServiceName) { Write-Host "Writing to the machine settings output file"   $vm = Get-AzureVM -name $vmName -ServiceName $vmServiceName $vmEndpoint = Get-AzureEndpoint -VM $vm -Name RDP   $sb = new-object System.Text.StringBuilder $sb.Append("Service Name: "); $sb.Append($vm.ServiceName); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("VM: "); $sb.Append($vm.Name); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("RDP Public Port: "); $sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Port); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("Public DNS: "); $sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Vip); $sb.AppendLine(""); [System.IO.File]::AppendAllText($machineSettingsPath, $sb.ToString());  } # end functions    Rest of Script In the rest of the script it is really just the bit that orchestrates the actions we want to happen. It will load the publisher settings, select the Azure subscription and then loop around the CreateVM function and create 16 VM's  Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile $azurePublisherSettings Set-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName -CurrentStorageAccount $defaultStorageAccount Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName  DeleteMachineSettings    "Starting creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab" $numberOfVMs = 16  for ($index=1; $index -le $numberOfVMs; $index++) { $vmNo = "$index" CreateVM($vmNo); }    "Finished creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab" # Give it a Minute Start-Sleep -s 60  $endTime = get-date "Script run time " + ($endTime - $startTime)    Conclusion As you can see there is nothing too fancy about this script but in our case of creating a small isolated training lab which is not connected to our corporate network then we can easily use this to provision the lab. Im sure if this is of use to anyone you can easily modify it to do other things with the lab environment too. A couple of points to note are that there are some soft limits in Azure about the number of cores and services your subscription can use. You may need to contact the Azure support team to be able to increase this limit. In terms of the real business value of this approach, it was not possible to use the existing desktops to do the training on, and getting some internal virtual machines would have been relatively expensive and time consuming for our ops team to do. With the Azure option we are able to spin these machines up for a temporary period during the training course and then throw them away when we are done. We expect the costing of this test lab to be very small, especially considering we have EA pricing. As a ball park I think my 18 lab VM training environment will cost in the region of $80 per day on our EA. This is a fraction of the cost of the creation of a single VM on premise.

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• Create Advanced Panoramas with Microsoft Image Composite Editor

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you enjoy making panoramas with your pictures, but want more features than tools like Live Photo Gallery offer?  Here’s how you can create amazing panoramas for free with the Microsoft Image Composite Editor. Yesterday we took a look at creating panoramic photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery. Today we take a look at a free tool from Microsoft that will give you more advanced features to create your own masterpiece. Getting Started Download Microsoft Image Composite Editor from Microsoft Research (link below), and install as normal.  Note that there are separate version for 32 & 64-bit editions of Windows, so make sure to download the correct one for your computer. Once it’s installed, you can proceed to create awesome panoramas and extremely large image combinations with it.  Microsoft Image Composite Editor integrates with Live Photo Gallery, so you can create more advanced panoramic pictures directly.  Select the pictures you want to combine, click Extras in the menu bar, and select Create Image Composite. You can also create a photo stitch directly from Explorer.  Select the pictures you want to combine, right-click, and select Stitch Images… Or, simply launch the Image Composite Editor itself and drag your pictures into its editor.  Either way you start a image composition, the program will automatically analyze and combine your images.  This application is optimized for multiple cores, and we found it much faster than other panorama tools such as Live Photo Gallery. Within seconds, you’ll see your panorama in the top preview pane. From the bottom of the window, you can choose a different camera motion which will change how the program stitches the pictures together.  You can also quickly crop the picture to the size you want, or use Automatic Crop to have the program select the maximum area with a continuous picture.   Here’s how our panorama looked when we switched the Camera Motion to Planar Motion 2. But, the real tweaking comes in when you adjust the panorama’s projection and orientation.  Click the box button at the top to change these settings. The panorama is now overlaid with a grid, and you can drag the corners and edges of the panorama to change its shape. Or, from the Projection button at the top, you can choose different projection modes. Here we’ve chosen Cylinder (Vertical), which entirely removed the warp on the walls in the image.  You can pan around the image, and get the part you find most important in the center.  Click the Apply button on the top when you’re finished making changes, or click Revert if you want to switch to the default view settings. Once you’ve finished your masterpiece, you can export it easily to common photo formats from the Export panel on the bottom.  You can choose to scale the image or set it to a maximum width and height as well.  Click Export to disk to save the photo to your computer, or select Publish to Photosynth to post your panorama online. Alternately, from the File menu you can choose to save the panorama as .spj file.  This preserves all of your settings in the Image Composite Editor so you can edit it more in the future if you wish.   Conclusion Whether you’re trying to capture the inside of a building or a tall tree, the extra tools in Microsoft Image Composite Editor let you make nicer panoramas than you ever thought possible.  We found the final results surprisingly accurate to the real buildings and objects, especially after tweaking the projection modes.  This tool can be both fun and useful, so give it a try and let us know what you’ve found it useful for. Works with 32 & 64-bit versions of XP, Vista, and Windows 7 Link Download Microsoft Image Composite Editor Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change or Set the Greasemonkey Script Editor in FirefoxNew Vista Syntax for Opening Control Panel Items from the Command-lineTune Your ClearType Font Settings in Windows VistaChange the Default Editor From Nano on Ubuntu LinuxMake MSE Create a Restore Point Before Cleaning Malware TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor

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• EU Digital Agenda scores 85/100

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  If the Digital Agenda was a bottle of wine and I were wine critic Robert Parker, I would say the Digital Agenda has "a great bouquet, many good elements, with astringent, dry and puckering mouth feel that will not please everyone, but still displaying some finesse. A somewhat controlled effort with no surprises and a few noticeable flaws in the delivery. Noticeably shorter aftertaste than advertised by the producers. Score: 85/100. Enjoy now". The EU Digital Agenda states that "standards are vital for interoperability" and has a whole chapter on interoperability and standards. With this strong emphasis, there is hope the EU's outdated standardization system finally is headed for reform. It has been 23 years since the legal framework of standardisation was completed by Council Decision 87/95/EEC8 in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector. Standardization is market driven. For several decades the IT industry has been developing standards and specifications in global open standards development organisations (fora/consortia), many of which have transparency procedures and practices far superior to the European Standards Organizations. The Digital Agenda rightly states: "reflecting the rise and growing importance of ICT standards developed by certain global fora and consortia". Some fora/consortia, of course, are distorted, influenced by single vendors, have poor track record, and need constant vigilance, but they are the minority. Therefore, the recognition needs to be accompanied by eligibility criteria focused on openness. Will the EU reform its ICT standardization by the end of 2010? Possibly, and only if DG Enterprise takes on board that Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) have driven half of the productivity growth in Europe over the past 15 years, a prominent fact in the EU's excellent Digital Competitiveness report 2010 published on Monday 17 May. It is ok to single out the ICT sector. It simply is the most important sector right now as it fuels growth in all other sectors. Let's not wait for the entire standardization package which may take another few years. Europe does not have time. The Digital Agenda is an umbrella strategy with deliveries from a host of actors across the Commission. For instance, the EU promises to issue "guidance on transparent ex-ante disclosure rules for essential intellectual property rights and licensing terms and conditions in the context of standard setting", by 2011 in the Horisontal Guidelines now out for public consultation by DG COMP and to some extent by DG ENTR's standardization policy reform. This is important. The EU will issue procurement guidance as interoperability frameworks are put into practice. This is a joint responsibility of several DGs, and is likely to suffer coordination problems, controversy and delays. We have seen plenty of the latter already and I have commented on the Commission's own interoperability elsewhere, with mixed luck. :( Yesterday, I watched the cartoonesque Korean western film The Good, the Bad and the Weird. In the movie (and I meant in the movie only), a bandit, a thief, and a bounty hunter, all excellent at whatever they do, fight for a treasure map. Whether that is a good analogy for the situation within the Commission, others are better judges of than I. However, as a movie fanatic, I still await the final shoot-out, and, as in the film, the only certainty is that "life is about chasing and being chased". The missed opportunity (in this case not following up the push from Member States to better define open standards based interoperability) is a casualty of the chaos ensued in the European Wild West (and I mean that in the most endearing sense, and my excuses beforehand to actors who possibly justifiably cannot bear being compared to fictional movie characters). Instead of exposing the ongoing fight, the EU opted for the legalistic use of the term "standards" throughout the document. This is a term that--to the EU-- excludes most standards used by the IT industry world wide. So, while it, for a moment, meant "weapon down", it will not lead to lasting peace. The Digital Agenda calls for the Member States to "Implement commitments on interoperability and standards in the Malmö and Granada Declarations by 2013". This is a far cry from the actual Ministerial Declarations which called upon the Commission to help them with this implementation by recognizing and further defining open standards based interoperability. Unless there is more forthcoming from the Commission, the market's judgement will be: you simply fall short. Generally, I think the EU focus now should be "from policy to practice" and the Digital Agenda does indeed stop short of tackling some highly practical issues. There is need for progress beyond the Digital Agenda. Here are some suggestions that would help Europe re-take global leadership on openness, public sector reform, and economic growth: A strong European software strategy centred around open standards based interoperability by 2011. An ambitious new eCommission strategy for 2011-15 focused on migration to open standards by 2015. Aligning the IT portfolio across the Commission into one Digital Agenda DG by 2012. Focusing all best practice exchange in eGovernment on one social networking site, epractice.eu (full disclosure: I had a role in getting that site up and running) Prioritizing public sector needs in global standardization over European standardization by 2014.

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• iPack -The iOS Application Packager

  - by user13277780

  iOS applications are distributed in .ipa archive files. These files are regular zip files which contain application resources and executable-s. To protect them from unauthorized modifications and to provide identification of their sources, the content of the archives is signed. The signature is included in the application executable of an.ipa archive and protects the executable file itself and the associated resource files. Apple provides native Mac OS tools for signing iOS executable-s (which are actually generic Mach-O code signing tools), but these tools are not generally available on other platforms. To provide a multi-platform development environment for JavaFX based iOS applications, we ported iOS signing and packaging to Java and created a dedicated ipack tool for it. The iPack tool can be used as a last step of creating .ipa package on various operating systems. Prototype has been tested by creating a final distributable for JavaFX application that runs on iPad, all done on Windows 7. Source Code The source code of iPac tool is in OpenJFX project repository. You can find it in: <openjfx root>/rt/tools/ios/Maven/ipack To build the iPack tool use: rt/tools/ios/Maven/ipack$ mvn package After building, you can run the tool: java -jar <path to ipack.jar> <arguments>  Signing keystore The tool uses a java key store to read the signing certificate and the associated private key. To prepare such keystore users can use keytool from JDK. One possible scenario is to import an existing private key and the certificate from a key store used on Mac OS: To list the content of an existing key store and identify the source alias: keytool -list -keystore <src keystore>.p12 -storetype pkcs12 -storepass <src keystore password> To create Java key store and import the private key with its certificate to the keys store: keytool -importkeystore \ -destkeystore <dst keystore> -deststorepass <dst keystore password> \ -srckeystore <src keystore>.p12 -srcstorepass <src keystore password> -srcstoretype pkcs12 \ -srcalias <src alias> -destalias <dst alias> -destkeypass <dst key password> Another scenario would be to generate a private / public key pair directly in a Java key store and create a certificate request from it. After sending the request to Apple one can then import the certificate response back to the Java key store and complete the signing certificate entry. In both scenarios the resulting alias in the Java key store will contain only a single (leaf) certificate. This can be verified with the following command: keytool -list -v -keystore <ipack keystore> -storepass <keystore password> When looking at the Certificate chain length entry, the number next to it is 1. When an executable file is signed on Mac OS, the resulting signature (in CMS format) includes the whole certificate chain up to the Apple Root CA. The ipack tool includes only the chain which is stored under the alias specified on the command line. So to have the whole chain in the signature we need to replace the single certificate entry under the alias with the corresponding full certificate chain. To do that we need first to create the chain in a separate file. It is easy to create such chain when working with certificates in Base-64 encoded PEM format. A certificate chain can be created by concatenating PEM certificates, which should form the chain, into a single file. For iOS signing we need the following certificates in our chain: Apple Root CA Apple Worldwide Developer Relations CA Our signing leaf certificate To convert a certificate from the binary DER format (.der, .cer) to PEM format: keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert -file <certificate>.cer keytool -exportcert -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert -rfc -file <certificate>.pem To export the signing certificate into PEM format: keytool -exportcert -keystore <ipack keystore> -storepass <keystore password> -alias <signing alias> -rfc -file SigningCert.pem After constructing a chain from AppleIncRootCertificate.pem, AppleWWDRCA.pem andSigningCert.pem, it can be imported back into the keystore with: keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore <ipack keystore> -storepass <keystore password> -alias <signing alias> -keypass <key password> -file SigningCertChain.pem To summarize, the following example shows the full certificate chain replacement process: keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert1 -file AppleIncRootCertificate.cer keytool -exportcert -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert1 -rfc -file AppleIncRootCertificate.pem keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert2 -file AppleWWDRCA.cer keytool -exportcert -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert2 -rfc -file AppleWWDRCA.pem keytool -exportcert -keystore ipack.ks -storepass keystorepwd -alias mycert -rfc -file SigningCert.pem cat SigningCert.pem AppleWWDRCA.pem AppleIncRootCertificate.pem >SigningCertChain.pem keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore ipack.ks -storepass keystorepwd -alias mycert -keypass keypwd -file SigningCertChain.pem keytool -list -v -keystore ipack.ks -storepass keystorepwd Usage When the ipack tool is started with no arguments it prints the following usage information: -appname MyApplication -appid com.myorg.MyApplication     Usage: ipack <archive> <signing opts> <application opts> [ <application opts> ... ] Signing options: -keystore <keystore> keystore to use for signing -storepass <password> keystore password -alias <alias> alias for the signing certificate chain and the associated private key -keypass <password> password for the private key Application options: -basedir <directory> base directory from which to derive relative paths -appdir <directory> directory with the application executable and resources -appname <file> name of the application executable -appid <id> application identifier Example: ipack MyApplication.ipa -keystore ipack.ks -storepass keystorepwd -alias mycert -keypass keypwd -basedir mysources/MyApplication/dist -appdir Payload/MyApplication.app -appname MyApplication -appid com.myorg.MyApplication    

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• Rip and Convert DVD’s to an ISO Image

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you own a lot of DVD’s, you might want to convert them to an ISO image for backup and easily playing them on your media center. Today we take a look at ripping your discs using DVDFab, then using ImgBurn to create an ISO image of the ripped DVD files. Rip DVD with DVDFab6 DVDFab will remove copy protection and rip the DVD files for free. Other components in the suite require you to purchase a license after the 30 day trial, but you’ll still be able to rip DVD’s after the trial. Install DVDFab by accepting the defaults (link below)…a system restart is required to complete the install process. The first time you run it, a welcome screen is displayed. If you don’t want to see it again check the box Do not show again, then Start DVDFab.  Pop the DVD in your drive and click Next. Now select your region and check Do not show again, then OK. It will then open the DVD and begin to scan it. Under DVD to DVD you can select either Full Disc or Main Movie depending on what you want to rip. If you want to burn the DVD to a disc after it’s created select the Full Disc option. Now click the Start button to begin the ripping process. After the ripping process has completed, you’ll get a message telling you it’s waiting for you to put in a blank DVD. Since we aren’t burning the disc, just cancel the message. Click Finish and close out of DVDFab or just minimize it if you’re going to keep using it to rip another DVD. By default the temporary directory is in My Documents \ DVDFab \ Temp…however you can change it in settings. If you go to the Temp directory you’ll see the DVD files listed there… Convert Files to ISO with ImgBurn Now that we have the files ripped from the DVD, we need to convert them to an ISO image using ImgBurn (link below). Open it up and from the main menu click on Create image file from files/folders. Click on the folder icon to browse to the location of the ripped DVD files. Browse to the DVDFab temp directory and the VIDEO_TS folder for the source and click Ok. Then choose a destination directory, give the ISO a name, and click Save. In this case we ripped the Unbreakable DVD, so named it that.   So now in ImgBurn you have the source being the ripped DVD files, and the destination for the ISO…then click the Build button. If you don’t create a volume label, ImgBurn is kind enough to create on for you. If everything looks correct, click Ok. Now wait while ImgBurn goes through the process of converting the ripped DVD files to an ISO image. The process has successfully completed. The ISO image of the DVD will be in the output directory you selected earlier. Now you can burn the ISO image to a blank DVD or store it on an external hard drive for safe keeping. When you’re done, you’ll probably want to go into the temp DVDFab folder and delete the VOB and other files in the Video_TS folder as they will take up a lot of space on your hard drive.   Conclusion Although this method requires two programs to make an ISO out of a DVD, it’s extremely quick. When burning DVD’s of various lengths, it took less than 30 minutes to get the final ISO. Now, you’ll have your DVD movies backed up in case something were to happen to the discs and are no longer playable. If you use Windows Media Center to watch your movies, check out our article on how to automatically mount and view ISO files in Windows 7 Media Center. With DVDFab, you get a 30 day fully functional trial for all of its features. You’ll still be able rip DVD’s even after the 30 day trial has ended. The more we’ve been using DVDFab, the more impressed we are with its capabilities, so after the 30 day trial you should consider purchasing a license. We will have a full review of the of it to share with you soon.  Download DVDFab Download ImgBurn Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Rip DVDs with VLCCalculate with Qalculate on LinuxConvert a Row to a Column in Excel the Easy WayEnjoy Quick & Easy Unit Conversion with Convert for WindowsConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser

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• Blog Buzz - Devoxx 2011

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Some day I will make it to Devoxx – for now, I’m content to vicariously follow the blogs of attendees and pick up on what’s happening.  I’ve been doing more blog "fishing," looking for the best commentary on 2011 Devoxx. There’s plenty of food for thought – and the ideas are not half-baked.The bloggers are out in full, offering useful summaries and commentary on Devoxx goings-on.Constantin Partac, a Java developer and a member of Transylvania JUG, a community from Cluj-Napoca/Romania, offers an excellent summary of the Devoxx keynotes. Here’s a sample:“Oracle Opening Keynote and JDK 7, 8, and 9 Presentation•    Oracle is committed to Java and wants to provide support for it on any device.•    JSE 7 for Mac will be released next week.•    Oracle would like Java developers to be involved in JCP, to adopt a JSR and to attend local JUG meetings.•    JEE 7 will be released next year.•    JEE 7 is focused on cloud integration, some of the features are already implemented in glassfish 4 development branch.•    JSE 8 will be release in summer of 2013 due to “enterprise community request” as they can not keep the pace with an 18    month release cycle.•    The main features included in JSE8 are lambda support, project Jigsaw, new Date/Time API, project Coin++ and adding   support for sensors. JSE 9 probably will focus on some of these features:1.    self tuning JVM2.    improved native language integration3.    processing enhancement for big data4.    reification (adding runtime class type info for generic types)5.    unification of primitive and corresponding object classes6.    meta-object protocol in order to use type and methods define in other JVM languages7.    multi-tenancy8.    JVM resource management” Thanks Constantin! Ivan St. Ivanov, of SAP Labs Bulgaria, also commented on the keynotes with a different focus.  He summarizes Henrik Stahl’s look ahead to Java SE 8 and JavaFX 3.0; Cameron Purdy on Java EE and the cloud; celebrated Java Champion Josh Bloch on what’s good and bad about Java; Mark Reinhold’s quick look ahead to Java SE 9; and Brian Goetz on lambdas and default methods in Java SE 8. Here’s St. Ivanov’s account of Josh Bloch’s comments on the pluses of Java:“He started with the virtues of the platform. To name a few:    Tightly specified language primitives and evaluation order – int is always 32 bits and operations are executed always from left  to right, without compilers messing around    Dynamic linking – when you change a class, you need to recompile and rebuild just the jar that has it and not the whole application    Syntax  similarity with C/C++ – most existing developers at that time felt like at home    Object orientations – it was cool at that time as well as functional programming is today    It was statically typed language – helps in faster runtime, better IDE support, etc.    No operator overloading – well, I’m not sure why it is good. Scala has it for example and that’s why it is far better for defining DSLs. But I will not argue with Josh.”It’s worth checking out St. Ivanov’s summary of Bloch’s views on what’s not so great about Java as well. What's Coming in JAX-RS 2.0Marek Potociar, Principal Software Engineer at Oracle and currently specification lead of Java EE RESTful web services API (JAX-RS), blogged on his talk about what's coming in JAX-RS 2.0, scheduled for final release in mid-2012.  Here’s a taste:“Perhaps the most wanted addition to the JAX-RS is the Client API, that would complete the JAX-RS story, that is currently server-side only. In JAX-RS 2.0 we are adding a completely interface-based and fluent client API that blends nicely in with the existing fluent response builder pattern on the server-side. When we started with the client API, the first proposal contained around 30 classes. Thanks to the feedback from our Expert Group we managed to reduce the number of API classes to 14 (2 of them being exceptions)! The resulting is compact while at the same time we still managed to create an API that reflects the method invocation context flow (e.g. once you decide on the target URI and start setting headers on the request, your IDE will not try to offer you a URI setter in the code completion). This is a subtle but very important usability aspect of an API…” Obviously, Devoxx is a great Java conference, one that is hitting this year at a time when much is brewing in the platform and beginning to be anticipated.

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• Enable DreamScene in Any Version of Vista or Windows 7

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Windows DreamScene was a utility available for Vista Ultimate that allowed users to set video as desktop wallpaper. It was dropped in Windows 7, but we’ll take a look at how to play DreamScenes in all versions of Windows 7 or Vista. Downloading DreamScenes First, you’ll need to find some DreamScenes to download. We’ve found some nice ones at both DreamScene.org and DeviantArt. You can find those download links at the end of the article. They’ll come as compressed files, so you’ll need to extract them after downloading. Windows 7 DreamScene Activator If you are running Windows 7 you can use Windows 7 DreamScene Activator. This free portable utility enables DreamScene in both 32 & 64 bit versions of Windows 7. Users can then set either MPG or WMV files as desktop wallpaper. Download and extract the Windows 7 DreamScene Activator (link below). Once extracted, you’ll need to run the application as administrator. Right-click on the .exe and select Run as administrator. Click on Enable DreamScene. This will also restart Windows Explorer if it is open. To play your DreamScene, browse for the file in Windows Explorer, right-click the file and select Set as Desktop Background. Enjoy your new Windows 7 DreamScene.   Although it says it is for Windows 7 only, we were able to get it to work with no problems on Vista Home Premium x32 as well.   You can Pause the DreamScene at anytime by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting Pause DreamScene.   When you are ready for a change, click Disable DreamScene and switch back to your previous wallpaper. Using VLC Media Player Users of all versions of Windows 7 & Vista can enable a DreamScene using VLC. Recently, we showed you how to set a video as your desktop wallpaper in VLC.  Since DreamScenes are in MPEG or WMV format, we will use the same tactic to display them as desktop wallpaper. We’ll just need to make a few additional tweaks to the VLC settings. You’ll need to download and install VLC media player if you don’t already have it. You can find the download link below. Next, select Tools > Preferences from the Menu. Select the Video button on the left and then choose DirectX video output from the Output dropdown list. Next, select All under Show Settings at the lower left, then select the Video button on the left pane. Uncheck Show media title on video. This will prevent VLC from constantly showing the title of the video on the screen each time the video loops. Click Save and the restart VLC.   Now we will add the video to our playlist and set it to continuously loop. Select View > Playlist from the Menu. Select the Add file button from the bottom of the Playlist window and select Add file.   Browse for your file and click Open.   Click the Loop button at the bottom so the video plays in a continuous loop.   Now, we’re ready to play the video. After the video starts playing, select Video > DirectX Wallpaper from the Menu, then minimize VLC.   If you’re using Aero Themes, you may get a pop-up warning and Windows will switch automatically to a basic theme.   If looping one video gets to be a little repetitive, you can add multiple videos to your playlist in VLC and loop the entire playlist. Just make sure you toggle the Loop button on the playlist window to Loop All. Now you’ve got a nice DreamScene playing on your desktop. Another cool trick you can do with VLC is take snapshots of favorite movie scenes and set them as backgrounds. When you’re ready to go back to your old wallpaper, maximize VLC, select Video and click DirectX Wallpaper again to turn it off the video background. Occasionally we were left with a black screen and had to manually change our wallpaper back to normal even after turning off the DirectX Wallpaper. Note: Keep in mind that using the VLC method takes up a lot of resources so if you try to run it on older hardware, or say a netbook, you’re not going to get good results. We also tried to use the VLC method in XP, but couldn’t get it to work. If you have leave a comment and let us know. While the DreamScene feature never really caught on in Vista, we find them to be a cool way to pump a little life into your desktop on any version of Vista or Windows 7. Downloads DreamScenes from Dreamscene.org DreamScenes from DeviantArt Download VLC media player Windows 7 DreamScene Activator Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Wait, How do I Turn on DreamScene Again?Enable Run Command on Windows 7 or Vista Start MenuEnable or Disable UAC From the Windows 7 / Vista Command LineUnderstanding Windows Vista Aero Glass RequirementsEnable Mapping to \HostnameC$ Share on Windows 7 or Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Microsoft Office Web Apps Guide Know if Someone Accessed Your Facebook Account Shop for Music with Windows Media Player 12 Access Free Documentaries at BBC Documentaries Rent Cameras In Bulk At CameraRenter Download Songs From MySpace

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• OpenSSL Versions in Solaris

  - by darrenm

  Those of you have have installed Solaris 11 or have read some of the blogs by my colleagues will have noticed Solaris 11 includes OpenSSL 1.0.0, this is a different version to what we have in Solaris 10.  I hope the following explains why that is and how it fits with the expectations on binary compatibility between Solaris releases. Solaris 10 was the first release where we included OpenSSL libraries and headers (part of it was actually statically linked into the SSH client/server in Solaris 9).  At time we were building and releasing Solaris 10 the current train of OpenSSL was 0.9.7.  The OpenSSL libraries at that time were known to not always be completely API and ABI (binary) compatible between releases (some times even in the lettered patch releases) though mostly if you stuck with the documented high level APIs you would be fine.   For this reason OpenSSL was classified as a 'Volatile' interface and in Solaris 10 Volatile interfaces were not part of the default library search path which is why the OpenSSL libraries live in /usr/sfw/lib on Solaris 10.  Okay, but what does Volatile mean ? Quoting from the attributes(5) man page description of Volatile (which was called External in older taxonomy): Volatile interfaces can change at any time and for any reason. The Volatile interface stability level allows Sun pro- ducts to quickly track a fluid, rapidly evolving specif- ication. In many cases, this is preferred to providing additional stability to the interface, as it may better meet the expectations of the consumer. The most common application of this taxonomy level is to interfaces that are controlled by a body other than Sun, but unlike specifications controlled by standards bodies or Free or Open Source Software (FOSS) communities which value interface compatibility, it can not be asserted that an incompatible change to the interface specifica- tion would be exceedingly rare. It may also be applied to FOSS controlled software where it is deemed more important to track the community with minimal latency than to provide stability to our customers. It also common to apply the Volatile classification level to interfaces in the process of being defined by trusted or widely accepted organization. These are generically referred to as draft standards. An "IETF Internet draft" is a well understood example of a specification under development. Volatile can also be applied to experimental interfaces. No assertion is made regarding either source or binary compatibility of Volatile interfaces between any two releases, including patches. Applications containing these interfaces might fail to function properly in any future release. Note that last paragraph!  OpenSSL is only one example of the many interfaces in Solaris that are classified as Volatile.  At the other end of the scale we have Committed (Stable in Solaris 10 terminology) interfaces, these include things like the POSIX APIs or Solaris specific APIs that we have no intention of changing in an incompatible way.  There are also Private interfaces and things we declare as Not-an-Interface (eg command output not intended for scripting against only to be read by humans). Even if we had declared OpenSSL as a Committed/Stable interface in Solaris 10 there are allowed exceptions, again quoting from attributes(5): 4. An interface specification which isn't controlled by Sun has been changed incompatibly and the vast majority of interface consumers expect the newer interface. 5. Not making the incompatible change would be incomprehensible to our customers. In our opinion and that of our large and small customers keeping up with the OpenSSL community is important, and certainly both of the above cases apply. Our policy for dealing with OpenSSL on Solaris 10 was to stay at 0.9.7 and add fixes for security vulnerabilities (the version string includes the CVE numbers of fixed vulnerabilities relevant to that release train).  The last release of OpenSSL 0.9.7 delivered by the upstream community was more than 4 years ago in Feb 2007. Now lets roll forward to just before the release of Solaris 11 Express in 2010. By that point in time the current OpenSSL release was 0.9.8 with the 1.0.0 release known to be coming soon.  Two significant changes to OpenSSL were made between Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 Express.  First in Solaris 11 Express (and Solaris 11) we removed the requirement that Volatile libraries be placed in /usr/sfw/lib, that means OpenSSL is now in /usr/lib, secondly we upgraded it to the then current version stream of OpenSSL (0.9.8) as was expected by our customers. In between Solaris 11 Express in 2010 and the release of Solaris 11 in 2011 the OpenSSL community released version 1.0.0.  This was a huge milestone for a long standing and highly respected open source project.  It would have been highly negligent of Solaris not to include OpenSSL 1.0.0e in the Solaris 11 release. It is the latest best supported and best performing version.     In fact Solaris 11 isn't 'just' OpenSSL 1.0.0 but we have added our SPARC T4 engine and the AES-NI engine to support the on chip crypto acceleration. This gives us 4.3x better AES performance than OpenSSL 0.9.8 running on AIX on an IBM POWER7. We are now working with the OpenSSL community to determine how best to integrate the SPARC T4 changes into the mainline OpenSSL.  The OpenSSL 'pkcs11' engine we delivered in Solaris 10 to support the CA-6000 card and the SPARC T1/T2/T3 hardware is still included in Solaris 11. When OpenSSL 1.0.1 and 1.1.0 come out we will asses what is best for Solaris customers. It might be upgrade or it might be parallel delivery of more than one version stream.  At this time Solaris 11 still classifies OpenSSL as a Volatile interface, it is our hope that we will be able at some point in a future release to give it a higher interface stability level. Happy crypting! and thank-you OpenSSL community for all the work you have done that helps Solaris.

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• The JavaOne 2012 Sunday Technical Keynote

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  At the JavaOne 2012 Sunday Technical Keynote, held at the Masonic Auditorium, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect, Java Platform Group, stated that they were going to do things a bit differently--"rather than 20 minutes of SE, and 20 minutes of FX, and 20 minutes of EE, we're going to mix it up a little," he said. "For much of it, we're going to be showing a single application, to show off some of the great work that's been done in the last year, and how Java can scale well--from the cloud all the way down to some very small embedded devices, and how JavaFX scales right along with it."Richard Bair and Jasper Potts from the JavaFX team demonstrated a JavaOne schedule builder application with impressive navigation, animation, pop-overs, and transitions. They noted that the application runs seamlessly on either Windows or Macs, running Java 7. They then ran the same application on an Ubuntu Linux machine--"it just works," said Blair.The JavaFX duo next put the recently released JavaFX Scene Builder through its paces -- dragging and dropping various image assets to build the application's UI, then fine tuning a CSS file for the finished look and feel. Among many other new features, in the past six months, JavaFX has released support for H.264 and HTTP live streaming, "so you can get all the real media playing inside your JavaFX application," said Bair. And in their developer preview builds of JavaFX 8, they've now split the rendering thread from the UI thread, to better take advantage of multi-core architectures.Next, Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect, explored language and library features planned for Java SE 8, including Lambda expressions and better parallel libraries. These feature changes both simplify code and free-up libraries to more effectively use parallelism. "It's currently still a lot of work to convert an application from serial to parallel," noted Goetz.Reinhold had previously boasted of Java scaling down to "small embedded devices," so Blair and Potts next ran their schedule builder application on a small embedded PandaBoard system with an OMAP4 chip set. Connected to a touch screen, the embedded board ran the same JavaFX application previously seen on the desktop systems, but now running on Java SE Embedded. (The systems can be seen and tried at four of the nearby JavaOne hotels.) Bob Vandette, Java Embedded Architect, then displayed a $25 Rasberry Pi ARM-based system running Java SE Embedded, noting the even greater need for the platform independence of Java in such highly varied embedded processor spaces. Reinhold and Vandetta discussed Project Jigsaw, the planned modularization of the Java SE platform, and its deferral from the Java 8 release to Java 9. Reinhold demonstrated the promise of Jigsaw by running a modularized demo version of the earlier schedule builder application on the resource constrained Rasberry Pi system--although the demo gods were not smiling down, and the application ultimately crashed.Reinhold urged developers to become involved in the Java 8 development process--getting the weekly builds, trying out their current code, and trying out the new features:http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/spechttp://jdk8.java.netFrom there, Arun Gupta explored Java EE. The primary themes of Java EE 7, Gupta stated, will be greater productivity, and HTML 5 functionality (WebSocket, JSON, and HTML 5 forms). Part of the planned productivity increase of the release will come from a reduction in writing boilerplate code--through the widespread use of dependency injection in the platform, along with default data sources and default connection factories. Gupta noted the inclusion of JAX-RS in the web profile, the changes and improvements found in JMS 2.0, as well as enhancements to Java EE 7 in terms of JPA 2.1 and EJB 3.2. GlassFish 4 is the reference implementation of Java EE 7, and currently includes WebSocket, JSON, JAX-RS 2.0, JMS 2.0, and more. The final release is targeted for Q2, 2013. Looking forward to Java EE 8, Gupta explored how the platform will provide multi-tenancy for applications, modularity based on Jigsaw, and cloud architecture. Meanwhile, Project Avatar is the group's incubator project for designing an end-to-end framework for building HTML 5 applications. Santiago Pericas-Geertsen joined Gupta to demonstrate their "Angry Bids" auction/live-bid/chat application using many of the enhancements of Java EE 7, along with an Avatar HTML 5 infrastructure, and running on the GlassFish reference implementation.Finally, Gupta covered Project Easel, an advanced tooling capability in NetBeans for HTML5. John Ceccarelli, NetBeans Engineering Director, joined Gupta to demonstrate creating an HTML 5 project from within NetBeans--formatting the project for both desktop and smartphone implementations. Ceccarelli noted that NetBeans 7.3 beta will be released later this week, and will include support for creating such HTML 5 project types. Gupta directed conference attendees to: http://glassfish.org/javaone2012 for everything about Java EE and GlassFish at JavaOne 2012.

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• How to Customize Fonts and Colors for Gnome Panels in Ubuntu Linux

  - by The Geek

  Earlier this week we showed you how to make the Gnome Panels totally transparent, but you really need some customized fonts and colors to make the effect work better. Here’s how to do it. This article is the first part of a multi-part series on how to customize the Ubuntu desktop, written by How-To Geek reader and ubergeek, Omar Hafiz. Changing the Gnome Colors the Easy Way You’ll first need to install Gnome Color Chooser which is available in the default repositories (the package name is gnome-color-chooser). Then go to System > Preferences > Gnome Color Chooser to launch the program. When you see all these tabs you immediately know that Gnome Color Chooser does not only change the font color of the panel, but also the color of the fonts all over Ubuntu, desktop icons, and many other things as well. Now switch to the panel tab, here you can control every thing about your panels. You can change font, font color, background and background color of the panels and start menus. Tick the “Normal” option and choose the color you want for the panel font. If you want you can change the hover color of the buttons on the panel by too. A little below the color option is the font options, this includes the font, font size, and the X and Y positioning of the font. The first two options are pretty straight forward, they change the typeface and the size. The X-Padding and Y-Padding may confuse you but they are interesting, they may give a nice look for your panels by increasing the space between items on your panel like this: X-Padding:   Y-Padding:   The bottom half of the window controls the look of your start menus which is the Applications, Places, and Systems menus. You can customize them just the way you did with the panel.   Alright, this was the easy way to change the font of your panels. Changing the Gnome Theme Colors the Command-Line Way The other hard (not so hard really) way will be changing the configuration files that tell your panel how it should look like. In your Home Folder, press Ctrl+H to show the hidden files, now find the file “.gtkrc-2.0”, open it and insert this line in it. If there are any other lines in the file leave them intact. include “/home/<username>/.gnome2/panel-fontrc” Don’t forget to replace the <user_name> with you user account name. When done close and save the file. Now navigate the folder “.gnome2” from your Home Folder and create a new file and name it “panel-fontrc”. Open the file you just created with a text editor and paste the following in it: style “my_color”{fg[NORMAL] = “#FF0000”}widget “*PanelWidget*” style “my_color”widget “*PanelApplet*” style “my_color” This text will make the font red. If you want other colors you’ll need to replace the Hex value/HTML Notation (in this case #FF0000) with the value of the color you want. To get the hex value you can use GIMP, Gcolor2 witch is available in the default repositories or you can right-click on your panel > Properties > Background tab then click to choose the color you want and copy the Hex value. Don’t change any other thing in the text. When done, save and close. Now press Alt+F2 and enter “killall gnome-panel” to force it to restart or you can log out and login again. Most of you will prefer the first way of changing the font and color for it’s ease of applying and because it gives you much more options but, some may not have the ability/will to download and install a new program on their machine or have reasons of their own for not to using it, that’s why we provided the two way. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware The Splendiferous Array of Culinary Tools [Infographic] Add a Real-Time Earth Wallpaper App to Ubuntu with xplanetFX The Citroen GT – An Awesome Video Game Car Brought to Life [Video] Final Man vs. Machine Round of Jeopardy Unfolds; Watson Dominates Give Chromium-Based Browser Desktop Notifications a Native System Look in Ubuntu Chrome Time Track Is a Simple Task Time Tracker

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• Row Count Plus Transformation

  As the name suggests we have taken the current Row Count Transform that is provided by Microsoft in the Integration Services toolbox and we have recreated the functionality and extended upon it. There are two things about the current version that we thought could do with cleaning up Lack of a custom UI You have to type the variable name yourself In the Row Count Plus Transformation we solve these issues for you. Another thing we thought was missing is the ability to calculate the time taken between components in the pipeline. An example usage would be that you want to know how many rows flowed between Component A and Component B and how long it took. Again we have solved this issue. Credit must go to Erik Veerman of Solid Quality Learning for the idea behind noting the duration. We were looking at one of his packages and saw that he was doing something very similar but he was using a Script Component as a transformation. Our philosophy is that if you have to write or Copy and Paste the same piece of code more than once then you should be thinking about a custom component and here it is. The Row Count Plus Transformation populates variables with the values returned from; Counting the rows that have flowed through the path Returning the time in seconds between when it first saw a row come down this path and when it saw the final row. It is possible to leave both these boxes blank and the component will still work.   All input columns are passed through the transformation unaltered, you are not permitted to change or add to the inputs or outputs of this component. Optionally you can set the component to fire an event, which happens during the PostExecute phase of the execution. This can be useful to improve visibility of this information, such that it is captured in package logging, or can be used to drive workflow in the case of an error event. Properties Property Data Type Description OutputRowCountVariable String The name of the variable into which the amount of row read will be passed (Optional). OutputDurationVariable String The name of the variable into which the duration in seconds will be passed. (Optional). EventType RowCountPlusTransform.EventType The type of event to fire during post execute, included in which are the row count and duration values. RowCountPlusTransform.EventType Enumeration Name Value Description None 0 Do not fire any event. Information 1 Fire an Information event. Warning 2 Fire a Warning event. Error 3 Fire an Error event. Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. For 2005/2008 Only - Finally you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Row Count Plus Transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations, and this component requires a minimum of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1. Downloads The Row Number Transformation is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2005 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2008 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.6 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.5 - SQL Server 2008 release. (15 Oct 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.1.0.43 - Bug fix for duration. For long running processes the duration second count may have been incorrect. (8 Sep 2006) Version 1.1.0.42 - SP1 Compatibility Testing. Added the ability to raise an event with the count and duration data for easier logging or workflow. (18 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.0.1 - SQL Server 2005 RTM. Made available as general public release. (20 Mar 2006) Screenshot Troubleshooting Make sure you have downloaded the version that matches your version of SQL Server. We offer separate downloads for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2012. If you get an error when you try and use the component along the lines of The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed.  ... The data flow object "Konesans ..." is not installed correctly on this computer, this usually indicates that the internal cache of SSIS components needs to be updated. This is held by the SSIS service, so you need restart the the SQL Server Integration Services service. You can do this from the Services applet in Control Panel or Administrative Tools in Windows. You can also restart the computer if you prefer. You may also need to restart any current instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Once installation is complete you need to manually add the task to the toolbox before you will see it and to be able add it to packages - How do I install a task or transform component?

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• Beginner Guide to User Styles for Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  While the default styles for most websites are nice there may be times when you would love to tweak how things look. See how easy it can be to change how websites look with the Stylish Extension for Firefox. Note: Scripts from Userstyles.org can also be added to Greasemonkey if you have it installed. Getting Started After installing the extension you will be presented with a first run page. You may want to keep it open so that you can browse directly to the Userstyles.org website using the link in the upper left corner. In the lower right corner you will have a new Status Bar Icon. If you have used Greasemonkey before this icon works a little differently. It will be faded out due to no user style scripts being active at the moment. You can use either a left or right click to access the Context Menu. The user style script management section is also added into your Add-ons Management Window instead of being separate. When you reach the user style scripts homepage you can choose to either learn more about the extension & scripts or… Start hunting for lots of user style script goodness. There will be three convenient categories to get you jump-started if you wish. You could also conduct a search if you have something specific in mind. Here is some information directly from the website provided for your benefit. Notice the reference to using these scripts with Greasemonkey… This section shows you how the scripts have been categorized and can give you a better idea of how to search for something more specific. Finding & Installing Scripts For our example we decided to look at the Updated Styles Section”first. Based on the page number listing at the bottom there are a lot of scripts available to look through. Time to refine our search a little bit… Using the drop-down menu we selected site styles and entered Yahoo in the search blank. Needless to say 5 pages was a lot easier to look through than 828. We decided to install the Yahoo! Result Number Script. When you do find a script (or scripts) that you like simply click on the Install with Stylish Button. A small window will pop up giving you the opportunity to preview, proceed with the installation, edit the code, or cancel the process. Note: In our example the Preview Function did not work but it may be something particular to the script or our browser’s settings. If you decide to do some quick editing the window shown above will switch over to this one. To return to the previous window and install the user style script click on the Switch to Install Button. After installing the user style the green section in the script’s webpage will actually change to this message… Opening up the Add-ons Manager Window shows our new script ready to go. The script worked perfectly when we conducted a search at Yahoo…the Status Bar Icon also changed from faded out to full color (another indicator that everything is running nicely). Conclusion If you prefer a custom look for your favorite websites then you can have a lot of fun experimenting with different user style scripts. Note: See our article here for specialized How-To Geek User Style Scripts that can be added to your browser. Links Download the Stylish Extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Visit the Userstyles.org Website Install the Yahoo! Result Number User Style Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Spice Up that Boring about:blank Page in FirefoxExpand the Add Bookmark Dialog in Firefox by DefaultEnjoy How-To Geek User Style Script GoodnessAuto-Hide Your Cluttered Firefox Status Bar ItemsBeginner Geek: Delete User Accounts in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative Error Goblin Explains Windows Error Codes Twelve must-have Google Chrome plugins

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