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• Updating a Minimum spanning tree when a new edge is inserted

  - by Lynette

  Hello, I've been presented the following problem in University: Let G = (V, E) be an (undirected) graph with costs ce = 0 on the edges e € E. Assume you are given a minimum-cost spanning tree T in G. Now assume that a new edge is added to G, connecting two nodes v, tv € V with cost c. a) Give an efficient algorithm to test if T remains the minimum-cost spanning tree with the new edge added to G (but not to the tree T). Make your algorithm run in time O(|E|). Can you do it in O(|V|) time? Please note any assumptions you make about what data structure is used to represent the tree T and the graph G. b)Suppose T is no longer the minimum-cost spanning tree. Give a linear-time algorithm (time O(|E|)) to update the tree T to the new minimum-cost spanning tree. This is the solution I found: Let e1=(a,b) the new edge added Find in T the shortest path from a to b (BFS) if e1 is the most expensive edge in the cycle then T remains the MST else T is not the MST It seems to work but i can easily make this run in O(|V|) time, while the problem asks O(|E|) time. Am i missing something? By the way we are authorized to ask for help from anyone so I'm not cheating :D Thanks in advance

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• Regex to ensure group match doesn't end with a specific character

  - by AJ

  I'm having trouble coming up with a regular expression to match a particular case. I have a list of tv shows in about 4 formats: Name.Of.Show.S01E01 Name.Of.Show.0101 Name.Of.Show.01x01 Name.Of.Show.101 What I want to match is the show name. My main problem is that my regex matches the name of the show with a preceding '.'. My regex is the following: "^([0-9a-zA-Z\.]+)(S[0-9]{2}E[0-9]{2}|[0-9]{4}|[0-9]{2}x[0-9]{2}|[0-9]{3})" Some Examples: >>> import re >>> SHOW_INFO = re.compile("^([0-9a-zA-Z\.]+)(S[0-9]{2}E[0-9]{2}|[0-9]{4}|[0-9]{2}x[0-9]{2}|[0-9]{3})") >>> match = SHOW_INFO.match("Name.Of.Show.S01E01") >>> match.groups() ('Name.Of.Show.', 'S01E01') >>> match = SHOW_INFO.match("Name.Of.Show.0101") >>> match.groups() ('Name.Of.Show.0', '101') >>> match = SHOW_INFO.match("Name.Of.Show.01x01") >>> match.groups() ('Name.Of.Show.', '01x01') >>> match = SHOW_INFO.match("Name.Of.Show.101") >>> match.groups() ('Name.Of.Show.', '101') So the question is how do I avoid the first group ending with a period? I realize I could simply do: var.strip(".") However, that doesn't handle the case of "Name.Of.Show.0101". Is there a way I could improve the regex to handle that case better? Thanks in advance.

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• Creating a content management system for dedicated use

  - by whitstone86

  I've been trying to create a specialised CMS, as none of the current open-source ones fit my needs for this project. I did my research on Google, tried multiple times but haven't got very far with this project. I'm trying to create a CMS for a TV/episode guide which is similar to this: (for some that don't have the :// just copy-and-paste and add it after http in the URL) http library.digiguide.com/lib/programmenextshowing/Police%2C+Camera%2C+Action!-12578 (one such example) - where records expire and delete from the database after expiration. This is the design I'm trying to emulate: http library.digiguide.com/lib/programme/24-84241/Drama/ - the programme http://library.digiguide.com/lib/episode/Under+Surveillance-714873 - a typical episode, could use .htaccess to remove php from name http library.digiguide.com/lib/programmenextshowing/24-84241 - paginated episode display (using script that I found in search here possibly) I don't have access to cron job as it's on Windows/Apache, so that's out the question for this one. I'm not sure how to go about this successfully, anyone got any advice? (Note:Although the linked site runs in ASP.NET, it's the design and feel of it I'm trying to emulate, except in PHP. I've managed to emulate that site's design, but with my own tweaks to it.)

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• pie chart (php graph lib) problem !

  - by gin

  i'm using phpgraphlib for creating charts i tried one of the example of the pie charts ex (with lil bit pf changes) which is : include('phpgraphlib.php'); include('phpgraphlib_pie.php'); $graph = new PHPGraphLibPie(400, 200); $data = array("CBS" = 0, "NBC" = 1); $graph-addData($data); $graph-setTitle('8/29/07 Top 5 TV Networks Market Share'); $graph-setLabelTextColor('50,50,50'); $graph-setLegendTextColor('50,50,50'); $graph-createGraph(); ? and whether i put $data = array("CBS" = 0, "NBC" = 1); or $data = array("CBS" = 1, "NBC" = 0); the pie chart have the same color.. shouldn't the whole pie/slice suppose to be colored with some color (i.e. blue) if ("CBS" = 0, "NBC" = 1) , while if ("CBS" = 1, "NBC" = 0) it should be colored with other color (i.e. red)/? is there any way to fix it? i would really appreciate any help ,,

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• Linking Listbox child categories

  - by Gerardo Abdo

  Hello I have few monhts working with aspx, and now I'm developing a shopping cart website. For the employee to upload the products on the DB, every product needs to be linked to a category and sub category, and sub-sub category, and so on. Sometimes the sub-sub categories are up to 5. For example Electronics-TV-LCD-Samsung-40 inches. First, What I would like to identify is if the SQL table has the apporpiate structure. I have 3 columns Id, Description, Parent_Id. Categories with Parent Id=0 is used for the top ones. Is this the best way to do it? Then I want to use the ListBox control to select main Categories, and once it is selected, filled a second listbox with its childs and so on. Do I need to query SQL DB everytime the change event happens? I heard about linq but have not used yet, What would be your suggestion to do this. If you have seen a sample to understand it better will be appreciated. Thank you

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• Show/hide text based on optgroup selection using Jquery

  - by general exception

  I have the following HTML markup:- <select name="Fault" class="textbox" id="fault"> <option>Single Light Out</option> <option>Light Dim</option> <option>Light On In Daytime</option> <option>Erratic Operating Times</option> <option>Flashing/Flickering</option> <option>Causing Tv/Radio Interference</option> <option>Obscured By Hedge/Tree Branches</option> <option>Bracket Arm Needs Realigning</option> <option>Shade/Cover Missing</option> <option>Column In Poor Condition</option> <option>Several Lights Out (please state how many)</option> <option>Column Leaning</option> <option>Door Missing/Wires Exposed</option> <option>Column Knocked Down/Traffic Accident</option> <option>Lantern Or Bracket Broken Off/Hanging On Wires</option> <option>Shade/Cover Hanging Open</option> </select> <span id="faulttext" style="color:Red; display:none">Text in the span</span> This Jquery snippet adds the last 5 options into an option group. $('#fault option:nth-child(n+12)').wrapAll('<optgroup label="Urgent Reasons">'); What I want to do is, remove the display:none if any of the items within the <optgroup> are selected, effectively displaying the span message, possibly with a fade in transition, and also hide the message if any options outside of the <optgroup> are selected.

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• how to scroll in android???

  - by antony

  I create a program to add check boxes dynamically.But i cant scroll down.I add the code here ,Pls HELP...... package dyntodo.pack; import android.app.Activity; import android.os.Bundle; import android.view.View; import android.widget.CheckBox; import android.widget.EditText; import android.widget.LinearLayout; import android.widget.Button; import android.widget.TextView; public class dynact extends Activity { @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); TextView tv = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textview); final EditText task = (EditText)findViewById(R.id.task); Button add = (Button)findViewById(R.id.add); add.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v) { addTask(task.getText().toString()); } }); } public void addTask(String task) { LinearLayout layout = (LinearLayout) findViewById(R.id.layout); final CheckBox chk = new CheckBox(this); //Creating checkbox objects….. chk.setText(task); layout.addView(chk); chk.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v) { chk.setVisibility(5); } }); } }

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• Android Signal analysis + some filters.

  - by Profete162

  Hello, as the world cup is the main sport event and the Vuvuzelas are the most annoying sound in the world, I had an idea to remove them definitively by reading this new ( http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2010-06/simple-software-can-filter-out-vuvuzela-whine) that told us that the sound has some frequencies at 233Hz + 466,932,1864Hz. I have already made a lot of Android application by myself but never touching the signal analysis and filtering part, so here are a few questions, I do not ask for precise answer but maybe links and tutorial to find something to work on. I guess that a new Android phone has the CPU and power to make real-time filtering. 1) How can I intercept the sound coming from the Jack microphone - Line-IN plug- ( I plan to link my TV to my phone with Jack to Jack plug). My question is totally software and coding, I have all the wires and adapters to plug a jack into my android phone Line IN. 2) Are there some Fourier analysis librairies, may I have a look to Java libraries on the web and import them to my Android project? I really apologize because my question seem not precise, but I think that would be something great. Thank you for your answers.

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• Broadcast live video from web-cam via plug-in

  - by Freebrainz

  Hello guys! Could you please suggest me what kind of software should I use to broadcast live video from webcam? Web-cam is connected via USB to my server. I want to broadcast video from my webcam on my web-page (HTML, ASP.NET - doesn't matter). I don't want to develop video broadcasting from the beginning - it takes a lot of time to implement good system. I'm looking for ready-to-use plug-in/widget for my site. I found ustream.tv, but live video start playing with delay about 2 seconds... You know, it's not real-time. I need something like Skype/icq/ooVoo... plug-in/widget for my web-site. Are these plug-ins exists in internet? P.S. I know that VideoLAN has ActiveX control. Does VLC provide me with real-time video broadcasting from webcam without any delays like Skype? Thank you!

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• re.sub emptying list

  - by jmau5

  def process_dialect_translation_rules(): # Read in lines from the text file specified in sys.argv[1], stripping away # excess whitespace and discarding comments (lines that start with '##'). f_lines = [line.strip() for line in open(sys.argv[1], 'r').readlines()] f_lines = filter(lambda line: not re.match(r'##', line), f_lines) # Remove any occurances of the pattern '\s*<=>\s*'. This leaves us with a # list of lists. Each 2nd level list has two elements: the value to be # translated from and the value to be translated to. Use the sub function # from the re module to get rid of those pesky asterisks. f_lines = [re.split(r'\s*<=>\s*', line) for line in f_lines] f_lines = [re.sub(r'"', '', elem) for elem in line for line in f_lines] This function should take the lines from a file and perform some operations on the lines, such as removing any lines that begin with ##. Another operation that I wish to perform is to remove the quotation marks around the words in the line. However, when the final line of this script runs, f_lines becomes an empty lines. What happened? Requested lines of original file: ## English-Geek Reversible Translation File #1 ## (Moderate Geek) ## Created by Todd WAreham, October 2009 "TV show" <=> "STAR TREK" "food" <=> "pizza" "drink" <=> "Red Bull" "computer" <=> "TRS 80" "girlfriend" <=> "significant other"

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• XML file does't load when HTML5 video plays

  - by DD77

  I should be able to loads the related XML file and displays the content of the XML file as the video plays back. What am I missing? DEMO JAVSCRIPT // properties var XML_PATH = "http://www.adjustyourset.tv/interview/cuepoints.xml"; var video_width; var video_height; var videos_array=new Array(); // init the application function init() { // call loadXML function loadXML(); } // XML loading function loadXML() { $.ajax({ type: "GET", url: XML_PATH, dataType: "xml", success: function onXMLloaded(xml) { // set cuepoints find("cuepoints"); find("cuepoints"); // loop for each cuepoint $(xml).find('cuepoint').each(function loopingItems(value) { // create an object var obj={timeStamp:$(this).find("timeStamp").text(), desc:$(this).find("desc").text(), thumbLink:$(this).find("thumbLink").text(), price:$(this).find("price").text()}; videos_array.push(obj); // append <ul> and timeStamp $("#mycustomscroll").append('<ul>'); $("#mycustomscroll").append('<a><li id="item">Time Stamp:'+obj.timeStamp+'</li></a>'); }); // close </ul> $("#mycustomscroll").append('</ul>'); // append li tags $("#leftcolumn").append('<li src="'+videos_array[0].desc+'"> <p src="'+videos_array[0].thumbLink+'" /></li>'); // append description $("#price").append(videos_array[0].price); // call addListeners function addListeners(); } }); }

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• Load iframe in html, only with jquery

  - by phpExe

  In this jquery code: $(document).ready(function(){ $list = $(".channeList li"); $list.click(function(){ var $this = $(this); var $mainDesc = $(".ply"); var iframe = $("a", $this).attr("rel"); $("iframe", $mainDesc).attr("src", iframe); } ); } ); There is a list o channels in left that iframe loads from a rel's. I want to load first iframe in <div class="ply"></div> In html, I dont want insert the first item. Can we do this without load first item in html and do this only with jquery? The php function channel() { if (is_numeric($_GET['kanalID'])) { $kanalID = $_GET['kanalID']; } if ($_GET['kanalID'] == "") { $kanalID = 1;} $channel = '<ul class="channeList">'; foreach ($tv as $id => $kanal) { $class = $kanalID == $id ? $class = "currentt": ''; $channel .= '<li> <a href="#" rel="http://mysite.com/index.php?id='.$id.'&w=500&h=320" >'.$kanal.'</a></li>'; } $channel .= '</ul>'; $channel .= '<div class="ply"><iframe frameborder=0 width="500" height="320"></iframe></div>'; return $channel; } Thanks in advance

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• Login to website and use cookie to get source for another page

  - by Stu

  I am trying to login to the TV Rage website and get the source code of the My Shows page. I am successfully logging in (I have checked the response from my post request) but then when I try to perform a get request on the My Shows page, I am re-directed to the login page. This is the code I am using to login: private string LoginToTvRage() { string loginUrl = "http://www.tvrage.com/login.php"; string formParams = string.Format("login_name={0}&login_pass={1}", "xxx", "xxxx"); string cookieHeader; WebRequest req = WebRequest.Create(loginUrl); req.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"; req.Method = "POST"; byte[] bytes = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(formParams); req.ContentLength = bytes.Length; using (Stream os = req.GetRequestStream()) { os.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length); } WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse(); cookieHeader = resp.Headers["Set-cookie"]; String responseStream; using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(resp.GetResponseStream())) { responseStream = sr.ReadToEnd(); } return cookieHeader; } I then pass the cookieHeader into this method which should be getting the source of the My Shows page: private string GetSourceForMyShowsPage(string cookieHeader) { string pageSource; string getUrl = "http://www.tvrage.com/mytvrage.php?page=myshows"; WebRequest getRequest = WebRequest.Create(getUrl); getRequest.Headers.Add("Cookie", cookieHeader); WebResponse getResponse = getRequest.GetResponse(); using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(getResponse.GetResponseStream())) { pageSource = sr.ReadToEnd(); } return pageSource; } I have been using this previous question as a guide but I'm at a loss as to why my code isn't working.

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• Getting hover text with selenium in java

  - by BinaryEmpire

  I am trying to figure out how to get the product availability text from a page like http://www.walmart.com/browse/TV-Video/TVs/_/N-96v3? (once a store has been selected) I selected 76574 as my zipcode and went to the "In My Store" tab The code I have now is WebElement hoverElement = driver.findElement(By.xpath(".//*[@id='Body_15992428']/span")); WebElement hidden = driver.findElement(By.xpath(".//*[@id='slapInfo_NoVariant_15992428']/div")); Actions builder = new Actions(driver); builder.clickAndHold(hoverElement).build().perform(); System.out.println(hidden.getText()); **Edit: I tried profile.setEnableNativeEvents(false); and the text is now displayed in the automated browser window. I still cannot get to the text I want though. It does not throw an exception, only displays nothing because the driver thinks its still hidden. Any one know how to fix this? I keep getting Exception in thread "main" org.openqa.selenium.InvalidElementStateException: Cannot perform native interaction: Could not load native events component. Even after I do profile.setEnableNativeEvents(true); Are there any other ways I can get the hidden text, or what am I doing wrong here? Additionally while I was inspecting the code with firebug, I saw that there is this code <script type="text/javascript"> WALMART.$(document).ready(function(){ WALMART.$('#Body_15992428').hover(function(){ WALMART.$('#SeeStoreAvailBubble').wmBubble('update',WALMART.$('#bubbleMsgUpdate_15992428').html()); }); }); </script> I dont really know how to do things directly with javascript but is there is any way of getting the message text directly from that with a javascript executor?

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• Do I want an embedded web-server, or what?

  - by mawg

  So, someone want me to hack some code for him. He has a 42" TFT display on which he will display some application/business related data. However, 75% of the screen real estate is unused, so he wants to fill it with "TV/adverts/flash/you know, that kind of thing... web based....". Any advice? Do I want an embedded web-server? If so, which? (he wants free & open source, or as cheap as possible) Do I display it in a browser? (duh! probably, dude) But I don't want/need a menu, address bar, toolbar, etc - it should be full screen (does that mean "kiosk mode"?). Sorry, folks, the requirements are not clear, but I hope that you can guess what he probably means (he is not very techie). How should I proceed with this? Thanks.

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• Cloning ID3DXMesh with declration that has 12 floats breaks?

  - by meds

  I have the following vertex declration: struct MESHVERTInstanced { float x, y, z; // Position float nx, ny, nz; // Normal float tu, tv; // Texcoord float idx; // index of the vertex! float tanx, tany, tanz; // The tangent const static D3DVERTEXELEMENT9 Decl[6]; static IDirect3DVertexDeclaration9* meshvertinstdecl; }; And I declare it as such: const D3DVERTEXELEMENT9 MESHVERTInstanced::Decl[] = { { 0, 0, D3DDECLTYPE_FLOAT3, D3DDECLMETHOD_DEFAULT, D3DDECLUSAGE_POSITION, 0 }, { 0, 12, D3DDECLTYPE_FLOAT3, D3DDECLMETHOD_DEFAULT, D3DDECLUSAGE_NORMAL, 0 }, { 0, 24, D3DDECLTYPE_FLOAT2, D3DDECLMETHOD_DEFAULT, D3DDECLUSAGE_TEXCOORD, 0 }, { 0, 32, D3DDECLTYPE_FLOAT1, D3DDECLMETHOD_DEFAULT, D3DDECLUSAGE_TEXCOORD, 1 }, { 0, 36, D3DDECLTYPE_FLOAT3, D3DDECLMETHOD_DEFAULT, D3DDECLUSAGE_TANGENT, 0 }, D3DDECL_END() }; What I try to do next is copy an ID3DXMesh into another one with the new vertex declaration as such: model->CloneMesh( model->GetOptions(), MESHVERTInstanced::Decl, gd3dDevice, &pTempMesh ); When I try to get the FVF size of pTempMesh (D3DXGetFVFVertexSize(pTempMesh-GetFVF())) I get '0' though the size should be 48. The whole thing is fine if I don't have the last declaration, '{ 0, 36, D3DDECLTYPE_FLOAT3, D3DDECLMETHOD_DEFAULT, D3DDECLUSAGE_TANGENT, 0 },' in it and the CloneMesh function does not return a FAIL. I've also tried using different declarations such as D3DDECLUSAGE_TEXCOORD and that has worked fine, returning a size of 48. Is there something specific about D3DDECLUSAGE_TANGENT I don't know? I'm at a complete loss as to why this isn't working...

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• .tpl files and website problem

  - by whitstone86

  Apologies if the title is in lowercase but it's describing an extension format. I've started using Dwoo as my template engine for PHP, and am not sure how to convert my PHP files into .tpl templates. My site is similar to, but not the same as, http://library.digiguide.com/lib/programme/Medium-319648/Drama/ with its design (except colour scheme and site name are different, plus it's in PHP - so copyright issues are avoided here, the design arguably could be seen as parody even though the content is different. The database is called tvguide, and it has these tables: Programmes House M.D. Medium Police Stop! American Dad! The tablenames of the above programmes are: housemdonair mediumonair policestopair americandad1 Episodes The tablenames for the above programmes' episode guides are: housemdepidata mediumepidata policestopepidata americandad1epidata All of them have the following rows: id (not an auto-increment, since I wish to dynamically generate a page from this) episodename seriesnumber episodenumber episodesynopsis (the above four after id do exactly as stated) I have a pagination script that works, it displays 20 records per page as I want it to. This is called pmcPagination.php - but I won't post it in full since it would take up too much space. However, I'm trying to get it so that variables are filled in like this: (ok, so the examples below are ASP.NET, but if there's a PHP/MySQL equivalent I would gratefully appreciate this!!): http://library.digiguide.com/lib/episode/741168 http://library.digiguide.com/lib/episode/714829 with the episode detail and data. My site works, but it's fairly basic, and it's not online yet until my bugs are fixed. Mod_rewrite is enabled so my site reads as http://mytvguide.com/episode/123456 or http://mytvguide.com/programme/123456 http://mytvguide.com/WorldInAction/123456/Documentary/ I've tried looking on Google, but am not sure how to get this TV guide script to work at its best - but I think .tpl, and .php/MySQL is the way to go. Any advice anyone has on making this project into a fully workable, ready to use site would be much appreciated, I've spent months refining this project! P.S. Apologies for the length of this, hope it describes my project well.

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• ListView and wrap_content

  - by gaiapac

  I want to create an activity with a ListView on the left and a TextView on the right, side by side. I write the following xml, but the ListView occupies the entire page and it don't worry about the wrap_content. Why? How can I resolve it? <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools" android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="match_parent" android:orientation="horizontal" > <ListView android:id="@+id/lv" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="match_parent" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/tv" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="match_parent" /> </LinearLayout> EDIT: my onCreate @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.activity_main); ListView lv = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.lv); String[] values = new String[] { "Test1", "Test2", "Test3", "Test4" }; ArrayAdapter<String> adapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this,R.layout.left, R.id.tv1, values); lv.setAdapter(adapter); }

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• Ajax Control Toolkit and Superexpert

  - by Stephen Walther

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

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• Create a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash Drive

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  The Ubuntu Live CD isn’t just useful for trying out Ubuntu before you install it, you can also use it to maintain and repair your Windows PC. Even if you have no intention of installing Linux, every Windows user should have a bootable Ubuntu USB drive on hand in case something goes wrong in Windows. Creating a bootable USB flash drive is surprisingly easy with a small self-contained application called UNetbootin. It will even download Ubuntu for you! Note: Ubuntu will take up approximately 700 MB on your flash drive, so choose a flash drive with at least 1 GB of free space, formatted as FAT32. This process should not remove any existing files on the flash drive, but to be safe you should backup the files on your flash drive. Put Ubuntu on your flash drive UNetbootin doesn’t require installation; just download the application and run it. Select Ubuntu from the Distribution drop-down box, then 9.10_Live from the Version drop-down box. If you have a 64-bit machine, then select 9.10_Live_x64 for the Version. At the bottom of the screen, select the drive letter that corresponds to the USB drive that you want to put Ubuntu on. If you select USB Drive in the Type drop-down box, the only drive letters available will be USB flash drives. Click OK and UNetbootin will start doing its thing. First it will download the Ubuntu Live CD. Then, it will copy the files from the Ubuntu Live CD to your flash drive. The amount of time it takes will vary depending on your Internet speed, an when it’s done, click on Exit. You’re not planning on installing Ubuntu right now, so there’s no need to reboot. If you look at the USB drive now, you should see a bunch of new files and folders. If you had files on the drive before, they should still be present. You’re now ready to boot your computer into Ubuntu 9.10! How to boot into Ubuntu When the time comes that you have to boot into Ubuntu, or if you just want to test and make sure that your flash drive works properly, you will have to set your computer to boot off of the flash drive. The steps to do this will vary depending on your BIOS – which varies depending on your motherboard. To get detailed instructions on changing how your computer boots, search for your motherboard’s manual (or your laptop’s manual for a laptop). For general instructions, which will suffice for 99% of you, read on. Find the important keyboard keys When your computer boots up, a bunch of words and numbers flash across the screen, usually to be ignored. This time, you need to scan the boot-up screen for a few key words with some associated keys: Boot menu and Setup. Typically, these will show up at the bottom of the screen. If your BIOS has a Boot Menu, then read on. Otherwise, skip to the Hard: Using Setup section. Easy: Using the Boot Menu If your BIOS offers a Boot Menu, then during the boot-up process, press the button associated with the Boot Menu. In our case, this is ESC. Our example Boot Menu doesn’t have the ability to boot from USB, but your Boot Menu should have some options, such as USB-CDROM, USB-HDD, USB-FLOPPY, and others. Try the options that start with USB until you find one that works. Don’t worry if it doesn’t work – you can just restart and try again. Using the Boot Menu does not change the normal boot order on your system, so the next time you start up your computer it will boot from the hard drive as normal. Hard: Using Setup If your BIOS doesn’t offer a Boot Menu, then you will have to change the boot order in Setup. Note: There are some options in BIOS Setup that can affect the stability of your machine. Take care to only change the boot order options. Press the button associated with Setup. In our case, this is F2. If your BIOS Setup has a Boot tab, then switch to it and change the order such that one of the USB options occurs first. There may be several USB options, such as USB-CDROM, USB-HDD, USB-FLOPPY, and others; try them out to see which one works for you. If your BIOS does not have a boot tab, boot order is commonly found in Advanced CMOS Options. Note that this changes the boot order permanently until you change it back. If you plan on only plugging in a bootable flash drive when you want to boot from it, then you could leave the boot order as it is, but you may find it easier to switch the order back to the previous order when you reboot from Ubuntu. Booting into Ubuntu If you set the right boot option, then you should be greeted with the UNetbootin screen. Press enter to start Ubuntu with the default options, or wait 10 seconds for this to happen automatically. Ubuntu will start loading. It should go straight to the desktop with no need for a username or password. And that’s it! From this live desktop session, you can try out Ubuntu, and even install software that is not included in the live CD. Installed software will only last for the duration of your session – the next time you start up the live CD it will be back to its original state. Download UNetbootin from sourceforge.net Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayReset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDHow-To Geek on Lifehacker: Control Your Computer with Shortcuts & Speed Up Vista SetupHow To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7Speed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoost 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 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser Scan for Viruses in Ubuntu using ClamAV Replace Your Windows Task Manager With System Explorer Create Talking Photos using Fotobabble

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• Try out Windows Phone 7 on your PC today

  - by Matthew Guay

  Anticipation has been building for the new Windows Phone 7 Series ever since Microsoft unveiled it at the Mobile World Congress in February.  Now, thanks to free developer tools, you can get a first-hand experience of the basic Windows Phone 7 Series devices on your PC. Windows Phone 7 Series represents a huge change in the mobile field for Microsoft, bringing the acclaimed Zune HD UI to an innovative phone platform.  Windows Mobile has often been criticized for being behind other Smartphone platforms, but Microsoft seeks to regain the lead with this new upcoming release.  A platform must have developers behind it to be useful, so they have released a full set of free development tools so anyone can make apps for it today.  Or, if you simply want to play with Windows Phone 7, you can use the included emulator to try out the new Metro UI.  Here’s how to do this today on your Vista or 7 computer. Please note: These tools are a Customer Technology Preview release, so only install them if you’re comfortable using pre-release software. Getting Started First, download the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (link below), and run the installer.  This will install the Customer Technology Preview (CTP) versions of Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, Windows Phone Emulator, Silverlight for Windows Phone, and XNA 4.0 Game Studio on your computer, all of which are required and cannot be installed individually. Accept the license agreement when prompted. Click “Install Now” to install the tools you need.  The only setup customization option is where to save the files, so choose Customize if you need to do so. Setup will now automatically download and install the components you need, and will additionally download either 32 or 64 bit programs depending on your operating system. About halfway thorough the installation, you’ll be prompted to reboot your system.  Once your computer is rebooted, setup will automatically resume without further input.   When setup is finished, click “Run the Product Now” to get started. Running Windows Phone 7 on your PC Now that you’ve got the Windows Phone Developer tools installed, it’s time to get the Windows Phone emulator running.  If you clicked “Run the Product Now” when the setup finished, Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone should have already started.   If not, simply enter “visual studio” in your start menu search and select “Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone”. Now, to run the Windows Phone 7 emulator, we have to test an application.  So, even if you don’t know how to program, we can open a phone application template, and then test it to run the emulator.  First, click New Project on the left hand side of the front page. Any of the application templates would work for this, but here let’s select “Windows Phone Application”, and then click Ok. Here’s your new application template, which already contains the basic phone application framework.  This is where you’d start if you want to develop a Windows Phone app, but for now we just want to see Windows Phone 7 in action. So, to run the emulator, click Debug in the menu and then select Start Debugging. Your new application will launch inside the Windows Phone 7 Series emulator.  The default template doesn’t give us much, but it does show an example application running in Windows Phone 7.   Exploring Windows Phone 7 Click the Windows button on the emulator to go to the home screen.  Notice the Zune HD-like transition animation.  The emulator only includes Internet Explorer, your test application, and a few settings. Click the arrow on the right to see the available applications in a list. Settings lets you change the theme, regional settings, and the date and time in your emulator.  It also has an applications settings pane, but this currently isn’t populated. The Time settings shows a unique Windows Phone UI. You can return to the home screen by pressing the Windows button.  Here’s the Internet Explorer app running, with the virtual keyboard open to enter an address.  Please note that this emulator can also accept input from your keyboard, so you can enter addresses without clicking on the virtual keyboard. And here’s Google running in Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7. Windows Phone 7 supports accelerometers, and you can simulate this in the emulator.  Click one of the rotate buttons to rotate the screen in that direction. Here’s our favorite website in Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 in landscape mode. All this, running right inside your Windows 7 desktop… Developer tools for Windows Phone 7 Although it may be fun to play with the Windows Phone 7 emulator, developers will be more excited to actually be able to create new and exciting apps for it.  The Windows Phone Developer Tools download includes Visual Studio Express and XNA Game Studio 4.0 which lets you create enticing games and apps for Windows Phones.  All development for Windows Phones will be in C#, Silverlight, and the XNA game framework.  Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone includes templates for these, and additionally has code samples to help you get started with development. Conclusion Many features are still not functional in this preview version, such as the search button and most of the included applications.  However, this still gives you a great way to experience firsthand the future of the Windows Phone platform.  And, for developers, this is your chance to set your mark on the Windows Phone 7 Series even before it is released to the public.  Happy playing and developing! Links Download Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Windows Phone Developer Site Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Keep Track of Homework Assignments with SoshikuWeekend Fun: Watch Television On Your PC With TVUPlayerEasily Manage Your Downloads with Download StatusbarCreate a Shortcut or Hotkey to Mute the System Volume in WindowsHow-To Geek on Lifehacker: How to Make Windows Vista Less Annoying 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 Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher Automate Tasks in Linux with Crontab Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family

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• Interesting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web server

  - by jamiet

  I overheard/read a couple of things today that really made me, data junkie that I am, take a step back and think, “Hmmm, yeah, that could be really interesting” and I wanted to make a note of them here so that (a) I could bring them to the attention of anyone that happens to read this and (b) I can maybe come back here in a few years and see if either of these have come to fruition. Your phone as a web server While listening to Jon Udell’s (twitter) “Interviews with Innovators Podcast” today in which he interviewed Herbert Van de Sompel (twitter) about his Momento project. During the interview Jon and Herbert made the following remarks: Jon: [some people] really had this vision of a web of servers, the notion that every node on the internet, every connected entity, is potentially a server and a client…we can see where we’re getting to a point where these endpoint devices we have in our pockets are going to be massively capable and it may be in the not too distant future that significant chunks of the web archive will be cached all over the place including on your own machine… Herbert: wasn’t it Opera who at one point turned your browser into a server? That really got my brain ticking. We all carry a mobile phone with us and therefore we all potentially carry a mobile web server with us as well and to my mind the only thing really stopping that from happening is the capabilities of the phone hardware, the capabilities of the network infrastructure and the will to just bloody do it. Certainly all the standards required for addressing a web server on a phone already exist (to this uninitiated observer DNS and IPv6 seem to solve that problem) so why not? I tweeted about the idea and Rory Street answered back with “why would you want a phone to be a web server?”: Its a fair question and one that I would like to try and answer. Mobile phones are increasingly becoming our window onto the world as we use them to upload messages to Twitter, record our location on FourSquare or interact with our friends on Facebook but in each of these cases some other service is acting as our intermediary; to see what I’m thinking you have to go via Twitter, to see where I am you have to go to FourSquare (I’m using ‘I’ liberally, I don’t actually use FourSquare before you ask). Why should this have to be the case? Why can’t that data be decentralised? Why can’t we be masters of our own data universe? If my phone acted as a web server then I could expose all of that information without needing those intermediary services. I see a time when we can pass around URLs such as the following: http://jamiesphone.net/location/current - Where is Jamie right now? http://jamiesphone.net/location/2010-04-21 – Where was Jamie on 21st April 2010? http://jamiesphone.net/thoughts/current – What’s on Jamie’s mind right now? http://jamiesphone.net/blog – What documents is Jamie sharing with me? http://jamiesphone.net/calendar/next7days – Where is Jamie planning to be over the next 7 days? and those URLs get served off of the phone in our pockets. If we govern that data then we can control who has access to it and (crucially) how long its available for. Want to wipe yourself off the face of the web? its pretty easy if you’re in control of all the data – just turn your phone off. None of this exists today but I look forward to a time when it does. Opera really were onto something last June when they announced Opera Unite (admittedly Unite only works because Opera provide an intermediary DNS-alike system – it isn’t totally decentralised). Opening up Twitter annotations Last week Twitter held their first developer conference called Chirp where they announced an upcoming new feature called ‘Twitter Annotations’; in short this will allow us to attach metadata to a Tweet thus enhancing the tweet itself. Think of it as a richer version of hashtags. To think of it another way Twitter are turning their data into a humongous Entity-Attribute-Value or triple-tuple store. That alone has huge implications both for the web and Twitter as a whole – the ability to enrich that 140 characters data and thus make it more useful is indeed compelling however today I stumbled upon a blog post from Eugene Mandel entitled Tweet Annotations – a Way to a Metadata Marketplace? where he proposed the idea of allowing tweets to have metadata added by people other than the person who tweeted the original tweet. This idea really fascinated me especially when I read some of the potential uses that Eugene and his commenters suggested. They included: Amazon could attach an ISBN to a tweet that mentions a book. Specialist clients apps for book lovers could be built up around this metadata. Advertisers could pay to place adverts in metadata. The revenue generated from those adverts could be shared with the tweeter or people who add the metadata. Granted, allowing anyone to add metadata to a tweet has the potential to create a spam problem the like of which we haven’t even envisaged but spam hasn’t halted the growth of the web and neither should it halt the growth of data annotations either. The original tweeter should of course be able to determine who can add metadata and whether it should be moderated. As Eugene says himself: Opening publishing tweet annotations to anyone will open the way to a marketplace of metadata where client developers, data mining companies and advertisers can add new meaning to Twitter and build innovative businesses. What Eugene and his followers did not mention is what I think is potentially the most fascinating use of opening up annotations. Google’s success today is built on their page rank algorithm that measures the validity of a web page by the number of incoming links to it and the page rank of the sites containing those links – its a system built on reputation. Twitter annotations could open up a new paradigm however – let’s call it People rank- where reputation can be measured by the metadata that people choose to apply to links and the websites containing those links. Its not hard to see why Google and Microsoft have paid big bucks to get access to the Twitter firehose! Neither of these features, phones as a web server or the ability to add annotations to other people’s tweets, exist today but I strongly believe that they could dramatically enhance the web as we know it today. I hope to look back on this blog post in a few years in the knowledge that these ideas have been put into place. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Twitter traffic might not be what it seems

  - by Piet

  Are you using bit.ly stats to measure interest in the links you post on twitter? I’ve been hearing for a while about people claiming to get the majority of their traffic originating from twitter these days. Now, I’ve been playing with the twitter ruby gem recently, doing various experiments which I’ll not go into detail here because they could be regarded as spamming… if I’d conduct them on a large scale, that is. It’s scary to see people actually engaging with @replies crafted with some regular expressions and eliza-like trickery on status updates found using the twitter api. I’m wondering how Twitter is going to contain the coming spam-flood. When posting links I used bit.ly as url shortener, since this one seems to be the de-facto standard on twitter. A nice thing about bit.ly is that it shows some basic stats about the redirects it performs for your shortened links. To my surprise, most links posted almost immediately resulted in several visitors. Now, seeing that I was posting the links together with some information concerning what the link is about, I concluded that the people who were actually clicking the links should be very targeted visitors. This felt a bit like free adwords, and I suddenly started to understand why everyone was raving about getting traffic from twitter. How wrong I was! (and I think several 1000 online marketers with me) On the destination site I used a traffic logging solution that works by including a little javascript snippet in your pages. It seemed that somehow all visitors disappeared after the bit.ly redirect and before getting to the site, because I was hardly seeing any visitors there. So I started investigating what was happening: by looking at the logfiles of the destination site, and by making my own ’shortened’ urls by doing redirects using a very short domain name I own. This way, I could check the apache access_log before the redirects. Most user agents turned out to be bots without a doubt. Here’s an excerpt of user-agents awk’ed from apache’s access_log for a time period of about one hour, right after posting some links: AideRSS 2.0 (postrank.com) Java/1.6.0_13 Java/1.6.0_14 libwww-perl/5.816 MLBot (www.metadatalabs.com/mlbot) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows -NT 5.0 - real-url.org) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Twitturls; +http://twitturls.com) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Viralheat Bot/1.0; +http://www.viralheat.com/) Mozilla/5.0 (Danger hiptop 4.6; U; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050920 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-us; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008092313 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.5 OpenCalaisSemanticProxy PycURL/7.18.2 PycURL/7.19.3 Python-urllib/1.17 Twingly Recon twitmatic Twitturly / v0.6 Wget/1.10.2 (Red Hat modified) Wget/1.11.1 (Red Hat modified) Of the few user-agents that seem ‘real’ at first, half are originating from an ip-address used by Amazon EC2. And I doubt people are setting op proxies on there. Oh yeah, Googlebot (the real deal, from a legit google owned address) is sucking up posted links like fresh oysters. I guess google is trying to make sure in advance to never be beaten by twitter in the ‘realtime search’ department. Actually, I think it’d be almost stupid NOT to post any new pages/posts/websites on Twitter, it must be one of the fastest ways to get a Googlebot visit. Same experiment with a real, established twitter account Now, because I was posting the url’s either as ’status’ messages or directed @people, on a test-account with hardly any (human) followers, I checked again using the twitter accounts from a commercial site I’m involved with. These accounts all have between 500 and 1000 targeted (I think) followers. I checked the destination access_logs and also added ‘my’ redirect after the bit.ly redirect: same results, although seemingly a bit higher real visitor/bot ratio. Btw: one of these account was ‘punished’ with a 1 week lock recently because the same (1 one!) status update was sent that was sent right before using another account. They got an email explaining the lock because the account didn’t act according to their TOS. I can’t find anything in their TOS about it, can you? I don’t think Twitter is on the right track punishing a legit account, knowing the trickery I had been doing with it’s api went totally unpunished. I might be wrong though, I often am. On the other hand: this commercial site reported targeted traffic and actual signups from visitors coming from Twitter. The ones that are really real visitors are also very targeted. I’m just not sure if the amount of work involved could hold up against an adwords campaign. Reposting the same link over and over again helps On thing I noticed: It helps to keep on reposting the same links with regular intervals. I guess most people only look at their first page when checking out recent posts of the ones they’re following, or don’t look too far back when performing a search. Now, this probably isn’t according to the twitter TOS. Actually, it might be spamming but no-one is obligated to follow anyone else of course. This way, I was getting more real visitors and less bots. To my surprise (when my programmer’s hat is on) there were still repeated visits from the same bots coming from the same ip-addresses. Did they expect to find something else when visiting for a 2nd or 3rd time? (actually,this gave me an idea: you can’t change a link once it’s posted, but you can change where it redirects to) Most bots were smart enough not to follow the same link again though. Are you successful in getting real visitors from Twitter? Are you only relying on bit.ly to provide traffic stats?

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• Is Berkeley DB a NoSQL solution?

  - by Gregory Burd

  Berkeley DB is a library. To use it to store data you must link the library into your application. You can use most programming languages to access the API, the calls across these APIs generally mimic the Berkeley DB C-API which makes perfect sense because Berkeley DB is written in C. The inspiration for Berkeley DB was the DBM library, a part of the earliest versions of UNIX written by AT&T's Ken Thompson in 1979. DBM was a simple key/value hashtable-based storage library. In the early 1990s as BSD UNIX was transitioning from version 4.3 to 4.4 and retrofitting commercial code owned by AT&T with unencumbered code, it was the future founders of Sleepycat Software who wrote libdb (aka Berkeley DB) as the replacement for DBM. The problem it addressed was fast, reliable local key/value storage. At that time databases almost always lived on a single node, even the most sophisticated databases only had simple fail-over two node solutions. If you had a lot of data to store you would choose between the few commercial RDBMS solutions or to write your own custom solution. Berkeley DB took the headache out of the custom approach. These basic market forces inspired other DBM implementations. There was the "New DBM" (ndbm) and the "GNU DBM" (GDBM) and a few others, but the theme was the same. Even today TokyoCabinet calls itself "a modern implementation of DBM" mimicking, and improving on, something first created over thirty years ago. In the mid-1990s, DBM was the name for what you needed if you were looking for fast, reliable local storage. Fast forward to today. What's changed? Systems are connected over fast, very reliable networks. Disks are cheep, fast, and capable of storing huge amounts of data. CPUs continued to follow Moore's Law, processing power that filled a room in 1990 now fits in your pocket. PCs, servers, and other computers proliferated both in business and the personal markets. In addition to the new hardware entire markets, social systems, and new modes of interpersonal communication moved onto the web and started evolving rapidly. These changes cause a massive explosion of data and a need to analyze and understand that data. Taken together this resulted in an entirely different landscape for database storage, new solutions were needed. A number of novel solutions stepped up and eventually a category called NoSQL emerged. The new market forces inspired the CAP theorem and the heated debate of BASE vs. ACID. But in essence this was simply the market looking at what to trade off to meet these new demands. These new database systems shared many qualities in common. There were designed to address massive amounts of data, millions of requests per second, and scale out across multiple systems. The first large-scale and successful solution was Dynamo, Amazon's distributed key/value database. Dynamo essentially took the next logical step and added a twist. Dynamo was to be the database of record, it would be distributed, data would be partitioned across many nodes, and it would tolerate failure by avoiding single points of failure. Amazon did this because they recognized that the majority of the dynamic content they provided to customers visiting their web store front didn't require the services of an RDBMS. The queries were simple, key/value look-ups or simple range queries with only a few queries that required more complex joins. They set about to use relational technology only in places where it was the best solution for the task, places like accounting and order fulfillment, but not in the myriad of other situations. The success of Dynamo, and it's design, inspired the next generation of Non-SQL, distributed database solutions including Cassandra, Riak and Voldemort. The problem their designers set out to solve was, "reliability at massive scale" so the first focal point was distributed database algorithms. Underneath Dynamo there is a local transactional database; either Berkeley DB, Berkeley DB Java Edition, MySQL or an in-memory key/value data structure. Dynamo was an evolution of local key/value storage onto networks. Cassandra, Riak, and Voldemort all faced similar design decisions and one, Voldemort, choose Berkeley DB Java Edition for it's node-local storage. Riak at first was entirely in-memory, but has recently added write-once, append-only log-based on-disk storage similar type of storage as Berkeley DB except that it is based on a hash table which must reside entirely in-memory rather than a btree which can live in-memory or on disk. Berkeley DB evolved too, we added high availability (HA) and a replication manager that makes it easy to setup replica groups. Berkeley DB's replication doesn't partitioned the data, every node keeps an entire copy of the database. For consistency, there is a single node where writes are committed first - a master - then those changes are delivered to the replica nodes as log records. Applications can choose to wait until all nodes are consistent, or fire and forget allowing Berkeley DB to eventually become consistent. Berkeley DB's HA scales-out quite well for read-intensive applications and also effectively eliminates the central point of failure by allowing replica nodes to be elected (using a PAXOS algorithm) to mastership if the master should fail. This implementation covers a wide variety of use cases. MemcacheDB is a server that implements the Memcache network protocol but uses Berkeley DB for storage and HA to replicate the cache state across all the nodes in the cache group. Google Accounts, the user authentication layer for all Google properties, was until recently running Berkeley DB HA. That scaled to a globally distributed system. That said, most NoSQL solutions try to partition (shard) data across nodes in the replication group and some allow writes as well as reads at any node, Berkeley DB HA does not. So, is Berkeley DB a "NoSQL" solution? Not really, but it certainly is a component of many of the existing NoSQL solutions out there. Forgetting all the noise about how NoSQL solutions are complex distributed databases when you boil them down to a single node you still have to store the data to some form of stable local storage. DBMs solved that problem a long time ago. NoSQL has more to do with the layers on top of the DBM; the distributed, sometimes-consistent, partitioned, scale-out storage that manage key/value or document sets and generally have some form of simple HTTP/REST-style network API. Does Berkeley DB do that? Not really. Is Berkeley DB a "NoSQL" solution today? Nope, but it's the most robust solution on which to build such a system. Re-inventing the node-local data storage isn't easy. A lot of people are starting to come to appreciate the sophisticated features found in Berkeley DB, even mimic them in some cases. Could Berkeley DB grow into a NoSQL solution? Absolutely. Our key/value API could be extended over the net using any of a number of existing network protocols such as memcache or HTTP/REST. We could adapt our node-local data partitioning out over replicated nodes. We even have a nice query language and cost-based query optimizer in our BDB XML product that we could reuse were we to build out a document-based NoSQL-style product. XML and JSON are not so different that we couldn't adapt one to work with the other interchangeably. Without too much effort we could add what's missing, we could jump into this No SQL market withing a single product development cycle. Why isn't Berkeley DB already a NoSQL solution? Why aren't we working on it? Why indeed...

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• Clarity is important, both in question and in answer.

  - by gerrylowry

  clarity is important ... i'm often reminded of the Clouseau movie in which Peter Sellers as Chief Inspector Clouseau asks a hotel clerk "Does your dog bite?" ... the clerk answers "no" ... after Clouseau has been bitten by the dog, he looks at the hotel clerk who says "That's not my dog".  Clarity is important, both in question and in answer. i've been a member of forums.asp.net since 2008 ... like many of my peers at forums.asp.net, i've answered my fair share of questions. FWIW, the purpose of this, my first web log post to http://weblogs.asp.net/gerrylowry is to help new members ask better questions and in turn get better answers. TIMTOWTDI  =.  there is more than one way to do it imho, the best way to ask a question in any forum, or even person to person, is to first formulate your question and then ask yourself to answer your own question. Things to consider when asking (the more complete your question, the more likely you'll get the answer you require): -- have you searched Google and/or your favourite search engine(s) before posting your question to forums.asp.net; examples: site:msdn.microsoft.com entity framework 5.0 c#http://lmgtfy.com/?q=site%3Amsdn.microsoft.com+entity+framework+5.0+c%23 site:forums.asp.net MVC tutorial c#http://lmgtfy.com/?q=site%3Aforums.asp.net+MVC+tutorial+c%23 -- are you asking your question in the correct forum?  look at the forums' descriptions at http://forums.asp.net/; examples: Getting Started If you have a general ASP.NET question on a topic that's not covered by one of the other more specific forums - ask it here. MVC Discussions regarding ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) C# Questions about using C# for ASP.NET development Note:  if your question pertains more to c# than to MVC, choosing the C# forum is likely to be more appropriate. -- is your post subject clear and concise, yet not too vague? compare these three subjects (all three had something to do with GridView):     (1)    please help     (2)    gridview      (3)    How to show newline in GridView  -- have you clearly explained your scenario? compare:  my leg hurts   with   when i walk too much, my right knee hurts in the knee joint  compare:  my code does not work    with    when i enter a date as 2012-11-8, i get a FormatException -- have you checked your spelling, your grammar, and your English? for better or worse, English is the language of forums.asp.net ... many of the currently 170000++ forums.asp.net are not native speakers of English; that's okay ... however, there are times when choosing the more appropriate words will likely get one a better answer; fortunately, there are web tools to help you formulate your question, for example, http://translate.google.com/.  -- have you provided relevant information about your environment? here are a few examples ... feel free to include other items to your question ... rule of thumb:  if you think a given detail is relevant, it likely is -- what technology are you using?    ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET MVC 3, WebForms, ...  -- what version of Visual Studio are you using?  vs2012 (ultimate, professional, express), vs2010, vs2008 ... -- are you hosting your own website?  are you using a shared hosting service? -- are you experience difficulties in just one browser? more than one browser? -- what browser version(s) are you using?   ie8? ie9? ... -- what is your operating system?     win8, win7, vista, XP, server 2008 R2 ... -- what is your database?   SQL Server 2008 R2, ss2005, MySQL, Oracle, ... -- what is your web server?  iis 7.5, iis 6, .... -- have you provided enough information for someone to be able to answer your question? Here's an actual example from an O.P. that i hope is self-explanatory: I'm trying to make a simple calculator when i write the code in windows application it worked when i tried it in web application it doesn't work and there are no errors what should i do ??!! -- have you included unnecessary information? more than once, i've seen the O.P. (original post, original poster) include many extra lines of code that were not relevant to the actual question; the more unnecessary code that you include, the less likely your volunteer peers will be motivated to donate their time to help you. -- have you asked the question that you want answered? "Does this dog bite?" -- are your expectations reasonable? -- generally, persons who are going to answer your questions are your peers ... they are unpaid volunteers ... -- are you looking for help with your homework, work assignment, or hobby? or, are you expecting someone else to do your work for you?  -- do you expect a complete solution or are you simply looking for guidance and direction? -- you are likely to get more help by first making a reasonable effort to help yourself first Clarity is important, both in question and in answer. if you are answering someone else's question, please remember that clear answers are just as important as clear questions; would you understand your own answer? Things to consider when answering: -- have you tested your code example?  if you have, say so; if you've not tested your code example, also say so -- imho, it's okay to guess as long as you clearly state that you're guessing ... sometimes a wrong guess can still help the O.P. find her/his way to the right answer -- meanness does not contribute to being helpful; sometimes one may become frustrated with the O.P. and/or others participating in a thread, if that happens to you, be kind regardless; speaking from my own experience, at least once i've allowed myself to be frustrated into writing something inappropriate that i've regretted later ... being a meany does not feel good ... being kind and helpful feels fantastic! Tip:  before asking your question, read more than a few existing questions and answers to get a sense of how your peers ask and answer questions. Gerry P.S.:  try to avoid necroposting and piggy backing. necroposting is adding to an old post, especially one that was resolved months ago. piggy backing is adding your own question to someone else's thread.

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