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  • Implementing an Interceptor Using NHibernate’s Built In Dynamic Proxy Generator

    - by Ricardo Peres
    NHibernate 3.2 came with an included proxy generator, which means there is no longer the need – or the possibility, for that matter – to choose Castle DynamicProxy, LinFu or Spring. This is actually a good thing, because it means one less assembly to deploy. Apparently, this generator was based, at least partially, on LinFu. As there are not many tutorials out there demonstrating it’s usage, here’s one, for demonstrating one of the most requested features: implementing INotifyPropertyChanged. This interceptor, of course, will still feature all of NHibernate’s functionalities that you are used to, such as lazy loading, and such. We will start by implementing an NHibernate interceptor, by inheriting from the base class NHibernate.EmptyInterceptor. This class does not do anything by itself, but it allows us to plug in behavior by overriding some of its methods, in this case, Instantiate: 1: public class NotifyPropertyChangedInterceptor : EmptyInterceptor 2: { 3: private ISession session = null; 4:  5: private static readonly ProxyFactory factory = new ProxyFactory(); 6:  7: public override void SetSession(ISession session) 8: { 9: this.session = session; 10: base.SetSession(session); 11: } 12:  13: public override Object Instantiate(String clazz, EntityMode entityMode, Object id) 14: { 15: Type entityType = Type.GetType(clazz); 16: IProxy proxy = factory.CreateProxy(entityType, new _NotifyPropertyChangedInterceptor(), typeof(INotifyPropertyChanged)) as IProxy; 17: 18: _NotifyPropertyChangedInterceptor interceptor = proxy.Interceptor as _NotifyPropertyChangedInterceptor; 19: interceptor.Proxy = this.session.SessionFactory.GetClassMetadata(entityType).Instantiate(id, entityMode); 20:  21: this.session.SessionFactory.GetClassMetadata(entityType).SetIdentifier(proxy, id, entityMode); 22:  23: return (proxy); 24: } 25: } Then we need a class that implements the NHibernate dynamic proxy behavior, let’s place it inside our interceptor, because it will only need to be used there: 1: class _NotifyPropertyChangedInterceptor : NHibernate.Proxy.DynamicProxy.IInterceptor 2: { 3: private PropertyChangedEventHandler changed = delegate { }; 4:  5: public Object Proxy 6: { 7: get; 8: set;} 9:  10: #region IInterceptor Members 11:  12: public Object Intercept(InvocationInfo info) 13: { 14: Boolean isSetter = info.TargetMethod.Name.StartsWith("set_") == true; 15: Object result = null; 16:  17: if (info.TargetMethod.Name == "add_PropertyChanged") 18: { 19: PropertyChangedEventHandler propertyChangedEventHandler = info.Arguments[0] as PropertyChangedEventHandler; 20: this.changed += propertyChangedEventHandler; 21: } 22: else if (info.TargetMethod.Name == "remove_PropertyChanged") 23: { 24: PropertyChangedEventHandler propertyChangedEventHandler = info.Arguments[0] as PropertyChangedEventHandler; 25: this.changed -= propertyChangedEventHandler; 26: } 27: else 28: { 29: result = info.TargetMethod.Invoke(this.Proxy, info.Arguments); 30: } 31:  32: if (isSetter == true) 33: { 34: String propertyName = info.TargetMethod.Name.Substring("set_".Length); 35: this.changed(this.Proxy, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); 36: } 37:  38: return (result); 39: } 40:  41: #endregion 42: } What this does for every interceptable method (those who are either virtual or from the INotifyPropertyChanged) is: For methods that came from the INotifyPropertyChanged interface, add_PropertyChanged and remove_PropertyChanged (yes, events are methods ), we add an implementation that adds or removes the event handlers to the delegate which we declared as changed; For all the others, we direct them to the place where they are actually implemented, which is the Proxy field; If the call is setting a property, it fires afterwards the PropertyChanged event. In order to use this, we need to add the interceptor to the Configuration before building the ISessionFactory: 1: using (ISessionFactory factory = cfg.SetInterceptor(new NotifyPropertyChangedInterceptor()).BuildSessionFactory()) 2: { 3: using (ISession session = factory.OpenSession()) 4: using (ITransaction tx = session.BeginTransaction()) 5: { 6: Customer customer = session.Get<Customer>(100); //some id 7: INotifyPropertyChanged inpc = customer as INotifyPropertyChanged; 8: inpc.PropertyChanged += delegate(Object sender, PropertyChangedEventArgs e) 9: { 10: //fired when a property changes 11: }; 12: customer.Address = "some other address"; //will raise PropertyChanged 13: customer.RecentOrders.ToList(); //will trigger the lazy loading 14: } 15: } Any problems, questions, do drop me a line!

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  • Creating a Reverse Proxy with URL Rewrite for IIS

    - by OWScott
    There are times when you need to reverse proxy through a server. The most common example is when you have an internal web server that isn’t exposed to the internet, and you have a public web server accessible to the internet. If you want to serve up traffic from the internal web server, you can do this through the public web server by creating a tunnel (aka reverse proxy). Essentially, you can front the internal web server with a friendly URL, even hiding custom ports. For example, consider an internal web server with a URL of http://10.10.0.50:8111. You can make that available through a public URL like http://tools.mysite.com/ as seen in the following image. The URL can be made public or it can be used for your internal staff and have it password protected and/or locked down by IP address. This is easy to do with URL Rewrite and IIS. You will also need Application Request Routing (ARR) installed even though for a simple reverse proxy you won’t use most of ARR’s functionality. If you don’t already have URL Rewrite and ARR installed you can do so easily with the Web Platform Installer. A lot can be said about reverse proxies and many different situations and ways to route the traffic and handle different URL patterns. However, my goal here is to get you up and going in the easiest way possible. Then you can dig in deeper after you get the base configuration in place. URL Rewrite makes a reverse proxy very easy to set up. Note that the URL Rewrite Add Rules template doesn’t include Reverse Proxy at the server level. That’s not to say that you can’t create a server-level reverse proxy, but the URL Rewrite rules template doesn’t help you with that. Getting Started First you must create a website on your public web server that has the public bindings that you need. Alternately, you can use an existing site and route using conditions for certain traffic. After you’ve created your site then open up URL Rewrite at the site level. Using the “Add Rule(s)…” template that is opened from the right-hand actions pane, create a new Reverse Proxy rule. If you receive a prompt (the first time) that the proxy functionality needs to be enabled, select OK. This is telling you that a proxy can route traffic outside of your web server, which happens to be our goal in this case. Be aware that reverse proxy rules can be dangerous if you open sites from inside you network to the world, so just be aware of what you’re doing and why. The next and final step of the template asks a few questions. The first textbox asks the name of the internal web server. In our example, it’s 10.10.0.50:8111. This can be any URL, including a subfolder like internal.mysite.com/blog. Don’t include the http or https here. The template assumes that it’s not entered. You can choose whether to perform SSL Offloading or not. If you leave this checked then all requests to the internal server will be over HTTP regardless of the original web request. This can help with performance and SSL bindings if all requests are within a trusted network. If the network path between the two web servers is not completely trusted and safe then uncheck this. Next, the template enables you to create an outbound rule. This is used to rewrite links in the page to look like your public domain name rather than the internal domain name. Outbound rules have a lot of CPU overhead because the entire web content needs to be parsed and updated. However, if you need it, then it’s well worth the extra CPU hit on the web server. If you check the “Rewrite the domain names of the links in HTTP responses” checkbox then the From textbox will be filled in with what you entered for the inbound rule. You can enter your friendly public URL for the outbound rule. This will essentially replace any reference to 10.10.0.50:8111 (or whatever you enter) with tools.mysite.com in all <a>, <form>, and <img> tags on your site. That’s it! Well, there is a lot more that you can do, this but will give you the base configuration. You can now visit www.mysite.com on your public web server and it will serve up the site from your internal web server. You should see two rules show up; one inbound and one outbound. You can edit these, add conditions, and tweak them further as needed. One common issue that can occur without outbound rules has to do with compression. If you run into errors with the new proxied site, try turning off compression to confirm if that’s the issue. Here’s a link with details on how to deal with compression and outbound rules. I hope this was helpful to get started and to see how easy it is to create a simple reverse proxy using URL Rewrite for IIS.

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  • Weekend With #iPad

    - by andrewbrust
    Saturday morning, I got up, got dressed and took a 7-minute walk up to the Apple Store in New York’s Meatpacking District to pick up my reserved iPad.  This precinct, which borders Greenwich Village (where I live and grew up) was, when I was a kid, a very industrial and smelly neighborhood during the day  and a rough neighborhood at night.  So imagine my sense of irony as I walked up Hudson Street towards 14th Street, to go wait in line with a bunch of hipsters to buy an iPad on launch day. Numerous blue T-shirt-clad Apple store workers were on hand to check people in to the line specifically identified for people who had reserved an iPad.  Others workers passed out water and all of them, I kid you not, applauded people as they got their chance to go into the store and buy their devices.  They also cheered people and yelled “congratulations” as they left.  The event had all the charm of a mass wedding officiated by Reverend Sung Myung Moon.  Once inside, a nice dude named Trey, with lots of tattoos on his calves, helped me and I acquired my device in short order.  Another guy helped me activate the device, which was comical, because that has to be done through iTunes, which I hadn’t logged into in a while. Turns out my user id was my email address from the company I sold 5 1/2 years ago.  Who knew?  Regardless, I go the device working, packed up and left the store, shuddering as I was cheered and congratulated.  By this time (about 10:30am) the line for reserved units and even walk-ins, was gone.  The iPhone launch this was not. As much as I detested the Apple Store experience, I must say the device is really nice.  the screen is bright, the colors are bold, and the experience is ultra-smooth.  I quickly tested Safari, YouTube, Google Maps, and then installed a few apps, including the New York Times Editors’ Choice and a couple of Twitter clients. Some initial raves: Google Maps and Street View on the iPad is just amazing.  The screen is full-size like a PC or Mac, but it’s right in front of you and responding to taps and flicks and pinches and it’s really engulfing.  Video and photos are really nice on this device, despite the fact that 16:9 and anamorphic aspect ration content is letter boxed.  It still looks amazing.  And apps that are designed especially for the iPad, including The Weather Channel and Gilt and Kayak just look stunning.  The richness, the friendly layout, the finger-friendly UIs, and the satisfaction of not having a keyboard between you and the information you’re managing, while you sit on a couch or an easy chair, is just really a beautiful thing.  The mere experience of seeing these apps’ splash screens causes a shiver and Goosebumps.  Truly.  The iPad is not a desktop machine, and it’s not pocket device.  That doesn’t mean it’s useless though.  It’s the perfect “couchtop” computer. Now some downsides: the WiFi radio seems a bit flakey.  More than a few times, I have had to toggle the WiFi off and back on to get it to connect properly.  Worse yet, the iPad is totally bamboozled by the fact that I have four WiFi access points in my house, each with the same SSID.  My laptops are smart enough to roam from one to the other, but the iPad seems to maintain an affinity for the downstairs access point, even if I’m turning it on two flights up.  Telling the iPad to “forget” my WiFi network and then re-associate with it doesn’t help. More downers: as you might expect, there are far more applications developed for the iPhone than the iPad.  And although iPhone apps run on the iPad, that provides about the same experience as watching standard def on a big HD flat panel, complete with the lousy choice of thick black borders or zooming the picture in to fill the screen.  And speaking of iPhone Apps, I can’t get the Sonos one to work.  Ideally, they’d have a dedicated iPad app and it would work on the first try.  And the iPad is just as bad as any netbook when it comes to being a magnet for fingerprints.  The lack of multi-tasking is quite painful too – truly, I don’t mind if only one app can be active at once, but the lack of ability to switch between apps, and the requirement to return to the home screen and re-launch a previous app to switch back, is already old and I’ve had the thing less than 48 hours. These are just initial impressions.  I’ll have a fuller analysis soon, after I’ve had some more break-in time with my new toy.  I’ll be thinking not just about the iPad and iPhone but also about Android, the 2.1 update for which was pushed to my Droid today, and Windows Phone 7, whose “hub” concept I now understand the value of.  This has been a great year for alternative computing devices, and I see no net downside for Apple, Google or Microsoft.  Exciting times.

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  • 2d tank movement and turret solution

    - by Phil
    Hi! I'm making a simple top-down tank game on the ipad where the user controls the movement of the tank with the left "joystick" and the rotation of the turret with the right one. I've spent several hours just trying to get it to work decently but now I turn to the pros :) I have two referencial objects, one for the movement and one for the rotation. The referencial objects always stay max two units away from the tank and I use them to tell the tank in what direction to move. I chose this approach to decouple movement and rotational behaviour from the raw input of the joysticks, I believe this will make it simpler to implement whatever behaviour I want for the tank. My problem is 1; the turret rotates the long way to the target. With this I mean that the target can be -5 degrees away in rotation and still it rotates 355 degrees instead of -5 degrees. I can't figure out why. The other problem is with the movement. It just doesn't feel right to have the tank turn while moving. I'd like to have a solution that would work as well for the AI as for the player. A blackbox function for the movement where the player only specifies in what direction it should move and it moves there under the constraints that are imposed on it. I am using the standard joystick class found in the Unity iPhone package. This is the code I'm using for the movement: public class TankFollow : MonoBehaviour { //Check angle difference and turn accordingly public GameObject followPoint; public float speed; public float turningSpeed; void Update() { transform.position = Vector3.Slerp(transform.position, followPoint.transform.position, speed * Time.deltaTime); //Calculate angle var forwardA = transform.forward; var forwardB = (followPoint.transform.position - transform.position); var angleA = Mathf.Atan2(forwardA.x, forwardA.z) * Mathf.Rad2Deg; var angleB = Mathf.Atan2(forwardB.x, forwardB.z) * Mathf.Rad2Deg; var angleDiff = Mathf.DeltaAngle(angleA, angleB); //print(angleDiff.ToString()); if (angleDiff > 5) { //Rotate to transform.Rotate(new Vector3(0, (-turningSpeed * Time.deltaTime),0)); //transform.rotation = new Quaternion(transform.rotation.x, transform.rotation.y + adjustment, transform.rotation.z, transform.rotation.w); } else if (angleDiff < 5) { transform.Rotate(new Vector3(0, (turningSpeed * Time.deltaTime),0)); //transform.rotation = new Quaternion(transform.rotation.x, transform.rotation.y + adjustment, transform.rotation.z, transform.rotation.w); } else { } transform.position = new Vector3(transform.position.x, 0, transform.position.z); } } And this is the code I'm using to rotate the turret: void LookAt() { var forwardA = -transform.right; var forwardB = (toLookAt.transform.position - transform.position); var angleA = Mathf.Atan2(forwardA.x, forwardA.z) * Mathf.Rad2Deg; var angleB = Mathf.Atan2(forwardB.x, forwardB.z) * Mathf.Rad2Deg; var angleDiff = Mathf.DeltaAngle(angleA, angleB); //print(angleDiff.ToString()); if (angleDiff - 180 > 1) { //Rotate to transform.Rotate(new Vector3(0, (turretSpeed * Time.deltaTime),0)); //transform.rotation = new Quaternion(transform.rotation.x, transform.rotation.y + adjustment, transform.rotation.z, transform.rotation.w); } else if (angleDiff - 180 < -1) { transform.Rotate(new Vector3(0, (-turretSpeed * Time.deltaTime),0)); //transform.rotation = new Quaternion(transform.rotation.x, transform.rotation.y + adjustment, transform.rotation.z, transform.rotation.w); print((angleDiff - 180).ToString()); } else { } } Since I want the turret reference point to turn in relation to the tank (when you rotate the body, the turret should follow and not stay locked on since it makes it impossible to control when you've got two thumbs to work with), I've made the TurretFollowPoint a child of the Turret object, which in turn is a child of the body. I'm thinking that I'm making it too difficult for myself with the reference points but I'm imagining that it's a good idea. Please be honest about this point. So I'll be grateful for any help I can get! I'm using Unity3d iPhone. Thanks!

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  • What Did You Do? is a Bad Question

    - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell
    Brian Moran (blog | Twitter) did a great presentation today for the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter on The Art of Questions.  One of the points that Brian made was that there are good questions and bad (or at least not-as-good) questions.  Good questions tend to open-up the conversation and engender positive reactions (perhaps even trust and respect) between the participants; and bad questions tend to close-down a conversation either through the narrow list of possible responses (e.g. strictly Yes/No) or through the negative reactions they can produce.  And this explains why I so frequently had problems troubleshooting real-time problems with users in the past.  I’ll explain that in more detail below, but before we go on, let me recommend that you watch the recording of Brian’s presentation to learn why the question Why is often problematic in the U.S. and yet we so often resort to it. For a short portion (3 years) of my career, I taught basic computer skills and Office applications in an adult vocational school, and this gave me ample opportunity to do live troubleshooting of user challenges with computers.  And like many people who ended up in computer related jobs, I also have had numerous times where I was called upon by less computer-savvy individuals to help them with some challenge they were having, whether it was part of my job or not.  One of the things that I noticed, especially during my time as a teacher, was that when I was helping somebody, typically the first question I would ask them was, “What did you do?”  This seemed to me like a good way to start my detective work trying to figure out what happened, what went wrong, how to fix it, and how to help the person avoid it again in the future.  I always asked it in a polite tone of voice as I was just trying to gather the facts before diving in deeper.  However; 99.999% of the time, I always got the same answer, “Nothing!”  For a long time this frustrated me because (remember I’m in detective mode at that point) I knew it could not possibly be true.  They HAD to have done SOMETHING…just tell me what were the last actions you took before this problem presented itself.  But no, they always stuck with “Nothing”.  At which point, with frustration growing, and not a little bit of disdain for their lack of helpfulness, I would usually ask them to move aside while I took over their machine and got them out of whatever they had gotten themselves into.  After a while I just grew used to the fact that this was the answer I would usually receive, but I always kept asking because for the .001% of the people who would actually tell me, I could then help them understand what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. Now, after hearing Brian’s talk, I understand what the problem was.  Even though I meant to just be in an information gathering mode, the words I was using, “What did YOU do?” have such a strong negative connotation that people would instinctively go into defense-mode and stop sharing information that might make them look bad.  Many of them probably were not even consciously aware that they had gone on the defensive, but the self-preservation instinct, especially self-preservation of the ego, is so strong that people would end up there without even realizing it. So, if “What did you do” is a bad question, what would have been better?  Well, one suggestion that Brian makes in his talk is something along the lines of, “Can you tell me what led up to this?” or “what was happening on the computer right before this came up?”  It’s subtle, but the point is to take the focus off of the person and their behavior; instead depersonalizing it and talk about events from more of a 3rd-party observer point of view.  With this approach, people will be more likely to talk about what the computer did and what they did in response to it without feeling the interrogation spotlight is on them.  They are also more likely to mention other events that occurred around the same time that may or may not be related, but which could certainly help you troubleshoot a larger problem if it is not just user actions.  And that is the ultimate goal of your asking the questions.  So yes, it does matter how you ask the question; and there are such things as good questions and bad questions.  Excellent topic Brian!  Thanks for getting the thinking gears churning! (Cross-posted to the Professional Development Virtual Chapter blog.)

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  • Convert a PDF eBook to ePub Format

    - by Matthew Guay
    Would you like to read a PDF eBook on an eReader or mobile device, but aren’t happy with the performance? Here’s how you can convert your PDFs to the popular ePub format so you can easily read them on any device. PDFs are a popular format for eBooks since they render the same on any device and can preserve the exact layout of the print book.  However, this benefit is their major disadvantage on mobile devices, as you often have to zoom and pan back and forth to see everything on the page.  ePub files, on the other hand, are an increasingly popular option. They can reflow to fill your screen instead of sticking to a strict layout style.  With the free Calibre program, you can quickly convert your PDF eBooks to ePub format. Getting Started Download the Calibre installer (link below) for your operating system, and install as normal.  Calibre works on recent versions of Windows, OS X, and Linux.  The Calibre installer is very streamlined, so the install process was quite quick. Calibre is a great application for organizing your eBooks.  It can automatically sort your books by their metadata, and even display their covers in a Coverflow-style viewer. To add an eBook to your library, simply drag-and-drop the file into the Calibre window, or click Add books at the top.  Here you can choose to add all the books from a folder and more. Calibre will then add the book(s) to your library, import the associated metadata, and organize them in the catalog. Convert your Books Once you’ve imported your books into Calibre, it’s time to convert them to the format you want.  Select the book or books you want to convert, and click Convert E-books.  Select whether you want to convert them individually or bulk convert them. The convertor window has lots of options, so you can get your ePub book exactly like you want.  You can simply click Ok and go with the defaults, or you can tweak the settings. Do note that the conversion will only work successfully with PDFs that contain actual text.  Some PDFs are actually images scanned in from the original books; these will appear just like the PDF after the conversion, and won’t be any easier to read. On the first tab, you’ll notice that Calibri will repopulate most of the metadata fields with info from your PDF.  It will also use the first page of the PDF as the cover.  Edit any of the information that may be incorrect, and add any additional information you want associated with the book. If you want to convert your eBook to a different format other than ePub, Calibri’s got you covered, too.  On the top right, you can choose to output the converted eBook into a many different file formats, including the Kindle-friendly MOBI format. One other important settings page is the Structure Detection tab.  Here you can choose to have it remove headers and footers in the converted book, as well as automatically detect chapter breaks. Click Ok when you’ve finished choosing your settings and Calibre will convert the book.  This may take a few minutes, depending on the size of the PDF.  If the conversion seems to be taking too long, you can click Show job details for more information on the progress.   The conversion usually works good, but we did have one job freeze on us.  When we checked the job details, it indicated that the PDF was copy-protected.  Most PDF eBooks, however, worked fine. Now, back in the main Calibri window, select your book and save it to disk.  You can choose to save only the EPUB format, or you can select Save to disk to save all formats of the book to your computer. You can also view the ePub file directly in Calibri’s built-in eBook viewer.  This is the PDF book we converted, and it looks fairly good in the converted format.  It does have some odd line breaks and some misplaced numbers, but on the whole, the converted book is much easier to read, especially on small mobile devices.   Even images get included inline, so you shouldn’t be missing anything from the original eBook. Conclusion Calibri makes it simple to read your eBooks in any format you need. It is a project that is in constant development, and updates regularly adding better stability and features.  Whether you want to ready your PDF eBooks on a Sony Reader, Kindle, netbook or Smartphone, your books will now be more accessible than ever.  And with thousands of free PDF eBooks out there, you’ll be sure to always have something to read. If you’d like some Geeky PDF eBooks, Microsoft Press is offering a number of free PDF eBooks right now.  Check them out at this link (Account Required). Download the Calibre eBook program Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Format a String as Currency in C#Convert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 FormatShare OneNote 2010 Notebooks with OneNote 2007Install an RPM Package on Ubuntu LinuxConvert PDF Files to Word Documents and Other Formats 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 Nice Websites To Watch TV Shows Online 24 Million Sites Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos

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  • Converting Creole to HTML, PDF, DOCX, ..

    - by Marko Apfel
    Challenge We documented a project on Github with the Wiki there. For most articles we used Creole as markup language. Now we have to deliver a lot of the content to our client in an usual format like PDF or DOCX. So we need a automatism to extract all relevant content, merge it together and convert the stuff to a new format. Problem One of the most popular toolsets to convert between several formats is Pandoc. But unfortunally Pandoc does not support Creole (see the converting matrix). Approach So we need an intermediate step: Converting from Creole to a supported Pandoc format. Creolo/c is a Creole to Html converter and does exactly what we need. After converting our Creole content to Html we could use Pandoc for all the subsequent tasks. Solution Getting the Creole stuff First at all we need the Creole content on our locale machines. This is easy. Because the Github Wiki themselves is a Git repository we could clone it to our machine. In the working copy we see now all the files and the suffix gives us the hint for the markup language. Converting and Merging Creole content to Html Because we would like all content from several Creole files in one HTML file, we have to convert and merge all the input files to one output file. Creole/c has an option (-b) to generate only the Html-stuff below a Html <Body>-tag. And this is hook for us to start. We have to create manually the additional preluding Html-tags (<html>, <head>, ..), then we merge all needed Creole content to our output file and last we add the closing tags. This could be done straightforward with a little bit old DOS magic: REM === Generate the intro tags === ECHO ^<html^> > %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^<head^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^<meta name="generator" content="creole/c"^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^</head^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^<body^> >> %TMP%\output.html REM === Mix in all interesting Creole stuff with creole/c === .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+overview.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+domain+CvdCaptureMode.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+domain+CvdDamageReducingActivity.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+lookup+IncidentDamageCodes.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+table+Attachments.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+table+TrafficLights.creole >> %TMP%\output.html REM === Generate the outro tags === ECHO ^</body^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^</html^> >> %TMP%\output.html REM === Convert the Html file to Docx with Pandoc === .\Pandoc\bin\pandoc.exe -o .\Database-Schema.docx %TMP%\output.html Some explanation for this The first ECHO call creates the file. Therefore the beginning <html> tag is send via > to a temporary working file. All following calls add content to the existing file via >>. The tag-characters < and > must be escaped. This is done by the caret sign (^). We use a file in the default temporary folder (%TMP%) to avoid writing in our current folders. (better for continuous integration) Both toolsets (Creole/c and Pandoc) are copied to a versioned tools folder in the Wiki. This is committable and no problem after pushing – Github does not do anything with it. In this folder is also the batch (Export-Docx.bat) for all the steps. Pandoc recognizes the conversion by the suffixes of the file names. So it is enough to specify only the input and output files.

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  • Advice on learning programming languages and math.

    - by Joris Ooms
    I feel like I'm getting stuck lately when it comes to learning about programming-related things; I thought I'd ask a question here and write it all down in the hope to get some pointers/advice from people. Perhaps writing it down helps me put things in perspective for myself aswell. I study Interactive Multimedia Design. This course is based on two things: graphic design on one hand, and web development on the other hand. I have quite a decent knowledge of web-related languages (the usual HTML/JS/PHP) and I'll be getting a course on ASP.NET next year. In my free time, I have learnt how to work with CodeIgniter, aswell as some diving into Ruby (and Rails) and basic iOS programming. In my first year of college I also did a class on Java (19/20 on the end result). This grade doesn't really mean anything though; I have the basics of OOP down but Java-wise, we learnt next to nothing. Considering the time I have been programming in, for example, PHP.. I can't say I'm bad at it. I'm definitely not good or great at it, but I'm decent. My teachers tell me I have the programming thing down. They just tell me I should keep on learning. So that's what I do, and I try to take in as much as possible; however, sometimes I'm unsure where to start and I have this tendency to always doubt myself. Now, for the 'question'. I want to get into iOS programming. I know iOS programming boils down to programming in Cocoa Touch and Objective-C. I also know Obj-C is a superset of C. I have done a class on C a couple of years ago, but I failed miserably. I got stuck at pointers and never really understood them.. Until like a month ago. I suddenly 'got' it. I have been working through a book on Objective-C for a week or so now, and I understand the basics (I'm at like.. chapter 6 or so). However, I keep running into similar problems as the ones I had when I did the C class: I suck at math. No, really. I come from a Latin-Modern Languages background in high school and I had nearly no math classes back then. I wanted to study Computer Science, but I failed there because of the miserable state of my mathematics knowledge. I can't explain why I'm suddenly talking about math here though, because it isn't directly related to programming.. yet it is. For example, the examples in the book I'm reading now are about programming a fraction-calculator. All good, I can do the programming when I get the formulas down.. but it takes me a full day or more to actually get to that point. I also find it hard to come up with ideas for myself. I made one small iOS app the other day and it's just a button / label kind of thing. When I press the button, it generates a random number. That's really all I could come up with. Can you 'learn' that? It probably comes down to creativity, but evidently, I'm not too great at being creative. Are there any sites or resources out there that provide something like a basic list of things you can program when you're just starting out? Maybe I'm focusing on too many things at once. I want to keep my HTML/CSS at a decent level, while learning PHP and CodeIgniter, while diving into Ruby on Rails and learning Objective-C and the iOS SDK at the same time. I just want to be good at something, I guess. The problem is that I can't seem to be happy with my PHP stuff. I want more, something 'harder'; that's why I decided to pick up the iOS thing. Like I said, I have the basics down of a lot of different languages. I can program something simple in Java, in C, in Objective-C as of this week.. but it ends there. Mostly because I can't come up with ideas for more complex applications, and also because I just doubt myself: 'Oh, that's too complex, I can never do that'. And then it ends there. To conclude my rant, let me basically rephrase my questions into a 'tl;dr' part. A. I want to get into iOS programming and I have basic knowledge of C/Objective-C. However, I struggle to come up with ideas of my own and implement them and I also suck at math which is something that isn't directly related to, yet often needed while programming. What can I do? B. I have an interest in a lot of different programming languages and I can't stop reading/learning. However, I don't feel like I'm good in anything. Should I perhaps focus on just one language for a year or longer, or keep taking it all in at the same time and hope I'll finally get them all down? C. Are there any resources out there that provide basic ideas of things I can program? I'm thinking about 'simple' command-line applications here to help me while studying C/Obj-C away from the whole iPhone SDK. Like I said, the examples in my book are mainly math-based (fraction calculator) and it's kinda hard. :( Thanks a lot for reading my post. I didn't plan it to be this long but oh well. Thanks in advance for any answers.

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  • Spotlight on Claims: Serving Customers Under Extreme Conditions

    - by [email protected]
    Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, recently attended the CII Spotlight on Claims event in London. Bad weather and its implications for the insurance industry have become very topical as the frequency and diversity of natural disasters - including rains, wind and snow - has surged across Europe this winter. On England's wettest day on record, the county of Cumbria was flooded with 12 inches of rain within 24 hours. Freezing temperatures wreaked havoc on European travel, causing high speed TVG trains to break down and stranding hundreds of passengers under the English Chanel in a tunnel all night long without heat or electricity. A storm named Xynthia thrashed France and surrounding countries with hurricane force, flooding ports and killing 51 people. After the Spring Equinox, insurers may have thought the worst had past. Then came along Eyjafjallajökull, spewing out vast quantities of volcanic ash in what is turning out to be one of most costly natural disasters in history. Such extreme events challenge insurance companies' ability to service their customers just when customers need their help most. When you add economic downturn and competitive pressures to the mix, insurers are further stretched and required to continually learn and innovate to meet high customer expectations with reduced budgets. These and other issues were hot topics of discussion at the recent "Spotlight on Claims" seminar in London, focused on how weather is affecting claims and the insurance industry. The event was organized by the CII (Chartered Insurance Institute), a group with 90,000 members. CII has been at the forefront in setting professional standards for the insurance industry for over a century. Insurers came to the conference to hear how they could better serve their customers under extreme weather conditions, learn from the experience of their peers, and hear about technological breakthroughs in climate modeling, geographic intelligence and IT. Customer case studies at the conference highlighted the importance of effective and constant communication in handling the overflow of catastrophe related claims. First and foremost is the need to rapidly establish initial communication with claimants to build their confidence in a positive outcome. Ongoing communication then needs to be continued throughout the claims cycle to mange expectations and maintain ownership of the process from start to finish. Strong internal communication to support frontline staff was also deemed critical to successful crisis management, as was communication with the broader insurance ecosystem to tap into extended resources and business intelligence. Advances in technology - such web based systems to access policies and enter first notice of loss in the field - as well as customer-focused self-service portals and multichannel alerts, are instrumental in improving customer satisfaction and helping insurers to deal with the claims surge, which often can reach four or more times normal workloads. Dynamic models of the global climate system can now be used to better understand weather-related risks, and as these models mature it is hoped that they will soon become more accurate in predicting the timing of catastrophic events. Geographic intelligence is also being used within a claims environment to better assess loss reserves and detect fraud. Despite these advances in dealing with catastrophes and predicting their occurrence, there will never be a substitute for qualified front line staff to deal with customers. In light of pressures to streamline efficiency, there was debate as to whether outsourcing was the solution, or whether it was better to build on the people you have. In the final analysis, nearly everybody agreed that in the future insurance companies would have to work better and smarter to keep on top. An appeal was also made for greater collaboration amongst industry participants in dealing with the extreme conditions and systematic stress brought on by natural disasters. It was pointed out that the public oftentimes judged the industry as a whole rather than the individual carriers when it comes to freakish events, and that all would benefit at such times from the pooling of limited resources and professional skills rather than competing in silos for competitive advantage - especially the end customer. One case study that stood out was on how The Motorists Insurance Group was able to power through one of the most devastating catastrophes in recent years - Hurricane Ike. The keys to Motorists' success were superior people, processes and technology. They did a lot of upfront planning and invested in their people, creating a healthy team environment that delivered "max service" even when they were experiencing the same level of devastation as the rest of the population. Processes were rapidly adapted to meet the challenge of the catastrophe and continually adapted to Ike's specific conditions as they evolved. Technology was fundamental to the execution of their strategy, enabling them anywhere access, on the fly reassigning of resources and rapid training to augment the work force. You can learn more about the Motorists experience by watching this video. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.

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  • [GEEK SCHOOL] Network Security 3: Windows Defender and a Malware-Free System

    - by Ciprian Rusen
    In this second lesson we are going to talk about one of the most confusing security products that are bundled with Windows: Windows Defender. In the past, this product has had a bad reputation and for good reason – it was very limited in its capacity to protect your computer from real-world malware. However, the latest version included in Windows 8.x operating systems is much different than in the past and it provides real protection to its users. The nice thing about Windows Defender in its current incarnation, is that it protects your system from the start, so there are never gaps in coverage. We will start this lesson by explaining what Windows Defender is in Windows 7 and Vista versus what it is in Windows 8, and what product to use if you are using an earlier version. We next will explore how to use Windows Defender, how to improve its default settings, and how to deal with the alerts that it displays. As you will see, Windows Defender will have you using its list of quarantined items a lot more often than other security products. This is why we will explain in detail how to work with it and remove malware for good or restore those items that are only false alarms. Lastly, you will learn how to turn off Windows Defender if you no longer want to use it and you prefer a third-party security product in its place and then how to enable it back, if you have changed your mind about using it. Upon completion, you should have a thorough understanding of your system’s default anti-malware options, or how to protect your system expeditiously. What is Windows Defender? Unfortunately there is no one clear answer to this question because of the confusing way Microsoft has chosen to name its security products. Windows Defender is a different product, depending on the Windows operating system you are using. If you use Windows Vista or Windows 7, then Windows Defender is a security tool that protects your computer from spyware. This but one form of malware made out of tools and applications that monitor your movements on the Internet or the activities you make on your computer. Spyware tends to send the information that is collected to a remote server and it is later used in all kinds of malicious purposes, from displaying advertising you don’t want, to using your personal data, etc. However, there are many other types of malware on the Internet and this version of Windows Defender is not able to protect users from any of them. That’s why, if you are using Windows 7 or earlier, we strongly recommend that you disable Windows Defender and install a more complete security product like Microsoft Security Essentials, or third-party security products from specialized security vendors. If you use Windows 8.x operating systems, then Windows Defender is the same thing as Microsoft Security Essentials: a decent security product that protects your computer in-real time from viruses and spyware. The fact that this product protects your computer also from viruses, not just from spyware, makes a huge difference. If you don’t want to pay for security products, Windows Defender in Windows 8.x and Microsoft Security Essentials (in Windows 7 or earlier) are good alternatives. Windows Defender in Windows 8.x and Microsoft Security Essentials are the same product, only their name is different. In this lesson, we will use the Windows Defender version from Windows 8.x but our instructions apply also to Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) in Windows 7 and Windows Vista. If you want to download Microsoft Security Essentials and try it out, we recommend you to use this page: Download Microsoft Security Essentials. There you will find both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of this product as well versions in multiple languages. How to Use and Configure Windows Defender Using Windows Defender (MSE) is very easy to use. To start, search for “defender” on the Windows 8.x Start screen and click or tap the “Windows Defender” search result. In Windows 7, search for “security” in the Start Menu search box and click “Microsoft Security Essentials”. Windows Defender has four tabs which give you access to the following tools and options: Home – here you can view the security status of your system. If everything is alright, then it will be colored in green. If there are some warnings to consider, then it will be colored in yellow, and if there are threats that must be dealt with, everything will be colored in red. On the right side of the “Home” tab you will find options for scanning your computer for viruses and spyware. On the bottom of the tab you will find information about when the last scan was performed and what type of scan it was. Update – here you will find information on whether this product is up-to-date. You will learn when it was last updated and the versions of the definitions it is using. You can also trigger a manual update. History – here you can access quarantined items, see which items you’ve allowed to run on your PC even if they were identified as malware by Windows Defender, and view a complete list with all the malicious items Windows Defender has detected on your PC. In order to access all these lists and work with them, you need to be signed in as an administrator. Settings – this is the tab where you can turn on the real-time protection service, exclude files, file types, processes, and locations from its scans as well as access a couple of more advanced settings. The only difference between Windows Defender in Windows 8.x and Microsoft Security Essentials (in Windows 7 or earlier) is that, in the “Settings” tab, Microsoft Security Essentials allows you to set when to run scheduled scans while Windows Defender lacks this option.

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  • Exitus Acta Probat: The Post-Processing Module

    - by Phil Factor
    Sometimes, one has to make certain ethical compromises to ensure the success of a corporate IT project. Exitus Acta Probat (literally 'the result validates the deeds' meaning that the ends justify the means)It was a while back, whilst working as a Technical Architect for a well-known international company, that I was given the task of designing the architecture of a rather specialized accounting system. We'd tried an off-the-shelf (OTS) Windows-based solution which crashed with dispiriting regularity, and didn't quite do what the business required. After a great deal of research and planning, we commissioned a Unux-based system that used X-terminals for the desktops of  the participating staff. X terminals are now obsolete, but were then hot stuff; stripped-down Unix workstations that provided client GUIs for networked applications long before the days of AJAX, Flash, Air and DHTML. I've never known a project go so smoothly: I'd been initially rather nervous about going the Unix route, believing then that  Unix programmers were excitable creatures who were prone to  indulge in role-play enactments of elves and wizards at the weekend, but the programmers I met from the company that did the work seemed to be rather donnish, earnest, people who quickly grasped our requirements and were faultlessly professional in their work.After thinking lofty thoughts for a while, there was considerable pummeling of keyboards by our suppliers, and a beautiful robust application was delivered to us ahead of dates.Soon, the department who had commissioned the work received shiny new X Terminals to replace their rather depressing lavatory-beige PCs. I modestly hung around as the application was commissioned and deployed to the department in order to receive the plaudits. They didn't come. Something was very wrong with the project. I couldn't put my finger on the problem, and the users weren't doing any more than desperately and futilely searching the application to find a fault with it.Many times in my life, I've come up against a predicament like this: The roll-out of an application goes wrong and you are hearing nothing that helps you to discern the cause but nit-*** noise. There is a limit to the emotional heat you can pack into a complaint about text being in the wrong font, or an input form being slightly cramped, but they tried their best. The answer is, of course, one that every IT executive should have tattooed prominently where they can read it in emergencies: In Vino Veritas (literally, 'in wine the truth', alcohol loosens the tongue. A roman proverb) It was time to slap the wallet and get the department down the pub with the tab in my name. It was an eye-watering investment, but hedged with an over-confident IT director who relished my discomfort. To cut a long story short, The real reason gushed out with the third round. We had deprived them of their PCs, which had been good for very little from the pure business perspective, but had provided them with many hours of happiness playing computer-based minesweeper and solitaire. There is no more agreeable way of passing away the interminable hours of wage-slavery than minesweeper or solitaire, and the employees had applauded the munificence of their employer who had provided them with the means to play it. I had, unthinkingly, deprived them of it.I held an emergency meeting with our suppliers the following day. I came over big with the notion that it was in their interests to provide a solution. They played it cool, probably knowing that it was my head on the block, not theirs. In the end, they came up with a compromise. they would temporarily descend from their lofty, cerebral stamping grounds  in order to write a server-based Minesweeper and Solitaire game for X Terminals, and install it in a concealed place within the system. We'd have to pay for it, though. I groaned. How could we do that? "Could we call it a 'post-processing module?" suggested their account executive.And so it came to pass. The application was a resounding success. Every now and then, the staff were able to indulge in some 'post-processing', with what turned out to be a very fine implementation of both minesweeper and solitaire. There were several refinements: A single click in a 'boss' button turned the games into what looked just like a financial spreadsheet.  They even threw in a multi-user version of Battleships. The extra payment for the post-processing module went through the change-control process without anyone untoward noticing, and peace once more descended. Only one thing niggles. Those games were good. Do they still survive, somewhere in a Linux library? If so, I'd like to claim a small part in their production.

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  • Puppet: Making Windows Awesome Since 2011

    - by Robz / Fervent Coder
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-making-windows-awesome-since-2011.aspxPuppet was one of the first configuration management (CM) tools to support Windows, way back in 2011. It has the heaviest investment on Windows infrastructure with 1/3 of the platform client development staff being Windows folks.  It appears that Microsoft believed an end state configuration tool like Puppet was the way forward, so much so that they cloned Puppet’s DSL (domain-specific language) in many ways and are calling it PowerShell DSC. Puppet Labs is pushing the envelope on Windows. Here are several things to note: Puppet x64 Ruby support for Windows coming in v3.7.0. An awesome ACL module (with order, SIDs and very granular control of permissions it is best of any CM). A wealth of modules that work with Windows on the Forge (and more on GitHub). Documentation solely for Windows folks - https://docs.puppetlabs.com/windows. Some of the common learning points with Puppet on Windows user are noted in this recent blog post. Microsoft OpenTech supports Puppet. Azure has the ability to deploy a Puppet Master (http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/microsoft). At Microsoft //Build 2014 in the Day 2 Keynote Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies co-presented with Mark Russonivich (http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY02  fast forward to 19:30)! Puppet has a Visual Studio Plugin! It can be overwhelming learning a new tool like Puppet at first, but Puppet Labs has some resources to help you on that path. Take a look at the Learning VM, which has a quest-based learning tool. For real-time questions, feel free to drop onto #puppet on freenode.net (yes, some folks still use IRC) with questions, and #puppet-dev with thoughts/feedback on the language itself. You can subscribe to puppet-users / puppet-dev mailing lists. There is also ask.puppetlabs.com for questions and Server Fault if you want to go to a Stack Exchange site. There are books written on learning Puppet. There are even Puppet User Groups (PUGs) and other community resources! Puppet does take some time to learn, but with anything you need to learn, you need to weigh the benefits versus the ramp up time. I learned NHibernate once, it had a very high ramp time back then but was the only game on the street. Puppet’s ramp up time is considerably less than that. The advantage is that you are learning a DSL, and it can apply to multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.) with the same Puppet resource constructs. As you learn Puppet you may wonder why it has a DSL instead of just leveraging the language of Ruby (or maybe this is one of those things that keeps you up wondering at night). I like the DSL over a small layer on top of Ruby. It allows the Puppet language to be portable and go more places. It makes you think about the end state of what you want to achieve in a declarative sense instead of in an imperative sense. You may also find that right now Puppet doesn’t run manifests (scripts) in order of the way resources are specified. This is the number one learning point for most folks. As a long time consternation of some folks about Puppet, manifest ordering was not possible in the past. In fact it might be why some other CMs exist! As of 3.3.0, Puppet can do manifest ordering, and it will be the default in Puppet 4. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources You may have caught earlier that I mentioned PowerShell DSC. But what about DSC? Shouldn’t that be what Windows users want to choose? Other CMs are integrating with DSC, will Puppet follow suit and integrate with DSC? The biggest concern that I have with DSC is it’s lack of visibility in fine-grained reporting of changes (which Puppet has). The other is that it is a very young Microsoft product (pre version 3, you know what they say :) ). I tried getting it working in December and ran into some issues. I’m hoping that newer releases are there that actually work, it does have some promising capabilities, it just doesn’t quite come up to the standard of something that should be used in production. In contrast Puppet is almost a ten year old language with an active community! It’s very stable, and when trusting your business to configuration management, you want something that has been around awhile and has been proven. Give DSC another couple of releases and you might see more folks integrating with it. That said there may be a future with DSC integration. Portability and fine-grained reporting of configuration changes are reasons to take a closer look at Puppet on Windows. Yes, Puppet on Windows is here to stay and it’s continually getting better folks.

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  • 3 Ways to Make Steam Even Faster

    - by Chris Hoffman
    Have you ever noticed how slow Steam’s built-in web browser can be? Do you struggle with slow download speeds? Or is Steam just slow in general? These tips will help you speed it up. Steam isn’t a game itself, so there are no 3D settings to change to achieve maximum performance. But there are some things you can do to speed it up dramatically. Speed Up the Steam Web Browser Steam’s built-in web browser — used in both the Steam store and in Steam’s in-game overlay to provide a web browser you can quickly use within games – can be frustratingly slow on many systems. Rather than the typical speed we’ve come to expect from Chrome, Firefox, or even Internet Explorer, Steam seems to struggle. When you click a link or go to a new page, there’s a noticeable delay before the new page appears — something that doesn’t happen in desktop browsers. Many people seem to have made peace with this slowness, accepting that Steam’s built-in browser is just bad. However, there’s a trick that will eliminate this delay on many systems and make the Steam web browser fast. This problem seems to arise from an incompatibility with the Automatically Detect Proxy Settings option, which is enabled by default on Windows. This is a compatibility option that very few people should actually need, so it’s safe to disable it. To disable this option, open the Internet Options dialog — press the Windows key to access the Start menu or Start screen, type Internet Options, and click the Internet Options shortcut. Select the Connections tab in the Internet Options window and click the LAN settings button. Uncheck the Automatically detect settings option here, then click OK to save your settings. If you experienced a significant delay every time a web page loaded in Steam’s web browser, it should now be gone. In the unlikely event that you encounter some sort of problem with your network connection, you could always re-enable this option. Increase Steam’s Game Download Speed Steam attempts to automatically select the nearest download server to your location. However, it may not always select the ideal download server. Or, in the case of high-traffic events like big seasonal sales and huge game launches, you may benefit from selecting a less-congested server. To do this, open Steam’s settings by clicking the Steam menu in Steam and selecting Settings. Click over to the Downloads tab and select the closest download server from the Download Region box. You should also ensure that Steam’s download bandwidth isn’t limited from here. You may want to restart Steam and see if your download speeds improve after changing this setting. In some cases, the closest server might not be the fastest. One a bit farther away could be faster if your local server is more congested, for example. Steam once provided information about content server load, which allowed you to select a regional server that wasn’t under high-load, but this information no longer seems to be available. Steam still provides a page that shows you the amount of download activity happening in different regions, including statistics about the difference in download speeds in different US states, but this information isn’t as useful. Accelerate Steam and Your Games One way to speed up all your games — and Steam itself —  is by getting a solid-state drive and installing Steam to it. Steam allows you to easily move your Steam folder — at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam by default — to another hard drive. Just move it like you would any other folder. You can then launch the Steam.exe program as if you had never moved Steam’s files. Steam also allows you to configure multiple game library folders. This means that you can set up a Steam library folder on a solid-state drive and one on your larger magnetic hard drive. Install your most frequently played games to the solid-state drive for maximum speed and your less frequently played ones to the slower magnetic hard drive to save SSD space. To set up additional library folders, open Steam’s Settings window and click the Downloads tab. You’ll find the Steam Library Folders option here. Click the Add Library Folder button and create a new game library on another hard drive. When you install a game in Steam, you’ll be asked which library folder you want to install it to. With the proxy compatibility option disabled, the correct download server chosen, and Steam installed to a fast SSD, it should be a speed demon. There’s not much more you can do to speed up Steam, short of upgrading other hardware like your computer’s CPU. Image Credit: Andrew Nash on Flickr     

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  • Why lock-free data structures just aren't lock-free enough

    - by Alex.Davies
    Today's post will explore why the current ways to communicate between threads don't scale, and show you a possible way to build scalable parallel programming on top of shared memory. The problem with shared memory Soon, we will have dozens, hundreds and then millions of cores in our computers. It's inevitable, because individual cores just can't get much faster. At some point, that's going to mean that we have to rethink our architecture entirely, as millions of cores can't all access a shared memory space efficiently. But millions of cores are still a long way off, and in the meantime we'll see machines with dozens of cores, struggling with shared memory. Alex's tip: The best way for an application to make use of that increasing parallel power is to use a concurrency model like actors, that deals with synchronisation issues for you. Then, the maintainer of the actors framework can find the most efficient way to coordinate access to shared memory to allow your actors to pass messages to each other efficiently. At the moment, NAct uses the .NET thread pool and a few locks to marshal messages. It works well on dual and quad core machines, but it won't scale to more cores. Every time we use a lock, our core performs an atomic memory operation (eg. CAS) on a cell of memory representing the lock, so it's sure that no other core can possibly have that lock. This is very fast when the lock isn't contended, but we need to notify all the other cores, in case they held the cell of memory in a cache. As the number of cores increases, the total cost of a lock increases linearly. A lot of work has been done on "lock-free" data structures, which avoid locks by using atomic memory operations directly. These give fairly dramatic performance improvements, particularly on systems with a few (2 to 4) cores. The .NET 4 concurrent collections in System.Collections.Concurrent are mostly lock-free. However, lock-free data structures still don't scale indefinitely, because any use of an atomic memory operation still involves every core in the system. A sync-free data structure Some concurrent data structures are possible to write in a completely synchronization-free way, without using any atomic memory operations. One useful example is a single producer, single consumer (SPSC) queue. It's easy to write a sync-free fixed size SPSC queue using a circular buffer*. Slightly trickier is a queue that grows as needed. You can use a linked list to represent the queue, but if you leave the nodes to be garbage collected once you're done with them, the GC will need to involve all the cores in collecting the finished nodes. Instead, I've implemented a proof of concept inspired by this intel article which reuses the nodes by putting them in a second queue to send back to the producer. * In all these cases, you need to use memory barriers correctly, but these are local to a core, so don't have the same scalability problems as atomic memory operations. Performance tests I tried benchmarking my SPSC queue against the .NET ConcurrentQueue, and against a standard Queue protected by locks. In some ways, this isn't a fair comparison, because both of these support multiple producers and multiple consumers, but I'll come to that later. I started on my dual-core laptop, running a simple test that had one thread producing 64 bit integers, and another consuming them, to measure the pure overhead of the queue. So, nothing very interesting here. Both concurrent collections perform better than the lock-based one as expected, but there's not a lot to choose between the ConcurrentQueue and my SPSC queue. I was a little disappointed, but then, the .NET Framework team spent a lot longer optimising it than I did. So I dug out a more powerful machine that Red Gate's DBA tools team had been using for testing. It is a 6 core Intel i7 machine with hyperthreading, adding up to 12 logical cores. Now the results get more interesting. As I increased the number of producer-consumer pairs to 6 (to saturate all 12 logical cores), the locking approach was slow, and got even slower, as you'd expect. What I didn't expect to be so clear was the drop-off in performance of the lock-free ConcurrentQueue. I could see the machine only using about 20% of available CPU cycles when it should have been saturated. My interpretation is that as all the cores used atomic memory operations to safely access the queue, they ended up spending most of the time notifying each other about cache lines that need invalidating. The sync-free approach scaled perfectly, despite still working via shared memory, which after all, should still be a bottleneck. I can't quite believe that the results are so clear, so if you can think of any other effects that might cause them, please comment! Obviously, this benchmark isn't realistic because we're only measuring the overhead of the queue. Any real workload, even on a machine with 12 cores, would dwarf the overhead, and there'd be no point worrying about this effect. But would that be true on a machine with 100 cores? Still to be solved. The trouble is, you can't build many concurrent algorithms using only an SPSC queue to communicate. In particular, I can't see a way to build something as general purpose as actors on top of just SPSC queues. Fundamentally, an actor needs to be able to receive messages from multiple other actors, which seems to need an MPSC queue. I've been thinking about ways to build a sync-free MPSC queue out of multiple SPSC queues and some kind of sign-up mechanism. Hopefully I'll have something to tell you about soon, but leave a comment if you have any ideas.

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  • CLR via C# 3rd Edition is out

    - by Abhijeet Patel
    Time for some book news update. CLR via C#, 3rd Edition seems to have been out for a little while now. The book was released in early Feb this year, and needless to say my copy is on it’s way. I can barely wait to dig in and chew on the goodies that one of the best technical authors and software professionals I respect has in store. The 2nd edition of the book was an absolute treat and this edition promises to be no less. Here is a brief description of what’s new and updated from the 2nd edition. Part I – CLR Basics Chapter 1-The CLR’s Execution Model Added about discussion about C#’s /optimize and /debug switches and how they relate to each other. Chapter 2-Building, Packaging, Deploying, and Administering Applications and Types Improved discussion about Win32 manifest information and version resource information. Chapter 3-Shared Assemblies and Strongly Named Assemblies Added discussion of TypeForwardedToAttribute and TypeForwardedFromAttribute. Part II – Designing Types Chapter 4-Type Fundamentals No new topics. Chapter 5-Primitive, Reference, and Value Types Enhanced discussion of checked and unchecked code and added discussion of new BigInteger type. Also added discussion of C# 4.0’s dynamic primitive type. Chapter 6-Type and Member Basics No new topics. Chapter 7-Constants and Fields No new topics. Chapter 8-Methods Added discussion of extension methods and partial methods. Chapter 9-Parameters Added discussion of optional/named parameters and implicitly-typed local variables. Chapter 10-Properties Added discussion of automatically-implemented properties, properties and the Visual Studio debugger, object and collection initializers, anonymous types, the System.Tuple type and the ExpandoObject type. Chapter 11-Events Added discussion of events and thread-safety as well as showing a cool extension method to simplify the raising of an event. Chapter 12-Generics Added discussion of delegate and interface generic type argument variance. Chapter 13-Interfaces No new topics. Part III – Essential Types Chapter 14-Chars, Strings, and Working with Text No new topics. Chapter 15-Enums Added coverage of new Enum and Type methods to access enumerated type instances. Chapter 16-Arrays Added new section on initializing array elements. Chapter 17-Delegates Added discussion of using generic delegates to avoid defining new delegate types. Also added discussion of lambda expressions. Chapter 18-Attributes No new topics. Chapter 19-Nullable Value Types Added discussion on performance. Part IV – CLR Facilities Chapter 20-Exception Handling and State Management This chapter has been completely rewritten. It is now about exception handling and state management. It includes discussions of code contracts and constrained execution regions (CERs). It also includes a new section on trade-offs between writing productive code and reliable code. Chapter 21-Automatic Memory Management Added discussion of C#’s fixed state and how it works to pin objects in the heap. Rewrote the code for weak delegates so you can use them with any class that exposes an event (the class doesn’t have to support weak delegates itself). Added discussion on the new ConditionalWeakTable class, GC Collection modes, Full GC notifications, garbage collection modes and latency modes. I also include a new sample showing how your application can receive notifications whenever Generation 0 or 2 collections occur. Chapter 22-CLR Hosting and AppDomains Added discussion of side-by-side support allowing multiple CLRs to be loaded in a single process. Added section on the performance of using MarshalByRefObject-derived types. Substantially rewrote the section on cross-AppDomain communication. Added section on AppDomain Monitoring and first chance exception notifications. Updated the section on the AppDomainManager class. Chapter 23-Assembly Loading and Reflection Added section on how to deploy a single file with dependent assemblies embedded inside it. Added section comparing reflection invoke vs bind/invoke vs bind/create delegate/invoke vs C#’s dynamic type. Chapter 24-Runtime Serialization This is a whole new chapter that was not in the 2nd Edition. Part V – Threading Chapter 25-Threading Basics Whole new chapter motivating why Windows supports threads, thread overhead, CPU trends, NUMA Architectures, the relationship between CLR threads and Windows threads, the Thread class, reasons to use threads, thread scheduling and priorities, foreground thread vs background threads. Chapter 26-Performing Compute-Bound Asynchronous Operations Whole new chapter explaining the CLR’s thread pool. This chapter covers all the new .NET 4.0 constructs including cooperative cancelation, Tasks, the aralle class, parallel language integrated query, timers, how the thread pool manages its threads, cache lines and false sharing. Chapter 27-Performing I/O-Bound Asynchronous Operations Whole new chapter explaining how Windows performs synchronous and asynchronous I/O operations. Then, I go into the CLR’s Asynchronous Programming Model, my AsyncEnumerator class, the APM and exceptions, Applications and their threading models, implementing a service asynchronously, the APM and Compute-bound operations, APM considerations, I/O request priorities, converting the APM to a Task, the event-based Asynchronous Pattern, programming model soup. Chapter 28-Primitive Thread Synchronization Constructs Whole new chapter discusses class libraries and thread safety, primitive user-mode, kernel-mode constructs, and data alignment. Chapter 29-Hybrid Thread Synchronization Constructs Whole new chapter discussion various hybrid constructs such as ManualResetEventSlim, SemaphoreSlim, CountdownEvent, Barrier, ReaderWriterLock(Slim), OneManyResourceLock, Monitor, 3 ways to solve the double-check locking technique, .NET 4.0’s Lazy and LazyInitializer classes, the condition variable pattern, .NET 4.0’s concurrent collection classes, the ReaderWriterGate and SyncGate classes.

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  • Find only physical network adapters with WMI Win32_NetworkAdapter class

    - by Mladen Prajdic
    WMI is Windows Management Instrumentation infrastructure for managing data and machines. We can access it by using WQL (WMI querying language or SQL for WMI). One thing to remember from the WQL link is that it doesn't support ORDER BY. This means that when you do SELECT * FROM wmiObject, the returned order of the objects is not guaranteed. It can return adapters in different order based on logged-in user, permissions of that user, etc… This is not documented anywhere that I've looked and is derived just from my observations. To get network adapters we have to query the Win32_NetworkAdapter class. This returns us all network adapters that windows detect, real and virtual ones, however it only supplies IPv4 data. I've tried various methods of combining properties that are common on all systems since Windows XP. The first thing to do to remove all virtual adapters (like tunneling, WAN miniports, etc…) created by Microsoft. We do this by adding WHERE Manufacturer!='Microsoft' to our WMI query. This greatly narrows the number of adapters we have to work with. Just on my machine it went from 20 adapters to 5. What was left were one real physical Realtek LAN adapter, 2 virtual adapters installed by VMware and 2 virtual adapters installed by VirtualBox. If you read the Win32_NetworkAdapter help page you'd notice that there's an AdapterType that enumerates various adapter types like LAN or Wireless and AdapterTypeID that gives you the same information as AdapterType only in integer form. The dirty little secret is that these 2 properties don't work. They are both hardcoded, AdapterTypeID to "0" and AdapterType to "Ethernet 802.3". The only exceptions I've seen so far are adapters that have no values at all for the two properties, "RAS Async Adapter" that has values of AdapterType = "Wide Area Network" and AdapterTypeID = "3" and various tunneling adapters that have values of AdapterType = "Tunnel" and AdapterTypeID = "15". In the help docs there isn't even a value for 15. So this property was of no help. Next property to give hope is NetConnectionId. This is the name of the network connection as it appears in the Control Panel -> Network Connections. Problem is this value is also localized into various languages and can have different names for different connection. So both of these properties don't help and we haven't even started talking about eliminating virtual adapters. Same as the previous one this property was also of no help. Next two properties I checked were ConfigManagerErrorCode and NetConnectionStatus in hopes of finding disabled and disconnected adapters. If an adapter is enabled but disconnected the ConfigManagerErrorCode = 0 with different NetConnectionStatus. If the adapter is disabled it reports ConfigManagerErrorCode = 22. This looked like a win by using (ConfigManagerErrorCode=0 or ConfigManagerErrorCode=22) in our condition. This way we get enabled (connected and disconnected adapters). Problem with all of the above properties is that none of them filter out the virtual adapters installed by virtualization software like VMware and VirtualBox. The last property to give hope is PNPDeviceID. There's an interesting observation about physical and virtual adapters with this property. Every virtual adapter PNPDeviceID starts with "ROOT\". Even VMware and VirtualBox ones. There were some really, really old physical adapters that had PNPDeviceID starting with "ROOT\" but those were in pre win XP era AFAIK. Since my minimum system to check was Windows XP SP2 I didn't have to worry about those. The only virtual adapter I've seen to not have PNPDeviceID start with "ROOT\" is the RAS Async Adapter for Wide Area Network. But because it is made by Microsoft we've eliminated it with the first condition for the manufacturer. Using the PNPDeviceID has so far proven to be really effective and I've tested it on over 20 different computers of various configurations from Windows XP laptops with wireless and bluetooth cards to virtualized Windows 2008 R2 servers. So far it always worked as expected. I will appreciate you letting me know if you find a configuration where it doesn't work. Let's see some C# code how to do this: ManagementObjectSearcher mos = null;// WHERE Manufacturer!='Microsoft' removes all of the // Microsoft provided virtual adapters like tunneling, miniports, and Wide Area Network adapters.mos = new ManagementObjectSearcher(@"SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter WHERE Manufacturer != 'Microsoft'");// Trying the ConfigManagerErrorCode and NetConnectionStatus variations // proved to still not be enough and it returns adapters installed by // the virtualization software like VMWare and VirtualBox// ConfigManagerErrorCode = 0 -> Device is working properly. This covers enabled and/or disconnected devices// ConfigManagerErrorCode = 22 AND NetConnectionStatus = 0 -> Device is disabled and Disconnected. // Some virtual devices report ConfigManagerErrorCode = 22 (disabled) and some other NetConnectionStatus than 0mos = new ManagementObjectSearcher(@"SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter WHERE Manufacturer != 'Microsoft' AND (ConfigManagerErrorCode = 0 OR (ConfigManagerErrorCode = 22 AND NetConnectionStatus = 0))");// Final solution with filtering on the Manufacturer and PNPDeviceID not starting with "ROOT\"// Physical devices have PNPDeviceID starting with "PCI\" or something else besides "ROOT\"mos = new ManagementObjectSearcher(@"SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter WHERE Manufacturer != 'Microsoft' AND NOT PNPDeviceID LIKE 'ROOT\\%'");// Get the physical adapters and sort them by their index. // This is needed because they're not sorted by defaultIList<ManagementObject> managementObjectList = mos.Get() .Cast<ManagementObject>() .OrderBy(p => Convert.ToUInt32(p.Properties["Index"].Value)) .ToList();// Let's just show all the properties for all physical adapters.foreach (ManagementObject mo in managementObjectList){ foreach (PropertyData pd in mo.Properties) Console.WriteLine(pd.Name + ": " + (pd.Value ?? "N/A"));}   That's it. Hope this helps you in some way.

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  • Spolskism or Twitterism: A Doctor writes...

    - by Phil Factor
    "I never realized I had a problem. I just 'twittered' because it was a social thing to do. All my mates were doing it. It made me feel good to have 'followers'; it bolstered my self-esteem. Of course, you don't think of the long-term effects on your work and on the way you think. There's no denying that it impairs your judgment…" Yes, this story is typical. Hundreds of people are waking up to the long term effects of twittering, and seeking help. Dave, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our reporter… "I started using Twitter at work. Just a few minutes now and then, throughout the day. A lot of my colleagues were doing it and I thought 'Well, that's cool; it must be part of what I should be doing at work'. Soon, I was avidly reading every twitter that came my way, and counting the minutes between my own twitters. I tried to kid myself that it was all about professional development and getting other people to help you with work-related problems, but in truth I had become addicted to the buzz of the social network. The worse thing was that it made me seem busy even when I was really just frittering my time away. Inevitably, I started to get behind with my real work." Experts have identified the syndrome and given it a name: 'Twitterism', sometimes referred to as 'Spolskism', after the person who first drew attention to the pernicious damage to well-being that the practice caused, and who had the courage to take the pledge of rejecting it. According to one expert… "The occasional Twitter does little harm to the participant, and can be an adaptive way of dealing with stress. Unfortunately, it rarely stops there. The addictive qualities of the practice have put a strain on the caring professions who are faced with a flood of people making that first bold step to seeking help". Dave is one of those now seeking help for his addiction… "I had lost touch with reality. Even though I twittered my work colleagues constantly, I found I actually spoke to them less and less. Even when out socializing, I would frequently disengage from the conversation, in order to twitter. I stopped blogging. I stopped responding to emails; the only way to reach me was through the world of Twitter. Unfortunately, my denial about the harm that twittering was doing to me, my friends, and my work-colleagues was so strong that I truly couldn't see that I had a problem." Like other addictions, the help and support of others who are 'taking the cure' is important. There is a common bond between those who have 'been through hell and back' and are once more able to experience the joys of actually conversing and socializing, rather than the false comfort of solitary 'twittering'. Complete abstinence is essential to the cure. Most of those who risk even an occasional twitter face a headlong slide back into 'binge' twittering. Tom, another twitterer who has managed to kick the habit explains… "My twittering addiction now seems more like a bad dream. You get to work, and switch on the PC. You say to yourself, just open up the browser, just for a minute, just to see what people are saying on Twitter. The next thing you know, half the day has gone by. The worst thing is that when you're addicted, you get good at covering up the habit; I spent so much time looking at the screen and typing on the keyboard, people just assumed I was working hard.I know that I must never forget what it was like then, and what it's like now that I've kicked the habit. I now have more time for productive work and a real social life." Like many addictions, Spolskism has its most detrimental effects on family, friends and workmates, rather than the addict. So often nowadays, we hear the sad stories of Twitter-Widows; tales of long lonely evenings spent whilst their partners are engrossed in their twittering into their 'mobiles' or indulging in their solitary spolskistic habits in privacy, under cover of 'having to do work at home'. Workmates suffer too, when the addicts even take their laptops or mobiles into meetings in order to 'twitter' with their fellow obsessives, even stooping to complain to their followers how boring the meeting is. No; The best advice is to leave twittering to the birds. You know it makes sense.

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  • AS11 Oracle B2B Sync Support - Series 2

    - by sinkarbabu.kirubanithi
    In the earlier series, we discussed about how to model "Sync Support" in Oracle B2B. And, we haven't discussed how the response can be consumed synchronously by the back-end application or initiator of sync request. In this sequel, we will see how we can extend it to the SOA composite applications to model the end-to-end usecase, this would help the initiator of sync request to receive the response synchronously. Series 2 - is little lengthier for blog standards so be prepared before you continue further :). Let's start our discussion with a high-level scenario where one need to initiate a synchronous request and get response synchronously. There are various approaches available, we will see one simplest approach here. Components Involved: 1. Oracle B2B 2. Oracle JCA JMS Adapter 3. Oracle BPEL 4. All of the above are wrapped up in a single SOA composite application. Oracle B2B: Skipping the "Sync Support" setup part in B2B, as we have already discussed that in the earlier series 1. Here we have provided "Sync Support" samples that can be imported to B2B directly and users can start testing the same in few minutes. Initiator Sample: This requires two JMS queues to be created, one for B2B to receive initial outbound sync request and the other is for B2B to deliver the incoming sync response to the back-end. Please enable "Use JMS Id" option in both internal listening and delivery channels. This would enable JCA JMS Adapter to correlate the initial B2B request and response and in turn it would be returned as synchronous response of BPEL. Internal Listening Channel Image: Internal Delivery Channel Image: To get going without much challenges, just create queues in Weblogic with the JNDI mentioned in the above two screenshots. If you want to use different names, then you may have to change the queue jndi names in sample after importing it into B2B. Here are the Queue related JNDI names used in the sample, 1. Internal Listening Channel Queue details, Name: JNDI Name: jms/b2b/syncreplyqueue 2. Internal Delivery Channel Queue details, Name: JNDI Name: jms/b2b/syncrequestqueue Here is the Initiator Sample Acme.zip Note: You may have to adjust the ip address of GlobalChips endpoint in the Delivery Channel. Responder Sample: Contains B2B meta-data and the Callout. Just import the sample and place the callout binary under "/tmp/callout" directory. If you choose to use a different location for callout, then you may have to change the same in B2B Configuration after importing the sample. Here are the artifacts, 1. Callout Source SampleCallout.java 2. Callout Binary sample-callout.jar 3. Responder Sample GlobalChips.zip Callout Details: Just gives the static response XML that needs to be sent back as response for the inbound sync request. For a sample purpose, we have given static response but in production you may have to invoke a web service or something similar to get the response. IMPORTANT NOTE: For Sync Support use case, responder is not expected to deliver the inbound sync request to backend as the process of delivering and getting the response from backend are expected from the Callout. This default behavior can be overridden by enabling the config property "b2b.SyncAppDelivery=true" in B2B config mbean (b2b-config.xml). This makes B2B to deliver the inbound sync request to be delivered to backend queue but the response to be sent to remote caller still has to come from Callout. 2. Oracle JCA JMS Adapter: On the initiator side, we have used JCA JMS Request/Reply pattern to send/receive the synchronous message from B2B. 3. Oracle BPEL: Exposes WS-SOAP Endpoint that takes payload as input and passes the same to B2B and returns the synchronous response of B2B as SOAP response. For outside world, it looks as if it is the synchronous web service endpoint but under the cover it uses JMS to trigger/initiate B2B to send and receive the synchronous response. 4. Composite application: All the components discussed above are wired in SOA composite application that helps to model a end-to-end synchronous use case. Here's the composite application sca_B2BSyncSample_rev1.0.jar, you may just deploy this to your AS11 SOA to make use of it. For any editing, you can just import the project in your JDEV under any SOA Application. Here are the composite application screenshots, Composite Application: BPEL With JCA JMS Adapter (Request/Reply):

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  • SQL SERVER – Number-Crunching with SQL Server – Exceed the Functionality of Excel

    - by Pinal Dave
    Imagine this. Your users have developed an Excel spreadsheet that extracts data from your SQL Server database, manipulates that data through the use of Excel formulas and, possibly, some VBA code which is then used to calculate P&L, hedging requirements or even risk numbers. Management comes to you and tells you that they need to get rid of the spreadsheet and that the results of the spreadsheet calculations need to be persisted on the database. SQL Server has a very small set of functions for analyzing data. Excel has hundreds of functions for analyzing data, with many of them focused on specific financial and statistical calculations. Is it even remotely possible that you can use SQL Server to replace the complex calculations being done in a spreadsheet? Westclintech has developed a library of functions that match or exceed the functionality of Excel’s functions and contains many functions that are not available in EXCEL. Their XLeratorDB library of functions contains over 700 functions that can be incorporated into T-SQL statements. XLeratorDB takes advantage of the SQL CLR architecture introduced in SQL Server 2005. SQL CLR permits managed code to be compiled into the database and run alongside built-in SQL Server functions like COUNT or SUM. The Westclintech developers have taken advantage of this architecture to bring robust analytical functions to the database. In our hypothetical spreadsheet, let’s assume that our users are using the YIELD function and that the data are extracted from a table in our database called BONDS. Here’s what the spreadsheet might look like. We go to column G and see that it contains the following formula. Obviously, SQL Server does not offer a native YIELD function. However, with XLeratorDB we can replicate this calculation in SQL Server with the following statement: SELECT *, wct.YIELD(CAST(GETDATE() AS date),Maturity,Rate,Price,100,Frequency,Basis) AS YIELD FROM BONDS This produces the following result. This illustrates one of the best features about XLeratorDB; it is so easy to use. Since I knew that the spreadsheet was using the YIELD function I could use the same function with the same calling structure to do the calculation in SQL Server. I didn’t need to know anything at all about the mechanics of calculating the yield on a bond. It was pretty close to cut and paste. In fact, that’s one way to construct the SQL. Just copy the function call from the cell in the spreadsheet and paste it into SMS and change the cell references to column names. I built the SQL for this query by starting with this. SELECT * ,YIELD(TODAY(),B2,C2,D2,100,E2,F2) FROM BONDS I then changed the cell references to column names. SELECT * --,YIELD(TODAY(),B2,C2,D2,100,E2,F2) ,YIELD(TODAY(),Maturity,Rate,Price,100,Frequency,Basis) FROM BONDS Finally, I replicated the TODAY() function using GETDATE() and added the schema name to the function name. SELECT * --,YIELD(TODAY(),B2,C2,D2,100,E2,F2) --,YIELD(TODAY(),Maturity,Rate,Price,100,Frequency,Basis) ,wct.YIELD(GETDATE(),Maturity,Rate,Price,100,Frequency,Basis) FROM BONDS Then I am able to execute the statement returning the results seen above. The XLeratorDB libraries are heavy on financial, statistical, and mathematical functions. Where there is an analog to an Excel function, the XLeratorDB function uses the same naming conventions and calling structure as the Excel function, but there are also hundreds of additional functions for SQL Server that are not found in Excel. You can find the functions by opening Object Explorer in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and expanding the Programmability folder under the database where the functions have been installed. The  Functions folder expands to show 3 sub-folders: Table-valued Functions; Scalar-valued functions, Aggregate Functions, and System Functions. You can expand any of the first three folders to see the XLeratorDB functions. Since the wct.YIELD function is a scalar function, we will open the Scalar-valued Functions folder, scroll down to the wct.YIELD function and and click the plus sign (+) to display the input parameters. The functions are also Intellisense-enabled, with the input parameters displayed directly in the query tab. The Westclintech website contains documentation for all the functions including examples that can be copied directly into a query window and executed. There are also more one hundred articles on the site which go into more detail about how some of the functions work and demonstrate some of the extensive business processes that can be done in SQL Server using XLeratorDB functions and some T-SQL. XLeratorDB is organized into libraries: finance, statistics; math; strings; engineering; and financial options. There is also a windowing library for SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2012 which provides functions for calculating things like running and moving averages (which were introduced in SQL Server 2012), FIFO inventory calculations, financial ratios and more, without having to use triangular joins. To get started you can download the XLeratorDB 15-day free trial from the Westclintech web site. It is a fully-functioning, unrestricted version of the software. If you need more than 15 days to evaluate the software, you can simply download another 15-day free trial. XLeratorDB is an easy and cost-effective way to start adding sophisticated data analysis to your SQL Server database without having to know anything more than T-SQL. Get XLeratorDB Today and Now! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Excel

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  • ct.sym steals the ASM class

    - by Geertjan
    Some mild consternation on the Twittersphere yesterday. Marcus Lagergren not being able to find the ASM classes in JDK 8 in NetBeans IDE: And there's no such problem in Eclipse (and apparently in IntelliJ IDEA). Help, does NetBeans (despite being incredibly awesome) suck, after all? The truth of the matter is that there's something called "ct.sym" in the JDK. When javac is compiling code, it doesn't link against rt.jar. Instead, it uses a special symbol file lib/ct.sym with class stubs. Internal JDK classes are not put in that symbol file, since those are internal classes. You shouldn't want to use them, at all. However, what if you're Marcus Lagergren who DOES need these classes? I.e., he's working on the internal JDK classes and hence needs to have access to them. Fair enough that the general Java population can't access those classes, since they're internal implementation classes that could be changed anytime and one wouldn't want all unknown clients of those classes to start breaking once changes are made to the implementation, i.e., this is the rt.jar's internal class protection mechanism. But, again, we're now Marcus Lagergen and not the general Java population. For the solution, read Jan Lahoda, NetBeans Java Editor guru, here: https://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=186120 In particular, take note of this: AFAIK, the ct.sym is new in JDK6. It contains stubs for all classes that existed in JDK5 (for compatibility with existing programs that would use private JDK classes), but does not contain implementation classes that were introduced in JDK6 (only API classes). This is to prevent application developers to accidentally use JDK's private classes (as such applications would be unportable and may not run on future versions of JDK). Note that this is not really a NB thing - this is the behavior of javac from the JDK. I do not know about any way to disable this except deleting ct.sym or the option mentioned above. Regarding loading the classes: JVM uses two classpath's: classpath and bootclasspath. rt.jar is on the bootclasspath and has precedence over anything on the "custom" classpath, which is used by the application. The usual way to override classes on bootclasspath is to start the JVM with "-Xbootclasspath/p:" option, which prepends the given jars (and presumably also directories) to bootclasspath. Hence, let's take the first option, the simpler one, and simply delete the "ct.sym" file. Again, only because we need to work with those internal classes as developers of the JDK, not because we want to hack our way around "ct.sym", which would mean you'd not have portable code at the end of the day. Go to the JDK 8 lib folder and you'll find the file: Delete it. Start NetBeans IDE again, either on JDK 7 or JDK 8, doesn't make a difference for these purposes, create a new Java application (or use an existing one), make sure you have set the JDK above as the JDK of the application, and hey presto: The above obviously assumes you have a build of JDK 8 that actually includes the ASM package. And below you can see that not only are the classes found but my build succeeded, even though I'm using internal JDK classes. The yellow markings in the sidebar mean that the classes are imported but not used in the code, where normally, if I hadn't removed "ct.sym", I would have seen red error marking instead, and the code wouldn't have compiled. Note: I've tried setting "-XDignore.symbol.file" in "netbeans.conf" and in other places, but so far haven't got that to work. Simply deleting the "ct.sym" file (or back it up somewhere and put it back when needed) is quite clearly the most straightforward solution. Ultimately, if you want to be able to use those internal classes while still having portable code, do you know what you need to do? You need to create a JDK bug report stating that you need an internal class to be added to "ct.sym". Probably you'll get a motivation back stating WHY that internal class isn't supposed to be used externally. There must be a reason why those classes aren't available for external usage, otherwise they would have been added to "ct.sym". So, now the only remaining question is why the Eclipse compiler doesn't hide the internal JDK classes. Apparently the Eclipse compiler ignores the "ct.sym" file. In other words, at the end of the day, far from being a bug in NetBeans... we have now found a (pretty enormous, I reckon) bug in Eclipse. The Eclipse compiler does not protect you from using internal JDK classes and the code that you create in Eclipse may not work with future releases of the JDK, since the JDK team is simply going to be changing those classes that are not found in the "ct.sym" file while assuming (correctly, thanks to the presence of "ct.sym" mechanism) that no code in the world, other than JDK code, is tied to those classes.

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  • Resetting Your Oracle User Password with SQL Developer

    - by thatjeffsmith
    There’s nothing more annoying than having to email, call, or log a support ticket to have one of your accounts reset. This is no less annoying in the Oracle database. Those pesky security folks have determined that your password should only be valid for X days, and your time is up. Time to reset the password! Except…you can’t log into the database to reset your password. What now? Wait a second, look at this nifty thing I see in SQL Developer: Right click on my connection, reset password not available! Why not? The JDBC Driver Doesn’t Support This Operation We can’t make this call over the Oracle JDBC layer, because it hasn’t been implemented. However our primary interface, OCI, does indeed support this. In order to use the Oracle Call Interface (OCI), you need to have an Oracle Client on your machine. The good news is that this is fairly easy to get going. The Instant Client will do. You have two options, the full or ‘Lite’ Instant Clients. If you want SQL*Plus and the other client tools, go for the full. If you just want the basic drivers, go for the Lite. Either of these is fine, but mind the bit level and version of Oracle! Make sure you get a 32 bit Instant Client if you run 32 bit SQL Developer or 64 bit if you run 64 Here’s the download link What, you didn’t believe me? Mind the version of Oracle too! You want to be at the same level or higher of the database you’re working with. You can use a 11.2.0.3 client with 11.2.0.1 database but not a 10gR2 client with 11gR2 database. Clear as mud? Download and Extract Put it where you want – Program Files is as good as place as any if you have the rights. When you’re done, copy that directory path you extracted the archive to, because we’re going to add it to your Windows PATH environment variable. The easiest way to find this in Windows 7 is to open the Start dialog and type ‘path’. In Windows 8 you’ll cast your spell and wave at your screen until something happens. I recommend you put it up front so we find our DLLs first. Now with that set, let’s start up SQL Developer. Check the Connection Context menu again Bingo! What happened there? SQL Developer looks to see if it can find the OCI resources. Guess where it looks? That’s right, the PATH. If it finds what it’s looking for, and confirms the bit level is right, it will activate the Reset Password option. We have a Preference to ‘force’ an OCI/THICK connection that gives you a few other edge case features, but you do not need to enable this to activate the Reset Password. Not necessary, but won’t hurt anything either. There are a few actual benefits to using OCI powered connections, but that’s beyond the scope of today’s blog post…to be continued. Ok, so we’re ready to go. Now, where was I again? Oh yeah, my password has expired… Right click on your connection and now choose ‘Reset Password’ You’ll need to know your existing password and select a new one that meets your databases’s security standards. I Need Another Option, This Ain’t Working! If you have another account in the database, you can use the DBA Panel to reset a user’s password, or of course you can spark up a SQL*Plus session and issue the ALTER USER JEFF IDENTIFIED BY _________; command – but you knew this already, yes? I need more help ‘installing’ the Instant Client, help! There are lots and lots of resources out there on this subject. But I also know from personal experience that many of you have problems getting this to ‘work.’ The key things to remember is to download the right bit level AND make sure the client install directory is in your path. I know many folks that will just ‘install’ the Instant Client directly to one of their ‘bin’ type directories. You can do that if you want, but I prefer the cleaner method. Of course if you lack admin privs to change the PATH variable, that might be your only option. Or you could do what the original ORA- message indicated and ‘contact your DBA.’

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  • The Case of the Extra Page: Rendering Reporting Services as PDF

    - by smisner
    I had to troubleshoot a problem with a mysterious extra page appearing in a PDF this week. My first thought was that it was likely to caused by one of the most common problems that people encounter when developing reports that eventually get rendered as PDF is getting blank pages inserted into the PDF document. The cause of the blank pages is usually related to sizing. You can learn more at Understanding Pagination in Reporting Services in Books Online. When designing a report, you have to be really careful with the layout of items in the body. As you move items around, the body will expand to accommodate the space you're using and you might eventually tighten everything back up again, but the body doesn't automatically collapse. One of my favorite things to do in Reporting Services 2005 - which I dubbed the "vacu-pack" method - was to just erase the size property of the Body and let it auto-calculate the new size, squeezing out all the extra space. Alas, that method no longer works beginning with Reporting Services 2008. Even when you make sure the body size is as small as possible (with no unnecessary extra space along the top, bottom, left, or right side of the body), it's important to calculate the body size plus header plus footer plus the margins and ensure that the calculated height and width do not exceed the report's height and width (shown as the page in the illustration above). This won't matter if users always render reports online, but they'll get extra pages in a PDF document if the report's height and width are smaller than the calculate space. Beginning the Investigation In the situation that I was troubleshooting, I checked the properties: Item Property Value Body Height 6.25in   Width 10.5in Page Header Height 1in Page Footer Height 0.25in Report Left Margin 0.1in   Right Margin 0.1in   Top Margin 0.05in   Bottom Margin 0.05in   Page Size - Height 8.5in   Page Size - Width 11in So I calculated the total width using Body Width + Left Margin + Right Margin and came up with a value of 10.7 inches. And then I calculated the total height using Body Height + Page Header Height + Page Footer Height + Top Margin + Bottom Margin and got 7.6 inches. Well, page sizing couldn't be the reason for the extra page in my report because 10.7 inches is smaller than the report's width of 11 inches and 7.6 inches is smaller than the report's height of 8.5 inches. I had to look elsewhere to find the culprit. Conducting the Third Degree My next thought was to focus on the rendering size of the items in the report. I've adapted my problem to use the Adventure Works database. At the top of the report are two charts, and then below each chart is a rectangle that contains a table. In the real-life scenario, there were some graphics present as a background for the tables which fit within the rectangles that were about 3 inches high so the visual space of the rectangles matched the visual space of the charts - also about 3 inches high. But there was also a huge amount of white space at the bottom of the page, and as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, a second page which was blank except for the footer that appeared at the bottom. Placing a textbox beneath the rectangles to see if they would appear on the first page resulted the textbox's appearance on the second page. For some reason, the rectangles wanted a buffer zone beneath them. What's going on? Taking the Suspect into Custody My next step was to see what was really going on with the rectangle. The graphic appeared to be correctly sized, but the behavior in the report indicated the rectangle was growing. So I added a border to the rectangle to see what it was doing. When I added borders, I could see that the size of each rectangle was growing to accommodate the table it contains. The rectangle on the right is slightly larger than the one on the left because the table on the right contains an extra row. The rectangle is trying to preserve the whitespace that appears in the layout, as shown below. Closing the Case Now that I knew what the problem was, what could I do about it? Because of the graphic in the rectangle (not shown), I couldn't eliminate the use of the rectangles and just show the tables. But fortunately, there is a report property that comes to the rescue: ConsumeContainerWhitespace (accessible only in the Properties window). I set the value of this property to True. Problem solved. Now the rectangles remain fixed at the configured size and don't grow vertically to preserve the whitespace. Case closed.

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  • Profit's COLLABORATE 10 Session Selections

    - by Aaron Lazenby
    COLLABORATE 2010 is a mere 11 days away (thanks for the reminder @ocp_advisor). Every year I publish my a list of the sessions I think reflect some of the more interesting people/trends in enterprise IT. I should be at all of these sessions, so drop by for a chat--I'll be the guy tapping out emails on my iPad... Monday, April 19 9:15 a.m. - Keynote: Transforming Customer Value, Delivering Highest Customer Service Location: Keynote Hall I never miss Charles Phillips when he speaks--it's one of the best opportunities to get an update on Oracle product developments and strategy. And there's certainly occasion for an update: this will be Phillips' first big presentation since the Oracle + Sun Strategy Update in late January. Phillips is appearing with Oracle Executive Vice President of Development Thomas Kurian which means there should be some excellent information about how customers are using Oracle's complete software and hardware stack to address enterprise IT challenges. The session should provide some excellent context for the rest of the week's session...don't miss it. 10:45 a.m. - Oracle Fusion Applications: Functional Overview Location: South Seas FI met Basheer Khan at COLLABORATE 08 in Denver and have followed his work ever since. He's a former member of the OAUG Board of Directors, an Oracle ACE, and a charismatic enterprise IT expert. Having worked with the Oracle Usability Advisory Board, Basheer should have some fascinating insights to share about the features and interface of Oracle's Fusine Applications. This session, along with Nadia Bendjedou's "10 Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for the Next Generation Applications" (on Tuesday, April 20 8:00 a.m. in room 3662) should give attendees the update they need about Oracle's next-generation applications.   1:15p.m. - E-Business Suite in the Amazon Cloud Location: South Seas HI did my first full-fledged cloud computing coverage at last year's COLLABORATE show (check out my interview with Oracle's Bill Hodak), where I first learned about Amazon's EC2 offering. I've since talked with several people who have provisioned server space on Amazon's cloud with great results. So I'm looking forward to watching the audience configure an instance of the Oracle E-Business Suite release 12 on the cloud while Chuck Edwards from Blue Gecko drives. This session should take some of the mist and vapor out of the cloud conversation.2:30 p.m. - "Zero Sign-on" to EBS - Enabling 96000 Users to Login to EBS Without User Maintenance Location: South Seas HI'll be sitting tight in South Seas H for the next session on Monday where Doug Pepka, a ten-year veteran of communications giant Comcast, will be walking attendees through a massive single sign-on (SSO) project across the enterprise. I'm working on a story about SSO for the August issue of Profit, so this session has real practical value to me. Plus the proliferation of user account logins--both personal and professional--makes this a critical usability/change management issue for IT leaders planning for successful long-term IT implementations.   Tuesday 8:00 am  - Information Architecture for Men in Kilts Location: SURF AGetting to a 8:00 a.m. presentation is a tall order in Las Vegas, but presenter Billy Cripe will make it worth your effort. Not only is the title of this session great, but the content should appeal to any IT strategist looking to push the limits of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. Cripe is a product management director of Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Content Management at Oracle, author of Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0, and a prolific blogger--he knows how information architecture is critical to and enterprise 2.0 implementation.    10:30a.m. - Oracle Virtualization: From Desktop to Data Center Location: REEF FData center virtualization is still one of the best ways to reduce the cost of running enterprise IT. With the addition of Sun products, Oracle has the industry's most comprehensive virtualization portfolio. I must admit, I'm no expert in this subject. So I'm looking forward to Monica Kumar's presentation so I can get up to speed.   Wednesday 8:00 a.m. - The Art of the Steal Location: Mandalay Bay Ballroom JMany will know Frank Abagnale from Steven Spielberg's 2002 film "Catch Me if You Can." The one-time con man and international fugitive who swindled $2.5 million in forged checks went on to help U.S. federal officials investigate fraud cases. Now the CEO of Abagnale and Associates, he has become an invaluable source to the business world on the subject of fraud and fraud protection. With identity theft and digital fraud still on the rise, this session should be an entertaining, and sobering, education on the threats facing businesses and customers around the world. A great way to start Wednesday.1:00 p.m. - Google Wave: Will it replace e-mail as we know it today? Location: SURF EBy many assessments (my own included), Google Wave is a bit of an open collaboration failure. It may seem like an odd reason for me to be excited about this session, but I'm looking forward to the chance to revisit the technology. Also, this is a great case study in connecting free, available Internet tools to existing enterprise computing environments--an issue that IT strategists must contend with as workers spreads out and choose their own productivity tools.  

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  • Silverlight Cream for January 11, 2011 -- #1024

    - by Dave Campbell
    1,000 blogposts is quite a few, but to die-hard geeks, 1000 isn't the number... 1K is the number, and today is my 1K blogpost! I've been working up to this for at least 11 months. Way back at MIX10, I approached some vendors about an idea I had. A month ago I contacted them and others, and everyone I contacted was very generous and supportive of my idea. My idea was not to run a contest, but blog as normal, and whoever ended up on my 1K post would get some swag... and I set a cut-off at 13 posts. So... blogging normally, I had some submittals, and then ran my normal process to pick up the next posts until I hit a total of 13. To provide a distribution channel for the swag, everyone on the list, please send me your snail mail (T-shirts) and email (licenses) addresses as soon as possible.   I'd like to thank the following generous sponsors for their contributions to my fun (in alphabetic order): and Rachel Hawley for contributing 4 Silverlight control sets First Floor Software and Koen Zwikstra for contributing 13 licenses for Silverlight Spy and Sara Faatz/Jason Beres for contributing 13 licenses for Silverlight Data Visualization controls and Svetla Stoycheva for contributing T-Shirts for everyone on the post and Ina Tontcheva for contributing 13 licenses for RadControls for Silverlight + RadControls for Windows Phone and Charlene Kozlan for contributing 1 combopack standard, 2 DataGrid for Silverlight, and 2 Listbox for Silverlight Standard And now finally...in this Issue: Nigel Sampson, Jeremy Likness, Dan Wahlin, Kunal Chowdhurry, Alex Knight, Wei-Meng Lee, Michael Crump, Jesse Liberty, Peter Kuhn, Michael Washington, Tau Sick, Max Paulousky, Damian Schenkelman Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties" Dan Wahlin WP7: "Using Windows Phone Gestures as Triggers" Nigel Sampson Expression Blend: "PathListBox: making data look cool" Alex Knight From SilverlightCream.com: Using Windows Phone Gestures as Triggers Nigel Sampson blogged about WP7 Gestures, the Toolkit, and using Gestures as Triggers, and actually makes it looks simple :) Jounce Part 9: Static and Dynamic Module Management Jeremy Likness has episode 9 of his explanation of his MVVM framework, Jounce, up... and a big discussion of Modules and Module Management from a Jounce perspective. Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties Dan Wahlin takes a page from one of his teaching opportunities, and shares his knowledge of Dependency Properties with us... beginning with what they are, defining them in code, and demonstrating their use. Customizing Silverlight ChildWindow Style using Blend Kunal Chowdhurry has a great post up about getting your Child Windows to match the look & feel of the rest of youra app... plus a bunch of Blend goodness thrown in. PathListBox: making data look cool File this post by Alex Knight in the 'holy crap' file along with the others in this series! ... just check out that cool Ticker Style Path ListBox at the top of the blog... too cool! Web Access in Windows Phone 7 Apps Wei-Meng Lee has the 3rd part of his series on WP7 development up and in this one is discussing Web Access... I mean *discussing* it... tons of detail, code, and explanation... great post. Prevent your Silverlight XAP file from caching in your browser. Michael Crump helps relieve stress on Silverlight developers everywhere by exploring how to avoid caching of your XAP in the browser... (WPFS) MVVM Light Toolkit: Soup To Nuts Part I Jesse Liberty continues his Windows Phone from Scratch series with a new segment exploring Laurent Bugnion's MVVMLight Toolkit beginning with acquiring and installing the toolkit, then proceeds to discuss linking the View and ViewModel, the ViewModel Locator, and page navigation. Silverlight: Making a DateTimePicker Peter Kuhn attacks a problem that crops up on the forums a lot -- a DateTimePicker control for Silverlight... following the "It's so simple to build one yourself" advice, he did so, and provides the code for all of us! Windows Phone 7 Animated Button Press Michael Washington took exception to button presses that gave no visual feedback and produced a behavior that does just that. Using TweetSharp in a Windows Phone 7 app Tau Sick demonstrates using TweetSharp to put a twitter feed into a WP7 app, as he did in "Hangover Helper"... all the instructions from getting Tweeetshaprt to the code necessary. Bindable Application Bar Extensions for Windows Phone 7 Max Paulousky has a post discussing some real extensions to the ApplicationBar for WP7.. he begins with a bindable application bar by Nicolas Humann that I've missed, probably because his blog is in French... and extends it to allow using DelegateCommand. How to: Load Prism modules packaged in a separate XAP file in an OOB application Damian Schenkelman posts about Prism, AppModules in separate XAPs and running OOB... if you've tried this, you know it's a hassle.. Damian has the solution. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Find odd and even rows using $.inArray() function when using jQuery Templates

    - by hajan
    In the past period I made series of blogs on ‘jQuery Templates in ASP.NET’ topic. In one of these blogs dealing with jQuery Templates supported tags, I’ve got a question how to create alternating row background. When rendering the template, there is no direct access to the item index. One way is if there is an incremental index in the JSON string, we can use it to solve this. If there is not, then one of the ways to do this is by using the jQuery’s $.inArray() function. - $.inArray(value, array) – similar to JavaScript indexOf() Here is an complete example how to use this in context of jQuery Templates: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head runat="server">     <style type="text/css">         #myList { cursor:pointer; }                  .speakerOdd { background-color:Gray; color:White;}         .speaker { background-color:#443344; color:White;}                  .speaker:hover { background-color:White; color:Black;}         .speakerOdd:hover { background-color:White; color:Black;}     </style>     <title>jQuery ASP.NET</title>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>     <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">         var speakers = [             { Name: "Hajan1" },             { Name: "Hajan2" },             { Name: "Hajan3" },             { Name: "Hajan4" },             { Name: "Hajan5" }         ];         $(function () {             $("#myTemplate").tmpl(speakers).appendTo("#myList");         });         function oddOrEven() {             return ($.inArray(this.data, speakers) % 2) ? "speaker" : "speakerOdd";         }     </script>     <script id="myTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl">         <tr class="${oddOrEven()}">             <td> ${Name}</td>         </tr>     </script> </head> <body>     <table id="myList"></table> </body> </html> So, I have defined stylesheet classes speakerOdd and speaker as well as corresponding :hover styles. Then, you have speakers JSON string containing five items. And what is most important in our case is the oddOrEven function where $.inArray(value, data) is implemented. function oddOrEven() {     return ($.inArray(this.data, speakers) % 2) ? "speaker" : "speakerOdd"; } Remark: The $.inArray() method is similar to JavaScript's native .indexOf() method in that it returns -1 when it doesn't find a match. If the first element within the array matches value, $.inArray() returns 0. From http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.inArray/ So, now we can call oddOrEven function from inside our jQuery Template in the following way: <script id="myTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl">     <tr class="${oddOrEven()}">         <td> ${Name}</td>     </tr> </script> And the result is I hope you like it. Regards, Hajan

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