Posts by Ewald Horn

I have some clients that use http://www.jivosite.com/ - it might be a good place to start looking.

I'm also sure Dani can give you pointers, she's built a nice chat system for this site!

Yes, indeed, Android applications can have embedded browsers, to a certain extent. The real question is whether this is worth your while.

Might I ask as to why you would need an app for something that sounds like it should work in a browser?

Ah, make no mistake - Python is often more than fast enough, in fact, I've done a bit of system monitoring, and even realtime payment transaction programming in it, and I was surprised at how easy it was to code, and how efficient the code performed.

Well, given that there's already a Python library, I think it's a cool idea to get to know Python a bit. Do yourself a favour, and visit http://www.codecademy.com/ - they have a great little tutorial on getting started in Python. The exercises there will give you a good feel for the language.

I asked around, and the general concensus is that you should serve the HTML directly from Python, avoiding any other overheads that you do not need. There are tonnes of simple Python-based web server code examples, but that's for later, after you've collected information and managed to, for example, output it to the console.

I'd be happy to help, I'm by no means a Python expert, but I have some time over weekends to tinker and this sounds like an interesting project.

By the way, Java and JavaScript are two completely seperate beasts, the semi-similar name is a point of tremendous confusion.

Ah, that is interesting. In that case, you might not need to go the Python route. Basically, any programming language that you are familiar with will do the job, as long as it can output text to a file.

Am I correct in understanding that it supports Node JS? If that is so, then you can actually write a Node JS server that will read the data from a RAM-based file and output the required HTML. In fact, this is probably an even simpler solution.

@Ray - Sure thing, what I have is a cron job that just runs a simple Python script (foundation source at http://www.decalage.info/fr/python/html) - the tricky part is of course reading the sensor data.

What format do you output this data, in CSV perhaps? I am happy to modify my code and put it here, I just need to remove a few bits that the company won't want shared.

I've had tremendous success using a bit of a cheat - I have a Python script that fires and generates HTML pages that are served on a Raspberry Pi (very similar to your setup) that includes JSON data required to draw charts with http://www.chartjs.org/ - This job fires every few minutes, and I have an auto-refresh directive on the pages, so they reload automatically with the new data every minute, creating quite a neat, ever-updating effect.

All I do is I overwrite the HTML file(s) in the standard Apache web-server, providing me with a simple and effective way of sharing information with users.

Oh, but there's more to fill, isn't there?

Let us know, there's nothing like finding a solution to something that's been bugging you for a while :)

Great job on not giving up by the way, I admire that.

Why would you split the two? My biggest pain is with the lack of security in cloud solutions. If you look at companies like Amazon, they dedicate a serious amount of time and effort to cloud architecture, but not nearly the same amount of effort to security.

The reason for this is simple - security, at the end of the day, is not the sole responsibility of the cloud provider. I see great value in knowing and understanding how the structure cloud services securely. With the way things are going, it's becoming easier and easier to build cloud services, but harder and harder to properly secure them.

There seems to be a movement of interoperability between cloud services, with different providers making API's available that you can use to tap into their services, like SalesForce and even Daniweb! Take for example the DW API - you can fetch articles from forums, and, in essence, DW is some kind of cloud service, at least, from that perspective. There's a distinct security challenge here - you don't know what's being pulled into your system, and relying on DW to provide all your security isn't a good strategy, no offense meant to DW :)

In this scenario, you'd want someone with a solid understanding of security to help set up and design your services, incoming and outgoing, to make sure you address the possible risks involved. At the same time, you'd need this person to also understand how different cloud services work, so …

Ah, that's great, so it's not such a large array at all. As you said, the problem is with the nested loops, there's a lot of expensive looping.

Is that the area in pixels, or is the area from 2 - 320 by 2 - 374 pixels?

There's got to be a way to short-circuit the test algorithm :)

This is quite an interesting conundrum. What are the values of the maximum x and maximum y? I'm trying to get a grasp for the scope of the loops.

Are you running through every pixel at a time?

How about using a scaling algorithm rather? Let's say, each entry in your grid equals 4 real pixels. Then you already have 1/4 of the number of calculations to do. I don't think that on a game like that, you really need to handle each pixel as a single block.

The original game was a text-mode game, so it worked on 80x25 characters! I guess things have changed a lot since then :)

Hi.

Even while using a cloud solution, you will have some data on your machine that is sensitive.

The best approach, even with a cloud host, is to encrypt your hard drive. Under Windows, you can use something like Check Point (http://www.checkpoint.com/products/full-disk-encryption/index.html) that will encrypt the entire drive.

I know there's a program called TrueCrypt, and it works very well, but I have found it's cumbersome to use and because it's not transparent, people don't bother to keep all their sensitive information in the TrueCrypt vault.

For Linux, you can set up an encrypted file system (Fedora 19, for example, ships with this built-in).

The best security you can have though, is to be diligent. Make sure you lock your computing device when not near it. Make sure you delete all sensitive data that you do not absolutely need. Also, ensure you do not place anything sensitive on an unencrypted device.

I hope this helps.

Are you 100% sure that you actually have data in your array?

Well, that depends on what you mean by mobile development.

Do you mean mobile applications, mobile-friendly websites, native applications, hybrid applications?

And, most importantly, which platform do you want to start with? Windows phone, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, J2ME...

This is a tremendously large field, I suggest figuring out what you want to do and then we can help point you in the right direction.

The error code was on line 23, character number 30. That's way better than C++ would have given you :D

Migrating from one database to another is never a smooth operation, you might be setting yourself up for a lot of effort. Plus the licenses required for MS-SQL might be quite heavy, which is going to have an impact on the sustainability of such a project.

Honestly, what you are trying to do is to retrofit something that was never designed to be multi-tenant to suddenly be multi-tenant. That, in the history of software, has always been a VERY BAD IDEA. Others might not agree, but I foresee tremendous amounts of pain trying to hammer this thing into what will become your own distributed cloud-based solution.

I agree that a web application is not the way to go, not if you are interfacing with hardware. Even with modern browsers and the fantastic tools available, it's still quite difficult to successfully and reliably speak to hardware.

What skills are available in the company? Are we looking at mostly VB and MySQL skills here? How much knowledge is in the company around network programming, queue management etc.?

The first error is easy - you are not specifying a return type. In Java, only constructors do not specify return types. Did you copy and paste this code into a new .java file? It looks like the original file was called MineCraftLoginReader.java - but you've changed that. Java requires that public classes and filenames match.

The second error, pretty much everything after that, are syntax errors. That is not proper Java code, and would never compile. Perhaps you made some mistakes when you copied the code? That might explain it as I see missing { brackets, ;'s in the wrong place etc.

If you are using the old heatsink, remember, it might not be transferring heat fast enough for the new CPU. Did you thoroughly clean the old heatsink before reusing it? It's critical that you remove all heat-conductive paste first, then apply sufficient, new paste before applying an older heatsink to a new CPU.

Your problem is definitely heat-related though. Some BIOS's have a safety setting that shuts down a system once the CPU reaches a certain temperature. Look up the operating temp for your new CPU and double-check that the BIOS is not shutting it down too soon.

I live in a country with 11 different languages, you learn to read between the lines :)

I think the OP asked about a learning platform for HTML5, not what kind of platform HTML5 is.

Is the CPU fan turning? I've had some MB's that won't power up if the CPU fan doesn't reach full speed. Also, it could be that the CPU is not seated properly, or that the RAM isn't seated properly.

Are there no POST beeps or lights that can give you a slight clue as to what is going on?

I highly recommend that you consider the following online resources, in the order provided :

http://www.codecademy.com - a great resource for absolute beginners.
https://dash.generalassemb.ly/ - after CodeCademy, you'll be ready for these tutorials
http://www.codeavengers.com - even more exercises!

In my experience, I've found people progress through HTML5 very well after mastering the basics on CodeCademy, and moving forward from there. Anytime that you get stuck, there's a whole Daniweb community to help you out!

Good luck - learning HTML5 is a lot of fun, it gets hard here and there, but with a bit of patience and effort, you'll quickly become an expert.

The date is just a String value, so you could simply parse it using a SimpleDateFormatter.

I'm assuming your variable name of date here:

SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
Date parsed = format.parse(date);

That of course assumes that your date is in this format. That might be different, if so, you'll have to play with the date format. Depending on your framework, like, for example, Spring, there might be utility methods available to help out with this as well.

Are you using an installer?

With most installers, you can run scripts after installation, so you could simply have an installer that upgrades the existing product and, as part of the process, removes unused files as well.

That will probably give the best user experience if you ask me.

That's one of the things that most search engines look for to disqualify you with!

Excellent!

OOP is great for exactly this use-case, but, be cautioned, OOP design should be carefully considered, it can also lead to a whole nightmare of intricate dependencies and completely un-understandable logic and hierachial structures.

Great article, with solid examples.

Live chat creates a sense of community and makes websites appear more personnel. It's all fine and dandy to be able to send a support mail, but having the opportunity to chat to an expert, and recieve realtime feedback is of tremendous value.

People have come to expect fast results, and live chat support provides a channel for that. Why do I want to send an email that's going to sit in an inbox somewhere and wait for possibly hours, or even days, without me knowing what's going on? Live chat is almost like a phone call, but without placing people on the actual telephone, and you'd be surprised how many people are afraid of using the phone!

Adding live chat options also provide an incentive to visit the website, and, let's face it, people are lazy, so a lot of live chat support is redirecting people to knowledgebase links they could have found themselves, but were too lazy to search for.

Live chat also provides an opportunity to gather information and trends from users, without them even knowing that you are keeping track of who finds some explanation on your site difficult to understand. Do not underestimate the power of communication - just providing a support site doesn't allow a two-way flow of communication.

Ah, another reason why I left Visual Studio behind. I'm sorry, if that dindn't work, you might have to visit MSDN and submit a post to their forum, it's obviously something that's not set up correctly. Sorry I couldn't be of help.

Ah, findall is used to highlight words in the webview, and it's rather buggy.

What you really should do is to make a HttpClient call to the webpage to retrieve the page into memory. You can then access the code and also display it in the webview, all with a single http call.

The following code snippet, when executed in a background thread, will place the retreived HTML source code into a StringBuffer for you. You can then parse it from there like a normal String:

    public static void showHTML(String url) {
        HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet(url);
        HttpResponse response;

        try {
            response = httpclient.execute(httpget);

            HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();

            if (entity != null) {
                InputStream instream = entity.getContent();
                BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(
                        new InputStreamReader(instream));
                StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

                String line = null;
                try {
                    while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                        sb.append(line + "\n");
                    }
                } catch (IOException e) {
                    e.printStackTrace();
                } finally {
                    try {
                        instream.close();
                    } catch (IOException e) {
                        e.printStackTrace();
                    }
                }

                Log.e("HTML", sb.toString());

                instream.close();
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            Log.e("ERROR", e.getMessage(), e);
        }
    }

That's quite a mean feat you wish to accomplish. Your best bet is to either use a rich text edit box, or, better yet, something that supports HTML and then copy the Word data as HTML.

MS-Word does support exporting your document as an HTML document, which is probably the closest you'll get to being able to do this.

MS Word does use a proprietory format though, so you might not get to represent the document 100% as you see it in Word.

Anytime!

The error message gave you a rather cryptic clue, as you get more used to it, you'll learn to read it better. Practice practice practice. Plus it always helps to get a fresh eye, we are often so blind to our own mistakes.

Good luck with your learning, Android development is a great skill to have.

Hi.

You are referencing R.id.container - but none of your components are called that. It looks like you are missing something from whatever tutorial you are using.

I can assure you that everything is not as it is in the tutorial :) - that code won't compile, thre's nothing with an android:id="@+id/container" in your XML files.

Hi, I have no idea how to get BACK to the chat room haha! See, noob of the year in the making!

*     *     *     *     *  command to be executed
-     -     -     -     -
|     |     |     |     |
|     |     |     |     +----- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0)
|     |     |     +------- month (1 - 12)
|     |     +--------- day of month (1 - 31)
|     +----------- hour (0 - 23)
+------------- min (0 - 59)

According to the docs, it's the day of the month... So yes, it will be when day % 4 == 0 but it will be day of the month. With this information in hand, your PHP script should be able to figure out when the next job will be fired :)

There's a post on the Microsoft website that has a probable solution : http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/1d5cb9c7-af77-4bcd-8421-e813aff88bd3/help-with-visual-studio-2012-error-unable-to-access-the-iis-metabase?forum=visualstudiogeneral

Looks like it's an old issue that is run into now and then. If that doesn't help, let us know, it would be nice to know what to do to fix this.

Please show us your effort. I, for one, am very happy to help you, but I'm certainly not doing your homework for you.

Put in a decent effort, show that you've tried your level best and we can help you with areas that your struggle.

Ah.

It seems you've tried most of the "easy" remedies.

First question - have you connected it to an external screen just to check if it's not the videocard? And you've double-checked there are no sliders / dials / switches to adjust the brightness, right?

If it's none of the above, it could be the backlight, I've seen this in a vast number of HP and Compaq laptops.

Look at the top-left section of your laptop keyboard, is there a little pin that sticks out? If you press this down with your finger (it's safe to do!), do you see the screen light up for a split second or not? If you can't find it, or nothing happens, don't worry.

At the bottom of your screen, right in the middle, on most Compaq screens, there's a component that controls the backlight - it's called an inverter. This or the actual backlight could be broken. If the laptop is no longer under warranty, I'd suggest you take this to a reputable repairer, it can be tricky to open a laptop screen without damaging the housing.

If you are brave and comfortable opening electronic devices, you could open the monitor yourself. The screws are hidden under the little rubber tabs that prevent the monitor from pressing directly on the keyboard. I would, however, advise against this as it's very easy to damage some of the wiring in a few of these laptops.

The good news is that inverters are available from HP …

Natural language generation is a rather advanced topic. Do you need the text to just LOOK natural, as in what is generated by http://www.lipsum.com/ or do you want actual English, as an example langauge?

Generating text that looks natural is hard enough, generating readible, sensible language is a bit tougher. The WikiPedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_generation) has excellent references, and information on how NLG works.

Of course, if you are using Java, you can cheat and use the library at http://code.google.com/p/simplenlg/ to help you generate the text.

Good luck and remember to show us some of your results, this is an interesting research topic.

That is how I would read it :)

I usually test this in a small VM that I have where I fast-forward the time a little bit... I know, that's cheating and not being hard-core, but hey!

The problem is that you are adding a new SimpleAdapter each time you run through the loop.

You need to get all your data from the database first and store it in a memory structure. You then add a single adapter to the View, passing in this list of data.

Move this code :

 ListAdapter adapter = new SimpleAdapter(
this, Timetablelist,R.layout.list_item, new String[] { "Subject", "Day",
"Slot","Instructor" }, new int[] { R.id.subject,
R.id.day, R.id.slot,R.id.instructor });
setListAdapter(adapter); 

Outside the loop to right at the end. That way, you will have populated Timetablelist with all the information and will be adding it only once :)

Hi,

could you by any chance give us a bit more insight into what you are struggling with? You seem to be able to get data and compare it already?

To save data locally, why not look at something like the embeddable H2 database from http://www.h2database.com/html/main.html - it is a brilliant, small SQL database, written in pure Java.

As for the last view, you can easily serialize and deserialize the state of your application, if your design supports it, of course. If you followed the MVC pattern, it should be easy to add a layer that persists the program state to the database, and then read it back on startup. You shouldn't try to save the GUI components, just the data that led to that UI being built. That way, once you load the data, you can "replay" the sequence that led to that UI being built.

You can save user preferences and database credentials in the H2 database as well. I'd use the H2 database for all three your requirements, it is very easy to use and makes sense given that you already have database experience.

The VX670 runs an ARM 32bit chip, and, according to the data sheet, has about 6mb of RAM. There are some mention in the reference manual of writing your own applications, but they are quite vague and it does seem to be C / C++ related, not Java. Look at http://www.verifonedevnet.com/verifone/devnet/dnProgramView.do?pageTypeId=109140&programId=148632 to see some of the SDK's that are available.

These devices are intended to be used with a POS system, they provide drivers for this from VeriFone that allow you to read some information from the device. Are you sure you need a custom program on the reader?

StoreDataMidlet variable named "midlet" is null when it comes into the third form, you never initialize it to anything in ChaineConnexion. The midlet received in the constructor of ChaineConnexion is never stored in your local private variable, hence the NPE exception.

There's a few things that can be wrong :

1. The power adapter to the mainboard is not properly connected. This might seem strange, but that plug can be seated poorly, so it will still start the machine, but it might not give power to the main board.

2. Remember that your fans and DVD R/W works of different power ports, so even if they are working, it doesn't mean the power supply is not faulty. If the circuits powering the main board are faulty, your other components could still be getting their required power, so if you have a multi-meter, double check your power supply output. Don't do this if you are not sure of what you are doing, please.

3. Check if the RAM, expansion cards (AGP etc.) and CPU are properly seated. Any one of them not sitting properly could prevent the main board from firing up.

4. Check that the CPU fan spins. On some main boards, if the CPU fan does not fire up, the board will shut down immediately to prevent the CPU from burning out.

5. Unplug ALL devices, even your monitor, from the machine an switch it on. Then plug in the monitor and see if there's anything happening.

If none of this works, you might want to consider getting a more experienced person to take a look.

Yes, it sounds as if you are relative layout for everything. I'd suggest you review the information at http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/declaring-layout.html to make sure you understand how layouts work. After that, you can start experimenting with nesting different layouts to get the effect you want. For example, you might use a vertical linear layout that contains relative layouts, depending on what you want to do.

The foundation of building a good UI is to first draw it on paper, that way, you can identify which "blocks" you will need, which in turn will make it much easier to determine what layouts you require in order to get the exact UI you need.

I'm not sure I'm following - you want to write a program in VB6.0 to read SMS's received on your mobile?

Are you sure you understand the assignment correctly? There must be more information available - I don't know of any phone that directly supports VB6.0 applications. Please give as much information as you received for this project, perhaps there's something that someone will spot that could help you.

That is an absurb amount of money for a domain!

The first question you have to ask : do you REALLY need that domain? Is there no other domain that will work for you, at all? I often get this with new businesses, who want to buy a very specific domain, yet they can easily get a workable domain for a lot less money.

Dealing with domain squatters can be pesky, in some instances, the hosting company might be of assistance, if you can prove that you are basically being held ransom for a particular domain. My first port of call would be the registrar of the domain and to ask them if there's something that can be done. The person in question might be a known squatter, and that could count in your favour.

The only way to ensure your money is not stolen, is to use an escrow company, a trusted third party that will, for a fee, accept payment and only release the money once the domain has been transferred. I do however urge you to first try to find alternate domain names what will work for you, before going this route.

That's just the nature of social media promotions, you will always have followers and unfollowers. If people find no value in your posts, they will unfollow you.

As a rule, people do not like it if they get spammed with advertisements or promotions all the time. Also, if you keep posting frequently, it also looks like spam.