How-To Tutorials

Placing buttons in a toolbar You can embed different types of components in a toolbar. This topic teaches you how to build a toolbar that contains image-only, text-only and image/text buttons, a toggle button, and a combo box. How to do it Create the styles for the toolbar items: #tbar{ width:600px;}.icon-data{ background:url(img/data.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-chart{ background:url(img/pie-chart.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-table{ background:url(img/table.png) 0 no-repeat !important;} Define a data store for the combo box: Ext.onReady(function() { Ext.QuickTips.init(); var makesStore = new Ext.data.ArrayStore({ fields: ['make'], data: makes // from cars.js }); Create a toolbar and define the buttons and combo box inline: var tb = new Ext.Toolbar({ renderTo: 'tbar', items: [{ iconCls: 'icon-data', tooltip: 'Icon only button', handler:clickHandler }, '-', { text: 'Text Button' }, '-', { text: 'Image/Text Button', iconCls: 'icon-chart' }, '-', { text: 'Toggle Button', iconCls: 'icon-table', enableToggle: true, toggleHandler: toggleHandler, pressed: true }, '->', 'Make: ', { xtype: 'combo', store: makesStore, displayField: 'make', typeAhead: true, mode: 'local', triggerAction: 'all', emptyText: 'Select a make...', selectOnFocus: true, width: 135 }]}); Finally, create handlers for the push button and the toggle button: function clickHandler(btn) { Ext.Msg.alert('clickHandler', 'button pressed');}function toggleHandler(item, pressed) { Ext.Msg.alert('toggleHandler', 'toggle pressed');} How it works The buttons and the combo box are declared inline. While the standard button uses a click handler through the handler config option, the toggle button requires the toggleHandler config option.The button icons are set with the iconCls option, using the classes declared in the first step of the topic. As an example, note the use of the Toolbar.Separator instances in this fragment: }, '-', { text: 'Text Button'}, '-', { text: 'Image/Text Button', iconCls: 'icon-chart'}, '-', { Using '-' to declare a Toolbar.Separator is equivalent to using xtype: 'tbseparator'. Similarly, using '->' to declare Toolbar.Fill is equivalent to using xtype:'tbfill'. See also... The next recipe, Working with the new ButtonGroup component, explains how to use the ButtonGroup class to organize a series of related buttons Working with the new ButtonGroup component A welcome addition to Ext JS is the ability to organize buttons in groups. Here's how to create a panel with a toolbar that contains two button groups: How to do it Create the styles for the buttons: #tbar{ width:600px;}.icon-data{ background:url(img/data.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-chart{ background:url(img/pie-chart.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-table{ background:url(img/table.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-sort-asc{ background:url(img/sort-asc.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-sort-desc{ background:url(img/sort-desc.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-filter{ background:url(img/funnel.png) 0 no-repeat !important;} Define a panel that will host the toolbar: Ext.onReady(function() { var pnl = new Ext.Panel({ title: 'My Application', renderTo:'pnl-div', height: 300, width: 500, bodyStyle: 'padding:10px', autoScroll: true, Define a toolbar inline and create two button groups: tbar: [{ xtype: 'buttongroup', title: 'Data Connections', columns: 1, defaults: { scale: 'small' }, items: [{ xtype:'button', text: 'Data Sources', iconCls:'icon-data' }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Tables', iconCls: 'icon-table' }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Reports', iconCls: 'icon-chart' }]}, { xtype: 'buttongroup', title: 'Sort & Filter', columns: 1, defaults: { scale: 'small' }, items: [{ xtype: 'button', text: 'Sort Ascending', iconCls: 'icon-sort-asc' }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Sort Descending', iconCls: 'icon-sort-desc' }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Filter', iconCls: 'icon-filter' }]}] How it works Using a button group consists of adding a step to the process of adding buttons, or other items, to a toolbar. Instead of adding the items directly to the toolbar, you need to firstly define the group and then add the items to the group: tbar: [{ xtype: 'buttongroup', title: 'Data Connections', columns: 1, defaults: { scale: 'small' }, items: [{ xtype:'button', text: 'Data Sources', iconCls:'icon-data' }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Tables', iconCls: 'icon-table' }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Reports', iconCls: 'icon-chart' }]} See also... The next recipe, Placing buttons in a toolbar, illustrates how you can embed different types of components in a toolbar Placing menus in a toolbar In this topic, you will see how simple it is to use menus inside a toolbar. The panel's toolbar that we will build, contains a standard button and a split button, both with menus: How to do it Create the styles for the buttons: #tbar{ width:600px;}.icon-data{ background:url(img/data.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-chart{ background:url(img/pie-chart.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-table{ background:url(img/table.png) 0 no-repeat !important;} Create a click handler for the menus: Ext.onReady(function() { Ext.QuickTips.init(); var clickHandler = function(action) { alert('Menu clicked: "' + action + '"');}; Create a window to host the toolbar: var wnd = new Ext.Window({ title: 'Toolbar with menus', closable: false, height: 300, width: 500, bodyStyle: 'padding:10px', autoScroll: true, Define the window's toolbar inline, and add the buttons and their respective menus: tbar: [{ text: 'Button with menu', iconCls: 'icon-table', menu: [ { text: 'Menu 1', handler:clickHandler.createCallback('Menu 1'), iconCls: 'icon-data' }, { text: 'Menu 1', handler: clickHandler.createCallback('Menu 2'), iconCls: 'icon-data'}]}, '-',{ xtype: 'splitbutton', text: 'Split button with menu', iconCls: 'icon-chart', handler: clickHandler.createCallback('Split button with menu'), menu: [ { text: 'Menu 3', handler: clickHandler.createCallback('Menu 3'), iconCls: 'icon-data' }, { text: 'Menu 4', handler: clickHandler.createCallback('Menu 4'), iconCls: 'icon-data'}] }]}); Finally, show the window: wnd.show(); How it works This is a simple procedure. Note how the split button is declared with the xtype: 'splitbutton' config option. Also, observe how the createCallback() function is used to invoke the clickHandler() function with the correct arguments for each button. See also... The next recipe, Commonly used menu items, shows the different items that can be used in a menu Commonly used menu items To show you the different items that can be used in a menu, we will build a menu that contains radio items, a checkbox menu, a date menu, and a color menu.This is how the radio options and checkbox menu will look: The Pick a Date menu item will display a date picker, as shown in the next screenshot: The Pick a Color menu item displays a color picker, as seen here: How to do it Create a handler for the checkbox menu: Ext.onReady(function() { Ext.QuickTips.init(); var onCheckHandler = function(item, checked) { Ext.Msg.alert('Menu checked', item.text + ', checked: ' + (checked ? 'checked' : 'unchecked')); }; Define a date menu: var dateMenu = new Ext.menu.DateMenu({ handler: function(dp, date) { Ext.Msg.alert('Date picker', date); }}); Define a color menu: var colorMenu = new Ext.menu.ColorMenu({ handler: function(cm, color) { Ext.Msg.alert('Color picker', String.format('You picked {0}.', color)); }}); Create a main menu. Now add the date and color menus, as well as a few inline menus: var menu = new Ext.menu.Menu({ id: 'mainMenu', items: [{ text: 'Radio Options', menu: { items: [ '<b>Choose a Theme</b>', { text: 'Aero Glass', checked: true, group: 'theme', checkHandler: onCheckHandler }, { text: 'Vista Black', checked: false, group: 'theme', checkHandler: onCheckHandler }, { text: 'Gray Theme', checked: false, group: 'theme', checkHandler: onCheckHandler }, { text: 'Default Theme', checked: false, group: 'theme', checkHandler: onCheckHandler } ] } }, { text: 'Pick a Date', iconCls: 'calendar', menu: dateMenu }, { text: 'Pick a Color', menu: colorMenu }, { text: 'The last menu', checked: true, checkHandler: onCheckHandler }]}); Create a toolbar and add the main menu: var tb = new Ext.Toolbar({ renderTo: 'tbar', items: [{ text: 'Menu Items', menu: menu }]}); How it works After defining the date and color pickers, the main menu is built. This menu contains the pickers, as well as a few more items that are defined inline. To display checked items (see the checked: true config option) with a radio button instead of a checkbox, the menu items need to be defined using the group config option. This is how the theme selector menu is built: menu: { items: [ '<b>Choose a Theme</b>', { text: 'Aero Glass', checked: true, group: 'theme', checkHandler: onCheckHandler }, { text: 'Vista Black', checked: false, group: 'theme', checkHandler: onCheckHandler See also... The Placing buttons in a toolbar recipe (covered earlier in this article) illustrates how you can embed different types of components in a toolbar >> Continue Reading Making Progress with Menus and Toolbars using Ext JS 3.0: Part 2 [ 1 | 2 ]   If you have read this article you may be interested to view : Making Progress with Menus and Toolbars using Ext JS 3.0: Part 2 Load, Validate, and Submit Forms using Ext JS 3.0: Part 1 Load, Validate, and Submit Forms using Ext JS 3.0: Part 2 Load, Validate, and Submit Forms using Ext JS 3.0: Part 3

What is the siteaccess system? To override eZ Publish's default configuration, we need to create a collection of configuration settings called siteaccess. The role of a siteaccess is to indicate to eZ which database, design, and var directory should be used for a particular context. With siteaccess it is possible to use the same content and different designs (for example, when creating a mobile version of our site) or do the opposite (for example, managing a multilingual site where the template doesn't change but the content does). It's also possible to create an administration siteaccess, where we can manage any kind of content, such as users, media files and, of course, the articles, or a frontend siteaccess that is the website, where we can only view the public published content. A typical eZ publish site consists of two siteaccesses: a public interface for visitors and a restricted interface for editors. In this case, both siteaccesses use the same content, but different designs. Whereas the administration siteaccess would most likely use the built-in administration design, the public siteaccess would probably use a custom design. The following illustration, taken from the official eZ Publish documentation, shows this scenario: Usually, in big projects it is also useful to have two additional siteaccesses: a staging siteaccess and a developing siteaccess. The first is used in a staging environment to make frequent deployments of modifications that can be tested by the customer (in this case, the siteaccess uses a different database but the same design as for the public and admin siteaccesses). The second one, instead, is used by developers on their local machine (this siteaccess uses a local database, but once again uses the same design as for the public and admin siteaccesses). A single eZ publish installation can host a virtually unlimited number of sites by simply adding new siteaccesses, designs, and databases. Siteaccess folder structure The configuration settings for siteaccesses are located inside a dedicated subfolder within the /settings/siteaccess folder. The name of the subfolder is the actual name of the siteaccess. It is very important to remember that a siteaccess name can only contain letters, numbers, and underscores. The following illustration shows a setup with two siteaccesses: admin and public. When a siteaccess is in use, eZ publish reads the configuration file in the following sequence: Default configuration settings: /settings/*.ini Siteaccess settings: /settings/siteaccess/[name_of_siteaccess]/*.ini.append.php Global overrides: /settings/override/*.ini.append.php eZ Publish will first read the default configuration settings. Then, it will determine which siteaccess to use based on the rules that are defined in the global override for site.ini /settings/override/site.ini.append.php. When it knows which siteaccess has to be used, it will go into the correct siteaccess folder and read the configuration files that belong to that siteaccess. The settings of the siteaccess will override the default configuration settings. For example, if a siteaccess uses a database called packtmediaproject_test, the system will find this and automatically use the specified database when an incoming request is processed. Finally, eZ Publish reads the configuration files in the global override directory. The settings in the global override directory will override all other settings. So, if a database called packtmediaproject is specified in the global override directory for site.ini, then eZ publish will attempt to use that database regardless of what is specified in the siteaccess settings. If a setting is not overridden either by the siteaccess, or from within a global override, then the default setting will be used. The default settings are set by the .ini files located in the /settings directory. The following figure illustrates how the system reads the configuration files, using the site.ini file as an example:                                                                                             Creating a siteaccess for dev, staging, and production environments Once we have finished installing eZ Publish, we'll find a folder called setting/siteaccess, with the default siteaccess automatically configured. In our case we'll find these folders: admin: This folder usually isn't used as siteaccess, but it contains a standard configuration file that can be used to set up the administration panel setup: This folder contains all of the configuration files that are used during the installation process ezwebin_site: This is where the main design is imported directly from the eZ.no site for the package eZ Webin ita, eng, fre: Last but not least, the ita, eng, and fre folders have the configuration files used by the site to enable internationalization and localization The ezwebin_site_admin is created by the webmin site package, and contains all of the configuration files for the administration panel. Enterprise siteaccess schema In an enterprise development process, it is very important to have four more siteaccesses: dev dev_panel staging staging_panel The siteaccesses dev and dev_panel will be used as a development playground installation, which can be used by the development team members, with their own configuration parameters, such as database connection, path, and debug file. This will help them to test different configuration parameters or extensions without impacting the production site. The siteaccesses staging and staging_panel will be used as a staging arena that can be used by a customer to evaluate new functionality before it is released to production. Usually, the staging installation is installed on a clone of the production server, to make sure that everything works in the same way. In our case, we will work on the same server to better understand how to create the different siteaccesses. All siteacccesses will have some configuration files in common, and sometimes these have to assign the same value to the parameters specified inside them. For example, if you need to create a new language siteacccess, you'll need to copy the same module configuration files to be sure that they will work in the same way for all of the languages. In this case, it will be useful to create a symbolic link from one siteaccess to another. If you don't know what a Linux symbolic link is, you can think of it as a virtual pointer to a real file, like a Windows XP shortcut.

Plotting dates Sooner or later, we all have had the need to plot some information over time, be it for the bank account balance each month, the total web site accesses for each day of the year, or one of many other reasons. Matplotlib has a plotting function ad hoc for dates, plot_date() that considers data on X, Y, or both axes, as dates, labeling the axis accordingly. As usual, we now present an example, and we will discuss it later: In [1]: import matplotlib as mplIn [2]: import matplotlib.pyplot as pltIn [3]: import numpy as npIn [4]: import datetime as dtIn [5]: dates = [dt.datetime.today() + dt.timedelta(days=i) ...: for i in range(10)]In [6]: values = np.random.rand(len(dates))In [7]: plt.plot_date(mpl.dates.date2num(dates), values, linestyle='-');In [8]: plt.show() First, a note about linestyle keyword argument: without it, there's no line connecting the markers that are displayed alone. We  created  the dates array using timedelta(), a datetime function that helps us define a date interval—10 days in this case. Note how we had to convert our date values using the date2num() function. This is because Matplotlib represents dates as float values corresponding to the number of days since 0001-01-01 UTC. Also note how the X-axis labels, the ones that have data values, are badly rendered. Matplotlib provides ways to address the previous two points—date formatting and conversion, and axes formatting. Date formatting Commonly, in Python programs, dates are represented as datetime objects, so we have to first convert other data values into datetime objects, sometimes by using the dateutil companion module, for example: import datetimedate = datetime.datetime(2009, 03, 28, 11, 34, 59, 12345) or import dateutil.parserdatestrings = ['2008-07-18 14:36:53.494013','2008-07-20 14:37:01.508990', '2008-07-28 14:49:26.183256']dates = [dateutil.parser.parse(s) for s in datestrings] Once we have the datetime objects, in order to let Matplotlib use them, we have to convert them into floating point numbers that represent the number of days since 0001-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. To do that, Matplotlib itself provides several helper functions contained in the matplotlib.dates module: date2num():  This function converts one or a sequence of datetime objects to float values representing days since 0001-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (the fractional parts represent hours, minutes, and seconds) num2date():  This function converts one or a sequence of float values representing days since 0001-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to datetime objects (or a sequence, if the input is a sequence) drange(dstart, dend, delta): This function returns a date range (a sequence) of float values in Matplotlib date format; dstart and dend are datetime objects while delta is a datetime.timedelta instance Usually, what we will end up doing is converting a sequence of datetime objects into a Matplotlib representation, such as: dates = list of datetime objectsmpl_dates = matplotlib.dates.date2num(dates) drange() can be useful in situations like this one: import matplotlib as mplfrom matplotlib import datesimport datetime as dtdate1 = dt.datetime(2008, 9, 23)date2 = dt.datetime(2009, 4, 12)delta = dt.timedelta(days=10)dates = mpl.dates.drange(date1, date2, delta) where dates will be a sequence of floats starting from date1 and ending at date2 with a delta timestamp between each item of the list. Axes formatting with axes tick locators and formatters As we have already seen, the X labels on the first image are not that nice looking. We would expect Matplotlib to allow a better way to label the axis, and indeed, there is. The solution is to change the two parts that form the axis   ticks—locators and formatters. Locators control the tick's position, while formatters control the formatting of labels. Both have a major and minor mode: the major locator and formatter are active by default and are the ones we commonly see, while minor mode can be turned on by passing a relative locator or formatter function (because minors are turned off by default by assigning NullLocator and NullFormatter to them). While this is a general tuning operation and can be applied to all Matplotlib plots, there are some specific locators and formatters for date plotting, provided by matplotlib.dates: MinuteLocator, HourLocator,DayLocator, WeekdayLocator,MonthLocator, YearLocator are all the  locators available that place a tick at the time specified by the name, for example, DayLocator will draw a tick at each day. Of course, a minimum knowledge of the date interval that we are about to draw is needed to select the best locator. DateFormatter is the tick formatter that uses strftime() to format strings.   The default locator and formatter are matplotlib.ticker.AutoDateLocator and matplotlib.ticker.AutoDateFormatter, respectively. Both are set by the plot_date() function when called. So, if you wish to set a different locator and/or formatter, then we suggest to do that after the plot_date() call in order to avoid the plot_date() function resetting them to the default values. Let's group all this up in an example: In [1]: import matplotlib as mplIn [2]: import matplotlib.pyplot as pltIn [3]: import numpy as npIn [4]: import datetime as dtIn [5]: fig = plt.figure()In [6]: ax2 = fig.add_subplot(212)In [7]: date2_1 = dt.datetime(2008, 9, 23)In [8]: date2_2 = dt.datetime(2008, 10, 3)In [9]: delta2 = dt.timedelta(days=1)In [10]: dates2 = mpl.dates.drange(date2_1, date2_2, delta2)In [11]: y2 = np.random.rand(len(dates2))In [12]: ax2.plot_date(dates2, y2, linestyle='-');In [13]: dateFmt = mpl.dates.DateFormatter('%Y-%m-%d')In [14]: ax2.xaxis.set_major_formatter(dateFmt)In [15]: daysLoc = mpl.dates.DayLocator()In [16]: hoursLoc = mpl.dates.HourLocator(interval=6)In [17]: ax2.xaxis.set_major_locator(daysLoc)In [18]: ax2.xaxis.set_minor_locator(hoursLoc)In [19]: fig.autofmt_xdate(bottom=0.18) # adjust for date labels displayIn [20]: fig.subplots_adjust(left=0.18)In [21]: ax1 = fig.add_subplot(211)In [22]: date1_1 = dt.datetime(2008, 9, 23)In [23]: date1_2 = dt.datetime(2009, 2, 16)In [24]: delta1 = dt.timedelta(days=10)In [25]: dates1 = mpl.dates.drange(date1_1, date1_2, delta1)In [26]: y1 = np.random.rand(len(dates1))In [27]: ax1.plot_date(dates1, y1, linestyle='-');In [28]: monthsLoc = mpl.dates.MonthLocator()In [29]: weeksLoc = mpl.dates.WeekdayLocator()In [30]: ax1.xaxis.set_major_locator(monthsLoc)In [31]: ax1.xaxis.set_minor_locator(weeksLoc)In [32]: monthsFmt = mpl.dates.DateFormatter('%b')In [33]: ax1.xaxis.set_major_formatter(monthsFmt)In [34]: plt.show() The result of executing the previous code snippet is as shown: We drew the subplots in reverse order to avoid some minor overlapping problems. fig.autofmt_xdate() is used to nicely format date tick labels. In particular, this function rotates the labels (by using rotation keyword argument, with a default value of 30°) and gives them  more room (by using bottom keyword argument, with a default value of 0.2). We can achieve the same result, at least for the additional spacing, with: fig = plt.figure()fig.subplots_adjust(bottom=0.2)ax = fig.add_subplot(111) This can also be done by creating the Axes instance directly with: ax = fig.add_axes([left, bottom, width, height]) while specifying the explicit dimensions. The subplots_adjust() function allows us to control the spacing around the subplots by using the following keyword arguments: bottom, top, left, right: Controls the spacing at the bottom, top, left, and right of the subplot(s)     wspace, hspace: Controls the horizontal and vertical spacing between subplots We can also control the spacing by using these parameters in the Matplotlib configuration file: figure.subplot.<position> = <value> Custom formatters and locators Even if it's not strictly related to date plotting, tick formatters allow for custom formatters too: ...import matplotlib.ticker as ticker...def format_func(x, pos): return <a transformation on x>...formatter = ticker.FuncFormatter(format_func)ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(formatter)... The  function format_func will be called for each label to draw, passing its value and position on the axis. With those two arguments, we can apply a transformation (for example, divide x by 10) and then return a value that will be used to actually draw the tick label. Here's a general note on NullLocator: it can be used to remove axis ticks by simply issuing: ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(matplotlib.ticker.NullLocator()) Text properties, fonts, and LaTeX Matplotlib has excellent text support, including mathematical expressions, TrueType font support for raster and vector outputs, newline separated text with arbitrary rotations, and Unicode. We have total control over every text property (font size, font weight, text location, color, and so on) with sensible defaults set in the rc configuration file. Specifically for those interested in mathematical or scientific figures, Matplotlib implements a large number of TeX math symbols and commands to support mathematical expressions anywhere in the figure. We already saw some text functions, but the following list contains all the functions which can be used to insert text with the pyplot interface, presented along with the corresponding API method and a description: Pyplot function API method Description text() mpl.axes.Axes.text() Adds text at an arbitrary location to the Axes xlabel() mpl.axes.Axes.set_xlabel() Adds an axis label to the X-axis ylabel() mpl.axes.Axes.set_ylabel() Adds an axis label to the Y-axis title() mpl.axes.Axes.set_title() Adds a title to the Axes figtext() mpl.figure.Figure.text() Adds text at an arbitrary location to the Figure suptitle() mpl.figure.Figure.suptitle() Adds a centered title to the Figure annotate() mpl.axes.Axes.annotate() Adds an annotation with an optional arrow to the Axes     All of these commands return a matplotlib.text.Text instance. We can customize the text properties by passing keyword arguments to the functions or by using matplotlib.artist.setp(): t = plt.xlabel('some text', fontsize=16, color='green') We can do it as: t = plt.xlabel('some text')plt.setp(t, fontsize=16, color='green') Handling objects allows for several new possibilities; such as setting the same property to all the objects in a specific group. Matplotlib has several convenience functions to return the objects of a plot. Let's take the example of the tick labels: ax.get_xticklabels() This line of code returns a sequence of object instances (the labels for the X-axis ticks) that we can tune: for t in ax.get_xticklabels(): t.set_fontsize(5.) or else, still using setp(): setp(ax.get_xticklabels(), fontsize=5.) It can take a sequence of objects, and apply the same property to all of them. To recap, all of the properties such as color, fontsize, position, rotation, and so on, can be set either: At function call using keyword arguments Using setp() referencing the Text instance Using the modification function Fonts Where there is text, there are also fonts to draw it. Matplotlib allows for several font customizations. The most complete documentation on this is currently available in the Matplotlib configuration file, /etc/matplotlibrc. We are now reporting that information here. There are six font properties available for modification. Property name Values and description font.family It has five values: serif (example, Times) sans-serif (example, Helvetica) cursive (example, Zapf-Chancery) fantasy (example, Western) monospace (example, Courier) Each of these font families has a default list of font names in decreasing order of priority associated with them (next table). In addition to these generic font names, font.family may also be an explicit name of a font available on the system. font.style Three values: normal (or roman), italic, or oblique. The oblique style will be used for italic, if it is not present. font.variant Two values: normal or small-caps. For TrueType fonts, which are scalable fonts, small-caps is equivalent to using a font size of smaller, or about 83% of the current font size. font.weight Effectively has 13 values-normal, bold, bolder, lighter, 100, 200, 300, ..., 900. normal is the same as 400, and bold is 700. bolder and lighter are relative values with respect to the current weight. font.stretch 11 values-ultra-condensed, extra-condensed, condensed, semi-condensed, normal, semi-expanded, expanded, extra-expanded, ultra-expanded, wider, and narrower. This property is not currently implemented. It works if the font supports it, but only few do. font.size The default font size for text, given in points. 12pt is the standard value.

Do you want to use paid incoming links? Paying for incoming links can be a tricky business if you do it the wrong way. Google doesn't like web sites that use this link building technique and their representative master anti-spam spokesman, Matt Cutts is very clear on this subject. Buy links and get penalized… sell links and get penalized as well The major penalty is a very likely drop in Page Rank. Although Page Rank is becoming less important as compared to your rankings on the search engine result pages, people still see it as a quality making if you do have a high Page Rank. Of course using AdWords to do a "Pay Per Click" campaign is also a form of paid links. If you want to use the sponsored link options to get your site started, that is fine, but the ultimate goal of this article is to get higher rankings in the organic results of the search engines. Studies support the idea of using sponsored links to bring in more traffic from the organic searchers even after the campaign has stopped. It depends on how hard you need the traffic to your site for business, or if you want to go for organic results. Helping people helps you with link building If you have a topic that you are passionate about and you build a web site about it, then this option is one for you. Find a forum that matches the topic of your web site and start helping other people with your knowledge. On most forums there is a possibility to have your own "Signature", where you can have one or more lines of text with a link that people can click on. For instance, the site http://forums.digitalpoint.com has a lot of requests for information on Joomla! where you can help people to solve their problems. After a number of replies to questions, you can put in your own signature such as:   The links you put in there will not only bring traffic from your posts, but they also count as incoming links for Google. Not all forums have the same rules—for example, some of them have a rule that you can put a link to your site, but it should be the URL only without your main keywords in the link. So, be sure to go to the best forums you can find on your topic and start helping others with your knowledge. In the meantime, work on your incoming links as well. Commenting done the right way Another option you have is to look for blogs about your web site's topic. You will already probably know the most useful ones in your field of expertise. Go to those blogs and read some of the posts they have published. If you are lucky, there will be some kind of widget that shows you how many readers they have on that blog for their RSS Feed or email system. Large numbers are a good sign as that means a lot of people will read the blog and it probably has a good ranking in Google. Read the posts that are relevant to your topic and if you can, write a comment which shows that you know more about the topic. Also, if possible, make a new suggestion or correct an error in the article. Don't write comments such as "I really liked this post", "Thank you for this information", or even "I really like your blog". If you write comments such as those you won't get any interaction with the blogger in question and you don't add value to the discussion. Such comments will get deleted or labeled as spam. When I get comment links such as these, I remove them as they add null to zero information for other visitors and they are clearly there just for link building. It won't work that way, and if you are outsourcing or want to outsource this kind of link building, here is a warning, make sure you state in your contract with these people that blog and comment spamming is not allowed! If you don't add that clause, they may start commenting in your name, linking to your site (well, you paid them to do that…) with the same remarks over and over again. What happens next is that bloggers will ban you from commenting on their blogs, and in the worst case scenario you will loose a lot of credibility in your community. People are sometimes better informed than you think and a mistake like the one mentioned above will cost you more than money alone. So, if you start commenting, ask yourself: Do I have something of value to add to the conversation? Will people read that comment? How effective will this blog be in sending me traffic? Keep those in mind, with more emphasis on the first point, and you will do fine. Finding places to comment As I said before, commenting is a great way to create your own incoming links. But how do you find more relevant blogs to read and comment on? First of all, do a search for blogs about your web site's topic. You can use http://blogsearch.google.com/ to find the most recent blog posts and see if the blogs it finds fit your web site's topic.   Technorati is of course the best place to look for blogs.   Go ahead and use the option search the blogosphere.... From the results of this initial search, you can filter based on several options. In the first selection list you will find options such as Search Posts, Search Blogs, Search Photos, and Seach Videos. The second selection list allows you to filter based on entire post or just tags. The third option is the one you really need to set and there you can choose to filter on a lot of authority.   This option means a lot of people are linking to that web site/blog and it will probably get lots of traffic and do well in the search engines. Those blogs are the ones you want your voice to be heard on and remember if you are going to comment, make sure it is a useful one. What you need to do after finding the blog, is to really check out the site. In some cases there might just be one post about your web site's topic on that blog. And you really want it to be on topic all the way!   Two other blog search services you can use are: http://www.icerocket.com http://www.blogpulse.com Both are set up to bring to you the most recent results like Google does but they have something extra. You can learn about trends as Icerocket has a trend tool and Blogpulse has its trend search option. Using those trend tools will give you more insight on which terms are "hot" at the moment and growing. If you combine that with the blogs you just found, for your keywords, you could have a winning team.

Time for action – animating projections Your project manager wants you to animate the perspective transform applied to the video while it is being reproduced. We are going to add a StoryBoard in XAML code to animate the PlaneProjection instance: Stay in the project, 3DInvadersSilverlight. Open MainPage.xaml and replace the PlaneProjection definition with the following line (we have to add a name to refer to it): <PlaneProjection x:Name ="proIntroduction" RotationX="-40" RotationY="15" RotationZ="-6" LocalOffsetX="-70" LocalOffsetY="-105" /> Add the following lines of code before the end of the definition of the cnvVideo Canvas: <Canvas.Resources>    <Storyboard x_Name="introductionSB">        <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="proIntroduction"                Storyboard.TargetProperty="RotationX"                From="-40" To="0" Duration="0:0:5"                AutoReverse="False" RepeatBehavior="1x" />    </Storyboard></Canvas.Resources> Now, add the following line of code before the end of the PlayIntroductoryVideo method (to start the animation): introductionSB.Begin(); Build and run the solution. Click on the butt on and the video will start its reproduction after the transition effect. While the video is being played, the projection will be animated, as shown in the following diagram: What just happened? Now, the projection that shows the video is animated while the video is being reproduced. Working with a StoryBoard in XAML to animate a projection First, we added a name to the existing PlaneProjection (proIntroduction). Then, we were able to create a new StoryBoard with a DoubleAnimation instance as a child, with the StoryBoard's TargetName set to proIntroduction and its TargetProperty set to RotationX. Thus, the DoubleAnimation controls proIntroduction's RotationX value. The RotationX value will go from -40 to 0 in five seconds—the same time as the video's duration: From="-40" To="0" Duration="0:0:5" The animation will run once (1x) and it won't reverse its behavior: AutoReverse="False" RepeatBehavior="1x" We added the StoryBoard inside . Thus, we were able to start it by calling its Begin method, in the PlayIntroductionVideo procedure: introductionSB.Begin(); We can define StoryBoard instances and different Animation (System. Windows.Media.Animation) subclasses instances as DoubleAnimation, using XAML code. This way, we can create amazing animations for many properties of many other UIElements defined in XAML code.   Time for action – solving navigation problems When the game starts, there is an undesired side effect. The projected video appears in the right background, as shown in the following screenshot: This usually happens when working with projections. Now, we are going to solve this small problem: Stay in the 3DInvadersSilverlight project. Open MainPage.xaml.cs and add the following line before the first one in the medIntroduction_MediaEnded method: cnvVideo.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed; Build and run the solution. Click on the button and after the video reproduction and animation, the game will start without the undesired background, as shown in the following screenshot: What just happened? Now, once the video finishes its reproduction and associated animation, we have hidden the Canvas that contains it. Hence, there are no parts of the previous animation visible when the game starts. Time for action – reproducing music Great games have appealing background music. Now, we are going to search and add background music to our game: As with other digital content, sound and music have a copyright owner and a license. Hence, we must be very careful when downloading sound and music for our games. We must read licenses before deploying our games with these digital contents embedded. One of the 3D digital artists found a very cool electro music sample for reproduction as background music. You have to pay to use it. However, you can download a free demo (Distorted velocity. 1) from http://www.musicmediatracks.com/music/Style/Electro/. Save the downloaded MP3 file (distorted_velocity._1.mp3) in the previously created media folder (C:Silverlight3DInvaders3DMedia). You can use any other MP3 sound for this exercise. The aforementioned MP3 demo is not included in the accompanying source code. Stay in the 3DInvadersSilverlight project. Right-click on the Media sub-folder in the 3DInvadersSilverlight.Web project and select Add | Existing item… from the context menu that appears. Go to the folder in which you copied the downloaded MP3 file (C:Silverlight3DInvaders3DMedia). Select the MP3 file and click on Add. This way, the audio file will be part of the web project, in the Media folder, as shown in the following screenshot: Now, add the following lines of code at the beginning of the btnStartGame button's Click event. This code will enable the new background music to start playing: // Background musicMediaElement backgroundMusic = new MediaElement();LayoutRoot.Children.Add(backgroundMusic);backgroundMusic.Volume = 0.8;backgroundMusic.Source = new Uri("Media/distorted_velocity._1.mp3", UriKind.Relative);backgroundMusic.Play(); Build and run the solution. Click on the button and turn on your speakers. You will hear the background music while the transition effect starts.

The basis for all of these topics is the object-oriented interface. Object-oriented versus MATLAB styles We have seen  a lot of examples, and in all of them we used the matplotlib.pyplot module to create and manipulate the plots, but this is not the only way to make use of the Matplotlib plotting power. There are three ways to use Matplotlib: pyplot: The module used so far in this article pylab:  A module to merge Matplotlib and NumPy together in an environment closer to MATLAB Object-oriented way: The Pythonic way to interface with Matplotlib Let's first elaborate a bit about the pyplot module: pyplot provides a MATLAB-style, procedural, state-machine interface to the underlying object-oriented library in Matplotlib. A state machine is a system with a global status, where each operation performed on the system changes its status. matplotlib.pyplot is stateful because the underlying engine keeps track of the current figure and plotting area information, and plotting functions change that information. To make it clearer, we did not use any object references during our plotting we just issued a pyplot command, and the changes appeared in the figure. At a higher level, matplotlib.pyplot is a collection of commands and functions that make Matplotlib behave like MATLAB (for plotting). This is really useful when doing interactive sessions, because we can issue a command and see the result immediately, but it has several drawbacks when we need something more such as low-level customization or application embedding. If we remember, Matplotlib started as an alternative to MATLAB, where we have at hand both numerical and plotting functions. A similar interface exists for Matplotlib, and its name is pylab. pylab (do you see the similarity in the names?) is a companion module, installed next to matplotlib that merges matplotlib.pyplot (for plotting) and numpy (for mathematical functions) modules in a single namespace to  provide an environment as near to MATLAB as possible, so that the transition would be easy. We and the authors of Matplotlib discourage the use of pylab, other than for proof-of-concept snippets. While being rather simple to use, it teaches developers the wrong way to use Matplotlib. The third way to use Matplotlib is through the object-oriented interface (OO, from now on). This is the most powerful way to write Matplotlib code because it allows for complete control of the result however it is also the most complex. This is the Pythonic way to use Matplotlib, and it's highly encouraged when programming with Matplotlib rather than working interactively. We will use it a lot from now on as it's needed to go down deep into Matplotlib. Please allow us to highlight again the preferred style that the author of this article, and the authors of Matplotlib want to enforce: a bit of pyplot will be used, in particular for convenience functions, and the remaining plotting code is either done with the OO style or with pyplot, with numpy explicitly imported and used for numerical functions. In this preferred style, the initial imports are: import matplotlib.pyplot as pltimport numpy as np In this way, we know exactly which module the function we use comes from (due to the module prefix), and it's exactly what we've always done in the code so far. Now, let's present the same piece of code expressed in the three possible forms which we just described. First, we present it in the style, pyplot only: In [1]: import matplotlib.pyplot as pltIn [2]: import numpy as npIn [3]: x = np.arange(0, 10, 0.1)In [4]: y = np.random.randn(len(x))In [5]: plt.plot(x, y)Out[5]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D object at 0x1fad810>]In [6]: plt.title('random numbers')In [7]: plt.show() The preceding code snippet results in: Now, let's see how we can do the same thing using the pylab interface: $ ipython -pylab... In [1]: x = arange(0, 10, 0.1)In [2]: y = randn(len(x)) In [3]: plot(x, y)Out[3]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D object at 0x4284dd0>] In [4]: title('random numbers')In [5]: show() Note that: ipython -pylab is not the same as running ipython and then: from pylab import * This is because ipython's-pylab switch, in addition to importing everything from pylab, also enables a specific ipython threading mode so that both the interactive interpreter and the plot window can be active at the same time. Finally, lets make the same chart by using OO style, but with some pyplot convenience functions: In [1]: import matplotlib.pyplot as pltIn [2]: import numpy as np In [3]: x = np.arange(0, 10, 0.1)In [4]: y = np.random.randn(len(x))In [5]: fig = plt.figure()In [6]: ax = fig.add_subplot(111)In [7]: l, = plt.plot(x, y)In [8]: t = ax.set_title('random numbers')In [9]: plt.show() The pylab code is the simplest, and ,pyplot is in the middle, while the OO is the most complex or verbose. As the Python Zen teaches us, "Explicit is better than implicit" and "Simple is better than complex" and those statements are particularly true for this example: for simple interactive sessions, pylab or ,pyplot are the perfect choice because they hide a lot of complexity, but if we need something more advanced, then the OO API makes clearer where things are coming from, and what's going on. This expressiveness will be appreciated when we will embed Matplotlib inside GUI applications. From now on, we will start presenting our code using the OO interface mixed with some pyplot functions. A brief introduction to Matplotlib objects Before we can go on in a productive way, we need to briefly introduce which Matplotlib objects compose a figure. Let's see from the higher levels to the lower ones how objects are nested: Object Description FigureCanvas Container class for the Figure instance Figure Container for one or more Axes instances Axes The rectangular areas to hold the basic elements, such as lines, text, and so on     Our first (simple) example of OO Matplotlib In the previous pieces of code, we had transformed this: ...In [5]: plt.plot(x, y)Out[5]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D object at 0x1fad810>]... into: ...In [7]: l, = plt.plot(x, y)... The new code uses an explicit reference, allowing a lot more customizations. As we can see in the first piece of code, the plot() function returns a list of Line2D instances, one for each line (in this case, there is only one), so in the second code, l is a reference to the line object, so every operation allowed on Line2D can be done using l. For example, we can set the line color with: l.set_color('red') Instead of using the keyword argument to plot(), so the line information can be changed after the plot() call. Subplots In the previous section, we have seen a couple of important functions without introducing them. Let's have a look at them now: fig = plt.figure(): This function returns a Figure, where we can add one or more Axes instances. ax = fig.add_subplot(111): This function returns an Axes instance, where we can plot (as done so far), and this is also the reason why we call the variable referring to that instance ax (from Axes). This is a common way to add an Axes to a Figure, but add_subplot() does a bit more: it adds a subplot. So far we have only seen a Figure with one Axes instance, so only one area where we can draw, but Matplotlib allows more than one. add_subplot() takes three parameters: fig.add_subplot(numrows, numcols, fignum) where: numrows  represents the number of rows of subplots to prepare numcols  represents the number of columns of subplots to prepare fignum  varies from 1 to numrows*numcols and specifies the current subplot (the one used now) Basically, we describe a matrix of numrows*numcols subplots that we want into the Figure; please note that fignum is 1 at the upper-left corner of the Figure and it's equal to numrows*numcols at the bottom-right corner. The following table should provide a visual explanation of this:   numrows=2, numcols=2, fignum=1 numrows=2, numcols=2, fignum=2 numrows=2, numcols=2, fignum=3 numrows=2, numcols=2, fignum=4

These instructions are Windows based but Linux users should have no difficulty adjusting them for their environment. Checking your installation If you already have SOA Suite and JDeveloper installed, confirm that you have the correct version and configuration by following the steps in the section below called Testing your installation. In addition, you may want to complete the items in the section called Additional actions. Finally, you must complete the section called Configuration to run a tutorial. What you will need and where to get it This installation requires 3 GB or more available memory. If you have less memory, try separating the installation of the database, the servers, and JDeveloper onto different machines. Memory and Disk Space requirements This installation requires 3 GB or more available memory. If you have less memory, try separating the installation of the database, the servers, and JDeveloper onto different machines. The installation process requires about 12 GB of disk space. After installation, you can delete the files used by installation to save about 4 GB. As you can see, you are installing a lot of software with a large memory and disk footprint. Running your disk defragmentation program now, before you start downloading and installing, can significantly improve install time as well as performance and disk space usage later on. Downloading files Download all the software to get started. In the following steps, save all downloaded files to c:stageSOA. This document assumes that path. If you save them somewhere else then make sure there are no spaces in your path and adjust accordingly when c:stageSOA is referenced in this document. Go to: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/soa/soasuite/index.html, and download the following from SOA Suite 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.1.0) to c:stageSOA: WebLogic Server:wls1031_win32.exe Repository Creation Utility:ofm_rcu_win32_11.1.1.1.0_disk1_1of1.zip SOA Suite:ofm_soa_generic_11.1.1.1.0_disk1_1of1.zip JDeveloper Studio, base install:jdevstudio11111install.jar Unzip the SOA Suite ZIP file to c:stageSOA. Unzip the RCU ZIP file to c:stageSOA. Additional Files needed: Tutorial Files: In Chapter 3, you were directed to download the files needed for this tutorial. Do that now as some are used during installation. You can download the files from here:http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/soa/soasuite/11gthebook.html. Unzip the tutorial ZIP file to c:stageSOA. SOA Extension for JDeveloper: You will get this later using the JDeveloper update option. Oracle Service Bus: When you are ready to do the Oracle Service Bus (OSB) lab, you will download the install file to install OSB. Checking your database Having your database up and running is the most important pre-requisite for installing SOA Suite. Read the following bulleted requirements carefully to be sure you are ready to begin the SOA Suite installation: You need one of: Oracle XE Universal database version 10.2.0.1 Oracle 10g database version 10.2.0.4+ Oracle 11g database version 11.1.0.7+ You cannot use any other database version in 11gR1 (certification of additional databases is on the roadmap). Specifically, you cannot use XE Standard, it must be Universal. We have seen problems with installing XE when a full 10g database is already installed in the environment. The Windows registry sometimes gets the database file location confused. It is recommended to pick one or the other to avoid such issues. If you need to uninstall XE, make sure that you follow the instructions in Oracle Database Express Edition Installation Guide 10g  Release 2 (10.2) for Microsoft Windows Part Number B25143-03, Section 7, Deinstalling Oracle Database XE (http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B25329_01/doc/install.102/b25143/toc.htm). If you need to uninstall 10.2, be sure to follow the instructions in Oracle Database Installation Guide 10g Release 2 (10.2) for Microsoft Windows (32-Bit) Part Number B14316-04, Section 6, Removing Oracle Database Software(http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/install.102/b14316/ deinstall.htm). Optional: Install OracleXEUniv.exe—recommended for a small footprint database. Make sure that you read step 1 above before installing. You can get XE from here: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/ xe/index.html. When you are using XE, you will see a warning when you install the database schema that this database version is too old. You can safely ignore this warning as it applies only to production environments. If needed, configure Oracle XE Universal. When you are using Oracle XE, you must update database parameters if you have never done this for your database installation. You only have to do this once after installing. Set the processes parameter to >=200 using the following instructions. C:OracleMiddlewarehome_11gR1user_projectsdomains domain1binsetSOADomainEnv.cmdCODE 1sqlplus sys/welcome1@XE as sysdbaSQL> show parameter sessionSQL> show parameter processesSQL> alter system reset sessions scope=spfile sid='*';SQL> alter system set processes=200 scope=spfile;SQL> shutdown immediateSQL> startupSQL> show parameter sessionSQL> show parameter processes The shutdown command can take a few minutes and sometimes the shutdown/startup command fails. In that case, simply restart the XE service in the Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Services dialog after setting up your parameters. Checking your browser Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1 has specific browser version requirements. Enterprise Manager requires Firefox 3 or IE 7. Firefox 3—get a portable version, such as the one available from http://portableapps.com, if you want it to co-exist peacefully with your Firefox 2 installation. Firefox 2 and IE 6 are not supported and will not work. BAM requires IE 7. Beware of certain IE 7 plugins that can create conflicts (a few search plugins have proved to be incompatible with BAM). IE 8 is not supported with 11gR1 (but is on the roadmap). IE 6 has a few issues and Firefox will not work with BAM Studio. Checking your JDK If you are going to install WebLogic server and JDeveloper on the same machine, you will use the JDK from WebLogic for JDeveloper too. However, if you are going to install on two machines, you need Java 1.6 update 11 JDK for JDeveloper. JDK 1.6 update 11—from the Sun downloads page: http://java.sun.com/products/archive/ You must use Java 1.6 update 11. Update 12 does not work.

Upstart The first new technology that I would like to outline is called Upstart. I thought it was fitting to outline this feature first because it is integral within the boot process. Without the improvements in Upstart, Ubuntu would not be able to boot as fast as it currently does. Upstart has been used, incrementally, in Ubuntu since version 6.10 but with Ubuntu 9.10 it has made the transition complete. Without going into too much detail, Upstart was designed to replace the aging System-V init system that is commonly found on Linux distributions. The idea behind Upstart is that modern systems are more dynamic and event-driven, as opposed to static and pre-defined, and the boot process should make use of that. With the previous system, System-V, each service that is started at boot-time was defined an ordered number in which to start. This has worked well enough for many years, but it can cause problems for maintainers as they have to make sure that the boot order of services is globally compatible. For example, networking needs to be enabled before network services are enabled. If these (as a simple example) get out of order, services will not be available as expected after the machine has booted. Upstart takes the simple idea that certain services rely on other services and redefines them into event-driven tasks. It is very exciting news that Ubuntu has finally completed the transition to Upstart after so many releases. This is a big step toward improving bootup performance on Ubuntu 9.10. You can read much more about Upstart at http://upstart.ubuntu.com. XSplash Ubuntu has also made another big change to the boot process with XSplash. XSplash is replacing the previous USplash, which was known to cause issues. I have noticed that XSplash seems faster, as well as addressing the compatibility issues caused by its predecessor. I think you'll also enjoy the new bootup graphic. This is another step towards Ubuntus goal of a ten-second boot process by Ubuntu 10.04, which is due out in April of 2010. While both Upstart and XSplash contribute to improved boot performance all other changes should be transparent to the end-user. All other boot related services should perform as expected, with no migration or customization on the user's part. Linux Kernel: 2.6.31 Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" has also upgraded the Linux Kernel to version 2.6.31. This version ships with Kernel Mode Settings enabled for Intel graphics cards as well as some impressive security features. Kernel mode-setting (KMS) shifts responsibility for selecting and setting up the graphics mode from the X window system to the Linux Kernel itself. When X is started, it then detects and uses the mode without any further mode changes. This promises to make booting faster, improves graphical performance and reduces screen flickering. In regards to security features, Ubuntu 9.10 enables non-exec memory in this latest version of the Linux Kernel. What does this mean? Most modern CPUs protect against executing non-executable memory regions such as heap or stacks, but require that the Linux Kernel use "PAE" addressing. This is known either as Non-eXecute (NX) or eXecute-Disable (XD). This is the default for 64bit and generic-pae kernels and this protection reduces the areas an attacker can use to perform arbitrary code execution. The protection is now partially emulated on 32-bit kernels without PAE starting in Ubuntu 9.10. In addition, Ubuntu 9.10 has also made it possible to disable the loading of any additional kernel modules once the system is running. This adds yet another layer of protections against attackers loading kernel rootkits. This feature can be enabled by setting the value of /proc/sys/kernel/modules_disabled to 1. With these security and performance additions in the 2.6.31 version of the Linux Kernel, Ubuntu promises to become a better contender on both the Desktop and the Server environments! EXT4 Filesystem The previous version of Ubuntu, version 9.04, offered the ext4 filesystem as an option, but not as a default. After six-months of testing and stabilization I am also happy to announce that ext4 will be enabled by default in Ubuntu 9.10. I have been very happy with the ext4 filesystem. I have seen impressive speed improvements over ext3, and now use ext4 on each of my systems that supports it. Again, another impressive step toward a faster and more performance-driven Ubuntu experience. AppArmor The AppArmor system in Ubuntu 9.10 features an improved parser engine that uses cache files. This greatly improves the time taken to initialize AppArmor at boot time. AppArmor also now supports 'pux' which, when specified, means a process can transition to an existing profile if one exists or simply run unconfined if not. If you're not familiar with AppArmor, it is a Mandatory Access Control application originally designed at Novell. It is now primarily community-driven, but has been the default in Ubuntu for a few releases. It continues to mature, and security profiles are pre-defined and applicable for many common applications. To find out more about AppArmor you can read the Ubuntu community documentation on using it at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AppArmor

There are many reasons why you would want to display a calendar. You can use it to display upcoming events, to keep a diary, or to show a timetable. Recently, for example, I combined a calendar with an online store for a client to book meetings and receive payments more intuitively. Google calendar is probably what springs to mind when people think of calendars online. There is a very good plugin called jquery-week-calendar that shows a week with events in a fashion similar to Google's calendar. Its homepage is at http://www.redredred.com.au/projects/jquery-week-calendar/. To get the latest copy of the plugin, go to http://code.google.com/p/jquery-week-calendar/downloads/list and get the highest-numbered file. The examples in this article are done with version 1.2.0. Download the library and extract it so that there is a directory named jquery-weekcalendar-1.2.0 in the root of your demo directory. Displaying the calendar As usual, the HTML for the simplest configuration is very simple. Save this as calendar.html: <html> <head> <script src="../jquery.min.js"></script> <script src="../jquery-ui.min.js"></script> <script src="../jquery-weekcalendar-1.2.0/jquery.weekcalendar.js"> </script> <script src="calendar.js"></script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../jquery-ui.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../jquery-weekcalendar-1.2.0/jquery.weekcalendar.css"/> </head> <body> <div id="calendar_wrapper" style="height:500px"></div> </body> </html> We will keep all of our JavaScript in an external file called calendar.js, which will initially contain just this: $(document).ready(function() { $('#calendar_wrapper').weekCalendar({ 'height':function($calendar){ return $('#calendar_wrapper')[0].offsetHeight; } }); }); This is fairly straightforward. The script will apply the widget to the #calendar_wrapper element, and the widget's height will be set to that of the wrapper element. Even with this tiny bit of code, we already have a good-looking calendar, and when you drag your mouse cursor around it, you'll see that events are created as you lift the mouse up: It looks good, but it doesn't do anything yet. The events are temporary, and will vanish as soon as you change the week or reload the page. In order to make them permanent, we need to send details of the events to the server and save them there. Creating an event What we need to do is to have the client save the event on the server when it is created. In this article, we'll use PHP sessions to save the data for the sake of simplicity. Sessions are chunks of data, which are kept on the server side and are related to the cookie or PHPSESSID parameter that the client uses to access that session. We will use sessions in these examples because they do not need as much setup as databases. For your own projects, you should adapt the PHP side in order to connect to a database instead. If you are using this article to create a full application, you will obviously want to use something more permanent than sessions, in which case the PHP code should be adapted such that all references to sessions are replaced with database references instead. This is beyond the scope of this book, but as you are a PHP developer, you probably do this everyday anyway! When the event has been created, we want a modal dialog to appear and ask for more details. In this test case, we'll add a text area for further details, which allows for more data than would appear in the small visible area in the calendar itself. A modal dialog is a "pop up" that appears and blocks all other actions on the page until it has been taken care of. It's useful in cases where the answer to a question must be known before a script can carry on with its work. Now, let's create an event and add it to our calendar. Client-side code In the calendar.js file, add an eventNew event to the weekCalendar call: $(document).ready(function() { $('#calendar_wrapper').weekCalendar({ 'height':function($calendar){ return $('#calendar_wrapper')[0].offsetHeight; }, 'eventNew':function(calEvent, $event) { calendar_new_entry(calEvent,$event); } }); }); When an event is created, the calendar_new_entry function will be called with details of the new event in the calEvent parameter. Now, add the function calendar_new_entry: function calendar_new_entry(calEvent,$event){ var ds=calEvent.start, df=calEvent.end; $('<div id="calendar_new_entry_form" title="New Calendar Entry"> event name<br /> <input value="new event" id="calendar_new_entry_form_title" /> <br /> body text<br /> <textarea style="width:400px;height:200px" id="calendar_new_entry_form_body">event description </textarea> </div>').appendTo($('body')); $("#calendar_new_entry_form").dialog({ bgiframe: true, autoOpen: false, height: 440, width: 450, modal: true, buttons: { 'Save': function() { var $this=$(this); $.getJSON('./calendar.php?action=save&id=0&start=' +ds.getTime()/1000+'&end='+df.getTime()/1000, { 'body':$('#calendar_new_entry_form_body').val(), 'title':$('#calendar_new_entry_form_title').val() }, function(ret){ $this.dialog('close'); $('#calendar_wrapper').weekCalendar('refresh'); $("#calendar_new_entry_form").remove(); } ); }, Cancel: function() { $event.remove(); $(this).dialog('close'); $("#calendar_new_entry_form").remove(); } }, close: function() { $('#calendar').weekCalendar('removeUnsavedEvents'); $("#calendar_new_entry_form").remove(); } }); $("#calendar_new_entry_form").dialog('open'); } What's happening here is that a form is created and added to the body (the second line of the function), then the third line of the function creates a modal window from that form and adds some buttons to it. Our modal dialog should look like this: The Save button, when pressed, calls the server-side file calendar.php with the parameters needed to save the event, including the start and end, and the title and body. When the result returns, the calendar is refreshed with the new event's data included. When any of the buttons are clicked, we close the dialog and remove it from the page completely. Note how we are sending time information to the server (shown highlighted in the code we just saw). JavaScript time functions usually measure in milliseconds, but we want to send it to PHP, which generally measures time in seconds. So, we convert the value on the client so that the PHP can use the received data as it is, without needing to do anything to it. Every little helps! Server-side code On the server side, we want to take the new event and save it. Remember that we're doing it in sessions in this example, but you should feel free to adapt this to any other model that you wish. Create a file called calendar.php and save it with this source in it: <?php session_start(); if(!isset($_SESSION['calendar'])){ $_SESSION['calendar']=array( 'ids'=>0, ); } if(isset($_REQUEST['action'])){ switch($_REQUEST['action']){ case 'save': // { $start_date=(int)$_REQUEST['start']; $data=array( 'title'=>(isset($_REQUEST['title'])?$_REQUEST['title']:''), 'body' =>(isset($_REQUEST['body'])?$_REQUEST['body']:''), 'start'=>date('c',$start_date), 'end' =>date('c',(int)$_REQUEST['end']) ); $id=(int)$_REQUEST['id']; if($id && isset($_SESSION['calendar'][$id])){ $_SESSION['calendar'][$id]=$data; } else{ $id= ++$_SESSION['calendar']['ids']; $_SESSION['calendar'][$id]=$data; } echo 1; exit; // } } } ?> In the server-side code of this project, all the requested actions are handled by a switch statement. This is done for demonstration purposes—whenever we add a new action, we simply add a new switch case. If you are using this for your own purposes, you may wish to rewrite it using functions instead of large switch cases. The date function is used to convert the start and end parameters into ISO 8601 date format. That's the format jquery-week-calendar prefers, so we'll try to keep everything in that format. Visually, nothing appears to happen, but the data is actually being saved. To see what's being saved, create a new file named test.php, and use the var_dump function in it to examine the session data (view it in your browser): <?php session_start(); var_dump($_SESSION); ?> Here's an example from my test machine:

  Before activities aim at motivating students to listen and getting them to anticipate texts and focus on key vocabulary in advance. Forum and Mindmap are two modules which enable us to do this. During activities focus on the detail of the text and include listening and matching, gap-fill, ordering tasks, identifying attitude, and summarizing tasks. Quiz and Lesson modules are well suited to this. After activities get students to review and evaluate texts they have listened to. Forum and Questionnaire are good for this purpose. The article is organized as follows: Activity and ease of setup Focus Module Description 1  * Before listening Forum and Mediacenter Students discuss recordings they would like to hear. 2  *   Mindmap Students brainstorm ideas or vocabulary. 3  *** During listening Quiz Students answer gist and detailed questions about recordings. 4  ***   Lesson Students predict text in recordings. 5  * After listening Choice Students vote on recordings. 6  ***   Questionnaire Students review and evaluate the content of recordings 7  *   Forum Students discuss recordings. Since there are various ways we can use Moodle to help students, the introduction to this article looks in detail at the types of players we can use. There is also some guidance on the range of sources of listening material available on the Internet. The final section in the introduction demonstrates how we can show and hide text on Moodle pages while students listen. Players This article offers four main ways of presenting listening material. Built-in Flash player: Recordings have to be made on an external recording program, such as Audacity. You need to do some simple editing of the HTML code on your pages, but it doesn't require any add-on modules and the player fits neatly into the page: The player usefully includes a pause facility. Mediacenter: This podcast player requires the add-on Inwicast module. It allows you to include high-quality recordings whose length is limited only by the maximum upload settings as set in the administration panel. The player is again simple and attractive: Mediacenter helps you organize recordings in one place. Recordings can be used in a variety of formats, such as Flash-FLV, MP4 and MOV, WMV and MP3. If your recording equipment records in another format, such as WAV, for example, you can use tools like Audacity to convert the audio format if necessary. You might find it useful to convert from WAV to MP3 format, which works in Mediacenter. Mediacenter also allows you to link to remote files on other websites. NanoGong player: This requires the add-on NanoGong module. It's well worth including in your Moodle setup, as it allows simple recording and playback on most HTML pages within Moodle. The major constraints as far as Moodle is concerned are the time limit of 2 minutes per recording and the lower recording quality. However, for ease of use and convenience, it's suitable for many of the activities. Embedded flash video players: You can embed Flash video players in Moodle HTML pages by pasting embed code from the source site on your page. Embed, here, means insert it into the page. You must check that there are no copyright issues when you embed video. Some sites allow it, some don't. Some request that you seek permission first. Since the video is sourced from another website, you are using its bandwidth as well as its content. So it is doubly right that you seek permission. Sources of listening material It's worth considering the range of sources of listening materials available. The following are the typical sources: You Your students Your colleagues Local interviewees, such as friends and professionals. You could approach representatives of local services, such as the police or tourist services, and ask if you can make short interviews. Recordings of local announcements from railway stations or airports Internet recordings Websites, such as Woices (http://woices.com) and voicethread (http://voicethread.com/), which combine audio with maps and images Activity 1 has an extended list of listening sources. Recording speed One of the many useful features of Audacity is that it allows us to reproduce recordings at different speeds without the pitch changing. It's well worth including slower recordings if you think your students will benefit from it. Presentations could include two recordings: the first one at a slower speed; the second at a faster, more natural speed. Alternatively, you could start with a recording at a natural speed and make slower speed versions available for students who need remedial help. You can use Audacity to record from the Internet (also known as grabbing). Showing the text before listening In many of the activities, you might want to create a facility for allowing students to see text before and/or after they hear it. Here is a simple way of doing that using ALT tags (Computer-speak for Alternative text). First, prepare a small GIF image that students will hover their mouse cursor over to see the text. In case you don't know, GIF is one of the formats you can save an image in. Other formats you may have heard of are JPG and PNG. You can do that using a simple graphic program like Paint. Alternatively, you can copy this pink square image from http://moodleforlanguages.co.uk/images/pinksquare.gif. To do that, right-click (or Ctrl+click on a Mac) on the image and select Save Image As.... Then, in the HTML area on your Moodle activity, upload the image, and write the text you want to show in the ALT area. The HTML page will now look like this. The text you write in the Alternate text box will appear in a separate box on the screen when you hover the mouse cursor over the pink square. Web conferencingIf you have the add-on module Dimdim, you could also create live listening sessions. Activity 1: Using Forum to motivate students Aim: Help motivate students by discussing what recordings to listen to Moodle modules: Forum Extra programs: Mediacenter (optional) Ease of setup: * As with many language-learning activities, it's important to try to motivate students at the outset. In this activity, students discuss what recordings to listen to. The choice of recordings will depend on the age, interests, and language level of the students. There are thousands of sources on the Internet, many of which you can find through good search engines. Here are some examples: Source Ideas News sites You could also consider getting students to listen to and compare news from different countries. The open directory project is a good place to look: http://www.dmoz.org/News/. Media repositories Sites like YouTube and Google Video are good sources of songs, presentations, TV clips, stories, and many other recordings. Sound archives are also good places to look. Some useful sources are: http://sounds.bl.uk/; http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/collections.shtml; http://tinyurl.com/birminghamdirectory   Poetry sites Many of these include recordings: http://poems.com/ http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/Poetry/Performance_and_Presentation/   Story sites More and more audio books are now available on the Internet often free, as with project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Audio_Books_Project Discussions Public broadcast stations like DW, BBC, CBC and CNN are good sources: http://www.dw-world.de/; http://bbc.co.uk; http://www.cbc.ca/; http://www.cnn.com/services/podcasting/   Film trailers Several websites are devoted to film trailers. For example: http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Trailers/ Soap operas A search for "podcast soap opera" should provide a good catch. Documentaries Again, public broadcast stations ofter an increasingly wide range of documentaries, which you can link to via your Moodle Mediacenter: http://tinyurl.com/publicbroadcast Lectures These can be made by you, your students, or sourced from websites such as http://www.ted.com/. A search for "online lectures" will yield many more sites. Advertisements Try http://www.google.com/Top/Arts/Television/Commercials/ for a directory of advertisements.

The examples are: Plotting data from a database Plotting data from a web page Plotting the data extracted by parsing an Apache log file Plotting the data read from a comma-separated values (CSV) file Plotting extrapolated data using curve fitting Third-party tools using Matplotlib (NetworkX and mpmath) Let's begin Plotting data from a database Databases often tend to collect much more information than we can simply extract and watch in a tabular format (let's call it the "Excel sheet" report style). Databases not only use efficient techniques to store and retrieve data, but they are also very good at aggregating it. One suggestion we can give is to let the database do the work. For example, if we need to sum up a column, let's make the database sum the data, and not sum it up in the code. In this way, the whole process is much more efficient because: There is a smaller memory footprint for the Python code, since only the aggregate value is returned, not the whole result set to generate it The database has to read all the rows in any case. However, if it's smart enough, then it can sum values up as they are read The database can efficiently perform such an operation on more than one column at a time The data source we're going to query is from an open source project: the Debian distribution. Debian has an interesting project called UDD , Ultimate Debian Database, which is a relational database where a lot of information (either historical or actual) about the distribution is collected and can be analyzed. On the project website http://udd.debian.org/, we can fi nd a full dump of the database (quite big, honestly) that can be downloaded and imported into a local PostgreSQL instance (refer to http://wiki.debian.org/UltimateDebianDatabase/CreateLocalReplica for import instructions Now that we have a local replica of UDD, we can start querying it: # module to access PostgreSQL databasesimport psycopg2# matplotlib pyplot moduleimport matplotlib.pyplot as plt Since UDD is stored in a PostgreSQL database, we need psycopg2 to access it. psycopg2 is a third-party module available at http://initd.org/projects/psycopg # connect to UDD databaseconn = psycopg2.connect(database="udd")# prepare a cursorcur = conn.cursor() We will now connect to the database server to access the udd database instance, and then open a cursor on the connection just created. # this is the query we'll be makingquery = """select to_char(date AT TIME ZONE 'UTC', 'HH24'), count(*) from upload_history where to_char(date, 'YYYY') = '2008' group by 1 order by 1""" We have prepared the select statement to be executed on UDD. What we wish to do here is extract the number of packages uploaded to the Debian archive (per hour) in the whole year of 2008. date AT TIME ZONE 'UTC': As date field is of the type timestamp with time zone, it also contains time zone information, while we want something independent from the local time. This is the way to get a date in UTC time zone. group by 1: This is what we have encouraged earlier, that is, let the database do the work. We let the query return the already aggregated data, instead of coding it into the program. # execute the querycur.execute(query)# retrieve the whole result setdata = cur.fetchall() We execute the query and fetch the whole result set from it. # close cursor and connectioncur.close()conn.close() Remember to always close the resources that we've acquired in order to avoid memory or resource leakage and reduce the load on the server (removing connections that aren't needed anymore). # unpack data in hours (first column) and# uploads (second column)hours, uploads = zip(*data) The query result is a list of tuples, (in this case, hour and number of uploads), but we need two separate lists—one for the hours and another with the corresponding number of uploads. zip() solves this with *data, we unpack the list, returning the sublists as separate arguments to zip(), which in return, aggregates the elements in the same position in the parameters into separated lists. Consider the following example: In [1]: zip(['a1', 'a2'], ['b1', 'b2'])Out[1]: [('a1', 'b1'), ('a2', 'b2')] To complete the code: # graph codeplt.plot(hours, uploads)# the the x limits to the 'hours' limitplt.xlim(0, 23)# set the X ticks every 2 hoursplt.xticks(range(0, 23, 2))# draw a gridplt.grid()# set title, X/Y labelsplt.title("Debian packages uploads per hour in 2008")plt.xlabel("Hour (in UTC)")plt.ylabel("No. of uploads") The previous code snippet is the standard plotting code, which results in the following screenshot: From this graph we can see that in 2008, the main part of Debian packages uploads came from European contributors. In fact, uploads were made mainly in the evening hours (European time), after the working days are over (as we can expect from a voluntary project). Plotting data from the Web Often, the information we need is not distributed in an easy-to-use format such as XML or a database export but for example only on web sites. More and more often we find interesting data on a web page, and in that case we have to parse it to extract that information: this is called web scraping . In this example, we will parse a Wikipedia article to extracts some data to plot. The article is at http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demografia_d'Italia and contains lots of information about Italian demography (it's in Italian because the English version lacks a lot of data); in particular, we are interested in the population evolution over the years. Probably the best known Python module for web scraping is BeautifulSoup ( http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/). It's a really nice library that gets the job done quickly, but there are situations (in particular with JavaScript embedded in the web page, such as for Wikipedia) that prevent it from working. As an alternative, we find lxml quite productive (http://codespeak.net/lxml/). It's a library mainly used to work with XML (as the name suggests), but it can also be used with HTML (given their quite similar structures), and it is powerful and easy–to-use. Let's dig into the code now: # to get the web pagesimport urllib2# lxml submodule for html parsingfrom lxml.html import parse# regular expression moduleimport re# Matplotlib moduleimport matplotlib.pyplot as plt Along with the Matplotlib module, we need the following modules: urllib2: This is the module (from the standard library) that is used to access resources through URL (we will download the webpage with this). lxml: This is the parsing library. re: Regular expressions are needed to parse the returned data to extract the information we need. re is a module from the standard library, so we don't need to install a third-party module to use it. # general urllib2 configuser_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT)'headers = { 'User-Agent' : user_agent }url = "http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demografia_d'Italia" Here, we prepare some configuration for urllib2, in particular, the user_agent header is used to access Wikipedia and the URL of the page. # prepare the request and open the urlreq = urllib2.Request(url, headers=headers)response = urllib2.urlopen(req) Then we make a request for the URL and get the HTML back. # we parse the webpage, getroot() return the document rootdoc = parse(response).getroot() We parse the HTML using the parse() function of lxml.html and then we get the root element. XML can be seen as a tree, with a root element (the node at the top of the tree from where every other node descends), and a hierarchical structure of elements. # find the data table, using css elementstable = doc.cssselect('table.wikitable')[0] We leverage the structure of HTML accessing the first element of type table of class wikitable because that's the table we're interested in. # prepare data structures, will contain actual datayears = []people = [] Preparing the lists that will contain the parsed data. # iterate over the rows of the table, except first and last onesfor row in table.cssselect('tr')[1:-1]: We can start parsing the table. Since there is a header and a footer in the table, we skip the first and the last line from the lines (selected by the tr tag) to loop over. # get the row cell (we will use only the first two)data = row.cssselect('td') We get the element with the td tag that stands for table data: those are the cells in an HTML table. # the first cell is the yeartmp_years = data[0].text_content()# cleanup for cases like 'YYYY[N]' (date + footnote link)tmp_years = re.sub('[.]', '', tmp_years) We take the first cell that contains the year, but we need to remove the additional characters (used by Wikipedia to link to footnotes). # the second cell is the population counttmp_people = data[1].text_content()# cleanup from '.', used as separatortmp_people = tmp_people.replace('.', '') We also take the second cell that contains the population for a given year. It's quite common in Italy to separate thousands in number with a '.' character: we have to remove them to have an appropriate value. # append current data to data lists, converting to integersyears.append(int(tmp_years))people.append(int(tmp_people)) We append the parsed values to the data lists, explicitly converting them to integer values. # plot dataplt.plot(years,people)# ticks every 10 yearsplt.xticks(range(min(years), max(years), 10))plt.grid()# add a note for 2001 Censusplt.annotate("2001 Census", xy=(2001, people[years.index(2001)]), xytext=(1986, 54.5*10**6), arrowprops=dict(arrowstyle='fancy')) Running the example results in the following screenshot that clearly shows why the annotation is needed: In 2001, we had a national census in Italy, and that's the reason for the drop in that year: the values released from the National Institute for Statistics (and reported in the Wikipedia article) are just an estimation of the population. However, with a census, we have a precise count of the people living in Italy. Plotting data by parsing an Apache log file Plotting data from a log file can be seen as the art of extracting information from it. Every service has a log format different from the others. There are some exceptions of similar or same format (for example, for services that come from the same development teams) but then they may be customized and we're back at the beginning. The main differences in log files are: Fields orders: Some have time information at the beginning, others in the middle of the line, and so on Fields types: We can find several different data types such as integers, strings, and so on Fields meanings: For example, log levels can have very different meanings From all the data contained in the log file, we need to extract the information we are interested in from the surrounding data that we don't need (and hence we skip). In our example, we're going to analyze the log file of one of the most common services: Apache. In particular, we will parse the access.log file to extract the total number of hits and amount of data transferred per day. Apache is highly configurable, and so is the log format. Our Apache configuration, contained in the httpd.conf file, has this log format: "%h %l %u %t "%r" %>s %b "%{Referer}i" "%{User-Agent}i"" This is in LogFormat specification where Log directive Description %h The host making the request %l Identity of the client (which is usually not available) %u User making the request (usually not available) %t The time the request was received %r The request %>s The status code %b The size (in bytes) of the response sent to the client (excluding the headers) %{Referer}i The page from where the requests originated (for example, the HTML page where a PNG image is requested) %{User-Agent}i The user agent used to make the request

Activity 3: Investigating texts using Quiz Aim: Using quiz to investigate texts Moodle modules: Quiz Extra programs: None Ease of setup: *** As noted elsewhere, Quiz can be a useful module for practicing different language skills. This is primarily because we can build in helpful feedback and because we can allow students to spend as much time as they want practicing. There are various ways that Quiz can help students listen. Here are some examples: Listening and matching: students listen for gist information and match answers to general questions about the text. Ordering task for arranging events in a sequence. Multiple-choice for information transfer, identifying speakers' attitudes, and identifying numbers. Gap-fill tasks: Students listen to a song, poem, or other text, and fill in the missing words. It's worth thinking carefully about what sorts of words you want to blank out. Do you want to focus on grammar words (prepositions, pronouns, and conjunctions, etc.), words that are difficult to spell, or keywords (words that convey the main meaning of the text)? To exemplify each of these examples, we'll make one quiz with four different question types. You could choose to have quizzes with any number of different question types. We'll take as our listening text a story which we recorded ourselves. We could record it in a recording program like Audacity. The story is about a rather special trip to the zoo. Here is a possible transcript abridged from http://www.onlyfunnystories.com/ZooJob.asp: One day an out of work mime artist is visiting the zoo and attempts to earn some money as a street performer monkey. As soon as he starts to draw a crowd, a zoo keeper grabs him and drags him into his office. The zoo keeper explains to the mime artist that the zoo's most popular attraction, a gorilla, has died suddenly and the keeper fears that attendance at the zoo will fall off. He offers the mime artist a job to dress up as the gorilla until they can get another one. The mime artist accepts. So the next morning the mime artist puts on the gorilla suit and enters the cage before the crowd comes. He discovers that it's a great job. He can sleep all he wants, play and make fun of people and he draws bigger crowds than he ever did as a mime. However, eventually the crowds tire of him and he tires of just swinging on trees. He begins to notice that the people are paying more attention to the lion in the cage next to his. Not wanting to lose the attention of his audience, he climbs to the top of his cage, crawls across a partition, and dangles from the top to the lion's cage. Of course, this makes the lion furious, but the crowd loves it. At the end of the day the zoo keeper comes and gives the mime artist a raise for being such a good attraction. Well, this goes on for some time, the mime keeps taunting the lion, the crowds grow larger, and his salary keeps going up. Then one terrible day when he is dangling over the furious lion he slips and falls. The mime artist is terrified. The lion gathers itself and prepares to pounce. The mime artist is so scared that he begins to run round and round the cage with the lion close behind. Finally, the mime artist starts screaming and yelling, "Help me, help me!", but the lion is quick and pounces. The mime artist soon finds himself flat on his back looking up at the angry lion and the lion says, "Shut up you idiot! Do you want to get us both fired?" The questions start with general gist questions (matching). Then comes an ordering question, which requires slightly more attention to detail. The last two are multiple-choice and gap-fill questions, which get students to focus on detailed aspects of the listening text. Here's how to do it The following sections refer you to the activities and point out any major differences. Setting up the quiz Listening and matching question Use NanoGong to create sound clips which replace pictures and texts. Here are some examples of the matching questions you could set up. These are general questions which help students get the gist of the story. Question Answer How many animals are there in the story?. Three Where does this take place? The zoo Where does the zoo keeper find the mime artist? On the street How many animals are there in the cages? Two This is what your matching question might look like: Here are a few more matching questions you could consider: Match recordings to pictures. Students could hear a description of an image (painting, photo) and identify the description. The easiest way to do this would be to take some photos of similar scenes. Match individual words to sounds. Students hear the recording and decide which words they are hearing. Recording Choice A. "I hear you're coming"   B."It's over here" hear/here   hear/here Ordering question In this variation students listen to a story and then order events in sequence. We need to make sure that the sequence is not guessable without hearing the story. Here are the stages from our story that you could include in the question: The zookeeper grabs the mime artist. The zookeeper offers the mime artist a job. The gorilla lies on top of the neighboring cage. The lion tries to attack the gorilla. The lion tells the gorilla off. This is what the ordering question would look like: Multiple-choice question Multiple-choice questions are a good way of getting students to investigate texts in more detail. Here are some possible questions we could include in this activity. Question 1 According to the story, why does the mime artist accept a job as a gorilla? Answer 1 His work on the street isn't going well. Answer 2 The zookeeper has an urgent need for a gorilla. Answer 3 He always wanted to work as a gorilla in a zoo. Answer 4 The last gorilla quit the job.

What is a report? A report is a vehicle for organizing, processing, and displaying data in a format suitable for outputting. In the past, reports went to hardcopy devices (for example printers). Reporting technology is now more general purpose and flexible. Reports may be displayed on-screen in preview mode rather than being printed, or output to another device (for example, disk storage in PDF format), but with the same formatting as though they were printed. In fact, all of the report screenshots in this article were taken from reports generated in preview mode. Once generated, the data contents of a report are static. Part of the new flexibility of NAV 2009 is the capability to output reports in preview mode, which have interactive capabilities. However, those capabilities only affect the presentation of the data, not the data included in the report dataset. Examples include dynamic sorting and show or hide data (expand or collapse). Even so, all specification of the data selection criteria for a report must be done at the beginning, before the report is generated. NAV 2009 also allows dynamic functionality for drill down into the underlying data, drill through to a page, and even drill through into another report. In NAV, report objects can also be classified as processing only by setting the correct report property (that is, by setting the ProcessingOnly property to Yes). A ProcessingOnly report will display no data to the user in the traditional reporting manner, but will simply process and update data in the tables. A report can add, change, or delete data in tables, whether the report is ProcessingOnly or a normal printing report. In general, reports are associated with one or more tables. A report can be created without being externally associated with any table, but that is an exception, not a rule. Even if a report is associated with a particular table, it can freely access and display data from other referenced tables. Two NAV report designers NAV 2009 report design uses a pair of Report Designer tools. The first is the Report Designer that is part of the C/SIDE development environment. The second is the Visual Studio Report Designer. For simplicity, we will refer to these as C/SIDE RD and VS RD in this article. The C/SIDE RD is the only tool needed to create reports for the Classic Client. If a NAV 2009 system is using only the Classic Client, then only reports created using the C/SIDE RD can be run. However, when using the RoleTailored Client, both C/SIDE RD and VS RD reports can be run. The RTC runs C/SIDE RD reports by invoking a temporary instance of the Classic Client, running the report, and then closing down the Classic Client instance (no additional license slots are used). In this article, we will focus totally on the design of reports for the RoleTailored Client using the VS RD. The typical report development process for an RTC report begins by doing foundation work in the C/SIDE RD. That's where all the data structure, working data elements, data flow, and C/AL logic are defined. The only way to create or modify report objects is to start in the C/SIDE RD. Once all of the elements are in place, the development work proceeds to the VS RD where the layout and presentation work is done, including any desired dynamic options. The following flow chart provides a conceptual view of the creation of a new report using the two different Report Design approaches—one for the Classic Client and the other for the RoleTailored Client. The functions in the center and left chart paths are those done in the C/SIDE RD (steps 1 through 7). Those in the right set of the chart are the ones done in the VS RD (steps 4 and 6 through 10). Steps 1, 2, 3, and 5 are essentially the same (but not quite) regardless of the target client. Step 4 is done in the C/SIDE RD Sections Designer for both clients, but what you do is quite different in each case. As you can see, many of the functions are the same regardless of the target client. Most of those are done within the Classic Report Designer. Therefore, the accurate claim for NAV 2009 that, even though the layout function uses Visual Studio Report Designer, a large part of the report design is still done within the traditional NAV Report Designer. For the experienced NAV Classic Client developer who is moving to RTC projects, the biggest challenges will be to learn exactly which tasks are done using which development tool, and to learn the intricacies of the Visual Studio Report Designer layout tools. Those intricacies include understanding just how the VS RD features interact with the NAV data structures and the C/SIDE RD definitions. This chart shows the general flow of NAV report design in order to make it easier to understand which functions are done in which of the Report Design tools, and allows comparison of the Classic and RoleTailored design processes. In practice, the actual flow will depend on the specifics of a particular report. It's feasible for a simple C/SIDE report to be entirely generated by the Wizard, but that is generally not true for a VS RD report. It's important to note that some of the steps defined in the chart can be performed in a different sequence than that is shown, and some can be repeated in an iterative fashion. Nevertheless, the chart that follows is a good introductory guide to NAV Report Design. Terminology for the following chart: Working Data is all the non-database data needed to process the report; Report Data is what will be displayed in the report. A Hybrid Report Designer The Report Designer toolset in NAV 2009 represents a set of compromises tied back to some initial NAV 2009 product feature goals. One product feature goal was to retain the ability of developers of developers to do their to do their work within C/SIDE, thus avoiding scrapping more than a decade of knowledge and experience. A second product feature goal was to provide a much more fully featured set of reporting capabilities. After much thought and experimentation, the decision was made to create a toolset that would target report generation using the functionality of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). The method of accomplishing that was to "glue together" the data and logic definition parts of the C/SIDE Report Designer to the layout parts of Visual Studio Report Designer, in order to create a hybrid. When a report is designed, VS RD builds a definition of the report layout in the XML-structured Report Definition Language Client-side (RDLC). When you exit VS RD, the latest copy of the RDLC code is stored in the current C/SIDE Report object. When you exit the Report Designer and save your Report object, the C/SIDE RD saves the combined set of report definition information, C/SIDE and RDLC, in the database. If you export a report object in text format, you will be able to see the two separate sets of report definition. The XML-structured RDLC is quite obvious (beginning with the heading RDLDATA). NAV report—look and feel NAV allows you to create reports of many different kinds with vastly different "look and feel" attributes. The consistency of report look and feel does not have the same level of design importance as the consistency of look and feel for pages does. The standard NAV application only uses a few of the possible report styles, most of which are in a relatively "plain-Jane" format. While good design practice dictates that enhancements should integrate seamlessly unless there is an overwhelming justification for being different, there are many opportunities for providing replacement or additional reporting capabilities. The tools that are available within NAV for accessing and manipulating data in textual format are very powerful. Unlike the previous versions of NAV, this new version includes a reasonable set of graphical reporting capabilities. And, of course, there is always the option to output report results to another processing/presentation tool such as Excel. NAV report types The following are the types of reports: List: This is a formatted list of data. A sample list report in the standard system is the Customer – Order Detail list shown in the following screenshot: Document: This is formatted along the lines of a pre-printed form, where a page (or several pages) represents a complete, self-contained report. Examples are Customer Invoice, Packing List (even though it's called a list, it's a document report), Purchase Order, and Accounts Payable check.The following screenshot is a Customer Sales-Invoice document report: The List and Document report types are defined based on their layout. The next three report types are defined based on their usage rather than their layout.

Introduction In this article we will discuss some simple promotion techniques that will make it easy for you and your site's users to bring in visitors to their blogs. You will learn how to offer RSS feeds that interested visitors can subscribe to, and how to "converse" with other bloggers via trackbacks. You will also learn how to use pings to tell blog directories that your blog has been updated and how to promote your blog on Twitter. Improved tagging Tags are a way to label content to make it easier to find later. Tags are a complement to the traditional "categories" way of organizing things. Blog owners can label a post with tags that describe the important content, making it easier for visitors and search engines to find those posts at a later date. You can add as many tags as you wish to a post, giving you extra freedom to tag subjects even if you don't think you'll be posting on that topic regularly. In this way, tags are less restrictive than categories. As an example, one of our Slayers may write a blog post on the Impending Apocalypse of 2009, where stuffed toys come to life and attempt to kill their owners. If this apocalypse was quickly averted, they may write only one blog post about it, which would be posted under the "Impending Apocalypses" category. There's no point making an entire new category for strange happenings surrounding stuffed toys, as it's unlikely to be a subject that would see many posts, but tagging the post with "apocalypse" and "stuffed toys" would help if any future Slayers encountered killer teddy bears at some point in the future. Time for action – tagging blog posts WordPress MU does have a simple, built-in form of tagging system, but it isn't very convenient to use, and many users may decide it's too much trouble to add new tags and figure out which tags to mark each blog post with. Let's offer them a more convenient and nicer looking way of doing things. Download WP Auto Tagger from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-auto-tagger/. Upload the contents of the ZIP file to your /wp-content/plugins directory. Enable the WP-Auto Tagger Plugin on your main blog via the Site Admin panel. Try creating a new post on the main blog. Beside the main post entry box you should see some new tag tools. Clicking on the Suggest Tags button should give you a list of appropriate tags. Submit the post and then look at the main blog. You should see some tags on the front page and tags on your new post, too. Using Plugin Commander, enable the plugin for your users. Suggest tags not working?If you get the curl not enabled message when you click on suggest tags or you simply see no suggested tags appear, you will need to have your web host enable curl for you. Some web hosts disable lib-curl by default because of security concerns, but most are willing to enable it if requested to do so. What just happened? We have set up an improved tagging system that our users may find very useful. The plugin will read new blog posts and suggest tags for them, saving our users the hassle of typing out tags for each post. Of course, our users can choose to type out the tags by hand if they prefer and can delete any tags that the plugin suggests if they don't like them; however, they should find that they get some very useful inspiration from the suggest tags feature. SlayerCafe displays a list of tags on the right-hand side of the blog. Tags that appear frequently show in a bigger font than tags that are used less often. This gives visitors an overview of the main focus of each blog. Sitewide tags Now that you have tags displaying for each individual user blog, let's offer a page with a tag cloud, which includes tags from all the blogs on the site. Time for action – sitewide tag clouds Download the WordPress MU Sitewide Tags application from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-sitewide-tags/ Upload the plugin to your /wp-content/plugins folder. Enable the plugin via the Site Admin panel. Go to Site Options, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and check the Tags Blog box to enable tags. Check the Tags can be indexed by Search Engines box. Make a post or two on your test blogs, and then visit the tags subdomain for your site; you should see something like this: What just happened? We have just set up an improved tagging system for our users. The WP Auto Tagger plugin pulls out words that it thinks are important from blog posts and uses them as tags. The plugin isn't perfect and it does sometimes come up with silly suggestions, but users can remove tags that they don't want, or replace them with their own. The Auto Tagger plugin ensures that even users who don't take the time to pick out their own tags will still have the option on of having some kind of tagging system. Why is this important? Well, think ahead to this time next year—imagine how many posts the average user will have on their blog. Now imagine trying to find those posts by category. Athena may have made a post on SlayerCafe about the apocalypse that Watcherlicious almost caused when she read the wrong spell from the Dark Magikus book, but finding that post in the category "Impending Apocalypses" would be a time-consuming task when you consider that Athena fights to stop an apocalypse almost every week! If Athena used a tagging system, then it is likely that this particular apocalypse related post would have been tagged with "Watcherlicious" and with "Dark Magikus", making it much easier to find. We also set up a sitewide tagging system. This adds a stream of all new posts to a central blog. Watchers can keep an eye on this blog to see what's happening on a broader level, that is, what are people talking about and what are the most important issues. The most commonly appearing tags appear in a bolder, bigger font. You can see that at the moment our biggest theme is Slayers. Obviously, there's not much exciting happening on the vampire slaying front at the moment, as the Slayers are just talking amongst themselves about general slayer stuff . If the theme of conversation suddenly changed to "demonic robots", then that tag would appear prominently and the Watchers would know very quickly that there is a global demonic robot problem. The sitewide tags page is useful from a search engine perspective too, as it presents the most recent content to the search engines in one convenient place. Have a go hero – styling the tags page Our tags page at the moment looks just like a normal blog and has a rather boring name—tags.slayercafe.com. You can rename the tags page in the Site Options panel on the main blog. A better name might be "pulse" or "live-stream". The default setting indexes the last 5000 posts. This number can be changed, but don't set it too high as it could tax the server. Try customizing the layout of the Tags blog. The blog network's admin account can be used to log into the Tags blog's admin panel so that you can change the theme and make some other tweaks such as adding widgets. If you want to take things a step further, take a look at http://www.wordpress.com/tags. Here you can see a great example of a streamlined "what's hot on our network" tags page. You may have noticed that the Tags blog appears under Recent User Posts, so new posts appear twice—once by the original poster and once under Tags. Check the blog ID number of the Tags blog, and try changing the code we created earlier so that the posts to the Tags blog don't display. Using pings WordPress MU is set up to ping a service called Ping-o-Matic when new posts are made. This service is useful for English language blogs and for bloggers in America in particular because most of the services that Ping-o-Matic works with are U.S. centric. But there are other services that may be more suitable for bloggers in other countries or even blogs in specific niches. Let's look at ways to add extra ping services to our list of sites to ping for each blog. Time for action – pings Open up /wp-admin/includes/schema.php Find the line that says add_option('ping_sites', 'http://rpc.pingomatic.com/'); Change that line so that it reads add_option('ping_sites', "http://rpc.pingomatic.com/nhttp://rpc.NEWPINGSITE.TLD"); You can add multiple sites as long as you separate each URL with a n. Save and upload the file. Any future blogs will be created with the new ping sites set in Site Options. You can update existing sites either via MySQL or by using the Site Admin panel. What just happened? We have added a few extra sites to the list of ping services that will be notified when a new post is made. A ping is an example of a push mechanism. Instead of blog aggregation services having to look at all the blogs, they are listed to see which ones have new content. The blogs themselves inform the aggregators that they have been updated by sending them a ping. Ping-o-Matic is a service that receives pings and then passes them on to multiple servers. This reduces the amount of servers you have to ping, saving you time when you publish an article. However, Ping-o-Matic may not cover every site you would want to ping. We have added only two sites to the ping list— WhiteWiccaBlogs and TheWatcherNetwork. We don't want to draw too much attention from normal people on sites such as NewsNow or the My Yahoo service. Try to keep the number of individual sites you ping to a minimum. Not only is there a possibility that pinging huge numbers of sites could make adding posts take longer, pinging sites that are outside the topic of your blog is unlikely to get you any valuable traffic. It is better to focus on gaining visits from people who are actually interested in your blog network's subject. For an English language blog, using Ping-o-Matic, Technorati , and Google would be a good start. If your network is aimed at people who speak a different language, pinging local news aggregators would be a good idea. Have a go hero – more sites to ping Take a look at the list of sites in the following table, and think about the type of blog you have and the people you want to reach. The sites in the table are very general ones. You may find that there are aggregator services out there for your niche—be that houses in Singapore, computer games, or travel. A Google search for "keyword aggregator" should help you find the right kind of sites. Once you've chosen the sites you would like to ping, remember that each URL is separated by the characters n and you need to surround the entire list in double quotes (" "), not single ones (' '). Site URL FeedBurner http://ping.feedburner.com My Yahoo http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping Syndic8 http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php Myblog.jp (Japanese) http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/ Newsgator http://rpc.newsgator.com/ Blogg.de (German) http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/ Blogshares.com http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

WordPress As I mentioned before, WordPress is the biggest scoring free service that you can use. It is also the only one that doesn't allow you to spam their system and use it just for promotional actions. All the other services mentioned earlier allow you to monetize your blog or web site. Some share a portion of their revenue as well. So, if you want to make some money on the side, these services will provide you with the possibility to do so. WordPress doesn't allow you to build blogs just for Search Engine Optimization and I quote: We have a very low tolerance for blogs created purely for Search Engine Optimization or commercial purposes, machine-generated blogs, and will continue to nuke them. So if that's what you're interested in, WordPress is not for you. A self-hosted solution would be much more appropriate for you; suitable hosts can be found at http://www.wordpress.org/ hosting. Also see the following text taken from http://support.wordpress.com/advertising: This might be just one of the reasons that Google loves WORDPRESS.COM blogs. So how is it possible to use WORDPRESS.COM to promote your website? Actually, you don't. On this service you are not going the promote your site in a way that you can do on the other services. On WORDPRESS.COM you truly build a blog or site containing pages with true value to the visitors of that blog. You can create an About page where you put a link to your main website and in that way show the readers where to get more information. You can also put a link to your website in the link section (Blogroll) together with a few other relevant links that contain valid information. Blogging on WordPress and your ranking If you cannot promote your web site in a big way then what is the point of creating a blog on WORDPRESS.COM? A blog on WordPress can rank highly for the topic that you are blogging about and will give you some SEO love through those rankings. What is more important is the fact that you can take a special topic from your main web site's topic and create a blog around that. If you write your blog posts well and start to rank on that topic you will be seen as an authority on that topic and people will want to know more about you. That is the main reason to invest time to blog on WORDPRESS.COM to be recognized as an authority in your field of expertise. As you took only one topic out of all the topics that your site is about, you can do it again for another topic as well. You could also see these blogs as a collection of topic silos that create an array of highly related web sites that point to yours. This kind of link building takes time, and a lot of it! Is it worth it? Yes most certainly, and in more ways than one. With blogging you can achieve the following: An authority status if you do it right More traffic to your web site Better rankings in the search engines More insight into what the visitors of your web site are looking for To interact with other people having interest in the same topic as you Fun in writing and that will reflect on your site as you want to create more content on that site as well There is also a downside that you have to consider—it takes time away from building content on your main site and you have to cover more locations to maintain in the beginning. If you use that blog to write some timeless quality content on a niche part of your main site you will find out that you can stop maintaining those blogs after a short period of time. Remember, these are valid blogs to build incoming links to your main site! Digging deeper into WORDPRESS.COM blogs Creating a blog on WordPress is also very simple, go to WORDPRESS.COM and get a blog. Wait! Don't go yet! You need a few guidelines to start. Your initial user account name is going to be the first part of your URL, so name it right and remember, you cannot use a "-" in your username. My first account was seo4joomla so what I got was seo4joomla.wordpress.com. When you are logged in to WORDPRESS.COM and you type in the URL with a new keyword that you want (if it is not taken); you will get the option to add that blog to your account so that you can manage all of your WordPress.COM blogs from one place. Think about the title of your blog, if you want to change it later you can do that in the settings panel. Once you have your new blog, start cleaning. Delete the sample post and the comment along with it. Delete all the links in the blogroll (unless you are going to write about WordPress). Change the base post category from Uncategorized to a relevant topic name. Change the name of the links category from Blogroll to your most relevant keyword. Delete the About page and create a new one with the keywords of your blog in the title. That way your URL (page slug in WordPress) is containing the same keywords. Choose a nice theme layout that fits your topic, and if possible use a customized header. Using a customized header will give your site a slightly different look from the other WORDPRESS.COM web sites. Change the tagline in the general settings and start writing the way you do on your web site!   Using free blogging services As you saw, there are several blogging platforms and free web site building platforms that you can use to promote your web site. There are a lot more out there on the Internet, but you need to look for the ones that rank well in the search engines before you put your valued time into building a linking "empire". These services are free of charge and sometimes live on the revenue that comes from the blog content they host. If you don't want to be on such a platform where there are advertisements around your writing, don't use them. If you are afraid that you can lose your blog on such sites look for a way to make backups (for example, on WORDPRESS.COM you can use the Export function). How to minimize your blog writing time Keeping content fresh and up-to-date on all the blogs that you build is not that difficult. If you focus on blogging on your own web site, you should try to integrate the RSS Feed from your web site into those blog pages. RSS Feeds are the best possible automatic way of updating one-to-many, so use it to your advantage. Using your best content for link building Use the best articles from your web site to get into the picture of social bookmarking web sites. Find the most visited pages and the pages with the greatest number of comments, if you have a blog on your Joomla! site. Go to bookmarking sites and bookmark your pages using your own account. There are a lot of bookmarking web sites that you can use, just make sure you send your bookmarks to at least the following: Delicous Digg Reddit Newsvine Bloglines StumbleUpon These are some of the most influential ones that count towards your search engine ranking and are a great way to get traffic. Traffic from this kind of web site will come in bursts and mostly will not span a longer time period than a few days. The real power lies in the long term effect. Writing articles for links If you like writing about your passion, you can consider writing articles and submitting them to article publishing services. People are always looking for information and, if you can provide that to them in a smart way, it will help you to gain recognition as a field expert. You don't have to write long articles, but they must be informative and should give the reader an answer to a question they might have. Write those articles and submit them to services such as: www.thewhir.com www.ideamarketers.com www.goarticles.com www.ezinearticles.com Each of those services have their own "Terms of Service" that you should read before submitting your articles. They have their quality guidelines as well. The length of the article might need to be of a certain minimum or maximum number of characters. You might not be permitted to link deeper into your web site than the top level. Get that information before you choose a service to work with. Depending on the number of webmasters that will use your articles to republish, you could get a lot more incoming links from just a few well-written articles. What you should NOT do is take an old article from your site and send it as an article to be republished. That could backfire, as the services mentioned have a clause in their "Terms of Service" stating that the article is original and not published before. You should really not republish an already submitted article on your own web site, it could give your site a duplicate content penalty as that article will be published all over the Internet (with your link in it). An alternative could be that you publish some of your articles combined and rewritten into an e-book in PDF format that you give away for free from your web site.