Tip: Be Administrator

Programming is full of ambiguous surprises :D You keep writing code, or configuring your environment just to be faced by a mysterious error message that takes you into a long cycle of search - try - search...etc

Okay, enough chitchat...

I was developing something against Azure Storage. For some reasons, I wanted to have my Azure Development Storage Emulator running on other machine than the development machine...

Well, that's pretty easy... Here are a couple of posts telling you how to do so:

• Configuring Azure development storage for team development scenarios
• Reaching Azure Development Fabriq from a remote machine

You just need to change the (127.0.0.1) in the "DSService.exe.config" file to the {IP Address} assigned to your network card. After starting the development storage service you will be able to let other computers on the network do work on this emulator.

However, you may get into problems running the service after modifying the config file! And that's my case.. I kept seeing "Access Denied" error message when trying to start the storage emulator :)

After some search, I dropped into this question on msdn. The answer was telling that the fabric and storage services can't listen on IPs other than the 127.0.0.1 for some reasons.. One of these reasons was:

Both of these are likely to be run as administrator...

So, I thought to use the "Run As Administrator" option in Windows. And YESS, It Worked :)

If you still have problems reaching the server after getting the storage emulator running and listening on the machine assigned IP, you may check your firewall settings.

Good Luck!

Innovative Maze Solving with Mathematica

A typical data structures assignment involves using stacks/queues to generate/solve mazes. This is usually performed by variants of BFS or DFS. As many of my students are currently busy with this task, I thought of presenting them a number of nontraditional solutions incorporating a real world example and some advanced techniques.

There has been a series of posts on a this problem on the Wolfram blog attacking the hedge maze at the Blenheim Palace. The solutions presented started with processing the aerial image acquired from Bing Maps, and proceeded to explore a variety of techniques from standard graph theory to a twisted application of topology.

The series progressed as follows:

• aMAZEing Image Processing in Mathematica


• Navigating the Blenheim Maze


• The Battle of the Marlborough Maze at Blenheim Palace Continues


• Retreat from Blenheim

Hope you find it interesting!

Best Downloads for Linux

As a follower of the very popular productivity website Lifehacker.com, today I just stumbled on one of their most recent posts. The post, titled Lifehacker Pack for Linux: Our List of the Best Linux Downloads lists and describes a number of free/open source software products that can be downloaded and installed on Linux. The post mentions that these are mostly for the Ubuntu distribution, but many of these applications have releases for other Linux distributions as well.

I personally find this list to be very useful, since it includes many applications that one would need in everyday's work/life, and many of them are not included by default with Linux. These include: web browser (Firefox, Chrome), email client (Thunderbird), office suite (OpenOffice.org), text editor (gedit), and many more. The list even provides direct links to download these applications or to directly install them in Ubuntu.

The Arabic CLIP for VS2010 is RTW!

Caption Language Interface Pack

The Arabic CLIP for VS2010 is live!

I am very pleased to announce the release of Arabic Captions Language Interface Pack v. 2.0 for Visual Studio 2010. Now, we are able to help Arabic developers use the Visual Studio 2010 in their own language, and CLIP is the first step in the roadmap to have better localization solution in the future. The Arabic CLIP project has been done in close collaboration with local communities. It has been translated by جامعة الإسكندرية - كلية الهندسة - جمهورية مصر العربية (University) and reviewed by local MVPs.

Click here to download

background information

The Captions Language Interface Pack is a tool that uses a tooltip caption and/or a small discrete dialog to display translations for user interface items. The user hovers with the mouse on top of the Visual Studio UI elements to see an instant translation. This release includes translations for following VS2010 components:

VS IDE, Deployment, Web Developer, VB, CSharp, VC, VSData, WPF Designer, Team Dev Debugger, Express features and help viewer.

Click here for more information about CLIP(English)

Click here for more information about CLIP(Arabic)

THANKS TO ALL THE TEAMS WHO ENABLED THIS RELEASE

This project is a great cross-team collaboration and partnership with many teams and people involved. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your contribution!

Community Partners:

جامعة الإسكندرية - كلية الهندسة - جمهورية مصر العربية (University):

Professor Mohamed S. Abougabal,

Professor Amin Shoukry,

Professor Saleh Shehaby

and student team:

Doaa Medhat Ashour

Evronia Azer

Fadwa Ahmad Ezzat

Kareem El-Sayed Khamis

Mohamed Adly Abd El-Fatah

Rasha El-Sayed Ali Mahmoud

Samia ELsayed megahed hafez

Sammar Moustafa Ibrahim Sayed

Arabic MVPs who contributed to linguistic review

Microsoft partner teams:

Local MS Office: Dina Lasheen, Baransel Dogan (Metis), Ahmed Aboulmagd, Ammar Abuthuraya, Moatasem Ayyash

STBI ATI developers: Lixin Song (WUXI HISOFT SERVICES LIMITED), Karsten Schneider (P2 SOLUTIONS GROUP LLC)

Office CLIP team: Jonathan Duncan, Seamus Browne, Andre McQuaid, Colin Fitzpatrick

STBI CPE team member:

Cristina Nardini, Lynne Dong, Maria Jesus Perez Perez (Lionbridge), Jae-Young Lee (AdaQuest, Inc.), Peter Khumara (Comsys Information Technology)

Cheers,

Lynne Dong

Program Manager

STBI CPE