Famed for songs such as Killing Me Softly and the first time I ever saw your face, this is truly going to be a night to remember.

The event is a fundraising event for the Bergen Catholic Basketball team with all proceeds of the event going to the team.

For more information check out : Bergen Catholic Fundraiser 2011 on Facebook

The night will as mentioned feature Roberta giving a live performance as well as local bands and acts.

So if you live in or around New Jersey, AND are wondering what you can do on Saturday night 26th November 2011, AND fancy seeing a Motown legend perform live whilst supporting a worthy cause, then hopefully I’ll see you there!

Aerial view of York

There certainly is no shortage of attractions in the city itself, from the physically and spiritually massive soul touching York Minster Cathedral to the nostalgic streets with the narrow streets and overhanging building you really feel in touch with the history deeply embedded in the city, to the bustling nightlife and plentiful array of pubs, restaurants and clubs.

Letters Of Distinction, a family run, independant Letting agent in York have created an excellent guide to Finding a flat in York which should certainly convince you to move if you have any doubts.

• UK Property Management
• RealEstate4 UK Property Management
• IRealEstate UK Property Management
• Real Estate Yellow
• RealEstateBig
• http://www.directoryrealestate.com/international/united-kingdom/property-management
• http://www.netsavvyagent.com/international/united-kingdom
• http://www.linkre.com/international-real-estate/united-kingdom/property-management/
• http://www.realestatekey.com/international-real-estate/united-kingdom/property-management
• http://www.realestateaward.com/international-real-estate/united-kingdom/property-management
• http://www.realestateregional.com/europe/united-kingdom/property-management
• http://www.realestatebest.com/index.php?sid=317390760&t=sub_pages&cat=4267

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices are a routine part of my daily tasks and as a result, there is a variety of tools and resources which I make use of to accomplish these tasks. Without a doubt it has taken me quite some time to decide just which of these tools are worthy of a place in my virtual toolbox and which have been discarded in favour of an alternative product.

When one engages in an SEO campaign, determining and understanding the rankings of a web site is of paramount important, without this fundamental data it is difficult to track the performance of your campaign. You could argue you can simply track a campaigns performance by a conversion rate, e.g. how many new customers your client is receiving or products being sold via their website but in order to carry out optimization you have to know what phrases are performing well, which are not and how changes made to a website are affecting these rankings.

There are many tools out there which will gather data for the rankings at the time of generation however to accurately track the success or failure or your efforts the historic data must also be available for you to review the campaign over time.

Typically many applications expect this to be a manual process whereby the data is first exported in the CSV (Comma Seperated Values) format prior to then being imported into Excel or another Spreadsheet application for data analysis. Charting this data for visual representation would then require further manual intervention.

These manual methods are further complicated when we also decide that we want to track our rankings on multiple search engines. Tracking the results simply on Google, Bing or Yahoo is becoming less of standard practice as vertical search is becoming more popular both by users as well as being pushed upon us by the search engines. Local business & service results should also be taken into consideration on the ‘local’ search engines, such as Google maps or places and Yahoo Listings. If like me, you are marketing products that not only are aimed at one geographic location, you may want to also track results on country specific search engines such as Google.co.uk in addition to Google.com.

The manual approach of tracking these results, exporting the data and then importing it into various Excel workbooks is nothing short of an administrative nightmare, and tends to deter the SEO practitioner from regularly gathering and managing these statistics, which of course without this information will harm the SEO campaign and lead to an unhappy client.

This is where Advanced Web Ranking fits into the puzzle perfectly, it is made quite clear very soon when you start to use that product that it has been well thought out, addresses the common requirements of the modern search engine optimizer and I am pleased to see also that the product is regularly updated. By regular updates I am not hinting there are high numbers of bugs that require frequent updates, this is not Windows I am referring to. An example would be new search engine definitions, for a massive variety of countries are regularly added.

The ability to run your campaigns for different projects, with different search engines and of course different keywords and phrases all from a single product is itself in my opinion a standard set of features that all ranking tools should adhere to, however the features that initially caught my attention and drew me to the Advanced Web Rankings product was the reporting feature.

I really had been surprised at the sheer lack of products available for search engine optimizers that include any reporting features, at least of sufficient quality. As I have mentioned and hinted at already, the manual process of generating data and manipulating spreadsheets to present data should these days be a technique to be found only in the history books, but many site rank reviewing products still do not include this feature.

Ultimately the onus is on us as professional SEO’s to keep our clients well informed and up to date with the performance of the campaign. After all they are paying us for the service so a product that allows us to create attractive reports ready to distribute to our clients with the click of the mouse is a must have tool.

Although I haven’t used it myself, Advanced Web Ranking provides an automation feature that allows you to schedule automatic updating of the keyword and phrase rankings and once complete, have the reports automatically generated and distributed.

I feel I must of course also point out any issues I personally have found with the product and the only niggling problem I have found, isn’t really a problem but more of a feature request anyway. To improve the readability of the keyword rankings in chart form, Advance Web Rankings allows the user to specify a unique colour for each keyword. What I would love to see is the ability to reset all colours and have a different colour automatically assigned for each keyword. As when you have a campaign with many different keywords, if they all share the same colour it can make differentiating the keywords in the charts quite hard, you can specify the colours yourself, but a quick reset function would be great.

There are many other features provided in this tool which I fully intend to investigate further when time permits, such as a keyword research tool for example, but what I can say for certain is that for the features I required at the time, Advance Web Rankings does a great job and for the reporting and rank tracking alone deserves a spot on any SEO’s shelf who is serious about providing a good service to their clients.

For more information on Advanced Web Ranking, visit their website at http://www.advancedwebranking.com/

Intent i = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW,
Uri.parse("google.navigation:q=Hemsworth+Pontefract"));
startActivity(i);

I don’t want to go into the why’s of using grails when there are already many other frameworks out there but for me, I love Java for its power, vast number of libraries and community support available. I also love Ruby On Rails, for its convention over configuration benefits so when I discovered Grails is a kind of merge of the two, it quickly gained my interest. There are many cool features to Grails but to pinpoint a couple, not having to go through all the initial setting up of Spring, Hibernate, JPA etc is a real time saver, and how it allows you to use it’s own Groovy code alongside pure Java is something in my opinion both very clever and incredible beneficial to us web developers.

My target for these tutorials are not just for beginners to Grails but for anyone looking for quick how-to instructions to use Grails with various Ajax features such as displaying data in a jQuery grid, ajax filtering of data.

I do make the assumption however that you already know the basics of a grails based application and can already create, modify and deploy projects. I also don’t want to insist on any particular IDE for working on these tutorials, although I will be using IntelliJ’s IDEA IDE, Netbeans also has great Grails support but at the time of writing does not offer gsp tag completion. I cannot offer any other comment on the others as I am not familiar with Grails support in the other main contenders.

I also cannot recommend enough the combination of using Firefox as your browser with the Firebug plugin installed so you can keep an eye of your AJAX calls from your page to server. Firebug is a great tool that allows you to easily see what you are sending and what you are receiving.

Anyway enough introduction, let’s move onto the first tutorial of my series.

Grails, JQuery and the Jquery Grid.

In this tutorial I aim to show you how to use the jQuery Grid to present data to your users.

I am using Grails version 1.2 alongside MySQL database.

I will setup a mock up of a customer database for this example, so first you will need to create a new Grails project and setup your datasource details so you are all setup ready to go.

The first step after you’ve created your project and defined your datasource is to create a new Grails Domain class called Customer. I’ve kept it simple, but with enough fields for us to create and display several columns in a grid.

class Customer {
  static constraints = {
    firstName(blank:false,maxSize:50)
    lastName(blank:false,maxSize:50)
    age(nullable:true)
    emailAddress(nullable:true)
  }

  String firstName
  String lastName
  Integer age
  String emailAddress
}

Once your class is defined, you should go ahead and generate the customer controller and corresponding views.

Now would be a good time to add some test data so we have something we can use to manipulate our views. A handy shortcut to create test data here is to edit the bootstrap groovy file so we can create some data at the time our application is launched. This is a technique I often use to preload testdata.

class BootStrap {

def init = { servletContext ->
  // if we have an empty customer database,
  // create some test data
  if (Customer.count() == 0) {
    new Customer(
      firstName:'John', lastName:'Smith',
      age:27,
      emailAddress:'john@somewhere.com'
    ).save()

    new Customer(
      firstName:'Frank', lastName:'Malone',
      age:37,
      emailAddress:'frank@somewhere.com'
    ).save()

    new Customer(
      firstName:'Dave', lastName:'Brown',
      age:34,
      emailAddress:'dave@somewhere.com'
    ).save()

    new Customer(
      firstName:'Barney', lastName:'Rubble',
      age:44,
      emailAddress:'barney@somewhere.com'
    ).save()
  }
}

def destroy = { }
}

I will also change the urlmappings so when we launch the application our default page is the customer index view :

class UrlMappings {
  static mappings = {
    "/$controller/$action?/$id?"{
      constraints {
      // apply constraints here
    }
  }
  "/"(controller:"customer",action:"index")
  "500"(view:'/error')
  }
}

So try running the application now and you should see the default presented list on the customer page. So far so good.

Before we create the necessary adjustments to use a jQuery grid, you will first need to download the required javascript librarys as well css styles for your grid from the following links:

jQuery latest release

jQuery Grid latest release – contains the necessary javascript and css (ui.grid.css). Copy the ui.grid.css to the web-app/css folder.

jQuery UI css themes : theme download – this is a great site that allows you to visual different UI themes for jquery widgets/plugins before downloading the necessary css/images.

I download the ‘min’ versions of the javascript librarys to cut down download time for the user. jquery.jqGrid.min.js and jquery-1.3.2.min.js both go into the web-app/js folder.
You theme will be downloaded as a zip file, you will need to copy the jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.min.js script into your applications js folder and the contents of the css folder go into your web-app/css folder. For the purpose of this tutorial I downloaded the ui-lightness theme.

So now I want to switch from the default list view, to a jQuery Grid to present our customer data.

Edit your Customer/list.gsp, and perform the following.

1. Include our new javascript librarys by adding the includes into the head section. Our css style sheet should also be reference by also adding to the head section. Your head section should then contain the following:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="${resource(dir:'css',file:'main.css')}" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="${resource(dir:'css',file:'ui.jqgrid.css')}" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="${resource(dir:'css/ui-lightness',file:'jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.css')}" />
<g:javascript library="jquery-1.3.2.min"/>
<g:javascript library="jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.min"/>
<g:javascript library="grid.locale-en"/>
<g:javascript library="jquery.jqGrid.min"/>

2. Remove the tag and contents of

tag as well as the paginator tag that immediately follows it.3. I usually create page fragments for my jquery specific grids but for this example we will just place the code directly into the main list page.

You have to create a table element to hold our grid, as well as div element to go at the end of the table to display record count, paginator.

Insert the following jquery Grid definition. This defines a very basic grid which will be rendered when the page loads in the browser. Notice the url parameter, url:’jq_customer_list’. This is the url from which the grid will load its data. I have also specified the format of the data will be JSON. These parameters lead us to our next stage, we need to create the necessary function in our Customer controller that will return the data.

<!-- table tag will hold our grid -->
<table id="customer_list" class="scroll jqTable" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"></table>
<!-- pager will hold our paginator -->
<div id="customer_list_pager" class="scroll" style="text-align:center;"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
/* when the page has finished loading.. execute the follow */
$(document).ready(function () {
  jQuery("#customer_list").jqGrid({
  url:'jq_customer_list',
  datatype: "json",
  colNames:['First Name','Last Name','Age','Email Address','id'],
  colModel:[
    {name:'firstName'},
    {name:'lastName'},
    {name:'age'},
    {name:'email'},
    {name:'id'}
  ],
  pager: jQuery('#customer_list_pager'),
  viewrecords: true,
  gridview: true
  });
});
// ]]></script>

4. Create the jq_customer_list action in the Customer controller to respond to the grids request for JSON data.

As we are returning JSON type data, you must add an import to the top of the controller : import grails.converters.JSON

Note that the order of the fields must match the order in which we defined the order in the colModel and colNames in the grid definition. The minimal code to return the data is as follows:

def jq_customer_list = {
  def customers = Customer.list()
  def jsonCells = customers.collect {
    [cell: [it.firstName,
    it.lastName,
    it.age,
    it.emailAddress], id: it.id]
  }
  def jsonData= [rows: jsonCells]
  render jsonData as JSON
}

5. Try and run your application, if all succeeded you should be presented with your customer data in a nice looking grid.

Browser showing customer list presented in jquery grid

The entire project for this tutorial can be downloaded here.

In my next tutorial I will take what we have done so far, and implement ajax pagination and table sorting when the user clicks on a column header.

Interested in learning more grails?  Head over and join up at the grails forum

The problem is releated to Grails running out of connections to MySQL over time, & not freeing stale connections.  I believe it happens when there hasn’t been activity for over 8 hours, which in my case happened everyday due to the overnight period.

So what we should be doing is managing our own database connection pool.   I use Tomcat 6 on my production servers so the following solution is specifically for tomcat 6.

What we need to do is first change our application configuration so it sets up a database connection pool through tomcat.  And secondly we need to tweak the configuration so that we validate the connection is present periodically and removed stale connections.

The first thing then is to define the connection pool in <your application dir>/web-app/META-INF/context.xml

A typical context.xml would be :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Context path="/MyApplication">
<Resource
 auth="Container"
 driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
 maxActive="20"
 maxIdle="10"
 maxWait="-1"
 removeAbandoned="true"
 name="jdbc/myAppsPool"
 type="javax.sql.DataSource"
 url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/Database_Name"
 username="user"
 password="password"
 validationQuery="SELECT '1'"
 removeAbandonedTimeout="60"
 logAbandoned="true"/>
</Context>

This alone will create the necessary database connection pool when you application is deployed.

All thats left to do now is to change your datasource configuration to refer to the connection pool so in your DataSource.groovy file, locate the production section and alter it to refer to the new pool, e.g :

production {
  dataSource {
    pooled = false
    dbCreate = "update"
    jndiName = "java:comp/env/jdbc/myAppsPool"
  }
}

That should solve any of those DataAccessResourceFailureExceptions from now on.[

Both formats are based on Decimal coordinates.

Latitude range is from -90 to +90

Longitude from -180 to +180

For Latitude the regex pattern is

(-?[0-8]?[0-9](\.\d*)?)|-?90(\.[0]*)?

For Longitude use

(-?([1]?[0-7][1-9]|[1-9]?[0-9])?(\.\d*)?)|-?180(\.[0]*)?

This will also restrict the decimal values being > 0 for both +- 90′ and +- 180

You have an application that uses Simple MAPI (from Outlook) to send Faxes.  The I.T. department then introduce SBS / Exchange Server into the company to manage users email accounts. Now Faxing no longer works.You get a NDR everytime you try and send.   Strange though as you can still send directly through outlook so your software gets the blame.

Sample Non Delivery Report:

  Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject:  E-MAIL FROM XXXXXXXX
       Sent:     10/25/2008 10:21

The
following recipient(s) could not be reached:

       '0XXXXXXXXXXXX' on
10/25/2008 10:21
The message could not be delivered because the
recipient's
destination email system is unknown or invalid. Please check the
address
and try again, or contact your system administrator to
verify
connectivity to the email system of the recipient.

<sbs.domain #5.1.2>

The Solution:

The problem is due to Exchange attempting to send the fax BEFORE the Fax transport gets a chance to.

To fix this, you need to make a registry modification on each workstation affected.

So in REGEDIT navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\MailSettings

and ADD a new DWORD key named StrictAccountOrder   

Set the value to 1

You may have to restart Outlook for the change to take affect but that should solve the problem.  Outlook will correctly identify the Fax transport before trying to send the Fax via Exchange.

Further reading can be found here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319820

1. I have a seperate mailbox I access explicitly for the purpose of holding Spam, so when my personal junk email folders have a significant amount of real spam in which dont have the ***SPAM*** mark, I move them over to the Spam mailbox.

2. Logging into my mail server as root, I can then proceed to the mailbox store, and inform spamassassin that everything in there should be treat as spam.   It’s always a good idea to double check the mail though !

3. Command I use to inform SpamAssassin is the sa-learn command :

 sa-learn –spam –progress <path-to-spam-mailbox>