TinyPic Images Unavailable, Broken Links, Bought out by PhotoBucket

UPDATE: Old images uploaded on TinyPic are now back up live! Thanks TinyPic!

If you are shocked that all your images uploaded on TinyPic have suddenly disappeared, then the reason is because TinyPic has seemingly been bought out by PhotoBucket. Unfortunately, they did not have the courtesy to at least prevent the broken links, as several blogs on the internet are highly dependent on such pictures uploaded on their servers. As stated on the TinyPic site:

Tinypic is no longer accepting uploads from international locations, and links are turned off. If you have content on Tinypic, you can still view the URLs and the content, but only on Tinypic. To upload, share, or link content, please go to Photobucket.com to register an account. You will need to upload your content again to your Photobucket account, but you will be able to share and link your images and videos. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope that you enjoy Photobucket, our premier image and video site. Click here for more details.

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Visual Web Developer Express 2010 Installation Error or Stalls

Using Microsoft's Web Platform Installer, you may run across issues when trying to install Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express 2010. If you have tried rebooting your PC and tried to install again via Web PI, and the installation still fails, then try downloading this alternate installer instead:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/D/6/0D600544-AD1A-45FB-8D40-838EBF3C03EC/vwd_web.exe
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Version Control Systems Comparison

Some of the most popular version control systems / source code management software tools include Subversion (SVN), Microsoft Visual Source Safe (VSS), Mercurial, Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), and Perforce. Embedded below is a fairly detailed comparison (compare & contrast, pros & cons) of these systems:




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SharePoint Calendar - Color Coding

The default SharePoint calendar does not come with event highlighting and color coding.

To fix this issue:

Calendar event highlighting and color coding functionality will be implemented by adding two columns to hold the background and foreground color values and another column to hold the display HTML code. A hidden web part will also be incorporated to translate the code from a literal string to actual HTML.

Details & Directions:


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SharePoint Calendar - Prevent Double Booking

The default SharePoint calendar does not come with double booking prevention.

To fix the issue:

Calendar double booking detection and prevention functionality will be implemented by first adding a column for the event/location—in this case, the Meeting Room. Views for different meeting rooms will also be created. A new class library will then be incorporated, which will include custom event handlers for ItemAdding and ItemUpdating events.

Details & Directions:



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C++ Console Progress Bar

Given the percentage complete, the following piece of code can print a text progress bar for a console application along with an animatedly "spinning" slash to show that the program is still running.

// this function prints progress bar
// pre: percentage complete
// post: progress bar
void progressbar(int percent)
{
static stringstream bars;
static int x = 0;
string slash[4];
slash[0] = "\\";
slash[1] = "-";
slash[2] = "/";
slash[3] = "|";
bars << "|";
cout << "\r"; // carriage return back to beginning of line
cout << bars.str() << " " << slash[x] << " " << percent << " %"; // print the bars and percentage
x++; // increment to make the slash appear to rotate
if(x == 4)
x = 0; // reset slash animation
}

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DARPA National Cyber Range (NCR) Proposal / Idea

In response to the DARPA National Cyber Range (NCR) project, the following diagram serves as a basic proposal/idea to accomplish the task of creating a virtual cyber "firing range" to enable a revolution in the nation’s ability to conduct cyber operations and providing a persistent virtual "range" for cyber warfare experiments and tactic/strategy implementation.

Utilizing several clusters of powerful Sun Microsystems x4600 M2 servers equipped with VMWare ESX virtualization platform to allow for the virtualization of a variety of operating systems, applications, and run-time environments, large testbeds can be segregated to perform various cyber defense/offense experiments. Furthermore, a super database can serve as a source of data/statistics for human emulation according to foreign statistics and intelligence gathered regarding a foreign target's user base habits and computer system/software specifications.

By David Poarch




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