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• Impressions on jQuery Mobile

  - by Jeff

  For the uninitiated, jQuery Mobile is a sweet little client framework that turns regular HTML into something more touch and mobile friendly. It results in a user interface that has bigger targets, rounded corners and simple skinning capability. When it was announced that ASP.NET MVC 4 would include support for a mobile-sensitive view engine, offering up alternate views for clients that fit the mobile profile, I was all over that. Combined with jQuery Mobile, it brought a chance to do some experimentation. I blitzed through the views in POP Forums and converted them all to mobile views. (For the curious, this first pass can be found here on CodePlex, while a more recent update that uses RC 2 of jQuery Mobile v1.1.0 is running on the demo site.) Initially, it was kind of a mixed bag. The jQuery demo site also acts as documentation, and it’s reasonably complete. I had no problem getting up a lot of basic views quickly, splitting out portions of some pages as subpages that they quickly load in. The default behavior in the older version was to slide the pages in, which looked a little weird when you were using a back button. They’ve since changed it so the default transition is a fade in/out. Because you’re dealing with Web pages, I don’t think anyone is really under the illusion that you’re not using a native app, so I don’t know that this matters. I’ve tested extensively on iPad and Windows Phone, and to be honest, I’ve encountered a lot of issues. On Windows Phone, there is some kind of inconsistency that prevents the proper respect for the viewport settings. The text background on text fields (for labeling) doesn’t work, either. On both platforms, certain in-DOM page navigation links work only half of the time. Is this an issue of user error? Probably, but that’s what’s frustrating about it. Most of what you accomplish with this framework involves decorating various elements with CSS classes. There isn’t any design-time safety to speak of to make sure that you’re doing it right. I think the issues can be overcome, but there are some trade-offs to consider. The first is download size. Yes, the scripts and CSS do get cached, but that first hit will cost nearly 40k for the mobile parts. That’s still a lot when you’re on some crappy AT&T EDGE network, or hotel Wi-Fi. Then you have to ask yourself, do you really want your app to look like it’s native to iOS? I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, because consistent UI is good, but you will end up feeling a whole lot of sameness, and maybe you don’t want that. I did some experimentation to try and Metro-ize the jQuery Mobile theme, and it’s kind of a mixed bag. It mostly works, but you get some weirdness on badges and with buttons that I’m not crazy about. It probably just means you need to keep tweaking. At this point, I’m a little torn about whether or not I’ll use it for POP Forums or one of the sites I’m working on. The benefits are pretty strong, but figuring out where I’m doing it wrong is proving a little time consuming.

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• Comparing Isis, Google, and Paypal

  - by David Dorf

  Back in 2010 I was sure NFC would make great strides, but here we are two years later and NFC doesn't seem to be sticking. The obvious reason being the chicken-and-egg problem.  Retailers don't want to install the terminals until the phones support NFC, and vice-versa. So consumers continue to sit on the sidelines waiting for either side to blink and make the necessary investment.  In the meantime, EMV is looking for a way to sneak into the US with the help of the card brands. There are currently three major solutions that are battling in the marketplace.  All three know that replacing mag-stripe alone is not sufficient to move consumers.  Long-term it's the offers and loyalty programs combined with tendering that make NFC attractive. NFC solutions cross lots of barriers, so a strong partner system is required.  The solutions need to include the carriers, card brands, banks, handset manufacturers, POS terminals, and most of all lots of merchants.  Lots of coordination is necessary to make the solution seamless to the consumer. Google Wallet Google's problem has always been that only the Nexus phone has an NFC chip that supports their wallet.  There are a couple of additional phones out there now, but adoption is still slow.  They acquired Zavers a while back to incorporate digital coupons, but the the bulk of their users continue to be non-NFC.  They have taken an open approach by not specifying particular payment brands.  Google is piloting in San Francisco and New York, supporting both MasterCard PayPass and stored value. I suppose the other card brands may eventually follow.  There's no cost for consumers or merchants -- Google will make money via targeted ads. Isis Not long after Google announced its wallet, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile announced a joint venture called Isis.  They are in the unique position of owning the SIM in the phones they issue.  At first it seemed Isis was a vehicle for the carriers to compete with the existing card brands, but Isis later switched to a generic wallet that supports the major card brands.  Isis reportedly charges issuers a $5 fee per customer per year.  Isis will pilot this summer in Salt Lake City and Austin. PayPal PayPal, the clear winner in the online payment space beyond traditional credit cards, is trying to move into physical stores.  After negotiations with Google to provide a wallet broke off, PayPal decided to avoid NFC altogether, at least for now, and focus on payments without any physical card or phone.  By avoiding NFC, consumers don't need an NFC-enabled phone and merchants don't need a new reader.  Consumers must enter their phone number and PIN in the merchant's existing device, or they can enter their PIN in the PayPal inStore app running on their phone, then show the merchant a unique barcode which authorizes payment. Paypal is free for consumers and charges a fee for merchants.  Its not clear, at least to me, how PayPal handles fraudulent transactions and whether the consumer is protected. The wildcard is, of course, Apple.  Their mobile technologies set the standard, so incorporating NFC chips would certainly accelerate adoption of many payment solutions.  Their announcement today of the iOS Passbook is a step in the right direction, but stops short of handling payments. For those retailers that have invested in modern terminals, it seems the best strategy is to support all the emerging solutions and let the consumers choose the winner.

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• Oracle Retail Mobile Point-of-Service

  - by David Dorf

  When most people discuss mobile in retail, they immediately go to shopping applications.  While I agree the consumer side of mobile is huge, I believe its also important to arm store associates with mobile tools.  There are around a dozen major roll-outs of mobile POS to chain retailers, and all have been successful.  This does not, however, signal the demise of traditional registers.  Retailers will adopt mobile POS slowly and reduce the number of fixed registers over time, but there's likely to be a combination of both for the foreseeable future.  Even Apple retains at least one fixed register in every store, you just have to know where to look. The business benefits for mobile POS are pretty straightforward: 1. Faster checkout.  Walmart's CFO recently reported that for every second they shave off the average transaction time, they can potentially save $12M a year in labor.  I think its more likely that labor will be redeployed to enhance the customer experience. 2. Smarter associates.  The sales associates on the floor need the same access to information that consumers have, if not more.  They need ready access to product details, reviews, inventory, etc. to meet consumer expectations.  In a recent study, 40% of consumers said a savvy store associate can impact their final product selection more than a website. 3. Lower costs.  Mobile POS hardware (iPod touch + sled) costs about a fifth of fixed registers, not to mention the reclaimed space that can be used for product displays. But almost all Mobile POS solutions can claim those benefits equally.  Where there's differentiation is on the technical side.  Oracle recently announced availability of the Oracle Retail Mobile Point-of-Service, and it has three big technology advantages in the market: 1. Portable. We used a popular open-source component called PhoneGap that abstracts the app from the underlying OS and hardware so that iOS, Android, and other platforms could be supported.  Further, we used Web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript, which are commonly known by many programmers, as opposed to ObjectiveC which is more difficult to find.  The screen can adjust to different form-factors and sizes, just like you see with browsers.  In the future when a new, zippy device gets released, retailers will have the option to move to that device more easily than if they used a native app. 2. Flexible.  Our Mobile POS is free with the Oracle Retail Point-of-Service product.  Retailers can use any combination of fixed and mobile registers, and those ratios can change as required.  Perhaps start with 1 mobile and 4 fixed per store, then transition over time to 4 mobile and 1 fixed without any additional software licenses.  Our scalable solution supports lots of combinations. 3. Consistent.  Because our Mobile POS is fully integrated to our traditional POS, the same business logic is reused.  Third-party Mobile POS solutions often handle pricing, promotions, and tax calculations separately leading to possible inconsistencies within the store.  That won't happen with Oracle's solution. For many retailers, Mobile POS can lower costs, increase customer service, and generally enhance a consumer's in-store experience.  Apple led the way, but lots of other retailers are discovering the many benefits of adding mobile capabilities in their stores.  Just be sure to examine both the business and technology benefits so you get the most value from your solution for the longest period of time.

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• SQL Server IO handling mechanism can be severely affected by high CPU usage

  - by sqlworkshops

  Are you using SSD or SAN / NAS based storage solution and sporadically observe SQL Server experiencing high IO wait times or from time to time your DAS / HDD becomes very slow according to SQL Server statistics? Read on… I need your help to up vote my connect item – https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/744650/sql-server-io-handling-mechanism-can-be-severely-affected-by-high-cpu-usage. Instead of taking few seconds, queries could take minutes/hours to complete when CPU is busy.In SQL Server when a query / request needs to read data that is not in data cache or when the request has to write to disk, like transaction log records, the request / task will queue up the IO operation and wait for it to complete (task in suspended state, this wait time is the resource wait time). When the IO operation is complete, the task will be queued to run on the CPU. If the CPU is busy executing other tasks, this task will wait (task in runnable state) until other tasks in the queue either complete or get suspended due to waits or exhaust their quantum of 4ms (this is the signal wait time, which along with resource wait time will increase the overall wait time). When the CPU becomes free, the task will finally be run on the CPU (task in running state).The signal wait time can be up to 4ms per runnable task, this is by design. So if a CPU has 5 runnable tasks in the queue, then this query after the resource becomes available might wait up to a maximum of 5 X 4ms = 20ms in the runnable state (normally less as other tasks might not use the full quantum).In case the CPU usage is high, let’s say many CPU intensive queries are running on the instance, there is a possibility that the IO operations that are completed at the Hardware and Operating System level are not yet processed by SQL Server, keeping the task in the resource wait state for longer than necessary. In case of an SSD, the IO operation might even complete in less than a millisecond, but it might take SQL Server 100s of milliseconds, for instance, to process the completed IO operation. For example, let’s say you have a user inserting 500 rows in individual transactions. When the transaction log is on an SSD or battery backed up controller that has write cache enabled, all of these inserts will complete in 100 to 200ms. With a CPU intensive parallel query executing across all CPU cores, the same inserts might take minutes to complete. WRITELOG wait time will be very high in this case (both under sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats and sys.dm_os_wait_stats). In addition you will notice a large number of WAITELOG waits since log records are written by LOG WRITER and hence very high signal_wait_time_ms leading to more query delays. However, Performance Monitor Counter, PhysicalDisk, Avg. Disk sec/Write will report very low latency times.Such delayed IO handling also occurs to read operations with artificially very high PAGEIOLATCH_SH wait time (with number of PAGEIOLATCH_SH waits remaining the same). This problem will manifest more and more as customers start using SSD based storage for SQL Server, since they drive the CPU usage to the limits with faster IOs. We have a few workarounds for specific scenarios, but we think Microsoft should resolve this issue at the product level. We have a connect item open – https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/744650/sql-server-io-handling-mechanism-can-be-severely-affected-by-high-cpu-usage - (with example scripts) to reproduce this behavior, please up vote the item so the issue will be addressed by the SQL Server product team soon.Thanks for your help and best regards,Ramesh MeyyappanHome: www.sqlworkshops.comLinkedIn: http://at.linkedin.com/in/rmeyyappan

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• QCon: A practitioner-driven conference for Developers

  - by Ruma Sanyal

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} QCon [http://www.qconsf.com] started yesterday with the 3-day conference from Monday thru Wednesday, followed by 2 days of tutorials on Thursday and Friday. The conference features over 100 speakers in 6 concurrent tracks daily covering the most timely and innovative topics driving the evolution of enterprise software development today. Oracle and its Cloud Application Foundation products are well represented at this event. Yesterday, Joe Huang, responsible for outbound product management of Oracle's Mobile Application Development Framework (ADF Mobile), discussed hybrid mobile development with Java & HTML5 for iOS and Android. If you missed Joe’s session you can download the presentation from here. Michael Kovacs will be talking tomorrow about how to keep your application data highly available. Michael works with Oracle customers in a pre-sales role to help them understand when and how to use Oracle's technology to solve their business problems. His focus is on Java and technologies like WebLogic and Coherence. His session details can be found here. Lastly, we believe in having fun. So don’t miss the Oracle hospitality reception today at the Hyatt Atrium. See you there!   /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Any tips on getting hired as a software project manager straight out of college?

  - by MHarrison

  I graduated with a BS in compsci last September, and I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to find a job as a project manager ever since. I fell in love with software engineering (the formal practice behind it all, not just coding) in school, and I've dedicated the last 3-4 years of my life to learning everything I can about project management and gaining experience. I've managed several projects (with teams around 12 people) while in school, and I worked with my university's software engineering research lab. My résumé is also decent - I worked as a programmer before I went to school (I'm 27 now), and I did Google Summer of Code for 3 summers. I also have general "people management" experience via working as the photo editor for my university's newspaper for 2 years. My first problem with the job hunt is not getting enough interviews. I use careers.stackoverflow.com, which is awesome because I usually get contacted by non-HR people who know what they're talking about, but there's just not enough companies using it for me to get interviews on a regular basis. I've also tried sites like monster.com, and in a fit of desperation, I sent out no less than 60 applications to project management positions. I've gotten 3 automated rejection letters and that's it. At least careers.stackoverflow gets me a phone interview with 8/10 places I apply to. But the main (and extremely frustrating) problem is the matter of experience. I've successfully managed projects from start to finish (in my software engineering classes we had real customers come in with a real software need and we built it for them), but I've never had to deal with budgets and money (I know this is why HR people immediately turn me away). Most of these positions require 5+ years PM experience, and I've seen absurd things like 12+ years required. Interviews are also maddening. I've had so many places who absolutely loved me and I made it to the final round of interviews, and I left thinking things went extremely well and they'd consider me. However, when I check in with them a week later, they tell me "We really liked you and your qualifications are excellent, but we're hoping to find someone with more experience." The bad interviews I can understand - like the PM position that would have had me managing developers both locally and overseas - I had 3 interviews with them and the ENTIRE interview process was them asking me CS brainteasers and having me waste time on things like writing quicksort on paper or writing binary search trees. Even when I tried steering the discussion towards more relevant PM stuff, they gave me some vague generic replies and went back to the "We want to be Google/MS" crap. But when I have a GOOD interview, they say my "qualifications are excellent" but they want "more experience"...that makes me want to tear my hair out. What else can I DO? While I'm aiming for technically-involved PM positions (not just crunching budget numbers), I really don't want a straight development job because I like creating software from the very high-level vs. spending a lot of time debugging memory leaks. In fact, I can't even GET development positions that I'm qualified for because I make the mistake of telling them that my future career goals are as PM (which usually results in them saying something like "Well we already have PMs and this position isn't really set up to get you there." - which I take to mean "No, that's my job, stay away.") My apologies on the long rant, but I'm seriously hellbent on getting hired as a PM since it's both my career goal and the passion that keeps me awake at night. Any suggestions on what the heck else I can do? I'm currently writing a blog where I talk about my philosophies about software engineering, and I'm writing up specs for an iOS app which I will design, code, and show employers, but this takes an awful lot of time that I don't have.

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• Web Services Example - Part 1: Declarative

  - by Denis T

  In this edition of the ADF Mobile blog we'll tackle part 1 of our Web Service examples. In this posting we'll take a look at using a declarative SOAP Web Service. Getting the sample code: Just click here to download a zip of the entire project. You can unzip it and load it into JDeveloper and deploy it either to iOS or Android. Please follow the previous blog posts if you need help getting JDeveloper or ADF Mobile installed. Defining our Web Service: First off, we should mention that this sample code is using a public web service provided free by CDYNE Corporation that provides weather forecasts by zipcode. Sometimes this service goes down so please ensure you know it's up before reporting this example isn't working. Let's take a look at the web service.  We created this by using the "Web Service Data Control" from the New Gallery and using this link to this wsdl:  "http://wsf.cdyne.com/WeatherWS/Weather.asmx?WSDL"   This web service has several methods but we're interested in GetCityForecastByZIP which takes a single string parameter for the zipcode and the second method, GetWeatherInformation that enumerates all possible forecast descriptions and associated image URLs.  The latter we'll use in the next edition but we included it here for completeness. Defing the Application: After adding a feature to the adfmf-feature.xml file, we added a taskflow to host the application flow.  This comprises of a home screen with a list with items for each method in the web service, "Forecast by Zip" and "Weather Info".  In this application we've also decided to hide the navigation bar since there is only one feature in the application. Forecast by Zip: The "Forecast By ZIP" option first presents the user with a screen where they can enter a zipcode and when the "Search" button is tapped, it executes the GetCityForecastByZIP method.  This is done by binding an Action binding to that method. The easiest way to accomplish this is to just drag & drop the method from the Data Control palette to the AMX page and drop it as a button and let the framework hook it up for you.  There is an inputText component on the page that is bound to a pageFlowScope variable called "zip".  This is used as the parameter to the Action binding when it is executed.  Because the actionListener attribute of the commandButton executes the Web Service each time, we ensure that the method is invoked every time the button is clicked. Weather Info: Unlike the previous method, this time instead of explictly executing the web service method we are using deferred invocation.  What this means is that we will bind to the results of the method and the framework will execute the method when it the data is required to be rendered.  We do this by simply doing a drag & drop of the results of the GetWeatherInformation to the AMX page.  When the page is rendered and the bindings are resolved the framework invokes the method.  This executes the method only when it is needed and fills the Data Control provider.  Because we never re-execute the method, you can click from Home to Weather Info and back many times and the web service is only ever invoked once. Issues and Possible Improvements: One thing you will quickly realize with this example is that the error handling is done by the framework for you. For simple examples this is fine but for real applications you'll want to customize these error messages.  With the declarative invocation of web services, this is difficult.  This is one aspect we'll address in the second installment of the web service examples where we will show you how to do programmatic invocation which allows you better error handling. Another issue you will notice with this example is that we can enumerate the weather information but there isn't an easy way to use that information to show the corresponding description and image as part of the forecast results.  We'll show you how to do this in the next example.

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 2 - Password Lists

  - by Argenis

    Digital World, Digital Locks One of the biggest digital assets that any company has is its secrets. These include passwords, key rings, certificates, and any other digital asset used to protect another asset from tampering or unauthorized access. As a DBA, you are very likely to manage some of these assets for your company - and your employer trusts you with keeping them safe. Probably one of the most important of these assets are passwords. As you well know, the can be used anywhere: for service accounts, credentials, proxies, linked servers, DTS/SSIS packages, symmetrical keys, private keys, etc., etc. Have you given some thought to what you're doing to keep these passwords safe? Are you backing them up somewhere? Who else besides you can access them? Good-Ol’ Post-It Notes Under Your Keyboard If you have a password-protected Excel sheet for your passwords, I have bad news for you: Excel's level of encryption is good for your grandma's budget spreadsheet, not for a list of enterprise passwords. I will try to summarize the main point of this best practice in one sentence: You should keep your passwords on an encrypted, access and version-controlled, backed-up, well-known shared location that every DBA on your team is aware of, and maintain copies of this password "database" on your DBA's workstations. Now I have to break down that statement to you: - Encrypted: what’s the point of saving your passwords on a file that any Windows admin with enough privileges can read? - Access controlled: This one is pretty much self-explanatory. - Version controlled: Passwords change (and I’m really hoping you do change them) and version control would allow you to track what a previous password was if the utility you’ve chosen doesn’t handle that for you. - Backed-up: You want a safe copy of the password list to be kept offline, preferably in long term storage, with relative ease of restoring. - Well-known shared location: This is critical for teams: what good is a password list if only one person in the team knows where it is? I have seen multiple examples of this that work well. They all start with an encrypted database. Certainly you could leverage SQL Server's native encryption solutions like cell encryption for this. I have found such implementations to be impractical, for the most part. Enter The World Of Utilities There are a myriad of open source/free software solutions to help you here. One of my favorites is KeePass, which creates encrypted files that can be saved to a network share, Sharepoint, etc. KeePass has UIs for most operating systems, including Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Other solutions I've used before worth mentioning include PasswordSafe and 1Password, with the latter one being a paid solution – but wildly popular in mobile devices. There are, of course, even more "enterprise-level" solutions available from 3rd party vendors. The truth is that most of the customers that I work with don't need that level of protection of their digital assets, and something like a KeePass database on Sharepoint suits them very well. What are you doing to safeguard your passwords? Leave a comment below, and join the discussion! Cheers, -Argenis

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• Web Service Example - Part 3: Asynchronous

  - by Denis T

  In this edition of the ADF Mobile blog we'll tackle part 3 of our Web Service examples.  In this posting we'll take a look at firing the web service asynchronously and then filling in the UI when it completes.  This can be useful when you have data on the device in a local store and want to show that to the user while the application uses lazy loading from a web service to load more data. Getting the sample code: Just click here to download a zip of the entire project.  You can unzip it and load it into JDeveloper and deploy it either to iOS or Android.  Please follow the previous blog posts if you need help getting JDeveloper or ADF Mobile installed.  Note: This is a different workspace than WS-Part2 What's different? In this example, when you click the Search button on the Forecast By Zip option, now it takes you directly to the results page, which is initially blank.  When the web service returns a second or two later the data pops into the UI.  If you go back to the search page and hit Search it will again clear the results and invoke the web service asynchronously.  This isn't really that useful for this particular example but it shows an important technique that can be used for other use cases. How it was done 1)  First we created a new class, ForecastWorker, that implements the Runnable interface.  This is used as our worker class that we create an instance of and pass to a new thread that we create when the Search button is pressed inside the retrieveForecast actionListener handler.  Once the thread is started, the retrieveForecast returns immediately.  2)  The rest of the code that we had previously in the retrieveForecast method has now been moved to the retrieveForecastAsync.  Note that we've also added synchronized specifiers on both these methods so they are protected from re-entrancy. 3)  The run method of the ForecastWorker class then calls the retrieveForecastAsync method.  This executes the web service code that we had previously, but now on a separate thread so the UI is not locked.  If we had already shown data on the screen it would have appeared before this was invoked.  Note that you do not see a loading indicator either because this is on a separate thread and nothing is blocked. 4)  The last but very important aspect of this method is that once we update data in the collections from the data we retrieve from the web service, we call AdfmfJavaUtilities.flushDataChangeEvents().   We need this because as data is updated in the background thread, those data change events are not propagated to the main thread until you explicitly flush them.  As soon as you do this, the UI will get updated if any changes have been queued. Summary of Fundamental Changes In This Application The most fundamental change is that we are invoking and handling our web services in a background thread and updating the UI when the data returns.  This allows an application to provide a better user experience in many cases because data that is already available locally is displayed while lengthy queries or web service calls can be done in the background and the UI updated when they return.  There are many different use cases for background threads and this is just one example of optimizing the user experience and generating a better mobile application. 

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• Getting 2D Platformer entity collision Response Correct (side-to-side + jumping/landing on heads)

  - by jbrennan

  I've been working on a 2D (tile based) 2D platformer for iOS and I've got basic entity collision detection working, but there's just something not right about it and I can't quite figure out how to solve it. There are 2 forms of collision between player entities as I can tell, either the two players (human controlled) are hitting each other side-to-side (i. e. pushing against one another), or one player has jumped on the head of the other player (naturally, if I wanted to expand this to player vs enemy, the effects would be different, but the types of collisions would be identical, just the reaction should be a little different). In my code I believe I've got the side-to-side code working: If two entities press against one another, then they are both moved back on either side of the intersection rectangle so that they are just pushing on each other. I also have the "landed on the other player's head" part working. The real problem is, if the two players are currently pushing up against each other, and one player jumps, then at one point as they're jumping, the height-difference threshold that counts as a "land on head" is passed and then it registers as a jump. As a life-long player of 2D Mario Bros style games, this feels incorrect to me, but I can't quite figure out how to solve it. My code: (it's really Objective-C but I've put it in pseudo C-style code just to be simpler for non ObjC readers) void checkCollisions() { // For each entity in the scene, compare it with all other entities (but not with one it's already compared against) for (int i = 0; i < _allGameObjects.count(); i++) { // GameObject is an Entity GEGameObject *firstGameObject = _allGameObjects.objectAtIndex(i); // Don't check against yourself or any previous entity for (int j = i+1; j < _allGameObjects.count(); j++) { GEGameObject *secondGameObject = _allGameObjects.objectAtIndex(j); // Get the collision bounds for both entities, then see if they intersect // CGRect is a C-struct with an origin Point (x, y) and a Size (w, h) CGRect firstRect = firstGameObject.collisionBounds(); CGRect secondRect = secondGameObject.collisionBounds(); // Collision of any sort if (CGRectIntersectsRect(firstRect, secondRect)) { //////////////////////////////// // // // Check for jumping first (???) // // //////////////////////////////// if (firstRect.origin.y > (secondRect.origin.y + (secondRect.size.height * 0.7))) { // the top entity could be pretty far down/in to the bottom entity.... firstGameObject.didLandOnEntity(secondGameObject); } else if (secondRect.origin.y > (firstRect.origin.y + (firstRect.size.height * 0.7))) { // second entity was actually on top.... secondGameObject.didLandOnEntity.(firstGameObject); } else if (firstRect.origin.x > secondRect.origin.x && firstRect.origin.x < (secondRect.origin.x + secondRect.size.width)) { // Hit from the RIGHT CGRect intersection = CGRectIntersection(firstRect, secondRect); // The NUDGE just offsets either object back to the left or right // After the nudging, they are exactly pressing against each other with no intersection firstGameObject.nudgeToRightOfIntersection(intersection); secondGameObject.nudgeToLeftOfIntersection(intersection); } else if ((firstRect.origin.x + firstRect.size.width) > secondRect.origin.x) { // hit from the LEFT CGRect intersection = CGRectIntersection(firstRect, secondRect); secondGameObject.nudgeToRightOfIntersection(intersection); firstGameObject.nudgeToLeftOfIntersection(intersection); } } } } } I think my collision detection code is pretty close, but obviously I'm doing something a little wrong. I really think it's to do with the way my jumps are checked (I wanted to make sure that a jump could happen from an angle (instead of if the falling player had been at a right angle to the player below). Can someone please help me here? I haven't been able to find many resources on how to do this properly (and thinking like a game developer is new for me). Thanks in advance!

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• How do I get public feed from facebook without user authentication on a native/Desktop app?

  - by KronoS

  I'm looking to get publicly available facebook feeds (i.e. Google's facebook page/posts). However instead of forcing the user to sign into their own facebook app, I want to be able to access these posts. I've looked into using "App Access Tokens" however since my application is a native/Desktop app (iOS, Android, WP8/Win 8) I'm not able to do this. Is there a way to get publicly accessible feeds from facebook without user authentication? I'm using the Facebook C# SDK to access facebook. Currently I'm doing the following: dynamic tokenInfo = fb.Get( String.Format( "/oauth/access_token?client_id={0}&client_secret={1}&grant_type=client_credentials", FbController.AppId, FbController.AppSecret)); var appAccessToken = (string) tokenInfo.access_token; fb = new FacebookClient(); dynamic response = fb.Get( String.Format( "/google/posts?access_token={0}", appAccessToken)); Problem is that this only works if my application is set to "web" instead of "native/Desktop". I get the following error when running this code and classified app as native/Desktop. (OAuthException - #15) (#15) Requires session when calling from a desktop app

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• Java and AppStore receipt verification

  - by user1672461

  I am trying to verify a payment receipt on server side. I am getting a {"status":21002, "exception":"java.lang.IllegalArgumentException"} in return Here is the code: private final static String _sandboxUriStr = "https://sandbox.itunes.apple.com/verifyReceipt"; public static void processPayment(final String receipt) throws SystemException { final BASE64Encoder encoder = new BASE64Encoder(); final String receiptData = encoder.encode(receipt.getBytes()); final String jsonData = "{\"receipt-data\" : \"" + receiptData + "\"}"; System.out.println(receipt); System.out.println(jsonData); try { final URL url = new URL(_productionUriStr); final HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpsURLConnection) url.openConnection(); conn.setRequestMethod("POST"); conn.setDoOutput(true); final OutputStreamWriter wr = new OutputStreamWriter(conn.getOutputStream()); wr.write(jsonData); wr.flush(); // Get the response final BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream())); String line; while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null) { System.out.println(line); } wr.close(); rd.close(); } catch (IOException e) { throw new SystemException("Error when trying to send request to '%s', %s", _sandboxUriStr, e.getMessage()); } } My receipt looks like this: {\n\t"signature" = "[exactly_1320_characters]";\n\t"purchase-info" = "[exactly_868_characters]";\n\t"environment" = "Sandbox";\n\t"pod" = "100";\n\t"signing-status" = "0";\n} Receipt data with a BASE64 encoded receipt looks like this: Blockquote {"receipt-data" : "[Block_of_chars_76x40+44=3084_chars_total]"} Does someone have an Idea, or sample code how can I get from receipt string to reply JSON, mentioned here: [http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StoreKitGuide/VerifyingStoreReceipts/VerifyingStoreReceipts.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008267-CH104-SW1]? Thank you

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• "Instance variable 'xxx' accessed in class method....why?

  - by Michael Levy

  So please forgive me as I am very new to stackoverflow and to ios programming in general. I am attempting to change the text of a button i have, replacing current text with a date string (dateStringForInput) I am passing in from another class. The button is called myTodayButton and is declared in my .h file for my class inputMilesViewController... @property (strong, nonatomic) IBOutlet UIButton *myTodayButton; Below is the code from my .m. +(void) changeButtonText:(NSString*) dateStringForInput{ NSLog(@"we got to changebuttontext"); [_myTodayButton setTitle:dateStringForInput forState:UIControlStateNormal]; } I am getting the following error "Instance variable "_myTodayButton" accessed in class method. I understand that this is written in a class method rather than an instance method but i cant figure out how to get this change to happen. the button which prompts this call to changeButtonText is in the other class which is creating dateStringForInput. please help! thanks so much! be gentle with me....a bit overwhelmed . :-)

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• c++ generate a good random seed for psudo random number generators

  - by posop

  I am trying to generate a good random seed for a psudo-random number generator. I thought I'd get the expert's opinions. let me know if this is a bad way of doing it or if there are much better ways. #include <iostream> #include <cstdlib> #include <fstream> #include <ctime> unsigned int good_seed() { unsigned int random_seed, random_seed_a, random_seed_b; std::ifstream file ("/dev/random", std::ios::binary); if (file.is_open()) { char * memblock; int size = sizeof(int); memblock = new char [size]; file.read (memblock, size); file.close(); random_seed_a = int(memblock); delete[] memblock; }// end if else { random_seed_a = 0; } random_seed_b = std::time(0); random_seed = random_seed_a xor random_seed_b; return random_seed; } // end good_seed()

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• Presenting UINavigationController modally -- problem setting up tool and nav bar items in root view controller viewDidLoad

  - by Bogatyr

  In my iOS app I'm creating and presenting a UINavigationController modally like so: MyViewController *myvc = [[[MyViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"MyViewController" bundle:nil] autorelease]; UINavigationController *navVC = [[[UINavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController:myvc] autorelease]; [self presentModalViewController:navVC animated:YES]; In the MyViewController viewDidLoad I'm creating and setting toolbar items for the navigation controller's toolbar, like so: self.navigationController.toolbar.items = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:(items...), nil]; the problem I'm having is that the items don't show up. If instead I call a method from MyViewController's viewDidLoad method that adds the toolbar items via performSelector:withObject:afterDelay:0, then it works perfectly. So there's obviously some race condition going on here with the initial presentation of the UINavigationController, initialization of its toolbar/navbar, and the initialization of the nav bar's specified initial root view controller. I verified in the debugger that the root view controller's viewDidLoad is called after the UINavigationController's viewDidLoad method. In fact, the root view controller's viewDidLoad method is not called until presentModalViewController: is called, and the UINavigationController's viewDidLoad is called within initWithRootViewController, so doesn't that imply that the UINavigationController object should be "all ready to go", including its nav bar and toolbars? I thought at first that the navigation controller's toolbar object may not exist yet at MyViewController's viewDidLoad time, but it clearly does. At least, NSLog shows that it is not nil during MyViewController's viewDidLoad method. In fact, the UINavigationController's toolbar object is identical at both times: in the root view controller's viewDidLoad, and in the "setupToolbar" method that I called with performSelector:withObject:afterDelay, so it's not getting "re-initialized" somehow. So, what's going on here? Why aren't my toolbar modifications "sticking" in MyViewController's viewDidLoad, and why does performing them in the next iteration of the runloop (performSelector:withObject:afterDelay:0) make it work? What is the "right" way of setting up initial navbar / toolbar items in code from the rootViewController of the UINavigationController?

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• Titanium won't run iPhone/Android Emulator

  - by BeOliveira

  I just installed Titanium SDK (1.5.1) and all the Android SDKs. Also, I already have iPhone SDK 4.2 installed. I downloaded KitchenSink and imported it into Titanium but whenever I try to run it on iPhone Emulator, I get this error: [INFO] One moment, building ... [INFO] Titanium SDK version: 1.5.1 [INFO] iPhone Device family: iphone [INFO] iPhone SDK version: 4.0 [INFO] Detected compiler plugin: ti.log/0.1 [INFO] Compiler plugin loaded and working for ios [INFO] Performing clean build [INFO] Compiling localization files [INFO] Detected custom font: comic_zine_ot.otf [ERROR] Error: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Library/Application Support/Titanium/mobilesdk/osx/1.5.1/iphone/builder.py", line 1003, in main execute_xcode("iphonesimulator%s" % iphone_version,["GCC_PREPROCESSOR_DEFINITIONS=LOG__ID=%s DEPLOYTYPE=development TI_DEVELOPMENT=1 DEBUG=1 TI_VERSION=%s" % (log_id,sdk_version)],False) File "/Library/Application Support/Titanium/mobilesdk/osx/1.5.1/iphone/builder.py", line 925, in execute_xcode output = run.run(args,False,False,o) File "/Library/Application Support/Titanium/mobilesdk/osx/1.5.1/iphone/run.py", line 31, in run sys.exit(rc) SystemExit: 1 And for Android, it runs the OS but not the KitchenSink app, here's the log: [INFO] Launching Android emulator...one moment [INFO] Building KitchenSink for Android ... one moment [INFO] plugin=/Library/Application Support/Titanium/plugins/ti.log/0.1/plugin.py [INFO] Detected compiler plugin: ti.log/0.1 [INFO] Compiler plugin loaded and working for android [INFO] Titanium SDK version: 1.5.1 (12/16/10 16:25 16bbb92) [INFO] Waiting for the Android Emulator to become available [ERROR] Timed out waiting for android.process.acore [INFO] Copying project resources.. [INFO] Detected tiapp.xml change, forcing full re-build... [INFO] Compiling Javascript Resources ... [INFO] Copying platform-specific files ... [INFO] Compiling localization files [INFO] Compiling Android Resources... This could take some time Any ideas on how to get Titanium to work?

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• Why isn’t my autoreleased object getting released?

  - by zoul

  Hello. I am debugging a weird memory management error and I can’t figure it out. I noticed that some of my objects are staying in memory longer than expected. I checked all my memory management and finally got to the very improbable conclusion that some of my autorelease operations don’t result in a release. Under what circumstances is that possible? I created a small testing Canary class that logs a message in dealloc and have the following testing code in place: NSLog(@"On the main thread: %i.", [NSThread isMainThread]); [[[Canary alloc] init] autorelease]; According to the code we’re really on the main thread, but the dealloc in Canary does not get called until much later. The delay is not deterministic and can easily take seconds or more. How is that possible? The application runs on a Mac, the garbage collection is turned off (Objective-C Garbage Collection is set to Unsupported on the target.) I am mostly used to iOS, is memory management on OS X different in some important way?

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• Add newline to a text field (Win32)

  - by user146780

  I'm making a Notepad clone. Right now my text loads fine but where their are newline characters, they do not make newlines in the text field. I load it like this: void LoadText(HWND ctrl,HWND parent) { int leng; char buf[330000]; char FileBuffer[500]; memset(FileBuffer,0,500); FileBuffer[0] = '*'; FileBuffer[1] = '.'; FileBuffer[2] = 't'; FileBuffer[3] = 'x'; FileBuffer[4] = 't'; OPENFILENAMEA ofn; memset(&ofn, 0, sizeof(OPENFILENAMEA)); ofn.lStructSize = sizeof(OPENFILENAMEA); ofn.hwndOwner = parent; ofn.lpstrFile = FileBuffer; ofn.nMaxFile = 500; ofn.lpstrFilter = "Filetype (*.txt)\0\0"; ofn.lpstrDefExt = "txt"; ofn.Flags = OFN_EXPLORER; if(!GetOpenFileNameA(&ofn)) { return; } ifstream *file; file = new ifstream(FileBuffer,ios::in); int lenn; lenn = 0; while (!file->eof()) { buf[lenn] = file->get(); lenn += 1; } buf[lenn - 1] = 0; file->read(buf,lenn); SetWindowTextA(ctrl,buf); file->close(); } How can I make it do the new line characters? Thanks

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• How can I change the precision of printing with the stl?

  - by mmr

  This might be a repeat, but my google-fu failed to find it. I want to print numbers to a file using the stl with the number of decimal places, rather than overall precision. So, if I do this: int precision = 16; std::vector<double> thePoint(3); thePoint[0] = 86.3671436; thePoint[0] = -334.8866574; thePoint[0] = 24.2814; ofstream file1(tempFileName, ios::trunc); file1 << std::setprecision(precision) << thePoint[0] << "\\" << thePoint[1] << "\\" << thePoint[2] << "\\"; I'll get numbers like this: 86.36714359999999\-334.8866574\24.28140258789063 What I want is this: 86.37\-334.89\24.28 In other words, truncating at two decimal points. If I set precision to be 4, then I'll get 86.37\-334.9\24.28 ie, the second number is improperly truncated. I do not want to have to manipulate each number explicitly to get the truncation, especially because I seem to be getting the occasional 9 repeating or 0000000001 or something like that that's left behind. I'm sure there's something obvious, like using the printf(%.2f) or something like that, but I'm unsure how to mix that with the stl << and ofstream.

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• add animation to layer's path in cocos2d

  - by greg rock

  so i'm on cocos2d but before I was on a normal ios app and I had this code : -(void)viewDidLoad{ rootLayer = [[CALayer alloc] init]; [imageView.layer addSublayer:rootLayer]; roundPath = CGPathCreateMutable(); CGPathMoveToPoint(roundPath, nil, center.x , center.y - 35); CGPathAddArcToPoint(roundPath, nil, center.x + 35, center.y - 35, center.x + 35, center.y + 35, 35); CGPathAddArcToPoint(roundPath, nil, center.x + 35, center.y + 35, center.x - 35, center.y + 35, 35); CGPathAddArcToPoint(roundPath, nil, center.x - 35, center.y + 35, center.x - 35, center.y, 35); CGPathAddArcToPoint(roundPath, nil, center.x - 35, center.y - 35, center.x, center.y - 35, 35); CGPathCloseSubpath(roundPath); //Box Path boxPath = CGPathCreateMutable(); CGPathMoveToPoint(boxPath, nil, center.x , center.y - 35); CGPathAddArcToPoint(boxPath, nil, center.x + 35, center.y - 35, center.x + 35, center.y + 35, 4.7); CGPathAddArcToPoint(boxPath, nil, center.x + 35, center.y + 35, center.x - 35, center.y + 35, 4.7); CGPathAddArcToPoint(boxPath, nil, center.x - 35, center.y + 35, center.x - 35, center.y, 4.7); CGPathAddArcToPoint(boxPath, nil, center.x - 35, center.y - 35, center.x, center.y - 35, 4.7); CGPathCloseSubpath(boxPath); shapeLayer = [CAShapeLayer layer]; shapeLayer.path = boxPath; [rootLayer addSublayer:shapeLayer]; } -(void)startAnimation { CABasicAnimation *animation = [CABasicAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"path"]; animation.duration = 2.0; animation.repeatCount = HUGE_VALF; animation.autoreverses = YES; animation.timingFunction = [CAMediaTimingFunction functionWithName:kCAMediaTimingFunctionEaseInEaseOut]; animation.fromValue = (id)boxPath; animation.toValue = (id)roundPath; [shapeLayer addAnimation:animation forKey:@"animatePath"]; } But I didn't found a way to do the animation fromboxpath toroundpath on cocos2d, I don't know what CCAction use . Can anybody help me ? sorry for my english I'm french :/

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• Why do i get exc bad access in cases when object is not nil?

  - by DixieFlatline

  I have an app that receives remote notifications. My view controller that is shown after push has a tableview. App crashes very randomly (1 in 20 tries) at line setting frame: if (!myTableView) { NSLog(@"self.myTableView is nil"); } myTableView.frame=CGRectMake(0, 70, 320, 376); This only happens when i open the app, then open some other apps and then receive the push notification. I guess it has something to do with memory. I use ARC (ios 5). The strange thing is that nslog is not displayed, so tableview is not nil. Crash log: Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x522d580c Crashed Thread: 0 Thread 0 name: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread Thread 0 Crashed: 0 libobjc.A.dylib 0x352b1f7e objc_msgSend + 22 1 Foundation 0x37dc174c NSKVOPendingNotificationCreate + 216 2 Foundation 0x37dc1652 NSKeyValuePushPendingNotificationPerThread + 62 3 Foundation 0x37db3744 NSKeyValueWillChange + 408 4 Foundation 0x37d8a848 -[NSObject(NSKeyValueObserverNotification) willChangeValueForKey:] + 176 5 Foundation 0x37e0ca14 _NSSetPointValueAndNotify + 76 6 UIKit 0x312af25a -[UIScrollView(Static) _adjustContentOffsetIfNecessary] + 1890 7 UIKit 0x312cca54 -[UIScrollView setFrame:] + 548 8 UIKit 0x312cc802 -[UITableView setFrame:] + 182 9 POViO 0x000913cc -[FeedVC viewWillAppear:] (FeedVC.m:303) Dealloc is not called because it is not logged: - (void)dealloc { NSLog(@"dealloc"); }

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• client-server syncing methodology [theoretical]

  - by Kenneth Ballenegger

  I'm in the progress of building an web-app that syncs with an iOS client. I'm currently tackling trying to figure out how to go about about syncing. I've come up with following two directions: I've got a fairly simple server web-app with a list of items. They are ordered by date modified and as such syncing the order does not matter. One direction I'm considering is to let the client deal with syncing. I've already got an API that lets the client get the data, as well as do certain actions on it, such as update, add or remove single items. I was considering: 1) on each sync asking the server for all items modified since the last successful sync and updating the local records based on what's returned by the server, and 2) building a persistent queue of create / remove / update requests on the client, and keeping them until confirmation by the server. The risk with this approach is that I'm basically asking each side to send changes to the other side, hoping it works smoothly, but risking a diversion at some point. This would probably be more bandwidth-efficient, though. The other direction I was considering was a more traditional model. I would have a "sync" process in which the client would send its whole list to the server (or a subset since last modified sync), the server would update the data on the server (by fixing conflicts by keeping the last modified item, and keeping deleted items with a deleted = 1 field), and the server would return an updated list of items (since last successful sync) which the client would then replace its data with. Thoughts?

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• LPCSTR, TCHAR, String

  - by user285327

  I am use next type of strings: LPCSTR, TCHAR, String i want to convert: 1) from TCHAR to LPCSTR 2) from String to char I convert from TCHAR to LPCSTR by that code: RunPath = TEXT("C:\\1"); LPCSTR Path = (LPCSTR)RunPath; From String to char i convert by that code: SaveFileDialog^ saveFileDialog1 = gcnew SaveFileDialog; saveFileDialog1->Title = "?????????? ?????-????????"; saveFileDialog1->Filter = "bck files (*.bck)|*.bck"; saveFileDialog1->RestoreDirectory = true; pin_ptr<const wchar_t> wch = TEXT(""); if ( saveFileDialog1->ShowDialog() == System::Windows::Forms::DialogResult::OK ) { wch = PtrToStringChars(saveFileDialog1->FileName); } else return; ofstream os(wch, ios::binary); My problem is that when i set "Configuration Properties - General Character Set in "Use Multi-Byte Character Set" the first part of code work correctly. But the second part of code return error C2440. When i set "Configuration Properties - General Character Set in "Use Unicode" the second part of code work correctly. But the first part of code return the only first character from TCHAR to LPCSTR.

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• CMBufferQueueCreate fail, required parameters?

  - by Agustin

  Reading the documentation about iOS SDK CMBufferQueueCreate, it says that getDuration and version are required, all the others callbacks can be NULL. but running the following code: CFAllocatorRef allocator; CMBufferCallbacks *callbacks; callbacks = malloc(sizeof(CMBufferCallbacks)); callbacks->version = 0; callbacks->getDuration = timeCallback; callbacks->refcon = NULL; callbacks->getDecodeTimeStamp = NULL; callbacks->getPresentationTimeStamp = NULL; callbacks->isDataReady = NULL; callbacks->compare = NULL; callbacks->dataBecameReadyNotification = NULL; CMItemCount capacity = 4; OSStatus s = CMBufferQueueCreate(allocator, capacity, callbacks, queue); NSLog(@"QUEUE: %x", queue); NSLog(@"STATUS: %i", s); with timeCallback: CMTime timeCallback(CMBufferRef buf, void *refcon){ return CMTimeMake(1, 1); } and queue is: CMBufferQueueRef* queue; queue creations fails (queue = 0) and returns a status of: kCMBufferQueueError_RequiredParameterMissing = -12761, The callbacks variable is correctly initialized, at least the debugger says so. Somebody have played arround with CMBufferQueue? google doesn't know about that! Thanks

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• Internal "Tee" setup

  - by RadlyEel

  I have inherited some really old VC6.0 code that I am upgrading to VS2008 for building a 64-bit app. One required feature that was implemented long, long ago is overriding std::cout so its output goes simultaneously to a console window and to a file. The implementation depended on the then-current VC98 library implementation of ostream and, of course, is now irretrievably broken with VS2008. It would be reasonable to accumulate all the output until program termination time and then dump it to a file. I got part of the way home by using freopen(), setvbuf(), and ios::sync_with_stdio(), but to my dismay, the internal library does not treat its buffer as a ring buffer; instead when it flushes to the output device it restarts at the beginning, so every flush wipes out all my accumulated output. Converting to a more standard logging function is not desirable, as there are over 1600 usages of "std::cout << " scattered throughout almost 60 files. I have considered overriding ostream's operator<< function, but I'm not sure if that will cover me, since there are global operator<< functions that can't be overridden. (Or can they?) Any ideas on how to accomplish this?

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