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Record 8 separate Line IN Channels from M-Audio Delta 1010 Card

- by Peter Hoffmann

I want to record the 8 separate Line IN Channels from my M-Audio Delta 1010 Card. The card is recogniced nicely and a can record a single channel via arecord -d 10 -f cd -t wav -D channel1 out2.wav. I've set up the different channels in ~/.asoundrc. Now if I want to record a second channel in parallel (arecord -d 10 -f cd -t wav -D channel2 out2.wav) I get the error arecord: main:564: audio open error: Device or resource busy As I understand the delta 1010 is a single Access Card, so only one application can access it at a time. Is this correct? The next step was to configure a dual channel input in .asoundrc # envy24 channel 1+2 only pcm.test { type plug ttable.0.0 1 ttable.0.1 1 slave.pcm ice1712 } Which works ok when I do a arecord -d 10 -f cd -t wav -D test -c 2 out.wav (BTW can anyone point me to a tool to split a multi channel wav into a file per channel?) But when I want to record the channels separately with (-I option) arecord -d 10 -f cd -t wav -D test -c 2 -I channel1.wav channel2.wav I get no recordings. Did I miss something with the configuration or what are my options to record all 8 channels via arecord. I've no experience with jackd. Is it an option to install jackd and record the line ins via jackd?

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Focus follows mouse stops working when opening window from launcher and no click to focus

- by user97600

This is 12.04 default desktop (unity). I set it to focus follows mouse, and changed the menus to be on the window. This worked for a while, then some unknown even, maybe an upgrade maybe some other setting change caused it to stop working. There are many ways for this behavior to start but one reliable one is to bring a window to the foreground/focus with the launcher. Now the focus is stuck on that window and not just the window but the regions within the window so the close, maximize, minimize and menus do not work. I have to use mouse middle and then mouse right and then focus follows mouse is restored for a bit. The exact details of the mouse action aren't clear, sometimes it seems like just mouse middle helps, sometimes just right some times a desperate sequence of clicks :-( I have tried switching to the gnome desktop and it seems to occur less there but it is not eliminated. I have tried switching mice to an old wired USB mouse. I have tried creating a new account and that has not worked. I have observed "split focus" where to scroll button scrolls one one window but the input goes to another. I go trapped recently where my keyboard input went to libre office calc, but I was selecting the search term in the chrome address window. The selection "grayed" but the keyboard input for the search went to libre. Regions in windows have very confused focus. I have to work hard to get focus on for example the close gliph (X) or the minimize gliph (_).

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Re-writing URL's with lighttpd

- by Tim Post

I'm using Lighttpd to serve a GET based API that I'm working on, and I'm having some difficulty with re-writing requests. My API calls are very simple. An example would be : url:/method/submethod?var1=something&var2=something&key=something This is what I have: url.rewrite-once = ( "^/methodfoo(.*)" => "/index.php$1&method=methodfoo") This works fine if all methods were shallow, but I have methodfoo/submethod to deal with. What I'd like to do is use a rule that can split this up for me, appending a &submethod to the end of the rewritten string. For instance: url://methodfoo/submethod?foo=bar&foobar=foo Would be re-written to: url://index.php?foo=bar&foobar=foo&method=methodfoo&submethod=foo Can I do that without an explicit rule for each submethod? Additional Information: Yes, I know I can use a rule like: "^/methodfoo/(.*)/(.*)" => "/index.php$2&method=methodfoo&submethod=$1" However, That fuglifies (TM) my link structure, as it would have to match: url://methodfoo/submethod/?foo=bar&foobar=foo When I really want: url://methodfoo/submethod?foo=bar&foobar=foo Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

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How do search engines handle hyphenated words?

- by NinjaKC

I am not sure my title fully explains what I mean. I thought this might be an interesting question. If I had a set of keywords, broken with a dash or 2, will search engines consider the dashed split keyword as maybe a full keyword? Say I have a site that sort of breaks words down, like the dictionary sites do. So a keyword for that page, might end up in the page, and / or the URL, as broken by dashes. Key-word = keyword Co-op-er-at-ive = cooperative Pho-to-gra-phy = Photography www.example.com/key-word/ www.example.com/co-op-er-at-ive/ www.example.com/pho-to-gra-phy/ I know search engines will consider a dash (at least Google) as a space, and understand it as multiple words. But in the English language, a dash can also break a word down (at least I think it can, can't it?), so will search engines also take this into consideration? I did a 'little' research, I Googled some words and placed random dashes, and it returned the words I searched for, but this could be considered a typo from the user on Google's search end, so really I am wondering if I can purposely put a dash in a keyword, and have the search engine spiders still catch that keyword as the real word without dashes? I've done a little Googling and looking here on Stackoverflow, but everything comes down to dashes for multiple words, not really the specific thing I'm trying to figure out. Hopefully that makes sense, I am not an expert in SEO, yet, but get the basics and have been playing, and this is just really a random question to satisfy my knowledge of playing :P

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isometric drawing order with larger than single tile images - drawing order algorithm?

- by Roger Smith

I have an isometric map over which I place various images. Most images will fit over a single tile, but some images are slightly larger. For example, I have a bed of size 2x3 tiles. This creates a problem when drawing my objects to the screen as I get some tiles erroneously overlapping other tiles. The two solutions that I know of are either splitting the image into 1x1 tile segments or implementing my own draw order algorithm, for example by assigning each image a number. The image with number 1 is drawn first, then 2, 3 etc. Does anyone have advice on what I should do? It seems to me like splitting an isometric image is very non obvious. How do you decide which parts of the image are 'in' a particular tile? I can't afford to split up all of my images manually either. The draw order algorithm seems like a nicer choice but I am not sure if it's going to be easy to implement. I can't solve, in my head, how to deal with situations whereby you change the index of one image, which causes a knock on effect to many other images. If anyone has an resources/tutorials on this I would be most grateful.

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Rendering large and high poly meshes

- by Aurus

Consider an huge terrain that has a lot polygons, to render this terrain I thought of following techniques: Using height-map instead of raw meshes: Yes, but I want to create a lot of caves and stuff that simply wont work with height-maps. Using voxels: Yes, but I think that this would be to much since I don't even want to support changing terrain.. Split into multiple chunks and do some sort of LOD with the mesh: Yes, but how would I do that? Tessellation usually creates more detail not less. Precompute the same mesh in lower poly version (like Mudbox does) and depending on the distance it renders one of these meshes: Graphic memory is limited and uploading only the chunks won't solve that problem since the traffic would be too high. IMO the last one sounds really good, but imagine the following process: Upload and render the chunks depending on the current player position. [No problem] Player will walk straight forward Now we maybe have to change on of the low poly chunk with the high poly one So, Remove the low poly chunk and load the high poly chunk [Already to much traffic here, I think] I am not very experienced in graphic programming and maybe the upper process is totally okay but somehow I think it is too much. And how about the disk space it would require.. I think 3 kind of levels would be fine but isn't that also too much? (I am using OpenGL but I don't think that this is important)

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How to determine if you should use full or differential backup?

- by Peter Larsson

Or ask yourself, "How much of the database has changed since last backup?". Here is a simple script that will tell you how much (in percent) have changed in the database since last backup. -- Prepare staging table for all DBCC outputs DECLARE @Sample TABLE ( Col1 VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL, Col2 VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL, Col3 VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL, Col4 VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL, Col5 VARCHAR(MAX) ) -- Some intermediate variables for controlling loop DECLARE @FileNum BIGINT = 1, @PageNum BIGINT = 6, @SQL VARCHAR(100), @Error INT, @DatabaseName SYSNAME = 'Yoda' -- Loop all files to the very end WHILE 1 = 1 BEGIN BEGIN TRY -- Build the SQL string to execute SET @SQL = 'DBCC PAGE(' + QUOTENAME(@DatabaseName) + ', ' + CAST(@FileNum AS VARCHAR(50)) + ', ' + CAST(@PageNum AS VARCHAR(50)) + ', 3) WITH TABLERESULTS' -- Insert the DBCC output in the staging table INSERT @Sample ( Col1, Col2, Col3, Col4 ) EXEC (@SQL) -- DCM pages exists at an interval SET @PageNum += 511232 END TRY BEGIN CATCH -- If error and first DCM page does not exist, all files are read IF @PageNum = 6 BREAK ELSE -- If no more DCM, increase filenum and start over SELECT @FileNum += 1, @PageNum = 6 END CATCH END -- Delete all records not related to diff information DELETE FROM @Sample WHERE Col1 NOT LIKE 'DIFF%' -- Split the range UPDATE @Sample SET Col5 = PARSENAME(REPLACE(Col3, ' - ', '.'), 1), Col3 = PARSENAME(REPLACE(Col3, ' - ', '.'), 2) -- Remove last paranthesis UPDATE @Sample SET Col3 = RTRIM(REPLACE(Col3, ')', '')), Col5 = RTRIM(REPLACE(Col5, ')', '')) -- Remove initial information about filenum UPDATE @Sample SET Col3 = SUBSTRING(Col3, CHARINDEX(':', Col3) + 1, 8000), Col5 = SUBSTRING(Col5, CHARINDEX(':', Col5) + 1, 8000) -- Prepare data outtake ;WITH cteSource(Changed, [PageCount]) AS ( SELECT Changed, SUM(COALESCE(ToPage, FromPage) - FromPage + 1) AS [PageCount] FROM ( SELECT CAST(Col3 AS INT) AS FromPage, CAST(NULLIF(Col5, '') AS INT) AS ToPage, LTRIM(Col4) AS Changed FROM @Sample ) AS d GROUP BY Changed WITH ROLLUP ) -- Present the final result SELECT COALESCE(Changed, 'TOTAL PAGES') AS Changed, [PageCount], 100.E * [PageCount] / SUM(CASE WHEN Changed IS NULL THEN 0 ELSE [PageCount] END) OVER () AS Percentage FROM cteSource

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Platformer Enemy AI

- by hayer

I'm currently developing a platformer shooter. The game is multiplayer and while my net code could use some real work I have put that off for the time, so currently I'm trying to implement the AI. The game is pretty simple; Players run around on a map filled with a X amount of zombies that try to eat their brains, classic and overused I know. Weapons spawn at random intervals around the map. The problem is that the zombies, when they find their pray the have to follow it for some while.. And here is the problem, running the AI navcode seems to take for ever. So here is the ideas I have come up with so far Have the AI update at different intervals with a maximum of Y ms with no updates. Have the zombies assigned to groups of zombies. One is appointed the leader of the group who finds the way to the player - the rest just follows the leader. If the leader dies another one of the zombies in the group is appointed president of the zombie swarm. If there is less than five zombies in a group they try to meet up with other zombies.(Aka they are assigned to a different group and therefor a new leader) Multi-threading option one or two? For navigation I have some kinda navmesh(since the game is not tile-based) that tells the zombies where they can walk etc. If anyone else got some ideas on how to do navigation I would love some input. For LoS(zombie - player) I have split the map into grids. If the players grid is connected to the zombies grid(if I go with option two I would only need to check if leader zombies grid is connected to player, aka less checks) - if they are connected and there is more than 250ms since last check do a raytrace.. This is my first time programming AI so input on any field is appreciated.

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Making an interactive 2D map

- by Chad

So recently I have been working on a Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past clone, and I am wondering how I could handle certain map interactions (like cutting grass, lifting rocks, etc). The way I am currently doing the tilemap is with 2 PNGs. The first is the "tilemap" where each pixel represents a 16x16 tile and the (red, green) values are the (x, y) coords for the tile in the second PNG (the "tileset"). I am then using the blue channel to store collision data. Each tile is split into 4 8x8 tiles and represented by a 2 bit value (0 = empty, 1 = Jumpdown point, 2 = unused right now, 3 = blocking). 4 of these 2 bit values make up the full blue channel (1 byte). So collisions work great, and I am moving on to putting interactive units on the level; but I am not sure what a good way is to do it. I have experimented with spawning an entity for each grass and rock, but there are just WAY to many; FPS just dies even if I confine it to the current "zone" the user is in (for those who remember LTTP it had zones you moved between). It does make a difference that this is a browser-based JavaScript game. tl;dr: What is a good way to have an interactive map without using full blown entities for each interactive item?

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Demystifying "chunked level of detail"

- by Caius Eugene

Just recently trying to make sense of implementing a chunked level of detail system in Unity. I'm going to be generating four mesh planes, each with a height map but I guess that isn't too important at the moment. I have a lot of questions after reading up about this technique, I hope this isn't too much to ask all in one go, but I would be extremely grateful for someone to help me make sense of this technique. 1 : I can't understand at which point down the Chunked LOD pipeline that the mesh gets split into chunks. Is this during the initial mesh generation, or is there a separate algorithm which does this. 2 : I understand that a Quadtree data structure is used to store the Chunked LOD data, I think i'm missing the point a bit, but Is the quadtree storing vertex and triangles data for each subdivision level? 3a : How is the camera distance usually calculated. When reading up about quadtree's, Axis-aligned bounding box's are mentioned a lot. In this case would each chunk have a collision bounding box to detect the camera or player is nearby? or is there a better way of doing this? (raycast maybe?) 3b : Do the chunks calculate the camera distance themselves? 4 : Does each chunk have the same "resolution". for example at top level the mesh will be 32x32, will each subdivided node also be 32x32. Example below:

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Effective way to check if an Entity/Player enters a region/trigger

- by Chris

I was wondering how multiplayer games detect if you enter a special region. Let's assume there is a huge map that is so big that simply checking it would become a huge performance issue. I've seen bukkit (a modding API for Minecraft servers) firing an Event on every single move. I don't think that larger games do the same because even if you have only a few coordinates you are interested in, you have to loop through a few trigger zone to see if the player is inside your region - for every player. This seems like an extremely CPU-intense operation to me even though I've never developed something like that. Is there a special algorithm that is used by larger games to accomplish this? The only thing I could imagine is to split up the world into multiple parts and to register the event not on the movement itself but on all the parts that are covered by your area and only check for areas that are registered in the current part. And another thing I would like to know: How could you detect when someone must have entered a trigger but you never saw him directly in it since his client only sent you an move packet shortly before entering and after leaving the trigger area. Drawing a line and calculate all colliding parts seems rather CPU intensive if you have to perform it every time.

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CPU Wars Is a Trump-Style Card Game Driven by Chip Stats

- by Jason Fitzpatrick

If you’re looking for the geekiest card game around, you’d be hard pressed to beat CPU Wars–a top-trumps card game built around CPU specs. From the game’s designers: CPU Wars is a trump card game built by geeks for geeks. For Volume 1.0 we chose 30 CPUs that we believe had the greatest impact on the desktop history. The game is ideally played by 2 or 3 people. The deck is split between the players and then each player takes a turn and picks a category that they think has the best value. We have chosen the most important specs that could be numerically represented, such as maximum speed achieved and maximum number of transistors. It’s lots of fun, it has a bit of strategy and can be played during a break or over a coffee. If you’re interested, you can pick up a copy for £7.99 (roughly $12.50 USD). Hit up the link below for more information. How To Customize Your Wallpaper with Google Image Searches, RSS Feeds, and More 47 Keyboard Shortcuts That Work in All Web Browsers How To Hide Passwords in an Encrypted Drive Even the FBI Can’t Get Into

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How to manage a developer who has poor communication skills

- by djcredo

I manage a small team of developers on an application which is in the mid-point of its lifecycle, within a big firm. This unfortunately means there is commonly a 30/70 split of Programming tasks to "other technical work". This work includes: Working with DBA / Unix / Network / Loadbalancer teams on various tasks Placing & managing orders for hardware or infrastructure in different regions Running tests that have not yet been migrated to CI Analysis Support / Investigation Its fair to say that the Developers would all prefer to be coding, rather than doing these more mundane tasks, so I try to hand out the fun programming jobs evenly amongst the team. Most of the team was hired because, though they may not have the elite programming skills to write their own compiler / game engine / high-frequency trading system etc., they are good communicators who "can get stuff done", work with other teams, and somewhat navigate the complex beaurocracy here. They are good developers, but they are also good all-round technical staff. However, one member of the team probably has above-average coding skills, but below-average communication skills. Traditionally, the previous Development Manager tended to give him the Programming tasks and not the more mundane tasks listed above. However, I don't feel that this is fair to the rest of the team, who have shown an aptitute for developing a well-rounded skillset that is commonly required in a big-business IT department. What should I do in this situation? If I continue to give him more programming work, I know that it will be done faster (and conversly, I would expect him to complete the other work slower). But it goes against my principles, and promotes the idea that you can carve out a "comfortable niche" for yourself simply by being bad at the tasks you don't like.

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How do I choose the scaling factor of a 3D game world?

- by concept3d

I am making a 3D tank game prototype with some physics simulation, am using C++. One of the decisions I need to make is the scale of the game world in relation to reality. For example, I could consider 1 in-game unit of measurement to correspond to 1 meter in reality. This feels intuitive, but I feel like I might be missing something. I can think of the following as potential problems: 3D modelling program compatibility. (?) Numerical accuracy. (Does this matter?) Especially at large scales, how games like Battlefield have huge maps: How don't they lose numerical accuracy if they use 1:1 mapping with real world scale, since floating point representation tend to lose more precision with larger numbers (e.g. with ray casting, physics simulation)? Gameplay. I don't want the movement of units to feel slow or fast while using almost real world values like -9.8 m/s^2 for gravity. (This might be subjective.) Is it ok to scale up/down imported assets or it's best fit with a world with its original scale? Rendering performance. Are large meshes with the same vertex count slower to render? I'm wondering if I should split this into multiple questions...

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Should GeeksWithBlogs move to the Wordpress Platform?

- by Martin Hinshelwood

Geekswithblogs was my first ever blog and my first post was on 22nd June 2006. Since then very little functionality has been added. This is not a complaint, but rather an observation that it is very hard to keep up with all of the blogging capabilities that people want. My point would be: “Why bother!” Vote now for a migration of the awesome Geekswithblogs content from SubText to Wordpress. Having been a long time user of GWB I have been worried of late by my envy of other blogging platforms. I made a number of requests around 10 months ago for things that almost all blogging platforms provide, but which are not available on GWB. Support other comment frameworks – The current comment system is so antiquated that it does not even have the common filters like Facebook, twitter or Google login to help prevent spam. Tags are not listed in the RSS – This can prevent you from getting the Google juice that you deserve 301 redirects to a single URL– If you use a custom URL then all your posts are split between both the GWB URL and the custom one. This is VERY bas for SEO. I realise that it is difficult to find time to add all of the features that all the uber geeks on this site want, so why bother… lets move to the most popular and moded platform available and allow everyone to add whatever widgets they like. Figure: Vote for Geekswithblogs moving to Wordpress Why would I want this? There are over 13k plugins available Easy augmentation model Full mobile support Regular releases lots more… This could be a turning point in the legendary history of Geeks With Blogs, be part of it… What can I do to make this happen? I need your help to make this happen: Vote for it Discuss it

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Data binding in web UI frameworks, what's the deal?

- by c-smile

I believe that most of modern Web frameworks that pretend to be MVC ones also has a notion of data binding in one form or another. Examples: AngularJS, EmberJS, KnockoutJS, etc. I am assuming that "data binding" is a declarative definition (oxymoron, no?) of live link between data (a.k.a. model) and its representation (a.k.a. view). With some transformers in between (a.k.a. controllers). I understand why declarativeness is kind of appealing but also understand that as usual it comes with the price. In particular: 1. Live binding is quite heavy, either with dirty watch (high CPU consumption) or with Object.observe() (high memory consumption with high CPU load in some scenarios). 2. There is a "frame" part in the framework word, means there are some boundaries/limits that can be hard to overcome if you need slightly more than it was designed for. Quite usual time split: 90% of features are made in 10% of project time. But 10% rest take 90% of project time. I suspect (a.k.a. educated guess) that those MVC things are not helping to implement more functionality in less time... If so their usage motivation is not quite clear. As an example: last week wanted to find virtual list idea/solution. Found one in vanilla JavaScript that is 120 LOC. Implementation of the same but in AngualrJS is about 420 LOC. Most of the code there seems like a fight with the framework itself... So is my question: what benefits that MVC stuff or data binding give us? Is it just a buzzword popular among project managers or they give us something useful. If later one then what exactly?

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Should I use procedural animation?

- by user712092

I have started to make a fantasy 3d fps swordplay game and I want to add animations. I don't want to animate everything by hand because it would take a lot of time, so I decided to use procedural animation. I would certainly use IK (starting with simple reaching an object with hand ...). I also assume procedural generation of animations will make less animations to do by hand (I can blend animations ...). I want also to have a planner for animation which would simplify complex animations; those which can be split to a sequence - run and then jump, jump and then roll - or which are separable - legs running and torso swinging with sword -. I want for example a character to chop a head of a big troll. If troll crouches character would just chop his head off, if it is standing he would climb on a troll. I know that I would have to describe the state ("troll is low", "troll is high", "chop troll head" ..) which would imply what regions animation will be in (if there is a gap between them character would jump), which would imply what places character can have some of legs and hands or would choose an predefined animation. My main goal is simplicity of coding, but I want my game to be looking cool also. Is it worthy to use procedural animation or does it make more troubles that it solves? (there can be lot of twiddling ...) I am using Blender Game Engine (therefore Python for scripting, and Bullet Physics).

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Where to put code documentation?

- by Patrick

I am currently using two systems to write code documentation (am using C++): Documentation about methods and class members are added next to the code, using the Doxygen format. On a server Doxygen is run on the sources so the output can be seen in a web browser Overview pages (describing a set of classes, the structure of the application, example code, ...) is added to a Wiki I personally think that this approach is easy because the documentation about members and classes is really close to the code, while the overview pages are really easy to edit in the Wiki (and it's also easy to add images, tables, ...). A web browser allows you to see both documentations. My co-worker now suggests to put everything in Doxygen, because we can then create one big help file with everything in it (using either Microsoft's HTML WorkShop or Qt Assistant). My concern is that editing Doxygen-style documentation is much harder (compared to Wiki), especially when you want to add tables, images, ... (or is there a 'preview' tool for Doxygen that doesn't require you to generate the code before you can see the result?) What do big open-source (or closed source) projects use to write their code documentation? Do they also split this up between Doxygen-style and a Wiki? Or do they use another system? What is the most appropriate way to expose the documentation? Via a Web server/browser, or via a big (several 100MB) help file? Which approach do you take when writing code documentation?

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How can I re-enable the typing break in 11.10?

- by Hamish Downer

I've just upgraded to beta 2 of Oneiric/11.10 and the typing break has gone. I've gone into the system settings and looked in "Keyboard Layout" and "Keyboard" and can't find anything. Has it just been dropped? Is there some hidden way to re-enable it? Update: Thought I'd write an update based on some stuff that has happened since this question (and the two answers) were written. Workrave has now been re-instated in oneiric-backports and for 12.04 (how to enable backports). It works fine, though if you want to put it in your systray then you need to allow it in there. The easy/lazy command line way to allow workrave into the notification area is to do something like: gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']" But read this question if you want a more detailed explanation about what you're doing here. Meanwhile the Gnome typing break has been split out into an app called DrWright, however it has not (at time of writing) been packaged for 11.10 (or later). And as mentioned in the other answer, another option is RSIBreak. It is a KDE app but works fine in Unity.

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Too much I/O in the morning ?

- by steveh99999

Interesting little improvement on a SQL 2005 system I encountered recently….. Some background - this system had a fairly ‘traditional OLTP’ workload ie heavily used during day – till around 9pm, then had a batch window for several hours, then not much activity in the early hours of the day, until normal workload resumed the following morning. Using perfmon, I noticed that every morning, we would see a big spike in SQL Server I/O when the application started to be used... As it was 2005 I decided to look at what tables were in cache before and after the overnight batch processing ran… ( using DMV equivalent of dbcc memusage that I posted earlier). Here’s what I saw :- So, contents of data cache split fairly evenly between my 'important/heavily used' tables. After this:- some application batch processing,backups, DBCC checks and reindexes were run. A fairly standard batch I'd suggest. Cache contents then looked like this :- Hmmmm – most of cache is now being used by a table I’ve described as ‘unimportant’. Why ? Well, that table was the last to be reindexed…. purely due to luck, as the reindexing stored procedure performing a loop in alphabetical order through all application tables... When the application starts to be used again – all this ‘unimportant’ data has to be replaced in cache by data that is heavily used… So, we changed the overnight reindex scripts – the most heavily accessed tables are now the last to be reindexed. Obvious really, but we did see a significant reduction in early-morning I/O after changing the order of our reindexing.

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Is "White-Board-Coding" inappropriate during interviews?

- by Eoin Campbell

This is a somewhat subjective quesiton but I'd love to hear feedback/opinions from either interviewers/interviewees on the topic. We split our technical part into 4 parts. Write Code, Read & Analyse Code, Design Session & Code on the white board. For the last part what we ask interviewees to do is write a small code snippet (4-5 lines) on the whiteboard and explain as they go through it. Let me be clear the purpose is not to catch people out. We're not looking for perfect syntax. Hell it can even be pseudo-code. but the point is to give them a very simple problem and see if their brain can communicate the solution to us. By simple problems I mean "Reverse a string", "FizzBuzz" etc... EDIT Just with regards the comment about Pseudo-Code. We always ask for an explicit language first. We;re a .NET C# house. we've only said "pseudo-code" where someone has been blanking/really struggling with the code. My question is "Is it innappropriate / unreasonable to expect a programmer to write a code snippet on a whiteboard during an interview ?"

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Problems compiling with Quickly

- by espectalll123

Welcome to another of my questions about compiling! :P So, after days of stress trying to compile my app, first manually, after porting the project to Quickly, I decided to create the project from scratch using this time Quickly. Now I've finished the app, it works great using quickly run and I haven't added any new file, just removed, replaced or modified. But it can't be compiled using quickly package --verbose --extras... why, if there doesn't seems to be errors related with my project? The fail happens because python-mkdebian doesn't haves enough parameters to work. The terminal output (in Spanish): running install_egg_info Writing /tmp/tmpsT6Pms/virtuam-0.1.egg-info WARNING: the following files are not recognized by DistUtilsExtra.auto: help/C/figures/icon.png help/C/index.page help/C/preferences.page help/C/topic1.page virtuam.desktop.in Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/python-mkdebian", line 368, in <module> egg = get_egg_info() File "/usr/bin/python-mkdebian", line 35, in get_egg_info k, v = l.strip().split(': ', 1) ValueError: need more than 1 value to unpack Ha ocurrido un error al crear el paquete Debian ERROR: no se puede crear o actualizar paquete ubuntu Error: la orden package ha fallado Cancelando

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Sort algorithms that work on large amount of data

- by Giorgio

I am looking for sorting algorithms that can work on a large amount of data, i.e. that can work even when the whole data set cannot be held in main memory at once. The only candidate that I have found up to now is merge sort: you can implement the algorithm in such a way that it scans your data set at each merge without holding all the data in main memory at once. The variation of merge sort I have in mind is described in this article in section Use with tape drives. I think this is a good solution (with complexity O(n x log(n)) but I am curious to know if there are other (possibly faster) sorting algorithms that can work on large data sets that do not fit in main memory. EDIT Here are some more details, as required by the answers: The data needs to be sorted periodically, e.g. once in a month. I do not need to insert a few records and have the data sorted incrementally. My example text file is about 1 GB UTF-8 text, but I wanted to solve the problem in general, even if the file were, say, 20 GB. It is not in a database and, due to other constraints, it cannot be. The data is dumped by others as a text file, I have my own code to read this text file. The format of the data is a text file: new line characters are record separators. One possible improvement I had in mind was to split the file into files that are small enough to be sorted in memory, and finally merge all these files using the algorithm I have described above.

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How to get initial API right using TDD?

- by Vytautas Mackonis

This might be a rather silly question as I am at my first attempts at TDD. I loved the sense of confidence it brings and generally better structure of my code but when I started to apply it on something bigger than one-class toy examples, I ran into difficulties. Suppose, you are writing a library of sorts. You know what it has to do, you know a general way of how it is supposed to be implemented (architecture wise), but you keep "discovering" that you need to make changes to your public API as you code. Perhaps you need to transform this private method into strategy pattern (and now need to pass a mocked strategy in your tests), perhaps you misplaced a responsibility here and there and split an existing class. When you are improving upon existing code, TDD seems a really good fit, but when you are writing everything from scratch, the API you write tests for is a bit "blurry" unless you do a big design up front. What do you do when you already have 30 tests on the method that had its signature (and for that part, behavior) changed? That is a lot of tests to change once they add up.

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What to include in metadata?

- by shyam

I'm wondering if there are any general guidelines or best practices regarding when to split data into a metadata format, as oppose to directly embedding it within the data. (Specific example below). My understanding of metadata is that it describes data (without the need to actually look at the data), allowing for data to be quickly search/filtered for easy access. Let's take for example a simple 3D model format. The actual data file itself is a binary file containing vertices and colors. Things like creation date, modified data and author name would be things that describe the binary data, so I would say these belong as metadata (outside of the binary file). But what if the application had no need to search or filter by these fields? Would it be acceptable to embed these fields directly into the binary data itself? Could they be duplicated in both the binary data and the meta data, or would this be considered bad practice? What about more ambiguous fields such as the model name, which could be considered part of the data itself, but also as data describing the binary data?... How do you decide which data to embed in the actual binary file, as opposed to separating into a more flexible metadata format? Thanks!

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