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  • Generate texture for a heightmap

    - by James
    I've recently been trying to blend multiple textures based on the height at different points in a heightmap. However i've been getting poor results. I decided to backtrack and just attempt to recreate one single texture from an SDL_Surface (i'm using SDL) and just send that into opengl. I'll put my code for creating the texture and reading the colour values. It is a 24bit TGA i'm loading, and i've confirmed that the rest of my code works because i was able to send the surfaces pixels directly to my createTextureFromData function and it drew fine. struct RGBColour { RGBColour() : r(0), g(0), b(0) {} RGBColour(unsigned char red, unsigned char green, unsigned char blue) : r(red), g(green), b(blue) {} unsigned char r; unsigned char g; unsigned char b; }; // main loading code SDLSurfaceReader* reader = new SDLSurfaceReader(m_renderer); reader->readSurface("images/grass.tga"); // new texture unsigned char* newTexture = new unsigned char[reader->m_surface->w * reader->m_surface->h * 3 * reader->m_surface->w]; for (int y = 0; y < reader->m_surface->h; y++) { for (int x = 0; x < reader->m_surface->w; x += 3) { int index = (y * reader->m_surface->w) + x; RGBColour colour = reader->getColourAt(x, y); newTexture[index] = colour.r; newTexture[index + 1] = colour.g; newTexture[index + 2] = colour.b; } } unsigned int id = m_renderer->createTextureFromData(newTexture, reader->m_surface->w, reader->m_surface->h, RGB); // functions for reading pixels RGBColour SDLSurfaceReader::getColourAt(int x, int y) { Uint32 pixel; Uint8 red, green, blue; RGBColour rgb; pixel = getPixel(m_surface, x, y); SDL_LockSurface(m_surface); SDL_GetRGB(pixel, m_surface->format, &red, &green, &blue); SDL_UnlockSurface(m_surface); rgb.r = red; rgb.b = blue; rgb.g = green; return rgb; } // this function taken from SDL documentation // http://www.libsdl.org/cgi/docwiki.cgi/Introduction_to_SDL_Video#getpixel Uint32 SDLSurfaceReader::getPixel(SDL_Surface* surface, int x, int y) { int bpp = m_surface->format->BytesPerPixel; Uint8 *p = (Uint8*)m_surface->pixels + y * m_surface->pitch + x * bpp; switch (bpp) { case 1: return *p; case 2: return *(Uint16*)p; case 3: if (SDL_BYTEORDER == SDL_BIG_ENDIAN) return p[0] << 16 | p[1] << 8 | p[2]; else return p[0] | p[1] << 8 | p[2] << 16; case 4: return *(Uint32*)p; default: return 0; } } I've been stumped at this, and I need help badly! Thanks so much for any advice.

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  • Top 5 characteristics Recruiters are looking for

    - by Maria Sandu
    Of course many skills and characteristics recruiters are looking for are job specific. But whether you are a graduate fresh out of college or seasoned in the workplace, recruiters are also looking for generic skills and attitude to see whether you are a good fit to the company. So make sure you prepare and show through examples that you have these skills. 1. Drive/passion Liking the job you are applying for is paramount and something recruiters are always looking for. Show and prove your drive for the role and/or the field you are applying for. Always be prepared to pitch yourself, this shows your drive in the role you are applying for. 2. Communication skills People often make the mistake by thinking this skill is related to how good they are able to talk about their background and expertise. This is important, but as least as important is it that you listen well to questions that are asked. Make sure you answer to the point and ask questions if you want questions to be clarified. This shows your interest in the role and the ability to communicate clearly. This also helps you building trust with the recruiter every time you speak to him/her. 3. Confidence Recruiters are looking for the best candidate for the job. So if you don’t think you are the best candidate why should the recruiter? Show with confidence, without being arrogant (think about building trust), why you are the right person for the job. Confidence also shows in your answers to difficult questions. Be confident enough to explain why some experiences went wrong and how you learnt from them. If you don’t have a direct explanation on a question, it is better to ask for a second to think instead of a random answer. 4. Vision The main reason to hire graduates for many companies is that graduates are perceived to be flexible. The organisation will train and up skill you in the direction best suitable for the organisation. However the most intense learning path is realised when you also know where you want to go. Companies are often happy to accommodate you to support with training and development, but if you don’t have a clear vision on what you want to achieve for yourself and what value you bring to the company, recruiters can decide you are not the right candidate as they are afraid you aren’t going to stay in the company. 5. Business awareness For every job you apply you will get challenged on your knowledge and interest for the market and business they are in. All companies add value in different ways in their respective markets. So make sure you are aware of what a company is doing, what their goal is and why and how they exist and how you can add value for the company in the role you are applying for. /* 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • Too complex/too many objects?

    - by Mike Fairhurst
    I know that this will be a difficult question to answer without context, but hopefully there are at least some good guidelines to share on this. The questions are at the bottom if you want to skip the details. Most are about OOP in general. Begin context. I am a jr dev on a PHP application, and in general the devs I work with consider themselves to use many more OO concepts than most PHP devs. Still, in my research on clean code I have read about so many ways of using OO features to make code flexible, powerful, expressive, testable, etc. that is just plain not in use here. The current strongly OO API that I've proposed is being called too complex, even though it is trivial to implement. The problem I'm solving is that our permission checks are done via a message object (my API, they wanted to use arrays of constants) and the message object does not hold the validation object accountable for checking all provided data. Metaphorically, if your perm containing 'allowable' and 'rare but disallowed' is sent into a validator, the validator may not know to look for 'rare but disallowed', but approve 'allowable', which will actually approve the whole perm check. We have like 11 validators, too many to easily track at such minute detail. So I proposed an AtomicPermission class. To fix the previous example, the perm would instead contain two atomic permissions, one wrapping 'allowable' and the other wrapping 'rare but disallowed'. Where previously the validator would say 'the check is OK because it contains allowable,' now it would instead say '"allowable" is ok', at which point the check ends...and the check fails, because 'rare but disallowed' was not specifically okay-ed. The implementation is just 4 trivial objects, and rewriting a 10 line function into a 15 line function. abstract class PermissionAtom { public function allow(); // maybe deny() as well public function wasAllowed(); } class PermissionField extends PermissionAtom { public function getName(); public function getValue(); } class PermissionIdentifier extends PermissionAtom { public function getIdentifier(); } class PermissionAction extends PermissionAtom { public function getType(); } They say that this is 'not going to get us anything important' and it is 'too complex' and 'will be difficult for new developers to pick up.' I respectfully disagree, and there I end my context to begin the broader questions. So the question is about my OOP, are there any guidelines I should know: is this too complicated/too much OOP? Not that I expect to get more than 'it depends, I'd have to see if...' when is OO abstraction too much? when is OO abstraction too little? how can I determine when I am overthinking a problem vs fixing one? how can I determine when I am adding bad code to a bad project? how can I pitch these APIs? I feel the other devs would just rather say 'its too complicated' than ask 'can you explain it?' whenever I suggest a new class.

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  • App freezing after lunch without any Error on Iphone Simulator?

    - by Meko
    HI.I am using CoreData on my UITable to show some records.It works when I first run.But if I run my app on simulator second time it shows up with data but then it stops.Sometimes it quits from app or it only froze and i cant click on table or tab bar. I looked also on Console but I thought there is no error.Here output from console The Debugger has exited with status 0. [Session started at 2010-03-30 00:22:06 +0300.] 2010-03-30 00:22:08.660 Paparazzi2[3556:207] Creating Photo: Urban disaster 2010-03-30 00:22:08.661 Paparazzi2[3556:207] Person is: Josh 2010-03-30 00:22:08.665 Paparazzi2[3556:207] Person is: Josh 2010-03-30 00:22:08.665 Paparazzi2[3556:207] -- Person Exists : Josh-- 2010-03-30 00:22:08.719 Paparazzi2[3556:207] Creating Photo: Concrete pitch forks 2010-03-30 00:22:08.719 Paparazzi2[3556:207] Person is: Josh 2010-03-30 00:22:08.721 Paparazzi2[3556:207] Person is: Josh 2010-03-30 00:22:08.721 Paparazzi2[3556:207] -- Person Exists : Josh-- 2010-03-30 00:22:08.727 Paparazzi2[3556:207] Creating Photo: Leaves on fire 2010-03-30 00:22:08.728 Paparazzi2[3556:207] Person is: Al 2010-03-30 00:22:08.734 Paparazzi2[3556:207] Person is: Al 2010-03-30 00:22:08.734 Paparazzi2[3556:207] -- Person Exists : Al-- [Session started at 2010-03-30 00:22:08 +0300.] GNU gdb 6.3.50-20050815 (Apple version gdb-967) (Tue Jul 14 02:11:58 UTC 2009) Copyright 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc. GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions. Type "show copying" to see the conditions. There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details. This GDB was configured as "i386-apple-darwin".sharedlibrary apply-load-rules all Attaching to process 3556. (gdb)

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  • iPhone - openAL stops playing if I record with AVAudioRecorder

    - by Oscar Peli
    Hi there, this is an iPhone-related question: I use openAL to play some sound (I have to manage gain, pitch, etc.). I want to record what I'm playing and I use AVAudioRecorder but when I "prepareToRecord" openAL stops to play audio. What's the problem? Here is the record IBAction I use: - (IBAction) record: (id) sender { NSError *error; NSMutableDictionary *settings = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary]; [settings setValue: [NSNumber numberWithInt:kAudioFormatLinearPCM] forKey:AVFormatIDKey]; [settings setValue: [NSNumber numberWithFloat:8000.0] forKey:AVSampleRateKey]; [settings setValue: [NSNumber numberWithInt: 1] forKey:AVNumberOfChannelsKey]; [settings setValue: [NSNumber numberWithInt:16] forKey:AVLinearPCMBitDepthKey]; [settings setValue: [NSNumber numberWithBool:NO] forKey:AVLinearPCMIsBigEndianKey]; [settings setValue: [NSNumber numberWithBool:NO] forKey:AVLinearPCMIsFloatKey]; NSURL *url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:FILEPATH]; self.recorder = [[AVAudioRecorder alloc] initWithURL:url settings:settings error:&error]; self.recorder.delegate = self; self.recorder.meteringEnabled = YES; [self.recorder prepareToRecord]; [self.recorder record]; } Thanks

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  • Regex to extract this semi formatted data

    - by Codygman
    Alright, I can't quite figure out how to do this. Given the following text: Roland AX-1: /start Roland's AX-1 strap-on remote MIDI controller has a very impressive 45-note velocity sensitive keyboard, and has switchable velocity curves, goes octave up/down, transpose, split/layering zones, and has fun tempo control for sequencers and more. Roland's AX-1 comes with a built-in GS control for total MIDI control of GM/GS synths. Its "Expression Bar" can control pitch and mod via an almost ribbon-like controller. It's also the newest and most advanced remote controller for your synths or midi modules. /end Roland AX-7: /start Roland's AX-7 builds on the infamous Roland AX-1 design. You just strap it on and put it to the front of the stage. Offering several controllers, such as: a D-Beam, then you can open the door to amazing live performance. 7-segment LED display, larger patch memory (Around 128 patches with MIDI data backup), and comes with GM2/GS compatibility make it extra easy to use. The 45-note, velocity-sensitive keyboard. 5 realtime controllers including a data entry knob, touch controller knob, opression bar, a hold button, and D-Beam. 128 patches with MIDI data backup. 2 MIDI zones. /end I'm trying to use the following: /^([\w\d \-]*):\s\s\s\s^\/start([^\:]*)\/end$/im You can see on rubular here: http://rubular.com/r/BVRRHsnWdp Thanks for any help. I guess i'm trying to match blocks of text until I hit the next title which always ends with a :$

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  • Python with Wiimote using pywiiuse module

    - by Anon
    After seeing the abilities and hackibility of wiimotes I really want to use it in my 'Intro to programming' final. Everyone must make a python program and present it to the class. I want to make a game with pygame incorporating a wiimote. I found pywiiuse which is a very basic wrapper for the wiiuse library using c types. I can NOT get anything beyond LEDs and vibrating to work. Buttons, IR, motion sensing, nothing. I've tried different versions of wiiuse, pywiiuse, even python. I can't even get the examples that came with it to run. Here's the code I made as a simple test. I copied some of the example C++ code. from pywiiuse import * from time import sleep #Init wiimotes = wiiuse_init() #Find and start the wiimote found = wiiuse_find(wiimotes,1,5) #Make the variable wiimote to the first wiimote init() found wiimote = wiimotes.contents #Set Leds wiiuse_set_leds(wiimote,WIIMOTE_LED_1) #Rumble for 1 second wiiuse_rumble(wiimote,1) sleep(1) wiiuse_rumble(wiimote,0) #Turn motion sensing on(supposedly) wiiuse_motion_sensing(wiimote,1) while 1: #Poll the wiimotes to get the status like pitch or roll if(wiiuse_poll(wiimote,1)): print 'EVENT' And here's the output when I run it. wiiuse version 0.9 wiiuse api version 8 [INFO] Found wiimote [assigned wiimote id 1]. EVENT EVENT Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Documents and Settings\Nick\Desktop\wiimotetext.py", line 26, in <mod ule> if(wiiuse_poll(wiimote,1)): WindowsError: exception: access violation reading 0x00000004 It seems each time I run it, it prints out EVENT 2-5 times until the trace back. I have no clue what to do at this point, I've been trying for the past two days to get it working. Thanks!

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  • Bringing ideas to life

    - by danixd
    I understand that this forum is filled with computer science genius's but there must come a point where your expertise in coding can not keep up with your creativity. I am a front end programmer and designer of sorts. I have so many ideas, with no ways of implementing them. I know of platforms that can help, I am really into the arduino project for physical ideas and I know Flash is an amazing platform for software, but when it comes to complex ideas, even such as a 3D game, things can be too much to handle individually. When you have an idea, what is your typical methodology of bring them to life? Write down the idea, save if for later (never gets made right...) Try building it yourself, on the platforms you work with and are good at Consult people on what platform it is best suited to and collaborate with an expert in that field to do the dirty work Consult people on what platform it is best suited to and try to learn it and make it yourself (at least the alpha stages) Are there any communities that support this idea of bringing things to life? Can you pitch ideas to x company as a business model and hope they take you on / sponsor you? Do you have to spend lots of $$$ to get things made?

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  • Could not determine the size of this expression.

    - by Søren
    Hi, I have resently started to use MATLAB Simulink, and my problem is that i can't implement an AMDF function, because simulink compiler cannot determine the lengths. Simulink errors: |--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Could not determine the size of this expression. Function 'Embedded MATLAB Function2' (#38.728.741), line 33, column 32: "1:flength-k+1" Errors occurred during parsing of Embedded MATLAB function 'Embedded MATLAB Function2'(#38) Embedded MATLAB Interface Error: Errors occurred during parsing of Embedded MATLAB function 'Embedded MATLAB Function2'(#38) . |--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MY CODE: |--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- persistent sLength persistent fLength persistent amdf % Length of the frame flength = length(frame); % Pitch period is between 2.5 ms and 19.5 ms for LPC-10 algorithm % This because this algorithm assumes the frequencyspan is 50 and 400 Hz pH = ceil((1/min(fspan))*fs); if(pH flength) pH = flength; end; pL = ceil((1/max(fspan))*fs); if(pL <= 0 || pL = flength) pL = 0; end; sLength = pH - pL; % Normalize the frame frame = frame/max(max(abs(frame))); % Allocating memory for the calculation of the amdf %amdf = zeros(1,sLength); %%%%%%%% amdf = 0; % Calculating the AMDF with unbiased normalizing for k = (pL+1):pH amdf(k-pL) = sum(abs(frame(1:flength-k+1) - frame(k:flength)))/(flength-k+1); end; % Output of the AMDF if(min(amdf) < lvlThr) voiced = 1; else voiced = 0; end; % Output of the minimum of the amdf minAMDF = min(amdf); |---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HELP Kind regards Søren

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  • Extracting note onset from MIDI

    - by Dolphin
    Hi I need to extract musical features (note details-pitch, duration, rhythm, loudness, note start time) from a polyphonic (having 2 scores for treble and bass - bass may also have chords) MIDI file. I'm using the jMusic API to extract these details from a MIDI file. My approach is to go through each score, into parts, then phrases and finally notes and extract the details. With my approach, it's reading all the treble notes first and then the bass notes - but chords are not captured (i.e. only a single note of the chord is taken), and I cannot identify from which point onwards are the bass notes. So what I tried was to get the note onsets (i.e. the start time of note being played) - since the starting time of both the treble and bass notes at the start of the piece should be same - But I cannot extract the note onset using jMusic API. Each time it shows 0.0. Is there any way I can identify the voice (treble or bass) of a note? And also all the notes of a chord? How is the voice or note onset for each note stored in MIDI? Is this different for each MIDI file? Any insight is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance

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  • Sell me Distributed revision control

    - by ring bearer
    I know 1000s of similar topics floating around. I read at lest 5 threads here in SO But why am I still not convinced about DVCS? I have only following questions (note that I am selfishly worried only about Java projects) What is the advantage or value of committing locally? What? really? All modern IDEs allows you to keep track of your changes? and if required you can restore a particular change. Also, they have a feature to label your changes/versions at IDE level!? what if I crash my hard drive? where did my local repository go? (so how is it cool compared to checking in to a central repo?) Working offline or in an air plane. What is the big deal?In order for me to build a release with my changes, I must eventually connect to the central repository. Till then it does not matter how I track my changes locally. Ok Linus Torvalds gives his life to Git and hates everything else. Is that enough to blindly sing praises? Linus lives in a different world compared to offshore developers in my mid-sized project? Pitch me!

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  • How can I initialize a QTMovie object with certain attributes using writable data?

    - by c-had
    I'm trying to create an empty QTMovie object that I can add segments to, and then play. This is easy to do with something like: movie = [[QTMovie alloc] initToWritableData:[NSMutableData dataWithCapacity:1048576] error:&error]; I can then use -insertSegmentOfMovie to insert segments from other movies into this one so I can play it back. The problem is that I also need to set a certain attribute when creating the QTMovie object. In particular, I need to set the QTMovieRateChangesPreservePitchAttribute attribute, so that I can alter playback speed during playback without changing pitch. This attribute cannot be written after the movie is initialized. So, I can create the QTMovie object like this: movie = [[QTMovie alloc] initWithAttributes:[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:[NSNumber numberWithBool:YES], QTMovieRateChangesPreservePitchAttribute, nil] error:&error]; Unfortunately, this is not editable. I've tried setting the QTMovieEditableAttribute as well on creation, but it does not help. I still get an exception when I try to insert anything into this movie. I presume this is because there is no writable file or data reference associated with the QTMovie. Any ideas on how to solve this?

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  • Calculate lookat vector from position and Euler angles

    - by Jaap
    I've implemented an FPS style camera, with the camera consisting of a position vector, and Euler angles pitch and yaw (x and y rotations). After setting up the projection matrix, I then translate to camera coordinates by rotating, then translating to the inverse of the camera position: // Load projection matrix glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); // Set perspective gluPerspective(m_fFOV, m_fWidth/m_fHeight, m_fNear, m_fFar); // Load modelview matrix glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); // Position camera glRotatef(m_fRotateX, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0); glRotatef(m_fRotateY, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0); glTranslatef(-m_vPosition.x, -m_vPosition.y, -m_vPosition.z); Now I've got a few viewports set up, each with its own camera, and from every camera I render the position of the other cameras (as a simple box). I'd like to also draw the view vector for these cameras, except I haven't a clue how to calculate the lookat vector from the position and Euler angles. I've tried to multiply the original camera vector (0, 0, -1) by a matrix representing the camera rotations then adding the camera position to the transformed vector, but that doesn't work at all (most probably because I'm way off base): vector v1(0, 0, -1); matrix m1 = matrix::IDENTITY; m1.rotate(m_fRotateX, 0, 0); m1.rotate(0, m_fRotateY, 0); vector v2 = v1 * m1; v2 = v2 + m_vPosition; // add camera position vector glBegin(GL_LINES); glVertex3fv(m_vPosition); glVertex3fv(v2); glEnd(); What I'd like is to draw a line segment from the camera towards the lookat direction. I've looked all over the place for examples of this, but can't seem to find anything. Thanks a lot!

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  • OpenAL not playing on Max OS X 10.6

    - by Grimless
    I've been working on getting a basic audio engine running on my Mac using OpenAL. It seems relatively straightforward after working with OpenGL for a while. However, despite the fact that I believe I have everything in place, my sound will not play. Here is the order of things I am doing: //Creating a new device ALCdevice* device = alcOpenDevice(NULL); //Create a new context with the device ALCcontext* context = alcCreateContext(device, NULL); //Make that context current alcMakeContextCurrent(context); //Do lots of loading stuff to bring in an AIFF... voodooAIFF = myAIFFLoader("name"); //Then use that data ALuint buf; alGenBuffers(1, &buf); //Check for errors, but none happen... //Bind buffer data. alBufferData(buf, voodooAIFF.format, voodooAIFF.data, voodooAIFF.sizeInBytes, voodooAIFF.frequency); //Check for errors, none here either... //Create Source ALuint src; alGenSources(1, &src); //Error check again, no errors. //Bind source to buffer alSourcei(src, AL_BUFFER, buf); //Set reference distance alSourcei(sourceID, AL_REFERENCE_DISTANCE, 1); //Set source attributes including gain and pitch to 1 (direction set to 0,0,0) //Check for errors, nothing... //Set up listener attributes. //Check for errors, no errors. //Begin playing. alSourcePlay(src); Observe silence... Any insight, what steps am I missing here?

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  • Aligning music notes using String matching algorithms or Dynamic Programming

    - by Dolphin
    Hi I need to compare 2 sets of musical pieces (i.e. a playing-taken in MIDI format-note details extracted and saved in a database table, against sheet music-taken into XML format). When evaluating playing against sheet music (i.e.note details-pitch, duration, rhythm), note alignment needs to be done - to identify missed/extra/incorrect/swapped notes that from the reference (sheet music) notes. I have like 1800-2500 notes in one piece approx (can even be more-with polyphonic, right now I'm doing for monophonic). So will I have to have all these into an array? Will it be memory overloading or stack overflow? There are string matching algorithms like KMP, Boyce-Moore. But note alignment can also be done through Dynamic Programming. How can I use Dynamic Programming to approach this? What are the available algorithms? Is it about approximate string matching? Which approach is much productive? String matching algos like Boyce-Moore, or dynamic programming? How can I assess which is more effective? Greatly appreciate any insight or suggestions Thanks in advance

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  • I&rsquo;m sorry RPGs, it&rsquo;s not you, it&rsquo;s me: The birth of my game idea

    - by George Clingerman
    One of the things I’ve had to give up in order to have some development time at night is gaming. It’s something I refused to admit for years but I’ve just had to face the facts. I’m no longer a gamer. I just don’t have hours and hours of free time to pour into gaming and when I do have hours and hours of free time I want to pour them into game development. That doesn’t mean I don’t game at all! I play games pretty much every day. It just means I’ve moved more into the casual game realm. It’s all I have time for when juggling priorities in my life. That means that games like Gears of War 2 sit shrink wrapped on my shelf and although I popped Dragon Age into my Xbox 360 one time, I barely made it through the opening sequence and haven’t had time to sit down and play again. Instead I’m playing short games like Jamestown, Atom Zombie Smasher, Fortix or if I have time to jump in and play a few rounds maybe some Monday Night Combat or Team Fortress 2. These are games I can instantly get into and play for just a short period of time and then walk away. Breath of Death VII saved my life: Back in the day (way, way back in the day) I used to be a pretty big RPG fan. Not big by a lot of RPG gamers' standards (most of the RPGs RPG fans about I’ve never heard of) but I used to LOVE to play them on the NES, SNES and Genesis and considered that my genre. Final Fantasy, Shining in the Darkness, Bard’s Tale, Faxanadu, Shadowrun, Ultima, Dragon Warrior, Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star, Shining Force and well the list could go on but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head. I loved playing RPGs and they were my games of choice. After my first son was born (this was just about 12 years ago), I tried to continue playing RPGs and purchased games like Baldur’s Gate I & II, Neverwinter Nights, Fable, then a few of the Final Fantasy’s then Kingdom Hearts. I kept buying these games and then only playing for about fifteen minutes and never getting back to them. I still loved RPGs but they just no longer fit into my life (I still haven’t accepted that since I still purchased Dragon Age II for some reason and convinced myself I’d find the time). Adding three more sons to the mix (that’s 4 total) didn’t help much to finding more RPG time (except for Breath of Death VII and other XBLIG RPG titles, thanks guys!) All work and no RPG: A few months ago as I was sitting thinking about the lack of RPGs in my life and talking to my wife about why I wish RPGs were different and easier for a dad like me to get into. She seemed like she was listening, so I started listing all the things that made them impossible for me to play. Here’s a short list I came up with. They take 15 billion hours to complete I have a few minutes at a time I can grab to play them if I want to have time to code. At that rate it would take me 9 trillion years to beat just one RPG. There’s such long spans of times between when I can play them I forget what I was even doing so I have to spend most of the playtime I have just figuring that out and then my play time is over. Repeat. I’ll never finish one and since it takes so long to get to the fun part in an RPG, I’m never having fun. RPGs aren’t fun if you don’t have hours to play them at a time. As you can see based on my science and math, RPGs aren’t fun for me any more. From there my brain started toying around with ideas of RPGs that would work for me. They would have to be a short RPG, you know one you could beat in a single play session. A dad sized play session. I started thinking, wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a fifteen minute RPG? That got me laughing and I took that as a good sign that it sounded fun and so I thought about it a little more. I immediately discarded the idea of doing a real RPG. I’m sure a short RPG like that could be done but it wasn’t the vibe that I had in my head. No this was going to be something that just had the core essence of an RPG. In reality what I’d be making would be more of an arcade style game. One with high scores and lots of crazy action on the screen. And that’s when it hit me. It would be a speed run RPG. That’s the basics of the game I’m working on.   The Elevator Pitch: It’s a 2D top down RPG themed arcade game focused on speed. It sounds like an RPG, smells like an RPG but it’s merely emulating an RPG. The game is focused on fun and mayhem in RPG form with players leveling up in seconds instead of hours and rushing to finish quests as quickly as possible because they’ve only got fifteen minutes before EVIL overtakes the world. If the player takes longer than fifteen minutes, it’s game over man. One to four player co-operative play to really see just how fast players can level up and beat the game. Gamers will compete on leaderboards for bragging rights for fastest 1, 2, 3, and 4 player speed runs, lowest leveled characters to beat the game, highest leveled characters to beat the game and so on. Times will be tracked for everything from how long a player sat distributing stats, equipping items, talking to NPCs to running around the level. These stats will be shown at the end of each quest/level so the players can work on improving their speed run for that part of the game next time around. It’s the perfect RPG for those of us who only have fifteen minutes of game time! Where I’m at: I’m still at the prototyping stage attempting to but all the basic framework pieces in place that will at minimum give me one level to rush through. I’ve been working on this prototype for about a month now though so I’m going to have to step it up a bit or I’m not going to get finished in time (remember I’ve only got 85 days left!) Lots of the game code is in place (although pretty sloppy) but I still can’t play through that first quest/level just yet. That’s my goal to finish up by the end of next Sunday (3/25/2012). You can all hold me to that and cheer me on or heckle me throughout the week. Either way that should help me stay a bit more motivated and focused. In my head this feels like it’s going to be a fun game so I’m looking forward to seeing how it actually plays!

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  • Laptop LCD sometimes stops working on reboot. Please help.

    - by J Ringle
    I have a Gateway P-6831FX Laptop with Vista Ultimate. The Laptop LCD will sometimes not come on after I reboot the computer. I don't even close the lid and it happens. It isn't dim, it doesn't come on at all. No posting of CMOS (BIOS), nothing. Please note... this happens sometimes, not every time. Frustrating! When plugged into an external monitor, which works fine, Vista display properties can't even "sense" the laptop LCD. I try to enable the laptop LCD for dual display, turning on the laptop LCD, and it does nothing. It's like the laptop LCD is not even there. Manually taking a magnet in my hand to the laptop lid sensing switch (the sensor that turns off display/sleep mode when you close lid), sometimes causes the LCD backlight to "turn on" but not display any images. By "turn on" I mean I can see the screen backlight turn on to a 'dark gray' screen instead of pitch black. Subsequent reboot the laptop display is not working again! Here are the facts: Only happens at random and only after a reboot. Waking from Sleep mode isn't a problem. Pressing F4 function key for dual display does nothing when this happens. Closing lid doesn't seem to be related. (unless it is only after reboot.) using external magnet from laptop screen sensor sometimes triggers backlight to turn on but reboot back to square one with no LCD display. an external display always works fine. I have taken apart LCD, checked all wires and ribbons for loose connections or damage. I have replaced the Inverter. It doesn't seem to be heat related as I can put in sleep mode and resume fine when very hot. (external monitor works fine too). Sometimes the screen works fine as if there is not a problem at all. Even after a reboot... This is random. Any ideas out there? If it is a bad part... which one? The LCD seems to be fine. What are the odds of 2 bad inverters? The backlight is fine. The LCD wires/ribbons seem to be fine. I am at a loss. No warranty left and Gateway tech support is clueless. Thanks for any feedback that might help.

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  • Wiimote accelerometer input on Windows? (in 2013 - Glovepie alternative?)

    - by user568458
    There were a few options for getting accelerometer input into Windows using a Nintendo Wiimote. As of mid 2013, these projects seem to be dead, corrupted with malware, or both. Are there any tools out there that can do this that are still available (and not full of malware)? Quick roundup of the options that used to exist, or that still exist but aren't suitable: Glovepie, which used to be the most recommended option, appears to be dead: it's own website hacked, its creator's googlepages page full of strange stuff that sounds like hacker-humour about the end of the world... (I'd rather not link to them, very dubious stuff...), and lots of forum threads asking if it's a dead project with comments along the lines of "I heard that the author intends to return to it" dated 2011... Wiiuse seems to be dead: its sourceforge page simply says "Error.", its own website has turned into a squatter page. There apparently was an extension for Autohotkey that allowed Wiimote input, but I've seen warnings that this too is now full of malware (see final commentin above link) Everything else I can find about using Wiimotes as input on Windows - for example, Johnny Lee Cheng's work - seems to be exclusively about using infrared or sensor bar, or tied to a specific purpose (e.g. FPS gaming). My main interest is in the accelerometer, and buttons if possible (although something that supports the IR stuff too would be ideal). Is there anything that works for getting Wiimote accelerometer input into Windows that is reliable and not a malware-fest? If anyone's interested in "Why?", it's to use the Wiimote as an audio / midi controller: to use movement, pitch, roll etc to modulate lots of different sound variables at once with one hand. Wiimotes are great for this, and Glovepie used to be the standard way to make this work (e.g. see for example this tutorial, and this one, ignore the unrelated video; I've also seen musicians using wiimote/glovepie setups at gigs, creating some really unique sounds). As of 2013, however, Glovepie seems to be a dead and thoroughly hacked project, sadly. Is there anything else? With or without MotionPlus is fine (with would be better). If anyone knows of any worthy alternatives to Wiimotes in terms of price and quality that can be made to work with a PC, that would also be great: but in my research I coulnd't find any (here's a link to someone reaching the same conclusion). found some potentially relevant stuff here, not had time to test any of it yet though - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2984450/using-accelerometer-in-wiimote-for-physics-practicals

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  • Silverlight 5 Hosting :: Features in Silverlight 5 and Release Date

    - by mbridge
    Silverlight 5 is finally announced in the Silverlight FireStarter Event on the 2nd December, 2010. This new version of Silverlight which was earlier labeled as 'Future of Microsoft Silverlight' has now come much closer to go live as the first Silverlight 5 Beta version is expected to be shipped during the early months of 2011. However for the full fledged and the final release of Silverlight 5, we have to wait many more months as the same is likely to be made available within the Q3 2011. As would have been usually expected, this latest edition would feature many new capabilities thereby extending the developer productivity to a whole new dimension of premium media experience and feature-rich business applications. It comes along with many new feature updates as well as the inclusion of new technologies to improve the standard of the Silverlight applications which are now fine-tuned to produce next generation business and media solutions that is capable to meet the requirements of the advanced web-based app development. The Silverlight 5 is all set to replace the previous fourth version which now includes more than forty new features while also dropping various deprecated elements that was prevalent earlier. It has brought around some major performance enhancements and also included better support for various other tools and technologies. Following are some of the changes that are registered to be available under the Silverlight 5 Beta edition which is scheduled to be launched during the Q1 2011. Silverlight 5 : Premium Media Experiences The media features of Silverlight 5 has seen some major enhancements with a lot of optimizations being made to deliver richer solutions. It's capability has now been extended to make things easier, faster and capable of performing the desired tasks in the most efficient manner. The Silverlight media solutions has already been a part of many companies in the recent days where various on-demand Silverlight services were featured but with the arrival of the next generation premium media solution of Silverlight 5, it is expected to register new heights of success and global user acclamation for using it with many esteemed web-based projects and media solutions. - The most happening element in the new Silverlight 5 will be its support for utilizing the GPU based hardware acceleration which is intended to lower down the CPU load to a significant extent and thereby allowing faster rendering of media contents without consuming much resources. This feature is believed to be particularly helpful for low configured machines to run full HD media content without any lagging caused due to processor load. It will hence be one great feature to revolutionize the new generation high quality media contents to be available within the web in a more efficient manner with its hardware decoded video playback capabilities. - With the inclusion of hardware video decoding to minimize the processor load, the Silverlight 5 also comes with another optimization enhancement to also reduce the power consumption level by making new methods to deal with the power-saver settings. With this optimization in effect, the computer would be automatically allowed to switch to sleep mode while no video playback is in progress and also to prevent any screensavers to popup and cause annoyances during any video playback. There would also be other power saver options which will be made available to best suit the users requirements and purpose. - The Silverlight trickplay feature is another great way to tweak any silverlight powered media content as is used for many video tutorial sites or for dealing with any sort of presentations. This feature enables the user to modify the playback speed to either slowdown or speedup during the playback durations based on the requirements without compromising on the quality of output. Normally such manipulations always makes the content's audio to go off-pitch, but the same will not be the case with TrickPlay and the audio would seamlessly progress with the video without skipping any of its part. - In addition to all of the above, the new Silverlight 5 will be featuring wireless control of all the media contents by making use of remote controllers. With the use of such remote devices, it will be easier to handle the various media playback controls thereby providing more freedom while experiencing the premium media services. Silverlight 5 : Business Application Development The application development standard has been extended with more possibilities by bringing forth new and useful technologies and also reviving the existing methods to work better than what it was used to. From the UI improvements to advanced technical aspects, the Silverlight 5 scores high on all grounds to produce great next generation business delivered applications by putting in more creativity and resourceful touch to all the apps being produced with it. - The WPF feature of Silverlight is made more effective by introducing new standards of Databinding which is intended to improve the productivity standards of the Silverlight application developer. It brings in a lot of convenience in debugging the databinding components or expressions and hence making things work in a flawless manner. Some additional features related to databinding includes that of Ancestor RelativeSource, Implicit DataTemplates and Model View ViewModel (MVVM) support with DataContextChanged event and many other new features relating it. - It now comes with a refined text and printing service which facilitates better clarity of the text rendering and also many positive changes which are being applied to the layout pattern. New supports has been added to include OpenType font, multi-column text, linked-text containers and character leading support to name a few among the available features.This also includes some important printing aspects like that of Postscript Vector Printing API which allows to program our printing tasks in a user defined way and Pivot functionality for visualization concerns of informations. - The Graphics support is the key improvements being incorporated which now enables to utilize three dimensional graphics pattern using GPU acceleration. It can manage to provide some really cool visualizations being curved to provide media contents within the business apps with also the support for full HD contents at 1080p quality. - Silverlight 5 includes the support for 64-bit operating systems and relevant browsers and is also optimized to provide better performance. It can support the background thread for the networking which can reduce the latency of the network to a considerable extent. The Out-of-Browser functionality adds the support for utilizing various libraries and also the Win32 API. It also comes with testing support with VS 2010 which is mostly an automated procedure and has also enabled increased security aspects of all the Silverlight 5 developed applications by using the improved version of group policy support.

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  • Silverlight 5 &ndash; What&rsquo;s New? (Including Screenshots &amp; Code Snippets)

    - by mbcrump
    Silverlight 5 is coming next year (2011) and this blog post will tell you what you need to know before the beta ships. First, let me address people saying that it is dead after PDC 2010. I believe that it’s best to see what the market is doing, not the vendor. Below is a list of companies that are developing Silverlight 4 applications shown during the Silverlight Firestarter. Some of the companies have shipped and some haven’t. It’s just great to see the actual company names that are working on Silverlight instead of “people are developing for Silverlight”. The next thing that I wanted to point out was that HTML5, WPF and Silverlight can co-exist. In case you missed Scott Gutherie’s keynote, they actually had a slide with all three stacked together. This shows Microsoft will be heavily investing in each technology.  Even I, a Silverlight developer, am reading Pro HTML5. Microsoft said that according to the Silverlight Feature Voting site, 21k votes were entered. Microsoft has implemented about 70% of these votes in Silverlight 5. That is an amazing number, and I am crossing my fingers that Microsoft bundles Silverlight with Windows 8. Let’s get started… what’s new in Silverlight 5? I am going to show you some great application and actual code shown during the Firestarter event. Media Hardware Video Decode – Instead of using CPU to decode, we will offload it to GPU. This will allow netbooks, etc to play videos. Trickplay – Variable Speed Playback – Pitch Correction (If you speed up someone talking they won’t sound like a chipmunk). Power Management – Less battery when playing video. Screensavers will no longer kick in if watching a video. If you pause a video then screensaver will kick in. Remote Control Support – This will allow users to control playback functions like Pause, Rewind and Fastforward. IIS Media Services 4 has shipped and now supports Azure. Data Binding Layout Transitions – Just with a few lines of XAML you can create a really rich experience that is not using Storyboards or animations. RelativeSource FindAncestor – Ancestor RelativeSource bindings make it much easier for a DataTemplate to bind to a property on a container control. Custom Markup Extensions – Markup extensions allow code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers. This is great for MVVM support. Changing Styles during Runtime By Binding in Style Setters – Changing Styles at runtime used to be a real pain in Silverlight 4, now it’s much easier. Binding in style setters allows bindings to reference other properties. XAML Debugging – Below you can see that we set a breakpoint in XAML. This shows us exactly what is going on with our binding.  WCF & RIA Services WS-Trust Support – Taken from Wikipedia: WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships between participants in a secure message exchange. You can reduce network latency by using a background thread for networking. Supports Azure now.  Text and Printing Improved text clarity that enables better text rendering. Multi-column text flow, Character tracking and leading support, and full OpenType font support.  Includes a new Postscript Vector Printing API that provides control over what you print . Pivot functionality baked into Silverlight 5 SDK. Graphics Immediate mode graphics support that will enable you to use the GPU and 3D graphics supports. Take a look at what was shown in the demos below. 1) 3D view of the Earth – not really a real-world application though. A doctor’s portal. This demo really stood out for me as it shows what we can do with the 3D / GPU support. Out of Browser OOB applications can now create and manage childwindows as shown in the screenshot below.  Trusted OOB applications can use P/Invoke to call Win32 APIs and unmanaged libraries.  Enterprise Group Policy Support allow enterprises to lock down or up the sandbox capabilities of Silverlight 5 applications. In this demo, he tore the “notes” off of the application and it appeared in a new window. See the black arrow below. In this demo, he connected a USB Device which fired off a local Win32 application that provided the data off the USB stick to Silverlight. Another demo of a Silverlight 5 application exporting data right into Excel running inside of browser. Testing They demoed Coded UI, which is available now in the Visual Studio Feature Pack 2. This will allow you to create automated testing without writing any code manually. Performance: Microsoft has worked to improve the Silverlight startup time. Silverlight 5 provides 64-bit browser support.  Silverlight 5 also provides IE9 Hardware acceleration.   I am looking forward to Silverlight 5 and I hope you are too. Thanks for reading and I hope you visit again soon.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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  • Oracle WebCenter at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

    - by Brian Dirking
    We had a great week at the E20 Conference, presenting in four sessions – Andy MacMillan gave a session titled Today’s Successful Enterprises are Social Enterprises and was on a panel that Tony Byrne moderated; Christian Finn spoke on a panel on Unified Communications Unified Communications + Social Computing = Best of Both Worlds?, Mark Bennett spoke on a panel on The Evolution of Talent Management. The key areas of focus this year were sentiment analysis, adoption and community building, the benefits of failure, and social’s role in process applications. Sentiment analysis. This was focused not on external audiences but more on employee sentiment. Tim Young showed his internal "NikoNiko" project, where employees use smilies to report their current mood. The result was a dashboard that showed the company mood by department. Since the goal is to improve productivity, people can see which departments are running into issues and try and address them. A company might otherwise wait until the end of the quarter financials to find out that there was a problem and product didn’t ship. This is a way to identify issues immediately. Tim is great – he had the crowd laughing as soon as he hit the stage, with his proposed hastag for his session: by making it 138 characters long, people couldn’t say much behind his back. And as I tweeted during his session, I loved his comment that complexity diffuses energy - it sounds like something Sun Tzu would say. Another example of employee sentiment analysis was CubeVibe. Founder and CEO Aaron Aycock, in his 3 minute pitch or die session talked about how engaged employees perform better. It was too bad he got gonged, he was just picking up speed, but CubeVibe did win the vote – congratulations to them. Internal adoption, community building, and involvement. On this topic I spoke to Terri Griffith, and she said there is some good work going on at University of Indiana regarding this, and hinted that she might be blogging about it in the near future. This area holds lots of interest for me. Amongst our customers, - CPAC stands out as an organization that has successfully built a community. So, I wonder - what are the building blocks? A strong leader? A common or unifying purpose? A certain level of engagement? I imagine someone has created an equation that says “for a community to grow at 30% per month, there must be an engagement level x to the square root of y, where x equals current community size, and y equals the expected growth rate, and the result is how many engagements the average user must contribute to maintain that growth.” Does anyone have a framework like that? The net result of everyone’s experience is that there is nothing to do but start early and fail often. Kevin Jones made this the focus of his keynote. He talked about the types of failure and what they mean. And he showed his famous kids at work video: Kevin’s blog also has this post: Social Business Failure #8: Workflow Integration. This is something that we’ve been working on at Oracle. Since so much of business is based in enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM (and since Oracle offers e-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards, as well as Fusion Applications), it makes sense that the social capabilities of Oracle WebCenter is built right into these applications. There are two types of social collaboration – ad-hoc, and exception handling. When you are in a business process and encounter an exception, you immediately look for 1) the document that tells you how to handle it, or 2) the person who can tell you how to handle it. With WebCenter built into these processes, people either search their content management system, or engage in expertise location and conversation. The great thing is, THEY DON’T HAVE TO LEAVE THE APPLICATION TO DO IT. Oracle has built the social capabilities right into the applications and business processes. I don’t think enough folks were able to see that at the event, but I expect that over the next six months folks will become very aware of it. WebCenter also provides the ability to have ad-hoc collaboration, search, and expertise location that folks need when they are innovating or collaborating. We demonstrated Oracle Social Network. It’s built on our Oracle WebCenter product to provide social collaboration inside and outside of your company. When we showed it to people, there were a number of areas that they commented on that were different from the other products being shown at the conference: Screenshots from within the product Many authors working on documents simultaneously Flagging people for follow up Direct ability to call out to people Ability to see presence not just if someone is online, but which conversation they are actively in Great stuff, the conference was full of smart people that that we enjoy spending time with. We’ll keep up in the meantime, but we look forward to seeing you in Boston.

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  • JavaOne 2011: Content review process and Tips for submissions

    - by arungupta
    The Technical Sessions, Birds of Feather, Panels, and Hands-on labs (basically all the content delivered at JavaOne) forms the backbone of the conference. At this year's JavaOne conference you'll have access to the rock star speakers, the ability to engage with luminaries in the hallways, and have beer (or 2) with community peers in designated areas. Even though the conference is Oct 2-6, 2011, and will be bigger and better than last year's conference, the Call for Paper submission and review/selection evaluation started much earlier.In previous years, I've participated in the review process and this year I was honored to serve as co-lead for the "Enterprise Service Architecture and Cloud" track with Ludovic Champenois. We had a stellar review team with an equal mix of Oracle and external community reviewers. The review process is very overwhelming with the reviewers going through multiple voting iterations on each submission in order to ensure that the selected content is the BEST of the submitted lot. Our ultimate goal was to ensure that the content best represented the track, and most importantly would draw interest and excitement from attendees. As always, the number and quality of submissions were just superb, making for a truly challenging (and rewarding) experience for the reviewers. As co-lead I tried to ensure that I applied a fair and balanced process in the evaluation of content in my track. . Here are some key steps followed by all track leads: Vote on sessions - Each reviewer is required to vote on the sessions on a scale of 1-5 - and also provide a justifying comment. Create buckets - Divide the submissions into different buckets to ensure a fair representation of different topics within a track. This ensures that if a particular bucket got higher votes then the track is not exclusively skewed towards it. Top 7 - The review committee provides a list of the top 7 talks that can be used in the promotional material by the JavaOne team. Generally these talks are easy to identify and a consensus is reached upon them fairly quickly. First cut - Each track is allocated a total number of sessions (including panels), BoFs, and Hands-on labs that can be approved. The track leads then start creating the first cut of the approvals using the casted votes coupled with their prior experience in the subject matter. In our case, Ludo and I have been attending/speaking at JavaOne (and other popular Java-focused conferences) for double digit years. The Grind - The first cut is then refined and refined and refined using multiple selection criteria such as sorting on the bucket, speaker quality, topic popularity, cumulative vote total, and individual vote scale. The sessions that don't make the cut are reviewed again as well to ensure if they need to replace one of the selected one as a potential alternate. I would like to thank the entire Java community for all the submissions and many thanks to the reviewers who spent countless hours reading each abstract, voting on them, and helping us refine the list. I think approximately 3-4 hours cumulative were spent on each submission to reach an evaluation, specifically the border line cases. We gave our recommendations to the JavaOne Program Committee Chairperson (Sharat Chander) and accept/decline notifications should show up in submitter inboxes in the next few weeks. Here are some points to keep in mind when submitting a session to JavaOne next time: JavaOne is a technology-focused conference so any product, marketing or seemingly marketish talk are put at the bottom of the list.Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop are better options for submitting product specific talks. Make your title catchy. Remember the attendees are more likely to read the abstract if they like the title. We try our best to recategorize the talk to a different track if it needs to but please ensure that you are filing in the right track to have all the right eyeballs looking at it. Also, it does not hurt marking an alternate track if your talk meets the criteria. Make sure to coordinate within your team before the submission - multiple sessions from the same team or company does not ensure that the best speaker is picked. In such case we rely upon your "google presence" and/or review committee's prior knowledge of the speaker. The reviewers may not know you or your product at all and you get 750 characters to pitch your idea. Make sure to use all of them, to the last 750th character. Make sure to read your abstract multiple times to ensure that you are giving all the relevant information ? Think through your presentation and see if you are leaving out any important aspects.Also look if the abstract has any redundant information that will not required by the reviewers. There are additional sections that allow you to share information about the speaker and the presentation summary. Use them to blow the horn about yourself and any other relevant details. Please don't say "call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx to find out the details" :-) The review committee enjoyed reviewing the submissions and we certainly hope you'll have a great time attending them. Happy JavaOne!

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  • JavaOne 2011: Content review process and Tips for submissions

    - by arungupta
    The Technical Sessions, Birds of Feather, Panels, and Hands-on labs (basically all the content delivered at JavaOne) forms the backbone of the conference. At this year's JavaOne conference you'll have access to the rock star speakers, the ability to engage with luminaries in the hallways, and have beer (or 2) with community peers in designated areas. Even though the conference is Oct 2-6, 2011, and will be bigger and better than last year's conference, the Call for Paper submission and review/selection evaluation started much earlier.In previous years, I've participated in the review process and this year I was honored to serve as co-lead for the "Enterprise Service Architecture and Cloud" track with Ludovic Champenois. We had a stellar review team with an equal mix of Oracle and external community reviewers. The review process is very overwhelming with the reviewers going through multiple voting iterations on each submission in order to ensure that the selected content is the BEST of the submitted lot. Our ultimate goal was to ensure that the content best represented the track, and most importantly would draw interest and excitement from attendees. As always, the number and quality of submissions were just superb, making for a truly challenging (and rewarding) experience for the reviewers. As co-lead I tried to ensure that I applied a fair and balanced process in the evaluation of content in my track. . Here are some key steps followed by all track leads: Vote on sessions - Each reviewer is required to vote on the sessions on a scale of 1-5 - and also provide a justifying comment. Create buckets - Divide the submissions into different buckets to ensure a fair representation of different topics within a track. This ensures that if a particular bucket got higher votes then the track is not exclusively skewed towards it. Top 7 - The review committee provides a list of the top 7 talks that can be used in the promotional material by the JavaOne team. Generally these talks are easy to identify and a consensus is reached upon them fairly quickly. First cut - Each track is allocated a total number of sessions (including panels), BoFs, and Hands-on labs that can be approved. The track leads then start creating the first cut of the approvals using the casted votes coupled with their prior experience in the subject matter. In our case, Ludo and I have been attending/speaking at JavaOne (and other popular Java-focused conferences) for double digit years. The Grind - The first cut is then refined and refined and refined using multiple selection criteria such as sorting on the bucket, speaker quality, topic popularity, cumulative vote total, and individual vote scale. The sessions that don't make the cut are reviewed again as well to ensure if they need to replace one of the selected one as a potential alternate. I would like to thank the entire Java community for all the submissions and many thanks to the reviewers who spent countless hours reading each abstract, voting on them, and helping us refine the list. I think approximately 3-4 hours cumulative were spent on each submission to reach an evaluation, specifically the border line cases. We gave our recommendations to the JavaOne Program Committee Chairperson (Sharat Chander) and accept/decline notifications should show up in submitter inboxes in the next few weeks. Here are some points to keep in mind when submitting a session to JavaOne next time: JavaOne is a technology-focused conference so any product, marketing or seemingly marketish talk are put at the bottom of the list.Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop are better options for submitting product specific talks. Make your title catchy. Remember the attendees are more likely to read the abstract if they like the title. We try our best to recategorize the talk to a different track if it needs to but please ensure that you are filing in the right track to have all the right eyeballs looking at it. Also, it does not hurt marking an alternate track if your talk meets the criteria. Make sure to coordinate within your team before the submission - multiple sessions from the same team or company does not ensure that the best speaker is picked. In such case we rely upon your "google presence" and/or review committee's prior knowledge of the speaker. The reviewers may not know you or your product at all and you get 750 characters to pitch your idea. Make sure to use all of them, to the last 750th character. Make sure to read your abstract multiple times to ensure that you are giving all the relevant information ? Think through your presentation and see if you are leaving out any important aspects.Also look if the abstract has any redundant information that will not required by the reviewers. There are additional sections that allow you to share information about the speaker and the presentation summary. Use them to blow the horn about yourself and any other relevant details. Please don't say "call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx to find out the details" :-) The review committee enjoyed reviewing the submissions and we certainly hope you'll have a great time attending them. Happy JavaOne!

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  • Silverlight Cream Monday WP7 App Review # 1

    - by Dave Campbell
    I'm going to try something here... if it seems useful, I'll continue, if it doesn't, I'll stop... so give me feedback! There are *lots* of Apps in the WP7 Marketplace, and heaven help me, but the Marketplace sucks for finding stuff. I won't rehash what's already been said in the blogs, but I agree with one and all. I went out last Saturday to find 2 apps that I knew were released, and couldn't do so on my device. Even in the Zune app, it took quite a while to find them... ok, I'll back off a bit, because I just found out I can do 'Search' now if I know the name... I didn't think that was working before. So my thought is on Monday (like today), I will post a review of 5 apps/games I either use or have played with on my device. These are strictly my opinions, you understand, but hey... it's better than a poke in the eye with an iPhone! A few disclaimers:     Feel free to write me about your app and tell me about it. While it would be very cool to receive a whole bunch of xap files to review, at this point, for technical reasons, I'm unable to side-load my device. Since I plan on only doing this one day a week, and only 5, I may never get caught up, so if you send me some info, be patient. Re: games ... remember I'm old... I'm from the era of Colossal Cave and Zork. Duke-Nukem 2D and Captain Comic were awesome. I don't own an XBOX or any other game system, so take game reviews from my perspective -- who knows, it may be refreshing :) I won't pay for an app or game just to try it. If you expect me to test-drive your app, it's going to have to have a Free Trial. In this Issue:   Jingo! is the first app I bought, just to see what the experience was like. It's very much like a game we used to play in school in the Army in 1971 on paper we passed around. Sort of a cross between hangman and Mastermind, you try to figure out the hidden word in 5 tries. You get really good at 5-letter words after a while. I like this because you have to think, and you're not pressured by a clock Jingo! is by James Furdell and is $1.99 I reviewed René Schulte's Pictures Lab a while back, and have not changed my mind. This is an excellent app for playing with any photo on your device... one you've just taken, one you've synced from your PC, or one you've saved from email. I like this because you can get some cool effects for your photos, and it just works. Pictures Lab is by Schulte Software Development and is $1.99 Since I work as a consultant, and from home, I wanted something I could track my time with. I've test-driven all the contenders I could find so far on the phone, and so far I like ONTRACK! the best. If asked, I have some suggestions, but it's probably just the way I work or think. What I do like is I can tap a project to start/stop/restart a counter, and at the end of the day it shows me how much time I've been working. If there's a way to make an adjustment in case you forget to tap the counter, I don't know how to do it, and that's my biggest complaint. I like this because you can get a daily readout which you can also email as a spreadsheet. The daily results display is very good. ONTRACK! is by Qmino and is $2.99 Remember Item 4 above... I've been playing guitar for 48 years... obviously since before the invention of 'tuners', so I'm not as dependent upon these as some folks are. I've tried some in the past and have always felt I can do just as good by ear (I have perfect relative pitch). So, I gave this app by András Velvárt a dance just to see how it works, and it is surprisingly good. If you're used to one of the stage tuners this may take a little getting used to, but it does the job. The difference with this one is there is no real 'null' point inside which you can think your guitar is in tune. The soundwave stays visible on the device, and if it's moving to the right, your string is flat, if it's moving to the left, your string is sharp. Getting it exact might be tricky, but it is exact! If you need to rely on a tuner, this is a good choice in my opinion, exactly because of the sensitivity.. tune up with this and you're dead-on. Guitar Tuner is by Kinabalu Innovation Limited and is $0.99 Popper 2 is the WP7 version of a wildly popular game by Bill Reiss named Dr. Popper. You can get a trial, or you can now get a free lite version of the game. Popper 2 is a fast-paced bubble breaker game. I find it something fun to play when I just want to buzz out, but maybe the best review is that my daughter didn't want to give my phone back when I showed it to her, and always wants to grab my phone to play 'that game'. A fun distraction with great graphics and a great price Popper 2 is by Blue Rose Systems, LLC and is $1.29 Let me know what you think of the idea of doing reviews, or the layout/whatever, and Stay in the 'Light!   Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • How is the gimbal locked problem solved using accumulative matrix transformations

    - by Luke San Antonio
    I am reading the online "Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming" book by Jason L. McKesson As of now, I am up to the gimbal lock problem and how to solve it using quaternions. However right here, at the Quaternions page. Part of the problem is that we are trying to store an orientation as a series of 3 accumulated axial rotations. Orientations are orientations, not rotations. And orientations are certainly not a series of rotations. So we need to treat the orientation of the ship as an orientation, as a specific quantity. I guess this is the first spot I start to get confused, the reason is because I don't see the dramatic difference between orientations and rotations. I also don't understand why an orientation cannot be represented by a series of rotations... Also: The first thought towards this end would be to keep the orientation as a matrix. When the time comes to modify the orientation, we simply apply a transformation to this matrix, storing the result as the new current orientation. This means that every yaw, pitch, and roll applied to the current orientation will be relative to that current orientation. Which is precisely what we need. If the user applies a positive yaw, you want that yaw to rotate them relative to where they are current pointing, not relative to some fixed coordinate system. The concept, I understand, however I don't understand how if accumulating matrix transformations is a solution to this problem, how the code given in the previous page isn't just that. Here's the code: void display() { glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); glClearDepth(1.0f); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); glutil::MatrixStack currMatrix; currMatrix.Translate(glm::vec3(0.0f, 0.0f, -200.0f)); currMatrix.RotateX(g_angles.fAngleX); DrawGimbal(currMatrix, GIMBAL_X_AXIS, glm::vec4(0.4f, 0.4f, 1.0f, 1.0f)); currMatrix.RotateY(g_angles.fAngleY); DrawGimbal(currMatrix, GIMBAL_Y_AXIS, glm::vec4(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f)); currMatrix.RotateZ(g_angles.fAngleZ); DrawGimbal(currMatrix, GIMBAL_Z_AXIS, glm::vec4(1.0f, 0.3f, 0.3f, 1.0f)); glUseProgram(theProgram); currMatrix.Scale(3.0, 3.0, 3.0); currMatrix.RotateX(-90); //Set the base color for this object. glUniform4f(baseColorUnif, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0); glUniformMatrix4fv(modelToCameraMatrixUnif, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(currMatrix.Top())); g_pObject->Render("tint"); glUseProgram(0); glutSwapBuffers(); } To my understanding, isn't what he is doing (modifying a matrix on a stack) considered accumulating matrices, since the author combined all the individual rotation transformations into one matrix which is being stored on the top of the stack. My understanding of a matrix is that they are used to take a point which is relative to an origin (let's say... the model), and make it relative to another origin (the camera). I'm pretty sure this is a safe definition, however I feel like there is something missing which is blocking me from understanding this gimbal lock problem. One thing that doesn't make sense to me is: If a matrix determines the difference relative between two "spaces," how come a rotation around the Y axis for, let's say, roll, doesn't put the point in "roll space" which can then be transformed once again in relation to this roll... In other words shouldn't any further transformations to this point be in relation to this new "roll space" and therefore not have the rotation be relative to the previous "model space" which is causing the gimbal lock. That's why gimbal lock occurs right? It's because we are rotating the object around set X, Y, and Z axes rather than rotating the object around it's own, relative axes. Or am I wrong? Since apparently this code I linked in isn't an accumulation of matrix transformations can you please give an example of a solution using this method. So in summary: What is the difference between a rotation and an orientation? Why is the code linked in not an example of accumulation of matrix transformations? What is the real, specific purpose of a matrix, if I had it wrong? How could a solution to the gimbal lock problem be implemented using accumulation of matrix transformations? Also, as a bonus: Why are the transformations after the rotation still relative to "model space?" Another bonus: Am I wrong in the assumption that after a transformation, further transformations will occur relative to the current? Also, if it wasn't implied, I am using OpenGL, GLSL, C++, and GLM, so examples and explanations in terms of these are greatly appreciated, if not necessary. The more the detail the better! Thanks in advance...

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