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  • Loading a new instance of a class through XML not working quite right

    - by Thegluestickman
    I'm having trouble with XML and XNA. I want to be able to load weapon settings through XML to make my weapons easier to make and to have less code in the actual project file. So I started out making a basic XML document, something to just assign variables with. But no matter what I changed it gave me a new error every time. The code below gives me a "XML element 'Tag' not found", I added and it started to say the variables weren't found. What I wanted to do in the XML file as well, was load a texture for the file too. So I created a static class to hold my texture values, then in the Texture tag of my XML document I would set it to that instance too. I think that's were the problems are occuring because that's where the "XML element 'Tag' not found" error is pointing me too. My XML document: <XnaContent> <Asset Type="ConversationEngine.Weapon"> <weaponStrength>0</weaponStrength> <damageModifiers>0</damageModifiers> <speed>0</speed> <magicDefense>0</magicDefense> <description>0</description> <identifier>0</identifier> <weaponTexture>LoadWeaponTextures.ironSword</weaponTexture> </Asset> </XnaContent> My Class to load the weapon XML: public static class LoadWeaponXML { static Weapon Weapons; public static Weapon WeaponLoad(ContentManager content, int id) { Weapons = content.Load<Weapon>(@"Weapons/" + id); return Weapons; } } public static class LoadWeaponTextures { public static Texture2D ironSword; public static void TextureLoad(ContentManager content) { ironSword = content.Load<Texture2D>("Sword"); } } I'm not entirely sure if you can load textures through XML, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Cloning (mirroring) laptop display to area of external monitor display

    - by intuited
    I'm using Maverick "10.10" Meercat on a HP Pavilion tx2110. This machine has an NVidia Go6150 graphics card, and sports a 1280x800 display. I have an external monitor which can do 1280x1024 resolution. FWIW I'm using openbox as my window manager; as I understand it this shouldn't be a factor. I'd like to clone the display to the monitor, so that the size of the desktop remains at 1280x800, and there is a horizontal blank area on the external monitor. I.E. I want to avoid having to pan the display of the desktop on either monitor. So the actual resolution of the monitor would be 1280x1024, but the resolution of the section of the monitor where stuff was actually being displayed would be 1280x800. Using the nvidia-settings applet, I'm able to set up the cloned display so that the desktop size is 1280x1024 (the resolution of the external monitor), but can't find a way to instead have the desktop size stay at the resolution of the laptop's built-in display. Is this achievable? Ideally I'd like the external monitor's blank area to be at the top of the screen, i.e. for it to align the display with the bottom of the screen.

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  • How should I evaluate the Database Solution for Large Data Application

    - by GµårÐïåñ
    Background I have been tasked to write an application that will be a combination of document and inventory management in VB.net which will be used to store document images in TIFF, PDF, XPS, TXT, DOC, PPT and so on as binary data that can be retrieved for viewing, printing, and possible OCR to be searchable as well along with meta data such as sender, recipient, type of document, date, source, etc. So the table would probably be something like: DOC_NAME, DOC_DATE, NOTES, ... DOC_BINARY (where the actual document will be put inside) Help Please I need help with understanding how to evaluate my database options. What my concern is finding a database solution that will not become unstable due to size restrictions, records limitations and performance. Some of the options are MS_SQL, SQL Express, SQLite, mySQL, and Access. Now I can pretty much eliminate Access right off the bat as it is just too limiting and not scalable. I can further eliminate SQL Express because of the 2 GB limit and again scalability. So I believe that leaves me with MS_SQL, SQLite and mySQL (note, I am open to alternatives). And this is where I need help in understanding how to evaluate those databases. The goal is that the data is all in one place (a single file) that will make backup and portability easier. For small volume usage, pretty much any solution will hold for a while, but my goal is to think ahead and make sure its able to withstand heavy large volume usage as well. Another consideration is also the interoperability with .NET and stability of such code to avoid errors and memory leaks. How should I evaluate my database options for this scenario?

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  • Should we have a database independent SQL like query language in Django?

    - by Yugal Jindle
    Note : I know we have Django ORM already that keeps things database independent and converts to the database specific SQL queries. Once things starts getting complicated it is preferred to write raw SQL queries for better efficiency. When you write raw sql queries your code gets trapped with the database you are using. I also understand its important to use the full power of your database that can-not be achieved with the django orm alone. My Question : Until I use any database specific feature, why should one be trapped with the database. For instance : We have a query with multiple joins and we decided to write a raw sql query. Now, that makes my website postgres specific. Even when I have not used any postgres specific feature. I feel there should be some fake sql language which can translate to any database's sql query. Even Django's ORM can be built over it. So, that if you go out of ORM but not database specific - you can still remain database independent. I asked the same question to Jacob Kaplan Moss (In person) : He advised me to stay with the database that I like and endure its whole power, to which I agree. But my point was not that we should be database independent. My point is we should be database independent until we use a database specific feature. Please explain, why should be there a fake sql layer over the actual sql ?

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  • Rotating a view of a chunked 2d tilemap

    - by Danie Clawson
    I'm working on a top-down (oblique) tile-based engine. I would like for the tiles to have a definable height in the world, with Characters being occluded by them, etc. This has led to a desire to be able to "rotate" the view of the world, even though I'm using all hand-drawn graphics and blitting. Therefor, I need to rotate the actual world itself, or change how the Camera traverses these arrays. How can, or should, I create individual rotations of 90 degrees, when I have multi-dimensional arrays? Is it faster to actually rotate the array, to access it differently, or to create pre-computed accessor(?) arrays, something like how my chunks work? How can I rotate an individual chunk, or set of chunks? Currently I establish my tile grid like this (tile height not included): function Surface(WIDTH, HEIGHT) { WIDTH = Math.max(WIDTH-(WIDTH%TPC), TPC); HEIGHT = Math.max(HEIGHT-(HEIGHT%TPC), TPC); this.tiles = []; this.chunks = []; //Establish tiles for(var x = 0; x < WIDTH; x++) { var col = [], ch_x = Math.floor(x/TPC); if(!this.chunks[ch_x]) this.chunks.push([]); for(var y = 0; y < HEIGHT; y++) { var tile = new Tile(x, y), ch_y = Math.floor(y/TPC); if(!this.chunks[ch_x][ch_y]) this.chunks[ch_x].push([]); this.chunks[ch_x][ch_y].push(tile); col.push(tile); } this.tiles.push(col); } }; Even some basic advice on my data struct would be much appreciated.

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  • Oracle’s Java Community Outreach Plan

    - by Tori Wieldt
    As the steward of Java, Oracle recognizes the importance and value of the Java community, and the relevant role it plays in keeping Java the largest, most vibrant developer community in the world.   In order to increase Oracle’s touch with Java developers worldwide, we are shifting our focus from a flagship JavaOne event followed by several regional JavaOne conferences, to a new outreach model which continues with the JavaOne flagship event, as well as a mix of online content, regional Java Tours, and regional 3rd party event participation.  1. JavaOne JavaOne continues to remain the premier hub for Java developers where you are given the opportunity to improve your Java technical skills, and interact with other members of the Java community. JavaOne is centered on open collaboration and sharing, and Oracle will continue to invest in JavaOne as a unique stand-alone event for the Java community. Oracle recognizes that many developers cannot attend JavaOne in person, therefore Oracle will share the wealth of the unique event material to those developers through a new and easy-to-access online Java program. While online JavaOne content cannot address the importance of actual face-to-face community/developer engagements and networking, online content does aide in extending the Java technical learning opportunity to a broader collection of developers. 2. Java Developer Day Tours Oracle will execute regional Java Developer Days with recognized Java User Groups (JUGs) with participation from Java Evangelist and Java Champions. This allows local, regional specific Java topics to be addressed both by Oracle and the Java community. In addition, Oracle will deliver more virtual technical content programs to reach developers where an existing JUG may not have a presence. 3. Sponsorship of Community-Driven Regional Events/Conferences Oracle also recognizes that improved community dialog and relations are achievable by continued Oracle sponsorship and onsite participation at both established/well-recognized 3rd party events and new emerging/growing 3rd party events. Oracle’s ultimate goal is to be an even better steward for Java by reaching more of the Java ecosystem with face-to-face and online community engagements. We look forward to planning tours and events with you, members of the Java community.

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  • Transfer .com domain to GoDaddy - websites running on same domain - 3 weeks left until expiration, 2 days left web hosting

    - by Eric Nguyen
    Our company purchased this abc.com domain from a local registrar. The domain will expire in about 3 weeks. We have our main websites running on this abc.com domain and they cannot be down for too long. The web hosting service will end in 2 days. Our websites are already hosted and they are up and running on Amazon EC2. We would like to transfer the domain to GoDaddy now or as soon as possible. (since we have many other domains there and we belive GoDaddy will be better in long-term considering the prices and the features it offers) There are many questions on the decision to transfer the domain to GoDaddy: 1) Cost and time required to move out of our local registrar? This is currently unknown as I'm still trying to retrieve the agreement we have with them 2) How does the 3 week time left until expiration of the domain matters here? Should we wait until the domain expires and then purchase in through GoDaddy? How long would such process take as I suppose our websites will be down during that time? Any other drawbacks? 3) What can I do to ensure our websites will continue functioning regardless of the domain transfer process? It seems the actual registrar here is enom.com and the local registrar here just partners with it I suppose I should then park the abc.com domain with enom.com and make changes to DNS settings so that our websites can continue to be hosted on EC2 as normal. How long does it normally take the domain to be transferred to GoDaddy completely? Is it even possible at all to keep our websites are up and running during the whole domain transfer process? Apologies that I'm throwing many questions at the same time here. It's rather last minutes and I suddenly realised there are too many unknown risks.

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  • Does a team of developers need a manager?

    - by Amadiere
    Background: I'm currently part of a team of four: 1 manager, 1 senior developer and 2 developers. We do a range of bespoke in-house systems / projects (e.g. 6-8 weeks) for an organisation of around 3500 staff, as well as all the maintenance and support required from the systems that have been created before. There is not enough of us to do all the work that is potentially coming our way - we're understaffed. Management acknowledge this, but budget restraints limit our ability to recruit additional members to the team (even if we make the salary back in savings). The Change This leaves us where we are now. Our manager is due to leave his role for pastures new, leaving a vacancy in the team. Management are using this opportunity to restructure our team which would see the team manager role replaced by another developer and another senior developer. Their logic being that we need more developers, so here's a way of funding it (one of the roles is partially funded from another vacant post). The team would have no direct line manager and the roles and responsibilities would be divided up between the seniors and the (relatively new to post) service manager (a non-technical role with little-to-no development knowledge/experience whose focus is shared amongst a number of other teams and individuals) - who would be our next actual manager up the food chain. I guess the final question is: Is it possible to run a development team without an manager? Have you had experience of this? And what things could go wrong / could be of benefit to us? I'd ideally like to "see the light" and the benefits of doing things this way, or come up with some points for argument against it.

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  • How common is it to submit papers to journals or conferences outside of academia?

    - by Furry
    I worked in academia a few years, but more on the D-side of R&D. The race for papers never appealed to me and I'm a practical not theoretical type, but I do like reading papers on certain topics (e.g. Google Papers, NLP, FB papers, ...) a lot. How common is it that normally working developers submit papers to conferences or even journals? It seems to be somewhat common in certain companies (it's not common or encouraged in mine). Do journals or conferences even take papers by an academic nobody (BSc) under consideration? I ask, because I have a few rough ideas and I would just like to bring them into form, one way or the other. Bonus question: Is there a list of CS (in the widest sense) conferences/journals with short descriptions? PS (Four out of five researchers I met published quite some fluffy stuff for my taste. I am no expert, but those people told me sometimes themselves, that the implementation does not matter, just the idea and the presentation. I always wondered about that. I probably could write about ideas all day long (not instantly but with a bit of preparation), but the implementation and the practical part is the really hard part, that academia just does not like to be concerned with. Also many papers actually scream: I was written so the publication list of my author gets longer - which is a waste of time for everyone, and often a waste of tax money, too. When I think of CS-ish papers, I think of running implementations or actual data, like e.g. Google's Map Reduce, Serving Large-scale Batch Computed Data with Project Voldemort or the like.)

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  • How do I load tmx files with Slick2d?

    - by mbreen
    I just started using Slick2D and learned how simple it is to load in a tilemap and display it. I tried atleast a dozen different tmx files from numerous examples to see if it was the actual file that was corrupted. Everytime I get this error: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.RuntimeException: Resource not found: data/maps/desert.tmx at org.newdawn.slick.util.ResourceLoader.getResourceAsStream(ResourceLoader.java:69) at org.newdawn.slick.tiled.TiledMap.<init>(TiledMap.java:101) at game.Game.init(Game.java:17) at game.Tunneler.initStatesList(Tunneler.java:37) at org.newdawn.slick.state.StateBasedGame.init(StateBasedGame.java:164) at org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer.setup(AppGameContainer.java:390) at org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer.start(AppGameContainer.java:314) at game.Tunneler.main(Tunneler.java:29) Here is my Game class: package game; import org.newdawn.slick.GameContainer; import org.newdawn.slick.Graphics; import org.newdawn.slick.SlickException; import org.newdawn.slick.state.BasicGameState; import org.newdawn.slick.state.StateBasedGame; import org.newdawn.slick.tiled.TiledMap; public class Game extends BasicGameState{ private int stateID = -1; private TiledMap map = null; public Game(int stateID){ this.stateID = stateID; } public void init(GameContainer container, StateBasedGame game) throws SlickException{ map = new TiledMap("data/maps/desert.tmx","maps");//ERROR } public void render(GameContainer container, StateBasedGame game, Graphics g) throws SlickException{ //map.render(0,0); } public void update(GameContainer container, StateBasedGame game, int delta) throws SlickException{ } public int getID(){return stateID;} } I've tried to see if anyone else has had similar problems but haven't turned up anything. I am able to load other files, so I don't believe it's a compiler issue. My menu class can load images and display them just fine. Also, the filepath is correct. Please let me know if you have any pointers that might help me sort this out.

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  • Adopting Technologies for the Sake of Technologies

    - by shiju
    Unlike other engineering industries, the software engineering industry is really lacking maturity. The lack of maturity can see in different aspects of entire software development life cycle. I think other engineering industries are well organised and structured with common, proven engineering practices. The software engineering industry is greatly a diverse industry with different operating systems, and variety of development platforms, programming languages, frameworks and tools. Now these days, people are going behind the hypes and intellectual thoughts without understanding their core business problems and adopting technologies and practices for the sake of technologies and practices and simply becoming a “poster child” of technologies and practices. Understanding the core business problem and providing best, solid solution with a platform neutral approach, will give you more business values and ROI, instead of blindly adopting technologies and tailor-made your applications for the sake of technologies and practices. People have been simply migrating their solutions in favour of new technologies and different versions of frameworks without any business need. The “Pepsi Challenge” in the Software Development  Pepsi Challenge marketing campaign of the 1980s was a popular and very interesting marketing promotion in which people taste one cup of Pepsi and another cup with Coca Cola. In the taste test, more than 50% of people were preferred Pepsi  over Coca Cola. The success story behind the Pepsi was more sweetness contains in the Pepsi cola. They have simply added more sugar and more people preferred more sweet flavour. You can’t simply identify the better one after sipping one cup of cola based on the sweetness which contains. These things have been happening in the software industry for choosing development frameworks and technologies. People have been simply choosing frameworks based on the initial sugary feeling without understanding its core strengths and weakness. The sugary framework might be more harmful when you develop real-world systems. There is not any silver bullet for solving all kind of problems and frameworks and tools do have strengths and weakness. So it would be better to understand their strength and weakness. And please keep in mind that you have to develop real apps to understand the real capabilities and weakness of a framework. Evaluating a technology based on few blog posts will harm your projects and these bloggers might be lacking real-world experience with the framework. The Problem with Align a Development Practice with Tools Recently I have observed a discussion in a group where one guy asked suggestions for practicing Continuous Delivery (CD) as part of the agile based application engineering. Then the discussion quickly went to using and choosing a Continuous Integration (CI) tool and different people suggested different Continuous Integration (CI) tools for simply practicing Continuous Delivery. If you have worked with core agile engineering practices, you could clearly know that the real essence of agile is neither choosing a tool nor choosing a process. By simply choosing CI tool from a particular vendor will not ensure that you are delivering an evolving software based on customer feedback. You have to understand the real essence of a engineering practice and choose a right tool for practicing it instead of simply focus on a particular tool for a practicing an development practice. If you want to adopt a practice, you need a solid understanding on it with its real essence where tools are just helping us for better automation. Adopting New Technologies for the Sake of Technologies The another problem is that developers have been a tendency to adopt new technologies and simply migrating their existing apps to new technologies. It is okay if your existing system is having problem  with a technology stack or or maintainability challenge with existing solution, and moving to new technology for solving the current problems. We have been adopting new technologies for solving new challenges like solving the scalability challenges when the application or user bases is growing unpredictably. Please keep in mind that all new technologies will become old after working with it for few years. The below Facebook status update of Janakiraman, expresses the attitude of a typical customer. For an example, Node.js is becoming a hottest buzzword in the software industry and many developers are trying to adopt Node.js for their apps. The important thing is that Node.js is a minimalist framework that does some great things for some problems, but it’s not a silver bullet. I have been also working with Node.js which is good for some problems, but really bad for choosing it for all kind of problems. By adopting new technologies for new projects is good if we could get real business values from it because newer framework would solve some existing well known problems and provide better solutions where it can incorporate good solutions for the latest challenges . But adopting a new technology for the sake of new technology is really bad idea. Another example is JavaScript is getting lot of attention so that lot of developers are developing heavy JavaScript centric web apps. First, they will adopt a client-side JavaScript MV* framework from AngularJS, Ember, Backbone etc, and develop a Single Page App(SPA) where they are repeating the mistakes we did in the past with server-side. The mistakes we did in the server-side is transforming to client-side. The problem is that people are just adopting new technologies, but not improving their solutions. I predict that many Single Page App will suck in the future. We need a hybrid approach where we should be able to leverage both server-side and client-side for developing next-generation web apps. The another problem is that if you like a particular framework, use it for all kind of apps. In the past, I know some Silverlight passionate guys were tried to use that framework for all kind of apps including larger line of business apps. And these days developers are migrating their existing Silverlight apps in favour of HTML5 buzzword. So the real question is, what is the business values we are getting from these apps when we are developing it for the sake of a particular technology instead of business need. The another problem is that our solutions consultants are trying to provide unnecessary solutions for the sake of a particular technology or for a hype. For an example, Big Data solutions are great for solving the problem of three Vs : volume, velocity and variety. But trying to put this for every application will make problems. Let’s say, there is a small web site running with limited budget and saying that we need a recommendation engine for the web site with a Hadoop based solution with a 16 node cluster, would be really horrible. If we really need a Hadoop based solution, got for it, but trying to put this for all application would be a big disaster. It would be great if could understand the core business problems first, and later choose a right framework for providing solutions for the actual business problem, instead of trying to provide so many solutions. The Problem with Tied Up to a Platform Vendor Some organizations and teams are tied up with a particular platform vendor where they don’t want to use any product other than their preferred or existing platform vendor. They will accept any product provided by the vendor regardless of its capability. This will lets you some benefits regards with integration and collaboration of different products provided by the same vendor, but it will loose your opportunity to provide better solution for your business problems. For a real world sample scenario, lot of companies have been using SAP for their ERP solutions. When they are thinking about mobility or thinking about developing hybrid mobile apps, they can easily find out a framework from SAP. SAP provides a framework for HTML 5 based UI development named SAPUI5. If you are simply adopting that framework only based for the preference of existing platform vendor, you might be loose different opportunities for providing better solution. Initially you might enjoy the sugary feeling provided by the platform vendor, but you have to think about developing apps which should be capable for solving future challenges. I am not saying that any framework is not good and I believe that all frameworks are good over another one for solving at least one problem. My point is that we should not tied up with any specific platform vendor unless your organization is having resource availability problems. Being Polyglot for Providing Right Solutions The modern software engineering industry is greatly diverse with different tools and platforms. Lot of open source frameworks and new programming languages have been releasing to the developer community, where choosing the right platform without any biased opinion, is really a difficult task. But it would really great if we could develop an attitude with platform neutral mindset and being a polyglot developer for providing better solutions based on the actual business problems. IMHO, we should learn a new programming language and a new framework every year. This will improve the quality of our developer capabilities and also improve the quality of our primary programming language skills. Being polyglot for individual developers and organizational teams will give you greater opportunity to your developer experience and also for your applications. Organizations can analyse their business problem without tied with any technology and later they can provide solutions by choosing different platform and tools. Summary    In this blog post, what I was trying to say that we should not tied up or biased with any development platform, technology, vendor or programming language and we should not adopt technologies and practices for the sake of technologies. If we are adopting a technology or a practice for the sake of it, we are simply becoming a “poster child” of the technology and practice. We should not become a poster child of other people’s intellectual thoughts and theories, instead of it we should become solutions developers and solutions consultants where we should be able to provide better solutions for the business problems. Being a polyglot developer is a good idea for improving your developer skills which lets you provide better solutions for the business problems. The most important thing is that we should become platform neutral developers where our passion should be for providing brilliant solutions. It would be great if we could provide minimalist, pragmatic business solutions. You can follow me on Twitter @shijucv

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  • Affect movieclip scale from a .as doc to another

    - by Madcowe
    I've been working on a game following a tutorial on the internet, the game is an avoider where you have the Avatar, that has to avoid the objects that fall. The way it is made is: I have a DocumentClass which addChild's the screen you should be seeing and removeChild's the screen that you were. For example: first it loads the menuScreen, then when you press play unloads menu and loads playscreen. When you die it loads the gameoverScreen and loads the playscreen. And from the gameOverScreen you can press the SHOP button to go to the shop. From here on I'm on my own and not following any tutorials. The shop has a button that is supposed to alter the Avatar's X and Y scale to 0.5, but the problem is: how do I make that work? I tried creating a sharedObject.data.avatarSize, on the store's size button the code would be something like: sharedObject.data.avatarSize *= 0.5; And on the AvoiderGame.as, which is the most of the actual game, on the part where the avatar is created I tried putting this after it's creation: scaleX.avatar = sharedObject.data.avatarSize; scaleY.avatar = sharedObject.data.avatarSize; This did not work since it gives me the error 1009 saying can't access something that is null. I tried this before "using" the sharedObject: if( sharedObject.data.avatarSize == null ) { sharedObject.data.avatarSize = 1; } But it did not work... So now I'm not sure on what to do. I know we should reduce global variables as much as we can but how do I do it? Also, if it helps, I'm using Flash CS5 and working with AS3.0

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  • Burned CD-R are not identical to the input iso image, why?

    - by Grumbel
    I have the issue that sometimes when I burn an iso image to a CD-R with: sudo wodim -v driveropts=burnfree -data dev=/dev/scd0 input.iso And then read it back out again with: sudo dd if=/dev/cdrom of=output.iso dd: reading `/dev/cdrom': Input/output error ... That I end up with two iso images that are not identical, namely the output.iso is missing 2048 bytes at the end. When I however mount the iso image or CD-R and compare the actual files on the mountpoint, both are identical. Is that expected behavior or is that an actually incorrect burn of the data? And if its expected, how can I verify that the burn process was successful? The reason why I ask in the first place is that it seems to be reproducible behavior, certain iso images come out 2048 bytes short, even on repeated burns, but all burned CD-Rs are under themselves identical. Also what is the reason behind the: dd: reading `/dev/cdrom': Input/output error As it happens always, I assume it is normal, but what is the technical reason behind it? I assume CDs don't allow the device to detect the size directly, so dd reads till it encounters the end the hard way. Edit: User karol on superusers.com mentioned that both the size issue and the read error are the result of using -tao (default) in wodim instead of -dao mode. I couldn't yet test it, but it sounds like the most plausible explanation so far.

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  • Understanding normal maps on terrain

    - by JohnB
    I'm having trouble understanding some of the math behind normal map textures even though I've got it to work using borrowed code, I want to understand it. I have a terrain based on a heightmap. I'm generating a mesh of triangles at load time and rendering that mesh. Now for each vertex I need to calculate a normal, a tangent, and a bitangent. My understanding is as follows, have I got this right? normal is a unit vector facing outwards from the surface of the triangle. For a vertex I take the average of the normals of the triangles using that vertex. tangent is a unit vector in the direction of the 'u' coordinates of the texture map. As my texture u,v coordinates follow the x and y coordinates of the terrain, then my understanding is that this vector is simply the vector along the surface in the x direction. So should be able to calculate this as simply the difference between vertices in the x direction to get a vector, (and normalize it). bitangent is a unit vector in the direction of the 'v' coordinates of the texture map. As my texture u,v coordinates follow the x and y coordinates of the terrain, then my understanding is that this vector is simply the vector along the surface in the y direction. So should be able to calculate this as simply the difference between vertices in the y direction to get a vector, (and normalize it). However the code I have borrowed seems much more complicated than this and takes into account the actual values of u, and v at each vertex which I don't understand the need for as they increase in exactly the same direction as x, and y. I implemented what I thought from above, and it simply doesn't work, the normals are clearly not working for lighting. Have I misunderstood something? Or can someone explain to me the physical meaning of the tangent and bitangent vectors when applied to a mesh generated from a hightmap like this, when u and v texture coordinates map along the x and y directions. Thanks for any help understanding this.

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  • XNA - Render texture to a rendertarget 2d via SpriteBatch error

    - by Jared B
    I got simple code that uses SpriteBatch to draw a texture onto a RenderTarget2D... private void drawScene(GameTime g) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(skyColor); GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(targetScene); drawSunAndMoon(); effect.Fog = true; GraphicsDevice.SetVertexBuffer(line); effect.MainEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Apply(); GraphicsDevice.DrawPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleStrip, 0, 2); GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); SceneTexture = targetScene; } private void drawPostProcessing(GameTime g) { effect.SceneTexture = SceneTexture; GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(targetBloom); spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Immediate, BlendState.Opaque, null, null, null); { if(Bloom) effect.BlurEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Apply(); spriteBatch.Draw(targetScene, new Rectangle(0, 0, Window.ClientBounds.Width, Window.ClientBounds.Height), Color.White); } spriteBatch.End(); BloomTexture = targetBloom; GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); } Both methods are called from Draw(GameTime gameTime). First drawScene is called, then drawPostProcessing is called. The thing is, I can't run the code because "the render target must not be set on the device when it is used as a texture." at line spriteBatch.Draw(targetScene, new Rectangle(0, 0, Window.ClientBounds.Width, Window.ClientBounds.Height), Color.White); I already found the solution, which is to draw the actual renderTarget (targetScene) to the texture so it doesn't create a reference to the loaded rendertarget. However, to my knowledge, the only way of doing this is to write: GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(OutputTarget) SpriteBatch.Draw(InputTarget, ...) GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null) Which encounters the same exact problem I'm having right now. So, the question I'm asking is: how would I render InputTarget to OutputTarget without reference issues?

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  • How to protect Google Ads from yontoo layers runtime?

    - by Dharmavir
    Since sometime I have observed that Google Ads on any website including my blog (http://blogs.digitss.com) gets replaced with something similar to uploaded image below. I am sure it's happening with many people and that could reduce google adsense income. After some research I found that it is because "yontoo layers runtime" from http://www.yontoo.com/ (tagline says: Platform that allows you to control the websites you visit everyday.) but actually they are taking over. I am not sure with which software they are making a way into users computer but that seems very bad in terms of freedom of Internet and advt/marketing industry. I don't remember I have ever said "yes" to install yontoo on my computer. This piece of software is successful to install itself on my laptop/desktop and workstation at office. I am going to disable it now but the question is how do I make my websites aware of Yontoo Runtime and stop them from replacing Google Ads? Basically they are not able to replace all adsense ads but so far they are successfully replaced 1st instance of adsense advt and I am sure in future they will hit more. There could be 2 approaches 1) Fool yontoo runtime by putting some misleading divs in html document to save actual ads, 2) Completely disable yontoo by working out some client side script (javascript) which can fail/crash yontoo runtime and so will fail it's purpose of replacing ads. You can visit my blog (http://blogs.digitss.com) and see on top-right corner, if you find that google ad replaced with something similar to image attached with question - it means your computer/browser is infected too. Looking forward to reply from webmasters, if someone has already wrote some code/plugin to make website (and google ads) safe from yontoo or similar runtime. FYI: it was able to push this runtime in all browsers installed on machine. So a dangerous threat. And yes, I am just using Google ads - not sure if yontoo runtime is doing trick against other ad networks or not? I am sure they must be doing it with some handful of ad networks.

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  • Developing a feature which sole purpose to be taken out?

    - by adib
    What is the name of the pattern in which individual contributors (programmers/designers) developed an artifact for the sole purpose is to serve as a diversion so that management can remove that feature in the final product? This is a folklore I heard from an ex-colleague who used to work at a large game development company. At that company, it is well known that middle management is pressurized to "give inputs" and "make changes" to the product otherwise they risk being seen as not contributing to the project. This situation have delayed many projects because of these superfluous "management inputs". In one project at the above company, the artists and developers created a supernumerary animated character that appears in every cutscene and sticks out like a sore thumb. They designed it in such a way that it can be easily removed before the game is shipped (this was when games were still sold in physical media and not a downloadable product). Obviously the management then voted to remove the animation. On the positive side, management didn't introduced any unnecessary changes that would have delayed the project because they have shown that they provided constructive inputs to the product. This process pattern has a name among game programmers that work in corporates, but I forgot what was the actual name. I believe it's duck-something. Anybody can help pointing out the name and perhaps some rather credible reference to how the pattern develops?.

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  • How can I make PDFs appear life-size when displayed at 100%?

    - by ændrük
    When I open a letter size PDF and then zoom to 100%, the page physically displayed on my monitor is smaller than a real letter size sheet of paper. How can I make "100%" on the computer screen correspond with "100%" in real life? Details This message suggests that I should be investigating the system-wide DPI settings for my monitor. xdpyinfo reports: dimensions: 1024x768 pixels (271x203 millimeters) resolution: 96x96 dots per inch My monitor has a native display resolution of 1024x768 pixels and a diagonal display size of 12.07 inches. PX CALC returns the following information: DPI: 106.05 Dot Pitch: 0.2395mm Size: 9.66" × 7.24" (24.53cm × 18.39cm) What I've tried so far Running xrandr --dpi 106.05 successfully caused my PDF to appear actual size at 100%, but this effect was lost after rebooting. To make the setting persistent I tried creating the following /etc/X11/xorg.conf: Section "Monitor" Identifier "ThinkPad X60 LCD" DisplaySize 245 183 EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Monitor "ThinkPad X60 LCD" EndSection After re-logging in, /var/log/Xorg.0.log contained [ 1167.824] (**) intel(0): Display dimensions: (245, 183) mm [ 1167.824] (**) intel(0): DPI set to (106, 106) but xdpyinfo still reported dimensions: 1024x768 pixels (271x203 millimeters) resolution: 96x96 dots per inch and "100%" still appeared too small. Link to XRANDR wiki Link to making XRANDR changes persistant

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  • XNA - Error while rendering a texture to a 2D render target via SpriteBatch

    - by Jared B
    I've got this simple code that uses SpriteBatch to draw a texture onto a RenderTarget2D: private void drawScene(GameTime g) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(skyColor); GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(targetScene); drawSunAndMoon(); effect.Fog = true; GraphicsDevice.SetVertexBuffer(line); effect.MainEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Apply(); GraphicsDevice.DrawPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleStrip, 0, 2); GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); SceneTexture = targetScene; } private void drawPostProcessing(GameTime g) { effect.SceneTexture = SceneTexture; GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(targetBloom); spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Immediate, BlendState.Opaque, null, null, null); { if (Bloom) effect.BlurEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Apply(); spriteBatch.Draw( targetScene, new Rectangle(0, 0, Window.ClientBounds.Width, Window.ClientBounds.Height), Color.White); } spriteBatch.End(); BloomTexture = targetBloom; GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); } Both methods are called from my Draw(GameTime gameTime) function. First drawScene is called, then drawPostProcessing is called. The thing is, when I run this code I get an error on the spriteBatch.Draw call: The render target must not be set on the device when it is used as a texture. I already found the solution, which is to draw the actual render target (targetScene) to the texture so it doesn't create a reference to the loaded render target. However, to my knowledge, the only way of doing this is to write: GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(outputTarget) SpriteBatch.Draw(inputTarget, ...) GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null) Which encounters the same exact problem I'm having right now. So, the question I'm asking is: how would I render inputTarget to outputTarget without reference issues?

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  • Different Flavors of Leases Back On

    - by Theresa Hickman
    Given the continued interest regarding the proposed changes to Lease Accounting, I decided to write another entry on this controversial topic with colorful commentary from our resident accounting expert, Seamus Moran. Background (A History Lesson) Back in 1976, the FASB issued FAS 13, “Accounting for Leases” that permitted leases to be either an operating lease or capital (finance) lease. In substance, operating leases are a form of off-balance sheet financing. According to Seamus, operating leases date back to the launch of the Boeing 707 in the 1950s.  Because the aircraft was so much more expensive than previous aircrafts, the industry came up with the operating lease concept to accommodate these jet liners that dominated air transport.  How it worked was the bank would buy the plane and lease it to the airline.  Because the bank never controlled or flew the plane, they never placed the asset on their balance sheet, and because the airline never owned the plane, they didn’t place it on their balance sheet either. They simply treated the monthly lease payments as rental expenses on the P&L.   August 2010 Original Lease Accounting Changes In August 2010, FASB and IASB decided to overhaul lease accounting as part of their joint commitment “to insure that investors and other users of financial statements are provided useful, transparent, and complete information about leasing transactions in the financial statements.”  Some say that the current lease accounting standards are broken because it keeps assets off the balance sheet, hidden from investors’ view. The original proposal abolished operating leases and only permitted capital leases where all leases would be recorded on the balance sheet as assets and liabilities. The asset side would reflect the right to use the asset for the leased term, and the liability side would reflect the obligation to make lease payments.   Why Companies Were Freaking Out According to the SEC, the financial impact of the aforementioned lease changes was estimated to add more than $1.3 trillion of operating lease obligations to corporate balance sheets. Many companies in various industries, especially retail, are concerned because the changes are significant and will impact existing leases with no grandfather clause for existing operating leases. Of course, the banks and airlines I mentioned earlier really hate this because neither wants to report the airplane (now costing around $60 M) as an asset. Regular companies were concerned that they would have to report routine short term leases of real estate or equipment as fixed assets, even though they were really just longer term rentals.  One company we spoke to leased roadside billboards, and really did not consider them to be fixed assets in any way. Obviously, these changes would have had a profound and lasting effect on a company’s financial and real estate strategies and significantly impact its financial statements.  Financial statements would show higher depreciation and interest expense with significantly higher total assets and debt. In terms of financial metrics, they’re negatively impacted. It would raise a company’s debt-to-capital ratio to reflect the higher debt compared to equity, it would negatively impact their return-on-assets because now companies will appear more asset intensive, and it will decrease EPS, lowering shareholder ROI. Feb. 2011 Recent Update The comment period on leases closed in December 2010. The FASB and the IASB have met several times since then and published their initial responses to the input they received from the various interested parties.  They are “redeliberating” the principles involved in Lease Accounting.  Some of the issues they are looking at include: The core definition of a lease.  This will articulate principles on what is a lease and what is “not-a-lease.” One theory or supposition is that they might define a lease as the transfer of certain but not all major ownership attributes for a certain period of time.  So a year’s lease of an aircraft might be a “lease,” but a year’s lease of half a floor in an office building would be “not-a-lease.”  The ownership attributes transferred from the core owner to the user are different; the airline must maintain, paint, and do whatever it needs to do on the aircraft. However, the office renter will have strictly limited rights in respect to the rented space. The differences between a lease contract and service contract.  Even if they call them “leases” for the purpose of commercial law, a service contract might not be accounted for as a lease. The accounting to be done by the lessee.  They would define when the bank or landlord would retain the asset on their balance sheet, and perhaps by implication, when the lessor would not need to include the asset on theirs.  So if the finance house keeps the airplane or office on their balance sheet, the tenant doesn’t need to.  I’m not sure that I can draw the opposite conclusion where the finance house doesn’t report but the tenant must. The difference, if any, between a financing lease and other leases, and the implications to the accounting. The present value calculation when renewable terms exist. They have reduced the circumstances in which one must look at the renewable terms of a lease in calculating the present value.  In most circumstances, you will use the lease term rather than the potential renewable term. Their latest discussion this past week with the contents of the discussion was not available at the time of me writing this entry.  For more details, the results of the discussions are posted on both the FASB and the IASB websites. Implied Software Changes Whatever the final rules turn out to be, all ERP systems, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards, and Oracle Hyperion will need to change their software to accommodate the new rules. The following lists some changes that might have to be made to accounting software depending on what the final standards will be in June 2011: Lease tracking may require modifications with tracking of additional lease details that might require a centralized repository to maintain Accounting may need to be modified as there are many changes to how capital leases and the new “other than finance” leases are accounted for both on the lessee and lessor side.  For example, valuation, amortization, and disclosure will be considerably different requiring different types of data to be captured. Companies may need to modify their chart of accounts depending on how they want to track leases, which could then impact financial reporting and consolidation Business processes may require changes which could then impact internal controls Software applications may need to perform more advanced computations on leases Reports and KPIs may need to reflect new operating metrics Hold Onto Your Seats           Before you redo all your lease agreements and call your software vendors asking when the changes to the software will be made, remember that the rules are not finalized yet, and from appearances, will not reflect the proposals in the exposure draft.  Not only are there objections to putting the operating lease assets on anyone’s balance sheet, there are lots of objections to subjectivity and the data required for the valuation.  According to Seamus, there is huge opposition from New York bankers, the airlines, the EU, the Communist Party of China (since it impacts their exporting business), and Republicans (hearing complaints from small and large businesses). Even if everyone can agree on the proposed changes, 2013 might be the earliest that companies would need to change how they report leases. The Boards will finish their deliberations in April, May or June 2011.  As we’ve seen with other Exposure Drafts, if the changes are minor and the principles met the General Acceptance consensus criteria, the Standard could be finalized at that time.  However, if substantial changes are made, a fresh exposure draft, comment period, and review period might be involved, too. Seamus added an interesting perspective. Even if the proposed changes do pass, don’t you think our customers, such as Boeing, GE Capital, United Airlines, etc. will be clever enough to come up with a new kind of financing arrangement that complies with the new accounting? How about the large retail customers, such as Best Buy and Macerich? Don’t you think they might simply cut deals around retail locations with new contracts that prevent their leases from being capital leases? Instead of blindly adapting the software to meet the principles outlined in the final standard, our software needs to accommodate how businesses will respond to the new rules. We cannot know our customers’ responses until the rules are finalized. Oracle is aware of the potential changes and is staying abreast of the developments through our domain expertise staff, our relationship with customers, our market awareness, and, of course, our relationships with the Big 4. This is part of our normal process with respect to worldwide regulatory compliance. Oracle products have been IFRS and GAAP compliant for years and we will continue to maintain those standards going forward.

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  • multi user web game with scheduled processing?

    - by Rooq
    I have an idea for a game which I am in the process of designing, but I am struggling to establish if the way I plan to implement it is possible. The game is a text based sports management simulation. This will require players to take certain actions through a web browser which will interact with a database - adding/updating and selecting. Most of the code required to be executed at this point will be fairly straightforward. The main processing will take place by applications which are scheduled to run on the server at certain times. These apps will process transactions added by the players and also perform some automatic processing based on the game date. My plan was to use an SQL server database (at last count I require about 20 tables) and VB.net for all the coding (coming from a mainframe programming background this language is the simplist for me to get to grips with). I will also need a scheduling tool on the server. Can anyone tell me if what I am planning is feasible before I dive into the actual coding stage of my project?

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  • How to handle growing QA reporting requirements?

    - by Phillip Jackson
    Some Background: Our company is growing very quickly - in 3 years we've tripled in size and there are no signs of stopping any time soon. Our marketing department has expanded and our IT requirements have as well. When I first arrived everything was managed in Dreamweaver and Excel spreadsheets and we've worked hard to implement bug tracking, version control, continuous integration, and multi-stage deployment. It's been a long hard road, and now we need to get more organized. The Problem at Hand: Management would like to track, per-developer, who is generating the most issues at the QA stage (post unit testing, regression, and post-production issues specifically). This becomes a fine balance because many issues can't be reported granularly (e.g. per-url or per-"page") but yet that's how Management would like reporting to be broken down. Further, severity has to be taken into account. We have drafted standards for each of these areas specific to our environment. Developers don't want to be nicked for 100+ instances of an issue if it was a problem with an include or inheritance... I had a suggestion to "score" bugs based on severity... but nobody likes that. We can't enter issues for every individual module affected by a global issue. [UPDATED] The Actual Questions: How do medium sized businesses and code shops handle bug tracking, reporting, and providing useful metrics to management? What kinds of KPIs are better metrics for employee performance? What is the most common way to provide per-developer reporting as far as time-to-close, reopens, etc.? Do large enterprises ignore the efforts of the individuals and rather focus on the team? Some other questions: Is this too granular of reporting? Is this considered 'blame culture'? If you were the developer working in this environment, what would you define as a measureable goal for this year to track your progress, with the reward of achieving the goal a bonus?

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  • Naming a class that decides to retrieve things from cache or a service + architecture evaluation

    - by Thomas Stock
    Hi, I'm a junior developer and I'm working on a pet project that I want to learn as much as possible from. I have the following scenario: There's a WCF service that I use to retrieve and update data, lets say Cars. So it's called CarWCFService and has a GetCars(), SaveCar(), ... . It implements interface ICarService. This isn't the Actual WCF service but more like a wrapper around it. Upon retrieving data from the service, I want to store them in local memory, as cache. I have made a class for this called CarCacheService which also implements interface ICarService. (I will explain later why it implements ICarService) I don't want client code to be calling these implementations. Instead, I want to create a third implementation for ICarService that tries to read from the CarCacheService before calling the WCFCarService, stores retrieved data in the CarCacheService, etc. 3 questions: How do I name this third class? I was thinking about something as simple as CarService. This does not really says what the service does exactly, tho. Is the naming for the other classes good? Would this naming and architecture be obvious for future programmers? This is my biggest concern. Does this architecture make sense? The reason that I implement ICarService on the CarCacheService is mainly because it allows me to fake the WCFService while debugging. I can store dummy data in a CarCacheService instance and pass it to the CarService, together with an(other) empty CarCacheService. If I made CacheCarService and WCFService public I could let client code decide if they want to drop the caching and just work directly on the WCFService.

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  • Azure Florida Association

    - by Dave Noderer
    Herve Roggero, SQL Azure MVP,  has created a virtual community to focus on Azure. Here is the outline from Herve:   User Group Name:  Azure Florida Association Purpose: Start a virtual Florida user group that targets the Azure platform Venues: Most meetings will be virtual; however I plan to host a few physical events across Florida if possible from time to time; physical events may be a few hours long with potentially more than one speaker Possible Topics: The topics will touch Azure generally speaking, but can have a wide array of concern such as Integration, Data Migration, Hosting, Security, Scalability, Mobile Device integration, successful ventures/lessons learned, cross cloud integration patterns, testing in the cloud, deployment management, reporting… Target Members: Architects, Developers, IT Managers Membership: Membership will be free; virtual events will be free; physical events may involve a minimal cover charge Speakers: If you are interested in speaking or if you have topic ideas, please let me know Frequency: Initially these meetings will be held every other month   The first meeting will be held on January 25, 2012 at 4PM EST. Vikas Sahni, SQL Azure MVP, will be presenting on Demystifying SQL Azure. Vikas will introduce SQL Azure, value proposition, usage scenarios, concepts and architecture, what is there and what is not, including Tips and Tricks.  The actual meeting link will be available in January but please join the linked in group now to be kept informed of this and future events: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4177626.

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  • How to have an improved relationship with recruiters?

    - by crosenblum
    I personally, always have problems with recruiter's and their constant spam.. I usually get tons of emails for jobs, not related to what I do. Or they have no idea what I do. Or they say they have a job in my field, but make me go thru hours of paperwork, only to find out they had no real job lead. Or my resume contained a keyword, that they searched for, but that keyword is like 1-10% of what I do, not my main job skill set. My point being is that I want to have a more polite, more accurate, less waste of each other's time. So I want to come up with a form letter, I can create in gmail to automatically send to all recruiter's, to help inform, educate and train them to deal better with me. That way, they know exactly what to send to me, so as to not waste my time. We don't play email/phone tag, just to find out they have no idea what I do, or how to find a job lead that matches that. I want this to be an improvement in my relationship and experience with recruiters, because honestly most of them waste my time. They call me at work, not considering I can't take phone call's at work, and they already had my email address. Mostly they annoy me, but I am tired of having to be rude to get my point across. I want them to immediately make sure they know what I can and have done, (Have you read my resume?) and have actual leads ready to be hired/interviewed soon or now. Any suggestions to how to improve the communication, to avoid wasting each other's time. I certainly hate having to come across as rude or improper, but when they just waste so much of my time, I don't know what else to do. So thank you for your time. Just to be clear, I want your help to write a form letter, that I can send to every recruiter that email's me, how to best work with me, and other people in IT/Web careers.

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