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• Disqus ads are disqusting and here is how you turn them off

  - by Gopinath

  After couple of months I spent sometime yesterday reviewing my blog and coziie.com to see if everything is fine. Disqus, the best commenting system and an unusual suspect was looking weird. Commenting sections of my sites are displayed links of third party sites which I was not aware of. The content is annoying to me and I believe my site users are also annoyed. I don’t remember configuring something in disqus to display ads or earn money by promoting other’s content. Why on earth I would like to shows content of someone else’s website right inside comments section and annoy readers? Here is a screen grab of comment section that shows ads.   It turns to be disqus automatically enabled a feature called as “Discovery” to all publishers who upgraded the commenting system to the latest release. I remember upgrading commenting system to the latest release couple of months ago but I don’t remember specifically allowing disqus to spam my comment section!! I’m extremely unhappy with the way disqus automatically enabled spamming comment sections in the name of so called new features that benefits bloggers. How to turn of Discovery or Ads in Disqus I turned them off as soon as I noticed them and it’s very easy to do that. Here are the steps to be followed to turn off ads in comments Login in to disqus Switch to Settings tab Click on Discovery tab Choose the option Just comments Save the settings.  Though it’s easy to turn off the ads, it would have been nice if disqus did not enable them by default. Hey guys at disqus, you lost my trust and from now onwards I’ll double check before opting in to any new features.

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• SEO + international sites? country.domain.com or domain.country?

  - by Pure.Krome

  Hi folks, is it better to have seperate country specific domains (which costs more money) or subdomains which define the country, for better SEO? eg. stackoverflow.com stackoverflow.com.au stackoverflow.co.uk vs stackoverflow.com au.stackoverflow.com uk.stackoverflow.com Assumption: int the search engine web master tools, each subdomain are associated to a country. eg. au.stackoverflow.com is associated to the country Australia. cheers! Update I understand that both methods do work, especially when i utilize the assumption, listed above. The question is about: Which method is better? Is there such a small SEO difference between them? Is the first method way way way better than the second with getting better SEO results? Update #2 A number of folks have suggested that the following is a good/better approach: stackoverflow.com/ stackoverflow.com/au stackoverflow.com/uk By adding a country specific iso code to the end of the url/the first folder of the domain can be recognised as the country. But a number of SEO mates have suggested that this is a valuable waste of folder level space. Er.. how can i explain. Ok, it's been suggested by some SEO experts that if the number of levels or folders in the domain exceeds 5 then the page drops dramatically in importance. Basically, you don't want to make it deep. As such, adding the country as the first level can be considered a waste, especially when it can be handled by the domain OR subdomain - hence the question :) So, any more thoughts on this? (Maybe SO is the wrong place to ask this question?)

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• How best to keep bumbling, non-technical managers at bay and still deliver good work?

  - by Curious

  This question may be considered subjective (I got a warning) and be closed, but I will risk it, as I need some good advice/experience on this. I read the following at the 'About' page of Fog Creek Software, the company that Joel Spolsky founded and is CEO of: Back in the year 2000, the founders of Fog Creek, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor, were having trouble finding a place to work where programmers had decent working conditions and got an opportunity to do great work, without bumbling, non-technical managers getting in the way. Every high tech company claimed they wanted great programmers, but they wouldn’t put their money where their mouth was. It started with the physical environment (with dozens of cubicles jammed into a noisy, dark room, where the salespeople shouting on the phone make it impossible for developers to concentrate). But it went much deeper than that. Managers, terrified of change, treated any new idea as a bizarre virus to be quarantined. Napoleon-complex junior managers insisted that things be done exactly their way or you’re fired. Corporate Furniture Police writhed in agony when anyone taped up a movie poster in their cubicle. Disorganization was so rampant that even if the ideas were good, it would have been impossible to make a product out of them. Inexperienced managers practiced hit-and-run management, issuing stern orders on exactly how to do things without sticking around to see the farcical results of their fiats. And worst of all, the MBA-types in charge thought that coding was a support function, basically a fancy form of typing. A blunt truth about most of today's big software companies! Unfortunately not every developer is as gutsy (or lucky, may I say?) as Joel Spolsky! So my question is: How best to work with such managers, keep them at bay and still deliver great work?

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• I am trying to set up a ubuntu sever 12.04 on my machine

  - by Jseb

  I am trying to set up a server on my home network which will eventually host rails. I am not great in linux server and i try to follow the prompt. I did succesfully get to a black screen which then prompts me to a username then password to then do anything ( assuming). However here what i try to do I kinda fellow his tutorial http://www.ubuntugeek.com/step-by-step-ubuntu-11-04-natty-lamp-server-setup.html but however the command where not 100% like him not in same order but same idea. Then i want to install ubuntu server with gui here the command i try with sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop Which however give me the following error Err http... inRelease w Failed to fetch ht... So been ignored if i try the desktop one i get E: unable to locate package ubuntu E: unable to locate package desktop So i am assuming i am not connected to the internet, so i try the following command sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces here the output it gives me and i know my gateway on my laptop is 192.168.1.1 address: 192.168.1.148 netmask: 255.255.255.0 network: 192.168.1.0 broadcasts: 192.168.1.255 gateway: 192.168.1.1 Btw i do not know the command to get out of vi and saving it. Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com precises InRelease Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com precises-updates InRelease Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com precises-backports InRelease Reading package lists... Done W: Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise/InRelease W: Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise-updates/InRelease W: Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise-backport/InRelease

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• Is it possible to transfer a domain without a "gap" in Whois privacy protection?

  - by Guest

  I currently own several domains on which I am using a Whois privacy protection service to hide my personal details. In the near future, I would like to transfer some of these domains to a different registrar. It has been many years since I last performed domain transfers, so I am no longer knowledgeable about what it involves. However, I have read from several registrars that they ask their customers to disable Whois protection before effecting a domain transfer. Since there are several websites out there that publish archived versions of Whois information (and ask handsome money for the information to be hidden, of course), I would prefer to avoid having such a "gap" in my privacy protection. I figured that these websites would fetch Whois information mainly when a query is effected through their own website. However, I have found out that at least one of these sites had a copy of the Whois information for a new domain up on their site within hours after I registered it, so they must have some other source (of course I used a Google search to find that out, not their own site). What that tells me is that the time it takes for the domain transfers to go through would be more than enough for these rogue websites to cache my information. If my new registrar offers privacy protection for domains right from the point of registration as well, is there no way to transfer the domain between the two without reverting to my default Whois information in between?

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• Azure &ndash; Part 5 &ndash; Repository Pattern for Table Service

  - by Shaun

  In my last post I created a very simple WCF service with the user registration functionality. I created an entity for the user data and a DataContext class which provides some methods for operating the entities such as add, delete, etc. And in the service method I utilized it to add a new entity into the table service. But I didn’t have any validation before registering which is not acceptable in a real project. So in this post I would firstly add some validation before perform the data creation code and show how to use the LINQ for the table service.   LINQ to Table Service Since the table service utilizes ADO.NET Data Service to expose the data and the managed library of ADO.NET Data Service supports LINQ we can use it to deal with the data of the table service. Let me explain with my current example: I would like to ensure that when register a new user the email address should be unique. So I need to check the account entities in the table service before add. If you remembered, in my last post I mentioned that there’s a method in the TableServiceContext class – CreateQuery, which will create a IQueryable instance from a given type of entity. So here I would create a method under my AccountDataContext class to return the IQueryable<Account> which named Load. 1: public class AccountDataContext : TableServiceContext 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _storageAccount; 4:  5: public AccountDataContext(CloudStorageAccount storageAccount) 6: : base(storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, storageAccount.Credentials) 7: { 8: _storageAccount = storageAccount; 9:  10: var tableStorage = new CloudTableClient(_storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, 11: _storageAccount.Credentials); 12: tableStorage.CreateTableIfNotExist("Account"); 13: } 14:  15: public void Add(Account accountToAdd) 16: { 17: AddObject("Account", accountToAdd); 18: SaveChanges(); 19: } 20:  21: public IQueryable<Account> Load() 22: { 23: return CreateQuery<Account>("Account"); 24: } 25: } The method returns the IQueryable<Account> so that I can perform the LINQ operation on it. And back to my service class, I will use it to implement my validation. 1: public bool Register(string email, string password) 2: { 3: var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString"); 4: var accountToAdd = new Account(email, password) { DateCreated = DateTime.Now }; 5: var accountContext = new AccountDataContext(storageAccount); 6:  7: // validation 8: var accountNumber = accountContext.Load() 9: .Where(a => a.Email == accountToAdd.Email) 10: .Count(); 11: if (accountNumber > 0) 12: { 13: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Your account {0} had been used.", accountToAdd.Email)); 14: } 15:  16: // create entity 17: try 18: { 19: accountContext.Add(accountToAdd); 20: return true; 21: } 22: catch (Exception ex) 23: { 24: Trace.TraceInformation(ex.ToString()); 25: } 26: return false; 27: } I used the Load method to retrieve the IQueryable<Account> and use Where method to find the accounts those email address are the same as the one is being registered. If it has I through an exception back to the client side. Let’s run it and test from my simple client application. Oops! Looks like we encountered an unexpected exception. It said the “Count” is not support by the ADO.NET Data Service LINQ managed library. That is because the table storage managed library (aka. TableServiceContext) is based on the ADO.NET Data Service and it supports very limit LINQ operation. Although I didn’t find a full list or documentation about which LINQ methods it supports I could even refer a page on msdn here. It gives us a roughly summary of which query operation the ADO.NET Data Service managed library supports and which doesn't. As you see the Count method is not in the supported list. Not only the query operation, there inner lambda expression in the Where method are limited when using the ADO.NET Data Service managed library as well. For example if you added (a => !a.DateDeleted.HasValue) in the Where method to exclude those deleted account it will raised an exception said "Invalid Input". Based on my experience you should always use the simple comparison (such as ==, >, <=, etc.) on the simple members (such as string, integer, etc.) and do not use any shortcut methods (such as string.Compare, string.IsNullOrEmpty etc.). 1: // validation 2: var accountNumber = accountContext.Load() 3: .Where(a => a.Email == accountToAdd.Email) 4: .ToList() 5: .Count; 6: if (accountNumber > 0) 7: { 8: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Your account {0} had been used.", accountToAdd.Email)); 9: } We changed the a bit and try again. Since I had created an account with my mail address so this time it gave me an exception said that the email had been used, which is correct.   Repository Pattern for Table Service The AccountDataContext takes the responsibility to save and load the account entity but only for that specific entity. Is that possible to have a dynamic or generic DataContext class which can operate any kinds of entity in my system? Of course yes. Although there's no typical database in table service we can threat the entities as the records, similar with the data entities if we used OR Mapping. As we can use some patterns for ORM architecture here we should be able to adopt the one of them - Repository Pattern in this example. We know that the base class - TableServiceContext provide 4 methods for operating the table entities which are CreateQuery, AddObject, UpdateObject and DeleteObject. And we can create a relationship between the enmity class, the table container name and entity set name. So it's really simple to have a generic base class for any kinds of entities. Let's rename the AccountDataContext to DynamicDataContext and make the type of Account as a type parameter if it. 1: public class DynamicDataContext<T> : TableServiceContext where T : TableServiceEntity 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _storageAccount; 4: private string _entitySetName; 5:  6: public DynamicDataContext(CloudStorageAccount storageAccount) 7: : base(storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, storageAccount.Credentials) 8: { 9: _storageAccount = storageAccount; 10: _entitySetName = typeof(T).Name; 11:  12: var tableStorage = new CloudTableClient(_storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, 13: _storageAccount.Credentials); 14: tableStorage.CreateTableIfNotExist(_entitySetName); 15: } 16:  17: public void Add(T entityToAdd) 18: { 19: AddObject(_entitySetName, entityToAdd); 20: SaveChanges(); 21: } 22:  23: public void Update(T entityToUpdate) 24: { 25: UpdateObject(entityToUpdate); 26: SaveChanges(); 27: } 28:  29: public void Delete(T entityToDelete) 30: { 31: DeleteObject(entityToDelete); 32: SaveChanges(); 33: } 34:  35: public IQueryable<T> Load() 36: { 37: return CreateQuery<T>(_entitySetName); 38: } 39: } I saved the name of the entity type when constructed for performance matter. The table name, entity set name would be the same as the name of the entity class. The Load method returned a generic IQueryable instance which supports the lazy load feature. Then in my service class I changed the AccountDataContext to DynamicDataContext and that's all. 1: var accountContext = new DynamicDataContext<Account>(storageAccount); Run it again and register another account. The DynamicDataContext now can be used for any entities. For example, I would like the account has a list of notes which contains 3 custom properties: Account Email, Title and Content. We create the note entity class. 1: public class Note : TableServiceEntity 2: { 3: public string AccountEmail { get; set; } 4: public string Title { get; set; } 5: public string Content { get; set; } 6: public DateTime DateCreated { get; set; } 7: public DateTime? DateDeleted { get; set; } 8:  9: public Note() 10: : base() 11: { 12: } 13:  14: public Note(string email) 15: : base(email, string.Format("{0}_{1}", email, Guid.NewGuid().ToString())) 16: { 17: AccountEmail = email; 18: } 19: } And no need to tweak the DynamicDataContext we can directly go to the service class to implement the logic. Notice here I utilized two DynamicDataContext instances with the different type parameters: Note and Account. 1: public class NoteService : INoteService 2: { 3: public void Create(string email, string title, string content) 4: { 5: var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString"); 6: var accountContext = new DynamicDataContext<Account>(storageAccount); 7: var noteContext = new DynamicDataContext<Note>(storageAccount); 8:  9: // validate - email must be existed 10: var accounts = accountContext.Load() 11: .Where(a => a.Email == email) 12: .ToList() 13: .Count; 14: if (accounts <= 0) 15: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("The account {0} does not exsit in the system please register and try again.", email)); 16:  17: // save the note 18: var noteToAdd = new Note(email) { Title = title, Content = content, DateCreated = DateTime.Now }; 19: noteContext.Add(noteToAdd); 20: } 21: } And updated our client application to test the service. I didn't implement any list service to show all notes but we can have a look on the local SQL database if we ran it at local development fabric.   Summary In this post I explained a bit about the limited LINQ support for the table service. And then I demonstrated about how to use the repository pattern in the table service data access layer and make the DataContext dynamically. The DynamicDataContext I created in this post is just a prototype. In fact we should create the relevant interface to make it testable and for better structure we'd better separate the DataContext classes for each individual kind of entity. So it should have IDataContextBase<T>, DataContextBase<T> and for each entity we would have class AccountDataContext<Account> : IDataContextBase<Account>, DataContextBase<Account> { … } class NoteDataContext<Note> : IDataContextBase<Note>, DataContextBase<Note> { … }   Besides the structured data saving and loading, another common scenario would be saving and loading some binary data such as images, files. In my next post I will show how to use the Blob Service to store the bindery data - make the account be able to upload their logo in my example.   Hope this helps, Shaun   All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Oracle Kicks Summer off Right with Our FY14 Global Partner Kickoff

  - by Kristin Rose

  Are you ready to see what Oracle has in store for FY14? How about hearing from top Oracle Executives like Mark Hurd and Thomas Kurian, as they explain how you can make more money with Oracle? Are you reading this blog? If you answered yes to any of the above questions and want to find out how Oracle’s strategy for the next fiscal year will affect your business, don’t miss Oracle’s FY14 Global Partner Kickoff event taking place Tuesday, June 25th at 9:00AM PT. Kick start your summer by participating in this live Oracle PartnerNetwork event! Here is how you can: 1. Send questions during the live event via Twitter using @oraclepartners and #OPN in your tweets! 2. Take part in our exciting FY14 Partner Kickoff Twitter contest and get entered to win a FREE OPN Exchange pass! Do this by tweeting @oraclepartners a creative picture of your team watching the LIVE event. The winner will be selected at the end of the show! 3. Finally, help us spread the word to the Twitter community using this tweet: “Can’t wait for #Oracle’s Global FY14 Partner Kickoff tomorrow 6/25 at 9AM PT! Join the #OPN conversation! http://bit.ly/12goIPR” You can join the live event by visiting the OPN homepage or OPN's Facebook page the day of the event. Red Stack. Red team. Engineered for Growth! The OPN Communications Team 

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• Why would accessing photos over a network be a problem for Digikam?

  - by Shedeki

  Digikam has always worked nicely for me. I recently setup a Synology DiskStation (DS212+) and moved all my pictures to it, keeping them in an encrypted folder. I mount that folder using cifs, as some bug prevents eCryptfs and NFS from working together. This has led Digikam to being incredibly slow. Startup takes a very long time (several minutes for 41779 items, 123.8GB) but worse is how long it takes Digikam to write files. I like using Digikams import feature to copy new images from my camera to the hard drive because it checks for duplicates as well as creating a clear folder structure according to the dates the images were taken. Since I moved to using the network drive Digikam takes about 5 to 10 times as long to import photos than it did before. Saving modified or converted images takes equally long. What I am looking for is a way to help Digikam speed things up or an alternative piece of software (I have never liked Digikam being so very much KDEish…). There are just so many features that only Digikam seems to combine, e.g.: Batch processing. Respects existing folder structure. Does not mess up files for other applications. *.NEF support. Caches thumbnails in a clean way.

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• Is /home encryption useful on a server?

  - by Dennis

  I've got a question about the use of encryption: I set up a Ubuntu 12.04 server to use it as a router, file server for backups and webserver. Of course, it is probably not the best idea to put backups on the same system as a web server, but it is only for private usage and I don't want to spend too much money. So I thought it is not a bad idea to set up /home-encryption for the backup-user-account with which I do my backups. But in the same moment, another quesiton arises: Does it still makes sense? Via SSH, root login is disabled. And access to the /home-folder of that user is reduced to the user itself. So the only scenario to access the /home-folder is to connect keyboard/display to the server, login as root and change to /home. Or have I overseen a scenario? In case I am right, you can only access the /home-folder from "outside" as the backup-user. But than, encryption also doesn't make sense anymore. Am I right about that thoughts? Or do you still see a way to access the /home-folder of the backup user so that encryption still makes sense? Thanks for your help in advance!

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• Paying it Forward

  - by Liam McLennan

  You’re a talented guy (or girl). You’ve done alright. Years of hard work and stick-to-it-ive-ness have paid off and left you with plenty and an opportunity to make a positive difference to someone else. And then there are people with less than they need. Sometimes all they need to help themselves is a start. Opportunity International provide micro financing to help people grow their small businesses so that they can afford food, shelter, water and education. microfinance to solve poverty   MonsoonerOrLater This June, Chris, Angus (my brother) and I are travelling to India, entering into a rickshaw race and raising money for charity (Opportunity International and Round Table India). The Deccan Odyssey is a nine day rally, racing up the coast of India from Goa to Mumbai in a three wheeled motorbike. If you would like to support us, please make a tax deductable donation via our secure site at GoFundraise. For more information take a look at the MonsoonerOrLater site. If you live in Brisbane come along to An Evening With MonsoonerOrLater. The entry fee includes a three-course Indian meal, live music, henna tattooist, chilli eating competition, best bollywood dance off, Dhalsim Vs Dhalsim Street fighter, Delhi Belly Bet, Auctions and Prizes. All profits go to our charities: Round Table India and Opportunity International.

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• Spam bot constantly hitting our site 800-1,000 times a day. Causing loss in sales

  - by akaDanPaul

  For the past 5 months our site has been receiving hits from these 4 sites below; sheratonbd.com newsheraton.com newsheration.com newsheratonltd.com Typically the exact url they come from looks something like this; http://www.newsheraton.com/ClickEarnArea.aspx?loginsession_expiredlogin=85 The spam bot goes to our homepage and stays there for about 1 min and then exist. Luckily we have some pretty beefy servers so it hasn't even come close to overloading our servers yet. Last month I started blocking the IP address's of the spam bots but they seem to keep getting new ones everyday. So far I have blocked over 200 IP address's, below are a few of the ones I have blocked. They all come from Bangladesh. 58.97.238.214 58.97.149.132 180.234.109.108 180.149.31.221 117.18.231.5 117.18.231.12 Since this has been going on for the past 5 months our real site traffic has started to drop, and everyday our orders get lower and lower. Also since these spam bots simply go to our homepage and then leave our bounce rate in analytics has sky rocketed. My questions are; Is it possible that these spam bots are affecting our SEO? 60% of our orders come from natural search, and since this whole thing has started orders have slowly been dropping. What would be the reason someone would want to waste resources in doing this to our site? IP's aren't free and either are domain names, what would be the goal in doing this to us? We have google adwords but don't advertise on extended networks nor advertise in Bangladesh since we don't ship there so they are not making money on adsense. Has anyone experienced anything similar to this? What did you do and what was the final out come?

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• Pygame: Save a list of objects/classes/surfaces

  - by Sam Tubb

  I am working on a game, in which you can create mazes. You place blocks on a 16x16 grid, while choosing from a variety of block to make the level with. Whenever you create a block, it adds this class: class Block(object): def __init__(self,x,y,spr): self.x=x self.y=y self.sprite=spr self.rect=self.sprite.get_rect(x=self.x,y=self.y) to a list called instances. I tried shelving it to a .bin file, but it returns some error dealing with surfaces. How can I go about saving and loading levels? Any help is appreciated! :) Here is the whole code for reference: import pygame from pygame.locals import * #initstuff pygame.init() screen=pygame.display.set_mode((640,480)) pygame.display.set_caption('PiMaze') instances=[] #loadsprites menuspr=pygame.image.load('images/menu.png').convert() b1spr=pygame.image.load('images/b1.png').convert() b2spr=pygame.image.load('images/b2.png').convert() currentbspr=b1spr curspr=pygame.image.load('images/curs.png').convert() curspr.set_colorkey((0,255,0)) #menu menuspr.set_alpha(185) menurect=menuspr.get_rect(x=-260,y=4) class MenuItem(object): def __init__(self,pos,spr): self.x=pos[0] self.y=pos[1] self.sprite=spr self.pos=(self.x,self.y) self.rect=self.sprite.get_rect(x=self.x,y=self.y) class Block(object): def __init__(self,x,y,spr): self.x=x self.y=y self.sprite=spr self.rect=self.sprite.get_rect(x=self.x,y=self.y) while True: #menu items b1menu=b1spr.get_rect(x=menurect.left+32,y=48) b2menu=b2spr.get_rect(x=menurect.left+64,y=48) menuitems=[MenuItem(b1menu,b1spr),MenuItem(b2menu,b2spr)] screen.fill((20,30,85)) mse=pygame.mouse.get_pos() key=pygame.key.get_pressed() placepos=((mse[0]/16)*16,(mse[1]/16)*16) if key[K_q]: if mse[0]<260: if menurect.right<255: menurect.right+=1 else: if menurect.left>-260: menurect.left-=1 else: if menurect.left>-260: menurect.left-=1 for e in pygame.event.get(): if e.type==QUIT: exit() if menurect.right<100: if e.type==MOUSEBUTTONUP: if e.button==1: to_remove = [i for i in instances if i.rect.collidepoint(placepos)] for i in to_remove: instances.remove(i) if not to_remove: instances.append(Block(placepos[0],placepos[1],currentbspr)) for i in instances: screen.blit(i.sprite,i.rect) if not key[K_q]: screen.blit(curspr,placepos) screen.blit(menuspr,menurect) for item in menuitems: screen.blit(item.sprite,item.pos) if item.rect.collidepoint(mse): if pygame.mouse.get_pressed()==(1,0,0): currentbspr=item.sprite pygame.draw.rect(screen, ((255,0,0)), item, 1) pygame.display.flip()

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• What is the best type of c# timer to use with an Unity game that uses many timers simultaneously?

  - by Kyle Seidlitz

  I am developing a stand-alone 3d game in Unity that will have anywhere from 1 to 200 timers running simultaneously. For this game timer durations will range from 5 minutes to 4 days. There will not be any countdown displays or any UI for the timers. An object will be selected, a menu choice will then be selected, and the timer will start. Several events will occur at different intervals during the duration of the timer. The events will be confined to changing the material of the selected object, and calling a 1 second sound effect like a chime or a bell. If the user wants to save or end the game before all the timers are done, the start of the still running timers is to be saved to an XML file such that when the game is started again, any still running timers will have a calculation done to see if the timer is then done, where the game will change the materials appropriately. I am still trying to figure out what type of timer to use, and see also if there are any suggestions for saving and calculating times over several days. What class(es) of timers should I use? Are there any special issues I should look out for in terms of performance?

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• Clean Code Development & Flexible work environment - MSCC 26.10.2013

  Finally, some spare time to summarize my impressions and experiences of the recent meetup of Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community. I already posted my comment on the event and on our social media networks: Professional - It's getting better with our meetups and I really appreciated that 'seniors' and 'juniors' were present today. Despite running a little bit out of time it was really great to see more students coming to the gathering. This time we changed location for our Saturday meetup and it worked out very well. A big thank you to Ebene Accelerator, namely Mrs Poonum, for the ability to use their meeting rooms for our community get-together. Already some weeks ago I had a very pleasant conversation with her about the MSCC aims, 'mission' and how we organise things. Additionally, I think that an environment like the Ebene Accelerator is a good choice as it acts as an incubator for young developers and start-ups. Reactions from other craftsmen Before I put my thoughts about our recent meeting down, I'd like to mention and cross-link to some of the other craftsmen that were present: "MSCC meet up is a massive knowledge gaining strategies for students, future entrepreneurs, or for geeks all around. Knowledge sharing becomes a fun. For those who have not been able to made it do subscribe on our MSCC meet up group at meetup.com." -- Nitin on Learning is fun with #MSCC #Ebene Accelerator "We then talked about the IT industry in Mauritius, salary issues in various field like system administration, software development etc. We analysed the reasons why people tend to hop from one company to another. That was a fun debate." -- Ish on MSCC meetup - Gang of Geeks "Flexible Learning Environment was quite interesting since these lines struck cords : "You're not a secretary....9 to 5 shouldn't suit you"....This allowed reflection...deep reflection....especially regarding the local mindset...which should be changed in a way which would promote creativity rather than choking it till death..." -- Yannick on 2nd MSCC Monthly Meet-up And others on Facebook... ;-) Visual impressions are available on our Meetup event page. More first time attendees We great pleasure I noticed that we have once again more first time visitors. A quick overlook showed that we had a majority of UoM students in first, second or last year. Some of them are already participating in the UoM Computer Club or are nominated as members of the Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) programme. Personally, I really appreciate the fact that the MSCC is able to gather such a broad audience. And as I wrote initially, the MSCC is technology-agnostic; we want IT people from any segment of this business. Of course, students which are about to delve into the 'real world' of working are highly welcome, and I hope that they might get one or other glimpse of experience or advice from employees. Sticking to the schedule? No, not really... And honestly, it was a good choice to go a little bit of the beaten tracks. I mean, yes we have a 'rough' agenda of topics that we would like to talk about or having a presentation about. But we keep it 'agile'. Due to the high number of new faces, we initiated another quick round of introductions and I gave a really brief overview of the MSCC. Next, we started to reflect on the Clean Code Developer (CCD) - Red Grade which we introduced on the last meetup. Nirvan was the lucky one and he did a good job on summarizing the various abbreviations of the first level of being a CCD. Actually, more interesting, we exchanged experience about the principles and practices of Red Grade, and it was very informative to get to know that Yann actually 'interviewed' a couple of friends, other students, local guys working in IT companies as well as some IT friends from India in order to counter-check on what he learned first-hand about Clean Code. Currently, he is reading the book of Robert C. Martin on that topic and I'm looking forward to his review soon. More output generates more input What seems to be like a personal mantra is working out pretty well for me since the beginning of this year. Being more active on social media networks, writing more article on my blog, starting the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community, and contributing more to other online communities has helped me to receive more project requests, job offers and possibilities to expand my business at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. Actually, it is not a coincidence that one of the questions new craftsmen should answer during registration asks about having a personal blog. Whether you are just curious about IT, right in the middle of your Computer Studies, or already working in software development or system administration since a while you should consider to advertise and market yourself online. Easiest way to resolve this are to have online profiles on professional social media networks like LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, and Google+ (no Facebook should be considered for private only), and considering to have a personal blog. Why? -- Be yourself, be proud of your work, and let other people know that you're passionate about your profession. Trust me, this is going to open up opportunities you might not have dreamt about... Exchanging ideas about having a professional online presence - MSCC meetup on the 26th October 2013 Furthermore, consider to put your Curriculum Vitae online, too. There are quite a number of service providers like 1ClickCV, Stack Overflow Careers 2.0, etc. which give you the ability to have an up to date CV online. At least put it on your site, next to your personal blog. Similar to what you would be able to see on my site here. Cyber Island Mauritius - are we there? A couple of weeks ago I got a 'cold' message on LinkedIn from someone living in the U.S. asking about the circumstances and conditions of the IT world of Mauritius. He has a great business idea, venture capital and is currently looking for a team of software developers (mainly mobile - iOS) for a new startup here in Mauritius. Since then we exchanged quite some details through private messages and Skype conversations, and I suggested that it might be a good chance to join our meetup through a conference call and see for yourself about potential candidates. During approximately 30 to 40 minutes the brief idea of the new startup was presented - very promising state-of-the-art technology aspects and integration of various public APIs -, and we had a good Q&A session about it. Also thanks to the excellent bandwidth provided by the Ebene Accelerator the video conference between three parties went absolutely well. Clean Code Developer - Orange Grade Hahaha - nice one... Being at the Orange Tower at Ebene and then talking about an Orange Grade as CCD. Well, once again I provided an overview of the principles and practices in that rank of Clean Code, and similar to our last meetup we discussed on the various aspect of each principle, whether someone already got in touch with it during studies or work, and how it could affect their future view on their source code. Following are the principles and practices of Clean Code Developer - Orange Grade: CCD Orange Grade - Principles Single Level of Abstraction (SLA) Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) Separation of Concerns (SoC) Source Code conventions CCD Orange Grade - Practices Issue Tracking Automated Integration Tests Reading, Reading, Reading Reviews Especially the part on reading technical books got some extra attention. We quickly gathered our views on that and came up with a result that ranges between Zero (0) and up to Fifteen (15) book titles per year. Personally, I'm keeping my progress between Six (6) and Eight (8) titles per year, but at least One (1) per quarter of a year. Which is also connected to the fact that I'm participating in the O'Reilly Reader Review Program and have a another benefit to get access to free books only by writing and publishing a review afterwards. We also had a good exchange on the extended topic of 'Reviews' - which to my opinion is abnormal difficult here in Mauritius for various reasons. As far as I can tell from my experience working with Mauritian software developers, either as colleagues, employees or during consulting services there are unfortunately two dominant pattern on that topic: Keeping quiet Running away Honestly, I have no evidence about why these are the two 'solutions' on reviews but that's the situation that I had to face over the last couple of years. Sitting together and talking about problematic issues, tackling down root causes of de-motivational activities and working on general improvements doesn't seem to have a ground within the IT world of Mauritius. Are you a typist or a creative software craftsman? - MSCC meetup on the 26th October 2013 One very good example that we talked about was the fact of 'job hoppers' as you can easily observe it on someone's CV - those people change job every single year; for no obvious reason! Frankly speaking, I wouldn't even consider an IT person like to for an interview. As a company you're investing money and effort into the abilities of your employees. Hiring someone that won't stay for a longer period is out of question. And sorry to say, these kind of IT guys smell fishy about their capabilities and more likely to cause problems than actually produce productive results. One of the reasons why there is a probation period on an employment contract is to give you the liberty to leave as early as possible in case that you don't like your new position. Don't fool yourself or waste other people's time and money by hanging around a full year only to snatch off the bonus payment... Future outlook: Developer's Conference Even though it is not official yet I already mentioned it several times during our weekly Code & Coffee sessions. The MSCC is looking forward to be able to organise or to contribute to an upcoming IT event. Currently, the rough schedule is set for April 2014 but this mainly depends on availability of location(s), a decent time frame for preparations, and the underlying procedures with public bodies to have it approved and so on. As soon as the information about date and location has been fixed there will be a 'Call for Papers' period in order to attract local IT enthusiasts to apply for a session slot and talk about their field of work and their passion in IT. More to come for sure... My resume of the day It was a great gathering and I am very pleased about the fact that we had another 15 craftsmen (plus 2 businessmen on conference call plus 2 young apprentices) in the same room, talking about IT related topics and sharing their experience as employees and students. Personally, I really appreciated the feedback from the students about their current view on their future career, and I really hope that some of them are going to pursue their dreams. Start promoting yourself and it will happen... Looking forward to your blogs! And last but not least our numbers on Meetup and Facebook have been increased as a direct consequence of this meetup. Please, spread the word about the MSCC and get your friends and colleagues to join our official site. The higher the number of craftsmen we have the better chances we have t achieve something great! Thanks!

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• How do I re-enable the backlight?

  - by Scott Severance

  Since Oneiric, if I leave my machine (HP Mini 110 netbook) unattended and it goes into power-save mode, the backlight gets disabled. How can I turn it back on? Note that the keyboard backlight controls (Fn+F4 and Fn+F3) don't have any effect in this situation. I've already filed a bug, but filing a bug doesn't fix my problem. I tried this workaround posted in this bug report dealing with Acer laptops: sudo setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=0 However, if anything, that command makes things worse. In the general case, I can see a little bit if I'm in a dark room with a flashlight aimed just so. But after running setpci I can't see anything. And I find the setpci documentation to be utterly incomprehensible, so I don't know whether I need to tweak my command somehow or whether I'm completely barking up the wrong tree. Update: I've found a workaround: I'm now booting with the kernel parameter acpi=off. This disables power management, which prevents the machine from going into power saving mode and thus failing to come back up correctly. Of course, not having power management means that I can't use suspend or do anything to manage power other than powering it off (even then, I have to manually use the power switch). Also, it prevents me from using Unity 3D or Gnome Shell, forcing me into Unity 2C or Gnome Classic. So, I'd really like to be able to stop using this hack.

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• Problems with Maverick upgrade

  - by altenuta

  I upgraded to Maverick 10.10 from Lucid. I have an old Toshiba Satellite with a 1.1 MHz and 256MB RAM. Initially I couldn't get my wireless to work. That solved itself after installing various updates and programs. The problems that remain are: I have to authorize at least 2 times at start-up. This machine is Ubuntu only. No boot load screen. I have a ton of programs and system directories that are in my home folder. Is this normal? It is difficult to wake the computer from sleep. Usually I just shut it down and restart. Tonight I waited and got a message about corrupt memory. The computer takes forever to do just about everything. Slow to start programs or doing things on the web. I am a longtime Mac user (since 1986). I also manage a network of several windoze machines. I am definitely a GUI guy and do very little in the terminal so I really need to know where to begin to get things straightened out. Can I rescue this machine without wiping it and doing a fresh install? This is basically a hobby machine. Aside from all the programs and upgrades I've installed, I have almost no files or documents to worry about saving. Anyone have any ideas about the problems I'm having and the best way to proceed? Thanks, Al

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• PPF Savings Interest Rate Increased To 8.6% From 8% [India]

  - by Gopinath

  Here is some good news to small Indian investors who save money in Public Provident Fund(PPF) accounts operated in Post Offices and few nationalized banks – returns of your PPF savings are going to increase. Indian government has decided to increase the rate of interest paid to customers from 8% to 8.6%. To put it in numbers, if you have a 2,00,000 of savings in PPF account they are going give returns of 17,200/- per annum compared to 16,000/- returns at 8%. Also the the maximum cap on the investments in to PPF account per annum is increased to 1,00,000 from 70,000/-. PPF is one of the safest debt investments that gives very decent returns, but if you are a salaried employee with PF account then consider investing in Voluntary PF(VPF) instead of PPF as VPF returns are higher than PPF. CC image credit: Dave Dugdale. This article titled,PPF Savings Interest Rate Increased To 8.6% From 8% [India], was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, October 14, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, October 14, 2013Popular ReleasesAD ACL Scanner: 1.3.2: Minor bug fixed: Powershell 4.0 will report: Select—Object: Parameter cannot be processed because the parameter name p is ambiguous.Json.NET: Json.NET 5.0 Release 7: New feature - Added support for Immutable Collections New feature - Added WriteData and ReadData settings to DataExtensionAttribute New feature - Added reference and type name handling support to extension data New feature - Added default value and required support to constructor deserialization Change - Extension data is now written when serializing Fix - Added missing casts to JToken Fix - Fixed parsing large floating point numbers Fix - Fixed not parsing some ISO date ...Fast YouTube Downloader: YouTube Downloader 2.2.0: YouTube Downloader 2.2.0VidCoder: 1.5.8 Beta: Added hardware acceleration options: Bicubic OpenCL scaling algorithm, QSV decoding/encoding and DXVA decoding. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5834. Updated VidCoder setup icon. Fixed crash when choosing the mp4v2 container on x86 and opening on x64. Warning: the hardware acceleration features require specific hardware or file types to work correctly: QSV: Need an Intel processor that supports Quick Sync Video encoding, with a monitor hooked up to the Intel HD Graphics output and the lat...ASP.net MVC Awesome - jQuery Ajax Helpers: 3.5.2: version 3.5.2 - fix for setting single value to multivalue controls - datepicker min max date offset fix - html encoding for keys fix - enable Column.ClientFormatFunc to be a function call that will return a function version 3.5.1 - fixed html attributes rendering - fixed loading animation rendering - css improvements version 3.5 ========================== - autosize for all popups ( can be turned off by calling in js awe.autoSize = false ) - added Parent, Paremeter extensions ...Coevery - Free ASP.NET CRM: Coevery_WebApp: it just for publish to microsoft web app gellaryWsus Package Publisher: Release v1.3.1310.12: Allow the Update Creation Wizard to be set in full screen mode. Fix a bug which prevent WPP to Reset Remote Sus Client ID. Change the behavior of links in the Update Detail Viewer. Left-Click to open, Right-Click to copy to the Clipboard.TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v7 [Terraria Inventory Editor]: This is a complete overhaul but has the same core style. I hope you enjoy it. This version is compatible with 1.2.0.3 Please send issues to my Twitter or https://github.com/TJChap2840WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.6.maint: I think this covers all of the issues. new additions: fixed the thumbnail problem for backgrounds. general clean up and error checking. need to get this put through the wringer and all feedback is welcome.BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6.4: This BIDS Helper release brings the following new features and fixes: New Features: A new Bus Matrix style report option when you run the Printer Friendly Dimension Usage report for an SSAS cube. The Biml engine is now fully in sync with the supported subset of Varigence Mist 3.4. This includes a large number of language enhancements, bugfixes, and project deployment support. Fixed Issues: Fixed Biml execution for project connections fixing a bug with Tabular Translations Editor not a...Free language translator and file converter: Free Language Translator 3.4: fixe for new version look up.MoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): MoreTerra 1.11.3: =========== =New Features= =========== New Markers added for Plantera's Bulb, Heart Fruits and Gold Cache. Markers now correctly display for the gems found in rock debris on the floor. =========== =Compatibility= =========== Fixed header changes found in Terraria 1.0.3.1Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Kitting: First Beta release of Kitting: First Beta release of Kitting Install by using XPO or Models.C# Intellisense for Notepad++: Release v1.0.8.0: - fixed document formatting artifacts To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.8.0: - fixed document formatting artifacts To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.Generic Unit of Work and Repositories Framework: v2.0: Async methods for Repostiories - Ivan (@ifarkas) OData Async - Ivan (@ifarkas) Glimpse MVC4 workig with MVC5 Glimpse EF6 Northwind.Repostiory Project (layer) best practices for extending the Repositories Northwind.Services Project (layer), best practices for implementing business facade Live Demo: http://longle.azurewebsites.net/Spa/Product#/list Documentation: http://blog.longle.net/2013/10/09/upgrading-to-async-with-entity-framework-mvc-odata-asyncentitysetcontroller-kendo-ui-gli...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.581b: Fix in place for TVDB xml issue. New* Movie - General Preferences, allow saving of ignored 'The' or 'A' to end of movie title, stored in sorttitle field. * Movie - New Way for Cropping Posters. Fixed* Movie - Rename of folders/filename. caught error message. * Movie - Fixed Bug in Save Cropped image, only saving in Pre-Frodo format if Both model selected. * Movie - Fixed Cropped image didn't take zoomed ratio into effect. * Movie - Separated Folder Renaming and File Renaming fuctions durin...(Party) DJ Player: DJP.124.12: 124.12 (Feature implementation completed): Changed datatype of HistoryDateInfo from string to DateTime New: HistoryDateInfoConverter for the listbox Improved: HistoryDateInfoDeleter, HistoryDateInfoLoader, HistoryDateInfoAsynchronizer, HistoryItemLoader, HistoryItemsToHistoryDateInfoConverterSmartStore.NET - Free ASP.NET MVC Ecommerce Shopping Cart Solution: SmartStore.NET 1.2.0: HighlightsMulti-store support "Trusted Shops" plugins Highly improved SmartStore.biz Importer plugin Add custom HTML content to pages Performance optimization New FeaturesMulti-store-support: now multiple stores can be managed within a single application instance (e.g. for building different catalogs, brands, landing pages etc.) Added 3 new Trusted Shops plugins: Seal, Buyer Protection, Store Reviews Added Display as HTML Widget to CMS Topics (store owner now can add arbitrary HT...NuGet: NuGet 2.7.1: Released October 07, 2013. Release notes: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/release-notes/nuget-2.7.1 Important note: After downloading the signed build of NuGet.exe, if you perform an update using the "nuget.exe update -self" command, it will revert back to the unsigned build.New Projectsaigiongai: aigiongaiArtificial LIfe BEing - ALIBE: An Autonomous Arduino Robot based on a 4 wheel electric RC style vehicle equipped w/ various sensors and reactionary devices powered by Arduino Mega. BH Auto-injector: This ia a BH hack injector developed for r/SlashDiablo. For more information visit: http://www.reddit.com/r/slashdiablo BloxServer: A server for a game currently in DevBugNet Premium: BugNet Premium is extended version of open source defect tracking tool BugNetCASP Editor: CASP Editor hosted at SimlogicalGrace: Grace is an Dependency Injection Container as well as a couple other services like Data Transformation Service, Validation Service, and Reflection Service.Halogy v1.2 CE1.0: Halogy v1.2 Community Edition v1.0Hot Likes: Simple web Application Like Facebook and TwitterHyper-V Backup.NET: TestIndexedList: This library helps you to create lists with large amount of data and do high speed searches on your data. Kinect Skeleton Stream to BVH Converter: The program converts the skeleton data stream into BVH.Mama Goose's Birthday & Anniversary Calendar: This is a simple calendar that allows entering birthdays and anniversaries and to print the calendar for the year or month.MQL to FDK converter with migration toolkit: "MQL to FDK" project provides an easy and convenient way for conversion of MQL advisers to C# and launching them on FDK.Produzr: Produzr is a very simple CMS without a high learning curve.PSWFWeb - PowerShell Workflow WebConsole: A PSWorkflow job managersacm: naSave Cleaner: Sims 3 save cleanerSimple AES file appender: Simple AES file appenderSims 3 Package Viewer: Sims 3 ProjectsxBot Framework: xBot Framework is a dot Net framework for building a bot for use with Reddit.com.

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• CodeStock 2012 Review: Eric Landes( @ericlandes ) - Automated Tests in to automated Builds! How to put the right type of automated tests in to the right automated builds.

  Automated Tests in to automated Builds! How to put the right type of automated tests in to the right automated builds.Speaker: Eric LandesTwitter: @ericlandesBlog: http://ericlandes.com/ This was one of the first sessions I attended during CodeStock 2012. Eric’s talk focused mostly on unit testing, and that the lack of proper unit testing can be compared to stealing from an employer. His point was that if you’re not doing proper unit testing then all of the time wasted on fixing issues that could have been detected with unit tests is like stealing money from employer. He makes the assumption that that time spent on fixing these issues could have been better spent developing new features that drive the business. To a point I can agree with Eric’s argument regarding unit testing and stealing from a company’s perspective. I can see how he relates resources being shifted from new development to bug fixes as stealing based on the fact that the resources used to fix bugs are directly taken from other projects. He also states that Boring/Redundant and Build/Test tasks should be automated because it reduces the changes of errors and frees up developer to do what they do best, DEVELOP! When he refers to testing, he breaks testing down in to four distinct types. Unit Test Acceptance Test (This also includes Integration Tests) Performance Test UI Test With this he also recommends that developers should not go buck wild striving for 100% code coverage because some test my not provide a great return on investment. In his experience he recommends that 70% test coverage was a very acceptable rate.

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• Is it possible to set a VPN through Tor? and have functionality for Software Updates?

  - by moazhmi

  Gday, I have been trying to do a software update on Trusty both on terminal and software update app but that hasnt been successful, apparently my ISP has a broken transparent proxy. moazhmi@moazhmi-K52F:~$ wget -S http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/trusty/InRelease --2014-06-04 17:34:52-- http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/trusty/InRelease Resolving extras.ubuntu.com (extras.ubuntu.com)... 91.189.92.152 Connecting to extras.ubuntu.com (extras.ubuntu.com)|91.189.92.152|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Content-Length: 213 Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 14:34:52 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu) Connection: Keep-Alive Vary: Accept-Encoding Length: 213 [text/html] Saving to: ‘InRelease’ 100%[======================================>] 213 --.-K/s in 0s 2014-06-04 17:34:52 (22.1 MB/s) - ‘InRelease’ saved [213/213] I was advised to refer back to the ISP with a complaint but that has returned with peanuts. My Question is - Is it possible to set a VPN through TOR , i.e whereas I can run software updates through terminals or the app . the browsing is out of question here as I need to update which I am not able to do / only on 12.04.

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• Server 2008R2 in Extra Small Windows Azure Instance?

  - by Shawn Eary

  Windows Azure hosting for an Extra Small (XS) Windows VM seems to come out to be about $10 a month right now. I think this XS instance gives you the equivalent of a 1 GHZ CPU with 768MB of RAM. I think the minimum requirements for Server 2008 is 1GHZ CPU with 512MB of RAM. Also, I think the minimum requirements for SQL Server Express is 1GHZ CPU with 256 MB of RAM and that the minimum requirements for Team Foundation Server Express 11 Beta is 2.2 GHZ CPU with 1 Gig of RAM (this 2.2 GHZ part could be a problem for my 1 GHZ XS VM...). Given the performance of the XS Azure instance, would I be able to install: a very basic MVC web site; a free instance of SQL Server Express; a free single user instance of Team Foundation Server Express 11 Beta and run the XS VM instance without serious crashing? I know there are other Shared WebHost providers that can provide these features for me, but those hosting providers have the following disadvantages: They sometimes cost a lot of money after all of the "addons" are in place They probably don't provide the level of security and employee integrity that Microsoft can provide They don't provide the total control that an Azure VM seems to provide

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• Basic procedural generated content works, but how could I do the same in reverse?

  - by andrew

  My 2D world is made up of blocks. At the moment, I create a block and assign it a number between 1 and 4. The number assigned to the nth block is always the same (i.e if the player walks backwards or restarts the game.) and is generated in the function below. As shown here by this animation, the colours represent the number. function generate_data(n) math.randomseed(n) -- resets the random so that the 'random' number for n is always the same math.random() -- fixes lua random bug local no = math.random(4) --print(no, n) return no end Now I want to limit the next block's number - a block of 1 will always have a block 2 after it, while block 2 will either have a block 1,2 or 3 after it, etc. Before, all the blocks data was randomly generated, initially, and then saved. This data was then loaded and used instead of being randomly called. While working this way, I could specify what the next block would be easily and it would be saved for consistency. I have now removed this saving/loading in favour of procedural generation as I realised that save whiles would get very big after travelling. Back to the present. While travelling forward (to the right), it is easy to limit what the next blocks number will be. I can generate it at the same time as the other data. The problem is when travelling backwards (to the left) I can not think of a way to load the previous block so that it is always the same. Does anyone have any ideas on how I could sort this out?

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• Open Source sponsored feature development

  - by Suma

  I am considering to sponsor a development of some particular features in some Open Source tools. I would like the results of the work to be available publicly, and if possible, to be included in the main product line. The features are usually something which is of general use, but not very critical, and no one has currently a plan to develop it. For illustration, imagine I would like to use MinGW for Win32 development, but I miss a post mortem debugging option, I would like this feature to be implemented and I am willing to pay $1000 for it. Is there some common way how to proceed, or is this wildly per-project dependent? Are there some general guidelines how to contact the product developers, or are there some common meeting places where smart open source people who might interested to participate in such sponsored development meet, which I should visit to advertise the sponsoring option? Are there some specific ways how to talk about the job to be more attractive to people participating in open source (e.g. it might be more interesting for them to participate in a contest than just to take a payed job, which might have a bit of mundane feel)? Or perhaps is this something which you think has little chance to succeed, because perhaps money has very little value for open source developers? Any tips and experiences from someone who has some experience of open source sponsorhip from any side (sponsor or the developer) are welcome.

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• Java Applet Tower Defence Game needs tweeking

  - by Ephiras

  Hello :) i have made a tower defence Game for my computer science class as one of my major projects, but have encountered some rather fatal roadblocks. here they are creating a menu screen (class Menu) that can set the total number of enimies, the max number of towers, starting money and the map. i tried creating a constructor in my Main class that sets all the values to whatever the Menu class passes in. I want the Menu screen to close after a difficulty has been selected and the main class to begin. Another problem i would really like some help with is instead of having to write entire arrays i would like to create a small segment of code that runs through an entire picture and sets up an array based on that pixels color.this way i can have multiple levels just dragged into a level folder and have the program read through them. users can even create their own. so a 1 if its yellow, a two if blue and a 3 if purple, then everything else = 0; you can download all the classes and code uif you'd like here sorry about having to redirect you but i wasn't sure how to efficently add a code spoiler. help is greatly appreciated

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• Long-term Freelance contract: should it have a salary-day or not?

  - by otto

  I don't like to speak about money. I just like to work. I still believe in a relationship between good work and good compensation. Hence I don't want ask my employer about my compensations, actually they are asking me. So I created a liberal contract with unspecified salary-day -- I did not want to lose my rights to my own projects and I did not pay any attention to the salary-day. Now the firm said that they would have paid me 1 month earlier if I had provided a tax -paper. I provided it before the next payment -day (unspecified). During the next month, the co-employer pretty much blocks my working -- does not allow me to access working repository and the co-employer goes to cruise when we should finalize a project so I cannot do anything. Now the project is not finalized, the co-employer has apparently provided some false statements to the boss about my doings (not getting anything for one month's work and 1 month when the co-employer pretty much wasted just my time) -- I was only allowed to debug the code of my co-employer and not to do anything. I feel that co-employer did not allow me to work by purpose so that they have an excuse not to pay any salary. The co-employer says that I cannot speak to the boss. The boss say that I need to speak directly to co-employer, not to him. I haven't said anything about the situation. I did not get things done because I was not allowed and now I am not even allowed to speak. Boss is the person who pays salaries. But both boss and co-employer have stages in the firm -- I think co-employer and boss are the same person pretty much, they created a theatre so that they get almost 2 month's work for free. Now I have multiple ideas how to avoid this kind of situations in the future: specify the salary day make sure you can speak directly to the manager and the boss, not through middle-hand other?

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