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• Things to install on a new machine – revisited

  - by RoyOsherove

  as I prepare to get a new dev machine at work, I write the things I am going to install on it, before writing the first line of code on that machine: Control Freak Tools: Everything Search Engine – a free and amazingly fast search engine for files all over your machine. (just file names, not inside files). This is so fast I use it almost as a replacement for my start menu, but it’s also great for finding those files that get hidden and tucked away in dark places on my system. Ever had a situation where you needed to see exactly how many copies of X.dll were hiding on your machine and where? this tool is perfect for that. Google Chrome. It’s just fast. very fast. and Firefox has become the IE of alternative browsers in terms of speed and memory. Don’t even get me started on IE. TweetDeck – get a complete view of what’s up on twitter Total Commander – my still favorite file manager, over five years now. KatMouse – will scroll any window your hovering on, even if it’s not an active window, when you use scroll the wheel on it. PowerIso or Daemon Tools – for loading up ISO images of discs LogMeIn Ignition – quick access to your LogMeIn computers for online Backup: JungleDisk or BackBlaze KeePass – save important passwords MS Security Essentials – free anti virus that’s quoest and doesn’t make a mess of your system. for home: uTorrent – a torrent client that can read rss feeds (like the ones from ezrss.it ) Camtasia Studio and SnagIt – for recording and capturing the screen, and then adding cool effects on top. Foxit PDF Reader – much faster that adove reader. Toddler Keys (for home) – for when your baby wants to play with your keyboard. Live Writer – for writing blog posts for Lenovo ThinkPads – Lenovo System Update – if you have a “custom” system instead of the one that came built in, this will keep all your lenovo drivers up to date. FileZilla – for FTP stuff All the utils from sysinternals, (or try the live-links) especially: AutoRuns for deciding what’s really going to load at startup, procmon to see what’s really going on with processes in your system   Developer stuff: Reflector. Pure magic. Time saver. See source code of any compiled assembly. Resharper. Great for productivity and navigation across your source code FinalBuilder – a commercial build automation tool. Love it. much better than any xml based time hog out there. TeamCity – a great visual and friendly server to manage continuous integration. powerful features. Test Lint – a free addin for vs 2010 I helped create, that checks your unit tests for possible problems and hints you about it. TestDriven.NET – a great test runner for vs 2008 and 2010 with some powerful features. VisualSVN – a commercial tool if you use subversion. very reliable addin for vs 2008 and 2010 Beyond Compare – a powerful file and directory comparison tool. I love the fact that you can right click in windows exporer on any file and select “select left side to compare”, then right click on another file and select “compare with left side”. Great usability thought! PostSharp 2.0 – for addind system wide concepts into your code (tracing, exception management). Goes great hand in hand with.. SmartInspect – a powerful framework and viewer for tracing for your application. lots of hidden features. Crypto Obfuscator – a relatively new obfuscation tool for .NET that seems to do the job very well. Crypto Licensing – from the same company –finally a licensing solution that seems to really fit what I needed. And it works. Fiddler 2 – great for debugging and tracing http traffic to and from your app. Debugging Tools for Windows and DebugDiag  - great for debugging scenarios. still wanting more? I think this should keep you busy for a while.   Regulator and Regulazy – for testing and generating regular expressions Notepad 2 – for quick editing and viewing with syntax highlighting

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• How do NTP Servers Manage to Stay so Accurate?

  - by Akemi Iwaya

  Many of us have had the occasional problem with our computers and other devices retaining accurate time settings, but a quick sync with an NTP server makes all well again. But if our own devices can lose accuracy, how do NTP servers manage to stay so accurate? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. Photo courtesy of LEOL30 (Flickr). The Question SuperUser reader Frank Thornton wants to know how NTP servers are able to remain so accurate: I have noticed that on my servers and other machines, the clocks always drift so that they have to sync up to remain accurate. How do the NTP server clocks keep from drifting and always remain so accurate? How do the NTP servers manage to remain so accurate? The Answer SuperUser contributor Michael Kjorling has the answer for us: NTP servers rely on highly accurate clocks for precision timekeeping. A common time source for central NTP servers are atomic clocks, or GPS receivers (remember that GPS satellites have atomic clocks onboard). These clocks are defined as accurate since they provide a highly exact time reference. There is nothing magical about GPS or atomic clocks that make them tell you exactly what time it is. Because of how atomic clocks work, they are simply very good at, having once been told what time it is, keeping accurate time (since the second is defined in terms of atomic effects). In fact, it is worth noting that GPS time is distinct from the UTC that we are more used to seeing. These atomic clocks are in turn synchronized against International Atomic Time or TAI in order to not only accurately tell the passage of time, but also the time. Once you have an exact time on one system connected to a network like the Internet, it is a matter of protocol engineering enabling transfer of precise times between hosts over an unreliable network. In this regard a Stratum 2 (or farther from the actual time source) NTP server is no different from your desktop system syncing against a set of NTP servers. By the time you have a few accurate times (as obtained from NTP servers or elsewhere) and know the rate of advancement of your local clock (which is easy to determine), you can calculate your local clock’s drift rate relative to the “believed accurate” passage of time. Once locked in, this value can then be used to continuously adjust the local clock to make it report values very close to the accurate passage of time, even if the local real-time clock itself is highly inaccurate. As long as your local clock is not highly erratic, this should allow keeping accurate time for some time even if your upstream time source becomes unavailable for any reason. Some NTP client implementations (probably most ntpd daemon or system service implementations) do this, and others (like ntpd’s companion ntpdate which simply sets the clock once) do not. This is commonly referred to as a drift file because it persistently stores a measure of clock drift, but strictly speaking it does not have to be stored as a specific file on disk. In NTP, Stratum 0 is by definition an accurate time source. Stratum 1 is a system that uses a Stratum 0 time source as its time source (and is thus slightly less accurate than the Stratum 0 time source). Stratum 2 again is slightly less accurate than Stratum 1 because it is syncing its time against the Stratum 1 source and so on. In practice, this loss of accuracy is so small that it is completely negligible in all but the most extreme of cases. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.

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• More SQL Smells

  - by Nick Harrison

  Let's continue exploring some of the SQL Smells from Phil's list. He has been putting together. Datatype mis-matches in predicates that rely on implicit conversion.(Plamen Ratchev) This is a great example poking holes in the whole theory of "If it works it's not broken" Queries will this probably will generally work and give the correct response. In fact, without careful analysis, you probably may be completely oblivious that there is even a problem. This subtle little problem will needlessly complicate queries and slow them down regardless of the indexes applied. Consider this example: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Page](     [PageId] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,     [Title] [varchar](75) NOT NULL,     [Sequence] [int] NOT NULL,     [ThemeId] [int] NOT NULL,     [CustomCss] [text] NOT NULL,     [CustomScript] [text] NOT NULL,     [PageGroupId] [int] NOT NULL;  CREATE PROCEDURE PageSelectBySequence ( @sequenceMin smallint , @sequenceMax smallint ) AS BEGIN SELECT [PageId] , [Title] , [Sequence] , [ThemeId] , [CustomCss] , [CustomScript] , [PageGroupId] FROM [CMS].[dbo].[Page] WHERE Sequence BETWEEN @sequenceMin AND @SequenceMax END  Note that the Sequence column is defined as int while the sequence parameter is defined as a small int. The problem is that the database may have to do a lot of type conversions to evaluate the query. In some cases, this may even negate the indexes that you have in place. Using Correlated subqueries instead of a join   (Dave_Levy/ Plamen Ratchev) There are two main problems here. The first is a little subjective, since this is a non-standard way of expressing the query, it is harder to understand. The other problem is much more objective and potentially problematic. You are taking much of the control away from the optimizer. Written properly, such a query may well out perform a corresponding query written with traditional joins. More likely than not, performance will degrade. Whenever you assume that you know better than the optimizer, you will most likely be wrong. This is the fundmental problem with any hint. Consider a query like this:  SELECT Page.Title , Page.Sequence , Page.ThemeId , Page.CustomCss , Page.CustomScript , PageEffectParams.Name , PageEffectParams.Value , ( SELECT EffectName FROM dbo.Effect WHERE EffectId = dbo.PageEffects.EffectId ) AS EffectName FROM Page INNER JOIN PageEffect ON Page.PageId = PageEffects.PageId INNER JOIN PageEffectParam ON PageEffects.PageEffectId = PageEffectParams.PageEffectId  This can and should be written as:  SELECT Page.Title , Page.Sequence , Page.ThemeId , Page.CustomCss , Page.CustomScript , PageEffectParams.Name , PageEffectParams.Value , EffectName FROM Page INNER JOIN PageEffect ON Page.PageId = PageEffects.PageId INNER JOIN PageEffectParam ON PageEffects.PageEffectId = PageEffectParams.PageEffectId INNER JOIN dbo.Effect ON dbo.Effects.EffectId = dbo.PageEffects.EffectId  The correlated query may just as easily show up in the where clause. It's not a good idea in the select clause or the where clause. Few or No comments. This one is a bit more complicated and controversial. All comments are not created equal. Some comments are helpful and need to be included. Other comments are not necessary and may indicate a problem. I tend to follow the rule of thumb that comments that explain why are good. Comments that explain how are bad. Many people may be shocked to hear the idea of a bad comment, but hear me out. If a comment is needed to explain what is going on or how it works, the logic is too complex and needs to be simplified. Comments that explain why are good. Comments may explain why the sql is needed are good. Comments that explain where the sql is used are good. Comments that explain how tables are related should not be needed if the sql is well written. If they are needed, you need to consider reworking the sql or simplify your data model. Use of functions in a WHERE clause. (Anil Das) Calling a function in the where clause will often negate the indexing strategy. The function will be called for every record considered. This will often a force a full table scan on the tables affected. Calling a function will not guarantee that there is a full table scan, but there is a good chance that it will. If you find that you often need to write queries using a particular function, you may need to add a column to the table that has the function already applied.

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• Outlook errors and blank address book?

  - by Chasester

  I have a user with a fresh install of Windows 7 64 bit. Office 2010 was installed also. Everything worked great until we installed Adobe Pro 9 and Wordperfect 12. (for outlook we are not using exchange). Then Outlook popped an error saying could not start Outlook. I then modified it to run in compatibility mode and Outlook starts. Then took compatibility mode off and outlook continues to start without difficulty. However, her address book went blank (contacts are all there). In the properties of the contact folder it is checked (and grayed out) to include this folder in the address book, and the Outlook address book is listed when I look at account properties. I tried creating a new profile to no avail. I tried creating a new profile and creating a new pst file - to no avail. I tried uninstalling office, removing the folders inside roaming and local, reinstalled office; got the same could not start Outlook error - did the compatibility mode bit and got it to start - but the Address book continues to be empty. Has anyone run across this before? I'm thinking that there must be some other preferences type folder other than those in Roaming and Local since her signature remained when I reinstalled Office.

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• Silverlight Cream for June 08, 2010 -- #877

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Miroslav Miroslavov, Chris Klug, Beau, Christian Schormann(-2-), Dan Wahlin, Pete Brown, Michael S. Scherotter, Philipp Sumi, Andy Wigley, and Phil Middlemiss. Shoutouts: Mark Tucker set about learning Caliburn, and in the process is writing a Caliburn Book: Chapters 1-3 Jesse Liberty has a great link-laden post up about why we should all be learning/using Blend: Why Developers Should, Must, Do Care About The New Expression Blend be sure to read what he says about WP7 development, however! Charlie Kindel announced an Install problem with the Developer Tools CTP Refresh and the WP7 tools... check this out if you're having problems. John Papa has a good post up on the happenings yesterday: Expression Studio 4 Launch of Blend, SketchFlow, Encoder and More! Erik Mork & Company's latest "This Week in Silverlight" is titled First Drop: Prism v4 – First Drop is Available From SilverlightCream.com: Animated navigation between Pages Miroslav Miroslavov has Part 8 of his "Silverlight in Action" series up, detailing cool things from the CompleteIT site... this one is on Animated navigation between pages. Subtitling videos Chris Klug got a gig adding subtitles to videos for Microsoft (sweet) ... and no, not *that* kind of subtitles... read how he approached the final solution. Silverlight Watermark TextBox I'm not sure we can have too many Watermark TextBoxes, and neither does Beau , who sent me a link to this one... give it a dance and decide. Blend 4: Collaborative SketchFlow Feedback with SharePoint With the new Blend release, Christian Schormann has a post up describing the lashup to Sharepoint for sharing Sketchflow and getting feedback. New Utility, Links, and Tutorials for Path-Based Layout Christian Schormann also has a collection of resources for Path-Based Layouts, including a utility "that lets you apply a whole bunch of position-specific effects without having to write any code"... lots of links to resources here. Tales from the Trenches – Building a Real-World Silverlight Line of Business Application Dan Wahlin draws on his recent experience and lays out some of the fun and pitfalls of building LOB apps in Silverlight... WCF, MVVM, slides, and code included WPF (and Silverlight): Choose your Fonts and Text Rendering Options Wisely Pete Brown has a great post up on using fonts wisely across multiple platforms... lots of info and good discussion in the comments as well. Ball Watch USA Remember the awesome watch Michael S. Scherotter did in Silverlight 1 and then converted to Updated Ball Trainmaster Cannonball Watch to Silverlight 2? Well... there's now a contest underfoot and 8 videos to help you get started... all good stuff, and good luck! ... Michael has a post up about the contest: Enter to Win a Ball Watch by Creating One in Silverlight Announcing Sketchables – Rapid Mockup Creation with SketchFlow By way of Jesse Libertyhttp://jesseliberty.com/2010/06/08/why-developers-should-must-do-care-about-the-new-expression-blend/, this is a cool production by Philipp Sumi about a simple mockup framework he's created. Perst - a database for Windows Phone 7 Silverlight I think one of my first comments to Michael Washington back at the MVP Summit 2010 was that we'd need a database engine, and too cool, but we've got one, Andy Wigley discusses Perst in this post... to save you some time, here's the Perst site A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 7 Phil Middlemiss has part 7 of his great theme-building series up... this time he's giving the accordian control a once-over. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• How to Crop Pictures in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2010

  - by DigitalGeekery

  When you add pictures to your Office documents you might need to crop them to remove unwanted areas, or isolate a specific part. Today we’ll take a look at how to crop images in Office 2010. Note: We will show you examples in Word, but you can crop images in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. To insert a picture into your Office document, click the Picture button on the Insert tab. The Picture Tools format ribbon should now be active. If not, click on the image. New in Office 2010 is the ability to see the area of the photo that you are keeping in addition to what will be cropped out. On the Format tab, click Crop. Click and drag inward any of the four corners to crop from any one side. Notice you can still see the area to be cropped out is show in translucent gray. Press and hold the CTRL key while you drag a corner cropping handle inward to crop equally on all four sides. To crop equally on right and left or the top and bottom, press and hold down the CTRL key while you drag the center cropping handle on either side inward. You can further adjust the cropping area by clicking and dragging the picture behind the cropping area. To accept the current dimensions and crop the photo, press escape or click anywhere outside the cropping area. You can manually crop the image to exact dimensions. This can be done by right clicking on the image and entering the dimensions in the Width and Height boxes, or in the Size group on the Format tab.   Crop to a Shape Select your photo and click Crop from the Size group on the Format tab. Select Crop to Shape and choose any of the available shapes. You photo will be cropped into that shape. Using Fit and Fill If you wish to crop a photo but fill the shape, select Fill. When you choose this option, some edges of the picture might not display but the original picture aspect ratio is maintained. If you wish to have all of the picture fit within a shape, choose Fit. The original picture aspect ratio will be maintained.   Conclusion Users moving from previous versions of Microsoft Office are sure to appreciate the improved cropping abilities in Office 2010, especially the ability to see what will and won’t be kept when you crop a photo. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Import Microsoft Access Data Into ExcelEmbed an Excel Worksheet Into PowerPoint or Word 2007Add Artistic Effects to Your Pictures in Office 2010Embed True Type Fonts in Word and PowerPoint 2007 DocumentsChange The Default Color Scheme In Office 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool Easily Create More Bookmark Toolbars in Firefox Filevo is a Cool File Hosting & Sharing Site Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate

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• Creating fillable, saveable PDF in OpenOffice.org results in garbage

  - by Ubuntourist

  I've been creating beautiful fillable PDFs using OOo Writer under Ubuntu for a few years. However, I've recently been asked to make them saveable rather than just printable. So, I go to my colleague's Windows computer which has Adobe Acrobat Professional 8, and following directions outlined in Save filled form in PDF file in Ubuntu. I end up with an unreadable, unfillable document. Acrobat Reader opens it, but it's garbage. It looks like it might be a character encoding issue. The document was created using Arial under Ubuntu. I installed OOo on the Windows box and changed the font to Tahoma. But with either font, the resulting file is a jumble of boxes and oddly placed random characters. Given that it fails with a fairly ubiquitous font, and a Microsoft specific font, I'm guessing it's not a font issue. Until I enable the rights, the PDF is readable both with Acrobat Reader and Acrobat Pro. Anyone else encounter the problem? If so, did you solve it? Thanks.

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• Laptop choice for development: MacBook Pro 17 vs Dell Studio XPS 16 vs HP Envy 15

  - by Shalan

  Hey! First things first - let me state that I am not intending to play games on this - I have narrowed down to these 3 purely based on specs and its individual brand reliability in the market. I intend to primarily use: Visual Studio 2008 Pro a lot (develop and deploy on Windows platforms) SQL Server 2005 Oracle 10g Adobe Photoshop CS4 Microsoft Expression Studio Google Sketchup I currently use a desktop PC (Core2Duo 2.66Ghz with 3GB DDRII memory) running Vista Business 32-bit - and I have to admit that, especially for Visual Studio, its quite sluggish to a point where it affects productivity. Furthermore, I intend to only use the notebook on a table - with a cooled surface, like granite :) - so I would appreciate people's input with regard to heat issues. Im aware that the Dell's primary exhaust gets blocked by the lid when open, but some reviews don't seem to place extraordinary emphasis on heat issues resulting from this. My options for the Dell/Alienware: Core i7 720QM 4GB DDRIII memory ATI mobility 3670 (512) 128GB Solid State Drive 16-inch Full HD RGB-LED LCD display (1080p) 3-year next-business-day support My configuration for the Apple MBP: Core2Duo 2.8Ghz (Im assuming the T9600) 4GB DDRIII memory 128GB Solid State Drive standard 1 year support The one advantage I think of with the MBP is that I can have the addition of OSX (though Im unsure what I would use it for, but purely to play around with a much-boasted-about OS) What are your thoughts on this, especially regarding build-quality, heat, performance and battery-life? Much thanks! ~shalan

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• Hardware Requirements & Tuning - Flash Media Server 3.5 Interactive

  - by Anthony Kanago

  I am trying to spec out a server to purchase (physically, not rented from someone like softlayer.com) to run an intranet instace of Flash Media Server 3.5 Interactive. In general, the server will likely be fielding somewhere on the order of 400 connections at a time at the upper limit. Of course, should this increase, we don't want to be stuck. While the decision is not final, we will likely be running the server on Red Hat rather than Windows. The server will be run on gigabit ethernet. I have two related questions: What sort of hardware would I need realistically to support this? What advice can you offer for settings in tuning FMS/the OS to be performant to this level? We are looking for a bare minimum that will run this effectively to save on costs. Realistically, the average number of connections will be fairly low (50-150) by comparison with that upper limit estimate. To reiterate: we just want to be cautious in not getting caught when we need more power, but we also need a low-cost solution (doesn't everyone?) and that may take priority. Windows and RedHat are the two officially supported operating systems. Since FMS is stated to be 32-bit only, I'm sticking with a 32-bit OS. The hardware requirements listed by Adobe on their website are: 3.2GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 processor (dual Intel Xeon® or faster recommended) 2GB of RAM (4GB recommended) 1Gb Ethernet card So what realistically do I need for those sorts of connection numbers, and what can I due to tune things up to get more out of less hardware? Thanks!

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• Silverlight Cream for March 30, 2010 -- #825

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Jeremy Likness, Tim Greenfield, Tim Heuer, ondrejsv, XAML Ninja, Nikhil Kothari, Sergey Barskiy, Shawn Oster, smartyP, Christian Schormann(-2-), and John Papa And Glenn Block. Shoutouts: Victor Gaudioso produced a RefCard for DZone: Getting Started with Silverlight and Expression Blend Way to go Victor... it looks great! Gavin Wignall announced Metia launch FourSquare and Bing maps mash up – called Near.me Cheryl Simmons talks about VS2010 and the design surface: Changing Templates with the Silverlight Designer (and seeing the changes immediately) Michael S. Scherotter posted that New York Times Silverlight Kit Updated for Windows Phone 7 Series Jaime Rodriguez posted about 2 free chapters in his new book (with Yochay Kiriaty): A Journey Into Silverlight On Windows Phone -Via Learning WIndows PHone Programming Did you know there was "MSDN Radio"?? Tim Heuer posted follow-up answers to this morning's show: MSDN Radio follow-up answers: Prism for Silverlight, DomainServices and relationships Michael Klucher posted a great set of links for WP7 game development this morning: Great Game Development Tutorials for Windows Phone Zhiming Xue has 3 pages of synopsis and links for everything Windows Phone at MIX. This is the 1st, but at the top of the pages are links to the other two: Windows Phone 7 Content From MIX10 – Part I From SilverlightCream.com: Using WriteableBitmap to Simplify Animations with Clones Jeremy Likness takes a break from his LOB posts to demonstrate a page flip animation using WriteableBitmap to simplify the animation using clones. SAX-like Xml parsing Want some experience or fun with Rx? Tim Greenfield has a post up on building an observable XmlReader. nstalling Silverlight applications without the browser involved Last night I blogged Mike Taulty's take on the "Silent Install" for an OOB app, tonight, I'm posting Tim Heuer's insight on the topic. How to: Create computed/custom properties for sample data in Blend/Sketchflow ondrejsv posted an example of digging into the files that control the sample data for Blend to get what you really want. PathListBox Adventures – radial layout Check out the radial layout XAML Ninja did using the PathListBox ... and all code available. RIA Services and Validation Nikhil Kothari has a great (duh!) post up that follows his Silverlight TV on the same subject: RIA Services and validation... lots of good external links also. Windows Phone 7 Application with OData Sergey Barskiy did an OData to WP7 app by using the feed from MIX10. You can see a list of sessions, and click on one to see details. Getting Blur And DropShadow to work in the Windows Phone Emulator Shawn Oster responds to some forum questions about Blur and DropShadow effects not showing up in the WP7 emulator, and gives the code trick we have to do for now. Metro Icons for Windows Phone 7 We all got the other icon set for WP7 from MSDN, but smartyP pulled the Metro Icons from the PPT deck of the MIX10 presentations... good job! Fonts in SketchFlow Christian Schormann talks about fonts in Sketchflow, where they live on your machine, and how you can use them. Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part III Christian Schormann also has Part III of his epic tutorial up on Path Layout and Blend. This one is on dynamic resizing layouts, and he has links back to the other two if you missed them... or you can find them with a search at SilverlightCream... :) Simple ViewModel Locator for MVVM: The Patients Have Left the Asylum John Papa And Glenn Block teamed up to solve the View First model only without the maintenance involved with the ViewModel locator by using MEF. It only took these guys and hour... sigh... :) Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Mystery undeletable file

  - by Hugh Allen

  I can't delete C:\Config.Msi\75ce84f.rbf. it's not readonly, system or hidden it's not in use by another process (according to Process Explorer) the NT security permissions aren't the problem either - I am the owner and have Full Control ; as a double-check, the Effective Permissions tab shows that I have permission to delete. Yet trying to delete the file gives "Access is Denied" from both Explorer and cmd. I can however rename it or move it to another folder on the same drive. I can also read it and Virustotal says it's clean which is what I would expect (it's just a Windows Installer temp file - a copy of some DLL I think). The relevant line from Process Monitor is: 6:52:14.3726983 PM 112 Explorer.EXE SetDispositionInformationFile C:\Config.Msi\75ce84f.rbf CANNOT DELETE Delete: True Write 1232 Background: I'm using XP SP2. I recently repaired my Adobe Reader installation to make it the default browser plugin again instead of Foxit. (there seems to be no UI to do it otherwise?) So the installer did its thing and then asked to reboot. As is my habit when rebooting is inconvenient I declined the offer and ran pendmoves to find out what files the installer had scheduled to move / delete. It wanted to delete two files with .rbf extension (rollback files) located in C:\Config.msi\. (this applies to both even though I've been speaking about one). So I tried to delete them manually and couldn't. Does anyone have any ideas what could be preventing deletion? (and I don't think it's malware even though I'm not running AV at the moment)

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• Windows Terminal Server: occasional memory violation for applications

  - by syneticon-dj

  On a virtualized (ESXi 4.1) Windows Server 2008 SP2 32-bit machine which is used as a terminal server, I occasionally (approximately 1-3 event log entries a day) see applications fail with an 0xc0000005 error - apparently a memory access violation. The problem seems quite random and only badly reproducable - applications may run for hours, fail with 0xc0000005 and restart quite fine or just throw the access violation at startup and start flawlessly at the second attempt. The names of executables, modules and offset addresses vary, although a single executable tends to fail with same modules and the same memory offset addresses (like "OUTLOOK.EXE" repeatedly failing on module "olmapi32.dll" with the offset "0x00044b7a") - even across multiple user's logons and with several days passing without a single failure inbetween. The offset addresses seem to change across reboots, however. Only selective executables seem affected by the problem, although I may simply not be seeing a sufficient number of application runs from the other ones. I first suspected a possible problem with the physical machine's RAM, but ruled this out as a rather unlikely cause - the memory comes with ECC and I've already moved the virtual machine across several times, without any perceptable change. I've seen that DEP was enabled in "OptOut" mode on this machine: C:\Users\administrator>wmic OS Get DataExecutionPrevention_SupportPolicy DataExecutionPrevention_SupportPolicy 3 and tried changing the policy to OptIn via startup options: bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx OptIn but have yet to see any effect - I also would expect Outlook 12 or Adobe Reader 9 (both affected applications) to play well with DEP. Any other ideas why the apps may be failing?

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• Memory leak in Google Chrome

  - by jasondavis

  As a developer it is very common for me to have 2-3 different IDE's open, 10-15 google chrome windows which can hold up to 200 open tabs (I know I get out of hand some times), Photoshop, couple twitter bots for promo, and a few other programs but my system still runs fast and smooth. I have an i7 processor with 12gb ram. Now with all my usual stuff running my Physical memory is usually running around 50-60% however over the course of the day or much less even, I will gradually grow to 98% The highest Memory usage processes will be from Google Chrome, if I sort in the task manager by highest memory usage and end the 1 highest process which will be a google chrome one, my memory usage will jump back down to about 60%. Also by ending that 1 process, all my Chrome windows will remain open and in use, so it doesn't affect me at all by ending that process. Based on this research I am assuming that that 1 runaway process is likely the Adobe Flash as I also can say that it gets up to the 98% much faster when I am using flash items like video or music player. But even without using any of them it will still climb up to that high number eventually. Has anyone else experienced similar results?

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• Friday Fun: Spell Blazer

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you ready for some fun and adventure after a long week back at work? This week’s game combines jewel-matching style game play with an RPG story for an awesome mix of fun and fiction. Your goal is to help a young wizard reach the magic academy in Raven as the forces of darkness are building. Spell Blazer The object of the game is to help young Kaven reach the Lightcaster Academy in Raven alive, but he will encounter many dangers along the way. Are you ready to begin the quest? As soon as you click Start Game the intro will automatically begin. If this is your first time playing the game the intro provides a nice background story for the game and what is happening in the game environment. Once you are past the intro, you will see a map of the region with your starting point in the Farmlands, various towns and the roads connecting them, along with your final destination of Raven. Notice that some of the roads are different colors…those colors indicate the “danger levels” for each part of your journey (green = good, yellow = some danger, etc.). To begin your journey click on the Town of Goose with your mouse. You will encounter your first monster part of the way towards Goose. This first round takes you through the game play process step-by-step. Once you have clicked Okay you will see the details about the monster you have just encountered. It is very important that you do not click on Fight! or Flee! until viewing and noting the types of spells that the monster is resistant to or has a weakness against. Choose your spells wisely based on the information provided about the monster. Keep in mind that the healing spell can be very useful depending on the monster you meet and your current health status. Note: Spells shown in order here are Healing, Fireball, Icebolt, & Lightning. Ready to fight! The first battle will also explain how to fight…click Okay to get started. Once the main window is in full view there are details that you need to look at. Beneath each of the combatants you will see the three attacks that each brings to the battle and at the bottom you will see their respective health points. We got lucky and had an Icebolt attack that we could utilize on the first play! Note: You can exchange two squares without making a match in order to try and line up an attack. While it happened too quickly to capture in our screenshot, there will be cool lightning bolt effects shoot out from matched up squares to the opposite combatant. You will also see the amount of damage inflicted from a particular attack on top of the avatars. Victory! Once you have won a round of combat a window will appear showing the amount of gold coins left behind by the monster. When you reach a town you will have the opportunity to stop over and rest or directly continue on with your journey. On to Halgard after a good rest! Play Spell Blazer Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video] Convert or View Documents Online Easily with Zoho, No Account Required Build a Floor Scrubbing Robot out of Computer Fans and a Frisbee Serene Blue Windows Wallpaper for Your Desktop 2011 International Space Station Calendar Available for Download (Free) Ultimate Elimination – Lego Black Ops [Video]

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• Tips to Make Your Website Cell Phone Friendly

  - by Aditi

  Working on a new website design? or Redesigning your website? There is a lot more to consider now a days not just user experience, clean code, CSS etc. one of the important attribute one must not miss, which is making them mobile friendly! With the growing use of handhelds & unlimited data plans, people browse on their cellphones! and All come in different sizes! it is tough to make a website that would look great not just on a high resolution widescreen monitor/LCD, but also should look equally impressive on the low resolutions of cellphones. We are today going to discuss about such factors that can help you make a website Cellphone Friendly. Fluid Width Layouts As we start discussing about this, Most people speak of the Fluid Width Layouts as vital step in moving your website to be mobile friendly. Fluid width allows the width of your website stretch or shrink depending on the browser size. However, having a layout which flows with the width of the screen’s resolution is certainly convenient, more often than not the website was originally laid out for a desktop in mind. Compressing a fluid layout to 320 pixels can do some serious damage to layout, Thus some people strongly believe it is far better to have a mobile style sheet and lay out the content specifically for that screen and have more control on the display. The best thing to do is to detect the type of platform that is connected to your website and disabling or changing some tools and effects to make it look better if not perfect. Keep Your Web Pages Short length One must avoid long pages on their website, a lot of scroll makes it very non user friendly for people, especially on mobile devices this is a huge draw back because of the longer load time it takes to download the webpage. Everyone likes crisp & concise content such pages are easier to load & browse. This makes your website accessible across all platforms. Also try to keep shorter urls, if they have to type..save them from that much work especially if someone is using a cellphone with no QWERTY keyboard it can be tough. Usable Navigation & Search Unlike Desktops, your website’s Navigation won’t super work on a cellphone. Keep in mind the user experience for cellphone users as you design your Navigation. Try to keep your content centered as they do have difficulty in reading the webpage. I always look upto Google and their pages as available on mobile as a great example. Keeping a functional & very visible search bar helps mobile users navigate by searching. Understanding Clean Website Code : Evolved for Mobile Clean code is important when you consider the diversity out there for handheld devices. Some cell phones may only understand WAP. More capable phones may understand WAP2, which allows rendering websites with XHTML and CSS. Most mobiles won’t display tables, floats, frames, JavaScript, and dynamic menus. Most cellphone will not support cookies. Devices at the high end of the mobile market such as BlackBerry, Palm, or the upcoming iPhone are highly capable and support nearly as much as a standard computer..but masses still do not have such phones. You can use specific emulators to test your website on mobile devices. Make sure your color combinations provide good contrast between foreground and background colors, particularly for devices with fewer color options.

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• Digital Asset Management, iPhoto / Aperture server... alternative

  - by Sisyphus

  Afternoon, Clients, 10 : All Apples running either Leopard or Snow Leopard Server : Snow Leopard server, (and I have a old Dell Poweredge 650 at home running Gentoo 2.6, if anybody as a Linux solution). The situation: I work in small design company with 8 people, at present we are looking to consolidate all our image files onto one location, at present we each use our preferred single user DAM solution, be it, Adobe Bridge, iPhoto/Aperture (some don't bother at all) The filetypes commonly used are .psd, .pdf, .eps, .tiff, .jpg and RAW image files. Ideally what is needed: Centralised on one server, but allows us to search via spotlight (not essential, but would be nice) Include searchable metadata information such as date, location, title Open-source or as low cost as possibly Allow simultaneous users to import files So far, I have looked at a few open source DAM, systems, such as Razuna, Gallery (not strictly DAM), ResourceSpace, Notre-DAM, while these are brilliant and open-source, they don't integrate as smoothly with the Desktop as iPhoto and aperture. For iPhoto and aperture, I have tried creating a Shared library on the server (a tad laggy), and also using a drive with no permissions, put a library and letting each client read from it, however if they want to put images onto the library only, it's only supports one user at a time writing to the library... Any ideas what could fulfill our needs? Or is it time to bite the bullet for FinalCut Server? Thanks in advance.

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• iOS 6 in-app email does not send from within any app that supports it

  - by Joe Termine

  A strange problem -- Last night I upgraded to the final release of iOS 6 on my iPhone 4S and my iPad 2. When I open an app that allows you to send emails from within the app (e.g. adobe Reader, TurboScan, etc.) -- doesn't matter which one -- I am prompted with the email dialog from within the app, I can compose the message, but when I go to send one of two things will happen: either the email sending sound will "swoosh" and the dialog will close (leading me to think it worked) or some apps with good error handling will say there is an "error sending email." The error logs on my device are not reporting errors. It's just that the email doesn't really send. I have two Exchange mail boxes on these devices. One connects to a corporate network hosting on-premise exchange 2007 and the other connects to Gmail over the exchange interface. Have attempted to delete and re-pair these accounts (one at a time) without any change. I'm wondering if others are experiencing this problem, or whether I should just wipe the devices and chalk it up to (another) failed upgrade. Thoughts much appreciated. Joe

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• Flash Media Server won't run on RHEL 6.2 EC2 instance - _defaultRoot__edge1 experienced 1 failure

  - by edoloughlin

  I've got a fresh Redhat Enterprise 6.2 64-bit instance on EC2. I've turned off the firewall and have installed an FMS 4.5 dev server. The FMS install failed, complaining about a missing libcap.so until I installed the libcap.i686 package. The following libcap packages are now installed: libcap.i686 2.16-5.5.el6 @rhui-us-east-1-rhel-server-releases libcap.x86_64 2.16-5.5.el6 @koji-override-0/$releasever libcap-ng.x86_64 0.6.4-3.el6_0.1 @koji-override-0/$releasever libpcap.x86_64 14:1.0.0-6.20091201git117cb5.el6 In the logs directory I have admin and master logs (only). The admin logs look ok: #Fields: date time x-pid x-status x-ctx x-comment 2012-02-29 09:24:26 1144 (i)2581173 FMS detected IPv6 protocol stack! - 2012-02-29 09:24:26 1144 (i)2581173 FMS config <NetworkingIPv6 enable=false> - 2012-02-29 09:24:26 1144 (i)2581173 FMS running in IPv4 protocol stack mode! - 2012-02-29 09:24:26 1144 (i)2581173 Host: ip-10-204-143-55 IPv4: 10.204.143.55 - 2012-02-29 09:24:26 1144 (i)2571011 Server starting... - 2012-02-29 09:24:26 1144 (i)2631174 Listener started ( FCSAdminIpcProtocol ) : localhost:11110/v4 - 2012-02-29 09:24:27 1144 (i)2631174 Listener started ( FCSAdminAdaptor ) : 1111/v4 - 2012-02-29 09:24:28 1144 (i)2571111 Server started (./conf/Server.xml). - I can't connect an RTMP client to the FMS. The master logs contain these lines, repeating every 5 seconds: 2012-02-29 10:43:17 1076 (i)2581226 Edge (2790) is no longer active. - 2012-02-29 10:43:17 1076 (w)2581255 Edge (2790) _defaultRoot__edge1 experienced 1 failure[s]! - 2012-02-29 10:43:17 1076 (i)2581224 Edge (2793) started, arguments : -edgeports ":1935,80" -coreports "localhost:19350" -conf "/opt/adobe/fms/conf/Server.xml" -adaptor "_defaultRoot_" -name "_defaultRoot__edge1" -edgename "edge1". -

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• Centralized Windows/Mac Patch Management that is easy to use

  - by BiggsTRC

  I'm looking for advice on what patch management solutions you would recommend based upon your experience. I'm also looking for which ones you would not recommend based upon your experience. We have a mixed network of Windows and Mac clients. Our central servers are all Windows servers, although I have considered putting in a Mac server to better handle our Mac clients. The issue we are facing currently is that we need to maintain the patches on all of our third-party applications. Right now we use WSUS, which handles with patching of Windows and some Microsoft products but that is about it. I need something to cover the other applications, specifically things like Adobe products (Reader, Flash, Dreamweaver, etc.) Our network isn't that big (maybe 200 clients) and I don't have a person to dedicate just to patching and maintaining a patch management solution. Thus very large and complicated solutions like System Center are most likely out. I have recently been looking at Dell's Kace K1000 solution (http://www.kace.com/products/systems-management-appliance/). It seems simple and it provides a lot of tools in one package that I would like/need as well. I like the fact that it is self-contained in an appliance and that it is designed for solutions like mine. However, I'm not sure if this is the best solution. I've also looked some at Shavlik's Netchk solution (http://www.shavlik.com/netchk-protect.aspx) but I don't need an anti-virus product. However, it looks like they might have a very good patch database. My question is this: What are your thoughts on these to products? Are there better products out there? Are there issues that I'm not considering? I want something that is very good at patching a broad range of products, that is simple to use, that takes a minimal amount of management (like WSUS), and that (hopefully) works with Mac and Windows.

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• Software for handling camera RAW-files

  - by Eikern

  I use a digital SLR as most other photographers do today and have quickly realised that capturing images using camera-RAW files is the way to go. Personally I use Adobe Lightroom to handle my photo library, but I know there are other software available like Apple Aperture. These applications are quite hard to use for a novice, and are quite expensive too. I've often recommended other photographers to switch to camera-raw, but they won't do it because Windows can't handle it natively. Are there any free or cheaper applications out there that can do simple file handling and adjustments? Preferably so simple that my mom can do it. I know Nikon offers a codec that allows you to view NEF-files natively inside Windows, but still limits the uses of the file and slows the system down if the file is big. Does anybody know of a drag-and-drop application that converts camera-raw to JPG on-the-fly? In case I or someone would need to upload an image to the web or use it inside a word-document. Thanks.

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• Can't find disk usage in one directory

  - by Xster

  Similar questions are asked frequently but no suggested answers solved my issue. I have some disk space usage that I can't find as well. In df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 144183992 136857180 2652 100% / udev 2013316 4 2013312 1% /dev tmpfs 808848 876 807972 1% /run none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock none 2022116 76 2022040 1% /run/shm overflow 1024 0 1024 0% /tmp I checked the inodes, I checked lsof for +L1 or deleted files, I rebooted, I checked for files hidden behind mounts but none of them were the issue. It grows periodically and I'm running out of things to delete to feed the beast. It's all in the home directory of the only user I have. In du in ~ du -h --max-depth=1 192K ./.nv 2.1M ./.gconf 12K ./Pictures 1.6M ./.launchpadlib 12K ./Public 24K ./.TemporaryItems 8.9M ./.cache 12K ./Network Trash Folder 28K ./.vnc 11M ./.AppleDB 48K ./.subversion 1.9G ./.xbmc 8.0K ./.AppleDesktop 12K ./.dbus 81M ./.mozilla 12K ./Music 160K ./.gnome2 44K ./Downloads 692K ./.zsh 236K ./.AppleDouble 64K ./.pulse 4.0K ./.gvfs 1.4M ./.adobe 44K ./.pki 44K ./.compiz-1 168K ./.config 1.4M ./.thumbnails 12K ./Templates 912K ./.gstreamer-0.10 8.0K ./.emacs.d 92K ./Desktop 1.3M ./.local 12K ./Ubuntu One 12K ./Documents 296K ./.fontconfig 12K ./.qt 12K ./.gnome2_private 20K ./.ssh 20K ./.mission-control 12K ./Videos 12K ./Temporary Items 640K ./.macromedia 124G . I can't find a way to figure out how it got to that 124G in that directory. There are no mount points in home.

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• Logitech webcam device only recognised by one software, without drivers

  - by Ben Franchuk

  A couple weeks ago I purchased a Logitech webcam at a garage sale; It did not come with any driver DVDs or anything like that. I plugged it in, turned on my computer, and continued work as usual. I did not at the time (and still have not) gotten any drivers for the device. Recently, though, I started up an audio software named as Cubase, only to find that it was picking up audio reads off of... something. I checked my sound card, and everything else plugged into my computer, but couldn't find where in the world this audio was being picked up from. There were no microphones listed in the device managers, and no "unknown devices" or whatever. Everything seemed as it always was. Running out of ideas, i blew an air-horn directly into the general area of the webcam, located directly in front of me. Sure enough, the audio peaked, indicating that the microphone was definitely in the webcam and that Cubase was somehow picking up this audio, even without drivers. The software lists the device as a "Universal USB Microphone". Adobe Audition, Soundbooth, and other audio applications cannot find the device either. Why is it that this one software (Cubase) can use this device without a driver, while every other piece of software on the computer can't? Not even the operating system can recognize it. Windows 7 Professional x64 bit

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• SQL SERVER – Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance – TechEd 2012 India

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India 2012 is just around the corner and I will be presenting there on two different session. SQL Server Performance Tuning is a very challenging subject that requires expertise in Database Administration and Database Development. I always have enjoyed talking about SQL Server Performance tuning subject. Just like doctors I like to call my every attempt to improve the performance of SQL Server queries and database server as a practice too. I have been working with SQL Server for more than 8 years and I believe that many of the performance tuning concept I have mastered. However, performance tuning is not a simple subject. However there are occasions when I feel stumped, there are occasional when I am not sure what should be the next step. When I face situation where I cannot figure things out easily, it makes me most happy because I clearly see this as a learning opportunity. I have been presenting in TechEd India for last three years. This is my fourth time opportunity to present a technical session on SQL Server. Just like every other year, I decided to present something different, something which I have spend years of learning. This time, I am going to present about parallel processes. It is widely believed that more the CPU will improve performance of the server. It is true in many cases. However, there are cases when limiting the CPU usages have improved overall health of the server. I will be presenting on the subject of Parallel Processes and its effects. I have spent more than a year working on this subject only. After working on various queries on multi-CPU systems I have personally learned few things. In coming TechEd session, I am going to share my experience with parallel processes and performance tuning. Session Details Title: Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance (Add to Calendar) Abstract: “More CPU More Performance” – A  very common understanding is that usage of multiple CPUs can improve the performance of the query. To get maximum performance out of any query – one has to master various aspects of the parallel processes. In this deep dive session, we will explore this complex subject with a very simple interactive demo. An attendee will walk away with proper understanding of CX_PACKET wait types, MAXDOP, parallelism threshold and various other concepts. Date and Time: March 23, 2012, 12:15 to 13:15 Location: Hotel Lalit Ashok - Kumara Krupa High Grounds, Bengaluru – 560001, Karnataka, India. Add to Calendar Please submit your questions in the comments area and I will be for sure discussing them during my session. If I pick your question to discuss during my session, here is your gift I commit right now – SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers Book. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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• Welcome 2011

  - by WeigeltRo

  Things that happened in 2010 MIX10 was absolutely fantastic. Read my report of MIX10 to see why.   The dotnet Cologne 2010, the community conference organized by the .NET user group Köln and my own group Bonn-to-Code.Net became an even bigger success than I dared to dream of.   There was a huge discrepancy between the efforts by Microsoft to support .NET user groups to organize public live streaming events of the PDC keynote (the dotnet Cologne team joined forces with netug  Niederrhein to organize the PDCologne) and the actual content of the keynote. The reaction of the audience at our event was “meh” and even worse I seriously doubt we’ll ever get that number of people to such an event (which on top of that suffered from technical difficulties beyond our control).   What definitely would have deserved the public live streaming event treatment was the Silverlight Firestarter (aka “Silverlight Damage Control”) event. And maybe we would have thought about organizing something if it weren’t for the “burned earth” left by the PDC keynote. Anyway, the stuff shown at the firestarter keynote was the topic of conversations among colleagues days later (“did you see that? oh yeah, that was seriously cool”). Things that I have learned/observed/noticed in 2010 In the long run, there’s a huge difference between “It works pretty well” and “it just works and I never have to think about it”. I had to get rid of my USB graphics adapter powering the third monitor (read about it in this blog post). Various small issues (desktop icons sometimes moving their positions after a reboot for no apparent reasons, at least one game I couldn’t get run at all, all three monitors sometimes simply refusing to wake up after standby) finally made me buy a PCIe 1x graphics adapter. If you’re interested: The combination of a NVIDIA GTX 460 and a GT 220 is running in “don’t make me think” mode for a couple of months now.   PowerPoint 2010 is a seriously cool piece of software. Not only the new hardware-accelerated effects, but also features like built-in background removal and picture processing (which in many cases are simply “good enough” and save a lot of time) or the smart guides.   Outlook 2010 crashes on me a lot. I haven’t been successful in reproducing these crashes, they just happen when every couple of days on different occasions (only thing in common: I clicked something in the main window – yeah, very helpful observation)   Visual Studio 2010 reminds me of Visual Studio 2005 before SP1, which is actually not a good thing to say about a piece of software. I think it’s telling that Microsoft’s message regarding the beta of SP1 has been different from earlier service pack betas (promising an upgrade path for a beta to the RTM sounds to me like “please, please use it NOW!”).   I have a love/hate relationship with ReSharper. I don’t want to develop without it, but at the same time I can’t fail to notice that ReSharper is taking a heavy toll in terms of performance and sometimes stability. Things I’m looking forward to in 2011 Obviously, the dotnet Cologne 2011. We already have been able to score some big name sponsors (Microsoft, Intel), but we’re still looking for more sponsors. And be assured that we’ll make sure that our partners get the most out of their contribution, regardless of how big or small.   MIX11, period.    Silverlight 5 is going to be great. The only thing I’m a bit nervous about is that I still haven’t read anything official on whether C# next version’s async/await will be in it. Leaving that out would be really stupid considering the end-of-2011 release of SL5 (moving the next release way into the future).

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• Speeding up procedural texture generation

  - by FalconNL

  Recently I've begun working on a game that takes place in a procedurally generated solar system. After a bit of a learning curve (having neither worked with Scala, OpenGL 2 ES or Libgdx before), I have a basic tech demo going where you spin around a single procedurally textured planet: The problem I'm running into is the performance of the texture generation. A quick overview of what I'm doing: a planet is a cube that has been deformed to a sphere. To each side, a n x n (e.g. 256 x 256) texture is applied, which are bundled in one 8n x n texture that is sent to the fragment shader. The last two spaces are not used, they're only there to make sure the width is a power of 2. The texture is currently generated on the CPU, using the updated 2012 version of the simplex noise algorithm linked to in the paper 'Simplex noise demystified'. The scene I'm using to test the algorithm contains two spheres: the planet and the background. Both use a greyscale texture consisting of six octaves of 3D simplex noise, so for example if we choose 128x128 as the texture size there are 128 x 128 x 6 x 2 x 6 = about 1.2 million calls to the noise function. The closest you will get to the planet is about what's shown in the screenshot and since the game's target resolution is 1280x720 that means I'd prefer to use 512x512 textures. Combine that with the fact the actual textures will of course be more complicated than basic noise (There will be a day and night texture, blended in the fragment shader based on sunlight, and a specular mask. I need noise for continents, terrain color variation, clouds, city lights, etc.) and we're looking at something like 512 x 512 x 6 x 3 x 15 = 70 million noise calls for the planet alone. In the final game, there will be activities when traveling between planets, so a wait of 5 or 10 seconds, possibly 20, would be acceptable since I can calculate the texture in the background while traveling, though obviously the faster the better. Getting back to our test scene, performance on my PC isn't too terrible, though still too slow considering the final result is going to be about 60 times worse: 128x128 : 0.1s 256x256 : 0.4s 512x512 : 1.7s This is after I moved all performance-critical code to Java, since trying to do so in Scala was a lot worse. Running this on my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S3), however, produces a more problematic result: 128x128 : 2s 256x256 : 7s 512x512 : 29s Already far too long, and that's not even factoring in the fact that it'll be minutes instead of seconds in the final version. Clearly something needs to be done. Personally, I see a few potential avenues, though I'm not particularly keen on any of them yet: Don't precalculate the textures, but let the fragment shader calculate everything. Probably not feasible, because at one point I had the background as a fullscreen quad with a pixel shader and I got about 1 fps on my phone. Use the GPU to render the texture once, store it and use the stored texture from then on. Upside: might be faster than doing it on the CPU since the GPU is supposed to be faster at floating point calculations. Downside: effects that cannot (easily) be expressed as functions of simplex noise (e.g. gas planet vortices, moon craters, etc.) are a lot more difficult to code in GLSL than in Scala/Java. Calculate a large amount of noise textures and ship them with the application. I'd like to avoid this if at all possible. Lower the resolution. Buys me a 4x performance gain, which isn't really enough plus I lose a lot of quality. Find a faster noise algorithm. If anyone has one I'm all ears, but simplex is already supposed to be faster than perlin. Adopt a pixel art style, allowing for lower resolution textures and fewer noise octaves. While I originally envisioned the game in this style, I've come to prefer the realistic approach. I'm doing something wrong and the performance should already be one or two orders of magnitude better. If this is the case, please let me know. If anyone has any suggestions, tips, workarounds, or other comments regarding this problem I'd love to hear them.

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