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My first Windows Phone 7 application is live – from zero to submitted in 5 hours

- by Eric Nelson

Tuesday evening I found myself minus family. I decided to use the time to “have a crack at this Silverlight Phone 7 stuff”. From zero (no experience, no tools installed, no membership on the AppHub) to submitted for approval took me from 8pm to 1am – with the last hour messing around with png files in Paint to complete the submission process! Two days later on Thursday it was approved and is now in the marketplace for you to install - or not :-) The application is very simple but it works and looks “finished” – and importantly I learnt a lot about what is involved and the power of our tooling to make this pretty easy to get going. Go on, give it a go by popping over to the App Hub. You do need to pay $99 to join the App Hub to publish but you can start by downloading the free tools and just work with the included emulator. Related Links https://create.msdn.com/ App Hub http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ff402535.aspx MSDN Documentation for Phone 7 Development

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Forking a GPL dual licensed software with business owned copyrights

- by Eric

After receiving some threats of the copyrights holder of a dual licensed software(GPL2 and commercial) to buy the commercial version for projects in production, I am thinking to make a fork. In a case of GPL2 and commercially dual licensed with business owned copyrights software, is forking the GPL2 version an option? Also, is forking a good way to deal with such cases? Background information The software is a web CMS released under 2 versions a GPL2 free open source edition and a commercial edition including technical support and extra functionality. The problem is that now, basing their argumentation on the "distribution" definition of the GPL2, the company holding the copyrights argue that delivering the software and some extensions to a client is considered as a "distribution". And that such a "distribution" falls under the GPL2 obligation to release the custom made extension code. Custom made extensions are mainly designs, templates and very specific functionality. Basically they give me 3 choices: Buying the commercial licensed edition for projects based on the GPL in production, Deleting all the projects in production based on GPL2 version, Releasing all the extensions as GPL2 code. The first 2 options are nothing realistic for finished projects. The third option could be fine, but as most of the extensions are very specific, cleaning the code to make it usable by other users means lot of works and also I am not sure the clients will appreciate to have their website designs and specific functionality released publicly. The copyrights holding company even contacted some clients directly, giving them the "choice". I know that this is a very corporate interpretation of GPL2, and a such action is nothing close to legal, but as an independent developer, I don't want to take the risk to get involved in some long and tiring legal procedures. PS. This question was first asked on Stack Overflow where it felt out of the scope and closed, after reading the present site FAQ, discussing about software licensing seems fine.

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Design Pattern for Skipping Steps in a Wizard

- by Eric J.

I'm designing a flexible Wizard system that presents a number of screens to complete a task. Some screens may need to be skipped based on answers to prompts on one or more previous screens. The conditions to skip a given screen need to be editable by a non-technical user via a UI. Multiple conditions need only be combined with and. I have an initial design in mind, but it feels inelegant. I wonder if there's a better way to approach this class of problem. Initial Design UI where The first column allows the user to select a question from a previous screen. The second column allows the user to select an operator applicable to the type of question asked. The third column allows the user to enter one or more values depending on the selected operator. Object Model public enum Operations { ... } public class Condition { int QuestionId { get; set; } Operations Operation { get; set; } List<object> Parameters { get; private set; } } List<Condition> pageSkipConditions; Controller Logic bool allConditionsTrue = pageSkipConditions.Count > 0; foreach (Condition c in pageSkipConditions) { allConditionsTrue &= Evaluate(previousAnswers, c); } // ... private bool Evaluate(List<Answers> previousAnswers, Condition c) { switch (c.Operation) { case Operations.StartsWith: // logic for this operation // etc. } }

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Q&A: Where does high performance computing fit with Windows Azure?

- by Eric Nelson

Answer I have been asked a couple of times this year about taking compute intensive operations to Windows Azure and/or High Performance Computing on Windows Azure. It is an interesting (if slightly niche) area. The good news is we have a great paper from David Chappell on HPC Server and Windows Azure integration. As a taster: A SOA application running entirely on Windows Azure runs its WCF services in Azure Worker nodes. Download now Related Links: Other Q&A posts on my team blog Don’t forget to connect with the UK team if you stumbled across this post by accident/bing/google

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Broke my sudoers password, how do I reset it without using sudo?

- by Eric Dand

I thought it would be a good idea to finally take the password off my little netbook since it has never actually been of any use, and has mostly just slowed down . But when I went to change my password, there wasn't even an option to make it blank, and any attempt to make it a few easy characters was met with "Password too weak". So I did what any good geek would do and popped open the terminal, read the manual entry for passwd and quickly used the -d option to remove the password from my account. It all went well for a couple days (I even managed to also make my keychain password blank) until I tried to update the thing. My sudoers password is not blank, and it's not my old password. I have no idea what it is. How do I reset it (or even better, make it blank) without the use of the sudo command?

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Single quotes vs double quotes

- by Eric Hydrick

I just started a job where I'm writing Python after coming from a Java background, and I'm noticing that other developers tend to quote strings using single quotes ('') instead of double quotes (""). For example: line1 = 'This is how strings typically look.' line2 = "Not like this." Is there a particular reason for this other than personal preference? Is this the proper way to be quoting strings?

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How To Be Your Own Personal Clone Army (With a Little Photoshop)

- by Eric Z Goodnight

Maybe you’ve always wanted more of yourself. Or maybe you’ve always thought you could be your own best friend! Regardless of your reasons, here’s how to duplicate yourself with some clever photograph tricks and either Photoshop or GIMP. How To Be Your Own Personal Clone Army (With a Little Photoshop) How To Properly Scan a Photograph (And Get An Even Better Image) The HTG Guide to Hiding Your Data in a TrueCrypt Hidden Volume

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What is a good solution for UA testing multiple projects simultaneously?

- by Eric Belair

My client often has several projects/tasks going at once that sometimes need to be tested simultaneously on one website. They are often separate applications on the website, but sometimes share UDFs, etc. We currently have 3 public-facing environment websites - i.e. dev.website.com, test.website.com, and www.website.com. As the programmer, I'm trying to find a good solution to allow for UA testing of multiple projects/tasks at once. Currently, I'm finding myself switching between code branches (using SubVersion). What some of my options?

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Where should instantiated classes be stored?

- by Eric C.

I'm having a bit of a design dilemma here. I'm writing a library that consists of a bunch of template classes that are designed to be used as a base for creating content. For example: public class Template { public string Name {get; set;} public string Description {get; set;} public string Attribute1 {get; set;} public string Attribute2 {get; set;} public Template() { //constructor } public void DoSomething() { //does something } ... } The problem is, not only is the library providing the templates, it will also supply quite a few predefined templates which are instances of these template classes. The question is, where do I put these instances of the templates? The three solutions I've come up with so far are: 1) Provide serialized instances of the templates as files. On the one hand, this solution would keep the instances separated from the library itself, which is nice, but it would also potentially add complexity for the user. Even if we provided methods for loading/deserializing the files, they'd still have to deal with a bunch of files, and some kind of config file so the app knows where to look for those files. Plus, creating the template files would probably require a separate app, so if the user wanted to stick with the files method of storing templates, we'd have to provide some kind of app for creating the template files. Also, this requires external dependencies for testing the templates in the user's code. 2) Add readonly instances to the template class Example: public class Template { public string Name {get; set;} public string Description {get; set;} public string Attribute1 {get; set;} public string Attribute2 {get; set;} public Template PredefinedTemplate { get { Template templateInstance = new Template(); templateInstance.Name = "Some Name"; templateInstance.Description = "A description"; ... return templateInstance; } } public Template() { //constructor } public void DoSomething() { //does something } ... } This method would be convenient for users, as they would be able to access the predefined templates in code directly, and would be able to unit test code that used them. The drawback here is that the predefined templates pollute the Template type namespace with a bunch of extra stuff. I suppose I could put the predefined templates in a different namespace to get around this drawback. The only other problem with this approach is that I'd have to basically duplicate all the namespaces in the library in the predefined namespace (e.g. Templates.SubTemplates and Predefined.Templates.SubTemplates) which would be a pain, and would also make refactoring more difficult. 3) Make the templates abstract classes and make the predefined templates inherit from those classes. For example: public abstract class Template { public string Name {get; set;} public string Description {get; set;} public string Attribute1 {get; set;} public string Attribute2 {get; set;} public Template() { //constructor } public void DoSomething() { //does something } ... } and public class PredefinedTemplate : Template { public PredefinedTemplate() { this.Name = "Some Name"; this.Description = "A description"; this.Attribute1 = "Some Value"; ... } } This solution is pretty similar to #2, but it ends up creating a lot of classes that don't really do anything (none of our predefined templates are currently overriding behavior), and don't have any methods, so I'm not sure how good a practice this is. Has anyone else had any experience with something like this? Is there a best practice of some kind, or a different/better approach that I haven't thought of? I'm kind of banging my head against a wall trying to figure out the best way to go. Thanks!

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My coworker created a 96 columns SQL table

- by Eric

Here we are in 2010, software engineers with 4 or 5 years or experience, still designing tables with 96 fracking columns. I told him it's gonna be a nightmare. I showed him that we have to use ordinals to interface MySQL with C#. I explained that tables with more columns than rows are a huge smell. Still, I get the "It's going to be simpler this way". What should I do? EDIT * This table contains data from sensors. We have sensor 1 with Dynamic_D1X Dynamic_D1Y [...] Dynamic_D6X Dynamic_D6Y [...]

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How do I simplify a 2D game grid for level management while keeping its by-pixel features?

- by Eric Thoma

(I cross-posted this from StackOverflow as this seems to be a more appropriate forum. I've looked around a little here and I did not find an answer, so I hope this is not a recurring question.) This is a question dealing with 2D world design. I am playing around by creating a 2D bird's eye view shooter game, and I am looking to make the game sleek and advanced. I hope to be able to write physics so projectiles have momentum and knock-down properties. I am immediately running into the problem of world design. I need a way to have level files that store everything there is about a game. This is easiest by just having a grid of objects. But there are thin-walls and other objects that don't seem to fit into a traditional cell of a grid. I want to be able to fit all these together so I can streamline level design; so I don't have to put in the exact pixel-specific start and end of a wall. There doesn't seem to be an obvious translation from level file to game without forcing myself into a pacman-life scenario, meaning a scenario where the game feels boxy and discrete. There is a contrast between the smoothly (relatively) moving characters and finite jumps in a grid. I would appreciate an answer that would describe implementation options or point me to resources that do. I would also appreciate references to sites that teach game design. The language I am using is Java (although I would love to use C or C++, but I can never find convenient resources in those languages). Thank you for any answers. Please leave any questions in the space below; I will be able to answer them later tonight (28th Nov).

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Oracle Open World 2012

- by Eric S

I'll be at Oracle Open World 2012 next week in San Francisco. I'm presenting in a session entitled "What’s New with Oracle VM Server for x86 and SPARC Architectures: A Technical Deep Dive", along with Adam Hawley. We'll be talking about Oracle's overall virtualization strategy, what's new with Oracle server virtualization on both x86 and SPARC, as well as an update on Oracle's virtualization management capabilities. The session runs from 11:45am to 12:45pm on Wednesday 10/3, in Moscone South - room 252. You can also find me at the Oracle VM Server for SPARC booth on Monday morning and Tuesday afternoon to showcase some pretty cool upcoming features for SPARC virtualization. And if you're there early, you might catch me at the Software Deployment with Oracle VM Templates booth on Sunday afternoon. It promises to be jam-packed and informative week!

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MIX11 Registration is open – the place to hear the latest on Silverlight, HTML5, IE and more

- by Eric Nelson

Every year a few lucky colleagues get to attend MIX – and they come back with nothing but praise for the event, the speakers, the content – and the buzz! If you build “web application” and want the latest from the experts then you should consider attending. You will get to see the latest tools and technologies and draw inspiration from a professional community of your peers and experts. Technologies covered include Silverlight, Internet Explorer, Windows Phone, ASP.NET, HTML5 and CSS3. It takes place April 12th to 14th in Las Vegas Early birds save big! Register by February 11 and save $500 on your conference pass and get one free hotel night. Register Now.

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Is it possible to outsource design properly?

- by Eric

I work in a company going through a downsizing process. It is assumed that a lot of "let go" developers jobs will eventually be outsourced. Some of those programmers had some design to do. Is it possible to outsource both design and creation/coding properly? I feel that by outsourcing design, we lose any in-house capability of really "owning" the code. It will be very difficult to maintain. Also we'll have a hard time ensuring a proper development. How can I address those issues?

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Analytics - how to tell where converted traffic came from?

- by Eric

I must be missing something obvious. I have Analytics set up with conversion tracking (goals), and I had 4 customers complete the goals yesterday. I'm trying to find out where those 4 customers came from (organic search? if organic, what keywords? etc) but I can't figure out how to do that in Adwords. When I click into the goal tracking overview, I see my 4 customers and it breaks it down so I see that 3 of them came from adwords (cpc) and 1 of them came from organic. I'd like to know exactly what ads brought the traffic and what keywords on the organic search led them to me. How can I do this? It seems like a simple request... but I can't figure it out... thanks for your help!

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How do I start implementing version control on legacy websites?

- by Eric

Assuming no experience with version control systems, just local to live web development. I've been dropped in on a few legacy website projects, and want an easier and more robust way to be able to quickly push and revert changes en masse. I'm currently the only developer on these projects, but more may be added in the future and I think it would be beneficial to set up a system that others can use.

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Playing a sound on collision?

- by Eric McLoughlin

I'm making a pool game. I've separated the gameplay logic and the physics into two systems, entities and physics. Each entity holds a reference to a body which the physics system uses. The body itself holds a reference back to it's owner. When an entity collides with another entity, the Collided(Entity other) method is called on both. What I'm trying to do now is to play a sound when both entities colliding are of a certain subclass. I'm not sure how to do that. I could do it in the Collided method, but then the sound would be played two times at the same time, since the method was called on both entities. How do you suggest I do this?

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45 Different Services, Sites, and Apps to Help You Read Your Favorite Sites (Like How-To Geek)

- by Eric Z Goodnight

Ever wonder how geeks stay connected with their favorite blogs and writers? Read on to learn about RSS feeds and how easy they are to use with these 45 apps, services, and websites that can help you stay current. Note: of course, our more geeky readers are going to understand a lot of this already, which is why we included 45 great services that you might not have heard about before. Keep reading for more, or give you advice to the newbies in the comments Latest Features How-To Geek ETC HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 Lord of the Rings Movie Parody Double Feature [Video] Turn a Webpage into an Asteroids-Styled Shooting Game in Opera Dolphin Browser Mini Leaves Beta; Sports New GUI, Easy Bookmarking, and More Updated Google Goggles Scans Faster; Solves Sudoku Puzzles Snowy Castle Retreat in the Mountains Wallpaper Fix TV Show Sorting Issues on iOS Devices

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USB internet not accessible

- by Eric

I'm brand new to ubuntu and linux. We access internet from a usb stick issued by a local telephone company. When I plug the stick into the computer, I see the device listed under internet connections as a mobile broadband device but it is grayed out and inaccessible. I tried to create a new mobile broadband connection but my country (Gabon) is not listed and we have no payment plans per se (we pay from a pre-paid card system).. Any clues as to how I can get the system to recognize the internet connection? Thanks for any help...

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Upgraded from 11.4 to 11.10, There was an error, now the system won't initiialize

- by Eric

This morning the system gave me a message that my Version (11.4) was no longer supported, and I took the 'upgrade' option (- 11.10). While installing the various components I encountered a message to the effect that the there was an error and the system may have become unusable. Among the messges: E:Sup-process /usr/bin/dpkg received a segmentation fault...returned an error code (1). I was given an option to do several things, one of which seemed to mean that it would attempt to roll back to the previous version (the default), which I took. After the process ran it said the upgrade process had finished, but there were errors. I attempted to initialize a console so I could enter ubuntu-bug update-manager /var/log/dist-upgrade, per the instructions I received when I received the error message, but the console failed during initialization. I restarted the machine, and the screen has stopped with the following contents: * Starting bluetooth * Stopping save kernel messages * Starting CUPS printing spooler/server * PulseAudio configured per-user sessions saned disabled: edit /etc/default/saned $starting up Cisco VPN daemon *Starting anac(h)ronistic cron *Stopping anac(h)ronistic cron Each of these steps followed by [ OK ] What are my options? Any help appreciated!

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Poll on Entity Framework 4 – one year on

- by Eric Nelson

12 months back (today is March 15th 2010) on the 16th of March 2009 I created a poll on Entity Framework v1 – the marmite of ORMs? A quick poll…. Entity Framework v1 was getting a mixed reception at the time – I met developers who genuinely hated it and I met developers who were loving the productivity improvements they were seeing. There were definitely issues with v1, too many IMHO. Which is why the product team placed a huge effort on listening to the community to drive the feature set for v2 (which ultimately was named Entity Framework 4 as it ships with .NET 4). I think overall the team have done a great job. It isn’t perfect in .NET 4 (which is why the team are busy on post .NET 4 improvements) but I would happily use it and recommend it for a wide variety of projects – much wider than I would have with v1. I am speaking on EF 4 at www.devweek.com this Wednesday and I thought it would be fun to put a new version of the poll out and see how v4 is being received. Obviously the big difference is we have not yet shipped EF4 vs when I did the original poll on EF1. March 2010 poll – please vote Summary of March 2009 poll – it was a tie between positive and negative Total votes 150 Positive about EF v1 42 (15 + 19 + 8) Negative about EF v1 43 (34 + 9)

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What is the best objective way to measure language popularity trends? (What's better than TIOBE?)

- by Eric Wilson

The best way to get data on computer language popularity that I know is the TIOBE index. But everyone knows that TIOBE is hopelessly flawed. (If someone provides a link to support this, I'll add it here.) So is there any data on programming language popularity that is generally considered meaningful? The only other option I know is to look at the trends at indeed.com, which is inherently flawed, being based on job postings. It isn't like I would make a future language decision solely based on an index, but it might provide a useful balance to the skewed perspective one obtains by talking to ones friends and colleagues. To illustrate that bias, I'll point out that based on the experience of those I personally know, the only languages used professionally today (in order of popularity) are Java, C#, Groovy, JavaScript, Ruby, Objective C, and Perl. (Though it is evident that C, C++ and PHP were used in the past.) So my question is, everyone bashes TIOBE, but is there anything else? If so, can anyone explain how we know the alternative has better methodology? Thanks.

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Advice on how to build html5 basic tile game (multi player, cross device)

- by Eric

I just read http://buildnewgames.com/real-time-multiplayer/ which explains the fundamentals and bets practices to build a massive real time multiplayer html5 game. My question is however given the “simplicity” of the game I need to build (simple kind of scratch game where you find or not something behind a tile), do I really need complex tools (canvas or node.js for example) ? The game The gamestakes place with a picture of our office as a background (tilemap). For HR purpose, we wish to create the following game fore employees: each day they can come to the website and click on a certain number of tiles (3 max per day) and find behind it motivation advice and interesting facts about the company. The constraints and rules the screen is divided into isometric 2D square tiles. There are basically an image (photograph of our office) number of tiles on the screen game: about 10,000 to much more (with scroll , see below) the players can scroll in 4 directions there are only 2 types of tiles: already open and closed player can open tiles that have not been yet open by other players there is no path for players : any player can click on any tile on the screen at any moment (if it’s not already done by another player) 2 players can’t be on the same tile at the same moment (or if they can, I’ll have to manage to see which one clicked on it first) only one type of player (all with similar roles), no weapon, no internal score… very simple game. no complex physics (collision only occurs if 2 players are on the same tile) The target I need to achieve: cross device, cross browsers high performance reaction (subsecond reactions) average nb of players per hour: up to 10K players per hour (quite high indeed but it’s because we aim at proving our case for the game to our business unit) So what I would like to know: 2D Tiled map: Do I need tiledmapeditor or can I enable me split the screen like here ? should I use canvas or plain html/css could be sufficient for my need? do I need a game engine/framework such as melon.js or crafty./js ? (even if the game play is extremely basic, I do need mouse and touché device support, mouse emulations on touch devices…) or ca I easily/quickly do it without? for my constraints and targets, should I use CPU acceleration ? for my constraints and targets, should I use web workers ? for the database, for a massively real time game should I avoid to put the current locations of player in MySQL as i feel it might slow me down. What kind of DB should I implement ? Thanks for your help !

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Why can't I mount the Ubuntu 12.04 installer ISOs in Mac OS X?

- by eric

Over the past few days, I have downloaded both the 32 and 64 bit version of server and desktop to install on an Intel based PC. It is normal from within OS X to double click on an ISO and it will mount the ISO in the finder as well as within disk utility. When I attempt to mount any of the Ubuntu ISOs I downloaded, OS X returns the error message The following disk images couldn't be opened. The reason given for the error is no mountable filesystem. However, I am still able to open the ISO directly from disk utility and burn it to a DVD/CD. What has changed in this release to cause this? Is there something wrong with the current ISOs? The OS X machine I am using is only two weeks old and is having no issues with any other ISO.

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How should I implement the repository pattern for complex object models?

- by Eric Falsken

Our data model has almost 200 classes that can be separated out into about a dozen functional areas. It would have been nice to use domains, but the separation isn't that clean and we can't change it. We're redesigning our DAL to use Entity Framework and most of the recommendations that I've seen suggest using a Repository pattern. However, none of the samples really deal with complex object models. Some implementations that I've found suggest the use of a repository-per-entity. This seems ridiculous and un-maintainable for large, complex models. Is it really necessary to create a UnitOfWork for each operation, and a Repository for each entity? I could end up with thousands of classes. I know this is unreasonable, but I've found very little guidance implementing Repository, Unit Of Work, and Entity Framework over complex models and realistic business applications.

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