Search Results

Search found 5136 results on 206 pages for 'hit'.

Page 194/206 | < Previous Page | 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201  | Next Page >

• Massive Silverlight Giveaway! DevExpress , Syncfusion, Crypto Obfuscator and SL Spy!

  - by mbcrump

  Oh my, have we grown! Maybe I should change the name to Multiple Silverlight Giveaways. So far, my Silverlight giveaways have been such a success that I’m going to be able to give away more than one Silverlight product every month. Last month, we gave away 3 great products. 1) ComponentOne Silverlight Controls 2)  ComponentOne XAP Optimizer (with obfuscation) and 3) Silverlight Spy. This month, we will give away 4 great Silverlight products and have 4 different winners. This way the Silverlight community can grow with more than just one person winning all the prizes. This month we will be giving away: DevExpress Silverlight Controls – Over 50+ Silverlight Controls Syncfusion User Interface Edition - Create stunning line of business silverlight applications with a wide range of components including a high performance grid, docking manager, chart, gauge, scheduler and much more. Crypto Obfuscator – Works for all .NET including Silverlight/Windows Phone 7. Silverlight Spy – provides a license EVERY month for this giveaway. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of one of the products listed above! 4 winners will be announced on April 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. – Use Google Reader, email or whatever is best for you.  Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) Retweet the following : I just entered to win free #Silverlight controls from @mbcrump . Register here: http://mcrump.me/fTSmB8 ! Don’t change the URL because this will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit each of the vendors sites because they made this possible. MichaelCrump.Net provides Silverlight Giveaways every month. You can also see the latest giveaway by bookmarking http://giveaways.michaelcrump.net . ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DevExpress Silverlight Controls Let’s take a quick look at some of the software that is provided in this giveaway. Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark for the DevExpress Silverlight Controls: The Live Demos of the Silverlight Controls is located here. Great Video Tutorials of the Silverlight Controls are here. One thing that I liked about the DevExpress is how easy it was to find demos of each control. After you install the controls the following Program Group appears complete with “demos” that include full-source.   So, the first question that you may ask is, “What is included?” Here is the official list below. I wanted to show several of the controls that I think developers will use the most. The Book – Very rich animation between switching pages. Very easy to add your own images and custom text. The Menu – This is another control that just looked great. You can easily add images to the menu items with a few lines of XAML. The Window / Dialog Box – You can use this control to make a very beautiful “Wizard” to help your users navigate between pages. This is useful in setup or installation. Calculator – This would be useful for any type of Banking app. Also a first that I’ve seen from a 3rd party Control company. DatePicker – This controls feels a lot smoother than the one provided by Microsoft. It also provides the ability to “Clear” the selection. Overall the DevExpress Silverlight Controls feature a lot of quality controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. If you win the contest you can simply enter your registration key and continue using the product without reinstalling. Syncfusion User Interface Edition Before we get started with the Syncfusion User Interface Edition, here is a couple of links to bookmark. The Live Demos can be found here. You can download a demo of it now at http://www.syncfusion.com/downloads/evalstart. After you install the Syncfusion, you can view the dashboard to run locally installed samples. You may also download the documentation to your local machine if needed. Since the name of the package is “User Interface Edition”, I decided to share several samples that struck me as “awesome”. Dashboard Gauges – I was very impressed with the various gauges they have included. The digital clock also looks very impressive. Diagram – The diagrams are also very easy to build. In the sample project below you can drag/drop the shapes onto the content pane. More complex lines like the Bezier lines are also easy to create using Syncfusion. Scheduling – Another strong component was the Scheduling with built-in support for Themes. Tools – If all of that wasn’t enough, it also comes with a nice pack of essential tools. Syncfusion has a nice variety of Silverlight Controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. Crypto Obfuscator The following feature set is what is important to me in an Obfuscator since I am a Silverlight/WP7 Developer: And thankfully this is what you get in Crypto Obfuscator. You can download a trial version right now if you want to go ahead and play with it. Let’s spend a few moments taking a look at the application. After you have installed Crypto Obfuscator you will see the following screen: After you click on Assemblies you have the option to add your .XAP file in: I went ahead and loaded my .xap file from a Silverlight Application. At this point, you can simply save your project and hit “Obfuscate” and your done. You don’t have to mess with any of the other settings if you don’t want too. Of course, you can change the settings and add obfuscation rules, watermarks and signing if you wish.  After Obfuscation, it looks like this in .NET Reflector: I was trying to browse through methods and it actually crashed Reflector. This confirms the level of protection the obfuscator is providing. If this were a commercial application that my team built, I would have a huge smile on my face right now. Crypto Obfuscator is a great product and I hope you will spend the time learning more about it. Silverlight Spy Silverlight Spy is a runtime inspector tool that will tell you pretty much everything that is going on with the application. Basically, you give it a URL that contains a Silverlight application and you can explore the element tree, events, xaml and so much more. This has already been reviewed on MichaelCrump.net. _________________________________________________________________________________________ Thanks for reading and don’t forget to leave a comment below in order to win one of the four prizes available! Subscribe to my feed

  Read the article

• Collide with rotation of the object

  - by Lahiru

  I'm developing a mirror for lazer beam(Ball sprite). There I'm trying to redirect the laze beam according to the ration degree of the mirror(Rectangle). How can I collide the ball to the correct angle if the colliding object is with some angle(45 deg) rather than colliding back. here is an screen shot of my work here is my code using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamerServices; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media; namespace collision { /// <summary> /// This is the main type for your game /// </summary> public class Game1 : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game { GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; SpriteBatch spriteBatch; Texture2D ballTexture; Rectangle ballBounds; Vector2 ballPosition; Vector2 ballVelocity; float ballSpeed = 30f; Texture2D blockTexture; Rectangle blockBounds; Vector2 blockPosition; private Vector2 origin; KeyboardState keyboardState; //Font SpriteFont Font1; Vector2 FontPos; private String displayText; public Game1() { graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to perform any initialization it needs to before starting to run. /// This is where it can query for any required services and load any non-graphic /// related content. Calling base.Initialize will enumerate through any components /// and initialize them as well. /// </summary> protected override void Initialize() { // TODO: Add your initialization logic here ballPosition = new Vector2(this.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width / 2, this.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height * 0.25f); blockPosition = new Vector2(this.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width / 2, this.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height /2); ballVelocity = new Vector2(0, 1); base.Initialize(); } /// <summary> /// LoadContent will be called once per game and is the place to load /// all of your content. /// </summary> protected override void LoadContent() { // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures. spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); ballTexture = Content.Load<Texture2D>("ball"); blockTexture = Content.Load<Texture2D>("mirror"); //create rectangles based off the size of the textures ballBounds = new Rectangle((int)(ballPosition.X - ballTexture.Width / 2), (int)(ballPosition.Y - ballTexture.Height / 2), ballTexture.Width, ballTexture.Height); blockBounds = new Rectangle((int)(blockPosition.X - blockTexture.Width / 2), (int)(blockPosition.Y - blockTexture.Height / 2), blockTexture.Width, blockTexture.Height); origin.X = blockTexture.Width / 2; origin.Y = blockTexture.Height / 2; // TODO: use this.Content to load your game content here Font1 = Content.Load<SpriteFont>("SpriteFont1"); FontPos = new Vector2(graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width - 100, 20); } /// <summary> /// UnloadContent will be called once per game and is the place to unload /// all content. /// </summary> protected override void UnloadContent() { // TODO: Unload any non ContentManager content here } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to run logic such as updating the world, /// checking for collisions, gathering input, and playing audio. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> /// private float RotationAngle; float circle = MathHelper.Pi * 2; float angle; protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { // Allows the game to exit if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed) this.Exit(); // TODO: Add your update logic here //check for collision between the ball and the block, or if the ball is outside the bounds of the screen if (ballBounds.Intersects(blockBounds) || !GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Bounds.Contains(ballBounds)) { //we have a simple collision! //if it has hit, swap the direction of the ball, and update it's position ballVelocity = -ballVelocity; ballPosition += ballVelocity * ballSpeed; } else { //move the ball a bit ballPosition += ballVelocity * ballSpeed; } //update bounding boxes ballBounds.X = (int)ballPosition.X; ballBounds.Y = (int)ballPosition.Y; blockBounds.X = (int)blockPosition.X; blockBounds.Y = (int)blockPosition.Y; keyboardState = Keyboard.GetState(); float val = 1.568017f/90; if (keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Space)) RotationAngle = RotationAngle + (float)Math.PI; if (keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Left)) RotationAngle = RotationAngle - val; angle = (float)Math.PI / 4.0f; // 90 degrees RotationAngle = angle; // RotationAngle = RotationAngle % circle; displayText = RotationAngle.ToString(); base.Update(gameTime); } /// <summary> /// This is called when the game should draw itself. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); // TODO: Add your drawing code here spriteBatch.Begin(); // Find the center of the string Vector2 FontOrigin = Font1.MeasureString(displayText) / 2; spriteBatch.DrawString(Font1, displayText, FontPos, Color.White, 0, FontOrigin, 1.0f, SpriteEffects.None, 0.5f); spriteBatch.Draw(ballTexture, ballPosition, Color.White); spriteBatch.Draw(blockTexture, blockPosition,null, Color.White, RotationAngle,origin, 1.0f, SpriteEffects.None, 0f); spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); } } }

  Read the article

• Dell Studio 1737 Overheating

  - by Sean

  I am using a Dell Studio 1737 laptop. I have been running Linux and have ran Windows recently for a very long time. I upgraded to the 10.10 distribution and since that distro, it seems that for some reason all Linuxes want to push my laptop to extremes. I have recently upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 since I heart that it contains kernel fixes for overheating issues. 12.04 will actually eventually cool the system, but that is after the fans run to the point it sounds like a jet aircraft taking off and the laptop makes my hands sweat. In trying to combat the heat problems I have done the following: I installed the propriatery driver for my ATI Mobility HD 3600. I have tried both the one in the Additional Drivers and also tried ATI's latest greatest version. If I don't install this my laptop will overheat and shut off in minutes. Both seem to perform similarly, but the heat problem remains. I have tried limiting the CPU by installing the CPUFreq Indicator. This does help keep the machine from shutting off, but the heat is still uncomfortable to be around the machine. I usually run in power saver mode or run the cpu at 1.6 GHZ just to error on safety. I ran sensors-detect and here are the results: sean@sean-Studio-1737:~$ sudo sensors-detect # sensors-detect revision 5984 (2011-07-10 21:22:53 +0200) # System: Dell Inc. Studio 1737 (laptop) # Board: Dell Inc. 0F237N This program will help you determine which kernel modules you need to load to use lm_sensors most effectively. It is generally safe and recommended to accept the default answers to all questions, unless you know what you're doing. Some south bridges, CPUs or memory controllers contain embedded sensors. Do you want to scan for them? This is totally safe. (YES/no): y Module cpuid loaded successfully. Silicon Integrated Systems SIS5595... No VIA VT82C686 Integrated Sensors... No VIA VT8231 Integrated Sensors... No AMD K8 thermal sensors... No AMD Family 10h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 11h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 12h and 14h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 15h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 15h power sensors... No Intel digital thermal sensor... Success! (driver `coretemp') Intel AMB FB-DIMM thermal sensor... No VIA C7 thermal sensor... No VIA Nano thermal sensor... No Some Super I/O chips contain embedded sensors. We have to write to standard I/O ports to probe them. This is usually safe. Do you want to scan for Super I/O sensors? (YES/no): y Probing for Super-I/O at 0x2e/0x2f Trying family `National Semiconductor/ITE'... No Trying family `SMSC'... No Trying family `VIA/Winbond/Nuvoton/Fintek'... No Trying family `ITE'... No Probing for Super-I/O at 0x4e/0x4f Trying family `National Semiconductor/ITE'... Yes Found `ITE IT8512E/F/G Super IO' (but not activated) Some hardware monitoring chips are accessible through the ISA I/O ports. We have to write to arbitrary I/O ports to probe them. This is usually safe though. Yes, you do have ISA I/O ports even if you do not have any ISA slots! Do you want to scan the ISA I/O ports? (YES/no): y Probing for `National Semiconductor LM78' at 0x290... No Probing for `National Semiconductor LM79' at 0x290... No Probing for `Winbond W83781D' at 0x290... No Probing for `Winbond W83782D' at 0x290... No Lastly, we can probe the I2C/SMBus adapters for connected hardware monitoring devices. This is the most risky part, and while it works reasonably well on most systems, it has been reported to cause trouble on some systems. Do you want to probe the I2C/SMBus adapters now? (YES/no): y Using driver `i2c-i801' for device 0000:00:1f.3: Intel ICH9 Module i2c-i801 loaded successfully. Module i2c-dev loaded successfully. Now follows a summary of the probes I have just done. Just press ENTER to continue: Driver `coretemp': * Chip `Intel digital thermal sensor' (confidence: 9) To load everything that is needed, add this to /etc/modules: #----cut here---- # Chip drivers coretemp #----cut here---- If you have some drivers built into your kernel, the list above will contain too many modules. Skip the appropriate ones! Do you want to add these lines automatically to /etc/modules? (yes/NO)y Successful! Monitoring programs won't work until the needed modules are loaded. You may want to run 'service module-init-tools start' to load them. Unloading i2c-dev... OK Unloading i2c-i801... OK Unloading cpuid... OK sean@sean-Studio-1737:~$ sudo service module-init-tools start module-init-tools stop/waiting I also tried installing i8k but that didn't work since it didn't seem to be able to communicate with the hardware (probably for different kind of device). Also I ran acpi -V and here are the results: Battery 0: Full, 100% Battery 0: design capacity 613 mAh, last full capacity 260 mAh = 42% Adapter 0: on-line Thermal 0: ok, 49.0 degrees C Thermal 0: trip point 0 switches to mode critical at temperature 100.0 degrees C Thermal 1: ok, 48.0 degrees C Thermal 1: trip point 0 switches to mode critical at temperature 100.0 degrees C Thermal 2: ok, 51.0 degrees C Thermal 2: trip point 0 switches to mode critical at temperature 100.0 degrees C Cooling 0: LCD 0 of 15 Cooling 1: Processor 0 of 10 Cooling 2: Processor 0 of 10 I have hit a wall and don't know what to do now. Any advice is appreciated.

  Read the article

• Java collision detection and player movement: tips

  - by Loris

  I have read a short guide for game develompent (java, without external libraries). I'm facing with collision detection and player (and bullets) movements. Now i put the code. Most of it is taken from the guide (should i link this guide?). I'm just trying to expand and complete it. This is the class that take care of updates movements and firing mechanism (and collision detection): public class ArenaController { private Arena arena; /** selected cell for movement */ private float targetX, targetY; /** true if droid is moving */ private boolean moving = false; /** true if droid is shooting to enemy */ private boolean shooting = false; private DroidController droidController; public ArenaController(Arena arena) { this.arena = arena; this.droidController = new DroidController(arena); } public void update(float delta) { Droid droid = arena.getDroid(); //droid movements if (moving) { droidController.moveDroid(delta, targetX, targetY); //check if arrived if (droid.getX() == targetX && droid.getY() == targetY) moving = false; } //firing mechanism if(shooting) { //stop shot if there aren't bullets if(arena.getBullets().isEmpty()) { shooting = false; } for(int i = 0; i < arena.getBullets().size(); i++) { //current bullet Bullet bullet = arena.getBullets().get(i); System.out.println(bullet.getBounds()); //angle calculation double angle = Math.atan2(bullet.getEnemyY() - bullet.getY(), bullet.getEnemyX() - bullet.getX()); //increments x and y bullet.setX((float) (bullet.getX() + (Math.cos(angle) * bullet.getSpeed() * delta))); bullet.setY((float) (bullet.getY() + (Math.sin(angle) * bullet.getSpeed() * delta))); //collision with obstacles for(int j = 0; j < arena.getObstacles().size(); j++) { Obstacle obs = arena.getObstacles().get(j); if(bullet.getBounds().intersects(obs.getBounds())) { System.out.println("Collision detect!"); arena.removeBullet(bullet); } } //collisions with enemies for(int j = 0; j < arena.getEnemies().size(); j++) { Enemy ene = arena.getEnemies().get(j); if(bullet.getBounds().intersects(ene.getBounds())) { System.out.println("Collision detect!"); arena.removeBullet(bullet); } } } } } public boolean onClick(int x, int y) { //click on empty cell if(arena.getGrid()[(int)(y / Arena.TILE)][(int)(x / Arena.TILE)] == null) { //coordinates targetX = x / Arena.TILE; targetY = y / Arena.TILE; //enables movement moving = true; return true; } //click on enemy: fire if(arena.getGrid()[(int)(y / Arena.TILE)][(int)(x / Arena.TILE)] instanceof Enemy) { //coordinates float enemyX = x / Arena.TILE; float enemyY = y / Arena.TILE; //new bullet Bullet bullet = new Bullet(); //start coordinates bullet.setX(arena.getDroid().getX()); bullet.setY(arena.getDroid().getY()); //end coordinates (enemie) bullet.setEnemyX(enemyX); bullet.setEnemyY(enemyY); //adds bullet to arena arena.addBullet(bullet); //enables shooting shooting = true; return true; } return false; } As you can see for collision detection i'm trying to use Rectangle object. Droid example: import java.awt.geom.Rectangle2D; public class Droid { private float x; private float y; private float speed = 20f; private float rotation = 0f; private float damage = 2f; public static final int DIAMETER = 32; private Rectangle2D rectangle; public Droid() { rectangle = new Rectangle2D.Float(x, y, DIAMETER, DIAMETER); } public float getX() { return x; } public void setX(float x) { this.x = x; //rectangle update rectangle.setRect(x, y, DIAMETER, DIAMETER); } public float getY() { return y; } public void setY(float y) { this.y = y; //rectangle update rectangle.setRect(x, y, DIAMETER, DIAMETER); } public float getSpeed() { return speed; } public void setSpeed(float speed) { this.speed = speed; } public float getRotation() { return rotation; } public void setRotation(float rotation) { this.rotation = rotation; } public float getDamage() { return damage; } public void setDamage(float damage) { this.damage = damage; } public Rectangle2D getRectangle() { return rectangle; } } For now, if i start the application and i try to shot to an enemy, is immediately detected a collision and the bullet is removed! Can you help me with this? If the bullet hit an enemy or an obstacle in his way, it must disappear. Ps: i know that the movements of the bullets should be managed in another class. This code is temporary. update I realized what happens, but not why. With those for loops (which checks collisions) the movements of the bullets are instantaneous instead of gradual. In addition to this, if i add the collision detection to the Droid, the method intersects returns true ALWAYS while the droid is moving! public void moveDroid(float delta, float x, float y) { Droid droid = arena.getDroid(); int bearing = 1; if (droid.getX() > x) { bearing = -1; } if (droid.getX() != x) { droid.setX(droid.getX() + bearing * droid.getSpeed() * delta); //obstacles collision detection for(Obstacle obs : arena.getObstacles()) { if(obs.getRectangle().intersects(droid.getRectangle())) { System.out.println("Collision detected"); //ALWAYS HERE } } //controlla se è arrivato if ((droid.getX() < x && bearing == -1) || (droid.getX() > x && bearing == 1)) droid.setX(x); } bearing = 1; if (droid.getY() > y) { bearing = -1; } if (droid.getY() != y) { droid.setY(droid.getY() + bearing * droid.getSpeed() * delta); if ((droid.getY() < y && bearing == -1) || (droid.getY() > y && bearing == 1)) droid.setY(y); } }

  Read the article

• Windows 8 Launch&ndash;Why OEM and Retailers Should STFU

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Microsoft has gotten a lot of flack for the Surface from OEM/hardware partners who create Windows-based devices and I’m sure, to an extent, retailers who normally stock and sell Windows-based devices. I mean we all know how this is supposed to work – Microsoft makes the OS, partners make the hardware, retailers sell the hardware. Now Microsoft is breaking the rules by not only offering their own hardware but selling them via online and through their Microsoft branded stores! The thought has been that Microsoft is trying to set a standard for the other hardware companies to reach for. Maybe. I hope, at some level, Microsoft may be covertly responding to frustrations associated with trusting the OEMs and Retailers to deliver on their part of the supply chain. I know as a consumer, I’m very frustrated with the Windows 8 launch. Aside from the Surface sales, there’s nothing happening at the retail level. Let me back up and explain. Over the weekend I visited a number of stores in hopes of trying out various Windows 8 devices. Out of three retailers (Staples, Best Buy, and Future Shop), not *one* met my expectations. Let me be honest with you Staples, I never really have high expectations from your computer department. If I need paper or pens, whatever, but computers – you’re not the top of my list for price or selection. Still, considering you flaunted Win 8 devices in your flyer I expected *something* – some sign of effort that you took the Windows 8 launch seriously. As I entered the 1910 Pembina Highway location in Winnipeg, there was nothing – no signage, no banners – nothing that would suggest Windows 8 had even launched. I made my way to the laptops. I had to play with each machine to determine which ones were running Windows 8. There wasn’t anything on the placards that made it obvious which were Windows 8 machines and which ones were Windows 7. Likewise, there was no easy way to identify the touch screen laptop (the HP model) from the others without physically touching the screen to verify. Horrible experience. In the same mall as the Staples I mentioned above, there’s a Future Shop. Surely they would be more on the ball. I walked in to the 1910 Pembina Highway location and immediately realized I would not get a better experience. Except for the sign by the front door mentioning Windows 8, there was *nothing* in the computer department pointing you to the Windows 8 devices. Like in Staples, the Win 8 laptops were mixed in with the Win 7 ones and there was nothing notable calling out which ones were running Win 8. I happened to hit up the St. James Street location today, thinking since its a busier store they must have more options. To their credit, they did have two staff members decked out in Windows 8 shirts and who were helping a customer understand Windows 8. But otherwise, there was nothing highlighting the Windows 8 devices and they were again mixed in with the rest of the Win 7 machines. Finally, we have the St. James Street Best Buy location here in Winnipeg. I’m sure Best Buy will have their act together. Nope, not even close. Same story as the others: minimal signage (there was a sign as you walked in with a link to this schedule of demo days), Windows 8 hardware mixed with the rest of the PC offerings, and no visible call-outs identifying which were Win 8 based. This meant that, like Future Shop and Staples, if you wanted to know which machine had Windows 8 you had to go and scrutinize each machine. Also, there was nothing identifying which ones were touch based and which were not. Just Another Day… To these retailers, it seemed that the Windows 8 launch was just another day, with another product to add to the showroom floor. Meanwhile, Apple has their dedicated areas *in all three stores*. It was dead simple to find where the Apple products were compared to the Windows 8 products. No wonder Microsoft is starting to push their own retail stores. No wonder Microsoft is trying to funnel orders through them instead of relying on these bloated retail big box stores who obviously can’t manage a product launch. It’s Not Just The Retailers… Remember when the Acer CEO, Founder, and President of Computer Global Operations all weighed in on how Microsoft releasing the Surface would have a “huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction”? Also remember the CEO stating “[making hardware] is not something you are good at so please think twice”? Well the launch day has come and gone, and so far Microsoft is the only one that delivered on having hardware available on the October 26th date. Oh sure, there are laptops running Windows 8 – but all in one desktop PCs? I’ve only seen one or two! And tablets are *non existent*, with some showing an early to late November availability on Best Buy’s website! So while the retailers could be doing more to make it easier to find Windows 8 devices, the manufacturers could help by *getting devices into stores*! That’s supposedly something that these companies are good at, according to the Acer CEO. So Here’s What the Retailers and Manufacturers Need To Do… Get Product Out The pivotal timeframe will be now to the end of November. We need to start seeing all these fantastic pieces of hardware ship – including the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro, the Acer Iconia, the Asus TAICHI 21, and the sexy Samsung Series 7 27” desktop. It’s not enough to see product announcements, we need to see actual devices. Make It Easy For Customers To Find Win8 Devices You want to make it easy to sell these things? Make it easy for people to find them! Have staff on hand that really know how these devices run and what can be done with them. Don’t just have a single demo day, have people who can demo it every day! Make It Easy to See the Features There’s touch screen desktops, touch screen laptops, tablets, non-touch laptops, etc. People need to easily find the features for each machine. If I’m looking for a touch-laptop, I shouldn’t need to sift through all the non-touch laptops to find them – at the least, I need to quickly be able to see which ones are touch. I feel silly even typing this because this should be retail 101 and I have no retail background (but I do have an extensive background as a customer). In Summary… Microsoft launching the Surface and selling them through their own channels isn’t slapping its OEM and retail partners in the face; its slapping them to wake the hell up and stop coasting through Windows launch events like they don’t matter. Unless I see some improvements from vendors and retailers in November, I may just hold onto my money for a Surface Pro even if I have to wait until early 2013. Your move OEM/Retailers. *Update – While my experience has been in Winnipeg, similar experiences have been voiced from colleagues in Calgary and Edmonton.

  Read the article

• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love"

  - by Jeff

  This is the third post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch in the next month or two. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects I finally hit a point in the re-do of CoasterBuzz where I feel like the major pieces are in place... rewritten, ported and what not, so that I can focus now on front-end design and more interesting creative problems. I've been asked on more than one occasion (OK, just twice) what's going on under the covers, so I figure this might be a good time to explain the overall architecture. As it turns out, I'm using a whole lof of the "Web stack of love," as Scott Hanselman likes to refer to it. Oh that Hanselman. First off, at the center of it all, is BizTalk. Just kidding. That's "enterprise architecture" humor, where every discussion starts with how they'll use BizTalk. Here are the bigger moving parts: It's fairly straight forward. A common library lives in a number of Web apps, all of which are (or will be) powered by ASP.NET MVC 4. They all talk to the same database. There is the main Web site, which also has the endpoint for the Silverlight-based Feed app. The cstr.bz site handles redirects, which are generated when news items are published and sent to Twitter. Facebook publishing is handled via the RSS Graffiti Facebook app. The API site handles requests from the Windows Phone app. The main site depends very heavily on POP Forums, the open source, MVC-based forum I maintain. It serves a number of functions, primarily handling users. These user objects serve in non-forum roles to handle things like news and database contributions, maintaining track records (coaster nerd for "list of rides I've been on") and, perhaps most importantly, paid club memberships. Before I get into more specifics, note that the "glue" for everything is Ninject, the dependency injection framework. I actually prefer StructureMap these days, but I started with Ninject in POP Forums a long time ago. POP Forums has a static class, PopForumsActivation, that new's up an instance of the container, and you can call it from where ever. The downside is that the forums require Ninject in your MVC app as the default dependency resolver. At some point, I'll decouple it, but for now it's not in the way. In the general sense, the entire set of apps follow a repository-service-controller-view pattern. Repos just do data access, service classes do business logic, controllers compose and route, views view. The forum also provides Scoring Game functionality. The Scoring Game is a reasonably abstract framework to award users points based on certain actions, and then award achievements when a certain number of point events happen. For example, the forum already awards a point when someone plus-one's a post you made. You can set up an achievement that says, "Give the user an award when they've had 100 posts plus'd." It also does zero-point entries into the ledger, so if you make a post, you could award an achievement based on 100 posts made. Wiring in the scoring game to CoasterBuzz functionality is just a matter of going to the Ninject container and getting an instance of the event publisher, and passing it events. Forum adapters were introduced into POP Forums a few versions ago, and they can intercept the model generated for forum topic lists and threads and designate an alternate view. These are used to make the "Day in Pictures" forum, where users can upload photos as frame-by-frame photo threads. Another adapter adds an association UI, so users can associate specific amusement parks with their trip report posts. The Silverlight-based Feed app talks to a simple JSON endpoint in the main app. This uses an underlying library I wrote ages ago, simply called Feeds, that aggregates event information. You inherit from a base class that creates instances of a publisher interface, and then use that class to send it an event type and any number of data fields. Feeds has two publishers: One is to the database, and that's used for the endpoint that talks to the Silverlight app. The second publisher publishes to Twitter, if the event is of the type "news." The wiring is a little strange, because for the new posts and topics events, I'm actually pulling out the forum repository classes from the Ninject container and replacing them with overridden methods to publish. I should probably be doing this at the service class level, but whatever. It's my mess. cstr.bz doesn't do anything interesting. It looks up the path, and if it has a match, does a 301 redirect to the long URL. The API site just serves up JSON for the Windows Phone app. The Windows Phone app is Silverlight, of course, and there isn't much to it. It does use the control toolkit, but beyond that, it relies on a simple class that creates a Webclient and calls the server for JSON to deserialize. The same class is now used by the Feed app, which used to use WCF. Simple is better. Data access in POP Forums is all straight SQL, because a lot of it was ported from the ASP.NET version. Most CoasterBuzz data access is handled by the Entity Framework, using the code-first model. The context class in this case does a lot of work to make sure that the table and key mapping works, since much of it breaks from the normal conventions of EF. One of the more powerful things you can do with EF, once you understand the little gotchas, is split tables by row into different entities. For example, a roller coaster photo has everything in the same row, including the metadata, the thumbnail bytes and the image itself. Obviously, if you want to get a list of photos to iterate over in a view, you don't want to get the image data. The use of navigation properties makes it easier to get just what you want. The front end includes Razor views in MVC, and jQuery is used for client-side goodness. I'm also using jQuery UI in a few places, for tabs, a dialog box and autocomplete. I'm also, tentatively, using jQuery Mobile. I've already ported most forum views to Mobile, but they need some work as v1.1 isn't finished yet. I'm not sure if I'll ship CoasterBuzz with mobile views or not yet. It's on the radar, but not something in my delivery criteria. That covers all of the big frameworks in play. Next time I hope to talk more about the front-end experience, which to me is where most of the fun is these days. Hoping to launch in the next month or two. Getting tired of looking at the old site!

  Read the article

• Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario   Conventional Structures   Columnstore   Δ SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically.  The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes.  As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics.  Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible.  The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators.  As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

  Read the article

• Neo4J and Azure and VS2012 and Windows 8

  - by Chris Skardon

  Now, I know that this has been written about, but both of the main places (http://www.richard-banks.org/2011/02/running-neo4j-on-azure.html and http://blog.neo4j.org/2011/02/announcing-neo4j-on-windows-azure.html) utilise VS2010, and well, I’m on VS2012 and Windows 8. Not that I think Win 8 had anything to do with it really, anyhews! I’m going to begin from the beginning, this is my first foray into running something on Azure, so it’s been a bit of a learning curve. But luckily the Neo4J guys have got us started, so let’s download the VS2010 solution: http://neo4j.org/get?file=Neo4j.Azure.Server.zip OK, the other thing we’ll need is the VS2012 Azure SDK, so let’s get that as well: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/downloads/ (I just did the full install). Now, unzip the VS2010 solution and let’s open it in VS2012: <your location>\Neo4j.Azure.Server\Neo4j.Azure.Server.sln One-way-upgrade? Yer! Ignore the migration report – we don’t care! Let’s build that sucker… Ahhh 14 errors… WindowsAzure does not exist in the namespace ‘Microsoft’ Not a problem right? We’ve installed the SDK, just need to update the references: We can ignore the Test projects, they don’t use Azure, we’re interested in the other projects, so what we’ll do is remove the broken references, and add the correct ones, so expand the references bit of each project: hunt out those yellow exclamation marks, and delete them! You’ll need to add the right ones back in (listed below), when you go to the ‘Add Reference’ dialog make sure you have ‘Assemblies’ and ‘Framework’ selected before you seach (and search for ‘microsoft.win’ to narrow it down) So the references you need for each project are: CollectDiagnosticsData Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient Diversify.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime Microsoft.WindowsAzure.CloudDrive Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient Right, so let’s build again… Sweet! No errors.   Now we need to setup our Blobs, I’m assuming you are using the most up-to-date Java you happened to have downloaded :) in my case that’s JRE7, and that is located in: C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre7 So, zip up that folder into whatever you want to call it, I went with jre7.zip, and stuck it in a temp folder for now. In that same temp folder I also copied the neo4j zip I was using: neo4j-community-1.7.2-windows.zip OK, now, we need to get these into our Blob storage, this is where a lot of stuff becomes unstuck - I didn’t find any applications that helped me use the blob storage, one would crash (because my internet speed is so slow) and the other just didn’t work – sure it looked like it had worked, but when push came to shove it didn’t. So this is how I got my files into Blob (local first): 1. Run the ‘Storage Emulator’ (just search for that in the start menu) 2. That takes a little while to start up so fire up another instance of Visual Studio in the mean time, and create a new Console Application. 3. Manage Nuget Packages for that solution and add ‘Windows Azure Storage’ Now you’re set up to add the code: public static void Main() { CloudStorageAccount cloudStorageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.DevelopmentStorageAccount; CloudBlobClient client = cloudStorageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); client.Timeout = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(30); CloudBlobContainer container = client.GetContainerReference("neo4j"); //This will create it as well   UploadBlob(container, "jre7.zip", "c:\\temp\\jre7.zip"); UploadBlob(container, "neo4j-community-1.7.2-windows.zip", "c:\\temp\\neo4j-community-1.7.2-windows.zip"); }   private static void UploadBlob(CloudBlobContainer container, string blobName, string filename) { CloudBlob blob = container.GetBlobReference(blobName);   using (FileStream fileStream = File.OpenRead(filename)) blob.UploadFromStream(fileStream); } This will upload the files to your local storage account (to switch to an Azure one, you’ll need to create a storage account, and use those credentials when you make your CloudStorageAccount above) To test you’ve got them uploaded correctly, go to: http://localhost:10000/devstoreaccount1/neo4j/jre7.zip and you will hopefully download the zip file you just uploaded. Now that those files are there, we are ready for some final configuration… Right click on the Neo4jServerHost role in the Neo4j.Azure.Server cloud project: Click on the ‘Settings’ tab and we’ll need to do some changes – by default, the 1.7.2 edition of neo4J unzips to: neo4j-community-1.7.2 So, we need to update all the ‘neo4j-1.3.M02’ directories to be ‘neo4j-community-1.7.2’, we also need to update the Java runtime location, so we start with this: and end with this: Now, I also changed the Endpoints settings, to be HTTP (from TCP) and to have a port of 7410 (mainly because that’s straight down on the numpad) The last ‘gotcha’ is some hard coded consts, which had me looking for ages, they are in the ‘ConfigSettings’ class of the ‘Neo4jServerHost’ project, and the ones we’re interested in are: Neo4jFileName JavaZipFileName Change those both to what that should be. OK Nearly there (I promise)! Run the ‘Compute Emulator’ (same deal with the Start menu), in your system tray you should have an Azure icon, when the compute emulator is up and running, right click on the icon and select ‘Show Compute Emulator UI’ The last steps! Make sure the ‘Neo4j.Azure.Server’ cloud project is set up as the start project and let’s hit F5 tension mounts, the build takes place (you need to accept the UAC warning) and VS does it’s stuff. If you look at the Compute Emulator UI you’ll see some log stuff (which you’ll need if this goes awry – but it won’t don’t worry!) In a bit, the console and a Java window will pop up: Then the console will bog off, leaving just the Java one, and if we switch back to the Compute Emulator UI and scroll up we should be able to see a line telling us the port number we’ve been assigned (in my case 7411): (If you can’t see it, don’t worry.. press CTRL+A on the emulator, then CTRL+C, copy all the text and paste it into something like Notepad, then just do a Find for ‘port’ you’ll soon see it) Go to your favourite browser, and head to: http://localhost:YOURPORT/ and you should see the WebAdmin! See you on the cloud side hopefully! Chris PS Other gotchas! OK, I’ve been caught out a couple of times: I had an instance of Neo4J running as a service on my machine, the Azure instance wanted to run the https version of the server on the same port as the Service was running on, and so Java would complain that the port was already in use.. The first time I converted the project, it didn’t update the version of the Azure library to load, in the App.Config of the Neo4jServerHost project, and VS would throw an exception saying it couldn’t find the Azure dll version 1.0.0.0.

  Read the article

• 10 tape technology features that make you go hmm.

  - by Karoly Vegh

  A week ago an Oracle/StorageTek Tape Specialist, Christian Vanden Balck, visited Vienna, and agreed to visit customers to do techtalks and update them about the technology boom going around tape. I had the privilege to attend some of his sessions and noted the information and features that took the customers by surprise and made them think. Allow me to share the top 10: I. StorageTek as a brand: StorageTek is one of he strongest names in the Tape field. The brand itself was valued so much by customers that even after Sun Microsystems acquiring StorageTek and the Oracle acquiring Sun the brand lives on with all the Oracle tapelibraries are officially branded StorageTek.See http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/tape-storage/overview/index.html II. Disk information density limitations: Disk technology struggles with information density. You haven't seen the disk sizes exploding lately, have you? That's partly because there are physical limits on a disk platter. The size is given, the number of platters is limited, they just can't grow, and are running out of physical area to write to. Now, in a T10000C tape cartridge we have over 1000m long tape. There you go, you have got your physical space and don't need to stuff all that data crammed together. You can write in a reliable pattern, and have space to grow too. III. Oracle has a market share of 62% worldwide in recording head manufacturing. That's right. If you are running LTO drives, with a good chance you rely on StorageTek production. That's two out of three LTO recording heads produced worldwide.  IV. You can store 1 Exabyte data in a single tape library. Yes, an Exabyte. That is 1000 Petabytes. Or, a million Terabytes. A thousand million GigaBytes. You can store that in a stacked StorageTek SL8500 tapelibrary. In one SL8500 you can put 10.000 T10000C cartridges, that store 10TB data (compressed). You can stack 10 of these SL8500s together. Boom. 1000.000 TB.(n.b.: stacking means interconnecting the libraries. Yes, cartridges are moved between the stacked libraries automatically.)  V. EMC: 'Tape doesn't suck after all. We moved on.': Do you remember the infamous 'Tape sucks, move on' Datadomain slogan? Of course they had to put it that way, having only had disk products. But here's a fun fact: on the EMCWorld 2012 there was a major presence of a Tape-tech company - EMC, in a sudden burst of sanity is embracing tape again. VI. The miraculous T10000C: Oracle StorageTek has developed an enterprise-grade tapedrive and cartridge, the T10000C. With awesome numbers: The Cartridge: Native 5TB capacity, 10TB with compression Over a kilometer long tape within the cartridge. And it's locked when unmounted, no rattling of your data.  Replaced the metalparticles datalayer with BaFe (bariumferrite) - metalparticles lose around 7% of magnetism within 30 days. BaFe does not. Yes we employ solid-state physicists doing R&D on demagnetisation in our labs. Can be partitioned, storage tiering within the cartridge!  The Drive: 2GB Cache Encryption implemented in HW - no performance hit 252 MB/s native sustained data rate, beats disk technology by far. Not to mention peak throughput.  Leading the tape while never touching the data side of it, protecting your data physically too Data integritiy checking (CRC recalculation) on tape within the drive without having to read it back to the server reordering data from tape-order, delivering it back in application-order  writing 32 tracks at once, reading them back for CRC check at once VII. You only use 20% of your data on a regular basis. The rest 80% is just lying around for years. On continuously spinning disks. Doubly consuming energy (power+cooling), blocking diskstorage capacity. There is a solution called SAM (Storage Archive Manager) that provides you a filesystem unifying disk and tape, moving data on-demand and for clients transparently between the different storage tiers. You can share these filesystems with NFS or CIFS for clients, and enjoy the low TCO of tape. Tapes don't spin. They sit quietly in their slots, storing 10TB data, using no energy, producing no heat, automounted when a client accesses their data.See: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/storage-software/storage-archive-manager/overview/index.html VIII. HW supported for three decades: Did you know that the original PowderHorn library was released in '87 and has been only discontinued in 2010? That is over two decades of supported operation. Tape libraries are - just like the data carrying on tapecartridges - built for longevity. Oh, and the T10000C cartridge has 30-year archival life for long-term retention.  IX. Tape is easy to manage: Have you heard of Tape Storage Analytics? It is a central graphical tool to summarize, monitor, analyze dataflow, health and performance of drives and libraries, see: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/tape-storage/tape-analytics/overview/index.html X. The next generation: The T10000B drives were able to reuse the T10000A cartridges and write on them even more data. On the same cartridges. We call this investment protection, and this is very important for Oracle for the future too. We usually support two generations of cartridges together. The current drive is a T10000C. (...I know I promised to enlist 10, but I got still two more I really want to mention. Allow me to work around the problem: ) X++. The TallBots, the robots moving around the cartridges in the StorageTek library from tapeslots to the drives are cableless. Cables, belts, chains running to moving parts in a library cause maintenance downtimes. So StorageTek eliminated them. The TallBots get power, commands, even firmwareupgrades through the rails they are running on. Also, the TallBots don't just hook'n'pull the tapes out of their slots, they actually grip'n'lift them out. No friction, no scratches, no zillion little plastic particles floating around in the library, in the drives, on your data. (X++)++: Tape beats SSDs and Disks. In terms of throughput (252 MB/s), in terms of TCO: disks cause around 290x more power and cooling, in terms of capacity: 10TB on a single media and soon more.  So... do you need to store large amounts of data? Are you legally bound to archive it for dozens of years? Would you benefit from automatic storage tiering? Have you got large mediachunks to be streamed at times? Have you got power and cooling issues in the growing datacenters? Do you find EMC's 180° turn of tape attitude interesting, but appreciate it at the same time? With all that, you aren't alone. The most data on this planet is stored on tape. Tape is coming. Big time.

  Read the article

• 3D Ball Physics Theory: collision response on ground and against walls?

  - by David

  I'm really struggling to get a strong grasp on how I should be handling collision response in a game engine I'm building around a 3D ball physics concept. Think Monkey Ball as an example of the type of gameplay. I am currently using sphere-to-sphere broad phase, then AABB to OBB testing (the final test I am using right now is one that checks if one of the 8 OBB points crosses the planes of the object it is testing against). This seems to work pretty well, and I am getting back: Plane that object is colliding against (with a point on the plane, the plane's normal, and the exact point of intersection. I've tried what feels like dozens of different high-level strategies for handling these collisions, without any real success. I think my biggest problem is understanding how to handle collisions against walls in the x-y axes (left/right, front/back), which I want to have elasticity, and the ground (z-axis) where I want an elastic reaction if the ball drops down, but then for it to eventually normalize and be kept "on the ground" (not go into the ground, but also not continue bouncing). Without kluging something together, I'm positive there is a good way to handle this, my theories just aren't getting me all the way there. For physics modeling and movement, I am trying to use a Euler based setup with each object maintaining a position (and destination position prior to collision detection), a velocity (which is added onto the position to determine the destination position), and an acceleration (which I use to store any player input being put on the ball, as well as gravity in the z coord). Starting from when I detect a collision, what is a good way to approach the response to get the expected behavior in all cases? Thanks in advance to anyone taking the time to assist... I am grateful for any pointers, and happy to post any additional info or code if it is useful. UPDATE Based on Steve H's and eBusiness' responses below, I have adapted my collision response to what makes a lot more sense now. It was close to right before, but I didn't have all the right pieces together at the right time! I have one problem left to solve, and that is what is causing the floor collision to hit every frame. Here's the collision response code I have now for the ball, then I'll describe the last bit I'm still struggling to understand. // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... if (m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal) <= 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold // -- NOTE: this was an experimental idea I had to solve the "jitter" bug I'll describe below float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position + intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); The above snippet is run after a collision is detected on the ball (collider) with a collidee (floor in this case). With a dampening force of 1.8f, the ball's reflected "upward" velocity will eventually be overcome by gravity, so the ball will essentially be stuck on the floor. THIS is the problem I have now... the collision code is running every frame (since the ball's z-velocity is constantly pushing it a collision with the floor below it). The ball is not technically stuck, I can move it around still, but the movement is really goofy because the velocity and position keep getting affected adversely by the above snippet. I was experimenting with an idea to clamp the z-velocity to zero if it was "close to zero", but this didn't do what I think... probably because the very next frame the ball gets a new gravity acceleration applied to its velocity regardless (which I think is good, right?). Collisions with walls are as they used to be and work very well. It's just this last bit of "stickiness" to deal with. The camera is constantly jittering up and down by extremely small fractions too when the ball is "at rest". I'll keep playing with it... I like puzzles like this, especially when I think I'm close. Any final ideas on what I could be doing wrong here? UPDATE 2 Good news - I discovered I should be subtracting the intersection.diff from the m_position (position prior to collision). The intersection.diff is my calculation of the difference in the vector of position to destPosition from the intersection point to the position. In this case, adding it was causing my ball to always go "up" just a little bit, causing the jitter. By subtracting it, and moving that clamper for the velocity.z when close to zero to being above the dot product (and changing the test from <= 0 to < 0), I now have the following: // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... float dotprod = m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal); if (dotprod < 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration? // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position - intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); UpdateWorldMatrix(m_destWorldMatrix, m_destOBB, m_destPosition, false); This is MUCH better. No jitter, and the ball now "rests" at the floor, while still bouncing off the floor and walls. The ONLY thing left is that the ball is now virtually "stuck". He can move but at a much slower rate, likely because the else of my dot product test is only letting the ball move at a rate multiplied against the tRemaining... I think this is a better solution than I had previously, but still somehow not the right idea. BTW, I'm trying to journal my progress through this problem for anyone else with a similar situation - hopefully it will serve as some help, as many similar posts have for me over the years.

  Read the article

• JSP Precompilation for ADF Applications

  - by Duncan Mills

  A question that comes up from time to time, particularly in relation to build automation, is how to best pre-compile the .jspx and .jsff files in an ADF application. Thus ensuring that the app is ready to run as soon as it's installed into WebLogic. In the normal run of things, the first poor soul to hit a page pays the price and has to wait a little whilst the JSP is compiled into a servlet. Everyone else subsequently gets a free lunch. So it's a reasonable thing to want to do... Let Me List the Ways So forth to Google (other search engines are available)... which lead me to a fairly old article on WLDJ - Removing Performance Bottlenecks Through JSP Precompilation. Technololgy wise, it's somewhat out of date, but the one good point that it made is that it's really not very useful to try and use the precompile option in the weblogic.xml file. That's a really good observation - particularly if you're trying to integrate a pre-compile step into a Hudson Continuous Integration process. That same article mentioned an alternative approach for programmatic pre-compilation using weblogic.jspc. This seemed like a much more useful approach for a CI environment. However, weblogic.jspc is now obsoleted by weblogic.appc so we'll use that instead.  Thanks to Steve for the pointer there. And So To APPC APPC has documentation - always a great place to start, and supports usage both from Ant via the wlappc task and from the command line using the weblogic.appc command. In my testing I took the latter approach. Usage, as the documentation will show you, is superficially pretty simple.  The nice thing here, is that you can pass an existing EAR file (generated of course using OJDeploy) and that EAR will be updated in place with the freshly compiled servlet classes created from the JSPs. Appc takes care of all the unpacking, compiling and re-packing of the EAR for you. Neat.  So we're done right...? Not quite. The Devil is in the Detail  OK so I'm being overly dramatic but it's not all plain sailing, so here's a short guide to using weblogic.appc to compile a simple ADF application without pain.  Information You'll Need The following is based on the assumption that you have a stand-alone WLS install with the Application Development  Runtime installed and a suitable ADF enabled domain created. This could of course all be run off of a JDeveloper install as well 1. Your Weblogic home directory. Everything you need is relative to this so make a note.  In my case it's c:\builds\wls_ps4. 2. Next deploy your EAR as normal and have a peek inside it using your favourite zip management tool. First of all look at the weblogic-application.xml inside the EAR /META-INF directory. Have a look for any library references. Something like this: <library-ref>    <library-name>adf.oracle.domain</library-name> </library-ref>   Make a note of the library ref (adf.oracle.domain in this case) , you'll need that in a second. 3. Next open the nested WAR file within the EAR and then have a peek inside the weblogic.xml file in the /WEB-INF directory. Again  make a note of the library references. 4. Now start the WebLogic as per normal and run the WebLogic console app (e.g. http://localhost:7001/console). In the Domain Structure navigator, select Deployments. 5. For each of the libraries you noted down drill into the library definition and make a note of the .war, .ear or .jar that defines the library. For example, in my case adf.oracle.domain maps to "C:\ builds\ WLS_PS4\ oracle_common\ modules\ oracle. adf. model_11. 1. 1\ adf. oracle. domain. ear". Note the extra spaces that are salted throughout this string as it is displayed in the console - just to make it annoying, you'll have to strip these out. 6. Finally you'll need the location of the adfsharebean.jar. We need to pass this on the classpath for APPC so that the ADFConfigLifeCycleCallBack listener can be found. In a more complex app of your own you may need additional classpath entries as well.  Now we're ready to go, and it's a simple matter of applying the information we have gathered into the relevant command line arguments for the utility A Simple CMD File to Run APPC  Here's the stub .cmd file I'm using on Windows to run this. @echo offREM Stub weblogic.appc Runner setlocal set WLS_HOME=C:\builds\WLS_PS4 set ADF_LIB_ROOT=%WLS_HOME%\oracle_common\modulesset COMMON_LIB_ROOT=%WLS_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\common\deployable-libraries set ADF_WEBAPP=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.view_11.1.1\adf.oracle.domain.webapp.war set ADF_DOMAIN=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.model_11.1.1\adf.oracle.domain.ear set JSTL=%COMMON_LIB_ROOT%\jstl-1.2.war set JSF=%COMMON_LIB_ROOT%\jsf-1.2.war set ADF_SHARE=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.share_11.1.1\adfsharembean.jar REM Set up the WebLogic Environment so appc can be found call %WLS_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\server\bin\setWLSEnv.cmd CLS REM Now compile away!java weblogic.appc -verbose -library %ADF_WEBAPP%,%ADF_DOMAIN%,%JSTL%,%JSF% -classpath %ADF_SHARE% %1 endlocal Running the above on a target ADF .ear  file will zip through and create all of the relevant compiled classes inside your nested .war file in the \WEB-INF\classes\jsp_servlet\ directory (but don't take my word for it, run it and take a look!) And So... In the immortal words of  the Pet Shop Boys, Was It Worth It? Well, here's where you'll have to do your own testing. In  my case here, with a simple ADF application, pre-compilation shaved an non-scientific "3 Elephants" off of the initial page load time for the first access of each page. That's a pretty significant payback for such a simple step to add into your CI process, so why not give it a go.

  Read the article

• Securing WebSocket applications on Glassfish

  - by Pavel Bucek

  Today we are going to cover deploying secured WebSocket applications on Glassfish and access to these services using WebSocket Client API. WebSocket server application setup Our server endpoint might look as simple as this: @ServerEndpoint("/echo") public class EchoEndpoint { @OnMessage   public String echo(String message) {     return message + " (from your server)";   } } Everything else must be configured on container level. We can start with enabling SSL, which will require web.xml to be added to your project. For starters, it might look as following: <web-app version="3.0" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee">   <security-constraint>     <web-resource-collection>       <web-resource-name>Protected resource</web-resource-name>       <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>       <http-method>GET</http-method>     </web-resource-collection>     <!-- https -->     <user-data-constraint>       <transport-guarantee>CONFIDENTIAL</transport-guarantee>     </user-data-constraint>   </security-constraint> </web-app> This is minimal web.xml for this task - web-resource-collection just defines URL pattern and HTTP method(s) we want to put a constraint on and user-data-constraint defines that constraint, which is in our case transport-guarantee. More information about these properties and security settings for web application can be found in Oracle Java EE 7 Tutorial. I have some simple webpage attached as well, so I can test my endpoint right away. You can find it (along with complete project) in Tyrus workspace: [webpage] [whole project]. After deploying this application to Glassfish Application Server, you should be able to hit it using your favorite browser. URL where my application resides is https://localhost:8181/sample-echo-https/ (may be different, depends on other configuration). My browser warns me about untrusted certificate (I use what freshly built Glassfish provides - self signed certificates) and after adding an exception for this site, I can see my webpage and I am able to securely connect to wss://localhost:8181/sample-echo-https/echo. WebSocket client Already mentioned demo application also contains test client, but execution of this is skipped for normal build. Reason for this is that Glassfish uses these self-signed "random" untrusted certificates and you are (in most cases) not able to connect to these services without any additional settings. Creating test WebSocket client is actually quite similar to server side, only difference is that you have to somewhere create client container and invoke connect with some additional info. Java API for WebSocket allows you to use annotated and programmatic way to construct endpoints. Server side shows the annotated case, so let's see how the programmatic approach will look. final WebSocketContainer client = ContainerProvider.getWebSocketContainer(); client.connectToServer(new Endpoint() {   @Override   public void onOpen(Session session, EndpointConfig EndpointConfig) {     try {       // register message handler - will just print out the       // received message on standard output.       session.addMessageHandler(new MessageHandler.Whole<String>() {       @Override         public void onMessage(String message) {          System.out.println("### Received: " + message);         }       });       // send a message       session.getBasicRemote().sendText("Do or do not, there is no try.");     } catch (IOException e) {       // do nothing     }   } }, ClientEndpointConfig.Builder.create().build(),    URI.create("wss://localhost:8181/sample-echo-https/echo")); This client should work with some secured endpoint with valid certificated signed by some trusted certificate authority (you can try that with wss://echo.websocket.org). Accessing our Glassfish instance will require some additional settings. You can tell Java which certificated you trust by adding -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore property (and few others in case you are using linked sample). Complete command line when you are testing your service might need to look somewhat like: mvn clean test -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore=$AS_MAIN/domains/domain1/config/cacerts.jks\ -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword=changeit -Dtyrus.test.host=localhost\ -DskipTests=false Where AS_MAIN points to your Glassfish instance. Note: you might need to setup keyStore and trustStore per client instead of per JVM; there is a way how to do it, but it is Tyrus proprietary feature: http://tyrus.java.net/documentation/1.2.1/user-guide.html#d0e1128. And that's it! Now nobody is able to "hear" what you are sending to or receiving from your WebSocket endpoint. There is always room for improvement, so the next step you might want to take is introduce some authentication mechanism (like HTTP Basic or Digest). This topic is more about container configuration so I'm not going to go into details, but there is one thing worth mentioning: to access services which require authorization, you might need to put this additional information to HTTP headers of first (Upgrade) request (there is not (yet) any direct support even for these fundamental mechanisms, user need to register Configurator and add headers in beforeRequest method invocation). I filed related feature request as TYRUS-228; feel free to comment/vote if you need this functionality.

  Read the article

• Corsair Hackers Reboot

  It wasn't easy for me to attend but it was absolutely worth to go. The Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM) organised another get-together for any open source enthusiast here on the island. Strangely named "Corsair Hackers Reboot" but it stands for a positive cause: "Corsair Hackers Reboot Event A collaborative activity involving LUGM, UoM Computer Club, Fortune Way Shopping Mall and several geeks from around the island, striving to put FOSS into homes & offices. The public is invited to discover and explore Free Software & Open Source." And it was a good opportunity for me and the kids to visit the east coast of Mauritius, too. Perfect timing It couldn't have been better... Why? Well, for two important reasons (in terms of IT): End of support for Microsoft Windows XP - 08.04.2014 Release of Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support - 17.04.2014 Quite funnily, those two IT dates weren't the initial reasons and only during the weeks of preparations we put those together. And therefore it was even more positive to promote the use of Linux and open source software in general to a broader audience. Getting there ... Thanks to the new motor way M3 and all the additional road work which has been completed recently it was very simple to get across the island in a very quick and relaxed manner. Compared to my trips in the early days of living in Mauritius (and riding on a scooter) it was very smooth and within less than an hour we hit Centrale de Flacq. Well, being in the city doesn't necessarily mean that one has arrived at the destination. But thanks to modern technology I had a quick look on Google Maps, and we finally managed to get a parking behind the huge bus terminal in Flacq. From there it was just a short walk to Fortune Way. The children were trying to count the number of buses... Well, lots and lots of buses - really impressive actually. What was presented? There were different areas set up. Right at the entrance one's attention was directly drawn towards the elevated hacker's stage. Similar to rock stars performing their gig there was bunch of computers, laptops and networking equipment in order to cater the right working conditions for coding/programming challenge(s) on the one hand and for the pen-testing or system hacking competition on the other hand. Personally, I was very impresses that actually Nitin took care of the pen-testing competition. He hardly started one year back with Linux in general, and Kali Linux specifically. Seeing his personal development from absolute newbie to a decent Linux system administrator within such a short period of time, is really impressive. His passion to open source software made him a living. Next, clock-wise seen, was the Kid's Corner with face-painting as the main attraction. Additionally, there were numerous paper print outs to colour. Plus a decent workstation with the educational suite GCompris. Of course, my little ones were into that. They already know GCompris since a while as they are allowed to use it on an IGEL thin client terminal here at home. To simplify my life, I set up GCompris as full-screen guest session on the server, and they can pass the login screen without any further obstacles. And because it's a thin client hooked up to a XDMCP remote session I don't have to worry about the hardware on their desk, too. The next section was the main attraction of the event: BYOD - Bring Your Own Device Well, compared to the usual context of BYOD the corsairs had a completely different intention. Here, you could bring your own laptop and a team of knowledgeable experts - read: geeks and so on - offered to fully convert your system on any Linux distribution of your choice. And even though I came later, I was told that the USB pen drives had been in permanent use. From being prepared via dd command over launching LiveCD session to finally installing a fresh Linux system on bare metal. Most interestingly, I did a similar job already a couple of months ago, while upgrading an existing Windows XP system to Xubuntu 13.10. So far, the female owner is very happy and enjoys her system almost every evening to go shopping online, checking mails, and reading latest news from the Anime world. Back to the Hackers event, Ish told me that they managed approximately 20 conversion during the day. Furthermore, Ajay and others gladly assisted some visitors with some tricky issues and by the end of the day you can call is a success. While I was around, there was a elderly male visitor that got a full-fledged system conversion to a Linux system running completely in French language. A little bit more to the centre it was Yasir's turn to demonstrate his Arduino hardware that he hooked up with an experimental electrical circuit board connected to an LCD matrix display. That's the real spirit of hacking, and he showed some minor adjustments on the fly while demo'ing the system. Also, very interesting there was a thermal sensor around. Personally, I think that platforms like the Arduino as well as the Raspberry Pi have a great potential at a very affordable price in order to bring a better understanding of electronics as well as computer programming to a broader audience. It would be great to see more of those experiments during future activities. And last but not least there were a small number of vendors. Amongst them was Emtel - once again as sponsor of the general internet connectivity - and another hardware supplier from Riche Terre shopping mall. They had a good collection of Android related gimmicks, like a autonomous web cam that can convert any TV with HDMI connector into an online video chat system given WiFi. It's actually kind of awesome to have a Skype or Google hangout video session on the big screen rather than on the laptop. Some pictures of the event LUGM: Great conversations on Linux, open source and free software during the Corsair Hackers Reboot LUGM: Educational workstation running GCompris suite attracted the youngest attendees of the day. Of course, face painting had to be done prior to hacking... LUGM: Nadim demoing some Linux specifics to interested visitors. Everyone was pretty busy during the whole day LUGM: The hacking competition, here pen-testing a wireless connection and access point between multiple machines LUGM: Well prepared workstations to be able to 'upgrade' visitors' machines to any Linux operating system Final thoughts Gratefully, during the preparations of the event I was invited to leave some comments or suggestions, and the team of the LUGM did a great job. The outdoor banner was a eye-catcher, the various flyers and posters for the event were clearly written and as far as I understood from the quick chats I had with Ish, Nadim, Nitin, Ajay, and of course others all were very happy about the event execution. Great job, LUGM! And I'm already looking forward to the next Corsair Hackers Reboot event ... Crossing fingers: Very soon and hopefully this year again :) Update: In the media The event had been announced in local media, too. L'Express: Salon informatique: Hacking Challenge à Flacq

  Read the article

• Can Google Employees See My Saved Google Chrome Passwords?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Storing your passwords in your web browser seems like a great time saver, but are the passwords secure and inaccessible to others (even employees of the browser company) when squirreled away? 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. The Question SuperUser reader MMA is curious if Google employees have (or could have) access to the passwords he stores in Google Chrome: I understand that we are really tempted to save our passwords in Google Chrome. The likely benefit is two fold, You don’t need to (memorize and) input those long and cryptic passwords. These are available wherever you are once you log in to your Google account. The last point sparked my doubt. Since the password is available anywhere, the storage must in some central location, and this should be at Google. Now, my simple question is, can a Google employee see my passwords? Searching over the Internet revealed several articles/messages. Do you save passwords in Chrome? Maybe you should reconsider: Talks about your passwords being stolen by someone who has access to your computer account. Nothing mentioned about the central storage security and vulnerability. There is even a response from Chrome browser security tech lead about the first issue. Chrome’s insane password security strategy: Mostly along the same line. You can steal password from somebody if you have access to the computer account. How to Steal Passwords Saved in Google Chrome in 5 Simple Steps: Teaches you how to actually perform the act mentioned in the previous two when you have access to somebody else’s account. There are many more (including this one at this site), mostly along the same line, points, counter-points, huge debates. I refrain from mentioning them here, simply carry a search if you want to find them. Coming back to my original query, can a Google employee see my password? Since I can view the password using a simple button, definitely they can be unhashed (decrypted) even if encrypted. This is very different from the passwords saved in Unix-like OS’s where the saved password can never be seen in plain text. They use a one-way encryption algorithm to encrypt your passwords. This encrypted password is then stored in the passwd or shadow file. When you attempt to login, the password you type in is encrypted again and compared with the entry in the file that stores your passwords. If they match, it must be the same password, and you are allowed access. Thus, a superuser can change my password, can block my account, but he can never see my password. So are his concerns well founded or will a little insight dispel his worry? The Answer SuperUser contributor Zeel helps put his mind at ease: Short answer: No* Passwords stored on your local machine can be decrypted by Chrome, as long as your OS user account is logged in. And then you can view those in plain text. At first this seems horrible, but how did you think auto-fill worked? When that password field gets filled in, Chrome must insert the real password into the HTML form element – or else the page wouldn’t work right, and you could not submit the form. And if the connection to the website is not over HTTPS, the plain text is then sent over the internet. In other words, if chrome can’t get the plain text passwords, then they are totally useless. A one way hash is no good, because we need to use them. Now the passwords are in fact encrypted, the only way to get them back to plain text is to have the decryption key. That key is your Google password, or a secondary key you can set up. When you sign into Chrome and sync the Google servers will transmit the encrypted passwords, settings, bookmarks, auto-fill, etc, to your local machine. Here Chrome will decrypt the information and be able to use it. On Google’s end all that info is stored in its encrpyted state, and they do not have the key to decrypt it. Your account password is checked against a hash to log in to Google, and even if you let chrome remember it, that encrypted version is hidden in the same bundle as the other passwords, impossible to access. So an employee could probably grab a dump of the encrypted data, but it wouldn’t do them any good, since they would have no way to use it.* So no, Google employees can not** access your passwords, since they are encrypted on their servers. * However, do not forget that any system that can be accessed by an authorized user can be accessed by an unauthorized user. Some systems are easier to break than other, but none are fail-proof. . . That being said, I think I will trust Google and the millions they spend on security systems, over any other password storage solution. And heck, I’m a wimpy nerd, it would be easier to beat the passwords out of me than break Google’s encryption. ** I am also assuming that there isn’t a person who just happens to work for Google gaining access to your local machine. In that case you are screwed, but employment at Google isn’t actually a factor any more. Moral: Hit Win + L before leaving machine. While we agree with zeel that it’s a pretty safe bet (as long as your computer is not compromised) that your passwords are in fact safe while stored in Chrome, we prefer to encrypt all our logins and passwords in a LastPass vault. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

  Read the article

• Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 3: Anonymous partial-trust consumer

  - by Elton Stoneman

  This is the third in the IPASBR series, see also: Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 2: Anonymous full-trust .NET consumer As the patterns get further from the simple .NET full-trust consumer, all that changes is the communication protocol and the authentication mechanism. In Part 3 the scenario is that we still have a secure .NET environment consuming our service, so we can store shared keys securely, but the runtime environment is locked down so we can't use Microsoft.ServiceBus to get the nice WCF relay bindings. To support this we will expose a RESTful endpoint through the Azure Service Bus, and require the consumer to send a security token with each HTTP service request. Pattern applicability This is a good fit for scenarios where: the runtime environment is secure enough to keep shared secrets the consumer can execute custom code, including building HTTP requests with custom headers the consumer cannot use the Azure SDK assemblies the service may need to know who is consuming it the service does not need to know who the end-user is Note there isn't actually a .NET requirement here. By exposing the service in a REST endpoint, anything that can talk HTTP can be a consumer. We'll authenticate through ACS which also gives us REST endpoints, so the service is still accessed securely. Our real-world example would be a hosted cloud app, where we we have enough room in the app's customisation to keep the shared secret somewhere safe and to hook in some HTTP calls. We will be flowing an identity through to the on-premise service now, but it will be the service identity given to the consuming app - the end user's identity isn't flown through yet. In this post, we’ll consume the service from Part 1 in ASP.NET using the WebHttpRelayBinding. The code for Part 3 (+ Part 1) is on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 3. Authenticating and authorizing with ACS We'll follow the previous examples and add a new service identity for the namespace in ACS, so we can separate permissions for different consumers (see walkthrough in Part 1). I've named the identity partialTrustConsumer. We’ll be authenticating against ACS with an explicit HTTP call, so we need a password credential rather than a symmetric key – for a nice secure option, generate a symmetric key, copy to the clipboard, then change type to password and paste in the key: We then need to do the same as in Part 2 , add a rule to map the incoming identity claim to an outgoing authorization claim that allows the identity to send messages to Service Bus: Issuer: Access Control Service Input claim type: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier Input claim value: partialTrustConsumer Output claim type: net.windows.servicebus.action Output claim value: Send As with Part 2, this sets up a service identity which can send messages into Service Bus, but cannot register itself as a listener, or manage the namespace. RESTfully exposing the on-premise service through Azure Service Bus Relay The part 3 sample code is ready to go, just put your Azure details into Solution Items\AzureConnectionDetails.xml and “Run Custom Tool” on the .tt files.  But to do it yourself is very simple. We already have a WebGet attribute in the service for locally making REST calls, so we are just going to add a new endpoint which uses the WebHttpRelayBinding to relay that service through Azure. It's as easy as adding this endpoint to Web.config for the service:         <endpoint address="https://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/rest"                   binding="webHttpRelayBinding"                    contract="Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services.IFormatService"                   behaviorConfiguration="SharedSecret">         </endpoint> - and adding the webHttp attribute in your endpoint behavior:           <behavior name="SharedSecret">             <webHttp/>             <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">               <clientCredentials>                 <sharedSecret issuerName="serviceProvider"                               issuerSecret="gl0xaVmlebKKJUAnpripKhr8YnLf9Neaf6LR53N8uGs="/>               </clientCredentials>             </transportClientEndpointBehavior>           </behavior> Where's my WSDL? The metadata story for REST is a bit less automated. In our local webHttp endpoint we've enabled WCF's built-in help, so if you navigate to: http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc/rest/help - you'll see the uri format for making a GET request to the service. The format is the same over Azure, so this is where you'll be connecting: https://[your-namespace].servicebus.windows.net/rest/reverse?string=abc123 Build the service with the new endpoint, open that in a browser and you'll get an XML version of an HTTP status code - a 401 with an error message stating that you haven’t provided an authorization header: <?xml version="1.0"?><Error><Code>401</Code><Detail>MissingToken: The request contains no authorization header..TrackingId:4cb53408-646b-4163-87b9-bc2b20cdfb75_5,TimeStamp:10/3/2012 8:34:07 PM</Detail></Error> By default, the setup of your Service Bus endpoint as a relying party in ACS expects a Simple Web Token to be presented with each service request, and in the browser we're not passing one, so we can't access the service. Note that this request doesn't get anywhere near your on-premise service, Service Bus only relays requests once they've got the necessary approval from ACS. Why didn't the consumer need to get ACS authorization in Part 2? It did, but it was all done behind the scenes in the NetTcpRelayBinding. By specifying our Shared Secret credentials in the consumer, the service call is preceded by a check on ACS to see that the identity provided is a) valid, and b) allowed access to our Service Bus endpoint. By making manual HTTP requests, we need to take care of that ACS check ourselves now. We do that with a simple WebClient call to the ACS endpoint of our service; passing the shared secret credentials, we will get back an SWT: var values = new System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection(); values.Add("wrap_name", "partialTrustConsumer"); //service identity name values.Add("wrap_password", "suCei7AzdXY9toVH+S47C4TVyXO/UUFzu0zZiSCp64Y="); //service identity password values.Add("wrap_scope", "http://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/"); //this is the realm of the RP in ACS var acsClient = new WebClient(); var responseBytes = acsClient.UploadValues("https://sixeyed-ipasbr-sb.accesscontrol.windows.net/WRAPv0.9/", "POST", values); rawToken = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(responseBytes); With a little manipulation, we then attach the SWT to subsequent REST calls in the authorization header; the token contains the Send claim returned from ACS, so we will be authorized to send messages into Service Bus. Running the sample Navigate to http://localhost:2028/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.WebHttpClient/Default.cshtml, enter a string and hit Go! - your string will be reversed by your on-premise service, routed through Azure: Using shared secret client credentials in this way means ACS is the identity provider for your service, and the claim which allows Send access to Service Bus is consumed by Service Bus. None of the authentication details make it through to your service, so your service is not aware who the consumer is (MSDN calls this "anonymous authentication").

  Read the article

• Why do we (really) program to interfaces?

  - by Kyle Burns

  One of the earliest lessons I was taught in Enterprise development was "always program against an interface".  This was back in the VB6 days and I quickly learned that no code would be allowed to move to the QA server unless my business objects and data access objects each are defined as an interface and have a matching implementation class.  Why?  "It's more reusable" was one answer.  "It doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" a slightly more knowing answer.  And let's not forget the discussion ending "it's a standard".  The problem with these responses was that senior people didn't really understand the reason we were doing the things we were doing and because of that, we were entirely unable to realize the intent behind the practice - we simply used interfaces and had a bunch of extra code to maintain to show for it. It wasn't until a few years later that I finally heard the term "Inversion of Control".  Simply put, "Inversion of Control" takes the creation of objects that used to be within the control (and therefore a responsibility of) of your component and moves it to some outside force.  For example, consider the following code which follows the old "always program against an interface" rule in the manner of many corporate development shops: 1: ICatalog catalog = new Catalog(); 2: Category[] categories = catalog.GetCategories(); In this example, I met the requirement of the rule by declaring the variable as ICatalog, but I didn't hit "it doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" because I explicitly created an instance of the concrete Catalog object.  If I want to test the functionality of the code I just wrote I have to have an environment in which Catalog can be created along with any of the resources upon which it depends (e.g. configuration files, database connections, etc) in order to test my functionality.  That's a lot of setup work and one of the things that I think ultimately discourages real buy-in of unit testing in many development shops. So how do I test my code without needing Catalog to work?  A very primitive approach I've seen is to change the line the instantiates catalog to read: 1: ICatalog catalog = new FakeCatalog();   once the test is run and passes, the code is switched back to the real thing.  This obviously poses a huge risk for introducing test code into production and in my opinion is worse than just keeping the dependency and its associated setup work.  Another popular approach is to make use of Factory methods which use an object whose "job" is to know how to obtain a valid instance of the object.  Using this approach, the code may look something like this: 1: ICatalog catalog = CatalogFactory.GetCatalog();   The code inside the factory is responsible for deciding "what kind" of catalog is needed.  This is a far better approach than the previous one, but it does make projects grow considerably because now in addition to the interface, the real implementation, and the fake implementation(s) for testing you have added a minimum of one factory (or at least a factory method) for each of your interfaces.  Once again, developers say "that's too complicated and has me writing a bunch of useless code" and quietly slip back into just creating a new Catalog and chalking any test failures up to "it will probably work on the server". This is where software intended specifically to facilitate Inversion of Control comes into play.  There are many libraries that take on the Inversion of Control responsibilities in .Net and most of them have many pros and cons.  From this point forward I'll discuss concepts from the standpoint of the Unity framework produced by Microsoft's Patterns and Practices team.  I'm primarily focusing on this library because it questions about it inspired this posting. At Unity's core and that of most any IoC framework is a catalog or registry of components.  This registry can be configured either through code or using the application's configuration file and in the most simple terms says "interface X maps to concrete implementation Y".  It can get much more complicated, but I want to keep things at the "what does it do" level instead of "how does it do it".  The object that exposes most of the Unity functionality is the UnityContainer.  This object exposes methods to configure the catalog as well as the Resolve<T> method which is used to obtain an instance of the type represented by T.  When using the Resolve<T> method, Unity does not necessarily have to just "new up" the requested object, but also can track dependencies of that object and ensure that the entire dependency chain is satisfied. There are three basic ways that I have seen Unity used within projects.  Those are through classes directly using the Unity container, classes requiring injection of dependencies, and classes making use of the Service Locator pattern. The first usage of Unity is when classes are aware of the Unity container and directly call its Resolve method whenever they need the services advertised by an interface.  The up side of this approach is that IoC is utilized, but the down side is that every class has to be aware that Unity is being used and tied directly to that implementation. Many developers don't like the idea of as close a tie to specific IoC implementation as is represented by using Unity within all of your classes and for the most part I agree that this isn't a good idea.  As an alternative, classes can be designed for Dependency Injection.  Dependency Injection is where a force outside the class itself manipulates the object to provide implementations of the interfaces that the class needs to interact with the outside world.  This is typically done either through constructor injection where the object has a constructor that accepts an instance of each interface it requires or through property setters accepting the service providers.  When using dependency, I lean toward the use of constructor injection because I view the constructor as being a much better way to "discover" what is required for the instance to be ready for use.  During resolution, Unity looks for an injection constructor and will attempt to resolve instances of each interface required by the constructor, throwing an exception of unable to meet the advertised needs of the class.  The up side of this approach is that the needs of the class are very clearly advertised and the class is unaware of which IoC container (if any) is being used.  The down side of this approach is that you're required to maintain the objects passed to the constructor as instance variables throughout the life of your object and that objects which coordinate with many external services require a lot of additional constructor arguments (this gets ugly and may indicate a need for refactoring). The final way that I've seen and used Unity is to make use of the ServiceLocator pattern, of which the Patterns and Practices team has also provided a Unity-compatible implementation.  When using the ServiceLocator, your class calls ServiceLocator.Retrieve in places where it would have called Resolve on the Unity container.  Like using Unity directly, it does tie you directly to the ServiceLocator implementation and makes your code aware that dependency injection is taking place, but it does have the up side of giving you the freedom to swap out the underlying IoC container if necessary.  I'm not hugely concerned with hiding IoC entirely from the class (I view this as a "nice to have"), so the single biggest problem that I see with the ServiceLocator approach is that it provides no way to proactively advertise needs in the way that constructor injection does, allowing more opportunity for difficult to track runtime errors. This blog entry has not been intended in any way to be a definitive work on IoC, but rather as something to spur thought about why we program to interfaces and some ways to reach the intended value of the practice instead of having it just complicate your code.  I hope that it helps somebody begin or continue a journey away from being a "Cargo Cult Programmer".

  Read the article

• Attaching a Command to the WP7 Application Bar.

  - by mbcrump

  One of the biggest problems that I’ve seen with people creating WP7 applications is how do you bind the application bar to a Relay Command. If your using MVVM then this is particular important. Let’s examine the code that one might add to start with.  <phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar> <shell:ApplicationBar IsVisible="True" IsMenuEnabled="True"> <shell:ApplicationBarIconButton x:Name="appbar_button1" IconUri="/icons/appbar.questionmark.rest.png" Text="About"> <i:Interaction.Triggers> <i:EventTrigger EventName="Click"> <GalaSoft_MvvmLight_Command:EventToCommand Command="{Binding DisplayAbout, Mode=OneWay}" /> </i:EventTrigger> </i:Interaction.Triggers> </shell:ApplicationBarIconButton> <shell:ApplicationBar.MenuItems> <shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem x:Name="menuItem1" Text="MenuItem 1"></shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem> <shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem x:Name="menuItem2" Text="MenuItem 2"></shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem> </shell:ApplicationBar.MenuItems> </shell:ApplicationBar> </phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar> Everything looks right. But we quickly notice that we have a squiggly line under our Interaction.Triggers. The problem is that the object is not a FrameworkObject. This same code would have worked perfect if this were a normal button. OK. Point has been proved. Let’s make the ApplicationBar support Commands. So, go ahead and create a new project using MVVM Light. If you want to check out the source and work along side this tutorial then click here.  7 Easy Steps to have binding on the Application Bar using MVVM Light (I might add that you don’t have to use MVVM Light to get this functionality, I just prefer it.) 1) Download MVVM Light if you don’t already have it and install the project templates. It is available at http://mvvmlight.codeplex.com/. 2) Click File-New Project and navigate to Silverlight for Windows Phone. Make sure you use the MVVM Light (WP7) Template. 3) Now that we have our project setup and ready to go let’s download a wrapper created by Nicolas Humann here, it is called Phone7.Fx. After you download it then extract it somewhere that you can find it. This wrapper will make our application bar/menu item bindable. 4) Right click References inside your WP7 project and add the .dll file to your project. 5) In your MainPage.xaml you will need to add the proper namespace to it. Don’t forget to build your project afterwards. xmlns:Preview="clr-namespace:Phone7.Fx.Preview;assembly=Phone7.Fx.Preview" 6) Now you can add the BindableAppBar to your MainPage.xaml with a few lines of code.  <Preview:BindableApplicationBar x:Name="AppBar" BarOpacity="1.0" > <Preview:BindableApplicationBarIconButton Command="{Binding DisplayAbout}" IconUri="/icons/appbar.questionmark.rest.png" Text="About" /> <Preview:BindableApplicationBar.MenuItems> <Preview:BindableApplicationBarMenuItem Text="Settings" Command="{Binding InputBox}" /> </Preview:BindableApplicationBar.MenuItems> </Preview:BindableApplicationBar> So your final MainPage.xaml will look similar to this: NOTE: The AppBar will be located inside of the Grid using this wrapper.   <!--LayoutRoot contains the root grid where all other page content is placed--> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Transparent"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <!--TitlePanel contains the name of the application and page title--> <StackPanel x:Name="TitlePanel" Grid.Row="0" Margin="24,24,0,12"> <TextBlock x:Name="ApplicationTitle" Text="{Binding ApplicationTitle}" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}" /> <TextBlock x:Name="PageTitle" Text="{Binding PageName}" Margin="-3,-8,0,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}" /> </StackPanel> <!--ContentPanel - place additional content here--> <Grid x:Name="ContentGrid" Grid.Row="1"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Welcome}" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" FontSize="40" /> </Grid> <Preview:BindableApplicationBar x:Name="AppBar" BarOpacity="1.0" > <Preview:BindableApplicationBarIconButton Command="{Binding DisplayAbout}" IconUri="/icons/appbar.questionmark.rest.png" Text="About" /> <Preview:BindableApplicationBar.MenuItems> <Preview:BindableApplicationBarMenuItem Text="Settings" Command="{Binding InputBox}" /> </Preview:BindableApplicationBar.MenuItems> </Preview:BindableApplicationBar> </Grid> 7) Let’s go ahead and create the RelayCommands and write them up to a MessageBox by editing our MainViewModel.cs file. public class MainViewModel : ViewModelBase { public string ApplicationTitle { get { return "MVVM LIGHT"; } } public string PageName { get { return "My page:"; } } public string Welcome { get { return "Welcome to MVVM Light"; } } public RelayCommand DisplayAbout { get; private set; } public RelayCommand InputBox { get; private set; } /// <summary> /// Initializes a new instance of the MainViewModel class. /// </summary> public MainViewModel() { if (IsInDesignMode) { // Code runs in Blend --> create design time data. } else { DisplayAbout = new RelayCommand(() => { MessageBox.Show("About box called!"); }); InputBox = new RelayCommand(() => { MessageBox.Show("settings button called"); }); } } If you run the project now you should get something similar to this (notice the AppBar at the bottom):  Now if you hit the question mark then you will get the following MessageBox: The MenuItem works as well so for Settings: As you can see, its pretty easy to add a Command to the ApplicationBar/MenuItem. If you want to look through the full source code then click here.   Subscribe to my feed

  Read the article

• Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Tips and Tricks&ndash;Part 1: Extensions

  - by ToStringTheory

  I don’t know about you, but when it comes to development, I prefer my environment to be as free of clutter as possible.  It may surprise you to know that I have tried ReSharper, and did not like it, for the reason that I stated above.  In my opinion, it had too much clutter.  Don’t get me wrong, there were a couple of features that I did like about it (inversion of if blocks, code feedback), but for the most part, I actually felt that it was slowing me down. Introduction Another large factor besides intrusiveness/speed in my choice to dislike ReSharper would probably be that I have become comfortable with my current setup and extensions.  I believe I have a good collection, and am quite happy with what I can accomplish in a short amount of time.  I figured that I would share some of my tips/findings regarding Visual Studio productivity here, and see what you had to say. The first section of things that I would like to cover, are Visual Studio Extensions.  In case you have been living under a rock for the past several years, Extensions are available under the Tools menu in Visual Studio: The extension manager enables integrated access to the Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery online with access to a few thousand different extensions.  I have tried many extensions, but for reasons of lack reliability, usability, or features, have uninstalled almost all of them.  However, I have come across several that I find I can not do without anymore: NuGet Package Manager (Microsoft) Perspectives (Adam Driscoll) Productivity Power Tools (Microsoft) Web Essentials (Mads Kristensen) Extensions NuGet Package Manager To be honest, I debated on whether or not to put this in here.  Most people seem to have it, however, there was a time when I didn’t, and was always confused when blogs/posts would say to right click and “Add Package Reference…” which with one of the latest updates is now “Manage NuGet Packages”.  So, if you haven’t downloaded the NuGet Package Manager yet, or don’t know what it is, I would highly suggest downloading it now! Features Simply put, the NuGet Package Manager gives you a GUI and command line to access different libraries that have been uploaded to NuGet. Some of its features include: Ability to search NuGet for packages via the GUI, with information in the detail bar on the right. Quick access to see what packages are in a solution, and what packages have updates available, with easy 1-click updating. If you download a package that requires references to work on other NuGet packages, they will be downloaded and referenced automatically. Productivity Tip If you use any type of source control in Visual Studio as well as using NuGet packages, be sure to right-click on the solution and click "Enable NuGet Package Restore". What this does is add a NuGet package to the solution so that it will be checked in along side your solution, as well as automatically grab packages from NuGet on build if needed. This is an extremely simple system to use to manage your package references, instead of having to manually go into TFS and add the Packages folder. Perspectives I can't stand developing with just one monitor. Especially if it comes to debugging. The great thing about Visual Studio 2010, is that all of the panels and windows are floatable, and can dock to other screens. The only bad thing is, I don't use the same toolset with everything that I am doing. By this, I mean that I don't use all of the same windows for debugging a web application, as I do for coding a WPF application. Only thing is, Visual Studio doesn't save the screen positions for all of the undocked windows. So, I got curious one day and decided to check and see if there was an extension to help out. This is where I found Perspectives. Features Perspectives gives you the ability to configure window positions across any or your monitors, and then to save the positions in a profile. Perspectives offers a Panel to manage different presets/favorites, and a toolbar to add to the toolbars at the top of Visual Studio. Ability to 'Favorite' a profile to add it to the perspectives toolbar. Productivity Tip Take the time to setup profiles for each of your scenarios - debugging web/winforms/xaml, coding, maintenance, etc. Try to remember to use the profiles for a few days, and at the end of a week, you may find that your productivity was never better. Productivity Power Tools Ah, the Productivity Power Tools... Quite possibly one of my most used extensions, if not my most used. The tool pack gives you a variety of enhancements ranging from key shortcuts, interface tweaks, and completely new features to Visual Studio 2010. Features I don't want to bore you with all of the features here, so here are my favorite: Quick Find - Unobtrusive search box in upper-right corner of the code window. Great for searching in general, especially in a file. Solution Navigator - The 'Solution Explorer' on steroids. Easy to search for files, see defined members/properties/methods in files, and my favorite feature is the 'set as root' option. Updated 'Add Reference...' Dialog - This is probably my favorite enhancement period... The 'Add Reference...' dialog redone in a manner that resembles the Extension/Package managers. I especially love the ability to search through all of the references. "Ctrl - Click" for Definition - I am still getting used to this as I usually try to use my keyboard for everything, but I love the ability to hold Ctrl and turn property/methods/variables into hyperlinks, that you click on to see their definitions. Great for travelling down a rabbit hole in an application to research problems. While there are other commands/utilities, I find these to be the ones that I lean on the most for the usefulness. Web Essentials If you have do any type of web development in ASP .Net, ASP .Net MVC, even HTML, I highly suggest grabbing the Web Essentials right NOW! This extension alone is great for productivity in web development, and greatly decreases my development time on new features. Features Some of its best features include: CSS Previews - I say 'previews' because of the multiple kinds of previews in CSS that you get font-family, color, background/background-image previews. This is great for just tweaking UI slightly in different ways and seeing how they look in the CSS window at a glance. Live Preview - One word - awesome! This goes well with my multi-monitor setup. I put the site on one monitor in a Live Preview panel, and then as I make changes to CSS/cshtml/aspx/html, the preview window will update with each save/build automatically. For CSS, you can even turn on live-update, so as you are tweaking CSS, the style changes in real time. Great for tweaking colors or font-sizes. Outlining - Small, but I like to be able to collapse regions/declarations that are in the way of new work, or are just distracting. Commenting Shortcuts - I don't know why it wasn't included by default, but it is nice to have the key shortcuts for commenting working in the CSS editor as well. Productivity Tip When working on a site, hit CTRL-ALT-ENTER to launch the Live Preview window. Dock it to another monitor. When you make changes to the document/css, just save and glance at the other monitor. No need to alt tab, then alt tab before continuing editing. Conclusion These extensions are only the most useful and least intrusive - ones that I use every day. The great thing about Visual Studio 2010 is the extensibility options that it gives developers to utilize. Have an extension that you use that isn't intrusive, but isn't listed here? Please, feel free to comment. I love trying new things, and am always looking for new additions to my toolset of the most useful. Finally, please keep an eye out for Part 2 on key shortcuts in Visual Studio. Also, if you are visiting my site (http://tostringtheory.com || http://geekswithblogs.net/tostringtheory) from an actual browser and not a feed, please let me know what you think of the new styling!

  Read the article

• How to implement smooth flocking

  - by Craig

  I'm working on a simple survival game, avoid the big guy and chase the the small guys to stay alive for as long as possible. I have taken the chase and evade example from MSDN create and drawn 20 mice on the screen. I want the small guys to flock when they arent evading. They are doing this, but it isnt as smooth as I would like it to be. How do i make the movement smoother? Its very jittery.# Below is what I have going at the moment, flocking code is within the IF statement, when it isnt set to evading. Any help would be greatly appreciated! :) namespace ChaseAndEvade { class MouseSprite { public enum MouseAiState { // evading the cat Evading, // the mouse can't see the "cat", and it's wandering around. Wander } // how fast can the mouse move? public float MaxMouseSpeed = 4.5f; // and how fast can it turn? public float MouseTurnSpeed = 0.20f; // MouseEvadeDistance controls the distance at which the mouse will flee from // cat. If the mouse is further than "MouseEvadeDistance" pixels away, he will // consider himself safe. public float MouseEvadeDistance = 100.0f; // this constant is similar to TankHysteresis. The value is larger than the // tank's hysteresis value because the mouse is faster than the tank: with a // higher velocity, small fluctuations are much more visible. public float MouseHysteresis = 60.0f; public Texture2D mouseTexture; public Vector2 mouseTextureCenter; public Vector2 mousePosition; public MouseAiState mouseState = MouseAiState.Wander; public float mouseOrientation; public Vector2 mouseWanderDirection; int separationImpact = 4; int cohesionImpact = 6; int alignmentImpact = 2; int sensorDistance = 50; public void UpdateMouse(Vector2 position, MouseSprite [] mice, int numberMice, int index) { Vector2 catPosition = position; int enemies = numberMice; // first, calculate how far away the mouse is from the cat, and use that // information to decide how to behave. If they are too close, the mouse // will switch to "active" mode - fleeing. if they are far apart, the mouse // will switch to "idle" mode, where it roams around the screen. // we use a hysteresis constant in the decision making process, as described // in the accompanying doc file. float distanceFromCat = Vector2.Distance(mousePosition, catPosition); // the cat is a safe distance away, so the mouse should idle: if (distanceFromCat > MouseEvadeDistance + MouseHysteresis) { mouseState = MouseAiState.Wander; } // the cat is too close; the mouse should run: else if (distanceFromCat < MouseEvadeDistance - MouseHysteresis) { mouseState = MouseAiState.Evading; } // if neither of those if blocks hit, we are in the "hysteresis" range, // and the mouse will continue doing whatever it is doing now. // the mouse will move at a different speed depending on what state it // is in. when idle it won't move at full speed, but when actively evading // it will move as fast as it can. this variable is used to track which // speed the mouse should be moving. float currentMouseSpeed; // the second step of the Update is to change the mouse's orientation based // on its current state. if (mouseState == MouseAiState.Evading) { // If the mouse is "active," it is trying to evade the cat. The evasion // behavior is accomplished by using the TurnToFace function to turn // towards a point on a straight line facing away from the cat. In other // words, if the cat is point A, and the mouse is point B, the "seek // point" is C. // C // B // A Vector2 seekPosition = 2 * mousePosition - catPosition; // Use the TurnToFace function, which we introduced in the AI Series 1: // Aiming sample, to turn the mouse towards the seekPosition. Now when // the mouse moves forward, it'll be trying to move in a straight line // away from the cat. mouseOrientation = ChaseAndEvadeGame.TurnToFace(mousePosition, seekPosition, mouseOrientation, MouseTurnSpeed); // set currentMouseSpeed to MaxMouseSpeed - the mouse should run as fast // as it can. currentMouseSpeed = MaxMouseSpeed; } else { // if the mouse isn't trying to evade the cat, it should just meander // around the screen. we'll use the Wander function, which the mouse and // tank share, to accomplish this. mouseWanderDirection and // mouseOrientation are passed by ref so that the wander function can // modify them. for more information on ref parameters, see // http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/14akc2c7(VS.80).aspx ChaseAndEvadeGame.Wander(mousePosition, ref mouseWanderDirection, ref mouseOrientation, MouseTurnSpeed); // if the mouse is wandering, it should only move at 25% of its maximum // speed. currentMouseSpeed = .25f * MaxMouseSpeed; Vector2 separate = Vector2.Zero; Vector2 moveCloser = Vector2.Zero; Vector2 moveAligned = Vector2.Zero; // What the AI does when it sees other AIs for (int j = 0; j < enemies; j++) { if (index != j) { // Calculate a vector towards another AI Vector2 separation = mice[index].mousePosition - mice[j].mousePosition; // Only react if other AI is within a certain distance if ((separation.Length() < this.sensorDistance) & (separation.Length()> 0) ) { moveAligned += mice[j].mouseWanderDirection; float distance = Math.Abs(separation.Length()); if (distance == 0) distance = 1; moveCloser += mice[j].mousePosition; separation.Normalize(); separate += separation / distance; } } } if (moveAligned.LengthSquared() != 0) { moveAligned.Normalize(); } if (moveCloser.LengthSquared() != 0) { moveCloser.Normalize(); } moveCloser /= enemies; mice[index].mousePosition += (separate * separationImpact) + (moveCloser * cohesionImpact) + (moveAligned * alignmentImpact); } // The final step is to move the mouse forward based on its current // orientation. First, we construct a "heading" vector from the orientation // angle. To do this, we'll use Cosine and Sine to tell us the x and y // components of the heading vector. See the accompanying doc for more // information. Vector2 heading = new Vector2( (float)Math.Cos(mouseOrientation), (float)Math.Sin(mouseOrientation)); // by multiplying the heading and speed, we can get a velocity vector. the // velocity vector is then added to the mouse's current position, moving him // forward. mousePosition += heading * currentMouseSpeed; } } }

  Read the article

• Bouncing off a circular Boundary with multiple balls?

  - by Anarkie

  I am making a game like this : Yellow Smiley has to escape from red smileys, when yellow smiley hits the boundary game is over, when red smileys hit the boundary they should bounce back with the same angle they came, like shown below: Every 10 seconds a new red smiley comes in the big circle, when red smiley hits yellow, game is over, speed and starting angle of red smileys should be random. I control the yellow smiley with arrow keys. The biggest problem I have reflecting the red smileys from the boundary with the angle they came. I don't know how I can give a starting angle to a red smiley and bouncing it with the angle it came. I would be glad for any tips! My js source code : var canvas = document.getElementById("mycanvas"); var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d"); // Object containing some global Smiley properties. var SmileyApp = { radius: 15, xspeed: 0, yspeed: 0, xpos:200, // x-position of smiley ypos: 200 // y-position of smiley }; var SmileyRed = { radius: 15, xspeed: 0, yspeed: 0, xpos:350, // x-position of smiley ypos: 65 // y-position of smiley }; var SmileyReds = new Array(); for (var i=0; i<5; i++){ SmileyReds[i] = { radius: 15, xspeed: 0, yspeed: 0, xpos:350, // x-position of smiley ypos: 67 // y-position of smiley }; SmileyReds[i].xspeed = Math.floor((Math.random()*50)+1); SmileyReds[i].yspeed = Math.floor((Math.random()*50)+1); } function drawBigCircle() { var centerX = canvas.width / 2; var centerY = canvas.height / 2; var radiusBig = 300; ctx.beginPath(); ctx.arc(centerX, centerY, radiusBig, 0, 2 * Math.PI, false); // context.fillStyle = 'green'; // context.fill(); ctx.lineWidth = 5; // context.strokeStyle = '#003300'; // green ctx.stroke(); } function lineDistance( positionx, positiony ) { var xs = 0; var ys = 0; xs = positionx - 350; xs = xs * xs; ys = positiony - 350; ys = ys * ys; return Math.sqrt( xs + ys ); } function drawSmiley(x,y,r) { // outer border ctx.lineWidth = 3; ctx.beginPath(); ctx.arc(x,y,r, 0, 2*Math.PI); //red ctx.fillStyle="rgba(255,0,0, 0.5)"; ctx.fillStyle="rgba(255,255,0, 0.5)"; ctx.fill(); ctx.stroke(); // mouth ctx.beginPath(); ctx.moveTo(x+0.7*r, y); ctx.arc(x,y,0.7*r, 0, Math.PI, false); // eyes var reye = r/10; var f = 0.4; ctx.moveTo(x+f*r, y-f*r); ctx.arc(x+f*r-reye, y-f*r, reye, 0, 2*Math.PI); ctx.moveTo(x-f*r, y-f*r); ctx.arc(x-f*r+reye, y-f*r, reye, -Math.PI, Math.PI); // nose ctx.moveTo(x,y); ctx.lineTo(x, y-r/2); ctx.lineWidth = 1; ctx.stroke(); } function drawSmileyRed(x,y,r) { // outer border ctx.lineWidth = 3; ctx.beginPath(); ctx.arc(x,y,r, 0, 2*Math.PI); //red ctx.fillStyle="rgba(255,0,0, 0.5)"; //yellow ctx.fillStyle="rgba(255,255,0, 0.5)"; ctx.fill(); ctx.stroke(); // mouth ctx.beginPath(); ctx.moveTo(x+0.4*r, y+10); ctx.arc(x,y+10,0.4*r, 0, Math.PI, true); // eyes var reye = r/10; var f = 0.4; ctx.moveTo(x+f*r, y-f*r); ctx.arc(x+f*r-reye, y-f*r, reye, 0, 2*Math.PI); ctx.moveTo(x-f*r, y-f*r); ctx.arc(x-f*r+reye, y-f*r, reye, -Math.PI, Math.PI); // nose ctx.moveTo(x,y); ctx.lineTo(x, y-r/2); ctx.lineWidth = 1; ctx.stroke(); } // --- Animation of smiley moving with constant speed and bounce back at edges of canvas --- var tprev = 0; // this is used to calculate the time step between two successive calls of run function run(t) { requestAnimationFrame(run); if (t === undefined) { t=0; } var h = t - tprev; // time step tprev = t; SmileyApp.xpos += SmileyApp.xspeed * h/1000; // update position according to constant speed SmileyApp.ypos += SmileyApp.yspeed * h/1000; // update position according to constant speed for (var i=0; i<SmileyReds.length; i++){ SmileyReds[i].xpos += SmileyReds[i].xspeed * h/1000; // update position according to constant speed SmileyReds[i].ypos += SmileyReds[i].yspeed * h/1000; // update position according to constant speed } // change speed direction if smiley hits canvas edges if (lineDistance(SmileyApp.xpos, SmileyApp.ypos) + SmileyApp.radius > 300) { alert("Game Over"); } // redraw smiley at new position ctx.clearRect(0,0,canvas.height, canvas.width); drawBigCircle(); drawSmiley(SmileyApp.xpos, SmileyApp.ypos, SmileyApp.radius); for (var i=0; i<SmileyReds.length; i++){ drawSmileyRed(SmileyReds[i].xpos, SmileyReds[i].ypos, SmileyReds[i].radius); } } // uncomment these two lines to get every going // SmileyApp.speed = 100; run(); // --- Control smiley motion with left/right arrow keys function arrowkeyCB(event) { event.preventDefault(); if (event.keyCode === 37) { // left arrow SmileyApp.xspeed = -100; SmileyApp.yspeed = 0; } else if (event.keyCode === 39) { // right arrow SmileyApp.xspeed = 100; SmileyApp.yspeed = 0; } else if (event.keyCode === 38) { // up arrow SmileyApp.yspeed = -100; SmileyApp.xspeed = 0; } else if (event.keyCode === 40) { // right arrow SmileyApp.yspeed = 100; SmileyApp.xspeed = 0; } } document.addEventListener('keydown', arrowkeyCB, true); JSFiddle : http://jsfiddle.net/gj4Q7/

  Read the article

• Let your Signature Experience drive IT-decision making

  - by Tania Le Voi

  Today’s CIO job description:  ‘’Align IT infrastructure and solutions with business goals and objectives ; AND while doing so reduce costs; BUT ALSO, be innovative, ensure the architectures are adaptable and agile as we need to act today on the changes that we may request tomorrow.”   Sound like an unachievable request? The fact is, reality dictates that CIO’s are put under this type of pressure to deliver more with less. In a past career phase I spent a few years as an IT Relationship Manager for a large Insurance company. This is a role that we see all too infrequently in many of our customers, and it’s a shame.  The purpose of this role was to build a bridge, a relationship between IT and the business. Key to achieving that goal was to ensure the same language was being spoken and more importantly that objectives were commonly understood - hence service and projects were delivered to time, to budget and actually solved the business problems. In reality IT and the business are already married, but the relationship is most often defined as ‘supplier’ of IT rather than a ‘trusted partner’. To deliver business value they need to understand how to work together effectively to attain this next level of partnership. The Business cannot compete if they do not get a new product to market ahead of the competition, or for example act in a timely manner to address a new industry problem such as a legislative change. An even better example is when the Application or Service fails and the Business takes a hit by bad publicity, being trending topics on social media and losing direct revenue from online channels. For this reason alone Business and IT need the alignment of their priorities and deliverables now more than ever! Take a look at Forrester’s recent study that found ‘many IT respondents considering themselves to be trusted partners of the business but their efforts are impaired by the inadequacy of tools and organizations’.  IT Meet the Business; Business Meet IT So what is going on? We talk about aligning the business with IT but the reality is it’s difficult to do. Like any relationship each side has different goals and needs and language can be a barrier; business vs. technology jargon! What if we could translate the needs of both sides into actionable information, backed by data both sides understand, presented in a meaningful way?  Well now we can with the Business-Driven Application Management capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager 12cR2! Enterprise Manager’s Business-Driven Application Management capabilities provide the information that IT needs to understand the impact of its decisions on business criteria.  No longer does IT need to be focused solely on speeds and feeds, performance and throughput – now IT can understand IT’s impact on business KPIs like inventory turns, order-to-cash cycle, pipeline-to-forecast, and similar.  Similarly, now the line of business can understand which IT services are most critical for the KPIs they care about. There are a good deal of resources on Oracle Technology Network that describe the functionality of these products, so I won’t’ rehash them here.  What I want to talk about is what you do with these products. What’s next after we meet? Where do you start? Step 1:  Identify the Signature Experience. This is THE business process (or set of processes) that is core to the business, the one that drives the economic engine, the process that a customer recognises the company brand for, reputation, the customer experience, the process that a CEO would state as his number one priority. The crème de la crème of your business! Once you have nailed this it gets easy as Enterprise Manager 12c makes it easy. Step 2:  Map the Signature Experience to underlying IT.  Taking the signature experience, map out the touch points of the components that play a part in ensuring this business transaction is successful end to end, think of it like mapping out a critical path; the applications, middleware, databases and hardware. Use the wealth of Enterprise Manager features such as Systems, Services, Business Application Targets and Business Transaction Management (BTM) to assist you. Adding Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) into the mix will make the end to end customer satisfaction story transparent. Work with the business and define meaningful key performance indicators (KPI’s) and thresholds to enable you to report and action upon. Step 3:  Observe the data over time.  You now have meaningful insight into every step enabling your signature experience and you understand the implication of that experience on your underlying IT.  Watch if for a few months, see what happens and reconvene with your business stakeholders and set clear and measurable targets which can re-define service levels.  Step 4:  Change the information about which you and the business communicate.  It’s amazing what happens when you and the business speak the same language.  You’ll be able to make more informed business and IT decisions. From here IT can identify where/how budget is spent whether on the level of support, performance, capacity, HA, DR, certification etc. IT SLA’s no longer need be focused on metrics such as %availability but structured around business process requirements. The power of this way of thinking doesn’t end here. IT staff get to see and understand how their own role contributes to the business making them accountable for the business service. Take a step further and appraise your staff on the business competencies that are linked to the service availability. For the business, the language barrier is removed by producing targeted reports on the signature experience core to the business and therefore key to the CEO. Chargeback or show back becomes easier to justify as the ‘cost of day per outage’ can be more easily calculated; the business will be able to translate the cost to the business to the cost/value of the underlying IT that supports it. Used this way, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is a key enabler to a harmonious relationship between the end customer the business and IT to deliver ultimate service and satisfaction. Just engage with the business upfront, make the signature experience visible and let Enterprise Manager 12c do the rest. In the next blog entry we will cover some of the Enterprise Manager features mentioned to enable you to implement this new way of working.  

  Read the article

• Struct Method for Loops Problem

  - by Annalyne

  I have tried numerous times how to make a do-while loop using the float constructor for my code but it seems it does not work properly as I wanted. For summary, I am making a TBRPG in C++ and I encountered few problems. But before that, let me post my code. #include <iostream> #include <string> #include <ctime> #include <cstdlib> using namespace std; int char_level = 1; //the starting level of the character. string town; //town string town_name; //the name of the town the character is in. string charname; //holds the character's name upon the start of the game int gems = 0; //holds the value of the games the character has. const int MAX_ITEMS = 15; //max items the character can carry string inventory [MAX_ITEMS]; //the inventory of the character in game int itemnum = 0; //number of items that the character has. bool GameOver = false; //boolean intended for the game over scr. string monsterTroop [] = {"Slime", "Zombie", "Imp", "Sahaguin, Hounds, Vampire"}; //monster name float monsterTroopHealth [] = {5.0f, 10.0f, 15.0f, 20.0f, 25.0f}; // the health of the monsters int monLifeBox; //life carrier of the game's enemy troops int enemNumber; //enemy number //inventory[itemnum++] = "Sword"; class RPG_Game_Enemy { public: void enemyAppear () { srand(time(0)); enemNumber = 1+(rand()%3); if (enemNumber == 1) cout << monsterTroop[1]; //monster troop 1 else if (enemNumber == 2) cout << monsterTroop[2]; //monster troop 2 else if (enemNumber == 3) cout << monsterTroop[3]; //monster troop 3 else if (enemNumber == 4) cout << monsterTroop[4]; //monster troop 4 } void enemDefeat () { cout << "The foe has been defeated. You are victorious." << endl; } void enemyDies() { //if the enemy dies: //collapse declaration cout << "The foe vanished and you are victorious!" << endl; } }; class RPG_Scene_Battle { public: RPG_Scene_Battle(float ini_health) : health (ini_health){}; float getHealth() { return health; } void setHealth(float rpg_val){ health = rpg_val;}; private: float health; }; //---------------------------------------------------------------// // Conduct Damage for the Scene Battle's Damage //---------------------------------------------------------------// float conductDamage(RPG_Scene_Battle rpg_tr, float damage) { rpg_tr.setHealth(rpg_tr.getHealth() - damage); return rpg_tr.getHealth(); }; // ------------------------------------------------------------- // void RPG_Scene_DisplayItem () { cout << "Items: \n"; for (int i=0; i < itemnum; ++i) cout << inventory[i] <<endl; }; In this code I have so far, the problem I have is the battle scene. For example, the player battles a Ghost with 10 HP, when I use a do while loop to subtract the HP of the character and the enemy, it only deducts once in the do while. Some people said I should use a struct, but I have no idea how to make it. Is there a way someone can display a code how to implement it on my game? Edit: I made the do-while by far like this: do RPG_Scene_Battle (player, 20.0f); RPG_Scene_Battle (enemy, 10.0f); cout << "Battle starts!" <<endl; cout << "You used a blade skill and deducted 2 hit points to the enemy!" conductDamage (enemy, 2.0f); while (enemy!=0) also, I made something like this: #include <iostream> using namespace std; int gems = 0; class Entity { public: Entity(float startingHealth) : health(startingHealth){}; // initialize health float getHealth(){return health;} void setHealth(float value){ health = value;}; private: float health; }; float subtractHealthFrom(Entity& ent, float damage) { ent.setHealth(ent.getHealth() - damage); return ent.getHealth(); }; int main () { Entity character(10.0f); Entity enemy(10.0f); cout << "Hero Life: "; cout << subtractHealthFrom(character, 2.0f) <<endl; cout << "Monster Life: "; cout << subtractHealthFrom(enemy, 2.0f) <<endl; cout << "Hero Life: "; cout << subtractHealthFrom(character, 2.0f) <<endl; cout << "Monster Life: "; cout << subtractHealthFrom(enemy, 2.0f) <<endl; }; Struct method, they say, should solve this problem. How can I continously deduct hp from the enemy? Whenever I deduct something, it would return to its original value -_-

  Read the article

• Box2D blocky map. Body, Fixtures a huge map and performance

  - by Solom

  Right now I'm still in the planning phase of a my very first game. I'm creating a "Minecraft"-like game in 2D that features blocks that can be destroyed as well as players moving around the map. For creating the map I chose a 2D-Array of Integers that represent the Block ID. For testing purposes I created a huge map (16348 * 256) and in my prototype that didn't use Box2D everything worked like a charm. I only rendered those blocks that where within the bounds of my camera and got 60 fps straight. The problem started when I decided to use an existing physics-solution rather than implementing my own one. What I had was basically simple hitboxes around the blocks and then I had to manually check if the player collided with any of those in his neighborhood. For more advanced physics as well as the collision detection I want to switch over to Box2D. The problem I have right now is ... how to go about the bodies? I mean, the blocks are of a static bodytype. They don't move on their own, they just are there to be collided with. But as far as I can see it, every block needs his own body with a rectangular fixture attached to it, so as to be destroyable. But for a huge map such as mine, this turns out to be a real performance bottle-neck. (In fact even a rather small map [compared to the other] of 1024*256 is unplayable.) I mean I create thousands of thousands of blocks. Even if I just render those that are in my immediate neighborhood there are hundreds of them and (at least with the debugRenderer) I drop to 1 fps really quickly (on my own "monster machine"). I thought about strategies like creating just one body, attaching multiple fixtures and only if a fixture got hit, separate it from the body, create a new one and destroy it, but this didn't turn out quite as successful as hoped. (In fact the core just dumps. Ah hello C! I really missed you :X) Here is the code: public class Box2DGameScreen implements Screen { private World world; private Box2DDebugRenderer debugRenderer; private OrthographicCamera camera; private final float TIMESTEP = 1 / 60f; // 1/60 of a second -> 1 frame per second private final int VELOCITYITERATIONS = 8; private final int POSITIONITERATIONS = 3; private Map map; private BodyDef blockBodyDef; private FixtureDef blockFixtureDef; private BodyDef groundDef; private Body ground; private PolygonShape rectangleShape; @Override public void show() { world = new World(new Vector2(0, -9.81f), true); debugRenderer = new Box2DDebugRenderer(); camera = new OrthographicCamera(); // Pixel:Meter = 16:1 // Body definition BodyDef ballDef = new BodyDef(); ballDef.type = BodyDef.BodyType.DynamicBody; ballDef.position.set(0, 1); // Fixture definition FixtureDef ballFixtureDef = new FixtureDef(); ballFixtureDef.shape = new CircleShape(); ballFixtureDef.shape.setRadius(.5f); // 0,5 meter ballFixtureDef.restitution = 0.75f; // between 0 (not jumping up at all) and 1 (jumping up the same amount as it fell down) ballFixtureDef.density = 2.5f; // kg / m² ballFixtureDef.friction = 0.25f; // between 0 (sliding like ice) and 1 (not sliding) // world.createBody(ballDef).createFixture(ballFixtureDef); groundDef = new BodyDef(); groundDef.type = BodyDef.BodyType.StaticBody; groundDef.position.set(0, 0); ground = world.createBody(groundDef); this.map = new Map(20, 20); rectangleShape = new PolygonShape(); // rectangleShape.setAsBox(1, 1); blockFixtureDef = new FixtureDef(); // blockFixtureDef.shape = rectangleShape; blockFixtureDef.restitution = 0.1f; blockFixtureDef.density = 10f; blockFixtureDef.friction = 0.9f; } @Override public void render(float delta) { Gdx.gl.glClearColor(1, 1, 1, 1); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); debugRenderer.render(world, camera.combined); drawMap(); world.step(TIMESTEP, VELOCITYITERATIONS, POSITIONITERATIONS); } private void drawMap() { for(int a = 0; a < map.getHeight(); a++) { /* if(camera.position.y - (camera.viewportHeight/2) > a) continue; if(camera.position.y - (camera.viewportHeight/2) < a) break; */ for(int b = 0; b < map.getWidth(); b++) { /* if(camera.position.x - (camera.viewportWidth/2) > b) continue; if(camera.position.x - (camera.viewportWidth/2) < b) break; */ /* blockBodyDef = new BodyDef(); blockBodyDef.type = BodyDef.BodyType.StaticBody; blockBodyDef.position.set(b, a); world.createBody(blockBodyDef).createFixture(blockFixtureDef); */ PolygonShape rectangleShape = new PolygonShape(); rectangleShape.setAsBox(1, 1, new Vector2(b, a), 0); blockFixtureDef.shape = rectangleShape; ground.createFixture(blockFixtureDef); rectangleShape.dispose(); } } } @Override public void resize(int width, int height) { camera.viewportWidth = width / 16; camera.viewportHeight = height / 16; camera.update(); } @Override public void hide() { dispose(); } @Override public void pause() { } @Override public void resume() { } @Override public void dispose() { world.dispose(); debugRenderer.dispose(); } } As you can see I'm facing multiple problems here. I'm not quite sure how to check for the bounds but also if the map is bigger than 24*24 like 1024*256 Java just crashes -.-. And with 24*24 I get like 9 fps. So I'm doing something really terrible here, it seems and I assume that there most be a (much more performant) way, even with Box2D's awesome physics. Any other ideas? Thanks in advance!

  Read the article

• Finding nuggets in ARC discussions

  - by alanc

  A bit over twenty years ago, Sun formed an Architecture Review Committee (ARC) that evaluates proposals to change interfaces between components in Sun software products. During the OpenSolaris days, we opened many of these discussions to the community. While they’re back behind closed doors, and at a different company now, we still continue to hold these reviews for the software from what’s now the Sun Systems Group division of Oracle. Recently one of these reviews was held (via e-mail discussion) to review a proposal to update our GNU findutils package to the latest upstream release. One of the upstream changes discussed was the addition of an “oldfind” program. In findutils 4.3, find was modified to use the fts() function to walk the directory tree, and oldfind was created to provide the old mechanism in case there were bugs in the new implementation that users needed to workaround. In Solaris 11 though, we still ship the find descended from SVR4 as /usr/bin/find and the GNU find is available as either /usr/bin/gfind or /usr/gnu/bin/find. This raised the discussion of if we should add oldfind, and if so what should we call it. Normally our policy is to only add the g* names for GNU commands that conflict with an existing Solaris command – for instance, we ship /usr/bin/emacs, not /usr/bin/gemacs. In this case however, that seemed like it would be more confusing to have /usr/bin/oldfind be the older version of /usr/bin/gfind not of /usr/bin/find. Thus if we shipped it, it would make more sense to call it /usr/bin/goldfind, which several ARC members noted read more naturally as “gold find” than as “g old find”. One of the concerns we often discuss in ARC is if a change is likely to be understood by users or if it will result in more calls to support. As we hit this part of the discussion on a Friday at the end of a long week, I couldn’t resist putting forth a hypothetical support call for this command: “Hello, Oracle Solaris Support, how may I help you?” “My admin is out sick, but he sent an email that he put the findutils package on our server, and I can run goldfind now. I tried it, but goldfind didn’t find gold.” “Did he get the binutils package too?” “No he just said findutils, do we need binutils?” “Well, gold comes in the binutils package, so goldfind would be able to find gold if you got that package.” “How much does Oracle charge for that package?” “It’s free for Solaris users.” “You mean Oracle ships packages of gold to customers for free?” “Yes, if you get the binutils package, it includes GNU gold.” “New gold? Is that some sort of alchemy, turning stuff into gold?” “Not new gold, gold from the GNU project.” “Oracle’s taking gold from the GNU project and shipping it to me?” “Yes, if you get binutils, that package includes gold along with the other tools from the GNU project.” “And GNU doesn’t mind Oracle taking their gold and giving it to customers?” “No, GNU is a non-profit whose goal is to share their software.” “Sharing software sure, but gold? Where does a non-profit like GNU get gold anyway?” “Oh, Google donated it to them.” “Ah! So Oracle will give me the gold that GNU got from Google!” “Yes, if you get the package from us.” “How do I get the package with the gold?” “Just run pkg install binutils and it will put it on your disk.” “We’ve got multiple disks here - which one will it put it on?” “The one with the system image - do you know which one that is? “Well the note from the admin says the system is on the first disk and the users are on the second disk.” “Okay, so it should go on the first disk then.” “And where will I find the gold?” “It will be in the /usr/bin directory.” “In the user’s bin? So thats on the second disk?” “No, it would be on the system disk, with the other development tools, like make, as, and what.” “So what’s on the first disk?” “Well if the system image is there the commands should all be there.” “All the commands? Not just what?” “Right, all the commands that come with the OS, like the shell, ps, and who.” “So who’s on the first disk too?” “Yes. Did your admin say when he’d be back?” “No, just that he had a massive headache and was going home after I tried to get him to explain this stuff to me.” “I can’t imagine why.” “Oh, is why a command too?” “No, _why was a Ruby programmer.” “Ruby? Do you give those away with the gold too?” “Yes, but it comes in the ruby package, not binutils.” “Oh, I’ll have to have my admin get that package too! Thanks!” Needless to say, we decided this might not be the best idea. Since the GNU package hasn’t had to release a serious bug fix in the new find in the past few years, the new GNU find seems pretty stable, and we always have the SVR4 find to use as a fallback in Solaris, so it didn’t seem that adding oldfind was really necessary, so we passed on including it when we update to the new findutils release. [Apologies to Abbott, Costello, their fans, and everyone who read this far. The Gold (linker) page on Wikipedia may explain some of the above, but can’t explain why goldfind is the old GNU find, but gold is the new GNU ld.]

  Read the article

• SharePoint logging to a list

  - by Norgean

  I recently worked in an environment with several servers. Locating the correct SharePoint log file for error messages, or development trace calls, is cumbersome. And once the solution hit the cloud, it got even worse, as we had no access to the log files at all. Obviously we are not the only ones with this problem, and the current trend seems to be to log to a list. This had become an off-hour project, so rather than do the sensible thing and find a ready-made solution, I decided to do it the hard way. So! Fire up Visual Studio, create yet another empty SharePoint solution, and start to think of some requirements. Easy on/offI want to be able to turn list-logging on and off.Easy loggingFor me, this means being able to use string.Format.Easy filteringLet's have the possibility to add some filtering columns; category and severity, where severity can be "verbose", "warning" or "error". Easy on/off Well, that's easy. Create a new web feature. Add an event receiver, and create the list on activation of the feature. Tear the list down on de-activation. I chose not to create a new content type; I did not feel that it would give me anything extra. I based the list on the generic list - I think a better choice would have been the announcement type. Approximately: public void CreateLog(SPWeb web)         {             var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListName);             if (list == null)             {                 var listGuid = web.Lists.Add(LogListName, "Logging for the masses", SPListTemplateType.GenericList);                 list = web.Lists[listGuid];                 list.Title = LogListTitle;                 list.Update();                 list.Fields.Add(Category, SPFieldType.Text, false);                 var stringColl = new StringCollection();                 stringColl.AddRange(new[]{Error, Information, Verbose});                 list.Fields.Add(Severity, SPFieldType.Choice, true, false, stringColl);                 ModifyDefaultView(list);             }         }Should be self explanatory, but: only create the list if it does not already exist (d'oh). Best practice: create it with a Url-friendly name, and, if necessary, give it a better title. ...because otherwise you'll have to look for a list with a name like "Simple_x0020_Log". I've added a couple of fields; a field for category, and a 'severity'. Both to make it easier to find relevant log messages. Notice that I don't have to call list.Update() after adding the fields - this would cause a nasty error (something along the lines of "List locked by another user"). The function for deleting the log is exactly as onerous as you'd expect:         public void DeleteLog(SPWeb web)         {             var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle);             if (list != null)             {                 list.Delete();             }         } So! "All" that remains is to log. Also known as adding items to a list. Lots of different methods with different signatures end up calling the same function. For example, LogVerbose(web, message) calls LogVerbose(web, null, message) which again calls another method which calls: private static void Log(SPWeb web, string category, string severity, string textformat, params object[] texts)         {             if (web != null)             {                 var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle);                 if (list != null)                 {                     var item = list.AddItem(); // NOTE! NOT list.Items.Add… just don't, mkay?                     var text = string.Format(textformat, texts);                     if (text.Length > 255) // because the title field only holds so many chars. Sigh.                         text = text.Substring(0, 254);                     item[SPBuiltInFieldId.Title] = text;                     item[Degree] = severity;                     item[Category] = category;                     item.Update();                 }             } // omitted: Also log to SharePoint log.         } By adding a params parameter I can call it as if I was doing a Console.WriteLine: LogVerbose(web, "demo", "{0} {1}{2}", "hello", "world", '!'); Ok, that was a silly example, a better one might be: LogError(web, LogCategory, "Exception caught when updating {0}. exception: {1}", listItem.Title, ex); For performance reasons I use list.AddItem rather than list.Items.Add. For completeness' sake, let us include the "ModifyDefaultView" function that I deliberately skipped earlier.         private void ModifyDefaultView(SPList list)         {             // Add fields to default view             var defaultView = list.DefaultView;             var exists = defaultView.ViewFields.Cast<string>().Any(field => String.CompareOrdinal(field, Severity) == 0);               if (!exists)             {                 var field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Severity);                 if (field != null)                     defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field);                 field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Category);                 if (field != null)                     defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field);                 defaultView.Update();                   var sortDoc = new XmlDocument();                 sortDoc.LoadXml(string.Format("<Query>{0}</Query>", defaultView.Query));                 var orderBy = (XmlElement) sortDoc.SelectSingleNode("//OrderBy");                 if (orderBy != null && sortDoc.DocumentElement != null)                     sortDoc.DocumentElement.RemoveChild(orderBy);                 orderBy = sortDoc.CreateElement("OrderBy");                 sortDoc.DocumentElement.AppendChild(orderBy);                 field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.Modified];                 var fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef");                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName);                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE");                 orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef);                   fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef");                 field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.ID];                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName);                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE");                 orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef);                 defaultView.Query = sortDoc.DocumentElement.InnerXml;                 //defaultView.Query = "<OrderBy><FieldRef Name='Modified' Ascending='FALSE' /><FieldRef Name='ID' Ascending='FALSE' /></OrderBy>";                 defaultView.Update();             }         } First two lines are easy - see if the default view includes the "Severity" column. If it does - quit; our job here is done.Adding "severity" and "Category" to the view is not exactly rocket science. But then? Then we build the sort order query. Through XML. The lines are numerous, but boring. All to achieve the CAML query which is commented out. The major benefit of using the dom to build XML, is that you may get compile time errors for spelling mistakes. I say 'may', because although the compiler will not let you forget to close a tag, it will cheerfully let you spell "Name" as "Naem". Whichever you prefer, at the end of the day the view will sort by modified date and ID, both descending. I added the ID as there may be several items with the same time stamp. So! Simple logging to a list, with sensible a view, and with normal functionality for creating your own filterings. I should probably have added some more views in code, ready filtered for "only errors", "errors and warnings" etc. And it would be nice to block verbose logging completely, but I'm not happy with the alternatives. (yetanotherfeature or an admin page seem like overkill - perhaps just removing it as one of the choices, and not log if it isn't there?) Before you comment - yes, try-catches have been removed for clarity. There is nothing worse than having a logging function that breaks your site!

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201  | Next Page >