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Search found 166 results on 7 pages for 'iain simpson'.

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• How do you go about finding out whether an idea you've had has already been patented?

  - by Iain Fraser

  I have an idea for image copy-protection that I'm in the process of coding up and plan on selling to one of my clients who sells images online. If successful I think there would be a lot of people in a similar situation to my client who would be interested in the code also. I think this is a fairly unique idea that could be packaged into a saleable product - but if I did do this, I wouldn't want some big corporation decending on me with their lawyers after all my hard work. So before I put too much work into this I'd really like to know how I'd go about finding if this idea has been patented already and whether I'd get in trouble if I sold my product and if it would be worthwhile patenting the idea myself. Although I find the idea of software patenting abhorrent, it would be more to protect myself from the usual suspects than to stop fellow-developers from using the idea (if it is in fact a worthwhile one). I live in Australia, so an idea of who to go and see and a ball park figure of how much money I'd be looking at having to pay would be fantastic (in orders of a magnitude: 100s, 1000s, 10s of thousands of dollars, etc). Cheers Iain

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• A list of game mechanics

  - by Iain

  I'm trying to compile a list of game mechanics, by which I mean high-level/meta game mechanics like Cooperation, Resource Management, Chance and Time Manipulation rather than low level mechanics like running, jumping climbing ladders, etc Does any one have any suggestions or can point me to good existing lists? My WIP list is already proving to be quite useful to me in the way I think about games.

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• Permanent redirect domain to www subdomain without web.config

  - by Lord Simpson

  I've just set up a site via 1and1 and have run into an issue, I want to accomplish the simple task of redirecting the root domain to the www sub domain however due to complications I cant seam to find a way to get it to work. I'm on a Microsoft (asp.net) package so can't use .htaccess, also the IIS server they have doesn't have the URL redirect module installed (so can't use <rewrite> in web.config). They have built in HTTP forwarding options however if I set the root domain to redirect to the www sub domain it just infinitely redirects. Hopefully there is some obvious option/method I've missed during the past two days of searching!

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• How can I cap cloud-costs?

  - by Joe Simpson

  I am looking into launching a cloud-based product for consumers where with a prepaid account they can start a server with a simple click and load up the software and access it remotely. The technical side of that I can manage, but I am worried about the costs escalating ridiculously high for both me and my customers Is there a way I can Limit how much each server can cost me before it will be deactivated See how much a server is currently costing me (so I can deduct it from their account) with it being extremely reliable as I don't want to have to have a giant bill in any possibility.

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• Are there any downsides of 2 developers getting married ?

  - by simpson

  I remember that in my first year at college, the professor told us that his wife is also a software developer, and a few decades ago when there has been a tough period of 2-3 years in the software field they both had been unemployed and had experienced some hard times. Of course I am not asking about this economic downside, as it is a general conclusion for a family working in the same field, and is not related specifically to programming. I am asking about any other possible downsides of a family where both people are programmers. To all developers married to developers - I am not asking if it is "horrible" or something like that, of course it's not, just if there are any specific issues (all kinds of relationships has some specific issues, and at the same time are immune to others). And yes, I am asking about a male developer married to a female developer, I am clarifying to avoid jokes like "I believe that 2 developers can get married in some states" and so on :)

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• Multi option step-by-step walkthrough? [closed]

  - by James Simpson

  I'm looking for a service ideally (but script maybe) that would allow me to create a step-by-step walkthrough, customised by options users choose in earlier steps. It is difficult to describe and if there is a better description I could Google for, please let me know! Basically, I want to start with a few options for a user to click on and then change what comes next based on that click and be able to do this through a whole walk through (explaining how to set a service up). As mentioned earlier, if it was a SAAS I could use (in the vein of desk.com) that would be perfect. Thank you and please ask questions if I've described it poorly!

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• An alternative to a video codec for storing motion changes [on hold]

  - by Andrew Simpson

  I have a 3 dimensional byte array. The 3-d array represents a jpeg image. Each channel/array represents part of the RGB spectrum. I am not interested in retaining black pixels. A black pixel is represented by this atypical arrangement: myarray[0,0,0] =0; myarray[0,0,1] =0; myarray[0,0,2] =0; So, I have flattened this 3d array out to a 1d array by doing this byte[] AFlatArray = new byte[width x height x 3] and then assigning values respective to the coordinate. But like I said I do not want black pixels. So this array has to only contain color pixels with the x,y coordinate. The result I want is to re-represent the image from the i dimension byte array that only contains non-black pixels. How do I do that? It looks like I have to store black pixels as well because of the xy coordinate system. I have tried writing to a binary file but the size of that file is greater than the jpeg file as the jpeg file is compressed. I am using c#.

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• XNA 4.0 SpriteFont not displaying all Characters

  - by Iain Brown

  Am looking for a little help and trying to use SpriteFont in my XNA 4.0 game but the problem is am displaying to string "This is a test" but all that's displayed on the screen is "This is st" so the "a te" are missing from the screen. The space is there for the characters but the letters are not. The code am using is: spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.BackToFront, BlendState.AlphaBlend); spriteBatch.DrawString(font,"this is a test",new Vector2(692,372),Color.White); spriteBatch.Draw(texture,new Rectangle(0,0,100,100),Color.White); spriteBatch.End(); Any help with this would be great!

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• Does a mobile app need more access than the public API of a site?

  - by Iain

  I have a site with a public API, and some mobile app developers have been brought in to produce an iPhone app for the site. They insist they need to see the database schema, but as I understand it, they should only need access to the documented public API. Am I right? Is there something I've missed? I've told them that if there's a feature missing or data they require I can extend the API so that they can access it. I thought a web service API held to much the same principles as OOP object API's, in that the implementation details should be hidden as much as possible. I'm not a mobile app developer so if there is something I don't quite see then please let me know. Any insight or help will be much appreciated.

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• How to get MAC address from c# [migrated]

  - by Andrew Simpson

  I have a C# application. In a routine I have code to get the MAC address from using SendARP. It works on Windows 7 but does not work on Windows XP. I just get a null string returned. This is my code. Thanks... System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("iphlpapi.dll", ExactSpelling = true)] static extern int SendARP(int DestIP, int SrcIP, byte[] pMacAddr, ref int PhyAddrLen); public static PhysicalAddress GetMacAddress(IPAddress ipAddress) { const int MacAddressLength = 6; //i know it is has a length of 6 int length = MacAddressLength; var macBytes = new byte[MacAddressLength]; SendARP(BitConverter.ToInt32(ipAddress.GetAddressBytes(), 0), 0, macBytes, ref length); return new PhysicalAddress(macBytes); }

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• Virtual Economy Setup - Virtual currencies advice

  - by Sarah Simpson

  I'm trying to figure out how to build my virtual economy. It seems like some games have one currency and some of them have up to 3 and 4 different ones. The game is an action game which is currently single player but I'm planning on adding a tournament mode that allows users to compete against each other. The virtual goods that a user would be able to purchase would be either customization to the character or powerups and utilities that give the character more abilities in the game. The character is able to gain coins during game play. The advice I'm trying to get is whether or not it makes sense to set up more than one currency and more than two currencies? What are the pros and cons? Reference to some resources that indicate research would be great.

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• Choosing a (browser) game environment [closed]

  - by Iain

  I apologise in advance if this post is something you've heard a million times already or seems like a trolling attempt. I just want some advice and I'm coming up short with my own Google searches. Basically, I would like to start learning some game development in my own free time (nothing serious, just purely as a hobbyist for fun). I'd like to know what the communities opinions are on the old HTML5/Javascript v Flash argument but purely from a game development perspective. I know people say Flash is dying because of issues like SEO, memory/bandwidth usage and Apple dropping it on tablet and mobile devices, so is it worth me dedicating my free time to learning to use Flash/AS3 for game development or should I focus on HTML5/Javascript? At the moment, I'm not sure HTML5/Javascript is mature enough or has the support tools that Flash does (framework, IDE, etc) and there seems to be a lot more resources online for beginner Flash/AS3 programming. When I'm reading tutorials online for Flash/AS3 I always have it in the back of my head that I'm wasting my time because it won't be around in a few years and I should be investing that time learning HTML5/Javascript. Thoughts? Disclaimer: I'm not trying to spark a flame war or troll anyone - I believe in the right tools for the job and I don't want to waste my time learning something that won't be around in a few years.

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• Best way to store motion changes to reduce memory

  - by Andrew Simpson

  I am comparing jpeg to jpeg in a constant 'video-stream'. i am using EMGU/OpenCV to compare each pixels at the byte level. There are 3 channels to each image (RGB). I had heard that it is common practice to store only the pixels that have changed between frames as a way of conserving memory space. But, if for instance/example I say EVERY pixel has changed (pls note i am using an exaggerated example to make my point and i would normally discard such large changes) then the resultant bytes saved is 3 times larger than the original jpeg. How can I store such motion changes efficiently? thanks

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• Converting 3 dimension byte array to a single byte array [on hold]

  - by Andrew Simpson

  I have a 3 dimensional byte array. The 3-d array represents a jpeg image. Each channel/array represents part of the RGB spectrum. I am not interested in retaining black pixels. A black pixel is represented by this atypical arrangement: myarray[0,0,0] =0; myarray[0,0,1] =0; myarray[0,0,2] =0; So, I have flattened this 3d array out to a 1d array by doing this byte[] AFlatArray = new byte[width x height x 3] and then assigning values respective to the coordinate. But like I said I do not want black pixels. So this array has to only contain color pixels with the x,y coordinate. The result I want is to re-represent the image from the i dimension byte array that only contains non-black pixels. How do I do that? It looks like I have to store black pixels as well because of the xy coordinate system. I have tried writing to a binary file but the size of that file is greater than the jpeg file as the jpeg file is compressed. I am using c#.

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• Is there a simple way to stop enemies standing in the same spot?

  - by Iain

  So: top-down game, my enemies chase the player, when they get within a certain distance they stand still and fire. If they're all coming from the same direction they all end up standing in the same spot (i.e. standing "within" each other), as I'm not currently doing collision detection between enemies - they are free to pass over each other. What's a simple way around this? Either some form of collision detection or some ai?

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• Which JavaScript carousel zooms blocks from the playlist?

  - by Iain Hallam

  I saw a carousel/slider for displaying featured content a while ago that does something that most don't. It started fairly simply, with the top feature large, and a playlist to the side of other featured stories: Feature 1 then began to slide towards the bottom right, while feature 2 moved to occupy the main slot, and the previews of features 3 and 4 moved up: The slider had now completed a whole swap, and was ready to do the same thing with feature 3. My Google-fu seems to be lacking in finding this again; does anyone know of this slider? I think it was based on one of the frameworks, but I'm not sure whether it was jQuery or one of the others.

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• What shall I include in a 10 week web technologies course?

  - by Iain

  In September I will be teaching a university module on web technologies. This session will be available to 1st year (freshman) students who don't necessarily have any programming knowledge or know how the web works. In the 2nd semester I will be teaching Flash, which is my specialism, so I know exactly what I am going to teach, but in the 1st semester I will be teaching them web standards technologies - HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery, PHP and MySQL. Where I need advice is how to proportion the emphasis for each part, and which parts of each technology to cover. Another real issue I'm struggling with is how much of the bad old ways should I teach them? Do they need to know about bold as well as strong, etc. UPDATE: based, on your feedback I will only be teaching the latest version of everything - CSS3, HTML5 etc. I'm not sure exactly how long the semester will be but I'm guessing about 10-12 weeks. Each session is a 2 hour lab. Obviously there's only so much I can cover in that time and it will be up to the students to go a research this stuff properly on W3 schools etc. My ideas so far were: Lesson 0 - Course intro and overview of the current tech landscape. What is out there, what will we be learning, what won't we. What is a web server, URL etc. Looking at different example websites and discussing how they work. Lesson 1 - HTML basics (head, body, title, img, table, a, lists, h1, strong etc) Lesson 2 - CSS for styling and layout - fonts, webfonts, float etc Lesson 3 - Intro to programming JS (variables, loops, conditionals, functions) Lesson 4 - more JS programming fundamentals, DOM manipulation Lesson 5 - jQuery - making things fly about and look cool Lesson 6 - XML and Ajax Lesson 7 - PHP basics - syntax, server-side principles Lesson 8 - PHP and MySQL - forms, logins, saving user info Lesson 9 - don't know Lesson 10 - don't know Please let me know if you think this is the right order, what have I missed, how to use any spare sessions etc. Thanks :) UPDATE BASED ON RESPONSES: Thanks for all your responses - some great stuff. To be absolutely clear, this is not a computer science course, it is a practical module on a creative technology course. The emphasis definitely has to be on making cool things work rather than understanding how the backbone of the internet works. That can come later, if the students are interested. At the end of the module I would like the students to be able to produce a web page or pages that does something cool, using some or all of the technologies I cover. Many of these topics are of course far beyond the scope of a 2 hour session, however I do not have the option of reducing the syllabus, I will just have to explain what the technology does and encourage the student to research it in their own time.

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• Is there a media player that works on HTTPS sites?

  - by Iain Hallam

  I'm currently using Yahoo! Media Player for a site that needs to play MP3 files that are stored on our server. In total, there's quite a bit more than the free limits at Soundcloud, but each file is only a few minutes long. YMP is pretty good, but causes security warnings on HTTPS pages, because it can only be served via HTTP. Is there an equivalent free player I can embed for the HTTPS pages? EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm initially looking for something that will scan the page and turn media links playable.

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• Logitech Microphone (AK5370) inaudible volume

  - by Iain Lane

  I bought this microphone from Amazon last week. It's detected just fine in 12.10. I can see it in the sound preferences. The problem is that the volume is so low as to be inaudible, even when turned up to maximum in this dialog. It is working, as I can see that the meter responds to noise, but it's just too low. alsamixer's control is the same, so that doesn't help. I tried messing around in pulseaudio too, but to no avail. In lsusb it's Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0556:0001 Asahi Kasei Microsystems Co., Ltd AK5370 I/F A/D Converter.

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• How do I remove only some values of a URL parameter in Google Analytics?

  - by Iain Hallam

  I'm using Google Analytics on a DokuWiki site, which uses a URL parameter to decide what to do with the current page: /page is equivalent to: /page?do=show 1) I want to see some of these "modes", but mostly I'd like them counted as viewing the bare page URL itself. The following are the only ones I want to see separately: /page?do=login /page?do=backlinks /page?do=revisions /page?do=subscribe How do I collapse the unwanted modes to the page itself (/page)? 2) Some modes do something that should really not have a page attached, such as: /page1?do=sitemap /page2?do=sitemap How do I get these to show up without the page part (/?do=sitemap)? 3) What do I do with the search mode? Can I remove the page part from this too, and still find out which page people used the search function on? /page?do=search&id=query+text

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• How do I best remove an entity from my game loop when it is dead?

  - by Iain

  Ok so I have a big list of all my entities which I loop through and update. In AS3 I can store this as an Array (dynamic length, untyped), a Vector (typed) or a linked list (not native). At the moment I'm using Array but I plan to change to Vector or linked list if it is faster. Anyway, my question, when an Entity is destroyed, how should I remove it from the list? I could null its position, splice it out or just set a flag on it to say "skip over me, I'm dead." I'm pooling my entities, so an Entity that is dead is quite likely to be alive again at some point. For each type of collection what is my best strategy, and which combination of collection type and removal method will work best?

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• Software or Photoshop plugins for professional photo album design

  - by Iain Fraser

  I am a graphic designer (among other things) and I'm used to doing magazine advertisements, brochures, posters and that sort of thing. Recently I was approached by a photographer who wants a graphic designer to produce wedding albums for him. I have already done a couple for him but I'm finding it hard to work by just arranging my layouts in Photoshop alone. It's very time consuming, but quite repetitive - especially when you're dealing with common page layouts. I know a lot of photographers use album design software to speed up the process a bit. What's the industry standard in terms of album design software?

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• Hook into linux mount/umount event

  - by Homer J. Simpson

  Hi, is there a way to provide post-mount and pre-umount scripts in Linux ? I am trying to do some scripts on storage media when mounted and before umounting (for synching). Any help appreciated.

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• How should I host a site that could potentially get a short spike in traffic of 1000%+

  - by James Simpson

  This is a purely theoretical question, but what if I had a site that would normally only get a couple thousand hits a day, but for a few days each month that could shoot to several hundred thousand or even several million hits over the period of 1-3 days. The site would be pretty bare-bones (as in, 2-3 total pages with 1-2 max MySQL queries on each page and some PHP), so bandwidth wouldn't be the issue, but sheer volume taking down the site would be the main concern. Cloud hosting seems like the best way to go, but would something like Amazon EC2, MediaTemple, or something else be the right choice in this case?

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• Office communicator voice chat

  - by Gareth Simpson

  My company recently mandated a switch from Skype to Office Communicator for IM / voice chat. While Skype was never the be all and end all of VOIP, it was at least usable. With Communicator, if one person is talking, everyone else is basically silent (or as good as) so a normal conversation is impossible. No one can interrupt anyone else, if two people start talking at once it's a crap shoot who gets to be heard and often the person who is inaudible doesn't know it. There do not seem to be any client side settings to fix this. Is there anything that can be done server side or is it just rubbish?

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