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• 'Unblock' / 'Yellow Out' game questions

  - by pimvdb

  I would very much like to build a game that is known as 'Unblock' or 'Yellow Out'. It is a puzzle game in which the task is to move a car out of a parking space by moving other cars in certain directions. These are links where the game can be played: Yellow Out Unblock My questions concerning this game are: Is this game actually licensed? I see it's available under two names (perhaps even more). Does this mean the game idea can be used freely? Is there an article about it? I have not been able to find it on Wikipedia. I would like to gather some information about the game so as to understand more details of it. Is there some database with puzzles available? I can just check the puzzles of existing games, but that's a pain because I have to finish a level to get on to the following one. I was wondering whether there is a general list of puzzles somewhere. Thanks!

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• Game with changing logic

  - by rsprat

  I'm planing to develop a puzzle like mobile game (android/ios) with a different logic for each puzzle. Say, for example one puzzle could be a Rubik's cube and another one a ball maze. Many more new puzzles will appear during the life of the game, and I want the users to be able to play those new puzzles. The standard way for managing this would be through application updates. Each time a new puzzle or bunch of puzzles appear, create a new update for the app that the user can download. However, I would like to do it in a more transparent way. When a new puzzle appears, the basic info of the puzzle would be displayed in the app menu, and the user would be able to play it by just clicking it. What comes to my mind is that the app would automatically download a .dll or .jar and inject it in the application at runtime. Is that even possible? Are there any restrictions from the OS? Is there a better way for solving it? Thanks alot

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• novice needing help on shuffeling an array

  - by steffen Myklebust

  Please help a TOTAL beginner.! I found this post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/56648/whats-the-best-way-to-shuffle-an-nsmutablearray And as i try to deploy this in my own code, I cant get it working... :-( Can anyone help me to resolve this code? To me it looks like the shuffle function is not called..? here is my code: // // shuffle2ViewController.h // shuffle2 #import @interface shuffle2ViewController : UIViewController { NSMutableArray *puzzles; int *randomSort; } - (void)shuffle; @end //============================= // shuffle2ViewController.m ´#import "shuffle2ViewController.h" @implementation shuffle2ViewController (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; NSMutableArray *puzzles = [NSMutableArray arrayWithObjects:@"1",@"2",@"3", @"4",@"5",@"6",@"7",@"8",@"9", @"10",@"11",@"12", nil]; // Call the shuffle function [self shuffle]; // print to log int i; NSLog(@"NEW OLD"); NSLog(@"================="); for (i = 0; i < 12; ++i) NSLog(@" %2i %@", i + 1, [puzzles objectAtIndex:i]); } int randomSort(id obj1, id obj2, void *context ) { // returns random number -1 0 1 return (random()%3 - 1); } (void)shuffle { // call custom sort function [puzzles sortUsingFunction:randomSort context:nil]; } Giving this result: NEW OLD ================= 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 9 10 10 11 11 12 12

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• Generating all unique crossword puzzle grids

  - by heydenberk

  I want to generate all unique crossword puzzle grids of a certain grid size (4x4 is a good size). All possible puzzles, including non-unique puzzles, are represented by a binary string with the length of the grid area (16 in the case of 4x4), so all possible 4x4 puzzles are represented by the binary forms of all numbers in the range 0 to 2^16. Generating these is easy, but I'm curious if anyone has a good solution for how to programmatically eliminate invalid and duplicate cases. For example, all puzzles with a single column or single row are functionally identical, hence eliminating 7 of those 8 cases. Also, according to crossword puzzle conventions, all squares must be contiguous. I've had success removing all duplicate structures, but my solution took several minutes to execute and probably was not ideal. I'm at something of a loss for how to detect contiguity so if anyone has ideas on this it'd be much appreciated. I'd prefer solutions in python but write in whichever language you prefer. If anyone wants, I can post my python code for generating all grids and removing duplicates, slow as it may be.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #005

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of curetted articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 SQL SERVER – Cursor to Kill All Process in Database I indeed wrote this cursor and when I often look back, I wonder how naive I was to write this. The reason for writing this cursor was to free up my database from any existing connection so I can do database operation. This worked fine but there can be a potentially big issue if there was any important transaction was killed by this process. There is another way to to achieve the same thing where we can use ALTER syntax to take database in single user mode. Read more about that over here and here. 2007 Rules of Third Normal Form and Normalization Advantage – 3NF The rules of 3NF are mentioned here Make a separate table for each set of related attributes, and give each table a primary key. If an attribute depends on only part of a multi-valued key, remove it to a separate table If attributes do not contribute to a description of the key, remove them to a separate table. Correct Syntax for Stored Procedure SP Sometime a simple question is the most important question. I often see in industry incorrectly written Stored Procedure. Few writes code after the most outer BEGIN…END and few writes code after the GO Statement. In this brief blog post, I have attempted to explain the same. 2008 Switch Between Result Pan and Query Pan – SQL Shortcut Many times when I am writing query I have to scroll the result displayed in the result set. Most of the developer uses the mouse to switch between and Query Pane and Result Pane. There are few developers who are crazy about Keyboard shortcuts. F6 is the keyword which can be used to switch between query pane and tabs of the result pane. Interesting Observation – Use of Index and Execution Plan Query Optimization is a complex game and it has its own rules. From the example in the article we have discovered that Query Optimizer does not use clustered index to retrieve data, sometime non clustered index provides optimal performance for retrieving Primary Key. When all the rows and columns are selected Primary Key should be used to select data as it provides optimal performance. 2009 Interesting Observation – TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY If you pull up any application or system where there are more than 100 SQL Server Views are created – I am very confident that at one or two places you will notice the scenario wherein View the ORDER BY clause is used with TOP 100 PERCENT. SQL Server 2008 VIEW with ORDER BY clause does not throw an error; moreover, it does not acknowledge the presence of it as well. In this article we have taken three perfect examples and demonstrated which clause we should use when. Comma Separated Values (CSV) from Table Column A Very common question – How to create comma separated values from a table in the database? The answer is also very common if we use XML. Check out this article for quick learning on the same subject. Azure Start Guide – Step by Step Installation Guide Though Azure portal has changed a quite bit since I wrote this article, the concept used in this article are not old. They are still valid and many of the functions are still working as mentioned in the article. I believe this one article will put you on the track to use Azure! Size of Index Table for Each Index – Solution Earlier I have posted a small question on this blog and requested help from readers to participate here and provide a solution. The puzzle was to write a query that will return the size for each index that is on any particular table. We need a query that will return an additional column in the above listed query and it should contain the size of the index. This article presents two of the best solutions from the puzzle. 2010 Well, this week in 2010 was the week of puzzles as I posted three interesting puzzles. Till today I am noticing pretty good interesting in the puzzles. They are tricky but for sure brings a great value if you are a database developer for a long time. I suggest you go over this puzzles and their answers. Did you really know all of the answers? I am confident that reading following three blog post will for sure help you enhance the experience with T-SQL. SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Usage of FAST Hint SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Challenge – Error While Converting Money to Decimal SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Why does RIGHT JOIN Exists 2011 DVM sys.dm_os_sys_info Column Name Changed in SQL Server 2012 Have you ever faced a situation where something does not work? When you try to fix it - you enjoy fixing it and started to appreciate the breaking changes. Well, this was exactly I felt yesterday. Before I begin my story, I want to candidly state that I do not encourage anybody to use * in the SELECT statement. Now the disclaimer is over – I suggest you read the original story – you will love it! Get Directory Structure using Extended Stored Procedure xp_dirtree Here is the question to you – why would you do something in SQL Server where you can do the same task in command prompt much easily. Well, the answer is sometime there are real use cases when we have to do such thing. This is a similar example where I have demonstrated how in SQL Server 2012 we can use extended stored procedure to retrieve directory structure. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever

  - by Josh Holmes

  For the second year in a row, my friend and colleague Jeff Blankenburg has created what is quickly proving to live up to it’s namesake – the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever. Some of the puzzles are technical, some are not but all require that you understand the web, development and technology to solve. Even if you don’t get in on the fantastic prizes that Jeff has lined up, there’s great bragging rights in being able to solve the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever. This year, I was honored enough to get to create three of the puzzles myself – let me know what you think of them. I’m not going to tell you which ones I created now and definitely don’t ask me for hints – Jeff has threatened me if I give any of the puzzle away… ;) All I can say now is “Good luck!”

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• Creating practically solvable 15 puzzle inputs

  - by Ashwin

  I am now developing a 15 puzzle game. I know the method to detect unsolvable puzzles. But unlike 8-puzzle, solution for 15-puzzle takes quite long time for some input states and can be solved within 5 seconds some other set of input states. Now the problem is that I cannot give the user(the player), a problem for which the solution takes more than 10 seconds(if he/she chooses to see the solution). So what I want is that when I initially shuffle the puzzle, I want to only present those puzzles which can be solved within 10 seconds. There must be some way to determine the hardness of the puzzle. I tried searching the net but could not find it. Does anyone know a way of determining the hardness of a puzzle? NOTE : I am using A* algorithm to find out the solution on a computer with 3GB RAM and 2.27GHZ processor.

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• Does it make the game more fun when the user is forced to progress through the levels sequentially rather than letting them pick and play?

  - by BeachRunnerJoe

  Hello. For the first time in my game, I'm stuck with a real design dilemma. I guess that's a good thing ;) I'm building a word puzzle game that has five levels, each with 30 puzzles. Currently, the user has to solve one puzzle at a time before moving to the next. However, I'm finding the user occasionally gets stuck on a puzzle, at which point they can no longer play until they solve it. This is obviously bad because many people will probably just quit playing the game and delete the app. The only elegant solution I can find to helping the player get unstuck is changing the design of the game to allow the users to pick any puzzle to play at any time. This way, if they get stuck, they can come back to it later and at least they have other puzzles to play in the meantime. It's my opinion, however, that this new flow design doesn't make the game as fun as the original flow design where the player has to complete a puzzle before moving to the next. To me, it's like anything else, when you only have one of something, it's more enjoyable, but when you have 30 of something, it's far less enjoyable. In fact, when I present the user with 30 puzzles to choose from, I'm concerned I might be making them feel like it's a lot of work they have to do and that's bad. I even had a tester voluntarily tell me that being forced to complete a puzzle before moving to the next is actually motivating. My questions are... Do you agree/disagree? Do you have any suggestions for how I can help the player get unstuck? Thanks so much in advance for your thoughts! EDIT: I should mention that I've already considered a few other solutions to helping the user get unstuck, but none of them seem like good ideas. They are... Add more hints: Currently, the user gets two hints per puzzle. If I increase the hint count, it only makes the game more easy and still leaves the possibility of the user getting stuck. Add a "Show Solution" button: This seems like a bad idea because it's my opinion this takes the fun out of the game for many people who would probably otherwise solve the puzzle if they didn't have the quick option to see the solution.

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• Front-end developer interview questions

  - by peirix

  There are a lot of good interview questions (even "puzzles") for software developers here on SO, but I was wondering if anyone had some good questions for a front-end developer position. We're looking for someone who knows HTML+CSS+JS. Some of the obvious questions: Have you worked with javascript libraries (which?) Are you following the development of HTML5 and CSS3 Do you know any good "puzzles" for a front-end developer? Maybe a JS fizz-buzz?

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• SQL SERVER – A Puzzle Part 4 – Fun with SEQUENCE in SQL Server 2012 – Guess the Next Value

  - by pinaldave

  It seems like every weekend I get a new puzzle in my mind. Before continuing I suggest you read my previous posts here where I have shared earlier puzzles. A Puzzle – Fun with SEQUENCE in SQL Server 2012 – Guess the Next Value  A Puzzle Part 2 – Fun with SEQUENCE in SQL Server 2012 – Guess the Next Value A Puzzle Part 3 – Fun with SEQUENCE in SQL Server 2012 – Guess the Next Value After reading above three posts, I am very confident that you all will be ready for the next set of puzzles now. First execute the script which I have written here. Now guess what will be the next value as requested in the query. USE TempDB GO -- Create sequence CREATE SEQUENCE dbo.SequenceID AS DECIMAL(3,0) START WITH 1 INCREMENT BY -1 MINVALUE 1 MAXVALUE 3 CYCLE NO CACHE; GO SELECT next value FOR dbo.SequenceID; -- Guess the number SELECT next value FOR dbo.SequenceID; -- Clean up DROP SEQUENCE dbo.SequenceID; GO Please note that Starting value is 1, Increment value is the negative value of -1 and Minimum value is 3. Now let us first assume how this will work out. In our example of the sequence starting value is equal to 1 and decrement value is -1, this means the value should decrement from 1 to 0. However, the minimum value is 1. This means the value cannot further decrement at all. What will happen here? The natural assumption is that it should throw an error. How many of you are assuming about query will throw an ERROR? Well, you are WRONG! Do not blame yourself, it is my fault as I have told you only half of the story. Now if you have voted for error, let us continue running above code in SQL Server Management Studio. The above script will give the following output: Isn’t it interesting that instead of error out it is giving us result value 3. To understand the answer about the same, carefully observe the original syntax of creating SEQUENCE – there is a keyword CYCLE. This keyword cycles the values between the minimum and maximum value and when one of the range is exhausted it cycles the values from the other end of the cycle. As we have negative incremental value when query reaches to the minimum value or lower end it will cycle it from the maximum value. Here the maximum value is 3 so the next logical value is 3. If your business requirement is such that if sequence reaches the maximum or minimum value, it should throw an error, you should not use the keyword cycle, and it will behave as discussed. I hope, you are enjoying the puzzles as much as I am enjoying it. If you have any interesting puzzle to share, please do share with me and I will share this on blog with due credit to you. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• What makes a game a game vs something else like a puzzle or a toy?

  - by Shannon John Clark

  Famously the Sims and similar games have been described by some designers as Toys and not "really" games. I'm curious if there is a good answer to what makes something a game. For example many companies sell Sudoku games - EA has an iPhone one, IronSudoku offers a great web based one, and there are countless others on most platforms. Many newspapers publish Sudoku puzzles in their print editions and often online. What differentiates a game from a puzzle? (or are all Sudoku "games" misnamed?) I'm not convinced there is a simple or easy answer - but I'd love to be proven wrong. I've seen some definitions and emphasize "rules" as core to something being a game (vs. "real life") but puzzles have rules as well - as do many other things. I'm open to answers that either focus only on computer games (on any platform) or which expand to include games and gameplay across many platforms. Here to I'm not fully convinced the lines are clear - is a "game" of D&D played over a virtual tabletop with computer dice rollers, video & audio chat a computer game or something else? (I'd lean towards something else - but where do you draw that line?)

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• Advice: The first-time interviewer's dilemna

  - by shan23

  I've been working in my first job for about 2 years now, and I've been "asked" to interview a potential teammate (whom I might have to mentor as well) on pretty short notice (2 days from now). Initially, I had been given a free rein(or so I thought, and hence agreed), but today, I've been told "not to pose bookish questions" - implying I can only ask basic programming puzzles and stuff similar to the 'fizbuzz' question. I strongly believe that not knowing basic algorithmic notations(the haziest ideas of space/time complexities) or the tiniest idea of regular expressions would make working with the guy very difficult for anyone. I know i'm asking for a lot here, but according to you, what would be a comprehensive way to test out the absolutely basic requirements of a CS guy(he has 2 yrs of exp) without sounding too pedantic/bookish etc ? It seems it would be legit to ask C questions/simple puzzles only....but I really do want to have something a bit different from "finding loops in linked lists" that has kind of become the opening statement of most techie interviews !! This is a face-to-face interview with about an hour or more of time - I looked at Steve's basic phone-screen questions, and I was wondering if there exists a guide on "basic face-to-face interview questions" that I can use(or compile from the community's answers here). EDIT: The position is mostly for a kernel level C programming job, with some smattering of C++ required for writing the test framework.

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• Ubuntu 11.10 loads from live usb fine, but boots to black screen from harddrive. Why?

  - by Estel

  A few days ago I had a hard drive failure, which was running Windows XP (32-bit) just fine. The second hard drive in my computer held a few unimportant files, so I formatted it in the Ubuntu setup and installed 11.10 without a hitch. I had been using it for about a week, but decided to install Windows 7 (64-bit) in order to utilize Networking with my home server (running Windows Server 2000). My system is 64-bit based, and thus I had no problems installing other than a basic RAM error that required me to remove my RAM down to a single stick. I played with the settings in Windows 7 for around an hour before I shut down. After reinstalling the RAM, Windows 7 would not boot. In this, I then assumed that something about my system was rejecting Win7 and I reinstalled Ubuntu. However, now Ubuntu (11.10) boots into black screen, and I've already attempted activating the grub menu with the shift key, and following steps listed here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/BlankScreen but nothing seems to work. I've reinstalled twice now, with the same result each time. Now, the very odd part about this whole scenario is that the USB I installed from has no problems booting as a live USB. This puzzles me greatly, because the hard drive boots straight to black screen and the live USB loads normally. At this point, my only theory is that the boot sector of the hard disk was somehow corrupted with Win7, and that Ubuntu was unable to completely write through. I used Darik's Boot n Nuke to wipe the drive, but was met with an error, this also puzzles me because the hard disk has no promblems reading or writing. Any suggestions/comments are appreciated. If you have a theory, I will be more than happy to oblige. Additional information: Intel Core2 Duo e6400 2.13GHz nVidia GeForce 7-series (7900 GS) 4 GB DDR2 333MHz (2x 2GB) Dell XPS 410 BIOS Revision 2.5.3

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• How do I produce "enjoyably" random, as opposed to pseudo-random?

  - by Hilton Campbell

  I'm making a game which presents a number of different kinds of puzzles in sequence. I choose each puzzle with a pseudorandom number. For each puzzle, there are a number of variations. I choose the variation with another pseudorandom number. And so on. The thing is, while this produces near-true randomness, this isn't what the player really wants. The player typically wants what they perceive to be and identify as random, but only if it doesn't tend to repeat puzzles. So, not really random. Just unpredictable. Giving it some thought, I can imagine hacky ways of doing it. For example, temporarily eliminating the most recent N choices from the set of possibilities when selecting a new choice. Or assigning every choice an equal probability, reducing a choice's probability to zero on selection, and then increasing all probabilities slowly with each selection. I assume there's an established way of doing this, but I just don't know the terminology so I can't find it. Anyone know? Or has anyone solved this in a pleasing way?

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• Puzzle: find the minimum number of weights

  - by avd

  I came across this question: say given two weights 1 and 3, u can weigh 1,2 (by 3-1),3,4 (by 3+1). Now find the minimum number of weights so that you can measure 1 to 1000. So the answer was 1,3,9,27... I want to know how do you arrive at such a solution means powers of 3. What is the thought process? Source: http://classic-puzzles.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20Interview%20Puzzles Solution: http://classic-puzzles.blogspot.com/2006/12/solution-to-shopkeeper-problem.html

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• Which language should I learn to create a sudoku game?

  - by Brandan

  I'd like to learn a new programming language, something besides all the scripting languages I've used for the past many years (Ruby, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, bash). I figured it might be interesting to make a sudoku game since there are plenty of documented algorithms and it only requires fairly simple data structures. It might start out as either a generator or a solver of puzzles, not necessarily both and not necessarily with a GUI. My goal is primarily to learn some new programming concepts beyond MVC and UI design, secondarily for this thing to be pretty fast. Is there a language that particularly shines for these sorts of constraint satisfaction problems? Is it suited to a functional language like Haskell or a highly concurrent language like Erlang (say for solving puzzles much larger than 9 x 9)? Or is this question mostly meaningless?

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• Friday Fun: Shape Fold

  - by Asian Angel

  This week’s game comes with lots of puzzle solving, brain-teasing goodness to keep you busy. On each level you will need to rotate, twist, and/or move the hinged puzzle pieces into their proper shape. Do you have the patience and skill to solve all the puzzles or will you be forced to admit defeat? 7 Ways To Free Up Hard Disk Space On Windows HTG Explains: How System Restore Works in Windows HTG Explains: How Antivirus Software Works

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• SQL SERVER – Simple Explanation and Puzzle with SOUNDEX Function and DIFFERENCE Function

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier this week I asked a question where I asked how to Swap Values of the column without using CASE Statement. Read here: A Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement,there were more than 50 solutions proposed in the comment. There were many creative solutions. I have mentioned my personal favorite (different ones) here: Solution of Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement. However, I received lots of questions regarding one of the Solution by SIJIN KUMAR V P. He has used the function SOUNDEX in his solution. The request was to explain how SOUNDEX and DIFFERENCE works. Well, there are pretty decent documentations provided over here SOUNDEX function and DIFFERENCE over on MSDN and if I attempt to explain this function I will end up writing the same details which are available on MSDN. Instead of writing theory, we will try to learn this function by using a couple of simple puzzles. You try to solve the puzzles using the MSDN and see if you can learn something very quickly. In simple words - SOUNDEX converts an alphanumeric string to a four-character code to find similar-sounding words or names. The first character of the code is the first character of character_expression and the second through fourth characters of the code are numbers that represent the letters in the expression. Vowels incharacter_expression are ignored unless they are the first letter of the string. DIFFERENCE function returns an integer value. The  integer returned is the number of characters in the SOUNDEX values that are the same. The return value ranges from 0 through 4: 0 indicates weak or no similarity, and 4 indicates strong similarity or the same values. Learning Puzzle 1: Now let us run following four queries and observe its output. SELECT SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority') SdxValue SELECT SOUNDEX('SLTR') SdxValue SELECT SOUNDEX('SaLaTaRa') SdxValue SELECT SOUNDEX('SaLaTaRaM') SdxValue When you look at the result set all the four values are same. The reason for all the values to be same is as for SQL Server SOUNDEX function all the four strings are similarly sounding string. Learning Puzzle 2: Now let us run following five queries and observe its output. SELECT DIFFERENCE (SOUNDEX('SLTR'),SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE (SOUNDEX('TH'),SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE ('SQLAuthority',SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE ('SLTR',SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE ('SLTR','SQLAuthority') When you look at the result set you will get the result in the ranges from 1 to 4. Here is how it works if your result is 0 which means absolutely not relevant to each other and if your result is 1 which means the results are relevant to each other. Have you ever used above two functions in your business need or on production server? If yes, would you please leave a comment with use cases. I believe it will be beneficial to everyone. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Game Review: God of Light

  Luckily I came across this title at a very early stage. If I remember correctly, I took notice of God of Light on Twitter right on the weekend it has been published on the Play Store. "Sit back and become immersed into the world of God of Light, the game that rethinks the physics puzzle genre with its unique environment exploration gameplay, amazing graphics and exclusive soundtrack created by electronic music icon UNKLE. Join cute game mascot, Shiny, on his way to saving the universe from the impending darkness. Play through a variety of exciting game worlds and dozens of levels with mind-blowing puzzles. Your goal is to explore game levels, seek for game objects that reflect, split, combine, paint, bend and teleport rays of light energy to activate the Sources of Life and bring light back to the universe." Mastering the various reflection items in God of Light is very easy to learn and new elements are introduced during the game. Amazing puzzle game Here's the initial review I posted on the Play Store: "Great change in puzzles Fantastic and refreshing concept of puzzle solving. The effects and the music match very well, putting the player in the right mood to game. Get enlightened and grow your skills until you are a true God of Light." And it remains true, even after completing the first realm completely. Similar to Quell it took me only a couple of hours during the evening to complete all levels in the available three realms, unfortunately. God of Light currently consists of 75 levels, well it's 25 in each realm to be precise, and the challenges are increasing. Compared to the iOS version from the AppStore, God of Light is available for free on Android - at least the first realm (25 levels). Unlocking the other two remaining realms is done through an in-app purchase. The visual appearance, the sound effects and the background music provided by UNKLE makes God of Light a superb package for any puzzle gamer. Whether it is simply reflecting light over multiple mirrors, or later on bending the rays of light with black holes, or using prisms to either split, enforce, or colourise your beam, God of Light is great fun and offers a good amount of joy. Check out the following screenshots for some impressions. God of Light: Astonishing graphics and visual appeal throughout the game God of Light - Introduction to the game during the first levels. New light items are introduced at each stage during the game play God of Light: Increasing complexity and puzzle fun Hopefully, Playmous is going to provide more astonishing looking realms and interesting gimmicks in future versions. Play Store: God of Light Also, check out the latest game updates on the official web site of Playmous

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• What is a good stopword in full text indexation?

  - by Benoit

  When you go to the Appendix D in Oracle Text Reference they provide lists of stopwords used by Oracle Text when indexing table contents. When I see the English list, nothing puzzles me. But the reason why the French list includes moyennant (French for in view of which) for example is unclear. Oracle has probably thought it through more than once before including it. How would you constitute a list of appropriate stopwords if you were to design an indexer?

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• Should I keep investing into data structures and algorithms?

  - by 4bu3li

  These days, I'm investing heavily in data structures and algorithms and trying to solve some programming puzzles. I'm trying to code and solve with Java and Clojure. Am I wasting my time? should I invest more in technologies and frameworks that I already know in order to gain deeper knowledge (the ins and the outs) and be able to code with them more quickly? By studying data structures and algorithms, am I going to become a better programmer or those subjects are only important during college years?

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• Should I keep investing into data structures and algorithms?

  - by Chiron

  These days, I'm investing heavily in data structures and algorithms and trying to solve some programming puzzles. I'm trying to code and solve with Java and Clojure. Am I wasting my time? should I invest more in technologies and frameworks that I already know in order to gain deeper knowledge (the ins and the outs) and be able to code with them more quickly? By studying data structures and algorithms, am I going to become a better programmer or those subjects are only important during college years?

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• Why can any user read the content in my homedir?

  - by Digiplace

  Why is it that the default setting makes it possible for user A to look in the homedir of user B and vice versa? And furthermore..that user can not only look into the homedir of another user, he can also open any document he wants to. It feels very insecure to me. There should be more privacy for users. I know how to prevent this situation, but it puzzles me why this should be possible in the first place.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #049

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Two Connections Related Global Variables Explained – @@CONNECTIONS and @@MAX_CONNECTIONS @@CONNECTIONS Returns the number of attempted connections, either successful or unsuccessful since SQL Server was last started. @@MAX_CONNECTIONS Returns the maximum number of simultaneous user connections allowed on an instance of SQL Server. The number returned is not necessarily the number currently configured. Query Editor – Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio This post may be very simple for most of the users of SQL Server 2005. Earlier this year, I have received one question many times – Where is Query Analyzer in SQL Server 2005? I wrote small post about it and pointed many users to that post – SQL SERVER – 2005 Query Analyzer – Microsoft SQL SERVER Management Studio. Recently I have been receiving similar question. OUTPUT Clause Example and Explanation with INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE SQL Server 2005 has a new OUTPUT clause, which is quite useful. OUTPUT clause has access to insert and deleted tables (virtual tables) just like triggers. OUTPUT clause can be used to return values to client clause. OUTPUT clause can be used with INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to identify the actual rows affected by these statements. OUTPUT clause can generate a table variable, a permanent table, or temporary table. Even though, @@Identity will still work with SQL Server 2005, however I find the OUTPUT clause very easy and powerful to use. Let us understand the OUTPUT clause using an example. Find Name of The SQL Server Instance Based on database server stored procedures has to run different logic. We came up with two different solutions. 1) When database schema is very much changed, we wrote completely new stored procedure and deprecated older version once it was not needed. 2) When logic depended on Server Name we used global variable @@SERVERNAME. It was very convenient while writing migrating script which depended on the server name for the same database. Explanation of TRY…CATCH and ERROR Handling With RAISEERROR Function One of the developers at my company thought that we can not use the RAISEERROR function in new feature of SQL Server 2005 TRY… CATCH. When asked for an explanation he suggested SQL SERVER – 2005 Explanation of TRY… CATCH and ERROR Handling article as excuse suggesting that I did not give example of RAISEERROR with TRY…CATCH. We all thought it was funny. Just to keep records straight, TRY… CATCH can sure use RAISEERROR function. Different Types of Cache Objects Serveral kinds of objects can be stored in the procedure cache: Compiled Plans: When the query optimizer finishes compiling a query plan, the principal output is compiled plan. Execution contexts: While executing a compiled plan, SQL Server has to keep track of information about the state of execution. Cursors: Cursors track the execution state of server-side cursors, including the cursor’s current location within a resultset. Algebrizer trees: The Algebrizer’s job is to produce an algebrizer tree, which represents the logic structure of a query. Open SSMS From Command Prompt – sqlwb.exe Example This article is written by request and suggestion of Sr. Web Developer at my organization. Due to the nature of this article most of the content is referred from Book On-Line. sqlwbcommand prompt utility which opens SQL Server Management Studio. Squib command does not run queries from the command prompt. sqlcmd utility runs queries from command prompt, read for more information. 2008 Puzzle – Solution – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation Just a day before I wrote article SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation which was inspired by SQL Server MVP Jacob Sebastian. I suggest that before continuing this article read the original puzzle question SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation.The question was if the computed column was of datatype TINYINT how to create a Computed Column of datatype INT? 2008 – Find If Index is Being Used in Database It is very often I get a query that how to find if any index is being used in the database or not. If any database has many indexes and not all indexes are used it can adversely affect performance. If the number of indices are higher it reduces the INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE operation but increase the SELECT operation. It is recommended to drop any unused indexes from table to improve the performance. 2009 Interesting Observation – Execution Plan and Results of Aggregate Concatenation Queries If you want to see what’s going on here, I think you need to shift your point of view from an implementation-centric view to an ANSI point of view. ANSI does not guarantee processing the order. Figure 2 is interesting, but it will be potentially misleading if you don’t understand the ANSI rule-set SQL Server operates under in most cases. Implementation thinking can certainly be useful at times when you really need that multi-million row query to finish before the backup fire off, but in this case, it’s counterproductive to understanding what is going on. SQL Server Management Studio and Client Statistics Client Statistics are very important. Many a times, people relate queries execution plan to query cost. This is not a good comparison. Both parameters are different, and they are not always related. It is possible that the query cost of any statement is less, but the amount of the data returned is considerably larger, which is causing any query to run slow. How do we know if any query is retrieving a large amount data or very little data? 2010 I encourage all of you to go through complete series and write your own on the subject. If you write an article and send it to me, I will publish it on this blog with due credit to you. If you write on your own blog, I will update this blog post pointing to your blog post. SQL SERVER – ORDER BY Does Not Work – Limitation of the View 1 SQL SERVER – Adding Column is Expensive by Joining Table Outside View – Limitation of the View 2 SQL SERVER – Index Created on View not Used Often – Limitation of the View 3 SQL SERVER – SELECT * and Adding Column Issue in View – Limitation of the View 4 SQL SERVER – COUNT(*) Not Allowed but COUNT_BIG(*) Allowed – Limitation of the View 5 SQL SERVER – UNION Not Allowed but OR Allowed in Index View – Limitation of the View 6 SQL SERVER – Cross Database Queries Not Allowed in Indexed View – Limitation of the View 7 SQL SERVER – Outer Join Not Allowed in Indexed Views – Limitation of the View 8 SQL SERVER – SELF JOIN Not Allowed in Indexed View – Limitation of the View 9 SQL SERVER – Keywords View Definition Must Not Contain for Indexed View – Limitation of the View 10 SQL SERVER – View Over the View Not Possible with Index View – Limitations of the View 11 SQL SERVER – Get Query Running in Session I was recently looking for syntax where I needed a query running in any particular session. I always remembered the syntax and ha d actually written it down before, but somehow it was not coming to mind quickly this time. I searched online and I ended up on my own article written last year SQL SERVER – Get Last Running Query Based on SPID. I felt that I am getting old because I forgot this really simple syntax. Find Total Number of Transaction on Interval In one of my recent Performance Tuning assignments I was asked how do someone know how many transactions are happening on a server during certain interval. I had a handy script for the same. Following script displays transactions happened on the server at the interval of one minute. You can change the WAITFOR DELAY to any other interval and it should work. 2011 Here are two DMV’s which are newly introduced in SQL Server 2012 and provides vital information about SQL Server. DMV – sys.dm_os_volume_stats – Information about operating system volume DMV – sys.dm_os_windows_info – Information about Operating System SQL Backup and FTP – A Quick and Handy Tool I have used this tool extensively since 2009 at numerous occasion and found it to be very impressive. What separates it from the crowd the most – it is it’s apparent simplicity and speed. When I install SQLBackupAndFTP and configure backups – all in 1 or 2 minutes, my clients are always impressed. Quick Note about JOIN – Common Questions and Simple Answers In this blog post we are going to talk about join and lots of things related to the JOIN. I recently started office hours to answer questions and issues of the community. I receive so many questions that are related to JOIN. I will share a few of the same over here. Most of them are basic, but note that the basics are of great importance. 2012 Importance of User Without Login Question: “In recent version of SQL Server we can create user without login. What is the use of it?” Great question indeed. Let me first attempt to answer this question but after reading my answer I need your help. I want you to help him as well with adding more value to it. Preserve Leading Zero While Coping to Excel from SSMS Earlier I wrote two articles about how to efficiently copy data from SSMS to Excel. Since I wrote that post there are plenty of interest generated on this subject. There are a few questions I keep on getting over this subject. One of the question is how to get the leading zero preserved while copying the data from SSMS to Excel. Well it is almost the same way as my earlier post SQL SERVER – Excel Losing Decimal Values When Value Pasted from SSMS ResultSet. The key here is in EXCEL and not in SQL Server. Solution – 2 T-SQL Puzzles – Display Star and Shortest Code to Display 1 Earlier on this blog we had asked two puzzles. The response from all of you is nothing but Amazing. I have received 350+ responses. Many are valid and many were indeed something I had not thought about it. I strongly suggest you read all the puzzles and their answers here - trust me if you start reading the comments you will not stop till you read every single comment. Seriously trust me on it. Personally I have learned a lot from it. Identify Most Resource Intensive Queries – SQL in Sixty Seconds #028 – Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlYy-TGaaA Importance of User Without Login – T-SQL Demo Script Earlier I wrote a blog post about SQL SERVER – Importance of User Without Login and my friend and SQL Expert Vinod Kumar has written excellent follow up blog post about Contained Databases inside SQL Server 2012. Now lots of people asked me if I can also explain the same concept again so here is the small demonstration for it. Let me show you how login without user can help. Before we continue on this subject I strongly recommend that you read my earlier blog post here. In following demo I am going to demonstrate following situation. Login using the System Admin account Create a user without login Checking Access Impersonate the user without login Checking Access Revert Impersonation Give Permission to user without login Impersonate the user without login Checking Access Revert Impersonation Clean up Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Looking for a free high-quality utility that can help me create an animated GIF: a rotating picture.

  - by Fantomas

  I have a 128x128 image of a cube (projection) like this one: http://www.math.cornell.edu/~mec/Winter2009/Lipa/Puzzles/pics/rubiks-cube.jpg I need to make a rotating gif out of a static image. I am looking for a free (or trial) utility or a script that can do that. Os in the order of preference: Windows, Mac Leopard, Ubuntu Linux. Thanks!

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