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• Opinions on collision detection objects with a moving scene

  - by Evan Teran

  So my question is simple, and I guess it boils down to how anal you want to be about collision detection. To keep things simple, lets assume we're talking about 2D sprites defined by a bounding box. In addition, let's assume that my sprite object has a function to detect collisions like this: S.collidesWith(other); Finally the scene is moving and "walls" in the scene can move, an object may not touch a wall. So a simple implementation might look like this (psuedo code): moveWalls(); moveSprite(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } The problem with this is that if the sprite and wall move towards each other, depending on the circumstances (such as diagonal moment). They may pass though each other (unlikely but could happen). So I may do this instead. moveWalls(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } moveSprite(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } This takes care of the passing through each other issue, but another rare issue comes up. If they are adjacent to each other (literally the next pixel) and both the wall and the sprite are moving left, then I will get an invalid collision since the wall moves, checks for collision (hit) then the sprite is moved. Which seems unfair. In addition, to that, the redundant collision detection feels very inefficient. I could give the player movement priority alleviating the first issue but it is still checking twice. moveSprite(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } moveWalls(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } Am I simply over thinking this issue, should this just be chalked up to "it'll happen rare enough that no one will care"? Certainly looking at old sprite based games, I often find situations where the collision detection has subtle flaws, but I figure by now we can do better :-P. What are people's thoughts?

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• When to call glEnable(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB)?

  - by Steven Lu

  I have a rendering system where I draw to an FBO with a multisampled renderbuffer, then blit it to another FBO with a texture in order to resolve the samples in order to read off the texture to perform post-processing shading while drawing to the backbuffer (FBO index 0). Now I'd like to get some correct sRGB output... The problem is the behavior of the program is rather inconsistent between when I run it on OS X and Windows and this also changes depending on the machine: On Windows with the Intel HD 3000 it will not apply the sRGB nonlinearity but on my other machine with a Nvidia GTX 670 it does. On the Intel HD 3000 in OS X it will also apply it. So this probably means that I'm not setting my GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB enable state at the right points in the program. However I can't seem to find any tutorials that actually tell me when I ought to enable it, they only ever mention that it's dead easy and comes at no performance cost. I am currently not loading in any textures so I haven't had a need to deal with linearizing their colors yet. To force the program to not simply spit back out the linear color values, what I have tried is simply comment out my glDisable(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB) line, which effectively means this setting is enabled for the entire pipeline, and I actually redundantly force it back on every frame. I don't know if this is correct or not. It certainly does apply a nonlinearization to the colors but I can't tell if this is getting applied twice (which would be bad). It could apply the gamma as I render to my first FBO. It could do it when I blit the first FBO to the second FBO. Why not? I've gone so far as to take screen shots of my final frame and compare raw pixel color values to the colors I set them to in the program: I set the input color to RGB(1,2,3) and the output is RGB(13,22,28). That seems like quite a lot of color compression at the low end and leads me to question if the gamma is getting applied multiple times. I have just now gone through the sRGB equation and I can verify that the conversion seems to be only applied once as linear 1/255, 2/255, and 3/255 do indeed map to sRGB 13/255, 22/255, and 28/255 using the equation 1.055*C^(1/2.4)+0.055. Given that the expansion is so large for these low color values it really should be obvious if the sRGB color transform is getting applied more than once. So, I still haven't determined what the right thing to do is. does glEnable(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB) only apply to the final framebuffer values, in which case I can just set this during my GL init routine and forget about it hereafter?

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• How do I stack images to simulate depth using Core Animation?

  - by Jeffrey Berthiaume

  I have a series of UIImages with which I need to simulate depth. I can't use scaling because I need to be able to rotate the parent view, and the images should look like they're stacked visibly in front of each other, not on the same plane. I made a new ViewController-based project and put this in the viewDidLoad (as well as attached three 120x120 pixel images named 1.png, 2.png, and 3.png): - (void)viewDidLoad { // display image 3 UIImageView *three = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"3.png"]]; three.center = CGPointMake(160 + 60, 240 - 60); [self.view addSubview:three]; // rotate image 3 around the z axis // THIS IS INCORRECT CATransform3D theTransform = three.layer.transform; theTransform.m34 = 1.0 / -1000; three.layer.transform = theTransform; // display image 2 UIImageView *two = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"2.png"]]; two.center = CGPointMake(160, 240); [self.view addSubview:two]; // display image 1 UIImageView *one = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"1.png"]]; one.center = CGPointMake(160 - 60, 240 + 60); [self.view addSubview:one]; // rotate image 3 around the z axis // THIS IS INCORRECT theTransform = one.layer.transform; theTransform.m34 = 1.0 / 1000; one.layer.transform = theTransform; // release the images [one release]; [two release]; [three release]; // rotate the parent view around the y axis theTransform = self.view.layer.transform; theTransform.m14 = 1.0 / -500; self.view.layer.transform = theTransform; [super viewDidLoad]; } I have very specific reasons why I'm not using an EAGLView and why I'm not loading the images as CALayers (i.e. why I'm using UIImageViews for each one). This is just a quick demo that I can use to work out exactly what I need in my parent application. Is there some matrix way to translate these 2d images along the z-axis so they will look like what I'm trying to represent? I've gone through the other StackOverflow articles as well as the Wikipedia references, and have not found what I'm looking for -- although I might not necessarily be using the right terms for what I'm trying to do.

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• How to resize an openGL window created with wglCreateContext?

  - by Nick

  Is it possible to resize an openGL window (or device context) created with wglCreateContext without disabling it? If so how? Right now I have a function which resizes the DC but the only way I could get it to work was to call DisableOpenGL and then re-enable. This causes any textures and other state changes to be lost. I would like to do this without the disable so that I do not have to go through the tedious task of recreating the openGL DC state. HWND hWnd; HDC hDC; void View_setSizeWin32(int width, int height) { // resize the window LPRECT rec = malloc(sizeof(RECT)); GetWindowRect(hWnd, rec); SetWindowPos( hWnd, HWND_TOP, rec->left, rec->top, rec->left+width, rec->left+height, SWP_NOMOVE ); free(rec); // sad panda DisableOpenGL( hWnd, hDC, hRC ); EnableOpenGL( hWnd, &hDC, &hRC ); glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); glOrtho(-(width/2), width/2, -(height/2), height/2, -1.0, 1.0); // have fun recreating the openGL state.... } void EnableOpenGL(HWND hWnd, HDC * hDC, HGLRC * hRC) { PIXELFORMATDESCRIPTOR pfd; int format; // get the device context (DC) *hDC = GetDC( hWnd ); // set the pixel format for the DC ZeroMemory( &pfd, sizeof( pfd ) ); pfd.nSize = sizeof( pfd ); pfd.nVersion = 1; pfd.dwFlags = PFD_DRAW_TO_WINDOW | PFD_SUPPORT_OPENGL | PFD_DOUBLEBUFFER; pfd.iPixelType = PFD_TYPE_RGBA; pfd.cColorBits = 24; pfd.cDepthBits = 16; pfd.iLayerType = PFD_MAIN_PLANE; format = ChoosePixelFormat( *hDC, &pfd ); SetPixelFormat( *hDC, format, &pfd ); // create and enable the render context (RC) *hRC = wglCreateContext( *hDC ); wglMakeCurrent( *hDC, *hRC ); } void DisableOpenGL(HWND hWnd, HDC hDC, HGLRC hRC) { wglMakeCurrent( NULL, NULL ); wglDeleteContext( hRC ); ReleaseDC( hWnd, hDC ); }

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• OpenGL, how to set a monochrome texture to a colored shape?

  - by Santiago

  I'm developing on Android with OpenGL ES, I draw some cubes and I change its colors with glColor4f. Now, what I want is to give a more realistic effect on the cubes, so I create a monochromatic 8bit depth, 64x64 pixel size PNG file. I loaded on a texture, and here is my problem, witch is the way to combine the color and the texture to get a colorized and textured cubes onto the screen? I'm not an expert on OpenGL, I tried this: On create: public void asignBitmap(GL10 gl, Bitmap bitmap) { int[] textures = new int[1]; gl.glGenTextures(1, textures, 0); mTexture = textures[0]; gl.glBindTexture(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, mTexture); gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL10.GL_NEAREST); gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL10.GL_LINEAR); gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL10.GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL10.GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); gl.glTexEnvf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL10.GL_REPLACE); GLUtils.texImage2D(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL10.GL_ALPHA, bitmap, 0); ByteBuffer tbb = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(texCoords.length * 4); tbb.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); mTexBuffer = tbb.asFloatBuffer(); for (int i = 0; i < 48; i++) mTexBuffer.put(texCoords[i]); mTexBuffer.position(0); } And OnDraw: public void draw(GL10 gl, int alphawires) { gl.glColor4f(1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.5f); //RED gl.glBindTexture(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, mTexture); gl.glBlendFunc(GL10.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL10.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D); gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_BLEND); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); gl.glTexCoordPointer(2, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, mTexBuffer); //Set the face rotation gl.glFrontFace(GL10.GL_CW); //Point to our buffers gl.glVertexPointer(3, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, vertexBuffer); //Enable the vertex and color state gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); //Draw the vertices as triangles, based on the Index Buffer information gl.glDrawElements(GL10.GL_TRIANGLES, 36, GL10.GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, indexBuffer); //Disable the client state before leaving gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_BLEND); gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D); } I'm even not sure if I have to use a blend option, because I don't need transparency, but is a plus :)

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• OpenGL, how to set a monocrome texture to a colored shape?

  - by Santiago

  I'm developing on Android with OpenGL ES, I draw some cubes and I change its colors with glColor4f. Now, what I want is to give a more realistic effect on the cubes, so I create a monochromatic 8bit depth, 64x64 pixel size PNG file. I loaded on a texture, and here is my problem, witch is the way to combine the color and the texture to get a colorized and textured cubes onto the screen? I'm not an expert on OpenGL, I tried this: On create: public void asignBitmap(GL10 gl, Bitmap bitmap) { int[] textures = new int[1]; gl.glGenTextures(1, textures, 0); mTexture = textures[0]; gl.glBindTexture(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, mTexture); gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL10.GL_NEAREST); gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL10.GL_LINEAR); gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL10.GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL10.GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); gl.glTexEnvf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL10.GL_REPLACE); GLUtils.texImage2D(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL10.GL_ALPHA, bitmap, 0); ByteBuffer tbb = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(texCoords.length * 4); tbb.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); mTexBuffer = tbb.asFloatBuffer(); for (int i = 0; i < 48; i++) mTexBuffer.put(texCoords[i]); mTexBuffer.position(0); } And OnDraw: public void draw(GL10 gl, int alphawires) { gl.glColor4f(1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.5f); //RED gl.glBindTexture(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, mTexture); gl.glBlendFunc(GL10.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL10.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D); gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_BLEND); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); gl.glTexCoordPointer(2, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, mTexBuffer); //Set the face rotation gl.glFrontFace(GL10.GL_CW); //Point to our buffers gl.glVertexPointer(3, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, vertexBuffer); //Enable the vertex and color state gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); //Draw the vertices as triangles, based on the Index Buffer information gl.glDrawElements(GL10.GL_TRIANGLES, 36, GL10.GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, indexBuffer); //Disable the client state before leaving gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_BLEND); gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D); } I'm even not sure if I have to use a blend option, because I don't need transparency, but is a plus :) Thank's

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• OpenGL Coordinate system confusion

  - by user146780

  Maybe I set up GLUT wrong. Basically I want verticies to be reletive to their size in pixels. Ex:right now if I create a hexagon, it hakes up the whole screen even though the units are 6. #include <iostream> #include <stdlib.h> //Needed for "exit" function #include <cmath> //Include OpenGL header files, so that we can use OpenGL #ifdef __APPLE__ #include <OpenGL/OpenGL.h> #include <GLUT/glut.h> #else #include <GL/glut.h> #endif using namespace std; //Called when a key is pressed void handleKeypress(unsigned char key, //The key that was pressed int x, int y) { //The current mouse coordinates switch (key) { case 27: //Escape key exit(0); //Exit the program } } //Initializes 3D rendering void initRendering() { //Makes 3D drawing work when something is in front of something else glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); } //Called when the window is resized void handleResize(int w, int h) { //Tell OpenGL how to convert from coordinates to pixel values glViewport(0, 0, w, h); glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); //Switch to setting the camera perspective //Set the camera perspective glLoadIdentity(); //Reset the camera gluPerspective(45.0, //The camera angle (double)w / (double)h, //The width-to-height ratio 1.0, //The near z clipping coordinate 200.0); //The far z clipping coordinate } //Draws the 3D scene void drawScene() { //Clear information from last draw glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); glLoadIdentity(); //Reset the drawing perspective glPolygonMode(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_FILL); glBegin(GL_POLYGON); //Begin quadrilateral coordinates //Trapezoid glColor3f(255,0,0); for(int i = 0; i < 6; ++i) { glVertex2d(sin(i/6.0*2* 3.1415), cos(i/6.0*2* 3.1415)); } glEnd(); //End quadrilateral coordinates glutSwapBuffers(); //Send the 3D scene to the screen } int main(int argc, char** argv) { //Initialize GLUT glutInit(&argc, argv); glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_DOUBLE | GLUT_RGBA | GLUT_DEPTH); glutInitWindowSize(400, 400); //Set the window size //Create the window glutCreateWindow("Basic Shapes - videotutorialsrock.com"); initRendering(); //Initialize rendering //Set handler functions for drawing, keypresses, and window resizes glutDisplayFunc(drawScene); glutKeyboardFunc(handleKeypress); glutReshapeFunc(handleResize); glutMainLoop(); //Start the main loop. glutMainLoop doesn't return. return 0; //This line is never reached } How can I make it so that a polygon of 0,0 10,0 10,10 0,10 defines a polygon starting at the top left of the screen and is a width and height of 10 pixels? Thanks

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• Weird Datagrid / paint behaviour

  - by Shane.C

  The scenario: A method sends out a broadcast packet, and returned packets that are validated are deemed okay to be added as a row in my datagrid (The returned packets are from devices i want to add into my program). So for each packet returned, containing information about a device, i create a new row. This is done by first sending packets out, creating rows and adding them to a list of rows that are to be added, and then after 5 seconds (In which case all packets would have returned by then) i add the rows. Here's a few snippets of code. Here for each returned packet, i create a row and add it to a list; DataRow row = DGSource.NewRow(); row["Name"] = deviceName; row["Model"] = deviceModel; row["Location"] = deviceLocation; row["IP"] = finishedIP; row["MAC"] = finishedMac; row["Subnet"] = finishedSubnet; row["Gateway"] = finishedGateway; rowsToAdd.Add(row); Then when the timer elapses; void timerToAddRows_Elapsed(object sender, System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs e) { timerToAddRows.Enabled = false; try { int count = 0; foreach (DataRow rowToAdd in rowsToAdd) { DGSource.Rows.Add(rowToAdd); count++; } rowsToAdd.Clear(); DGAutoDevices.InvokeEx(f => DGAutoDevices.Refresh()); lblNumberFound.InvokeEx(f => lblNumberFound.Text = count + " new devices found."); } catch { } } So at this point, each row has been added, and i call the re paint, by doing refresh. (Note: i've also tried refreshing the form itself, no avail). However, when the datagrid shows the rows, the scroll bar / datagrid seems to have weird behavour..for example i can't highlight anything with clicks (It's set to full row selection), and the scroll bar looks like so; Calling refresh doesn't work, although if i resize the window even 1 pixel, or minimize and maximise, the problem is solved. Other things to note : The method that get's the packets and adds the rows to the list, and then from the list to the datagrid runs in it's own thread. Any ideas as to something i might be missing here?

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• Is there anything wrong with my texture loading method ?

  - by José Joel.

  I'm a noob in openGL and trying to learn as much as possible. I'm using this method to load my openGL textures, loading every .png as RGBA4444. I'm doing anything incorrect ? - (void)loadTexture:(NSString*)nombre { CGImageRef textureImage =[UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:nombre ofType:nil]].CGImage; if (textureImage == nil) { NSLog(@"Failed to load texture image"); return; } textureWidth = NextPowerOfTwo(CGImageGetWidth(textureImage)); textureHeight = NextPowerOfTwo(CGImageGetHeight(textureImage)); imageSizeX= CGImageGetWidth(textureImage); imageSizeY= CGImageGetHeight(textureImage); GLubyte *textureData = (GLubyte *)calloc(1,textureWidth * textureHeight * 4); // Por 4 pues cada pixel necesita 4 bytes, RGBA CGContextRef textureContext = CGBitmapContextCreate(textureData, textureWidth,textureHeight,8, textureWidth * 4,CGImageGetColorSpace(textureImage),kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedLast ); CGContextDrawImage(textureContext, CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, (float)textureWidth, (float)textureHeight), textureImage); //Convert "RRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGBBBBBBBBAAAAAAAA" to "RRRRGGGGBBBBAAAA" void *tempData = malloc(textureWidth * textureHeight * 2); unsigned int* inPixel32 = (unsigned int*)textureData; unsigned short* outPixel16 = (unsigned short*)tempData; for(int i = 0; i < textureWidth * textureHeight ; ++i, ++inPixel32) *outPixel16++ = ((((*inPixel32 >> 0) & 0xFF) >> 4) << 12) | // R ((((*inPixel32 >> 8) & 0xFF) >> 4) << 8) | // G ((((*inPixel32 >> 16) & 0xFF) >> 4) << 4) | // B ((((*inPixel32 >> 24) & 0xFF) >> 4) << 0); // A free(textureData); textureData = tempData; CGContextRelease(textureContext); glGenTextures(1, &textures[0]); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, textures[0]); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, textureWidth, textureHeight, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_4_4_4_4 , textureData); free(textureData); glTexParameterf(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameterf(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); } And this is my dealloc method: - (void)dealloc { glDeleteTextures(1,textures); [super dealloc]; }

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• Java - StackOverflow Error on recursive 2D boolean array method that shouldn't happen.

  - by David W.

  Hey everyone, I'm working on a runnable java applet that has a fill feature much like the fill method in drawing programs such as Microsoft Paint. This is how my filling method works: 1.) The applet gets the color that the user clicked on using .getRGB 2.) The applet creates a 2D boolean array of all the pixels in the window, with the value "true" if that pixel is the same color as the color clicked on or "false" if not. The point of this step is to keep the .getRGB method out of the recursive method to hopefully prevent this error. 3.) The applet recursively searches the 2D array of booleans where the user clicked, recording each adjacent point that is "true" in an ArrayList. The method then changes each point it records to false and continues. 4.) The applet paints every point stored in the ArrayList to a user selected color. All of the above steps work PERFECTLY if the user clicks within a small area, where only a few thousand pixels or so have their color changed. If the user selects a large area however (such as about 360,000 / the size of the applet window), the applet gets to the recursive stage and then outputs this error: Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-1" java.lang.StackOverflowError at java.util.ArrayList.add(ArrayList.java:351) at paint.recursiveSearch(paint.java:185) at paint.recursiveSearch(paint.java:190) at paint.recursiveSearch(paint.java:190) at paint.recursiveSearch(paint.java:190) at paint.recursiveSearch(paint.java:190) at paint.recursiveSearch(paint.java:190) at paint.recursiveSearch(paint.java:190) (continues for a few pages) Here is my recursive code: public void recursiveSearch(boolean [][] list, Point p){ if(isValid(p)){ if(list[(int)p.y][(int)p.x]){ fillPoints.add(p); list[(int)p.y][(int)p.x] = false; recursiveSearch(list, new Point(p.x-1,p.y));//Checks to the left recursiveSearch(list, new Point(p.x,p.y-1));//Checks above recursiveSearch(list, new Point(p.x+1,p.y));//Checks to the right recursiveSearch(list, new Point(p.x,p.y+1));//Checks below } } } Is there any way I can work around an error like this? I know that the loop will never go on forever, it just could take a lot of time. Thanks in advance.

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• glReadPixels() returning non-accurate value

  - by max

  I'm trying to implement the flood fill algorithm. But glReadPixels() is returning float RGB values of a pixel which are slightly different from the actual value set by me, causing the algorithm to fail. Why is this happening? Outputting returned RGB values to check. #include<iostream> #include<GL/glut.h> using namespace std; float boundaryColor[3]={0,0,0}, interiorColor[3]={0,0,0.5}, fillColor[3]={1,0,0}; float readPixel[3]; void init(void) { glClearColor(0,0,0.5,0); glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); gluOrtho2D(0,500,0,500); } void setPixel(int x,int y) { glColor3fv(fillColor); glBegin(GL_POINTS); glVertex2f(x,y); glEnd(); } void getPixel(int x, int y, float *color) { glReadPixels(x,y,1,1,GL_RGB,GL_FLOAT,color); } void floodFill(int x,int y) { getPixel(x,y,readPixel); //outputting values here to check cout<<readPixel[0]<<endl; cout<<readPixel[1]<<endl; cout<<readPixel[2]<<endl; if( readPixel[0]==interiorColor[0] && readPixel[1]==interiorColor[1] && readPixel[2]==interiorColor[2] ) { setPixel(x,y); floodFill(x+1,y); floodFill(x,y+1); floodFill(x-1,y); floodFill(x,y-1); } } void display() { glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); glColor3fv(boundaryColor); glLineWidth(3); glBegin(GL_LINE_STRIP); glVertex2i(150,150); glVertex2i(150,350); glVertex2i(350,350); glVertex2i(350,150); glVertex2i(150,150); glEnd(); floodFill(200,200); glFlush(); } int main(int argc,char** argv) { glutInit(&argc,argv); glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_SINGLE | GLUT_RGB); glutInitWindowPosition(100,100); glutInitWindowSize(500,500); glutCreateWindow("Flood fill"); init(); glutDisplayFunc(display); glutMainLoop(); }

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• Looking for some help working with premultiplied alpha

  - by user315142

  I am trying to update a source image with the contents of multiple destination images. From what I can tell using premultiplied alpha is the way to go with this, but I think I am doing something wrong (function below). the image I am starting with is initialized with all ARGB values set to 0. When I run the function once the resulting image looks great, but when I start compositing on any others all the pixels that have alpha information get really messed up. Does anyone know if I am doing something glaringly wrong or if there is something extra I need to do to modify the color values? void CompositeImage(unsigned char *src, unsigned char *dest, int srcW, int srcH){ int w = srcW; int h = srcH; int px0; int px1; int px2; int px3; int inverseAlpha; int r; int g; int b; int a; int y; int x; for (y = 0; y < h; y++) { for (x= 0; x< w*4; x+=4) { // pixel number px0 = (y*w*4) + x; px1 = (y*w*4) + (x+1); px2 = (y*w*4) + (x+2); px3 = (y*w*4) + (x+3); inverseAlpha = 1 - src[px3]; // create new values r = src[px0] + inverseAlpha * dest[px0]; g = src[px1] + inverseAlpha * dest[px1]; b = src[px2] + inverseAlpha * dest[px2]; a = src[px3] + inverseAlpha * dest[px3]; // update destination image dest[px0] = r; dest[px1] = g; dest[px2] = b; dest[px3] = a; } } }

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• Professional WordPress Business Themes

  - by Matt

  Every now and then JustSkins.com receives quote requests for WordPress design for business websites. Most companies now keep up to date with a blog on their corporate website, that showcases their day to day activities & progresses.  Getting such professional wordpress driven website designed from the scratch costs you a lot. If you have decided to make WordPress the CMS for your business website, there are some Professional WordPress themes you can take a look at. We have created this list to help you save some time to do all the trying and the testing. Optimize by WooThemes Last year one of the most popular Business theme by WooThemes was the Coffee Break theme, Optimize is further adaptation of the same. It is simple, sleek design with great functionality. The customizable front page lets you showcase your work or product etc. Demo | Price: $70, Developer Price: $150 | DOWNLOAD WooThemes is also offering their whole Business theme pack for a very very reasonable fee, If you like multiple designs from them you can get this big deal for only $125 Onyx , Impacto by Simple Themes Simple Themes has been making very crisp & beautiful WordPress Themes & are also very reasonably priced. If their themes solve your purpose $39 membership for 3 months is a good deal.  If you are looking to create quick website, landing page or micro site their templates are best. Demo | Price: $39 for 3 Months Membership Rejuvenate by Templatic One of the most beautiful Premium WordPress Theme, Available in 4 elegant color schemes. This theme can be used for your Beauty, Spa and Studio Business. Demo | Price: $65  | DOWNLOAD Templatic has created great professional business templates, such as Gourmet, Real Estate, Job Board, Automobile & lots More. You can also get a Best Value Offer in $299 for all of Templatic Themes. TheProfessional by ElegantThemes Elegant Themes is known to provide very beautiful & straightforward designs. The professional wordpress theme is a simple, crisp & concise Theme you can use to create a business website. The 3 short blurbs on the homepage are simple, which can be used to point them to your major offerings and the prominent slider indicates a clear call to action. There are 52 themes to choose from & Elegant Themes is giving a great offer at such a small yearly fee. Demo | Price: $39 Yearly Membership  | DOWNLOAD Elegant Themes has a cluster of 52 magnificent themes, and all you have to do is pay $39 to win access to all of them. Join today! Some of the Professional designs that I like for a business website are SimplePress and Corporation. Extatic by Chimera Themes The theme includes plenty of great features including custom feature tour pages, portfolio sections, static feature areas, pricing table page, 20+ shortcodes, multiple page/post options, unlimited custom sidebars which can be assigned to posts/pages, advanced theme style editor and options page and much more. Its a must buy Demo | Price: $37 | DOWNLOAD Corporate by Clover Themes Simple Theme for a small business. Corporate is an clean, powerful and feature-rich corporate theme with dynamic and energy design. Demo | Price: $69.95 | DOWNLOAD Bizco by Themify Bizco is a very professional template for wordpress targeted at corporate and product based businesses. This theme is simple yet highly functional and is suitable for showcasing features of your service or product. With the custom page template you can change the display of your pages and posts easily with our visual custom panel. Demo | Price: $70  |DOWNLOAD Devision by Themetrust Devision is a small business wordpress theme that can be used to make a business website within a few minutes. It makes it very easy to showcase and highlight your services or product on the homepage. Demo | Price: Euro 39 | DOWNLOAD BizPress by WPZoom A professional business WordPress theme from WPZoom suitable for companies, organizations, product showcases or other business websites. The theme comes with 4 colour options, featured products / services slider on the homepage, drop down menus, theme options page etc. Demo | Price: $ 69 | DOWNLOAD Clean Classy Corporate by ThemeFuse A very impressive WordPress business theme, that can be used in multiple ways. It is suitable for many kinds, like web products, services, hosting etc etc. Clean Classy Corporate WordPress Theme has a clean crisp look and is professional in appeal. Demo | Price: $49  | DOWNLOAD Insdustry by ThemeJam A powerful Business WordPress Template along with lots of options, colors, and customizable features. This is one for almost any kind of blogger, corporate, or organization. Lots of features, gives it the kind of scalability you might need to create any kind of website. Demo | Price: $ 59 | DOWNLOAD AppPress by ChimeraThemes This professional business WordPress theme includes 5 different colour schemes, advanced theme options page, multiple homepage sliders, custom widgets and page templates. The theme also includes a range of other unique features such as custom title, live style editor to modify colours, font styles, sizes etc, and 20+ shortcodes for creating pricing tables, content columns, boxes, buttons and others. Demo | Price: $ 37 | DOWNLOAD Why WordPress Professional Template? You can modify them, these usually come with a lot of fancy features that enable you to create the website as per your usability & choice. In some cases the  Premium WordPress business themes can be accessed through a subscription service. Premium Vs Free WordPress Themes There are very good Free WordPress themes out there that you can use to modify and code further or create what you want, but this possible when you are technically able. On the contrary Premium WordPress business themes offers great features & can save you a lot of time and money. It varies from business to business, some like to keep their website simple while most want to keep cool nifty features and abilities to scale it differently for various sections, products or categories. All this & more is possible with a Professional Business theme that is suitable/close to your needs.

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• New MySQL Cluster 7.3 Previews: Foreign Keys, NoSQL Node.js API and Auto-Tuned Clusters

  - by Mat Keep

  At this weeks MySQL Connect conference, Oracle previewed an exciting new wave of developments for MySQL Cluster, further extending its simplicity and flexibility by expanding the range of use-cases, adding new NoSQL options, and automating configuration. What’s new: Development Release 1: MySQL Cluster 7.3 with Foreign Keys Early Access “Labs” Preview: MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js Early Access “Labs” Preview: MySQL Cluster GUI-Based Auto-Installer In this blog, I'll introduce you to the features being previewed. Review the blogs listed below for more detail on each of the specific features discussed. Save the date!: A live webinar is scheduled for Thursday 25th October at 0900 Pacific Time / 1600UTC where we will discuss each of these enhancements in more detail. Registration will be open soon and published to the MySQL webinars page MySQL Cluster 7.3: Development Release 1 The first MySQL Cluster 7.3 Development Milestone Release (DMR) previews Foreign Keys, bringing powerful new functionality to MySQL Cluster while eliminating development complexity. Foreign Key support has been one of the most requested enhancements to MySQL Cluster – enabling users to simplify their data models and application logic – while extending the range of use-cases for both custom projects requiring referential integrity and packaged applications, such as eCommerce, CRM, CMS, etc. Implementation The Foreign Key functionality is implemented directly within the MySQL Cluster data nodes, allowing any client API accessing the cluster to benefit from them – whether they are SQL or one of the NoSQL interfaces (Memcached, C++, Java, JPA, HTTP/REST or the new Node.js API - discussed later.) The core referential actions defined in the SQL:2003 standard are implemented: CASCADE RESTRICT NO ACTION SET NULL In addition, the MySQL Cluster implementation supports the online adding and dropping of Foreign Keys, ensuring the Cluster continues to serve both read and write requests during the operation.  This represents a further enhancement to MySQL Cluster's support for on0line schema changes, ie adding and dropping indexes, adding columns, etc.  Read this blog for a demonstration of using Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster.  Getting Started with MySQL Cluster 7.3 DMR1: Users can download either the source or binary and evaluate the MySQL Cluster 7.3 DMR with Foreign Keys now! (Select the Development Release tab). MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js Node.js is hot! In a little over 3 years, it has become one of the most popular environments for developing next generation web, cloud, mobile and social applications. Bringing JavaScript from the browser to the server, the design goal of Node.js is to build new real-time applications supporting millions of client connections, serviced by a single CPU core. Making it simple to further extend the flexibility and power of Node.js to the database layer, we are previewing the Node.js Javascript API for MySQL Cluster as an Early Access release, available for download now from http://labs.mysql.com/. Select the following build: MySQL-Cluster-NoSQL-Connector-for-Node-js Alternatively, you can clone the project at the MySQL GitHub page.  Implemented as a module for the V8 engine, the new API provides Node.js with a native, asynchronous JavaScript interface that can be used to both query and receive results sets directly from MySQL Cluster, without transformations to SQL. Figure 1: MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js enables end-to-end JavaScript development Rather than just presenting a simple interface to the database, the Node.js module integrates the MySQL Cluster native API library directly within the web application itself, enabling developers to seamlessly couple their high performance, distributed applications with a high performance, distributed, persistence layer delivering 99.999% availability. The new Node.js API joins a rich array of NoSQL interfaces available for MySQL Cluster. Whichever API is chosen for an application, SQL and NoSQL can be used concurrently across the same data set, providing the ultimate in developer flexibility.  Get started with MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js tutorial MySQL Cluster GUI-Based Auto-Installer Compatible with both MySQL Cluster 7.2 and 7.3, the Auto-Installer makes it simple for DevOps teams to quickly configure and provision highly optimized MySQL Cluster deployments – whether on-premise or in the cloud. Implemented with a standard HTML GUI and Python-based web server back-end, the Auto-Installer intelligently configures MySQL Cluster based on application requirements and auto-discovered hardware resources Figure 2: Automated Tuning and Configuration of MySQL Cluster Developed by the same engineering team responsible for the MySQL Cluster database, the installer provides standardized configurations that make it simple, quick and easy to build stable and high performance clustered environments. The auto-installer is previewed as an Early Access release, available for download now from http://labs.mysql.com/, by selecting the MySQL-Cluster-Auto-Installer build. You can read more about getting started with the MySQL Cluster auto-installer here. Watch the YouTube video for a demonstration of using the MySQL Cluster auto-installer Getting Started with MySQL Cluster If you are new to MySQL Cluster, the Getting Started guide will walk you through installing an evaluation cluster on a singe host (these guides reflect MySQL Cluster 7.2, but apply equally well to 7.3 and the Early Access previews). Or use the new MySQL Cluster Auto-Installer! Download the Guide to Scaling Web Databases with MySQL Cluster (to learn more about its architecture, design and ideal use-cases). Post any questions to the MySQL Cluster forum where our Engineering team and the MySQL Cluster community will attempt to assist you. Post any bugs you find to the MySQL bug tracking system (select MySQL Cluster from the Category drop-down menu) And if you have any feedback, please post them to the Comments section here or in the blogs referenced in this article. Summary MySQL Cluster 7.2 is the GA, production-ready release of MySQL Cluster. The first Development Release of MySQL Cluster 7.3 and the Early Access previews give you the opportunity to preview and evaluate future developments in the MySQL Cluster database, and we are very excited to be able to share that with you. Let us know how you get along with MySQL Cluster 7.3, and other features that you want to see in future releases, by using the comments of this blog.

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• UCM 11g is 4 days old!

  - by kyle.hatlestad

  Ok...so I missed posting a blog entry when UCM 11g and the entire ECM suite released on Tuesday. Hopefully you've already seen the announcements on any number of the Oracle ECM blogs out there such as ECM Alerts, Fusion ECM, bex huff, or C4. So I won't bore you with the same talking points like 179 million check-ins per day or 124 web site page hits per second. Instead, I thought I'd show some screenshots of the new features in UCM and URM 11g. WebLogic Server and Enterprise Manager So probably the biggest change in 11g is UCM and URM now run on top of the WebLogic Server application server. This is a huge step as ECM is now on a standard platform with the rest of Oracle Fusion Middleware which makes installation, configuration, and integration consistent among all the products. From a feature perspective, it's also beneficial because it's now integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager. Enterprise Manager provides a lot of provisioning control over servers as well as performance monitoring and access to logs and debugging information. Desktop Integration Suite Desktop Integration Suite got a complete overhaul for 11g. It exposes a lot more features within Windows Explorer such as saved searches, workflow queue, and checked-out items. It also now support metadata pop-up screens to let users fill in additional metadata when they drag-n-drop files in! And the integration within Office applications has changed significantly by introducing a dedicated UCM menu to do open, save, compare, etc. Site Studio for External Applications In UCM Site Studio 10gR4, a major architectural shift was introduced which brought several new objects such as elements, region definitions, region templates, and placeholder definitions. This truly separated the content from the display and from the definition. It also allowed separation of the content from needing to be rendered on a complete Site Studio page. Well, the new Site Studio for External Applications takes advantage of that architecture and introduces pre-built tags and plug-ins to JDeveloper to allow to go from simply adding a content area to your web application page to building an entire web site, just like you would have done in Site Studio Designer. In addition to these changes, enhancements to the core Site Studio have been added as well. One of the big ones is called Designer Mode which allows power-users to bypass the standard rules defined by the placeholder definition or template and perform any number of additional actions. This reduces the need to go back to Site Studio Designer or JDeveloper to make more advanced changes to the site. Dashboards As part of the updated records management functionality in both UCM and URM, users can now set a dashboard view on their home page to surface common functions in a single view. It has pre-built "portlets" users can choose from to display and organize they way they want. Behind the scenes, these dashboards are stored as Content Folios. So the dashboards themselves are content items that can be revisioned and shared between users. And new dashboard portlets can be easily added (like the User Profile one in the screenshots) by getting a copy of an existing one, modifying the display, and then checking it in as a new one to select from. URM Interface Enhancements URM includes several new UI and usability enhancements in 11g. There is a new view for physical records, a place to configure "favorite" items to quickly get to, and new placement of the records management menu. BI Publisher Reports Records management in UCM and URM now offer reports generated through embedded BI Publisher. Templates are controlled by rich text files checked directly into the repository, so they can be easily modified. Other Features A new Inbound Refinery conversion option is available that does native Microsoft Office HTML conversion. If your IBR is on Windows and you have the native applications loaded, the IBR can use them to produce HTML. A new GUI template editor for Dynamic Converter is available. It's written in Java so is available through all the supported browsers and platforms. The original ActiveX based editor is also still available. The Component Manager interface has changed to help provide an easier and more descriptive way to enable core components that are installed along with UCM. All of the supported components are immediately available to turn on and do not have to be installed separately as in previous versions. My Downloads is located in the My Content Server menu and provides for easy download of client installs including Desktop Integration Suite and Site Studio Designer. Well, hopefully that gives you a taste for some of the new things in 11g. We're all pretty excited here at Oracle about all the new changes and enhancements. Over the next few months I hope to highlight some of these features more in-depth, so keep your eye out for those posts.

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• XNA Notes 006

  - by George Clingerman

  If you used to think the XNA community was small and inactive, hopefully these XNA Notes are opening your eyes. And I honestly feel like I’m still only catching the tail end of everything that’s going on. It’s a large and active community and you can be so mired down in one part of it you miss all sorts of cool stuff another part is doing. XNA is many things to a lot of people and that makes for a lot of really awesome things going on. So here’s what I saw going on this last week! Time Critical XNA New: XNA Team - Peer Review now closes for XNA 3.1 games http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/02/08/peer-review-pipeline-closed-for-new-xna-gs-3-1-games-or-updates-on-app-hub.aspx http://twitter.com/XNACommunity/statuses/34649816529256448 The XNA Team posts about a meet up with Microsoft for Creator’s going to be at GDC, March 3rd at the Lobby Bar http://on.fb.me/fZungJ XNA Team: @mklucher is busying playing the the bubblegum on WP7 made by a member of the XNA team (although reportedly made in Silverlight? Crazy! ;) ) http://twitter.com/mklucher/statuses/34645662737895426 http://bubblegum.me Shawn Hargreaves posts multiple posts (is this a sign that something new is coming from the XNA team? Usually when Shawn has time to post, something has just wrapped up…) Random Shuffle http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/09/random-shuffle.aspx Doing the right thing: resume, rewind or skip ahead http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/10/doing-the-right-thing-resume-rewind-or-skip-ahead.aspx XNA Developers: Andrew Russel was on .NET Rocks recently talking with Carl and Richard about developing games for Xbox, iPhone and Android http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?ShowNum=635 Eric W. releases the Fishing Girl source code into the wild http://ericw.ca/blog/posts/fishing-girl-now-open-source/ http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/74642/454512.aspx#454512 BinaryTweedDeej reminds that XNA community that Indie City wants you involved http://twitter.com/BinaryTweedDeej/statuses/34596114028044288 http://www.indiecity.com Mike McLaughlin (@mikebmcl) releases his first two XNA articles on the TechNet wiki http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/xna-framework-overview.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/content-pipeline-overview.aspx John Watte plays around with the Content Pipeline and Music Visualization exploring just what can be done. http://www.enchantedage.com/xna-content-pipeline-fft-song-analysis http://www.enchantedage.com/fft-in-xna-content-pipeline-for-beat-detection-for-the-win Simon Stevens writes up his talk on Vector Collision Physics http://www.simonpstevens.com/News/VectorCollisionPhysics @domipheus puts together an XNA Task Manager http://www.flickr.com/photos/domipheus/5405603197/ MadNinjaSkillz releases his fork of Nick's Easy Storage component on CodePlex http://twitter.com/MadNinjaSkillz/statuses/34739039068229634 http://ezstorage.codeplex.com @ActiveNick was interviewed by Rob Cameron and discusses Windows Phone 7, Bing Maps and XNA http://twitter.com/ActiveNick/statuses/35348548526546944 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/cc537546 Radiangames (Luke Schneider) posts about converting his games from XNA to Unity http://radiangames.com/?p=592 UberMonkey (@ElementCy) posts about a new project in the works, CubeTest a Minecraft style terrain http://www.ubergamermonkey.com/personal-projects/new-project-in-the-works/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Ubergamermonkey+%28UberGamerMonkey%29 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): VideoGamer Rob review Bonded Realities http://videogamerrob.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/xblig-review-bonded-realities/ XBLIG Round Up on Gamergeddon http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/06/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-6th/ Are gamers still rating Indie Games after the Xbox Dashboard update? http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/06/are-gamers-still-rating-indie-games-after-the-xbox-dashboard-update.aspx Joystiq - Xbox Live Indie Gems: Corrupted http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/04/xbox-live-indie-gems-corrupted/ Raymond Matthews of DarkStarMatryx reviews (Almost) Total Mayhem and Aban Hawkins & the 1000 Spikes http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=225 http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=229 8 Bit Horse reviews Aban Hawkins & the 1000 spikes http://8bithorse.blogspot.com/2011/01/aban-hawkins-1000-spikes-xbl-indie.html 2010 wrap-up for FunInfused Games http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=245 NeoGaf roundup of January's XBLIGs http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=420528 Armless Ocotopus interviews Michael Ventnor creator of Bonded Realities http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/02/07/interview-michael-ventnor-of-red-crest-studios/ @recharge_media posts about the new city music for Woodvale in Sin Rising http://rechargemedia.com/2011/02/08/new-city-theme-woodvale/ @DrMisty posts some footage of YoYoYo in action http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/54-yoyoyoblogs/184-video-update.html Xona Games - Decimation X3 on Reviews on the Run http://video.citytv.com/video/detail/782443063001.000000/reviews-on-the-run--february-8-2011/g4/ @benkane gives an early peek at his action RPG coming to XBLIG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDF_PrvtwU8 Rock, Paper Shotgun talks to Zeboyd games about bringing Cthulhu Saves the World to PC http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/11/summoning-cthulhu-natter-with-zeboyd/ Xbox LIVE Indieverse interviews the creator of Bonded Realities http://xbl-indieverse.blogspot.com/2011/02/xbl-indieverse-interview-red-crest.html XNA Game Development: Dream-In-Code posts about an upcoming XNA Challenge/Coding contest http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/blog/1385/entry-3192-xna-challengecontest/ Sgt.Conker covers Fishing Girl and IndieFreaks Game Framework release http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/fishing-girl-did-not-sell-a-single-copy/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/indiefreaks-game-framework-v0-2-0-0/ @slyprid releases Transmute v0.40a with lots of new features and fixes http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/34125423067533312 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/35326876243337216 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/ Jeff Brown writes an XNA 4.0 tutorial on Saving/Loading on the Xbox 360 http://www.robotfootgames.com/xna-tutorials/92-xna-tutorial-savingloading-on-xbox-360-40 XNA for Silverlight Developers: Part 3- Animation http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-3-Animation-transforms.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+xna-connection-twitter-specific-stream+%28XNA+Connection%27s+Twitter+specific+stream%29 The news from Nokia is definitely something XNA developers will want to keep their eye on http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/2011/02/11/letter-to-developers?sf1066337=1

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• Silverlight 5 Hosting :: Features in Silverlight 5 and Release Date

  - by mbridge

  Silverlight 5 is finally announced in the Silverlight FireStarter Event on the 2nd December, 2010. This new version of Silverlight which was earlier labeled as 'Future of Microsoft Silverlight' has now come much closer to go live as the first Silverlight 5 Beta version is expected to be shipped during the early months of 2011. However for the full fledged and the final release of Silverlight 5, we have to wait many more months as the same is likely to be made available within the Q3 2011. As would have been usually expected, this latest edition would feature many new capabilities thereby extending the developer productivity to a whole new dimension of premium media experience and feature-rich business applications. It comes along with many new feature updates as well as the inclusion of new technologies to improve the standard of the Silverlight applications which are now fine-tuned to produce next generation business and media solutions that is capable to meet the requirements of the advanced web-based app development. The Silverlight 5 is all set to replace the previous fourth version which now includes more than forty new features while also dropping various deprecated elements that was prevalent earlier. It has brought around some major performance enhancements and also included better support for various other tools and technologies. Following are some of the changes that are registered to be available under the Silverlight 5 Beta edition which is scheduled to be launched during the Q1 2011. Silverlight 5 : Premium Media Experiences The media features of Silverlight 5 has seen some major enhancements with a lot of optimizations being made to deliver richer solutions. It's capability has now been extended to make things easier, faster and capable of performing the desired tasks in the most efficient manner. The Silverlight media solutions has already been a part of many companies in the recent days where various on-demand Silverlight services were featured but with the arrival of the next generation premium media solution of Silverlight 5, it is expected to register new heights of success and global user acclamation for using it with many esteemed web-based projects and media solutions. - The most happening element in the new Silverlight 5 will be its support for utilizing the GPU based hardware acceleration which is intended to lower down the CPU load to a significant extent and thereby allowing faster rendering of media contents without consuming much resources. This feature is believed to be particularly helpful for low configured machines to run full HD media content without any lagging caused due to processor load. It will hence be one great feature to revolutionize the new generation high quality media contents to be available within the web in a more efficient manner with its hardware decoded video playback capabilities. - With the inclusion of hardware video decoding to minimize the processor load, the Silverlight 5 also comes with another optimization enhancement to also reduce the power consumption level by making new methods to deal with the power-saver settings. With this optimization in effect, the computer would be automatically allowed to switch to sleep mode while no video playback is in progress and also to prevent any screensavers to popup and cause annoyances during any video playback. There would also be other power saver options which will be made available to best suit the users requirements and purpose. - The Silverlight trickplay feature is another great way to tweak any silverlight powered media content as is used for many video tutorial sites or for dealing with any sort of presentations. This feature enables the user to modify the playback speed to either slowdown or speedup during the playback durations based on the requirements without compromising on the quality of output. Normally such manipulations always makes the content's audio to go off-pitch, but the same will not be the case with TrickPlay and the audio would seamlessly progress with the video without skipping any of its part. - In addition to all of the above, the new Silverlight 5 will be featuring wireless control of all the media contents by making use of remote controllers. With the use of such remote devices, it will be easier to handle the various media playback controls thereby providing more freedom while experiencing the premium media services. Silverlight 5 : Business Application Development The application development standard has been extended with more possibilities by bringing forth new and useful technologies and also reviving the existing methods to work better than what it was used to. From the UI improvements to advanced technical aspects, the Silverlight 5 scores high on all grounds to produce great next generation business delivered applications by putting in more creativity and resourceful touch to all the apps being produced with it. - The WPF feature of Silverlight is made more effective by introducing new standards of Databinding which is intended to improve the productivity standards of the Silverlight application developer. It brings in a lot of convenience in debugging the databinding components or expressions and hence making things work in a flawless manner. Some additional features related to databinding includes that of Ancestor RelativeSource, Implicit DataTemplates and Model View ViewModel (MVVM) support with DataContextChanged event and many other new features relating it. - It now comes with a refined text and printing service which facilitates better clarity of the text rendering and also many positive changes which are being applied to the layout pattern. New supports has been added to include OpenType font, multi-column text, linked-text containers and character leading support to name a few among the available features.This also includes some important printing aspects like that of Postscript Vector Printing API which allows to program our printing tasks in a user defined way and Pivot functionality for visualization concerns of informations. - The Graphics support is the key improvements being incorporated which now enables to utilize three dimensional graphics pattern using GPU acceleration. It can manage to provide some really cool visualizations being curved to provide media contents within the business apps with also the support for full HD contents at 1080p quality. - Silverlight 5 includes the support for 64-bit operating systems and relevant browsers and is also optimized to provide better performance. It can support the background thread for the networking which can reduce the latency of the network to a considerable extent. The Out-of-Browser functionality adds the support for utilizing various libraries and also the Win32 API. It also comes with testing support with VS 2010 which is mostly an automated procedure and has also enabled increased security aspects of all the Silverlight 5 developed applications by using the improved version of group policy support.

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• Surface development: it&rsquo;s just like software development

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Surface is magic. Everyone using it seems to think that way. And I have to be honest, after working for almost 2 years with the platform I still get that special feeling the moment I turn on the unit to do some more work. The whole user experience, the rich environment of the SDK, the touch, even the look and feel of the Surface environment is so much different from the stuff I’ve been working on all my career that I am still bewildered by it. But… and this is a big but.. in the end we’re still talking about a computer and that needs software to become useful. Deep down the magic of the Surface unit there is a PC somewhere, running Windows Vista and the .net framework 3.5. When you write that magic software that makes the platform come alive you’re still working with .net, WPF/XNA, C#, VB.Net and all those other tools and technologies you know so well. Sure, the whole user experience is different from what you’ve known. And the way of thinking about users, their interaction and the positioning of screen elements requires a whole new paradigm. And that takes time. It took me about half a year before I had the feeling I got it nailed down. But when that moment came (about 18 months ago…) I realized that everything I had learned so far on software development still is true when it comes to Surface. The last 6 months I have been working with some people with a different background to start a new company. The idea was that the new company would be focussing on Surface and Surface only. These people come from a marketing background and had some good ideas for some applications. And I have to admit: their ideas were good. Very good. Where it all fell down of course is that these ideas need to be implemented in a piece of software. And creating great software takes skilled developers and a lot of time and money. That’s where things went wrong: the marketing guys didn’t realize and didn’t want to realize that software development is a job that takes skill. You can’t just hire a bunch of developers and expect them to deliver the best sort of software, especially not when it comes to Surface. I tried to explain that yes, their User Interface in Photoshop looked great, but no: I couldn’t develop an application like that in a weeks time. Even worse: the while backend of the software (WCF for communications, SQL Server for the database, etc) would take a lot more time than the frontend. They didn’t understand. It took them a couple of days to drawn the UI in Photoshop so in Blend I should be able to build the software in about the same amount of time. Well, you and I know that it doesn’t work that way. Software is hard to write, and even harder to write well, and it takes skill and dedication. It’s not something you can do as fast as you can draw a mock up for a Surface application in Photohop. The same holds true for web applications of course. A lot of designers there fail to appreciate the hard work that goes into writing the plumbing for a good web app that can handle thousands of users. Although the UI is very important, it’s not all there is to it. And in Surface development this is the same. The UI should create the feeling of magic, but the software behind it is what makes it come alive. And that takes time. A lot of time. So brush of you skills and don’t throw them away if you start developing for Surface. Because projects (and colaborations) can fail there as hard as they can in any other area of software development. On a side note: we decided to stop the colaboration (something the other parties involved didn’t appreciate and were very angry about) and decided to hire a designer for the Surface projects. The focus is back where it belongs: on the software development we know so well and have been doing very well for 13 years. UI is just a part of the whole project and not the end product. So my company Detrio is still going strong when it comes to develivering Surface solutions but once again from a technological background, not a marketing background.

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• Social Network Updates: While You Were Busy Marketing 2

  - by Mike Stiles

  Since social moves at the speed of data, it’s already time for another update, as we did back in April, on the changes the various social networks have made or gone through while you were busy marketing. Facebook There’s a lot of talk Facebook’s developing a mobile product to act like Flipboard and surface news, from both users and media outlets. The biggest news was Facebook/Instagram’s introduction of 15-second videos, enhanced with with filters, to take some of Vine’s candy. You can also delete parts of videos and rerecord them, and there’s image stabilization. Facebook’s ad revenue is coming along just fine, thank you very much. 35% quarter-to-quarter growth in Q2. And it looks like new formats like Mobile App Install Ads and Unpublished Page Posts are adding to the mix. If you don’t already, you’ll soon see a little camera in comment boxes letting you insert photos right into the comments you make. The drive toward “more visual” continues. The other big news is Facebook’s adoption of our Twitter friend, the hashtag. Adding # sets apart the post topic so it can be easily found or discovered. It’s also being added to Google Plus, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Twitter Want to send someone a promoted tweet when they’re in range of your store? That could be happening by the end of this year. Some users have been seeing automatic in-stream previews of images on Twitter.com. Right now it’s images in your own tweets, but we can assume all tweets are next. Get your followers organized! Twitter raised the limit on the number of lists you can create from 20 to 1,000. They also raised the number of accounts you can have in a list from 500 to 5,000. Twitter started notifying you when someone favorites a tweet you’re mentioned in or re-tweets a tweet you re-tweeted. Anyway, it’s the first time Twitter’s notified you about indirect interactions like that. Who’s afraid of Instagram? A study shows 6-second Vine videos are being posted to Twitter at the rate of 9/second, up from 5/second 2 months ago. Vine has over 13 million users and branded Vines are 4x more likely to be shared than video ads. Google Plus Now featuring a 3-column redesigned stream, and images that take up a whole column. And photo filters Auto Highlight and Auto Awesome work to turn your photos into a real show. Google Hangouts is the workhorse for all Google messaging now, it’s not just an online chat with 9 people anymore. Google Plus Dashboard improves the connection between your company’s Google Plus business page and your Google Plus Local. Updates go out across all Google properties and you can do your managing from the dashboard. With Google Plus’ authorship system, you can build “Author Rank” based on what you write and put on the web. If your stuff is +1’ed and shared a lot, you’re the real deal and there are search result benefits. LinkedIn "Who's Viewed Your Updates" shows you what you’ve shared recently, who saw it and what they did about it in real-time. “Influencers” is, well, influential. Traffic to all LI news products has gone up 8x since it was introduced. LinkedIn is quickly figuring out how to get users to stick around awhile. You and your brand can post images and documents in status updates now. In fact, that whole “document posting” thing is making some analysts wonder if LinkedIn will drift on over to the Dropboxes and YouSendIts of the world. C’mon, admit it. Your favorite part of LinkedIn is being able to see who’s viewed your profile. Now you’ve got even more info and can see what/who you have in common. Premium users get even deeper insights about how people are finding them. If you’re a big fan of security, you’ll love that LinkedIn started offering two-factor authentication (2FA). It’s optional, but step 2 is a one-time code texted to your registered mobile. Pinterest A study showed pins have a looong shelf life compared to other social net posts. “Clicks kept coming for 30 days and beyond.” Most pins are timeless, and the infinite scroll causes people to see older pins. Is it a keeper? Pinterest jumped 82% to 54 million users in the past year. It’s valued at $2.5 billion and is one of the biggest sources of referral traffic there is. That said, CEO Ben Silbermann adds, "Right now, we don't make money." A new search feature stops you from having to endlessly scroll through your own pins looking for that waterfall picture you posted. Simply select “just my pins” in the search bar. New "Rich Pins" lets brands add info like price and availability to pins that can be updated daily via a data feed from your merchant site. Not so fast, you have to apply to Pinterest for it first. Like other social nets, Pinterest does not allow sexual content, nudity, or even partial nudity. However…some art contains nudity, and Pinterest wants to allow art. What constitutes “art” will be judged by…what we have to assume are Pinterest employees who love their job. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng, Tim Marmon

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• Adaptive ADF/WebCenter template for the iPad

  - by Maiko Rocha

  One of my WebCenter Portal customers was asking about adaptive design with ADF/WebCenter Portal and how they could go about creating an adaptive iPad template for their WebCenter Portal application. They were looking not only for the out-of-the-box support for mobile Safari which is certified against PS5+ (11.1.1.6) for ADF/WebCenter - but also to create a specific template to streamline their workflow on the iPad. Seems like they wanted something in the lines of Yahoo! Mail provides for the iPad - so the example I will use is shamelessly inspired by Y! Mail's iPad UI.  But first, let's quickly understand how can we bake in some adaptive goodness into ADF Faces. First thing we need to understand is, yes, there are a couple of constraints that we will need to work around, namely, the use or layout managers and skins. Please also keep in mind that I'm not and I don't pretend to be a web designer, much less an UX specialist, so feel free to leave your thoughts on the matter in the comments section. Now, back to the limitations. Layout Managers ADF Faces layout managers create an abstraction on top of the generated HTML code for a page so a developer doesn't need to be worried about how to size and dimension the UI layout (eg, af:panelStretchLayout). Although layout managers are very helpful, in this specific situation we will need to know a little bit more of how the final HTML is being rendered so we can apply the CSS class accordingly and create transition containers where the media queries will be applied - now, if you're using 11gR2 (11.1.2.2.3) there's the new component af:panelGridLayout (here and here) that will greatly improve creating responsive templates and pages because it is based on the grid/fluid systems and will generate straight out to DIVs on your final page. For now, I'm limited to PS5 and the af:panelStretchLayout component as a starting point because that's the release my customer is on. Skins You won't be able to use media queries, or use anything with "@" notation on the skin CSS file - the skin pre-processor will remove all extraneous "@" from the CSS file. The solution is to split your CSS in two separate files: a skin CSS file and plain CSS where you will add the media queries. The issue here is that you won't be able to use media queries for any faces components. We can, though, still apply the media queries for the components like af:panelGroupLayout and af:panelBorderLayout through their styleClass property to enable these components to be responsive to to the iPad orientation, by changing its dimensions, font sizes, hide/show areas, etc. Difference between responsive and adaptive design The best definition of adaptive vs responsive web design I could find is this: “Responsive web design,” as coined by Ethan Marcotte, means “fluid grids, fluid images/media & media queries.” “Adaptive web design,” as I use it, is about creating interfaces that adapt to the user’s capabilities (in terms of both form and function). To me, “adaptive web design” is just another term for “progressive enhancement” of which responsive web design can (an often should) be an integral part, but is a more holistic approach to web design in that it also takes into account varying levels of markup, CSS, JavaScript and assistive technology support. Responsive/adapative web design is much more than slapping an HTML template with CSS around your content or application. The content and application themselves are part of your web design - in other words, a responsive template is just an afterthought if it is not originating from a responsive design the involves the whole web application/s. Tips on responsive / adapative design with ADF/WebCenter Some of the tips listed below were already mentioned in multiple blog posts about ADF layout and skinning, but it is still worth remembering: a simple guideline for ADF/WebCenter apps would be to first create a high-level group of devices, for example: smartphones, tablets,  and desktop. For each of these large groups, create the basic structure to provide responsiveness: a page template, a skin, and an external CSS: pagetemplate_smartphone.jspx, smartphone_skin.css, smartphone-responsive.css pagetemplate_tablet.jspx, tablet_skin.css, tablet-responsive.css pagetemplate_desktop.jspx, desktop_skin.css, desktop-responsive.css These three assets can be changed on the fly through an user-agent check on the server side, delivering the right UI to the right device. Within each of the assets, you can make fine adjustments for each subgroup of devices with media queries - for example, smart phones with different screen dimensions and pixel density. Having these three groups and the corresponding assets per group seem to be a good compromise between trying to put everything on a single set of assets - specially considering the constraints above - and going to the other side of the spectrum to create assets per discrete device (iPhone4, iPhone5, Nexus, S3, etc.). Keep in mind that these are my rules and are not in any shape or form a best practice - this is how it fits best for the scenarios I've been working with. If you need to use HTML tags on your page, surround them with af:group to protect the DOM structure For stretchable/fluid layouts: Use non-stretching containers: panelGroupLayout, panelBorderLayout, … panelBorderLayout can be used to approximate HTML table component To avoid multiple scroll bars, do not nest scrolling PanelGroupLayout components. Consider layout="vertical" For stretchable/fluid layouts: Most stretchable ADF components also work in flowing context with dimensionsFrom="auto" To stretch a component horizontally, use styleClass="AFStretchWidth" instead of  "width:100%" Skinning Don't use CSS3 @media, @import, animations, etc. on skin css files. They will be removed. CSS3 properties within a class (box-shadow, transition, etc.) work just fine. Consider resetting some skin classes to better control their rendering: body {color: inherit;font: inherit;} af|document {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|commandLink {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|goLink {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|inputText::content {font: inherit;} Specific meta tags and CSS properties: Use  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0"/> to avoid zooming (if you want) Use -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch to enable native momentum scrolling within overflown areas (here) Use text-rendering: optmizeLegibility to improve readability. (here) User text-overflow: ellipsis to gracefully crop overflown text. (here) The meta-tags are included in each and every page in the metaContainer facet of af:document tag. You can also use a javascript to inject the meta-tags from the template. For the purpose of the example, I wanted to use as few workarounds as possible.   The iPad template and sample application This sample application has been built as a WebCenter Portal application, but you will also be able to reuse the template and techniques on your vanilla ADF application. Keep in mind that I'm neither a designer nor a CSS specialist, so please don't bash me too much on the messy CSS file you'll find on the application.  I've extended the provided PreferencesBean class that comes with WebCenter Portal and added code to dinamically change the template and skin on the fly.   This is the sample application in landscape orientation: This is the sample application in portrait orientation - the left side menu hides automatically based on a CSS media query: Another screenshot with a skinned popup opened: This is a sample application for you to play with - ideally you shouldn't use it as a starting point. On the left side bar you will find links rendered from a WebCenter Portal navigation model - the link triggers a full request through an af:goLink, while the light blue PPR button triggers a PPR navigation. The dark blue toolbar buttons at the top don't have any function,while the Approve and Reject buttons show a skinned popup. The search box of course doesn't have any behavior attahed to it either. There's a known issue right now with some PPR calls that are randomly generating a 403 error redirecting to the login page - I didn't have time to investigate if this is iOS6 specific or not - if you have any insights please let me know your findings. You can download the sample here.

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• What’s New for Oracle Commerce? Executive QA with John Andrews, VP Product Management, Oracle Commerce

  - by Katrina Gosek

  Oracle Commerce was for the fifth time positioned as a leader by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce. This inspired me to sit down with Oracle Commerce VP of Product Management, John Andrews to get his perspective on what continues to make Oracle a leader in the industry and what’s new for Oracle Commerce in 2013. Q: Why do you believe Oracle Commerce continues to be a leader in the industry? John: Oracle has a great acquisition strategy – it brings best-of-breed technologies into the product fold and then continues to grow and innovate them. This is particularly true with products unified into the Oracle Commerce brand. Oracle acquired ATG in late 2010 – and then Endeca in late 2011. This means that under the hood of Oracle Commerce you have market-leading technologies for cross-channel commerce and customer experience, both designed and developed in direct response to the unique challenges online businesses face. And we continue to innovate on capabilities core to what our customers need to be successful – contextual and personalized experience delivery, merchant-inspired tools, and architecture for performance and scalability. Q: It’s not a slow moving industry. What are you doing to keep the pace of innovation at Oracle Commerce? John: Oracle owes our customers the most innovative commerce capabilities. By unifying the core components of ATG and Endeca we are delivering on this promise. Oracle Commerce is continuing to innovate and redefine how commerce is done and in a way that drive business results and keeps customers coming back for experiences tailored just for them. Our January and May 2013 releases not only marked the seventh significant releases for the solution since the acquisitions of ATG and Endeca, we also continue to demonstrate rapid and significant progress on the unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities of the two commerce technologies. Q: Can you tell us what was notable about these latest releases under the Oracle Commerce umbrella? John: Specifically, our latest product innovations give businesses selling online the ability to get to market faster with more personalized commerce experiences in the following ways: Mobile: the latest Commerce Reference Application in this release offers a wider range of examples for online businesses to leverage for iOS development and specifically new iPad reference capabilities. This release marks the first release of the iOS Universal application that serves both the iPhone and iPad devices from a single download or binary. Business users can now drive page content management and layout of search results and category pages, as well as create additional storefront elements such as categories, facets / dimensions, and breadcrumbs through Experience Manager tools. Cross-Channel Commerce: key commerce platform capabilities have been added to support cross-channel commerce, including an expanded inventory model to maintain inventory for stores, pickup in stores and Web-based returns. Online businesses with in-store operations can now offer advanced shipping options on the web and make returns and exchange logic easily available on the web. Multi-Site Capabilities: significant enhancements to the Commerce Platform multi-site architecture that allows business users to quickly launch and manage multiple sites on the same cluster and share data, carts, and other components. First introduced in 2010, with this latest release business users can now partition or share customer profiles, control users’ site-based access, and manage personalization assets using site groups. Internationalization: continued language support and enhancements for business user tools as well and search and navigation. Guided Search now supports 35 total languages with 11 new languages (including Danish, Arabic, Norwegian, Serbian Cyrillic) added in this release. Commerce Platform tools now include localized support for 17 locales with 4 new languages (Danish, Portuguese (European), Finnish, and Thai). No development or customization is required in order for business users to use the applications in any of these supported languages. Business Tool Experience: valuable new Commerce Merchandising features include a new workflow for making emergency changes quickly and increased visibility into promotions rules and qualifications in preview mode. Oracle Commerce business tools continue to become more and more feature rich to provide intuitive, easy- to-use (yet powerful) capabilities to allow business users to manage content and the shopping experience. Commerce & Experience Unification: demonstrable unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities include – productized cartridges that provide supported integration between the Commerce Platform and Experience Management tools, cross-channel returns, Oracle Service Cloud integration, and integrated iPad application. The mission guiding our product development is to deliver differentiated, personalized user experiences across any device in a contextual manner – and to give the business the best tools to tune and optimize those user experiences to meet their business objectives. We also need to do this in a way that makes it operationally efficient for the business, keeping the overall total cost of ownership low – yet also allows the business to expand, whether it be to new business models, geographies or brands. To learn more about the latest Oracle Commerce releases and mission, visit the links below: • Hear more from John about the Oracle Commerce mission • Hear from Oracle Commerce customers • Documentation on the new releases • Listen to the Oracle ATG Commerce 10.2 Webcast • Listen to the Oracle Endeca Commerce 3.1.2 Webcast

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• XNA Notes 010

  - by George Clingerman

  With GDC 2011 wrapping up there were a LOT of great interviews and posts with and about XNA and XBLIG and some of our more notorious developers. Definitely worth spending many, many hours watching, listening and reading all those. Very inspiring! Also, don’t forget to get signed up for Dream Build Play! And just as an early warning reminder do NOT, I repeat do NOT wait to submit your game the last day. There are major issues submitting the last day every year and you do not want all your hard work to be hanging on whether your entry actually went through in that last day. Plan on submitting a few days if not a week before. I’m serious, you’ll thank yourself later! Now on to what’s happening in the XNA community! Time Critical XNA News: PAX East Meet Up (really wish I was going!) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71921/439262.aspx Want to stay panicked about the countdown to Dream Build Play? Mike McLaughlin shares his DBP countdown clock http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/44454458960252928 XNA Team: Nick Gravelyn Only needs less than 600 new users in his unique marketing plan for Pixel Man 2 http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ And hares his ad revenue numbers with his XNA WP7 games http://theoneswiththelight.com/2011/my-results-with-ad-revenue-for-wp7-games/ XNA MVPs: Andy “The ZMan” Dunn posts his 15,000th App Hub forum post and shares a few thoughts on the MVP summit http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/77625.aspx Chris Williams shares his thoughts on the MVP summit http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/03/07/144229.aspx XNA Developers: Nathan Fouts of Mommy’s Best games Wraps up GDC http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/03/gdc-2011-wrapped.html And shares the wonderful screenshots from Serious Sam. (I’m so jealous people at PAX East willl be playing a demo of this game!) http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/03/serious-sam-double-d.html James Silva of Ska Studios announces http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/09/vampire-smile-at-hotel-sierra/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/08/vengeance-begins-april-6th/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/04/good-morning-gato-52/ Michael McLaughlin writes an extremely useful set of tips for XNA WP7 developers http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/03/10/tips-for-xna-wp7-developers.aspx Robert Boyd “the one man XBLIG improving machine” posts his 9 tips for marketing an Xbox LIVE Indie Gam http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110309/7183/9_Tips_for_XBLIG_Marketing.php http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/77534/470586.aspx#470586 And shares his day by day experience at GDC this year http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110301/7118/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_1.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110301/7123/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_2.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110303/7129/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_3.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110307/7133/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_4.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110307/7160/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_5.php Phillipe Da Silva releases new IGF Pong Sample preview http://www.vimeo.com/20904070 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Gamergeddon posts XBox Indie Game Roundup for March 6th http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/03/06/xbox-indie-game-round-up-march-6th/ Dealspwn interviews FortressCraft developer Projector Games http://www.dealspwn.com/fortresscraft-developer-interview-minecraft-clones-venting-haters-part-1/ http://www.dealspwn.com/fortresscraft-developer-interview-part-2-trials-tribulations-indie-development/ Writings of Mass Destruction continues the Xbox LIVE Indie Game a day campaign, here’s his take on FishCraft (be sure to check out his other posts!) http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/2011/03/05/day-116-fishcraft/ Tom Ogburn shares his GDC notes on the XBLIG panel jotted quickly while attending the panel http://twitter.com/#!/TOgburn/status/44454191028125696 http://www.starlitskygames.com/blogs/site_news/archive/2011/03/06/802.aspx Dave Voyles of Armless Octopus has crazy good coverage on XNA and Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers at GDC 2011. Interviews and articles all extremely well done! http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/06/gdc-2011-successful-indie-developers-share-insight-on-microsofts-self-publishing-service/ There’s honestly so many posts and interviews you should just hit his front page and scroll down through all of the latest ones. http://www.armlessoctopus.com/ GameMarx Episode 12 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/27/ep-12-march-4-2011.aspx B.U.T.T.O.N now on Steam! http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2011/03/button_party_game_now_on_steam.php German Xbox Dashboard gets review program from GamePro http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/07/gamepo-indie-review-show-debuts-on-german-xbox-dashboard/ XboxIndies.com (one of the best XNA sites out there at this point!) continues to add review sites to it’s main review feed. (And don’t forget to play with that awesome XBLIG pivot control!) http://xboxindies.com/ Kris Steele of FunInfused Games shares early footage of his game World of Chalk http://twitter.com/#!/kriswd40/status/45007114371989504 Raymond Matthews of Darkstarmatryx reviews FunInfused Games Abduction Action http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=264 TheVideoGamerRob reviews Zombie Football Carnage http://videogamerrob.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/xblig-review-zombie-football-carnage/ XBLIG Square Off Making the Jump to WP7 http://www.wp7connect.com/2011/03/08/xblig-square-off-will-make-the-jump-to-windows-phone/ Mommy’s Best Games making the news round with their Serious Sam announcement http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/09/serious-sam-gets-serious-indie-cred-with-new-indie-series/ Most quoted and linked XBLIG article of the week with the least amount of actual facts and reporting. Shared only because it makes me sad that this is the best coverage we get. (Hey reporters, there’s LOT and LOTS of XBLIG and XNA experts you can contact if you need to check up on facts or wonder why on questions like, Why can’t XBLIGs have Nazis? There’s actually a real answer for that..) http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/06/xblig-facts-nazi-killing-a-no-no-revenue-a-yes-yes/ XNA Development: Mort8088 has been in an XNA tutorial writing frenzy releasing 4 XNA 4.0 entry level tutorials this week! http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-0-intro/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-1-fonts/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-2-sprites/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-3-input-from-keyboard/ Interesting discussion on what it means to be a community (you do have to sign up to be a member of the XNA UK forums to read it...) http://twitter.com/#!/XNAUK/status/44705269254594560 Slyprid continues his incredible pace on Transmute and shares screens of his new Animation Builder http://twitter.com/#!/slyprid/status/45169271847911424 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/blog/ Philippe Da Silva wants to know who is using IGF for their games. If it’s you, drop him a note letting him know! http://twitter.com/#!/philippedasilva/status/44325893719588864 New Sunburn Video Tutorials released http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/fivesidedbarrel/archive/2011/03/07/new-documentation-video-tutorials.aspx Loading and rendering animated collada models using XNA 4.0 http://bunkernetz.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/loading-and-rendering-animated-collada-models-using-xna-4-0/ XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 6 Accelerometer Input http://buzzgamesnews.blogspot.com/2011/03/xna-for-silverlight-developers-part-6.html

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• Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy Adds Social Cloud and Showcases early customers Redwood Shores, Calif. – June 6, 2012 “Almost seven years of relentless engineering and innovation plus key strategic acquisitions. An investment of billions. We are now announcing the most comprehensive Cloud on the planet Earth,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Most cloud vendors only have niche assets. They don’t have platforms to extend. Oracle is the only vendor that offers a complete suite of modern, socially-enabled applications, all based on a standards-based platform.” News Facts In a major strategy update today, Larry Ellison announced the industry’s broadest and most advanced Cloud strategy and introduced Oracle Cloud Social Services, a broad Enterprise Social Platform offering. Oracle Cloud delivers a broad set of industry-standards based, integrated services that provide customers with subscription-based access to Oracle Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all completely managed, hosted and supported by Oracle. Offering a wide range of business applications and platform services, the Oracle Cloud is the only cloud to enable customers to avoid the data and business process fragmentation that occurs when using multiple, siloed public clouds. Oracle Cloud is powered by leading enterprise-grade infrastructure, including Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, providing customers and partners with a high-performance, reliable, and secure infrastructure for running critical business applications. Oracle Cloud enables easy self-service for both business users and developers. Business users can order, configure, extend, and monitor their applications. Developers and administrators can easily develop, deploy, monitor and manage their applications. As part of the event, Oracle also showcased several early Oracle Cloud customers and partners including system integrators and independent software vendors. Oracle Cloud Platform Services Built on a common, complete, standards-based and enterprise-grade set of infrastructure components, Oracle Cloud Platform Services enable customers to speed time to market and lower costs by quickly building, deploying and managing bespoke applications. Oracle Cloud Platform Services will include: Database Services to manage data and build database applications with the Oracle Database. Java Services to develop, deploy and manage Java applications with Oracle WebLogic. Developer Services to allow application developers to collaboratively build applications. Web Services to build Web applications rapidly using PHP, Ruby, and Python. Mobile Services to allow developers to build cross-platform native and HTML5 mobile applications for leading smartphones and tablets. Documents Services to allow project teams to collaborate and share documents through online workspaces and portals. Sites Services to allow business users to develop and maintain visually engaging .com sites Analytics Services to allow business users to quickly build and share analytic dashboards and reports through the Cloud. Oracle Cloud Application Services Oracle Cloud Application Services provides customers access to the industry’s broadest range of enterprise applications available in the cloud today, with built-in business intelligence, social and mobile capabilities. Easy to setup, configure, extend, use and administer, Oracle Cloud Application Services will include: ERP Services: A complete set of Financial Accounting, Project Management, Procurement, Sourcing, and Governance, Risk & Compliance solutions. HCM Services: A complete Human Capital Management solution including Global HR, Workforce Lifecycle Management, Compensation, Benefits, Payroll and other solutions. Talent Management Services: A complete Talent Management solution including Recruiting, Sourcing, Performance Management, and Learning. Sales and Marketing Services: A complete Sales and Marketing solution including Sales Planning, Territory Management, Leads & Opportunity Management, and Forecasting. Customer Experience Services: A complete Customer Service solution including Web Self-Service, Contact Centers, Knowledge Management, Chat, and e-mail Management. Oracle Cloud Social Services Oracle Cloud Social Services provides the most broad and complete enterprise social platform available in the cloud today.  With Oracle Cloud Social Services, enterprises can engage with their customers on a range of social media properties in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion including social marketing, commerce, service and listening. The platform also provides enterprises with a rich social networking solution for their employees to collaborate effectively inside the enterprise. Oracle’s integrated social platform will include: Oracle Social Network to enable secure enterprise collaboration and purposeful social networking for business. Oracle Social Data Services to aggregate data from social networks and enterprise data sources to enrich business applications. Oracle Social Marketing and Engagement Services to enable marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns. Oracle Social Intelligence Services to enable marketers to analyze social media interactions and to enable customer service and sales teams to engage with customers and prospects effectively. Supporting Resources Oracle Cloud – learn more cloud.oracle.com – sign up now Webcast – watch the replay About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. TrademarksOracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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• CQRS &ndash; Questions and Concerns

  - by Dylan Smith

  I’ve been doing a lot of learning on CQRS and Event Sourcing over the last little while and I have a number of questions that I haven’t been able to answer. 1. What is the benefit of CQRS when compared to a typical DDD architecture that uses Event Sourcing and properly captures intent and behavior via verb-based commands? (other than Scalability) 2. When using CQRS what do you do with complex query-based logic? I’m going to elaborate on #1 in this blog post and I’ll do a follow-up post on #2. I watched through Greg Young’s video on the business benefits of CQRS + Event Sourcing and first let me say that I thought it was an excellent presentation that really drives home a lot of the benefits to this approach to architecture (I watched it twice in a row I enjoyed it so much!). But it didn’t answer some of my questions fully (I wish I had been there to ask these of Greg in person!). So let me pick apart some of the points he makes and how they relate to my first question above. I’m completely sold on the idea of event sourcing and have a clear understanding of the benefits that it brings to the table, so I’m not going to question that. But you can use event sourcing without going to a CQRS architecture, so my main question is around the benefits of CQRS + Event Sourcing vs Event Sourcing + Typical DDD architecture Architecture with Event Sourcing + Commands on Left, CQRS on Right Greg talks about how the stereotypical architecture doesn’t support DDD, but is that only because his diagram shows DTO’s coming up from the client. If we use the same diagram but allow the client to send commands doesn’t that remove a lot of the arguments that Greg makes against the stereotypical architecture? We can now introduce verbs into the system. We can capture intent now (storing it still requires event sourcing, but you can implement event sourcing without doing CQRS) We can create a rich domain model (as opposed to an anemic domain model) Scalability is obviously a benefit that CQRS brings to the table, but like Greg says, very few of the systems we create truly need significant scalability Greg talks about the ability to scale your development efforts. He says CQRS allows you to split the system into 3 parts (Client, Domain/Commands, Reads) and assign 3 teams of developers to work on them in parallel; letting you scale your development efforts by 3x with nearly linear gains. But in the stereotypical architecture don’t you already have 2 separate modules that you can split your dev efforts between: The client that sends commands/queries and receives DTO’s, and the Domain which accepts commands/queries, and generates events/DTO’s. If this is true it’s not really a 3x scaling you achieve with CQRS but merely a 1.5x scaling which while great doesn’t sound nearly as dramatic (“I can do it with 10 devs in 12 months – let me hire 5 more and we can have it done in 8 months”). Making the Query side “stupid simple” such that you can assign junior developers (or even outsource it) sounds like a valid benefit, but I have some concerns over what you do with complex query-based logic/behavior. I’m going to go into more detail on this in a follow-up blog post shortly. He also seemed to focus on how “stupid-simple” it is doing queries against the de-normalized data store, but I imagine there is still significant complexity in the event handlers that interpret the events and apply them to the de-normalized tables. It sounds like Greg suggests that because we’re doing CQRS that allows us to apply Event Sourcing when we otherwise wouldn’t be able to (~33:30 in the video). I don’t believe this is true. I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to apply Event Sourcing without separating out the Commands and Queries. The queries would just operate against the domain model instead of the database. But you’d still get the benefits of Event Sourcing. Without CQRS the queries would only be able to operate against the current state rather than the event history, but even in CQRS the domain behaviors can only operate against the current state and I don’t see that being a big limiting factor. If some query needs to operate against something that is not captured by the current state you would just have to update the domain model to capture that information (no different than if that statement were made about a Command under CQRS). Some of the benefits I do see being applicable are that your domain model might end up being simpler/smaller since it only needs to represent the state needed to process commands and not worry about the reads (like the Deactivate Inventory Item and associated comment example that Greg provides). And also commands that can be handled in a Transaction Script style manner by the command handler simply generating events and not touching the domain model. It also makes it easier for your senior developers to focus on the command behavior and ignore the queries, which is usually going to be a better use of their time. And of course scalability. If anybody out there has any thoughts on this and can help educate me further, please either leave a comment or feel free to get in touch with me via email:

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• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality: Ever Integration-ready

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  It is closing in on a year now since Oracle’s acquisition of Datanomic, and the addition of Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) to the Oracle software family. The big move has caused some big shifts in emphasis and some very encouraging excitement from the field.  To give an illustration, combined with a shameless promotion of how EDQ can help to give quick insights into your data, I did a quick Phrase Profile of the subject field of emails to the Global EDQ mailing list since it was set up last September. The results revealed a very clear theme:   Integration, Integration, Integration! As well as the important Siebel and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) integrations, we have been asked about integration with a huge variety of Oracle applications, including EBS, Peoplesoft, CRM on Demand, Fusion, DRM, Endeca, RightNow, and more - and we have not stood still! While it would not have been possible to develop specific pre-integrations with all of the above within a year, we have developed a package of feature-rich out-of-the-box web services and batch processes that can be plugged into any application or middleware technology with ease. And with Siebel, they work out of the box. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality version 9.0.4 includes the Customer Data Services (CDS) pack – a ready set of standard processes with standard interfaces, to provide integrated: Address verification and cleansing  Individual matching Organization matching The services can are suitable for either Batch or Real-Time processing, and are enabled for international data, with simple configuration options driving the set of locale-specific dictionaries that are used. For example, large dictionaries are provided to support international name transcription and variant matching, including highly specialized handling for Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Korean data. In total across all locales, CDS includes well over a million dictionary entries.   Excerpt from EDQ’s CDS Individual Name Standardization Dictionary CDS has been developed to replace the OEM of Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR) for attached Data Quality on the Oracle price list, but does this in a way that creates a ‘best of both worlds’ situation for customers, who can harness not only the out-of-the-box functionality of pre-packaged matching and standardization services, but also the flexibility of OEDQ if they want to customize the interfaces or the process logic, without having to learn more than one product. From a competitive point of view, we believe this stands us in good stead against our key competitors, including Informatica, who have separate ‘Identity Resolution’ and general DQ products, and IBM, who provide limited out-of-the-box capabilities (with a steep learning curve) in both their QualityStage data quality and Initiate matching products. Here is a brief guide to the main services provided in the pack: Address Verification and Standardization EDQ’s CDS Address Cleaning Process The Address Verification and Standardization service uses EDQ Address Verification (an OEM of Loqate software) to verify and clean addresses in either real-time or batch. The Address Verification processor is wrapped in an EDQ process – this adds significant capabilities over calling the underlying Address Verification API directly, specifically: Country-specific thresholds to determine when to accept the verification result (and therefore to change the input address) based on the confidence level of the API Optimization of address verification by pre-standardizing data where required Formatting of output addresses into the input address fields normally used by applications Adding descriptions of the address verification and geocoding return codes The process can then be used to provide real-time and batch address cleansing in any application; such as a simple web page calling address cleaning and geocoding as part of a check on individual data.     Duplicate Prevention Unlike Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR), EDQ uses stateless services for duplicate prevention to avoid issues caused by complex replication and synchronization of large volume customer data. When a record is added or updated in an application, the EDQ Cluster Key Generation service is called, and returns a number of key values. These are used to select other records (‘candidates’) that may match in the application data (which has been pre-seeded with keys using the same service). The ‘driving record’ (the new or updated record) is then presented along with all selected candidates to the EDQ Matching Service, which decides which of the candidates are a good match with the driving record, and scores them according to the strength of match. In this model, complex multi-locale EDQ techniques can be used to generate the keys and ensure that the right balance between performance and matching effectiveness is maintained, while ensuring that the application retains control of data integrity and transactional commits. The process is explained below: EDQ Duplicate Prevention Architecture Note that where the integration is with a hub, there may be an additional call to the Cluster Key Generation service if the master record has changed due to merges with other records (and therefore needs to have new key values generated before commit). Batch Matching In order to allow customers to use different match rules in batch to real-time, separate matching templates are provided for batch matching. For example, some customers want to minimize intervention in key user flows (such as adding new customers) in front end applications, but to conduct a more exhaustive match on a regular basis in the back office. The batch matching jobs are also used when migrating data between systems, and in this case normally a more precise (and automated) type of matching is required, in order to minimize the review work performed by Data Stewards.  In batch matching, data is captured into EDQ using its standard interfaces, and records are standardized, clustered and matched in an EDQ job before matches are written out. As with all EDQ jobs, batch matching may be called from Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) if required. When working with Siebel CRM (or master data in Siebel UCM), Siebel’s Data Quality Manager is used to instigate batch jobs, and a shared staging database is used to write records for matching and to consume match results. The CDS batch matching processes automatically adjust to Siebel’s ‘Full Match’ (match all records against each other) and ‘Incremental Match’ (match a subset of records against all of their selected candidates) modes. The Future The Customer Data Services Pack is an important part of the Oracle strategy for EDQ, offering a clear path to making Data Quality Assurance an integral part of enterprise applications, and providing a strong value proposition for adopting EDQ. We are planning various additions and improvements, including: An out-of-the-box Data Quality Dashboard Even more comprehensive international data handling Address search (suggesting multiple results) Integrated address matching The EDQ Customer Data Services Pack is part of the Enterprise Data Quality Media Pack, available for download at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/oedq/downloads/index.html.

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