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• How does a one-man developer do its games' sounds?

  - by Gustavo Maciel

  Before anything, that's not a "oh, where can I find resources?" question. Well, I've been curious about one thing in the indie games industry. For the development of the game, such tasks like game design, art, sketches, code programming and etc can be easily done by just one person. You can just take up a paper and pencil and you're a game designer. You can just take software like Photoshop or Paint and you're an artist, a scanner and you're a sketcher, a compiler and you're a programmer. For sound it's different. You may tell me: Well, follow the line, take a lot of instruments and record it. But all we know that things don't work this way. I can list up some changes for us: External noises are a big problem, sound effects can't be made with instruments, it can't sound like a recorded and clipped sound. Well I can imagine how they do this in large companies, with such big studios and etc. But to summarise, my question is: What's the best way for a one-man indie to do all its sound? Does he have to synthesize everything? Record and buy some crazy program for editing sounds?

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• How to remove seams from a tile map in 3D?

  - by Grimshaw

  I am using my OpenGL custom engine to render a tilemap made with Tiled, using a well spread tileset from the web. There is nothing fancy going on. I load the TMX file from Tiled and generate vertex arrays and index arrays to render the tilemap. I am rendering this tilemap as a wall in my 3D world, meaning that I move around with a fly camera in my 3D world and at Z=0 there is a plane showing me my tiles. Everything is working correctly but I get ugly seems between the tiles. I've tried orthographic and perspective cameras and with either I found particular sets of parameters for the projection and view matrices where the artifacts did not show, but otherwise they are there 99% of the time in multiple patterns, depending on the zoom and camera parameters like field of view. Here's a screenshot of the artifact being shown: http://i.imgur.com/HNV1g4M.png Here's the tileset I am using (which Tiled also uses and renders correctly): http://i.imgur.com/SjjHK4q.png My tileset has no mipmaps and is set to GL_NEAREST and GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE values. I've looked around many articles in the internet and nothing helped. I tried uv correction so the uv fall at half of the texel, rather than the end of the texel to prevent interpolating with the neighbour value(which is transparency). I tried debugging with my geometry and I verified that with no texture and a random color in each tile, I don't seem to see any seams. All vertices have integer coordinates, i.e, the first tile is a quad from (0,0) to (1,1) and so on. Tried adding a little offset both to the UV and to the vertices to see if the gaps cease to exist. Disabled multisampling too. Nothing fixed it so far. Thanks.

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• How often does Dreamhost change IP Addresses

  - by pjreddie

  So I just migrated our site to dreamhost because they are free for non-profits. However, right after I switched the nameservers over to them they changed the IP address of the site. So first they propagated out IP address x.x.x.180, then they switched it to x.x.x.178 and had to propagate that out. Point being it meant a lot of downtime since a lot of big DNS servers (like google) thought the address was still x.x.x.180 for up to 5 hours after they switched it. This is compounded by the fact that most our visitors to the site live here in Unalaska and we have local DNS servers that take a LONG time to update (like a day or more) since we get all our internet over satellite. So every time Dreamhost changes our IP address it can mean a day of downtime for us in our community. So my question is, how often do these changes take place? I asked Dreamhost support and they gave me a vague response: I wish I could say, however those changes happen at random times. They're not that frequent, maybe even months between updates, but there's no way to know for sure. First, I hardly believe that they don't know their own system well enough to give me at least some estimate or average. Second, is it worth looking at other providers so that I can get a static IP address? We were hosting the site here originally and hadn't run into this problem since we have a static IP here. We don't get a ton of traffic but usually around 500 hits a day or so, sometimes more if our stories are featured on statewide or national news broadcasts. So hours of downtime every time Dreamhost "randomly" decides to move our server location can be bad for our readership.

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• How does one escape the GPL?

  - by tehtros

  DISCLAIMER I don't pretend to know anything about licensing. In fact, everything I say below may be completely false! Backstory: Recently, I've been looking for a decent game engine, and I think I've found one that I really like, Cafu Engine. However, they have a dual licensing plan, where everything you make with the engine is forced under GPL, unless you pay for a commercial license. I'm not saying that it's a bad engine, they even say that they are very relaxed about the licensing fees. However, the fact that it even involves the GPL scares me. So my question is basicly, how does one escape the GPL. Here's an example: The id Tech engine, also known as the Quake engine, or the Doom engine, was the base for the popular Source engine. However, the id Tech engine has been released under the GPL, and the Source engine is proprietary. Did Valve get a different license? Or did they do something to escape the GPL? Is there a way to escape the GPL? Or, if you use GPL'd source code as a base for another project, are you forced to use the GPL, and make your source code available to the world. Could some random person take the id Tech engine, modify it past the point of recognition, then use it as a proprietary engine for commercial products? Or are they required to make it open source. One last thing, I generally have no problem what-so-ever with open source. However I feel that open source has it's place, but that is not in the bushiness world.

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• How does eMail encryption work?

  - by Dummy Derp

  I have been going over YouTube watching videos on eMail encryption and everyone seems to explain it from a different perspective. Some do it for a CompTIA exam while others just provide a primer. Here is what I understood: Step1: You compose an email that you want to send. Without encryption, it will be simple ASCII text that will be visible to anyone along the way. Step2: You generate a digital signature to make sure that nobody gets to re-transmit your email and claim it was you. Digital Signature is generated using Sender's private key which is usually a hash of the password and is then combined with the original message to form one long hash string. These signatures are one-time-use-only and a new one is calculated for every email. Step 3: You encrypt the compose of your email using Receiver's public key so that the only person who can read it is the intended receiver using their private key Step 4: When you hit the send the email, what is transmitted now is gibberish to everyone apart from the intended receiver who will decrypt is using their private key And there are various ways to do it like PEM, PGP, etc. Correct me where I am wrong or refine where necessary.

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• Self Service Reporting With PowerPivot

  - by blakmk

  There are so many cool new features in Sql 2008 release 2 it was difficult for me to pick a topic for T-SQL Tuesday . But the one that I am now a secret fan of, I once resented for its creation. Let me explain, for years I have encountered reporting systems cobbled together in tools like Access and Excel built by "database hobbyists" who had no formal training in database design or best practices. They would take their monstrosities as far as they could go before ultimatley it stopped working or the person that wrote it left the company. At that point it would become the resident DBA's problem to support it as a Live application. So when I first heard of Power Pivot, a sense of Deja Vu overtook me and I felt like the guy in the Ausin Powers movie , knowing the inevitable is coming but somehow unsure how to get out of the way. But when I eventually saw it in action, I quickly realised that it is a very powerful tool. It has a much smaller "time to market" than traditional BI architectures. Combined with the new features of Excel, some pretty impressive dashboards can be produced.Of course PowerPivot is not a magic bullet and along with potential scalability issues there are the usual issues such as master data management and data quality that cannot be overcome easily with power pivot. As a tool though, it has potential. Traditional BI is expensive, both in terms of time and the amount of resources it takes to deliver the system. The time lag between an analyst or a commercial accountant requesting reports and the report being delivered can make a huge commercial difference. I have observed companies where empowered end users become extremely productive when allowed to plough in to various disperate datasets. It may not be the correct way or the most sustainable but its cheap and quick. In these times when budgets are being slashed and we are forced to deliver more with less, why not empower the end user in a tool that is designed for exactly this task.... @blakmk  

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• How do I make time?

  - by SystemNetworks

  I wanted to output a text for a certain amount of time. One way is to use threads. Are there any other ways? I can't use threads for slick2d. This is my code when I use threads for slick: package javagame; import org.newdawn.slick.GameContainer; import org.newdawn.slick.Graphics; import org.newdawn.slick.Image; import java.util.Random; import org.newdawn.slick.Input; import org.newdawn.slick.*; import org.newdawn.slick.state.*; import org.lwjgl.input.Mouse; public class thread1 implements Runnable { String showUp; int timeLeft; public thread1(String s) { s = showUp; } public void run(Graphics g) { try { g.drawString("%s is sleeping %d", 500, 500); Thread.sleep(timeLeft); g.drawString("%s is awake", 600,600); } catch(Exception e) { } } @Override public void run() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub run(); } } It auto generates a new run() And also when I call it to my main class it has stack overflow!

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• You Don't Want to Meet Orgad Kimchi in a Dark Alley

  - by rickramsey

  source Do you remember what those bad guys in the old Charles Bronson films looked like? They looked like Orgad Kimchi, that's what they looked like. When I met him at Oracle OpenWorld 2012, I realized I didn't want to meet him in the wrong alleyway of Budapest after dark. Neither do old versions of Oracle Solaris, which Orgad bends to his will with as much ease as he probably bends stray tourists to his will in Budapest, Kandahar, or Dagestan. How Orgad Made Oracle Database Migrate from Oracle Solaris 8 to Oracle Solaris 11 In this article, which we liked so much we reprinted it from his blog (please don't tell him!), Orgad explains how he head-butted an Oracle Database into submission. The database thought it was safe running in Oracle Solaris 8, but Orgad dragged its whimpering carcas into Oracle Solaris 11. How'd he do that? Well, if you had met Orgad in person, you wouldn't ask that question. Because you'd know he could have simply stared at it, and the database would have migrated on its own. But Orgad didn't do that. Instead, he stuffed an Oracle Solaris 8 Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) Archiver Tool into his leather trench coat, the one with the special pockets sown in by the East German Secret Police for several Uzis and their ammo, and walked into his data center in a way that reminded the survivors of this clip from Matrix Reloaded. The end result? The Oracle Database 10.2 that was running on Oracle Solaris 8 is now running inside a Solaris 10 branded zone in Oracle Solaris 11. With no complaints. Don't make Orgad angry. Read his article. - Rick Website Newsletter Facebook Twitter

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• Defunct website taken over by spammer. How to stop them?

  - by Robert

  A friend of mine used to publish a small literary fiction magazine, both in print and on the web. In 2011 she announced that she was quitting, put a note on the website, and carefully unwound the subscriptions. She continued hosting the site (with all the back-issues available for free) until the beginning of this year, when she let the hosting lapse and the domain name expire. Today she discovered that some unknown person has purchased her former domain name and put up a modified version of her entire site. The design is different but all the content is the same, including all of the back-issues of the magazine (and the stories by diverse authors contained within), their cover art, news posts, and even her contact information. All the content would have been available from Archive.org, so it's no mystery how they got it. The only thing noticeably changed is a column added to the front page titled "Favorite Videos", with around 35 links to Youtube videos. The links are named things like "Video (Worry)" and "Video (Squirting)" and the videos all feature a man named Leo giving dubious advice and promoting his life-coaching website. Here's one of the suspect videos. There does not appear to be any connection between the content of the videos and my friend or her magazine. I also posted to the Security StackExchange to ask why someone would do this and what the security risks are to her. What I want to know here is, what can she do to stop them? To be clear she doesn't want the domain name back. She just doesn't want her name and copyrighted material used deceptively. Also, what (if anything) could she have done when shutting down her website to avoid this happening?

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• Lessons From OpenId, Cardspace and Facebook Connect

  - by mark.wilcox

  (c) denise carbonell I think Johannes Ernst summarized pretty well what happened in a broad sense in regards to OpenId, Cardspace and Facebook Connect. However, I'm more interested in the lessons we can take away from this. First  - "Apple Lesson" - If user-centric identity is going to happen it's going to require not only technology but also a strong marketing campaign. I'm calling this the "Apple Lesson" because it's very similar to how Apple iPad saw success vs the tablet market. The iPad is not only a very good technology product but it was backed by a very good marketing plan. I know most people do not want to think about marketing here - but the fact is that nobody could really articulate why user-centric identity mattered in a way that the average person cared about. Second - "Facebook Lesson" - Facebook Connect solves a number of interesting problems that is easy for both consumer and service providers. For a consumer it's simple to log-in without any redirects. And while Facebook isn't perfect on privacy - no other major consumer-focused service on the Internet provides as much control about sharing identity information. From a developer perspective it is very easy to implement the SSO and fetch other identity information (if the user has given permission). This could only happen because a major company just decided to make a singular focus to make it happen. Third - "Developers Lesson" -  Facebook Social Graph API is by far the simplest API for accessing identity information which also is another reason why you're seeing such rapid growth in Facebook enabled Websites. By using a combination of URL and Javascript - the power a single HTML page now gives a developer writing Web applications is simply amazing. For example It doesn't get much simpler than this "http://api.facebook.com/mewilcox" for accessing identity. And while I can't yet share too much publicly about the specifics - the social graph API had a profound impact on me in designing our next generation APIs.  Posted via email from Virtual Identity Dialogue

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• What is Mark Shuttleworth's "Easter eggs" blog a reference to? [closed]

  - by fluteflute

  I saw this blog post today, and I was wondering if there's some meaning within the Ubuntu community that I've missed? (I know what an easter egg is in a computer context.) One of our ducks has started dropping eggs in random locations in the garden. I don’t know which duck, but I assume it’s one of the new females we took in from the SPCA, who hasn’t figured out “nesting” yet. I do love ‘em but they’re not African Grey’s in the IQ department. Anyhow, I think I finally understand why people hide eggs in the garden at Easter. Because ducks used to do it for them! I suppose, for millennia, this has been the season to go hunting for eggs. Now we just substitute chocolate ones instead. For the moment, I’ve kept them in a cool shady spot while I keep an eye out for an actual nest. If a polecat doesn’t find them first, I may be able to slip them onto the nest in time for them to get hatched along with some cousins.

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• Google Image Search Quick Fix

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you tired of unneeded webpage loading and extra link clicking just to access an image found using Google Image Search? Now you can jump directly to the image itself with the clickGOOGLEview extension for Google Chrome. The Problem When you find an image that you like using Google Image Search you always have to go through extra hassle just to get to the image itself. First you have an entire webpage loading in your browser and then you have to click through that irritating “See full size image” link. All that you need is the image, right? Problem Fixed Once you have installed the clickGOOGLEview extension you will absolutely love the result. Find an image that you like, click the link, and there is your new image without any of the hassle or extra link clicking. Big or small having direct access to the image is how it should have been from the beginning. Conclusion The clickGOOGLEview extension does one thing and does it extremely well…it gets you to those images without the extra hassle or additional link clicking. Links Download the clickGOOGLEview extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make Firefox Quick Search Use Google’s Beta Search KeysChange Internet Explorer in Windows Vista to Search Google by DefaultMake Firefox Built-In Search Box Use Google’s Experimental Search KeysQuick Tip: Show PageRank in Firefox while Google Toolbar is HiddenQuick Tip: Use Google Talk Sidebar in Firefox TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher

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• Restoring GRUB2 on Software RAID 0 after Windows 7 wiped it using LiveCD

  - by unknownthreat

  I have installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my system. However, I need to install Windows 7 back, and I expect that it would alter GRUB and it did. Right now, my partition on my Software RAID 0 looks like this: nvidia_acajefec1 is Ubuntu 10.10 and nvidia_acajefec3 is Windows 7. I've been following some guides around and I am always stuck at GRUB not able to detect the usual RAID content. I've tried running: sudo grub > root (hd0,0) GRUB complains it couldn't find my hard disk. So I tried: find (hd0,0) And it complains that it couldn't find anything. So I tried: find /boot/grub/stage1 It said "file not found". Here's the text from the console: ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ grub Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time. [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible completions of a device/filename. ] grub> root (hd0,0) root (hd0,0) Error 21: Selected disk does not exist grub> find /boot/grub/stage1 find /boot/grub/stage1 Error 15: File not found Fortunately, I got one person suggesting that what I've been trying to do is for GRUB Legacy, not GRUB2. So I went to the suggested website, ** (http://grub.enbug.org/Grub2LiveCdInstallGuide) **try to look around, and try: ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l Unable to seek on /dev/sda This is just the step 2 of the instruction in the http://grub.enbug.org/Grub2LiveCdInstallGuide and I cannot proceed because it cannot seek /dev/sda. However, ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo dmraid -r /dev/sdb: nvidia, "nvidia_acajefec", stripe, ok, 488397166 sectors, data@ 0 /dev/sda: nvidia, "nvidia_acajefec", stripe, ok, 488397166 sectors, data@ 0 So what now? Do you have an idea for how to make fdisk see my RAID array on live cd (Ubuntu 10.10)? Honestly, I am lost, very lost in trying to restore GRUB2 on this software RAID 0 system right now.

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• Diablo 3 "freezes" periodically

  - by Shauna

  I'm running Diablo 3 (start edition, digital download) on the following: Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit (stock Unity, Gnome, etc; kernel version 3.2.0-29-generic) Wine version 1.5.11 (base, from Wine's PPA, game started with setarch i386 -3) Intel i7 920 CPU nVidia GTX260 with driver version 295.49 ("post-release updates" entry within the proprietary drivers tool), dual monitors 6GB RAM Every so often (and what appears to be at random), the game video will freeze up. I can still move the mouse, and it reacts to ctrl+alt+f2 to drop into text mode, but I can't get back to the desktop (which means I can check terminal to see what's going on after launching from terminal, especially since even in windowed mode, the secondary screen gets shut off by the game), and I can't continue to play the game. In order to get it running again, I have to restart lightdm, then relaunch the game (or, in a couple of rare cases, I had to restart the computer entirely, because running sudo service lightdmn [stop/start] doesn't appear to react). Turning down the video settings seems to have helped in some cases, but not all of them. Times it's frozen on me: The beginning of The Fallen Start quest part 6 - kill the Wretched Mother, right as you walk out of New Tristram and engage in the monsters on the northern path (repeatedly froze here until I adjusted the graphics down) Within the cinematic/event upon finding Deckard Cain While fighting the skeletons to protect Deckard Cain When about to enter Leoric's passage after Cain sends you back to where you found him That's as far as I've gotten through the game so far. Additionally, this doesn't happen on other games I play and seems to only occur with Diablo 3. Has anyone else run into this issue and know a possible cause or fix, or at least know where I can look (and what to look for) to figure out why this is happening?

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• One Does Like To Code: DevoxxUK

  - by Tori Wieldt

  What's happening at Devoxx UK? I'll be talking to Rock Star speakers, Community leaders, authors, JSR leads and more.  This video is a short introduction.   Check out these great sessions: Thursday, June 12Perchance to Stream with Java 8by Paul Sandoz13:40 - 14:30 | Room 1 Making the Internet-of-Things a Reality with Embedded Javaby Simon Ritter11:50 - 12:40 | Room 4 Java SE 8 Lambdas and Streams Labby Simon Ritter17:00 - 20:00 | Room Mezzanine Safety Not Guaranteed: Sun. Misc. Unsafe and the Quest for Safe Alternativesby Paul Sandoz18:45 - 19:45 | Room 3 Join the Java EvolutionHeather VanCuraPatrick Curran19:45 – 20:45 | Room 2  Glassfish is Here to StayDavid DelabasseeAntonio Goncalves19:45 – 20:45 | Room Expo Here is the full line-up of sessions. Devoxx UK includes a Hackergarten, where can devs work an Open Source project of their choice. The Adopt OpenJDK and Adopt a JSR Program folks will be there to help attendees contribute back to Java SE and Java EE itself!   Saturday includes a special Devoxx4Kids event in conjunction with the London Java Community. It's design to teach 10-16 year-olds simple programming concepts, robotics, electronics, and games making. Workshops include LEGO Mindstorms (robotic engineering), Greenfoot (programming), Arduino (electronics), Scratch (games making), Minecraft Modding (game hacking) and NAO (robotic programming). Small fee, you must register. If you can't attend Devoxx UK in person, stay tuned to the YouTube/Java channel. I'll be doing plenty of interviews so you can join the fun from around the world. 

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• Strange spam posts not making sense

  - by Paaland

  I'm running a web site with a forum where one small part is open for posting from unregistered users. The site uses captcha, but still some spam posts get through every day. Here is the thing. All of the messages follow the same pattern, but all also come from different IP's. That makes me thing this is some sort of automated scripted "attack" from a botnet of some sorts. The strange thing is that all the messages start with six random characters and contains a couple of links. The words have no meaning and the domains in the links does not even exist. Why would anyone use time and resources spreading these things? Below you can see two of these messages: A5Zfs6 exrzvrbspntz, [url=http://nktqoqllnuab.com/]nktqoqllnuab[/url], [link=http://wtrenldadvsy.com/]wtrenldadvsy[/link], [http://rnlrqfgdvdot.com/] O2oLpL nqeffxhryfdk, [url=http://jutyurbpfxow.com/]jutyurbpfxow[/url], [link=http://jpcdtmdalpow.com/]jpcdtmdalpow[/link], [http://qopqwqxwjdjx.com/] Since all the messages come from different IP's I can't see blocking those will help much. For now I'm considering just dropping all messages following this pattern since it's quite easy to match with a regexp. Have anyone else seen these kinds of messages or know the point of posting them?

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• Why is <my site url> not indexed by search engines? [closed]

  - by Henrik Erlandsson

  was indexed fine until about a year ago. The only thing I can think of is that search engines throw up at using h5 before h4, or that some person (fantasizing now) has reported my site as unsafe to every search engine. However, I'm not here to speculate. The site validates, and has an RSS feed on the front page, for Pat Morita's sake! To me, it looks like the kind of site search engines would feast on. It's got more than a dozen blogs on it, if nothing else. Hah. :) I was thinking you could identify basically what has changed in search engines (currently, google, yahoo, bing which used to work fine) the last year to make them not find news and blog articles on this site. The site was submitted to Google, oh, way back in 2006. With online crawler tests I get mixed results, some crawlers index fine, some go blank. I don't really know which ones are reliable and am looking to you guys for advice on that. Yes, I am prepared to again verify my site with Google and upload a sitemap, but that's not the topic here. I really would first like to know what change on the site last year could make search engines not index it. (Yees, the robots.txt is fine. Should be nothing to discourage bots there.) It's a very intriguing problem. One which I have yet to find the reason for but would like to know the reason for. Any and all input appreciated, but I would heavily enjoy pertinent advice the most. ;) Edit: Some google searches that don't show up include - aca630 All of which are posted in the news and blogs that are on the front page there. Now, these search terms are extremely specific as the term in is almost unique on the web and ACA630 is also a very qualified search term that can't be confused with mainstream search terms.

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• PASS Summit 2011 &ndash; Part I

  - by Tara Kizer

  What an amazing week I had at PASS Summit 2011 in Seattle, WA!  I hadn’t attended a PASS conference since September of 2005 when it was in Grapevine, Texas.  It has grown so much since then.  I am not sure how many people attended back then, but I’d guesstimate about 1500.  They announced that at this year’s conference there were 4000 attendees.  WOW! Here are my favorite aspects of this conference: Networking! – Not only did I meet a lot of new people, but I also got to meet people in person that I’ve known on the Internet for years like Mladen Prajdic (blog|twitter) and Rob Volk (blog|twitter).  I even met someone that I’d recently helped out in the SQLTeam forums.  Learning – I took a lot of notes during the sessions I attended and plan on blogging very soon about them.  It is amazing the amount of things you learn and the things that you unlearn.  Yes I said unlearn.  Some of the stuff that I thought I knew was either out-dated or just plain wrong.  Fun, fun, fun – To say that this conference was fun would be an understatement.  I had a blast!  I attended the “Welcome Reception and Quizbowl” on Tuesday night, the “Exhibitor Reception” on Wednesday night, and the “Community Appreciation Party” at GameWorks on Thursday night.  There were many other after-hours events to attend, but I had to make my kids a priority at night so I had to get back to my hotel room before 9pm so that I could Skype with them.   It was very entertaining reading and posting with #sqlpass on Twitter.  Twitter has changed the conference experience for the better.  I will definitely be able to do my job better due to attending this conference.  The return on investment is HUGE!

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• Permanent death in a MUD (think command line MMORPG)

  - by Luke Laupheimer

  I have considered writing a MUD for years, and I have a lot of ideas my friends think are really cool (and that's how I'd hope to get anywhere -- word of mouth). Thing is, there's one thing I have always wanted, that my friends and strangers hated: permanent death. Now, the emotional response I get to this is visceral revulsion, every time. I'm pretty sure I am the only person that wants this, or if I'm not, I'm a tiny minority. Now, the reason I want it is because I want the actions of the players to matter. Unlike a lot of other MUDs, which have a set of static city-states and social institutions etc, I want the things my players do, should I get any, to actually change the situation. And that includes killing people. If you kill someone, you didn't send them to time out, you killed them. What happens when you kill people? They go away. They don't come back in half an hour to smack talk you some more. They're gone. Forever. By making death non-permanent, you make death not matter. It would be similar if a climax to a character's arc is getting a speeding ticket. It cheapens it. Non-permanent death cheapens death. How can I: 1) Convince my players (and random people!) that this is actually a good idea?, or 2) Find some other way to make death and violence matter as much as it does in real life (except within the game, of course) sans character deletion? What alternatives are there out there?

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• More Tables or More Databases?

  - by BuckWoody

  I got an e-mail from someone that has an interesting situation. He has 15,000 customers, and he asks if he should have a database for their data per customer. Without a LOT more data it’s impossible to say, of course, but there are some general concepts to keep in mind. Whenever you’re segmenting data, it’s all about boundary choices. You have not only boundaries around how big the data will get, but things like how many objects (tables, stored procedures and so on) that will be involved, if there are any cross-sections of data (do they share location or product information) and – very important – what are the security requirements? From the answer to these types of questions, you now have the choice of making multiple tables in a single database, or using multiple databases. A database carries some overhead – it needs a certain amount of memory for locking and so on. But it has a very clean boundary – everything from objects to security can be kept apart. Having multiple users in the same database is possible as well, using things like a Schema. But keeping 15,000 schemas can be challenging as well. My recommendation in complex situations like this is similar to a post on decisions that I did earlier – I lay out the choices on a spreadsheet in rows, and then my requirements at the top in the columns. I  give each choice a number based on how well it meets each requirement. At the end, the highest number wins. And many times it’s a mix – perhaps this person could segment customers into larger regions or districts or products, in a database. Within that database might be multiple schemas for the customers. Of course, he needs to query across all customers, that becomes another requirement. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Heading to GTC 2010

  - by Daniel Moth

  Next week the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2010 takes place in San Jose, CA and I am lucky enough to be attending the entire week. It has been an extremely long time (in fact, I can't remember the last time) where I am registered as an attendee at a conference (full pass/access) without being a speaker *and* without having any booth duty! Having said that, we (our team at Microsoft) will be running GPU debugging UX studies throughout the entire week (similar to what I had previously advertised). If you are attending GTC 2010 and you are interested, look for the related flyer in your conference bag. The conference is an excellent opportunity to connect in-person with various individuals that I have only met virtually. From an educational perspective there is a very long and interesting session list, with multiple concurrent slots, making it very hard to choose between them, but I have managed to create my (packed) schedule. I am most looking forward to sessions on the programming languages and tools, both from Microsoft and MS partners. For full conference details, visit the GTC 2010 official page. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Do I need social networks to be an expert developer? [closed]

  - by Gerald Blizzy

  This question may sound odd, but do I need twitter, facebook and google+ if I am a web-developer? I see many expert developers nowadays using it in working order. It seems like it's harder to stay in touch with customers, co-workers and potential customers if you don' use social networks. Am I right? Reason why I ask is that I am totally not a facebook/twitter person, I find it boring and annoying. I understand that linkedin is usefull for career, but what about twitter and facebook? Are they needed for web-developer career? What I am trying to ask is if I only use linkedin, own portfolio website, google talks, gmail and something like github, would I actually miss anything professionally/job-wise? My thoughts are that I can just have my portfolio website where I list all my projects aswell as contacts page with my google talks/gmail account. It can suit both fulltime job, freelance and own projects. So this way email and google talks is just enough. Am I right or not? Thanks in advance!

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• Infrastructure to effectively set up experiements and learn from them

  - by David

  Open-org.com is in the early stages of creating our first product, a place on the web, where one can ask lawyers questions at a fraction of their normal costs. An early stage front page can be found here. I got inspired by this video, which is recommended by Jeff Atwood, which talks about getting feedback faster, which is the reason for this question. The problem Needless to say, we want our conversion rates to be as high as possible. Therefore, we want to be able to rapidly set up a new experiment where we change something on the site (like moving an image slightly, rewriting a sentence etc.). We then want to present the modified page to a random subset of the users. After that we will compare the conversion rates of the experiment with another version. I could very well imagine that we want to run 10-100 experiments simultaneously and it would be nice to have features, where experiments that obviously have worse results will be ended before schedule. My question Does infrastructure to support the whole process exist? A short description of our infrastructure... We use EC2 and PHP and have a script to automatically start up new instances with all needed software. Still, starting up a new server for every experiment, seems like a bit of overkill, so I am wondering what other options exist. Btw. If you feel like working for Open-org.com, you can pick a task, and start working, or suggest a new task. All profits are given out to the contributors.

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• Huge procedurally generated 'wilderness' worlds

  - by The Communist Duck

  I'm sure you all know of games like Dwarf Fortress - massive, procedural generated wilderness and land. Something like this, taken from this very useful article. However, I was wondering how I could apply this to a much larger scale; the scale of Minecraft comes to mind (isn't that something like 8x the size of the Earth's surface?). Pseudo-infinite, I think the best term would be. The article talks about fractal perlin noise. I am no way an expert on it, but I get the general idea (it's some kind of randomly generated noise which is semi-coherent, so not just random pixel values). I could just define regions X by X in size, add some region loading type stuff, and have one bit of noise generating a region. But this would result in just huge amounts of islands. On the other extreme, I don't think I can really generate a supermassive sheet of perlin noise. And it would just be one big island, I think. I am pretty sure Perlin noise, or some noise, would be the answer in some way. I mean, the map is really nice looking. And you could replace the ascii with tiles, and get something very nice looking. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks. :D

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• Failure to Boot 12.04 on HP AMD Dual Core. Rescue Mode doesn't even come up

  - by L R Bellmore Jr

  I have 12.04 installed on HP 64 bit dual core AMD laptop.. worked great until about 1-2 months ago.. now takes 1/2 hour to 25 hours to boot if it ever does. A minor number of times I get the HP logo with hash lines on screen and it just hangs... When it finally boots 95% it will run until I turn it off days later to see if any of the upgrades fixed the problem. Currently, if it boots, it is random.. .left on over night .. 2 nights ago and came back to a HP logo with Hash Lines horizontal across the screen.. frozen.. rebooted back to black screen.. no HP logo... Most often when it does boot.. no HP logo.. just cursor shows up.. and then I know it will finally load... computer has been made worthless and it is my work computer..HELP PLEASE... Rescue Mode can't be invoked.. computer doesnt respond.. has shown up 3 times in about 100 and when I have tried it... 1 time it resulted in a boot up but then failed in a couple hours.

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