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  • Import SSIS Project in Denali CTP1

    For years Analysis Services has had the ability to take an existing database from a server and reverse engineer it into a BIDS project.  This is extremely useful when all you have is the running instance of the database and the project that created it has long since disappeared.  Reverse engineering has never been a feature of SSIS until now. Let me walk you through the simple steps. The first step is that you obviously have to have a project deployed to an SSIS Catalog.  I will do a video on this soon but in case you can’t wait then my good buddy Jamie Thomson has written it up here As you can see I have a project called imaginatively “Denali1” with one package “Package.dtsx” The next thing we need to do is fire up BIDS and choose the right project type (Integration Services Import Project) Now we just follow the wizard.  We make sure we specify on which server to find the Catalog and in which folder to look for the project. Next the setting are validated and we are greeted with the familiar review screen before the creation of our new project from the deployed project happens Hit Import and away we go The result is just what we wanted.

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  • Broad topics needed for teaching game development

    - by livingtech
    I am going to be doing a presentation on game development to an iPhone user group in the near(ish) future. My audience are iPhone developers, but not necessarily very experienced ones, and this is meant to be an introduction. My question is, what broad topics are needed to understand game development? I acknowledge that this is fairly subjective, but I really am hoping for a comprehensive list of high-level topics that apply to a broad enough swath of games that anyone interested in the topic SHOULD know about them. I would be ecstatic with some pointers to any resources that attempt to make a list such as this this. (I have looked, but my google-fu is failing me tonight.) Here's what I have so far: The Game Loop a sub-note about event driven games 2D Animation sprites/texture maps 3D Animation importance of frameworks modeling software Particles and particle effects hit detection AI Obviously I will not be covering all these topics with any depth, more like simply defining them so that after my talk, the audience will (hopefully) be able to wrap their heads around how any given game might be developed. What am I missing?

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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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  • Desktop switcher appears to be broken for quick double-switches

    - by Jon Blackburn
    I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this. I have three virtual desktops aligned in a horizontal row. In the middle desktop I have only a single application window. I have keyboard shortcuts mapping to navigate between the desktops. Obviously, I never use the up/down arrows because I only have one row of workspaces. Here's the problem, which only started to happen after I installed 12.04.1: When I rapidly hit to go from workspace 1 to workspace 3, the window on workspace 2 gets moved to workspace 1. I have checked using both Unity and Gnome3, and the behavior is the same under both. If I change back to the default workspace setup (a 2x2 grid of desktops) things seem to settle down (i.e., no wandering windows). Not every type of application window behaves the same way. I couldn't get a Chrome browser to jump from 2 to 1, but both Terminal and Terminator exhibit the behavior. Any thoughts? Better workarounds? Thanks in advance.

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  • How best to keep bumbling, non-technical managers at bay and still deliver good work?

    - by Curious
    This question may be considered subjective (I got a warning) and be closed, but I will risk it, as I need some good advice/experience on this. I read the following at the 'About' page of Fog Creek Software, the company that Joel Spolsky founded and is CEO of: Back in the year 2000, the founders of Fog Creek, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor, were having trouble finding a place to work where programmers had decent working conditions and got an opportunity to do great work, without bumbling, non-technical managers getting in the way. Every high tech company claimed they wanted great programmers, but they wouldn’t put their money where their mouth was. It started with the physical environment (with dozens of cubicles jammed into a noisy, dark room, where the salespeople shouting on the phone make it impossible for developers to concentrate). But it went much deeper than that. Managers, terrified of change, treated any new idea as a bizarre virus to be quarantined. Napoleon-complex junior managers insisted that things be done exactly their way or you’re fired. Corporate Furniture Police writhed in agony when anyone taped up a movie poster in their cubicle. Disorganization was so rampant that even if the ideas were good, it would have been impossible to make a product out of them. Inexperienced managers practiced hit-and-run management, issuing stern orders on exactly how to do things without sticking around to see the farcical results of their fiats. And worst of all, the MBA-types in charge thought that coding was a support function, basically a fancy form of typing. A blunt truth about most of today's big software companies! Unfortunately not every developer is as gutsy (or lucky, may I say?) as Joel Spolsky! So my question is: How best to work with such managers, keep them at bay and still deliver great work?

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  • Resizing partition using Gparted gives "can't have overlapping partitions" error

    - by Marcus
    I just decided to install Ubuntu 12.04 alongside Windows 7 on my Dell laptop. However I didn't do this manually but instead used the "Run Ubuntu alongside Windows 7" option upon installation, and now the partition that Ubuntu runs on has very little space (It's giving me warnings). I'm trying to use Gparted 0.12.1-5 (via a live CD) to give Windows less space and give Ubuntu more. I've managed to remove 100GB from the Windows partition so I now have some unallocated space between Windows and Ubuntu. This is what it looks like inside Ubuntu (not using the live CD, since it won't let me mount a USB to save a screenshot): http://i.stack.imgur.com/0keQq.png So first I take sda4 (extended?) and resize it to the left so it takes up all the unallocated space. Then I resize sda5 (ext4) as well so it takes up all the new space. However, when I hit apply, it fails on the first action (resizing sd4), saying "can't have overlapping partitions". Any ideas as to why this happens? I also tried resizing sda4 by just a few MB so that it definitely didn't overlap anything, but I still got the same error message. To clarify, I am doing it using the CD, I just took the screenshot from Ubuntu. Any help would be greatly appreciated! And again, I can't mount any USB (I'm following the guide on the gparted website but it says "Invalid argument" or something like that) so I couldn't attach the details file from Gparted. If this is needed, I may need some hints on how to solve the USB issue as well. :) Thanks

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  • 12.04 LTS boot hangs at "SP5100 TCO timer: mmio address 0xfec000f0 already in use", didn't yesterday

    - by DarkIron112
    Dual-booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I went to reboot from Win to Ubu, and found a few interesting things. My POST screen is covered in blocks of epileptic colors until I hit GRUB, which continues when I try to boot into Ubuntu. These color blocks don't appear when I use my on-board VGA, so I'll just attribute to that. Grub dimensions are swapped (card vs onboard, probably), but, when interfacing with onboard VGA, the Grub Timeout Counter works and when using my card, it does not (see "[!!!]" below for more information) Booting into Ubuntu directly causes the error: SP5100 TCO timer: mmio address 0xfec000f0 already in use Booting into recovery mode, meanwhile, and then "resuming normal boot" gets me to the desktop without native 1440x900 resolution and graphic drivers can't tell the monitor it's looking at (I assume this is because it's not a full graphic boot, and as it says, some drivers won't run?) [!!!] When I reboot after going into recovery mode, the countdown timer works ONCE, puts me back into default ubuntu boot, and then does not work again until after another recovery-mode boot. Windows 7 can boot perfectly with no issues whatsoever from epilepsy color blocks or driver detection. This makes me wonder /why/ the POST screen can't handle my video card anymore. Amidst all the diagnostics, I opened my case and re-seated the videocard securely, ensuring it wasn't a loose connection-- But this did nothing to help me. Hardware I am running an NVidia GeForce GTX 8800 video card in a PCI slot. I have 4.8GiB memory, an AMD Athlon II Quad-core 640 Processor, on an MSI K9N6GM Series Mobo. Onboard video is an NVidia GeForce MCP61(V/S/P) card. Note: I did not have any of these problems yesterday, and I have been using Ubuntu intensively for a week, though it's been working flawlessly for months. I've recently been using it to mod my Android phone, perhaps I messed something up in the file system?

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  • ASP.Net Fails to Detect IE10 without .Net Hotfix

    - by Ben Barreth
    Benny Mathew recently alerted us that he couldn’t create, edit or delete posts on GeeksWithBlogs in IE10 (Windows 8). It turns out the problem is that ASP.Net fails to detect IE10 causing a javascript error on postback. We’ll be applying a hotfix to the .Net framework on GWB shortly to fix this issue. In the meantime you can use the simple workaround outlined below. (Note that if you create posts using Windows Live Writer you won’t have this issue creating posts). Log into your GWB Account and go to the “Posts” page. Hit F12 to bring up the developer window in IE10. Click on the ‘Browser Mode’ option and change it to IE9. You should now be able to create/edit/delete posts in GWB. Note this also fixes any other sites in IE10 that might not yet have the hotfix applied. You can tell if the hotfix is the likely culprit if you’re using IE10 and see the following error in the Web Developers Console area: SCRIPT5009: '__doPostBack' is undefined Let us know ASAP if there are other issues you are experiencing that aren’t fixed by this workaround!

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  • Android&ndash;Finding your SDK debug certificate MD5 fingerprint using Keytool

    - by Bill Osuch
    I recently upgraded to a new development machine, which means the certificate used to sign my applications during debug changed. Under most circumstances you’ll never notice a difference, but if you’re developing apps using Google’s Maps API you’ll find that your old API key no longer works with the new certificate fingerprint. Google's instructions walk you through retrieving the MD5 fingerprint of your SDK debug certificate - the certificate that you’re probably signing your apps with before publishing, but it doesn't talk much about the Keytool command. The thing to remember is that Keytool is part of Java, not the Android SDK, so you'll never find it searching through your Android and Eclipse directories. Mine is located in C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_02\bin so you should find yours somewhere similar. From a command prompt, navigate to this directory and type: keytool -v -list -keystore "C:/Documents and Settings/<user name>/.android/debug.keystore" That’s assuming the path to your debug certificate is in the typical location. If this doesn’t work, you can find out where it’s located in Eclipse by clicking Window –> Preferences –> Android –> Build. There's no need to use the additional commands shown on Google's page. You'll be prompted for a password, just hit enter. The last line shown, Certificate fingerprint, is the key you'll give Google to generate your new Maps API key. Technorati Tags: Android Mapping

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  • WouldISurviveANuke Assesses Your Distance From Nuclear War Strike Sites

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    WouldISurviveANuke is a morbid Google Maps mashup that plots out the effective radius of nuclear weapons on major metropolitan areas, your distance from them, and your chances of survival. Visit the site, plug in your zipcode, and set the parameters (how big of a nuclear weapon and how large the nearest target city needs to be) to find out if you’re in the blast radius. We plugged in a downtown address in Detroit, MI. The verdict? Neither we nor the cockroaches will be coming out alive. If you plug in a location far enough away from the direct blast radius you’ll also get a quality of life report that spells out the effects of a local nuclear strike. As far as startling anti-nuclear proliferation arguments go, WouldISurviveANuke is an effective and interactive demonstration. Hit up the link below to try it out. WouldISurviveANuke [via Y! Tech] How to Run Android Apps on Your Desktop the Easy Way HTG Explains: Do You Really Need to Defrag Your PC? Use Amazon’s Barcode Scanner to Easily Buy Anything from Your Phone

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  • Sending changes to a terrain heightmap over UDP

    - by Floomi
    This is a more conceptual, thinking-out-loud question than a technical one. I have a 3D heightmapped terrain as part of a multiplayer RTS that I would like to terraform over a network. The terraforming will be done by units within the gameworld; the player will paint a "target heightmap" that they'd like the current terrain to resemble and units will deform towards that on their own (a la Perimeter). Given my terrain is 257x257 vertices, the naive approach of sending heights when they change will flood the bandwidth very quickly - updating a quarter of the terrain every second will hit ~66kB/s. This is clearly way too much. My next thought was to move to a brush-based system, where you send e.g. the centre of a circle, its radius, and some function defining the influence of the brush from the centre going outwards. But even with reliable UDP the "start" and "stop" messages could still be delayed. I guess I could compare timestamps and compensate for this, although it'd likely mean that clients would deform verts too much on their local simulations and then have to smooth them back to the correct heights. I could also send absolute vert heights in the "start" and "stop" messages to guarantee correct data on the clients. Alternatively I could treat brushes in a similar way to units, and do the standard position + velocity + client-side prediction jazz on them, with the added stipulation that they deform terrain within a certain radius around them. The server could then intermittently do a pass and send (a subset of) recently updated verts to clients as and when there's bandwidth to spare. Any other suggestions, or indications that I'm on the right (or wrong!) track with any of these ideas would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Unity throws SynchronizationLockException while debugging

    - by pjohnson
    I've found Unity to be a great resource for writing unit-testable code, and tests targeting it. Sadly, not all those unit tests work perfectly the first time (TDD notwithstanding), and sometimes it's not even immediately apparent why they're failing. So I use Visual Studio's debugger. I then see SynchronizationLockExceptions thrown by Unity calls, when I never did while running the code without debugging. I hit F5 to continue past these distractions, the line that had the exception appears to have completed normally, and I continue on to what I was trying to debug in the first place.In settings where Unity isn't used extensively, this is just one amongst a handful of annoyances in a tool (Visual Studio) that overall makes my work life much, much easier and more enjoyable. But in larger projects, it can be maddening. Finally it bugged me enough where it was worth researching it.Amongst the first and most helpful Google results was, of course, at Stack Overflow. The first couple answers were extensive but seemed a bit more involved than I could pull off at this stage in the product's lifecycle. A bit more digging showed that the Microsoft team knows about this bug but hasn't prioritized it into any released build yet. SO users jaster and alex-g proposed workarounds that relieved my pain--just go to Debug|Exceptions..., find the SynchronizationLockException, and uncheck it. As others warned, this will skip over SynchronizationLockExceptions in your code that you want to catch, but that wasn't a concern for me in this case. Thanks, guys; I've used that dialog before, but it's been so long I'd forgotten about it.Now if I could just do the same for Microsoft.CSharp.RuntimeBinder.RuntimeBinderException... Until then, F5 it is.

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  • If statement causing xna sprites to draw frame by frame

    - by user1489599
    I’m a bit new to XNA but I wanted to write a simple program that would fire a cannon ball from a cannon at a 45 degree angle. It works fine outside of my keyboard i/o if statement, but when I encapsulate the code around an if statement checking to see if the user hits the space bar, the sprite will draw one frame at a time every time the space bar is hit. This is the code in question if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyUp(Keys.Space) && previousKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Space) && !skullBall.Alive) { //works outside the keyboard input if statement //{ skullBall.Position = cannon.Position; skullBall.DeltaY = -(float)(Math.Sin(MathHelper.ToRadians(45)) * 50/*39.7577*/ * time + 0.5 * (gravity * (time * time))); skullBall.DeltaX = (float)(Math.Cos(MathHelper.ToRadians(45)) * 50/*39.7577*/ * time); skullBall.Alive = true; //} } The skull ball represents the cannon ball and the cannon is just the starting point. DeltaX and DeltaY are the values I’m using to update the cannon balls position per update. I know it's dumb to have the cannon ball start at the cannons position every time the update is called but it’s not really noticeable right now. I was wondering if after examining my code, if anyone noticed any errors that would cause the sprite to display frame by frame instead of drawing it as a full animation of the cannon ball leaving the cannon and moving from there.

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  • Google analytics - drop in traffic

    - by Andy
    Bit of a general question here. We are in the process of converting a number of our clients from older web sites to new ones. The problem we are getting, and sorry for being so general here, is we are getting a sharp decline in traffic as reported on Google Analytics. It's not a gradual decline, it seems to hit almost as soon as the new site goes live. I've just got a few questions to see if there is something we are doing wrong: a) We are using the same analytics accounts going from old to new site. Is this a bad idea? b) The actual analytics code is integrated into the pages using a server-side include. IS this a bad idea? c) We structure our sites differently to our old site. IE. The old sites would pretty must have all the web pages in the root directory, and hyperlinks would be linked to the page files: EG. <a href="somepage.aspx">Link</a> Our new sites now have a directory structure that pretty much reflects the navigation structure, and hyper links link to the pages directory instead of the actual page: EG. <a href="/new-items/shoes/">New shoes</a> Is this a bad idea. I'm really searching for a needle in a haystack here. Would appriciate any help or advice as to why we are getting such a sharp and sudden drop in traffic. Again, so this is such a general question. Thanks in advance.

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  • Apt-get saying "Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages."

    - by YatharthROCK
    TL;DR: sudo apt-get install ... saying "Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages." The problem I was trying to get the WebApps feature for PP and QQ following this blog post. I ran the sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webapps/preview command to add the repository, but i got a connection error. Since I know my current ISP gives a shaky connection, I tried again and sure enough, it worked. Then I ran sudo apt-get install unity-webapps-preview, but I realized we had to update apt-get first, so I hit Ctrl + C to stop it. Then I ran sudo apt-get update which worked w/o a fuss, but when I ran sudo apt-get install unity-webapps-preview again later, it showed an error message. Here's the dump: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: unity-webapps-preview : Depends: xul-ext-unity but it is not going to be installed Depends: xul-ext-websites-integration but it is not going to be installed Depends: xul-ext-webaccounts but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. I think this might be because of me interrupting the earlier command. It hadn't got a chance to output anything, though — I stopped it pretty fast. What I tried I have tried running a number of commands:- sudo apt-get install --fix-broken sudo apt-get autoclean sudo apt-get autoremove sudo apt-get -f install sudoapt-get install ppa-purgeandsudo ppa-purge ppa:webapps/preview` Even after running sudo apt-get upgrade after every try, none of them worked. Research I tried searching Google, looking at a couple of forums and searching on AU, but to no avail. Help would be appreciated.

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  • How do you name/brand software?

    - by JasCav
    I am working on an application that is brand new. We have been using an internal name up to this point, but it's not very imaginative and is definitely not good from a branding standpoint. I have been tasked to come up with a name for the software. I am really struggling with this as every name I have thought about really doesn't seem to do the software justice. I have tried acronyms, mythology names, scientific names, etc. I may be being a bit picky, but I feel like the name should just hit me when its right. Here are my requirements: The name has to be easy to say (and hopefully catchy). The name has to relate back to what the software does. The name has to be able to be branded. (For example, vivid imagery, tagline, etc.) So, although I can't give the specifics of the software, I was hoping the brains here could provide some insight as to how I should go about naming/branding a piece of software?

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  • How can a usb be detected but not show up anywhere?

    - by George Mauer
    I started the morning by trying to create a bootable usb using a 2gb stick and the startup disk creator. It seemed to run through the whole process just fine until it got to a screen that read something like "Creating memory partion" and which sat on 100% for about 45 minutes before I hit cancel and removed the usb stick. Now the usb stick is not being detected as storage or...anything (even on my windows pc) though it does show up in the syslog. Allow me to demonstrate. We start with the usb not plugged in: [georgemauer@ubuntu:~]$ sudo fdisk -l (04-04 16:01) Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x994bdc0f Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 2048 27650047 13824000 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE /dev/sda2 * 27650048 27854847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda3 27854848 976771119 474458136 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT I plug in the usb: [georgemauer@ubuntu:~]$ tail -f /var/log/syslog ***Snip*** Apr 4 15:01:18 ubuntu wpa_supplicant[1136]: WPA: Group rekeying completed with 00:24:36:ad:e7:3f [GTK=TKIP] Apr 4 15:02:29 wpa_supplicant[1136]: last message repeated 3 times Apr 4 15:02:29 ubuntu kernel: [22122.788133] usb 2-1: new high speed USB device number 13 using ehci_hcd Apr 4 15:02:29 ubuntu kernel: [22122.923873] scsi10 : usb-storage 2-1:1.0 Apr 4 15:02:29 ubuntu mtp-probe: checking bus 2, device 13: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.2/usb2/2-1" Apr 4 15:02:30 ubuntu mtp-probe: bus: 2, device: 13 was not an MTP device Apr 4 15:02:30 ubuntu kernel: [22123.926154] scsi 10:0:0:0: Direct-Access GENERIC USB Mass Storage 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 Apr 4 15:02:30 ubuntu kernel: [22124.105118] sd 10:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0 Apr 4 15:02:30 ubuntu kernel: [22124.108212] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk but then: [georgemauer@ubuntu:~]$ ls /mnt -alF (04-04 16:02) total 8 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2011-04-21 12:51 ./ drwxr-xr-x 26 root root 4096 2012-03-31 13:16 ../ [georgemauer@ubuntu:~]$ ls /media -alF (04-04 16:03) total 8 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2012-04-04 12:18 ./ drwxr-xr-x 26 root root 4096 2012-03-31 13:16 ../ What could be going on and how do I recover my usb key?

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  • Smart Taskbar Is a Thumb Friendly Android Task Launcher

    - by ETC
    If you frequently use your phone one handed you’ll definitely want to check out Smart Taskbar, an add-on for Android phones that makes it easy to launch apps with the swipe of your thumb. Smart Taskbar tucks an application launcher on the side of your screen, out of sight. Swipe your thumb across the screen and it slides out like a dock, revealing five of your favorite apps in a toolbar across the top and your lesser used apps in the main panel below. It’s much easier to swipe to view your applications than it is to peck at the application icon on the home screen; Smart Taskbar is great for one handed launching. Search for “Smart Taskbar” in the Android Market to download a copy or hit up the link below to read more. Smart Taskbar [AppBrain] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Smart Taskbar Is a Thumb Friendly Android Task Launcher Comix is an Awesome Comics Archive Viewer for Linux Get the MakeUseOf eBook Guide to Speeding Up Windows for Free Need Tech Support? Call the Star Wars Help Desk! [Video Classic] Reclaim Vertical UI Space by Adding a Toolbar to the Left or Right Side of Firefox Androidify Turns You into an Android-style Avatar

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  • Prevent oversteering catastrophe in racing games

    - by jdm
    When playing GTA III on Android I noticed something that has been annoying me in almost every racing game I've played (maybe except Mario Kart): Driving straight ahead is easy, but curves are really hard. When I switch lanes or pass somebody, the car starts swiveling back and forth, and any attempt to correct it makes it only worse. The only thing I can do is to hit the brakes. I think this is some kind of oversteering. What makes it so irritating is that it never happens to me in real life (thank god :-)), so 90% of the games with vehicles inside feel unreal to me (despite probably having really good physics engines). I've talked to a couple of people about this, and it seems either you 'get' racing games, or you don't. With a lot of practice, I did manage to get semi-good at some games (e.g. from the Need for Speed series), by driving very cautiously, braking a lot (and usually getting a cramp in my fingers). What can you do as a game developer to prevent the oversteering resonance catastrophe, and make driving feel right? (For a casual racing game, that doesn't strive for 100% realistic physics) I also wonder what games like Super Mario Kart exactly do differently so that they don't have so much oversteering? I guess one problem is that if you play with a keyboard or a touchscreen (but not wheels and pedals), you only have digital input: gas pressed or not, steering left/right or not, and it's much harder to steer appropriately for a given speed. The other thing is that you probably don't have a good sense of speed, and drive much faster than you would (safely) in reality. From the top of my head, one solution might be to vary the steering response with speed.

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  • Grab a Copy of Plants vs. Zombies for Free; Courtesy of the ADA

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    In a rather unlikely pairing, PopCap Games and the American Dental Association have teamed up to give away copies of PopCap’s smash hit game Plants vs. Zombies; grab a copy for yourself and print off some game coupons to hand out at Halloween. At StopZombieMouth.com they explain the pairing: This Halloween, the ADA and PopCap Games are redefining what a Halloween “treat” can be… by giving FUN instead of candy. We’re giving away Plants vs. Zombies™ download games as a sugar-free alternative, and you can join in the fun. Ask if your local dentist has the limited-edition, collectible Plants vs. Zombies trading cards with the code for a free Plants vs. Zombies download game. Or, download printable free-game coupons here. Now go out and give PvZ fun as a Halloween treat to kids of all ages. And thanks for helping Stop Zombie Mouth! 7 Ways To Free Up Hard Disk Space On Windows HTG Explains: How System Restore Works in Windows HTG Explains: How Antivirus Software Works

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  • What follows after lexical analysis?

    - by madflame991
    I'm working on a toy compiler (for some simple language like PL/0) and I have my lexer up and running. At this point I should start working on building the parse tree, but before I start I was wondering: How much information can one gather from just the string of tokens? Here's what I gathered so far: One can already do syntax highlighting having only the list of tokens. Numbers and operators get coloured accordingly and keywords also. Autoformatting (indenting) should also be possible. How? Specify for each token type how many white spaces or new line characters should follow it. Also when you print tokens modify an alignment variable (when the code printer reads "{" increment the alignment variable by 1, and decrement by 1 for "}". Whenever it starts printing on a new line the code printer will align according to this alignment variable) In languages without nested subroutines one can get a complete list of subroutines and their signature. How? Just read what follows after the "procedure" or "function" keyword until you hit the first ")" (this should work fine in a Pascal language with no nested subroutines) In languages like Pascal you can even determine local variables and their types, as they are declared in a special place (ok, you can't handle initialization as well, but you can parse sequences like: "var a, b, c: integer") Detection of recursive functions may also be possible, or even a graph representation of which subroutine calls who. If one can identify the body of a function then one can also search if there are any mentions of other function's names. Gathering statistics about the code, like number of lines, instructions, subroutines EDIT: I clarified why I think some processes are possible. As I read comments and responses I realise that the answer depends very much on the language that I'm parsing.

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  • Dirt Cheap Bi-Directional Antenna Wirelessly Extends Your LAN

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    If you’re looking for an effective way to link remote LANs without the hassle of laying cable, this DIY bi-directional antenna is a quick (and cheap) method for bringing internet access to outbuildings and other locations. Tinker Danilo Larizza needed to share internet access between apartments that are relatively close together but not hardwired–ruling out simply sharing the access via existing LAN infrastructure. His solution combines a simple scrap wire antenna array mounted inside a plastic food bin (seen here with the cover removed to show the antenna) and some coaxial cable to link the antenna to two routers. Our favorite part about his build is that he constructed the pair to establish if the antenna setup would even work in his location and intended to buy commercial antennas if it did; his Tupperware models worked so well, however, they’re now the permanent solution. Hit up the link below for more information about the project. 2.4 Ghz Directive Biquad Antenna [via Hack A Day] How To Use USB Drives With the Nexus 7 and Other Android Devices Why Does 64-Bit Windows Need a Separate “Program Files (x86)” Folder? Why Your Android Phone Isn’t Getting Operating System Updates and What You Can Do About It

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  • WizMouse Enables Mouse Over Scrolling on Any Window

    - by ETC
    WizMouse is a free and lightweight Windows application that enables a simple but effective trick: the ability to scroll the contents of a window that is under your mouse cursor without shifting the focus to that window. It may not seem like much, at first glance, but the ability to scroll a window without having to click on it and shift the focus of your current window is a huge time saver. Once WizMouse is installed simply mousing over any open window and engage your scroll wheel for instant scroll with no additional click or shift in focus necessary. You’ll get so used to it you’ll forget that it wasn’t built into Windows from the start. Hit up the link below to grab a copy of WizMouse, a free and Windows only application. WizMouse [Antibody Software] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Should You Delete Windows 7 Service Pack Backup Files to Save Space? What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) WizMouse Enables Mouse Over Scrolling on Any Window Enhance GIMP’s Image Editing Power with Gimp Paint Studio Reclaim Vertical UI Space by Moving Your Tabs to the Side in Firefox Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles – An Awesome Game for Linux and Windows How Star Wars Changed the World [Infographic] Tabs Visual Manager Adds Thumbnailed Tab Switching to Chrome

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  • Hack a Linksys Router into a Ambient Data Monitor

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    If you have a data source (like a weather report, bus schedule, or other changing data set) you can pull it and display it with an ambient data monitor; this fun build combines a hacked Linksys router and a modified toy bus to display transit arrival times. John Graham-Cumming wanted to keep an eye on the current bus arrival time tables without constantly visiting the web site to check them. His workaround turns a hacked Linksys router, a display, a modified London city bus (you could hack apart a more project-specific enclosure, of course), and a simple bit code that polls the bus schedule’s API, into a cool ambient data monitor that displays the arrival time, in minutes, of the next two buses that will pass by his stop. The whole thing could easily be adapted to another API to display anything from stock prices to weather temps. Hit up the link below for more information on the project. Ambient Bus Arrival Monitor Hacked from Linksys Router [via Make] Make Your Own Windows 8 Start Button with Zero Memory Usage Reader Request: How To Repair Blurry Photos HTG Explains: What Can You Find in an Email Header?

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  • How to create an extensible rope in Box2D?

    - by Thomas
    Let's say I'm trying to create a ninja lowering himself down a rope, or pulling himself back up, all whilst he might be swinging from side to side or hit by objects. Basically like http://ninja.frozenfractal.com/ but with Box2D instead of hacky JavaScript. Ideally I would like to use a rope joint in Box2D that allows me to change the length after construction. The standard Box2D RopeJoint doesn't offer that functionality. I've considered a PulleyJoint, connecting the other end of the "pulley" to an invisible kinematic body that I can control to change the length, but PulleyJoint is more like a rod than a rope: it constrains maximum length, but unlike RopeJoint it constrains the minimum as well. Re-creating a RopeJoint every frame using a new length is rather inefficient, and I'm not even sure it would work properly in the simulation. I could create a "chain" of bodies connected by RotationJoints but that is also less efficient, and less robust. I also wouldn't be able to change the length arbitrarily, but only by adding and removing a whole number of links, and it's not obvious how I would connect the remainder without violating existing joints. This sounds like something that should be straightforward to do. Am I overlooking something?

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