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• Data binding in web UI frameworks, what's the deal?

  - by c-smile

  I believe that most of modern Web frameworks that pretend to be MVC ones also has a notion of data binding in one form or another. Examples: AngularJS, EmberJS, KnockoutJS, etc. I am assuming that "data binding" is a declarative definition (oxymoron, no?) of live link between data (a.k.a. model) and its representation (a.k.a. view). With some transformers in between (a.k.a. controllers). I understand why declarativeness is kind of appealing but also understand that as usual it comes with the price. In particular: 1. Live binding is quite heavy, either with dirty watch (high CPU consumption) or with Object.observe() (high memory consumption with high CPU load in some scenarios). 2. There is a "frame" part in the framework word, means there are some boundaries/limits that can be hard to overcome if you need slightly more than it was designed for. Quite usual time split: 90% of features are made in 10% of project time. But 10% rest take 90% of project time. I suspect (a.k.a. educated guess) that those MVC things are not helping to implement more functionality in less time... If so their usage motivation is not quite clear. As an example: last week wanted to find virtual list idea/solution. Found one in vanilla JavaScript that is 120 LOC. Implementation of the same but in AngualrJS is about 420 LOC. Most of the code there seems like a fight with the framework itself... So is my question: what benefits that MVC stuff or data binding give us? Is it just a buzzword popular among project managers or they give us something useful. If later one then what exactly?

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• Comparing the Performance of Visual Studio's Web Reference to a Custom Class

  As developers, we all make assumptions when programming. Perhaps the biggest assumption we make is that those libraries and tools that ship with the .NET Framework are the best way to accomplish a given task. For example, most developers assume that using ASP.NET's Membership system is the best way to manage user accounts in a website (rather than rolling your own user account store). Similarly, creating a Web Reference to communicate with a web service generates markup that auto-creates a proxy class, which handles the low-level details of invoking the web service, serializing parameters, and so on. Recently a client made us question one of our fundamental assumptions about the .NET Framework and Web Services by asking, "Why should we use proxy class created by Visual Studio to connect to a web service?" In this particular project we were calling a web service to retrieve data, which was then sorted, formatted slightly and displayed in a web page. The client hypothesized that it would be more efficient to invoke the web service directly via the HttpWebRequest class, retrieve the XML output, populate an XmlDocument object, then use XSLT to output the result to HTML. Surely that would be faster than using Visual Studio's auto-generated proxy class, right? Prior to this request, we had never considered rolling our own proxy class; we had always taken advantage of the proxy classes Visual Studio auto-generated for us. Could these auto-generated proxy classes be inefficient? Would retrieving and parsing the web service's XML directly be more efficient? The only way to know for sure was to test my client's hypothesis. Read More >

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• Blur gets displaced compared to original image

  - by user1294203

  I have implemented a SSAO and I'm using a blur step to smooth it out. The problem is that the blurred texture is slightly displaced compared to the original. I'm blurring using a 4x4 kernel since that was my noise kernel in SSAO. The following is the blurring shader: float result = 0.0; for(int i = 0; i < 4; i++){ for(int j = 0; j < 4; j++){ vec2 offset = vec2(TEXEL_SIZE.x * i, TEXEL_SIZE.y * j); result += texture(aoSampler, TexCoord + offset).r; } } out_AO = vec4(vec3(0.0), result * 0.0625); Where TEXEL_SIZE is one over my window resolution. I was thinking that this is was an error based on how OpenGL counts the Texel center, so I tried displacing the texture coordinate I was using by 0.5 * TEXEL_SIZE, but there was still a slight displacement. The texture input to my blur shader, has wrap parameters: glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP); When I tell the blur shader to just output the the value of the pixel, the result is not displaced, so it must have something to do with how neighboring pixels are sampled. Any thoughts?

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• Flattening PDF transparency

  - by Jan

  I have a PDF, made with Inkscape, that uses transparent colors. This image shall be used in a LaTeX document. While preserving the transparency is nice for editing, it can be a problem for printing. Printing usually involves PDF to PS conversion. Since Postscript does not support transparency, this requires either flatting, i.e. creating a vector graphic that works without transparency or rastering, i.e. rendering a bitmap image. When a PDF document containing such a figure is printed (or converted to PS) using Evince (or Cairo or Ghostscript), the whole page gets rendered as a bitmap, rendering fonts ugly (different from other pages). (Adobe Acrobat handles such PDFs well.) Unfortunately, converting the PDF figures to EPS (before including them with LaTeX) doesn't help much, because both pdftops and pdf2ps (again, Cairo or Ghostscript) rasterize the image, i.e. render a bitmap (saved as EPS). (This is slightly better, because it doesn't affect the whole page, but I'd still prefer a vector graphics.) How can I flatten transparency with Inkscape or other software on Linux?

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• is it possible to execute keyboard input programmaticly in linux?

  - by Taylor Hawkes

  For example is there a Linux command or way that I could from a program (c++ | python| or other) enter a serious of keyboard inputs that are interpreted as though they are keyboard inputs. I have a bad case of RSI from typing. To ease my pain I developed a voice controlled interface using pocket sphinx and a custom grammar and to run a number of very common commands. ex: "open chrome" , "open vim". basically what is shown here, but with slightly diff tools: http://bloc.eurion.net/archives/2008/writing-a-command-and-control-application-with-voice-recognition/ I have run into some limitation as I can only execute command line commands given a voice command. Rather than having a "voice command" - "command line command" mapping I would like to have "voice command" - "keyboard input" mapping. So when my active window is a browser and i type + n, and new tab opens. If i'm in vim and new vim tab opens. Any suggestions, ideas, tools or approaches to this problem would be much appreciated. I understand the answer may not be simple, but would like to develop it none the less.

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• I Blame SNMP!

  - by brendonpage

  Anyone who has been reading my blog would have noticed that I have deviated slightly from my original post plan! This post was meant to be on uploading files in Silverlight, so what happened you may ask? Well last weekend I had some friends over for a LAN and one of them brought a managed switch with, which he had just been purchased for work. He proceeded show me how cool it was, how he planned on improving his work network and how it can be monitored remotely via SNMP. After this explanation he started to google for a free SNMP graphing tool. After a few hours of hearing disgruntled mutterings from him I asked what was wrong, he proceeded to rant about how he couldn’t find any tools that suited his needs. It was at this point I though the most dangerous thing a programmer can ever think “I wonder how hard it would be to make one”, of course the answer at the time is always “It can’t be that hard”, and so started my journey into SNMP. I am still in the early stages of this journey so I don’t have to much to report yet, but once I have finished the first version of my SNMP graphing tool I will definitely be posting about it! For now if there are any of you who are interested in doing any SNMP development in C# I would recommend looking at the #Sharp project on CodePlex (http://sharpsnmplib.codeplex.com/), it is the SNMP library I have decided to use and thus far it works beautifully.

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• unit/integration testing web service proxy client

  - by cori

  I'm rewriting a PHP client/proxy library that provides an interface to a SOAP-based .Net webservice, and in the process I want to add some unit and integration tests so future modifications are less risky. The work the library I'm working on performs is to marshall the calls to the web service and do a little reorganizing of the responses to present a slightly more -object-oriented interface to the underlying service. Since this library is little else than a thin layer on top of web service calls, my basic assumption is that I'll really be writing integration tests more than unit tests - for example, I don't see any reason to mock away the web service - the work that's performed by the code I'm working on is very light; it's almost passing the response from the service right back to its consumer. Most of the calls are basic CRUD operations: CreateRole(), CreateUser(), DeleteUser(), FindUser(), &ct. I'll be starting from a known database state - the system I'm using for these tests is isolated for testing purposes, so the results will be more or less predictable. My question is this: is it natural to use web service calls to confirm the results of operations within the tests and to reset the state of the application within the scope of each test? Here's an example: One test might be createUserReturnsValidUserId() and might go like this: public function createUserReturnsValidUserId() { // we're assuming a global connection to the service $newUserId = $client->CreateUser("user1"); assertNotNull($newUserId); assertNotNull($client->FindUser($newUserId); $client->deleteUser($newUserId); } So I'm creating a user, making sure I get an ID back and that it represents a user in the system, and then cleaning up after myself (so that later tests don't rely on the success or failure of this test w/r/t the number of users in the system, for example). However this still seems pretty fragile - lots of dependencies and opportunities for tests to fail and effect the results of later tests, which I definitely want to avoid. Am I missing some options of ways to decouple these tests from the system under test, or is this really the best I can do? I think this is a fairly general unit/integration testing question, but if it matters I'm using PHPUnit for the testing framework.

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• What causes critical glib errors (when coding using messaging menu)?

  - by fluteflute

  If I run the python code below (almost entirely from this useful blog post) then I get three identical nasty looking error messages in the terminal. What might be causing them? I note the number (5857 in the example below) changes slightly on each run. What does this number signify? Is it a memory location or something similar? (messaging-menu.py:5857): GLib-GIO-CRITICAL **: g_dbus_method_invocation_return_dbus_error: assertion `error_name != NULL && g_dbus_is_name (error_name)' failed (messaging-menu.py:5857): GLib-GIO-CRITICAL **: g_dbus_method_invocation_return_dbus_error: assertion `error_name != NULL && g_dbus_is_name (error_name)' failed (messaging-menu.py:5857): GLib-GIO-CRITICAL **: g_dbus_method_invocation_return_dbus_error: assertion `error_name != NULL && g_dbus_is_name (error_name)' failed I'm running this on Natty, I should probably find out if I get the same errors in 10.10 though... import gtk def show_window_function(x, y): print x print y # get the indicate module, which does all the work import indicate # Create a server item mm = indicate.indicate_server_ref_default() # If someone clicks your server item in the MM, fire the server-display signal mm.connect("server-display", show_window_function) # Set the type of messages that your item uses. It's not at all clear which types # you're allowed to use, here. mm.set_type("message.im") # You must specify a .desktop file: this is where the MM gets the name of your # app from. mm.set_desktop_file("/usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop") # Show the item in the MM. mm.show() # Create a source item mm_source = indicate.Indicator() # Again, it's not clear which subtypes you are allowed to use here. mm_source.set_property("subtype", "im") # "Sender" is the text that appears in the source item in the MM mm_source.set_property("sender", "Unread") # If someone clicks this source item in the MM, fire the user-display signal mm_source.connect("user-display", show_window_function) # Light up the messaging menu so that people know something has changed mm_source.set_property("draw-attention", "true") # Set the count of messages in this source. mm_source.set_property("count", "15") # If you prefer, you can set the time of the last message from this source, # rather than the count. (You can't set both.) This means that instead of a # message count, the MM will show "2m" or similar for the time since this # message arrived. # mm_source.set_property_time("time", time.time()) mm_source.show() gtk.main()

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• Enabling support of EUS and Fusion Apps in OUD

  - by Sylvain Duloutre

  Since the 11gR2 release, OUD supports Enterprise User Security (EUS) for database authentication and also Fusion Apps. I'll plan to blog on that soon. Meanwhile, the R2 OUD graphical setup does not let you configure both EUS and FusionApps support at the same time. However, it can be done manually using the dsconfig command line. The simplest way to proceed is to select EUS from the setup tool, then manually add support for Fusion Apps using dsconfig using the commands below: - create a FA workflow element with eusWfe as next element: dsconfig create-workflow-element \           --set enabled:true \           --set next-workflow-element:Eus0 \           --type fa \           --element-name faWfe - modify the workflow so that it starts from your FA workflow element instead of Eus: dsconfig set-workflow-prop \           --workflow-name userRoot0 \           --set workflow-element:faWfe  Note: the configuration changes may slightly differ in case multiple databases/suffixes are configured on OUD.

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• In a 2D platform game, how to ensure the player moves smoothly over sloping ground?

  - by Kovsa

  See image: http://i41.tinypic.com/huis13.jpg I'm developing a physics engine for a 2D platform game. I'm using the separating axis theorem for collision detection. The ground surface is constructed from oriented bounding boxes, with the player as an axis aligned bounding box. (Specifically, I'm using the algorithm from the book "Realtime Collision Detection" which performs swept collision detection for OBBs using SAT). I'm using a fairly small (close to zero) restitution coefficient in the collision response, to ensure that the dynamic objects don't penetrate the environment. The engine mostly works fine, it's just that I'm concerned about some edge cases that could possibly occur. For example, in the diagram, A, B and C are the ground surface. The player is heading left along B towards A. It seems to me that due to inaccuracy, the player box could be slightly below the box B as it continues up and left. When it reaches A, therefore, the bottom left corner of the player might then collide with the right side of A, which would be undesirable (as the intention is for the player to move smoothly over the top of A). It seems like a similar problem could happen when the player is on top of box C, moving left towards B - the most extreme point of B could collide with the left side of the player, instead of the player's bottom left corner sliding up and left above B. Box2D seems to handle this problem by storing connectivity information for its edge shapes, but I'm not really sure how it uses this information to solve the problem, and after looking at the code I don't really grasp what it's doing. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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• Double audio cd ripping weirdness

  - by jqno

  Since I installed Ubuntu 12.04, Rhythmbox, Banshee and Sound Juicer have started acting weird around double cd's, and specifically, cd #2 of said double cd. Sometimes, they will show the information of cd #1. Track names, durations, and even count are incorrect. Sometimes, they will first show the tracks for cd #1, then continue onto cd #2 if cd #2 has more tracks than #1. Sound Juicer seems to be unable to find any track durations at all, even for single cd's. Obviously, this is a pain when I'm trying to rip double cd's. And I have a fair number of them, which I want to rip. This happens on both my machines (a slightly aging iMac, and a 1-year-old Sony Vaio). However, on previous versions of Ubuntu, this never happened. All on the same machines. So I suspect 12.04 is using a different lib for extracting audio cd data. Just for kicks, I tried with Linux Mint 13, and there it works correctly, even though it claims to be based on Ubuntu 12.04 and therefore should be using (partially) the same software. So if the Mint guys can fix it, I should be able to do it too, right? So, my question: what changed in 12.04 that could cause this? And more importantly: what can I do to fix it?

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• Unity: parallel vectors and cross product, how to compare vectors

  - by Heisenbug

  I read this post explaining a method to understand if the angle between 2 given vectors and the normal to the plane described by them, is clockwise or anticlockwise: public static AngleDir GetAngleDirection(Vector3 beginDir, Vector3 endDir, Vector3 upDir) { Vector3 cross = Vector3.Cross(beginDir, endDir); float dot = Vector3.Dot(cross, upDir); if (dot > 0.0f) return AngleDir.CLOCK; else if (dot < 0.0f) return AngleDir.ANTICLOCK; return AngleDir.PARALLEL; } After having used it a little bit, I think it's wrong. If I supply the same vector as input (beginDir equal to endDir), the cross product is zero, but the dot product is a little bit more than zero. I think that to fix that I can simply check if the cross product is zero, means that the 2 vectors are parallel, but my code doesn't work. I tried the following solution: Vector3 cross = Vector3.Cross(beginDir, endDir); if (cross == Vector.zero) return AngleDir.PARALLEL; And it doesn't work because comparison between Vector.zero and cross is always different from zero (even if cross is actually [0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f]). I tried also this: Vector3 cross = Vector3.Cross(beginDir, endDir); if (cross.magnitude == 0.0f) return AngleDir.PARALLEL; it also fails because magnitude is slightly more than zero. So my question is: given 2 Vector3 in Unity, how to compare them? I need the elegant equivalent version of this: if (beginDir.x == endDir.x && beginDir.y == endDir.y && beginDir.z == endDir.z) return true;

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• ATI Radeon HD 6870 Driver fails to install default-policy.sh does not support version

  - by Rogue Coder

  I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 Beta, with everything updated completely. I'm using Ubuntu Classic, because Unity fails to run, supposedly because of my video card. The drivers for the Radeon HD 6870 series is apparently lacking, but I found a post stating the newest version has full support for Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. That post is slightly old, so i grabbed 11.3 for Ubuntu x86 off the ATI website. When I run the installation program, I receive the following error: > ./ati-driver-installer-11-3-x86.x86_64.run Created directory fglrx-install.uREFoO Verifying archive integrity... All good. Uncompressing ATI Catalyst(TM) Proprietary Driver-8.831.2......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... ===================================================================== ATI Technologies Catalyst(TM) Proprietary Driver Installer/Packager ===================================================================== Error: ./default_policy.sh does not support version default:v2:i686:lib::none:2.6.38-8-generic-pae:; make sure that the version is being correctly set by --iscurrentdistro ===================================================================== ATI Technologies Catalyst(TM) Proprietary Driver Installer/Packager ===================================================================== Error: ./default_policy.sh does not support version default:v2:i686:lib::none:2.6.38-8-generic-pae:; make sure that the version is being correctly set by --iscurrentdistro Removing temporary directory: fglrx-install.uREFoO > I would love to get the latest ATI drivers working so that I can try out Unity!

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• What can you do to decrease the number of live issues with applications?

  - by User Smith

  First off I have seen this post which is slightly similar to my question. : What can you do to decrease the number of deployment bugs of a live website? Let me layout the situation for you. The team of programmers that I belong to have metrics associated with our code. Over the last several months our errors in our live system have increased by a large amount. We require that our updates to applications be tested by at least one other programmer prior to going live. I personally am completely against this as I think that applications should be tested by end users as end users are much better testers than programmers, I am not against programmers testing, obviously programmers need to test code, but they are most of the times too close to the code. The reason I specify that I think end users should test in our scenario is due to the fact that we don't have business analysts, we just have programmers. I come from a background where BAs took care of all the testing once programmers checked off it was ready to go live. We do have a staging environment in place that is a clone of the live environment that we use to ensure that we don't have issues between development and live environments this does catch some bugs. We don't do end user testing really at all, I should say we don't really have anyone testing our code except programmers, which I think gets us into this mess (Ideally, we would have BAs or QA or professional testers test). We don't have a QA team or anything of that nature. We don't have test cases for our projects that are fully laid out. Ok, I am just a peon programmer at the bottom of the rung, but I am probably more tired of these issues than the managers complaining about them. So, I don't have the ability to tell them you are doing it all wrong.....I have tried gentle pushes in the correct direction. Any advice or suggestions on how to alleviate this issue is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

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• importing animations in Blender, weird rotations/locations

  - by user975135

  This is for the Blender 2.6 API. There are two problems: 1. When I import a single animation frame from my animation file to Blender, all bones look fine. But when I import multiple (all of the frames), just the first one looks right, seems like newer frames are affected by older ones, so you get slightly off positions/rotations. This is true when both assigning PoseBone.matrix and PoseBone.matrix_basis. bone_index = 0 # for each frame: for frame_index in range(frame_count): # for each pose bone: add a key for bone_name in bone_names: # "bone_names" - a list of bone names I got earlier pose.bones[bone_name].matrix = animation_matrices[frame_index][bone_index] # "animation_matrices" - a nested list of matrices generated from reading a file # create the 'keys' for the Action from the poses pose.bones[bone_name].keyframe_insert('location', frame = frame_index+1) pose.bones[bone_name].keyframe_insert('rotation_euler', frame = frame_index+1) pose.bones[bone_name].keyframe_insert('scale', frame = frame_index+1) bone_index += 1 bone_index = 0 Again, it seems like previous frames are affecting latter ones, because if I import a single frame from the middle of the animation, it looks fine. 2. I can't assign armature-space animation matrices read from a file to a skeleton with hierarchy (parenting). In Blender 2.4 you could just assign them to PoseBone.poseMatrix and bones would deform perfectly whether the bones had a hierarchy or none at all. In Blender 2.6, there's PoseBone.matrix_basis and PoseBone.matrix. While matrix_basis is relative to parent bone, matrix isn't, the API says it's in object space. So it should have worked, but doesn't. So I guess we need to calculate a local space matrix from our armature-space animation matrices from the files. So I tried multiplying it ( PoseBone.matrix ) with PoseBone.parent.matrix.inverted() in both possible orders with no luck, still weird deformations.

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• A Panorama of JavaOne Latin America

  - by reza_rahman

  As you know, JavaOne Latin America 2012 was held at the Transamerica Expo Center in Sao Paulo, Brazil on December 4-6. It was a resounding success with a great vibe, excellent technical content and numerous world class speakers, both local and international. Various folks like Tori Wieldt, Steve Chin, Arun Gupta, Bruno Borges and myself looked at the conference from slightly different colored lenses. It's interesting to put them all together in a panoramatic collage: Tori wrote about the Sao Paulo Geek Bike Ride held the Saturday before the conference here (enjoy the photos and video). She also discusses the keynotes in great detail here. Steve looked at it from the viewpoint of someome instrumental to putting the event together. Read his thoughts here (he has more geek bike ride photos as well as material for his JavaFX/HTML 5 talk). Arun had a more holistic view of the conference. He covers the geek bike ride, the GlassFish party (organized by Bruno Borges), his Java EE talks, and more. Check out the cool photos as well as the technical material. Bruno provides the critical local perspective in his 7 reasons you had to be at JavaOne Latin America 2012. He discusses the OTN Lounge, the hands-on-lab, the Java community keynote, Java EE technical sessions and of course the GlassFish party! I covered the GlassFish booth, the lab and my technical sessions (as well as Sao Paulo's lively metal underground) here.

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• Multiple sites with the same codebase in Python

  - by Jimmy

  I am trying to run a large amount of sites which share about 90% of their code. They are simply designed to query an API and return the results. They will have a common userbase / database but will be configured slightly different and will have different CSS (perhaps even different templating). My initial idea was to run them as separate applications with a common library but I have read about the sites framework which would allow them to run from a single instance of Django which may help to reduce memory usage. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/sites/ Is the site framework the right approach to a problem like this, and does it have real benefits over running separate applications? Initially I thought it was, but now I think otherwise. I have heard the following: Your SITE_ID is set in settings.py, so in order to have multiple sites, you need multiple settings.py configurations, which means multiple distinct processes/instances. You can of course share the code base between them, but each site will need a dedicated worker / WSGIDaemon to serve the site. This effectively removes any benefit of running multiple sites under one hood, if each site needs a UWSGI instance running. Alternative ideas of systems: https://github.com/iivvoo/django_layers https://github.com/shestera/django-multisite I don't know what route to be taking with this.

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• Updating games for iOS 6 and new iPhone/iPod Touch

  - by SundayMonday

  Say I have a game that runs full-screen on iPhone 4S and older devices. The balance of the game is just right for the 480 x 320 screen and associated aspect ratio. Now I want to update my game to run full-screen on the new iPhone/iPod Touch where the aspect ratio of the screen is different. It seems like this can be challenging for some games in terms of maintaining the "balance". For example if the extra screen space was just tacked onto the right side of Jet Pack Joyride the balance would be thrown off since the user now has more time to see and react to obstacles. Also it could be challenging in terms of code maintenance. Perhaps Jet Pack Joyride would slightly increase the speed of approaching obstacles when the game is played on newer devices. However this quickly becomes messy when extra conditional statements are added all over the code. One solution is to have some parameters that are set in once place at start-up depending on the device type. What are some strategies for updating iOS games to run on the new iPhone and iPod Touch?

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• Linqpad and StreamInsight

  Slightly before the announcement of StreamInsight being available for Linqpad I downloaded it from here.  I had seen Roman Schindlauer demonstrate it at Teched and it looked a really good tool to do some StreamInsight dev.   You will need .Net 4.0 and StreamInsight installed. Here’s what you need to do after downloading and installing Linqpad. Add a new connection   The next thing we need to do is install and enable the StreamInsight driver.  Choose to view more drivers.   Choose StreamInsight     Select the driver after install     I have chosen the Default Context.     And after all that I can finally get to writing my query.  This is a very simple query where I turn a collection (IEnumerable) into a PointStream.  After doing that I create 30 minute windows over the stream before outputting the count of events in each of those windows to the result window.     I have played with Linqpad only a little but I think it is going to be a really good tool to get ideas developed and quickly.  I have also enabled Autcompletion (paid £25) and I recommend it.

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• What can be done to decrease the number of live issues with applications?

  - by User Smith

  First off I have seen this post which is slightly similar to my question. : What can you do to decrease the number of deployment bugs of a live website? Let me layout the situation for you. The team of programmers that I belong to have metrics associated with our code. Over the last several months our errors in our live system have increased by a large amount. We require that our updates to applications be tested by at least one other programmer prior to going live. I personally am completely against this as I think that applications should be tested by end users as end users are much better testers than programmers, I am not against programmers testing, obviously programmers need to test code, but they are most of the times too close to the code. The reason I specify that I think end users should test in our scenario is due to the fact that we don't have business analysts, we just have programmers. I come from a background where BAs took care of all the testing once programmers checked off it was ready to go live. We do have a staging environment in place that is a clone of the live environment that we use to ensure that we don't have issues between development and live environments this does catch some bugs. We don't do end user testing really at all, I should say we don't really have anyone testing our code except programmers, which I think gets us into this mess (Ideally, we would have BAs or QA or professional testers test). We don't have a QA team or anything of that nature. We don't have test cases for our projects that are fully laid out. Ok, I am just a peon programmer at the bottom of the rung, but I am probably more tired of these issues than the managers complaining about them. So, I don't have the ability to tell them you are doing it all wrong.....I have tried gentle pushes in the correct direction. Any advice or suggestions on how to alleviate this issue ?

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• Preventing possible burnout in a junior dev, or perhaps I'm not doing enough?

  - by m.edmondson

  I'm a software developer with 5 years experience over 3 companies. Within the last year a junior (brand new to the industry) has started at my current employer. I believe he is an excellent developer, who always delivers and is skilled as solving complex problems. However I'm slightly concerned that he is possibly applying himself too much for the following reasons: He begins work approximately 2 hours before most (and is expected) In his free time he has developed an application that was clearly months worth of work that is specific to our employer I and the team are completely greatful for all he is doing, and is clearly an asset to our team. However I'm worried that this is not sustainable. I can almost see that he has the same enthusiasm that I had when I began coding for work, however over the years I've realised that extra curricular work not only doesn't progress your career, but eats into your all important free time. The question I'm asking is: Should I advise him to take things a bit more slowly? Or perhaps I need to learn from him and do more for my employer out of hours?

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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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• How to handle multiple effect files in XNA

  - by Adam 'Pi' Burch

  So I'm using ModelMesh and it's built in Effects parameter to draw a mesh with some shaders I'm playing with. I have a simple GUI that lets me change these parameters to my heart's desire. My question is, how do I handle shaders that have unique parameters? For example, I want a 'shiny' parameter that affects shaders with Phong-type specular components, but for an environment mapping shader such a parameter doesn't make a lot of sense. How I have it right now is that every time I call the ModelMesh's Draw() function, I set all the Effect parameters as so foreach (ModelMesh m in model.Meshes) { if (isDrawBunny == true)//Slightly change the way the world matrix is calculated if using the bunny object, since it is not quite centered in object space { world = boneTransforms[m.ParentBone.Index] * Matrix.CreateScale(scale) * rotation * Matrix.CreateTranslation(position + bunnyPositionTransform); } else //If not rendering the bunny, draw normally { world = boneTransforms[m.ParentBone.Index] * Matrix.CreateScale(scale) * rotation * Matrix.CreateTranslation(position); } foreach (Effect e in m.Effects) { Matrix ViewProjection = camera.ViewMatrix * camera.ProjectionMatrix; e.Parameters["ViewProjection"].SetValue(ViewProjection); e.Parameters["World"].SetValue(world); e.Parameters["diffuseLightPosition"].SetValue(lightPositionW); e.Parameters["CameraPosition"].SetValue(camera.Position); e.Parameters["LightColor"].SetValue(lightColor); e.Parameters["MaterialColor"].SetValue(materialColor); e.Parameters["shininess"].SetValue(shininess); //e.Parameters //e.Parameters["normal"] } m.Draw(); Note the prescience of the example! The solutions I've thought of involve preloading all the shaders, and updating the unique parameters as needed. So my question is, is there a best practice I'm missing here? Is there a way to pull the parameters a given Effect needs from that Effect? Thank you all for your time!

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• Personalized Pricing

  - by David Dorf

  In past postings I've spent a fair amount of time talking about targeted promotions.  Using a complete view of the customer that includes purchase history, location history, and psychographics gleaned from social media, we can select the offer with the greatest chance of redemption.  This is done to influence shopping behavior, which might be introducing the consumer to a new product line, increasing their basket size, increasing frequency of purchases, etc. Safeway seems to be taking a slightly different approach with their personalized pricing.  In additional to offering electronic coupons and club card offers, they are also providing a personalized price for certain items based on purchase history.  So when Sally want to shop at Safeway, she first checks the "Just for U" website for three types of deals.  She starts by selecting manufacturer coupons to load into her loyalty card, then she checks the Club Card for offers like "buy one get one free." The third step is the interesting one.  Safeway will set a particular lower price for Sally good for 90 days on items she buys often.  Clearly this isn't enforcing a new behavior but rather instilling loyalty.  I would love to know exactly how they are determining the personalized price.  Of course bargain hunters can still stack the three offers so they can, for example, get their $4.99 Oatmeal for $0.72. I like this particular question and answer from their website's FAQ: My offers are not that great. Can I tell you what offers I need? That's a good idea. That functionality is not currently available, but we appreciate your input and are constantly improving our just for U program. Stay tuned for exciting enhancements! I suppose if Safeway is tracking all the purchases, they can easily determine whether the customer if profitable.  As long as the customer stays profitable, why not let them determine a few offers themselves?  Food for thought.

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• What causes player box/world geometry glitches in old games?

  - by Alexander

  I'm looking to understand and find the terminology for what causes - or allows - players to interfere with geometry in old games. Famously, ID's Quake3 gave birth to a whole community of people breaking the physics by jumping, sliding, getting stuck and launching themselves off points in geometry. Some months ago (though I'd be darned if I can find it again!) I saw a conference held by Bungie's Vic DeLeon and a colleague in which Vic briefly discussed the issues he ran into while attempting to wrap 'collision' objects (please correct my terminology) around environment objects so that players could appear as though they were walking on organic surfaces, while not clipping through them or appear to be walking on air at certain points, due to complexities in the modeling. My aim is to compose a case study essay for University in which I can tackle this issue in games, drawing on early exploits and how techniques have changed to address such exploits and to aid in the gameplay itself. I have 3 current day example of where exploits still exist, however specifically targeting ID Software clearly shows they've massively improved their techniques between Q3 and Q4. So in summary, with your help please, I'd like to gain a slightly better understanding of this issue as a whole (its terminology mainly) so I can use terms and ask the right questions within the right contexts. In practical application, I know what it is, I know how to do it, but I don't have the benefit of level design knowledge yet and its technical widgety knick-knack terms =) Many thanks in advance AJ

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