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• Detecting collision between ball (circle) and brick(rectangle)?

  - by James Harrison

  Ok so this is for a small uni project. My lecturer provided me with a framework for a simple brickbreaker game. I am currently trying to overcome to problem of detecting a collision between the two game objects. One object is always the ball and the other objects can either be the bricks or the bat. public Collision hitBy( GameObject obj ) { //obj is the bat or the bricks //the current object is the ball // if ball hits top of object if(topX + width >= obj.topX && topX <= obj.topX + obj.width && topY + height >= obj.topY - 2 && topY + height <= obj.topY){ return Collision.HITY; } //if ball hits left hand side else if(topY + height >= obj.topY && topY <= obj.topY + obj.height && topX + width >= obj.topX -2 && topX + width <= obj.topX){ return Collision.HITX; } else return Collision.NO_HIT; } So far I have a method that is used to detect this collision. The the current obj is a ball and the obj passed into the method is the the bricks. At the moment I have only added statement to check for left and top collisions but do not want to continue as I have a few problems. The ball reacts perfectly if it hits the top of the bricks or bat but when it hits the ball often does not change directing. It seems that it is happening toward the top of the left hand edge but I cannot figure out why. I would like to know if there is another way of approaching this or if people know where I'm going wrong. Lastly the collision.HITX calls another method later on the changes the x direction likewise with y.

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• Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 4: Application Development Considerations

  - by Tim Murphy

  This is the final part in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. Application Development Considerations Now we get to the actual building of your solutions.  What are the skills and resources that will be needed in order to develop a smartphone application in the enterprise? Language Knowledge One of the first things you need to consider when you are deciding which platform language do you either have the most in house skill base or can you easily acquire.  If you already have developers who know Java or C# you may want to use either Android or Windows Phone.  You should also take into consideration the market availability of developers.  If your key developer leaves how easy is it to find a knowledgeable replacement? A second consideration when it comes to programming languages is the qualities exposed by the languages of a particular platform.  How well does that development language and its associated frameworks support things like security and access to the features of the smartphone hardware?  This will play into your overall cost of ownership if you have to create this infrastructure on your own. Manage Limited Resources Everything is limited on a smartphone: battery, memory, processing power, network bandwidth.  When developing your applications you will have to keep your footprint as small as possible in every way.  This means not running unnecessary processes in the background that will drain the battery or pulling more data over the airwaves than you have to.  You also want to keep your on device in as compact a format as possible. Mobile Design Patterns There are a number of design patterns that have either come to life because of smartphone development or have been adapted for this use.  The main pattern in the Windows Phone environment is the MVVM (Model-View-View-Model).  This is great for overall application structure and separation of concerns.  The fun part is trying to keep that separation as pure as possible.  Many of the other patterns may or may not have strict definitions, but some that you need to be concerned with are push notification, asynchronous communication and offline data storage. Real estate is limited on smartphones and even tablets. You are also limited in the type of controls that can be represented in the UI. This means rethinking how you modularize your application. Typing is also much harder to do so you want to reduce this as much as possible.  This leads to UI patterns.  While not what we would traditionally think of as design patterns the guidance each platform has for UI design is critical to the success of your application.  If user find the application difficult navigate they will not use it. Development Process Because of the differences in development tools required, test devices and certification and deployment processes your teams will need to learn new way of working together.  This will include the need to integrate service contracts of back-end systems with mobile applications.  You will also want to make sure that you present consistency across different access points to corporate data.  Your web site may have more functionality than your smartphone application, but it should have a consistent core set of functionality.  This all requires greater communication between sub-teams of your developers. Testing Process Testing of smartphone apps has a lot more to do with what happens when you lose connectivity or if the user navigates away from your application. There are a lot more opportunities for the user or the device to perform disruptive acts.  This should be your main testing concentration aside from the main business requirements.  You will need to do things like setting the phone to airplane mode and seeing what the application does in order to weed out any gaps in your handling communication interruptions. Need For Outside Experts Since this is a development area that is new to most companies the need for experts is a lot greater. Whether these are consultants, vendor representatives or just development community forums you will need to establish expert contacts. Nothing is more dangerous for your project timelines than a lack of knowledge.  Make sure you know who to call to avoid lengthy delays in your project because of knowledge gaps. Security Security has to be a major concern for enterprise applications. You aren't dealing with just someone's game standings. You are dealing with a companies intellectual property and competitive advantage. As such you need to start by limiting access to the application itself.  Once the user is in the app you need to ensure that the data is secure at all times.  This includes both local storage and across the wire.  This means if a platform doesn’t natively support encryption for these functions you will need to find alternatives to secure your data.  You also need to keep secret (encryption) keys obfuscated or locked away outside of the application. People can disassemble the code otherwise and break your encryption. Offline Capabilities As we discussed earlier one your biggest concerns is not having connectivity.  Because of this a good portion of your code may be dedicated to handling loss of connection and reconnection situations.  What do you do if you lose the network?  Back up all your transactions and store of any supporting data so that operations can continue off line. In order to support this you will need to determine the available flat file or local data base capabilities of the platform.  Any failed transactions will need to support a retry mechanism whether it is automatic or user initiated.  This also includes your services since they will need to be able to roll back partially completed transactions.  What ever you do, don’t ignore this area when you are designing your system. Deployment Each platform has different deployment capabilities. Some are more suited to enterprise situations than others. Apple's approach is probably the most mature at the moment. Prior to the current generation of smartphone platforms it would have been Windows CE. Windows Phone 7 has the limitation that the app has to be distributed through the same network as public facing applications. You mark them as private which means that they are only accessible by a direct URL. Unfortunately this does not make them undiscoverable (although it is very difficult). This will change with Windows Phone 8 where companies will be able to certify their own applications and distribute them.  Given this Windows Phone applications need to be more diligent with application access in order to keep them restricted to the company's employees. My understanding of the Android deployment schemes is that it is much less standardized then either iOS or Windows Phone. Someone would have to confirm or deny that for me though since I have not yet put the time into researching this platform further. Given my limited exposure to the iOS and Android platforms I have not been able to confirm this, but there are varying degrees of user involvement to install and keep applications updated. At one extreme the user just goes to a website to do the install and in other case they may need to download files and perform steps to install them. Future Bluetooth Today we use Bluetooth for keyboards, mice and headsets.  In the future it could be used to interrogate car computers or manufacturing systems or possibly retail machines by service techs.  This would open smartphones to greater use as a almost a Star Trek Tricorder.  You would get you all your data as well as being able to use it as a universal remote for just about any device or machine. Better corporation controlled deployment At least in the Windows Phone world the upcoming release of Windows Phone 8 will include a private certification and deployment option that is currently not available with Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We currently have to run the apps through the Marketplace certification process and use a targeted distribution method. Platform independent approaches HTML5 and JavaScript with Web Service has become a popular topic lately for not only creating flexible web site, but also creating cross platform mobile applications.  I’m not yet convinced that this lowest common denominator approach is viable in most cases, but it does have it’s place and seems to be growing.  Be sure to keep an eye on it. Summary From my perspective enterprise smartphone applications can offer a great competitive advantage to many companies.  They are not cheap to build and should be approached cautiously.  Understand the factors I have outlined in this series, do you due diligence and see if there is a portion of your business that can benefit from the mobile experience. del.icio.us Tags: Architecture,Smartphones,Windows Phone,iOS,Android

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• Should a programmer be indispensable?

  - by Tim

  As a programmer or system administrator, you could either strive to have your fingers in every system or to isolate yourself as much as possible to become an easily-substituted cog. Advantages of the latter include being able to take vacations and not being on call, while the former means that you'd always have something to do and be very difficult to fire. Aiming for either extreme would require a conscious effort. Except for the obvious ethical considerations, what should one strive for?

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• Documenting a REST interface with a flowchart

  - by James Kassemi

  Does anybody have suggestions on creating a flowchart representation of a REST-style web interface? In the interest of supplying thorough documentation to co-developers, I've been toying around in dia modeling the interface for modifying and generating a product resource: This particular system begins to act differently with user authentication/resource counts, so before I make modifications, I'm looking for some clarification: Complexity: how would you simplify the overall structure to make this easier to read? Display Symbol: is this appropriate for representing a page? Manual Operation Symbol: is this appropriate for representing a user action like a button click? Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated. My apologies for the re-post. The main stackexchange site suggested this question was better presented on programmers.

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• Where would a spam bot be located?

  - by Tim

  I have a hosted website using a free hosting service, I received an email this afternoon saying that I have been suspended because my account has been compromised. Basically, someone is using my email account to mass send spam. I've changed all the passwords and everything but when my Gmail pulls the emails from the host it's still downloading loads of spam messages that show like this: This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: [email protected] SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data: host 198.91.80.251 [198.91.80.251]: 554 5.6.0 id=23634-03 - Rejected by MTA on relaying, from MTA([127.0.0.1]:10030): 554 Error: This email address has lost rights to send email from the system ------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------ Return-path: <[email protected]> Received: from keenesystems.com ([66.135.33.211]:2370 helo=server211) by absolut.x10hosting.com with esmtpsa (TLSv1:RC4-MD5:128) (Exim 4.77) (envelope-from <[email protected]>) id 1TGwSW-002hHe-Lc for [email protected]; Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:35:44 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:35:43 -0500 X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 3.9.9 (8.5.3-6) Subject: New staff members wanted at Auction It Online From: [email protected] Reply-To: [email protected] To: "Nadia Monti" <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-ID: <OUTLOOK-IDM-9aed7054-6a3e-e1a4-1d5c-3e73377652a6@server211> Date : 26 September 2012=0ATime : 13:35=0ASender : Dennise Halcomb Head = Office Manager of RJ Auction Drop-Off Int.=0A=0ANice to meet you Nadia M= onti=0A=0ARJ ADO Ltd., a USA based company, offers a significant amount = of goods worldwide for our customers on eBay and other auction venues. = Our company's main target is to provide a suitable and cost-effective se= rvice for any person, company or fundraising company. The main purpose o= f the administrative assistant / sales support representative is to cont= ribute to the sales force and add convenience to our cost-effective serv= ice dedicated to individuals, businesses, and organizations worldwide. O= ur HR department obtained your resume from one of the various job-orient= ed websites just to offer you this post.=0A=0AWorking Schedule: This is = a part time and home-based offer. You won't need to spend more than 3 ho= urs each day. Your =0Aschedule will be flexible.=0A=0ASalary: At the end= of the trial period (it lasts for 1 month) you will be paid 1,800 EUR. = With the average volume of clients your overall income will raise up to = 3,000 EUR per month. After the trial period is over your base salary wil= l grow up to 2,500 EUR per month, so you will earn 5% commission from th= e transactions completed.=0A=0AWhere?: Italy Wide. As it is a stay at ho= me position all the communication will be carried out via email and via = phone.=0A=0ARequirements: Access to the internet during the workday and = basic microsoft office skills are needed. Basic knowledge of English is = required (most of the contacts will be in English).=0A=0ACosts and Fees:= There are NO costs at any time for our employees. All fees related to t= his position are covered by the RJ ADO Co. Ltd..=0A=0AFurther Hiring Pro= cess: If you are interested in position we offer, please reply to this e= mail and send us the copy of your resume for verification.=0A=0AAfter re= viewing all of the received applications we will reply to successful app= licants only. Then we'll offer to these successful applicants a position= within our firm on a trial period basis for one month beginning from th= e date you sign a trial agreement. During this trial period you will rec= eive full guidance and support. Employees on a one monthly trial period = are evaluated at least one week prior to the end of their trial. During = the trial, your supervisor can recommend termination. At the end of the = trial period, the supervisor can offer continued employment, extension o= f trial period, or termination. After the trial period you may ask for m= ore hours or continue full-time.=0A=0AIf you are interested in this posi= tion, just reply to this email and send any questions you have and the c= opy of your resume for verification.=0A=0AThank You,=0AHR-Manager of RJ = ADO Co. Ltd.=0A=0APermission Settings=0AYou have been referred to RJ Auc= tion Drop-Off If you feel you received this email in error or do not wis= h to receive future messages, please reply to this message with "remove"= in the subject field. We will immediately update our database according= ly. =0AWe apologize for any inconvenience caused.=0A=0ARJ Auction Drop-O= ff Co. Ltd. I'm not aware of how this has happened. I'm not sure how anyone could have got hold of my password. It's a simple wordpress install, at some point recently my host went down and there was a fresh install of wordpress with default admin accounts, I have a feeling it could be something to do with this. My question is, even though I've changed all my passwords it's all still happening, is there annywhere in paticular this script would be stored on my host. I really can't deal with having my hosting account suspended and my email account sending all this spam.

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• SharePoint Thoughts

  - by Tim Murphy

  I was listening to .NET Rocks episode #713 and it got me thinking about a number of SharePoint related topics. I have been working with SharePoint since the 2001 product came out and have watched it evolve over the years.  Today SharePoint is one of the most powerful and flexible products in the market.  Of course that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement (a lot of improvement in fact) and with much power comes much responsibility. My main gripe these days is that you have to develop on a server instance.  This adds a real barrier to entry for developers.  You either have to run VMWare or Hyper-V on your developer machine or actually develop on your dev server for most tasks.  Yes, there is a way to setup a Windows 7 machine with the SharePoint components but it is very hackish. Beyond that the tools in VS2010 are a great leap forward from past generations.  Not requiring a separate package creation tool is not the least of the improvements.  Better workflow and web part development have also eased the burden of many developers. The other thing the show brought up in my thoughts was more around usage.  Users want to be able to self server everything without regard to what affect that has on leveraging their data from a corporate perspective.  My coworkers who work on Lotus Notes ask why the user can’t just do what ever they want? Part of the reason is that those features have not been built, but the other part is that giving them those features is often like giving an infant a loaded hand gun.  You can do it but it doesn’t make it the smart thing to do. As with any tool that is going to be used in the enterprise it should be subject to governance.  If controls are not in place as they said in the episode of DNR the document libraries and I believe SharePoint in general starts to look as disarrayed and unusable as a shared drive.  Consider these factors before giving into every whim of the users.  You should be able to explain to them the tradeoffs of giving them full control versus being able to leverage the information they collect to the benefit of the organization. These are just a couple of the thoughts that were triggered by the show.  I’m sure there are more discussions that can be had.  Feel free to leave your comments about the pros and cons of SharePoint. del.icio.us Tags: .NET Rocks,SharePoint,software development

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• Why don't C++ Game Developers use the boost library?

  - by James

  So if you spend any time viewing / answering questions over on Stack Overflow under the C++ tag, you will quickly notice that just about everybody uses the boost library; some would even say that if you aren't using it, you're not writing "real' C++ (I disagree, but that's not the point). But then there is the game industry, which is well known for using C++ and not using boost. I can't help but wonder why that is. I don't care to use boost because I write games (now) as a hobby, and part of that hobby is implementing what I need when I am able to and using off-the-shelf libraries when I can't. But that is just me. Why don't game developers, in general, use the boost library? Is it performance or memory concerns? Style? Something Else? I was about to ask this on stack overflow, but I figured the question is better asked here. EDIT : I realize I can't speak for all game programmers and I haven't seen all game projects, so I can't say game developers never use boost; this is simply my experience. Allow me to edit my question to also ask, if you do use boost, why did you choose to use it?

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• May 2010 Chicago Architects Group Wrap Up

  - by Tim Murphy

  Scott Seely did a wonderful job this evening of explaining how cloud services fit into our application architectures and specifically how Azure is organized.  He covered everything from Table Storage to code name Dallas (OData).  The discussion continued well beyond the end of the meeting which was attended by members of all sectors of IT and multiple platforms. Be sure to join us in the upcoming months as we cover the following topics: June – Document Generation Architecture July – Architecting a BI Installation August - MVVM – the What, Why and When Stay tuned. del.icio.us Tags: Chicago Architects Group,Azure,Cloud Computing,Dallas,Scott Seely,MVVM,Business Intelligence

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• Playing part of a sfx audio file in HTML5 using WebAudio

  - by Matthew James Davis

  I have compiled all of my sound effects into one sequenced .ogg file. I have the start and stop times for each sound effect. How do I play the individual effects? That is, how do I play part of an audio file. More specificially, I've created a dictionary { 'sword_hit': { src: 'sfx.ogg', start: 265, // ms length: 212 // ms } } that my play_sound() function can use to look up 'sword_hit' and play the correct audio file at the correct start time for the correct duration. I simply need to know how to tell the WebAudio API to start playing at start ms and only play for length ms.

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• Uninstalling GRUB from MacBook Air

  - by James Brooke

  So... I have a MacBook Air and I recently tried to install Ubuntu on my external HD. I booted Ubuntu from a flash drive and everything had gone fine. I turned off my computer and when I turned it on again I got a message of error and a "grub rescue" line to enter some code. I rebooted holding the "option" key and I selected the Mac partition and everything is fine with my system, but every time I start my system and I don't hold the "option" key, I get the same error and the grub rescue message. I just want things to go back to normal, as they were before I installed Ubuntu on my external HD (which, btw, presented a message that said there was no boot loader). What do I do?

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• twin view on gnome when monitor is unplugged

  - by james t

  i have a macbook pro which is often connected to a monitor, twin view on gnome works pretty well, but a problem arises when i disconnect the monitor, any window that resided on that workspace is no longer available. another issue is when i start my computer when a monitor is not present, because xorg.conf file has the monitor configuration in it, my mouse pointer often disappears in the other monitor's virtual space, as if it is currently plugged, osx deals with this issue elegantly by refreshing the display every time a plug in/out occurs, is there anything similar that can be done in linux ?

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• 3 Reasons You Need To Know Something About Every Technology

  - by Tim Murphy

  I make my living as a consultant and a general technologist.  I credit my success to the fact that I have never been afraid to pick up any product, language or platform needed to get the job done.  While Microsoft technologies I my mainstay, I have done work on mainframe and UNIX platforms and have worked with a wide variety of database engines.  Each one has it’s use and most times it is less expensive to find a way to communicate with an existing system than to replace it. So what are the main benefits of expending the effort to learn a new technology? New ways to solve problems Accelerate development Advise clients and get new business opportunities By new technology I mean ones that you haven’t had experience with before.  They don’t have to be the the one that just came out yesterday.  As they say, those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.  If you can learn something from an older technology it can be just as valuable as the shiny new one.  Either way, when you add another tool to your kit you get a new view on each problem you face.  This makes it easier to create a sound solution. The next thing you can learn from working with different products and techniques is how to more efficiently develop solve problems.  Many times if you are working with a new language you will find that there are specific design patterns that are used with it in normal use.  These can usually be applied with most languages.  You just needed to be exposed to them. The last point is about helping your clients and helping yourself.  If you can get in on technologies early you will have advantage over your competition in the market.  You will also be able to honestly advise you client on why they should or should not go with a new product.  Being able to compare products and their features is always an ability that stake holders appreciate. You don’t need to learn every detail of a product.  Learn enough to function and get an idea of how to use the technology.  Keep eating those technology Wheaties and you will be ready to go the distance in any project. del.icio.us Tags: Technology,technologists,technology generalist,Software Architecture

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• Are there any Java based libraries that provide game mapping features?

  - by James.Elsey

  Hi All, I'm working on a Java web based game in my spare time (springMVC / JSPs etc), and I'm wondering what are my options for dealing with the "game world" or mapping element. My game will be 2d / text based, so I have no need for any OpenGL / Flash etc. My initial idea was to use Google maps and provide a custom overlay, but I want to know if there are any alternatives? For example, if I create a 2d map with all my zones, are there any libraries that will help me plot players, work out distances and so forth? Regards

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• Discovering Your Project

  - by Tim Murphy

  The discovery phase of any project is both exciting and critical to the project’s success.  There are several key points that you need to keep in mind as you navigate this process. The first thing you need to understand is who the players in the project are and what their motivations are for the project.  Leaving out a key stakeholder in the resulting product is one of the easiest ways to doom your project to fail.  The better the quality of the input you have at this early phase the better chance you will have of creating a well accepted deliverable. The next task you should tackle is to gather the goals for the project.  Specifically, what does the company expect to get for the money they are about to layout.  This seems like a common sense task, but you would be surprised how many teams to straight to building the system.  Even if you are following an agile methodology I believe that this is critical. Inventorying the resources that already exists gives you an idea what you are going to have to build and what you can leverage at lower risk.  This list should include documentation, servers, code repositories, databases, languages, security systems and supporting teams.  All of these are “resources” that can effect the cost and delivery schedule of your project. Finally, you need to verify what you have found and documented with the stakeholders and subject matter experts.  Documentation that has not been reviewed is actually a list of assumptions and we all know that assumptions are the mother of all screw ups. If you give the discovery phase of your project the attention that it deserves your project has a much better chance of success. I would love to hear what other people find important for this phase.  Please leave comments on this post so we can share the knowledge. del.icio.us Tags: Project discovery,documentation,business analysis,architecture

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• .mdf Database Filetype

  - by James Izzard

  Would somebody be kind enough to correct my understanding of the following (if incorrect)? Microsoft's .mdf file-type can be used by both the LocalDB and the full Server database engines (apologies if engine is not the correct word?). The .mdf file does not care which of these two options are accessing it - so you could use either to access any given .mdf file, provided you had permissions and password etc. The LocalDB and the SQL Server are two options that can be interchangeably chosen to access .mdf files depending on the application requirements. Appreciate any clarification. Thanks

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• Comb Over

  - by Tim Dexter

  Being some what follicly challenged, and to my wife's utter relief, the comb over is not something I have ever considered. The title is a tenuous reference to a formatting feature that Adobe offers in their PDF documents. The comb provides the ability to equally space a string of characters on a pre-defined form layout so that it fits neatly in the area. See the numbers above are being spaced correctly. Its not a function of the font but a property of the form field. For the first time, in a long time I had the chance to build a PDF template today to help out a colleague. I spotted the property and thought, hey, lets give it a whirl and see in Publisher supports it? Low and behold, Publisher handles the comb spacing in its PDF outputs. Exciting eh? OK, maybe not that exciting but I was very pleasantly surprise to see it working. I am reliably informed, by Leslie, BIP Evangelist and Tech Writer that, this feature was introduced from version 10.1.3.4.2 onwards. Official docs and no mention of comb overs here. Happy Combing!

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• Grub Rescue Error: Unknown Filesystem

  - by James

  I was trying to dual boot Windows with Linux (linux installed first). I read that it was easier to do so if windows was installed first. So I tried to install windows, by creating a partition for it. There wasn't enough room on the drive so I tried changing the filesystem of my existing partition to support windows. Now whenever I try to start my computer I get the grub rescue screen. I've tried booting from CD and USB with ubuntu and also with windows, but nothing happens. I ran ls in grub rescue and got hd0, (hd0,msdos5), cd (with an install disc inserted), fd0, and fd1. However if I run ls on any of these I receive the error: unknown filesystem. Can anyone help me out?

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• Page Load Time - "Waiting on..." taking ages. What part of page request process is hung?

  - by James

  I have a new cluster site running on Magento that's on a development server that is made up of 2 x web servers and 1 x database server. I have optimized the site in all areas I know (gzip, increasing php memory limits, increasing database memory limits etc) but sometimes the page loading gets stuck on 'waiting for xxx.xx.xx.xxx' (Chrome and other broswers, chrome just shows it that way). It can sit there for 40 + seconds, sometimes it just never loads and I close it in frustration. What part of the page loading process is this hung at? Is it a server issue, database issue, platform issue? I need to know where to start or whether to push the hosting provider about it.

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• Has test driven development (TDD) actually benefited a real world project?

  - by James

  I am not new to coding. I have been coding (seriously) for over 15 years now. I have always had some testing for my code. However, over the last few months I have been learning test driven design/development (TDD) using Ruby on Rails. So far, I'm not seeing the benefit. I see some benefit to writing tests for some things, but very few. And while I like the idea of writing the test first, I find I spend substantially more time trying to debug my tests to get them to say what I really mean than I do debugging actual code. This is probably because the test code is often substantially more complicated than the code it tests. I hope this is just inexperience with the available tools (RSpec in this case). I must say though, at this point, the level of frustration mixed with the disappointing lack of performance is beyond unacceptable. So far, the only value I'm seeing from TDD is a growing library of RSpec files that serve as templates for other projects/files. Which is not much more useful, maybe less useful, than the actual project code files. In reading the available literature, I notice that TDD seems to be a massive time sink up front, but pays off in the end. I'm just wondering, are there any real world examples? Does this massive frustration ever pay off in the real world? I really hope I did not miss this question somewhere else on here. I searched, but all the questions/answers are several years old at this point. It was a rare occasion when I found a developer who would say anything bad about TDD, which is why I have spent as much time on this as I have. However, I noticed that nobody seems to point to specific real-world examples. I did read one answer that said the guy debugging the code in 2011 would thank you for have a complete unit testing suite (I think that comment was made in 2008). So, I'm just wondering, after all these years, do we finally have any examples showing the payoff is real? Has anybody actually inherited or gone back to code that was designed/developed with TDD and has a complete set of unit tests and actually felt a payoff? Or did you find that you were spending so much time trying to figure out what the test was testing (and why it was important) that you just tossed out the whole mess and dug into the code?

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• Styling Windows Phone Silverlight Applications

  - by Tim Murphy

  If you have not developed with styles in Silverlight/XAML then it can be challenging and resources can be sparse depending on how deep you get.  One thing that you need to understand is what level you can apply styles and how much they can cascade.  What I am finding is that this doesn’t go to the level that we are used to in HTML and CSS. While styles can be defined at a page level if you want to share styles throughout your application they should be defined in the App.xaml file.  This is of course analogous to placing a style in your HTML file versus an external CSS file.  This is the type of style I will concentrate on in this post. The first thing to look it how styles associate to elements.  TargetType defines the object type that your style will apply to.  In the example below the style is targeting the TextBlock object type. <Style x:Key="TextBlockSmallGray" TargetType="TextBlock"> Next we use a Setter which allows you to apply values for specific attributes of the target object type.  The setters can be a simple value or complex.  The first example here is simply applying a color to the background property of the target. <Setter Property="Background" Value="White"/> The second setter example here is for the same property, but we are applying a the definition of a LinearGradientBrush. <Setter Property="Background"> <Setter.Value> <LinearGradientBrush> <GradientStop Offset="0" Color="Black"/> <GradientStop Offset="1" Color="White"/> </LinearGradientBrush> </Setter.Value> </Setter> The last thing I want to cover here is that you can leverage the system styles and then override or extend them.  The BasedOn attribute of the Style tag allows this sort of inheritance.  In the example below I am going to start with the PhoneTextTitleStyle and then override properties as needed. <Style x:Key="TextBlockTitle" BasedOn="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}" TargetType="TextBlock"> So now that we have our styles defined applying it is fairly straight forward.  Add the style name as a static resource to the style property of the element in your page and off you go. <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Style="{StaticResource PageGridStyle}"> So this is one step in creating consistency in your application’s look.  In future posts I will dig a little deeper. del.icio.us Tags: windows phone 7,mobile development,windows phone 7 development,.NET,software development,design,UX

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• Moving objects colliding when using unalligned collision avoidance (steering)

  - by James Bedford

  I'm having trouble with unaligned collision avoidance for what I think is a rare case. I have set two objects to move towards each other but with a slight offset, so one of the objects is moving slightly upwards, and one of the objects is moving slightly downwards. In my unaligned collision avoidance steering algorithm I'm finding the points on the object's forward line and the other object's forward line where these two lines are the closest. If these closest points are within a collision avoidance distance, and if the distance between them is smaller than the two radii of the two object's bounding spheres, then the objects should steer away in the appropriate direction. The problem is that for my case, the closest points on the lines are calculated to be really far away from the actual collision point. This is because the two forward lines for each object are moving away from each other as the objects pass. The problem is that because of this, no steering takes place, and the two objects partially collide. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can correctly calculate the point of collision? Perhaps by somehow taking into account the size of the two objects?

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• OpenGL setup on Windows

  - by kevin james

  I have been trying to use OpenGL for two days now. First on Mac, then on Windows. The problem with Mac is that it doesn't support the newer versions of OpenGL. I ran a tutorial that actually did get some things working, but it only works in XCode (i.e., I can't create a new file, paste in the same code, and get it to work). Because of these issues, I moved to Windows. My Windows 7 has OpenGL 4.3, which is the same that is used in alot of other tutorials. However, not one of these tutorials gives any instruction on how to set it up for the first time. I have come across some vague posts saying that some libraries need to be linked. But WHAT libraries, and HOW do I link them? Please help. I am pretty desperate to set this up as this project is due for work soon. I have actually used OpenGL before at my university, but the computers already had everything set up. The project itself is very easy, but setting up OpenGL is not something I know how to do.

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• Number of Classes in a Namespace - Code Smell?

  - by Tim Claason

  I have a C# library that's used by several executables. There's only a couple namespaces in the library, and I just noticed that one of the namespaces has quite a few classes in it. I've always avoided having too many classes in a single namespace because of categorization, and because subconsciously, I think it looks "prettier" to have a deeper hierarchy of namespaces. My question is: does anyone else consider it a "code smell" when a namespace has many classes - even if the classes relate to each other? Would you put in a lot of effort to find nuances in the classes that allows for subcategorization?

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• Next Post...

  - by James Michael Hare

  The next post on the concurrent collections will be next Monday.  I'm a little behind from my Topeka trip earlier this week, so sorry about the delay! Also, I was thinking about starting a C++ Little Wonders series as well.  Would anyone have an interest in that topic?  I primarily use C# in my development work, but there is still a lot of legacy C++ I work on as well and could share some tips & tricks.

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• Cursor (touchpad) moves and clicks erratically

  - by James Wood

  Sometimes (usually after two-finger scrolling) the touchpad on my Asus X54C becomes unresponsive and the cursor begins to click and move small distances. Clicking seems to happen more often than moving. Unlike with other similar problems, I've never seen the cursor move to (0, 0). Suspending (closing the lid) and unsuspending doesn't help, and neither does moving to a tty and back or rebooting. I've also tried disabling the touchpad via Fn+F9. That tends to take a long time, but doesn't have any effect. I'm on 13.10 at the moment, but I remember it happening on 13.04 as well. Here's the pointer section of xinput: ? Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)] ? ? Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)] ? ? ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad id=12 [slave pointer (2)]

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