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• Developing momentum on open source projects

  - by sashang

  Hi I've been struggling to develop momentum contributing to open source projects. I have in the past tried with gcc and contributed a fix to libstdc++ but it was a once off and even though I spent months in my spare time on the dev mailing list and reading through things I just never seemed to develop any momentum with the code. Eventually I unsubscribed and got my free time back and uncluttered my mailbox. Like a lot of people I have some little open source defunct projects lying around on the net, but they're not large and I'm the only contributor. At the moment I'm more interested in contributing to a large open source project and want to know how people got started because I find it difficult while working full time to develop any momentum with the code base. Other more regular contributors, who are on the project full-time, are able to make changes at will and as result enter that positive feedback cycle where they understand the code and also know where it's heading. It makes the barrier to entry higher for those that come along later. My questions are to people who actively contribute to large opensource projects, like the Linux kernel, or gcc or clang/llvm or anything else with say a developer head count of more than 10. How did you get started? Was there a large chunk of time in your life that you just could dedicate to working on the project? I know in Linus's case he had a chunk of time (6 months) to get it started. What barriers to entry did you encounter? Can you describe the initial stages of the time spent with the project, from when you had little understanding of the code to when you understood enough to commit regularly. Thanks

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• HTG Explains: What Is RSS and How Can I Benefit From Using It?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If you’re trying to keep up with news and content on multiple web sites, you’re faced with the never ending task of visiting those sites to check for new content. Read on to learn about RSS and how it can deliver the content right to your digital doorstep. In many ways, content on the internet is beautifully linked together and accessible, but despite the interconnectivity of it all we still frequently find ourselves visiting this site, then that site, then another site, all in an effort to check for updates and get the content we want. That’s not particular efficient and there’s a much better way to go about it. Imagine if you will a simple hypothetical situation. You’re a fan of a web comic, a few tech sites, an infrequently updated but excellent blog about an obscure music genre you’re a fan of, and you like to keep an eye on announcements from your favorite video game vendor. If you rely on manually visiting all those sites—and, let’s be honest, our hypothetical example has a scant half-dozen sites while the average person would have many, many, more—then you’re either going to be wasting a lot of time checking the sites every day for new content or you’re going to be missing out on content as you either forget to visit the sites or find the content after it’s not as useful or relevant to you. RSS can break you free from that cycle of either over-checking or under-finding content by delivering the content to you as it is published. Let’s take a look at what RSS is how it can help. HTG Explains: What Is RSS and How Can I Benefit From Using It? HTG Explains: Why You Only Have to Wipe a Disk Once to Erase It HTG Explains: Learn How Websites Are Tracking You Online

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• Ubuntu 12.04 using b43-fwcutter

  - by Nathan

  I have used 10.04 with the b43-fwcutter driver to drive my BCM4318 Broadcom card (a Linksys WPC54G v3) on my old Dell Inspiron 8100 for two years+ with no troubles. I just upgraded to 12.04 and although everything worked fine after install, before I added the b43-fwcutter driver, once I installed the driver, the system refuses to boot. Even before I install the Linksys card!! It just hangs on boot with graphical garbage on the screen. I tried several attempts to recover the system using the live CD, and finally reinstalled completely. I have been thru the cycle, install fresh system, verify everything works, then install b43-fwcutter and it is hung, several times. Consistent hard fail. The system runs fine on hardwire Ethernet, and wireless was fine on 10.04. But I cannot get there with 12.04. So after several attempts, I am now ready to admit defeat and ask for help. I have read every thread that search turned up, and either the advice is to do what I did, i.e. install fwcutter, or does not apply (Different Broadcom, STA, legacy, whatever) So what do I need to do to fix it? Or is the B43-fwcutter driver broken for 12.04? Thoughts? Tips? Log files needed??

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• Putting DSMD into Remission

  - by Justin Greenwood

  As a programmer with over ten years of professional experience, I've often suffered from DSMD (distraction surplus/motivation deficit) disorder. I know I'm not alone. Many of my colleagues have shared their experiences with this productivity cancer to me in support groups or in moments of inebriated intimacy. Often, I observe friends unknowingly surrendering to it - sitting at their computer, cycling through the same set of web sites (blogs, facebook, youtube, news providers, wikipeida, etc.), over and over again. Intermittently, they get up, take a walk around the office, make small talk with their colleagues, get another cup of coffee, then sit down and start the cycle all over again. It is completely controlled by the subconscious mind and will destroy your ability to get into that groove you used to live in back in your better days. Programming requires extended periods of focused attention, and this type of behavior will really kill productivity and in the end, when deadlines are near, launch your stress level to near emotional breakdown levels.DiagnosisThe best way to diagnose infection is to completely disconnect your devices from the internet while working. If you find yourself launching web browsers every minute or so, then you're down with the sickness.TreatmentA few techniques I've found that will help send this ailment into regression are as follows:Segment your day into two to three hour work segments. For example: 9:00-11:00, 1:00-3:00, 3:30-5:00.Define a few small one to two hour tasks you want to accomplish in your day. Assign each of those tasks to one of the short work segments.If possible, turn off the internet and any other distractions during these work segments (at least until you regain control of your browsing habits) - this includes instant messaging and email. You can check your email and waste time surfing in the hours between work segments.Reward yourself on productive days with a beer or whatever butters your muffins.

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• Failure Driven Development

  - by DevSolo

  At our shop, we strive to be agile. And I'd say we are making great strides. That said, a few of us have spotted a pattern we have started calling "Failure Driven Development". Failure Driven Development can basically be desribed as an agile release/iteration cycle where the bugs/features are guided not by tasks and stories with acceptance criteria, but with defects entered in the defect tracking software. Our team has a great Project Manager who strives to get the acceptance criteria from the customer(s), but it's not always possible. From my development chair, this is due to the customer either not knowing exactly what they want or (and this is the kicker) two different "camps" at the customer's main office conflict with how a story should be implemented. Camp A will losely dictate that Feature X works like this, then Camp B will fail it due not functioning like that. Hence, the term "FDD". The process is driven by "failures". This leads to my question: Has anyone else encountered this and if so, any tips/suggestions for dealing with it? We have, of course, tried to get Camp A and B to agree prior, but everyone knows this isn't always the case. Thanks

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• General Availability: Simplified User Experience Design Patterns eBook

  - by ultan o'broin

  Karen Scipi (@karenscipi) writes: The Oracle Applications User Experience team is delighted to announce that our Simplified User Experience Design Patterns for the Oracle Applications Cloud Service eBook is available for free. Working with publishers McGraw-Hill, we're pleased to make the eBook available in EPUB (for use on Apple iOS devices), MOBI (ideal for Amazon Kindle), and PDF (for anything with Adobe Reader) versions. The Simplified User Experience Design Patterns for the Oracle Applications Cloud Service eBook We’re sharing the same user experience design patterns, and their supporting guidance on page types and Oracle ADF components that Oracle uses to build simplified user interfaces (UIs) for the Oracle Sales Cloud and Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud, with you so that you can build your own simplified UI solutions. Click to register and download your free copy of the eBook Design patterns offer big wins for applications builders because they are proven, reusable, and based on Oracle technology. They enable developers, partners, and customers to design and build the best user experiences consistently, shortening the application's development cycle, boosting designer and developer productivity, and lowering the overall time and cost of building a great user experience. Developers use the eBook to build their own simplified UIs with Oracle ADF and Oracle JDeveloper Now, Oracle partners, customers and the Oracle ADF community can share further in the Oracle Applications User Experience science and design expertise that brought the acclaimed simplified UIs to the Cloud and they can build their own UIs, simply and productively too!

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• Speed up ADF Mobile Deployment to Android with Keystore

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  As you might have noticed from my latest ADF Mobile entries, I'm doing most of my ADF Mobile development on a windows machine and testing on an Android device. Unfortunately the Android/windows experience is not as fast as the iOS/Mac one. However, there is one thing I learned today that can make this a bit less painful in terms of the speed to deploy and test your application - and this is to use the "Release" mode when deploying your application instead of the "Debug" mode. To do this you'll first need to define a keystore, but as Joe from our Mobile team showed me today, this is quite easy. Here are the steps: Open a command line in your JDK bin directory (I just used the JDK that comes with the JDeveloper install). Issue the following command: keytool –genkey –v –keystore <Keystore Name>.keystore –alias <Alias Name> -keyalg RSA –keysize 2048 –validity 10000 Both keystore name and alias names are strings that you decide on. The keytool utility will then prompt you with various questions that you'll need to answer. Once this is done, the next step is to configure your JDeveloper preferences->ADF Mobile to add this keystore there under the release tab:  Then for your application specific deployment profile - switch the build mode from debug to release. The end result is a much smaller mobile application (for example from 60 to 21mb) and a much faster deployment cycle (for me it is about twice as fast as before).

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• Thinkpad W510 with default graphics drivers shows weird brightness issues

  - by Chantz

  Hey guys, I am currently running 10.10 - 32 bit on a new Thinkpad W510 with nVidia Quadro FX 880M graphics card. I am running with the default graphics drivers that installed with ubuntu install. My problem is that when I am logging in the screen acts normally as far as birghtness is concerned. I can increase/decrease brightness with Fn keys. But few seconds after I log in screen goes pitch dark. Hitting Fn+Home flickers the screen to all the way bright, then all the way dark. This behavior continues until I reach maximum brightness, in which case the screen stays all the way bright, for a few more seconds and then again goes dark if there is no activity & the cycle continues. Have you guys faced any of these issues? If so any pointers on how to resolve it. I am not alone, on ubuntu forum I saw another person having the same issue - link but no solution. Please help! UPDATE I followed the instructions that htorque mentions in his answer and it worked.

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• How (and when) to move users to mysqli and PDO_MYSQL?

  - by cj

  An important discussion on the PHP "internals" development mailing list is taking place. It's one that you should take some note of. It concerns the next step in transitioning PHP applications away from the very old mysql extension and towards adopting the much better mysqli extension or PDO_MYSQL driver for PDO. This would allow the mysql extension to, at some as-yet undetermined time in the future, be removed. Both mysqli and PDO_MYSQL have been around for many years, and have various advantages: http://php.net/manual/en/mysqlinfo.api.choosing.php The initial RFC for this next step is at https://wiki.php.net/rfc/mysql_deprecation I would expect the RFC to change substantially based on current discussion. The crux of that discussion is the timing of the next step of deprecation. There is also discussion of the carrot approach (showing users the benfits of moving), and stick approach (displaying warnings when the mysql extension is used). As always, there is a lot of guesswork going on as to what MySQL APIs are in current use by PHP applications, how those applications are deployed, and what their upgrade cycle is. This is where you can add your weight to the discussion - and also help by spreading the word to move to mysqli or PDO_MYSQL. An example of such a 'carrot' is the excellent summary at Ulf Wendel's blog: http://blog.ulf-wendel.de/2012/php-mysql-why-to-upgrade-extmysql/ I want to repeat that no time frame for the eventual removal of the mysql extension is set. I expect it to be some years away.

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• Android - Efficient way to draw tiles in OpenGL ES

  - by Maecky

  Hi, I am trying to write efficient code to render a tile based map in android. I load for each tile the corresponding bitmap (just one time) and then create the according tiles. I have designed a class to do this: public class VertexQuad { private float[] mCoordArr; private float[] mColArr; private float[] mTexCoordArr; private int mTextureName; private static short mCounter = 0; private short mIndex; As you can see, each tile has it's x,y location, a color array, texture coordinates and a texture name. Now, I want to render all my created tiles. To reduce the openGL api calls (I read somewhere that the state changes are costly and therefore I want to keep them to a minimum), I first want to hand ALL the coordinate-arrays, color-arrays and texture-coordinates over to OpenGL. After that I run two for loops. The first one iterates over the textures and binds the texture. The second for loop iterates over all Tiles and puts all tiles with the corresponding texture into an IndexBuffer. After the second for loop has finished, I call gl.gl_drawElements() whith the corresponding index buffer, to draw all tiles with the texture associated. For the next texture I do the same again. Now I run into some problems: Allocating and filling the FloatBuffers at the start of each rendering cycle costs very much time. I just run a test, where i wanted to put 400 coordinates into a FloatBuffer which took me about 200ms. My questions now are: Is there a better way, handling the coordinate and color structures? How is this correctly done, this is obviously not the optimal way? ;) thanks in advance, regards Markus

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• Don't miss Virtual Developer Day - All about ADF next week

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  In case you haven't heard we are holding a free online virtual developer day next week - July 10th that you should attend - even if you think you already know ADF. First the registration link - http://bit.ly/fusiondev. While one of the tracks is aimed at developer who are relatively new to ADF - and cover ADF Faces, ADF Controller and a comparison of productivity with Forms and other tools - the two other tracks have great content on some topics that you might not be familiar with even if you already work with ADF. This include sessions about the upcoming ADF Mobile, The new ADF support in Eclipse and information about Application Life Cycle Management with ADF and JDeveloper. As well as sessions that will open your mind to the areas where ADF integrates with other Fusion Middleware Solutions such as ADF integration with BI, WebCenter and SOA. Most of the sessions are quite heavy on demos and you'll get a chance to interact with the presenters and ask questions during the live event. You should register even if you can't attend the live event - this way you'll get an email pointing you to the recorded sessions for on demand viewing. See you next week.

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• Notification framework for object lifecycle

  - by rlandster

  I am looking for an application, framework, or library that would help us with "object life-cycle management". There are many things that are created for users, departments, and services that, all too often, are left unmanaged. Some examples: user accounts groups SSL certificates access rights databases software license provisionings storage list-serve accounts These objects are created and managed by a wide variety of applications and systems. Typically, a user (person) requests (either explicitly or implicitly) one of these objects. A centralized management tool would help us manage such administration chores as: What objects does user X currently own/manage? Move the ownership of object P to user X; move all objects owned by user X (who was just been fired) to user Y. For all objects of type T that have expired be sure the objects have been disabled or deleted by their provider. How many active (expired, about-to-expire) objects of type P are there? Send periodic notifications to all users who own active objects of type P reminding them of what they own. There is a security alert for objects of type P; send a notification to all users who own these types of objects to take a specific remedial action. Delete or disable a set of objects based on expiration (or some other criteria). These objects are directly managed through their own applications (Active Directory, MySql, file systems, etc.) and may even have their own notification systems, but I want to centralize this into an "object management system". The OMS should allow the association with an external identity provider that defines who the users and groups are (e.g., LDAP, Active Directory) creation of objects association of an object to a specific user and/or group association with an expiration date creation of flexible reporting including letting users know what objects they currently own and their expiration dates integration with an external object "provider" via a plug-in We could write something from scratch, but I am hoping there is something already out there that will help, either an entire application or a set of libraries that provide much of what is needed. Any ideas?

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• What are my choices for server side sandboxed scripting?

  - by alfa64

  I'm building a public website where users share data and scripts to run over some data. The scripts are run serverside in some sort of sandbox without other interaction this cycle: my Perl program reads from a database a User made script, adds the data to be processed into the script ( ie: a JSON document) then calls the interpreter, it returns the response( a JSON document or plain text), i save it to the database with my perl script. The script should be able to have some access to built in functions added to the scripting language by myself, but nothing more. So i've stumbled upon node.js as a javascript interpreter, and and hour or so ago with Google's V8(does v8 makes sense for this kind of thing?). CoffeeScript also came to my mind, since it looks nice and it's still Javascript. I think javascript is widespread enough and more "sandboxeable" since it doesn't have OS calls or anything remotely insecure ( i think ). by the way, i'm writing the system on Perl and Php for the front end. To improve the question: I'm choosing Javascript because i think is secure and simple enough to implement with node.js, but what other alternatives are for achieving this kind of task? Lua? Python? I just can't find information on how to run a sandboxed interpreter in a proper way.

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• The Home Stretch: NetBeans IDE 7.1 Release Candidate

  - by TinuA

  The first release candidate build of NetBeans IDE 7.1 is live and available for download, which means the big release (GA) is expected any day soon.NetBeans IDE 7.1 delivers support for JavaFX 2.0, enabling the full compile, debug and profile development cycle for JavaFX 2.0 applications and keeping developers in sync with the latest from the Java platform. Beyond JavaFX support, 7.1 also provides significant Swing GUI Builder enhancements, CSS3 support, and visual debugging tools for JavaFX and Swing user interfaces. And Git--a much anticipated featured--has been integrated into the IDE."The entire NetBeans team is tremendously excited about this release, which provides developers with more state-of-the-art tools for building front-end clients," says NetBeans Engineering Director John Jullion-Ceccarelli. "Whether you are doing JavaFX, HTML5, Swing, or JSF, NetBeans 7.1 will let you quickly and easily develop great-looking and full-featured clients for your Java or PHP-based applications."But there's one more task to check off before the general availability: The NetBeans team has launched a Community Acceptance Survey to get user feedback about the release candidate. Download the RC build, test it and take the survey to let the team know if NetBeans IDE 7.1 is ready for its debut!

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• Why is the use of abstractions (such as LINQ) so taboo?

  - by Matthew Patrick Cashatt

  I am an independent contractor and, as such, I interview 3-4 times a year for new gigs. I am in the midst of that cycle now and got turned down for an opportunity even though I felt like the interview went well. The same thing has happened to me a couple of times this year. Now, I am not a perfect guy and I don't expect to be a good fit for every organization. That said, my batting average is lower than usual so I politely asked my last interviewer for some constructive feedback, and he delivered! The main thing, according to the interviewer, was that I seemed to lean too much towards the use of abstractions (such as LINQ) rather than towards lower-level, organically grown algorithms. On the surface, this makes sense--in fact, it made the other rejections make sense too because I blabbed about LINQ in those interviews as well and it didn't seem that the interviewers knew much about LINQ (even though they were .NET guys). So now I am left with this question: If we are supposed to be "standing on the shoulders of giants" and using abstractions that are available to us (like LINQ), then why do some folks consider it so taboo? Doesn't it make sense to pull code "off the shelf" if it accomplishes the same goals without extra cost? It would seem to me that LINQ, even if it is an abstraction, is simply an abstraction of all the same algorithms one would write to accomplish exactly the same end. Only a performance test could tell you if your custom approach was better, but if something like LINQ met the requirements, why bother writing your own classes in the first place? I don't mean to focus on LINQ here. I am sure that the JAVA world has something comparable, I just would like to know why some folks get so uncomfortable with the idea of using an abstraction that they themselves did not write. UPDATE As Euphoric pointed out, there isn't anything comparable to LINQ in the Java world. So, if you are developing on the .NET stack, why not always try and make use of it? Is it possible that people just don't fully understand what it does?

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• Calculate travel time on road map with semaphores

  - by Ivansek

  I have a road map with intersections. At intersections there are semaphores. For each semaphore I generate a red light time and green light time which are represented with syntax [R:T1, G:T2], for example: 119 185 250 A ------- B: [R:6, G:4] ------ C: [R:5, G:5] ------ D I want to calculate a car travel time from A - D. Now I do this with this pseudo code: function get_travel_time(semaphores_configuration) { time = 0; for( i=1; i<path.length;i++) { prev_node = path[i-1]; next_node = path[i]); cost = cost_between(prev_node, next_node) time += (cost/movement_speed) // movement_speed = 50px per second light_times = get_light_times(path[i], semaphore_configurations) lights_cycle = get_lights_cycle(light_times) // Eg: [R,R,R,G,G,G,G], where [R:3, G:4] lights_sum = light_times.green_time+light_times.red_light; // Lights cycle time light = lights_cycle[cost%lights_sum]; if( light == "R" ) { time += light_times.red_light; } } return time; } So for distance 119 between A and B travel time is, 119/50 = 2.38s ( exactly mesaured time is between 2.5s and 2.6s), then we add time if we came at a red light when at B. If we came at a red light is calculated with lines: lights_cycle = get_lights_cycle(light_times) // Eg: [R,R,R,G,G,G,G], where [R:3, G:4] lights_sum = light_times.green_time+light_times.red_light light = lights_cycle[cost%lights_sum]; if( light == "R" ) { time += light_times.red_light; } This pseudo code doesn't calculate exactly the same times as they are mesaured, but the calculations are very close to them. Any idea how I would calculate this?

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• Connecting / disconnecting DisplayPort causes crash

  - by iGadget

  I wanted to file a bug about this using ubuntu-bug xserver-xorg-video-intel, but the system prompted my to try posting here first. So here goes :-) While the situation in Ubuntu 11.10 was still somewhat workable (see UI freezes when disconnecting DisplayPort), in 12.04 (using Unity 3D) it has gotten worse. The weird part is that during the 12.04 beta's, the situation was actually improving! I was able to successfully connect and disconnect a DisplayPort monitor without the system breaking down on me. But now with 12.04 final (with all updates), it's just plain terrible. When I now connect an external monitor using the DisplayPort connector on my HP ProBook 6550b, it only works sometimes. Most times (but not always!) the screen just goes blank and the system seems to crash (not even CTRL+ALT+F1 works anymore). Only a hard shutdown by keeping the power button pressed for several seconds and then a restart gets me out of this. I suspect the chances of the system crashing become higher as the system's uptime increases, especially when there have been one or more suspend-resume cycles (although I have also experienced this bug once from a cold boot). Disconnecting is roughly the same as with 11.10 (see issue mentioned above), with the difference that if I resume from suspend, I no longer have to do a CTRL+ALT+F1, ALT+F7 cycle to get my screen back. So what more can I try? Or should I just go ahead and file the bug anyway?

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• Develop in trunk and then branch off, or in release branch and then merge back?

  - by Torben Gundtofte-Bruun

  Say that we've decided on following a "release-based" branching strategy, so we'll have a branch for each release, and we can add maintenance updates as sub-branches from those. Does it matter whether we: develop and stabilize a new release in the trunk and then "save" that state in a new release branch; or first create that release branch and only merge into the trunk when the branch is stable? I find the former to be easier to deal with (less merging necessary), especially when we don't develop on multiple upcoming releases at the same time. Under normal circumstances we would all be working on the trunk, and only work on released branches if there are bugs to fix. What is the trunk actually used for in the latter approach? It seems to be almost obsolete, because I could create a future release branch based on the most recent released branch rather than from the trunk. Details based on comment below: Our product consists of a base platform and a number of modules on top; each is developed and even distributed separately from each other. Most team members work on several of these areas, so there's partial overlap between people. We generally work only on 1 future release and not at all on existing releases. One or two might work on a bugfix for an existing release for short periods of time. Our work isn't compiled and it's a mix of Unix shell scripts, XML configuration files, SQL packages, and more -- so there's no way to have push-button builds that can be tested. That's done manually, which is a bit laborious. A release cycle is typically half a year or more for the base platform; often 1 month for the modules.

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• TXPAUSE : polite waiting for hardware transactional memory

  - by Dave

  Classic locks are an appropriate tool to prevent potentially conflicting operations A and B, invoked by different threads, from running at the same time. In a sense the locks cause either A to run before B or vice-versa. Similarly, we can replace the locks with hardware transactional memory, or use transactional lock elision to leverage potential disjoint access parallelism between A and B. But often we want A to wait until B has run. In a Pthreads environment we'd usually use locks in conjunction with condition variables to implement our "wait until" constraint. MONITOR-MWAIT is another way to wait for a memory location to change, but it only allows us to track one cache line and it's only available on x86. There's no similar "wait until" construct for hardware transactions. At the instruction-set level a simple way to express "wait until" in transactions would be to add a new TXPAUSE instruction that could be used within an active hardware transaction. TXPAUSE would politely stall the invoking thread, possibly surrendering or yielding compute resources, while at the same time continuing to track the transaction's address-set. Once a transaction has executed TXPAUSE it can only abort. Ideally that'd happen when some other thread modifies a variable that's in the transaction's read-set or write-set. And since we're aborting all writes would be discarded. In a sense this gives us multi-location MWAIT but with much more flexibility. We could also augment the TXPAUSE with a cycle-count bound to cap the time spent stalled. I should note that we can already enter a tight spin loop in a transaction to wait for updates to address-set to cause an abort. Assuming that the implementation monitors the address-set via cache-coherence probes, by waiting in this fashion we actually communicate via the probes, and not via memory values. That is the updating thread signals the waiter via probes instead of by traditional memory values. But TXPAUSE gives us a polite way to spin.

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• Question on methods in Object Oriented Programming

  - by mal

  I’m learning Java at the minute (first language), and as a project I’m looking at developing a simple puzzle game. My question relates to the methods within a class. I have my Block type class; it has its many attributes, set methods, get methods and just plain methods. There are quite a few. Then I have my main board class. At the moment it does most of the logic, positioning of sprites collision detection and then draws the sprites etc... As I am learning to program as much as I’m learning to program games I’m curious to know how much code is typically acceptable within a given method. Is there such thing as having too many methods? All my draw functionality happens in one method, should I break this into a few ‘sub’ methods? My thinking is if I find at a later stage that the for loop I’m using to cycle through the array of sprites searching for collisions in the spriteCollision() method is inefficient I code a new method and just replace the old method calls with the new one, leaving the old code intact. Is it bad practice to have a method that contains one if statement, and place the call for that method in the for loop? I’m very much in the early stages of coding/designing and I need all the help I can get! I find it a little intimidating when people are talking about throwing together a prototype in a day too! Can’t wait until I’m that good!

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• Developing my momentum on open source projects

  - by sashang

  Hi I've been struggling to develop momentum contributing to open source projects. I have in the past tried with gcc and contributed a fix to libstdc++ but it was a once off and even though I spent months in my spare time on the dev mailing list and reading through things I just never seemed to develop any momentum with the code. Eventually I unsubscribed and got my free time back and uncluttered my mailbox. Like a lot of people I have some little open source defunct projects lying around on the net, but they're not large and I'm the only contributor. At the moment I'm more interested in contributing to a large open source project and want to know how people got started because I find it difficult while working full time to develop any momentum with the code base. Other more regular contributors, who are on the project full-time, are able to make changes at will and as result enter that positive feedback cycle where they understand the code and also know where it's heading. It makes the barrier to entry higher for those that come along later. My questions are to people who actively contribute to large opensource projects, like the Linux kernel, or gcc or clang/llvm or anything else with say a developer head count of more than 10. How did you get started? Was there a large chunk of time in your life that you just could dedicate to working on the project? I know in Linus's case he had a chunk of time (6 months) to get it started. What barriers to entry did you encounter? Can you describe the initial stages of the time spent with the project, from when you had little understanding of the code to when you understood enough to commit regularly. Thanks

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• AI agents with FSM: a question regarding this

  - by Prog

  Finite State Machines implemented with the State design pattern are a common way to design AI agents. I am familiar with the State design pattern and know how to implement it. However I have a question regarding how this is used in games to design AI agents. Please consider a class Monster that represents an AI agent. Simplified it looks like this: class Monster{ State state; // other fields omitted public void update(){ // called every game-loop cycle state.execute(this); } public void setState(State state){ this.state = state; } // irrelevant stuff omitted } There are several State subclasses that implement execute() differently. So far classic State pattern. Here's my question: AI agents are subject to environmental effects and other objects communicating with them. For example an AI agent might tell another AI agent to attack (i.e. agent.attack()). Or a fireball might tell an AI agent to fall down. This means that the agent must have methods such as attack() and fallDown(), or commonly some message receiving mechanism to understand such messages. My question is divided to two parts: 1- Please say if this is correct: With an FSM, the current State of the agent should be the one taking care of such method calls - i.e. the agent delegates to the current state upon every event. Correct? Or wrong? 2- If correct, than how is this done? Are all states obligated by their superclass) to implement methods such as attack(), fallDown() etc., so the agent can always delegate to them on almost every event? Or is it done in some other way?

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• Join Us!! Live Webinar: Using UPK for Testing

  - by Di Seghposs

  Create Manual Test Scripts 50% Faster with Oracle User Productivity Kit  Thursday, March 29, 2012 11:00 am – 12:00 pm ET Click here to register now for this informative webinar. Oracle UPK enhances the testing phase of the implementation lifecycle by reducing test plan creation time, improving accuracy, and providing the foundation for reusable training documentation, application simulations, and end-user performance support—all critical assets to support an enterprise application implementation. With Oracle UPK: Reduce manual test plan development time - Accelerate the testing cycle by significantly reducing the time required to create the test plan. Improve test plan accuracy - Capture test steps automatically using Oracle UPK and import those steps directly to any of these testing suites eliminating many of the errors that occur when writing manual tests. Create the foundation for reusable assets - Recorded simulations can be used for other lifecycle phases of the project, such as knowledge transfer for training and support. With its integration to Oracle Application Testing Suite, IBM Rational, and HP Quality Center, Oracle UPK allows you to deploy high-quality applications quickly and effectively by providing a consistent, repeatable process for gathering requirements, planning and scheduling tests, analyzing results, and managing  issues. Join this live webinar and learn how to decrease your time to deployment and enhance your testing plans today! 

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• Ubuntu 14.04 install fails with Via S3 UniChrome Pro graphics

  - by WizardNo.7

  I am trying to install Ubuntu 14.04 on a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pro laptop(it's quite old yes, has about 30GB Hard Drive and I think 192mb of RAM) which currently has Windows XP installed (which I'd like to keep for the time being). I have downloaded the 32-bit Desktop ISO and used unetbootin to create a Live USB for this laptop. When I boot from USB, I arrive at the unetbootin Grey and Blue menu and pick either "Try Ubuntu without installing", or "Install Ubuntu". The menu goes away and an Ubuntu loadscreen showing UBUNTU and four dots which progressively change between white and orange. At about the second color changing cycle a white underscore symbol appears next to the fourth dot and flickers. There is some leftover text from the kernel boot still visible, but there is no graphical desktop. After this I have to hard reboot or shut-down. $ lshw -c video *-display UNCLAIMED description: VGA compatible controller product: CN700/P4M800 Pro/P4M800 CE/VN800 Graphics [S3 UniChrome Pro] Vendor: VIA Technologies, Inc. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: 01 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: pm agp agp-2.0 vga_controller bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=64 mingnt=2 resources: memory:f0000000-f3ffffff memory:d1000000-d1ffffff

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• Oracle Buys BigMachines - Adds Leading Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) Cloud to the Oracle Cloud to Enable Smarter Selling

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  News Facts Oracle today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire BigMachines, a leading cloud-based Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) solution provider. BigMachines’ CPQ Cloud accelerates the conversion of sales opportunities into revenue by automating the sales order process with guided selling, dynamic pricing, and an easy-to-use workflow approval process, accessible anywhere, on any device. Companies that use sales automation technology often rely on manual, cumbersome and disconnected processes to convert opportunities into orders. This creates errors, adds costs, delays revenue, and degrades the customer experience. BigMachines’ CPQ cloud extends sales automation to include the creation of an optimal quote, which enables sales personnel to easily configure and price complex products, select the best options, promotions and deal terms, and include up sell and renewals, all using automated workflows. In combination with Oracle’s enterprise-grade cloud solutions, including Marketing, Sales, Social, Commerce and Service Clouds, Oracle and BigMachines will create an end-to-end smarter selling cloud solution so sales personnel are more productive, customers are more satisfied, and companies grow revenue faster. More information on this announcement can be found at http://www.oracle.com/bigmachines Supporting Quotes “The fundamental goals of smarter selling are to provide sales teams with the information, access, and insights they need to maximize revenue opportunities and execute on all phases of the sales cycle,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development. “By adding BigMachines’ CPQ Cloud to the Oracle Cloud, companies will be able to drive more revenue and increase customer satisfaction with a seamlessly integrated process across marketing and sales, pricing and quoting, and fulfillment and service.” “BigMachines has developed leading CPQ solutions that serve companies of all sizes across multiple industries,” said David Bonnette, BigMachines’ CEO. “Together with Oracle, we expect to provide a complete cloud solution to manage sales processes and deliver exceptional customer experiences.” Supporting Resources About Oracle and BigMachines General Presentation Customer and Partner Letter FAQ

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