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• Ubuntu 10.10 not recognizing external hard drive

  - by sr71

  Installed Ubuntu 10.10 on a hard drive by itself (no windows). All updates are up to date. Everything`works fine except when I plug in a 320 gig Toshiba external hard drive....it is not recognized. When I plug in an 8 gig flash drive it is recognized no problem. What do I mean by "not recognized"? I mean: how do you know it was not recognized. You can check the command "cat /proc/partitions" in a terminal with and without the hdd attached. If you see some difference, it's ok. If the difference is something like "sda1" (sd+letter+number) then you have partition on it, maybe it can't be handled in Ubuntu (no filesystem on it or so). If there is only "sda" in the difference for example (sd+letter, but no number after it) then the drive itself is detected, just no partition is created on it. Also you can check out the messages of the kernel, with the "dmesg" command in the terminal. If there is no disk/partition/anything in /proc/partitions, there can be an USB level problem, you can issue command "lsusb" as it was suggested before my answer. It's really matter of what do you mean about "not recognized". @Marco Ceppi @Oli @Pitto By "not recognized" I meant that when I plug in a 8 gig flash drive an icon immediately appears on the desktop imdicating that there is a flash drive plugged in and I can click on it and view the files on the flash drive. It also shows up on the "Nautilus" default file manager. When I plug in the 320 gig Toshiba external hard drive, I get no indication on the desktop or the file manager (thus "not recogized"). When I run the command "cat/proc/partitions/" I get an error message Could not open location 'file:///home/bob/cat/proc/partitions' with or without the external hard drive installed. With the "dmeg" command I get about 10 pages of info with no mention of disk/partition/anything in /proc/partitions. When I run "lsub" command I get the following: bob@bob-desktop:~$ lsusb Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 003: ID 04b3:3003 IBM Corp. Rapid Access III Keyboard Bus 003 Device 002: ID 04b3:3004 IBM Corp. Media Access Pro Keyboard Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub bob@bob-desktop:~$

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• Why does my code dividing a 2D array into chunks fail?

  - by Borog

  I have a 2D-Array representing my world. I want to divide this huge thing into smaller chunks to make collision detection easier. I have a Chunk class that consists only of another 2D Array with a specific width and height and I want to iterate through the world, create new Chunks and add them to a list (or maybe a Map with Coordinates as the key; we'll see about that). world = new World(8192, 1024); Integer[][] chunkArray; for(int a = 0; a < map.getHeight() / Chunk.chunkHeight; a++) { for(int b = 0; b < map.getWidth() / Chunk.chunkWidth; b++) { Chunk chunk = new Chunk(); chunkArray = new Integer[Chunk.chunkWidth][Chunk.chunkHeight]; for(int x = Chunk.chunkHeight*a; x < Chunk.chunkHeight*(a+1); x++) { for(int y = Chunk.chunkWidth*b; y < Chunk.chunkWidth*(b+1); y++) { // Yes, the tileMap actually is [height][width] I'll have // to fix that somewhere down the line -.- chunkArray[y][x] = map.getTileMap()[x*a][y*b]; // TODO:Attach to chunk } } chunkList.add(chunk); } } System.out.println(chunkList.size()); The two outer loops get a new chunk in a specific row and column. I do that by dividing the overall size of the map by the chunkSize. The inner loops then fill a new chunkArray and attach it to the chunk. But somehow my maths is broken here. Let's assume the chunkHeight = chunkWidth = 64. For the first Array I want to start at [0][0] and go until [63][63]. For the next I want to start at [64][64] and go until [127][127] and so on. But I get an out of bounds exception and can't figure out why. Any help appreciated! Actually I think I know where the problem lies: chunkArray[y][x] can't work, because y goes from 0-63 just in the first iteration. Afterwards it goes from 64-127, so sure it is out of bounds. Still no nice solution though :/ EDIT: if(y < Chunk.chunkWidth && x < Chunk.chunkHeight) chunkArray[y][x] = map.getTileMap()[y][x]; This works for the first iteration... now I need to get the commonly accepted formula.

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• Any ideas on reducing lag in terrain generation?

  - by l5p4ngl312

  Ok so here's the deal. I've written an isometric engine that generates terrain based on camera values using 2D perlin noise. I planned on doing 3D but first I need to work out the lag issues I'm having. I will try to explain how I am doing this so that maybe someone can spot where I am going wrong. I know it should not be this laggy. There is the abstract class Block which right now just contains render(). BlockGrass, etc. extend this class and each has code in the render function to create a textured quad at the given position. Then there is the class Chunk which has the function Generate() and setBlocksInArea(). Generate uses 2D perlin noise to make a height map and stores the heights in a 2D array. It stores the positions of each block it generates in blockarray[x][y][z]. The chunks are 8x8x128. In the main game class there is a 3D array called blocksInArea. The blocks in this array are what gets rendered. When a chunk generates, it adds its blocks to this array at the correct index. It is like this so chunks can be saved to the hard drive (even though they aren't yet) but there can still be optimization with the rendering that you wouldn't have if you rendered each chunk separately. Here's where the laggy part comes in: When the camera moves to a new chunk, a row of chunks generates on the end of the axis that the camera moved on. But it still has to move the other chunks up/down in the blocksInArea (render) array. It does this by calculating the new position in the array and doing the Chunk.setBlocksInArea(): for(int x = 0; x < 8; x++){ for(int y = 0; y < 8; y++){ nx = x+(coordX - camCoordX)*8 ny = y+(coordY - camCoordY)*8 for(int z = 0; z < height[x][y]; z++){ blockarray[x][y][z] = Game.blocksInArea[nx][ny][z]; } } } My reasoning was that this would be much faster than doing the perlin noise all over again, but there are still little spikes of lag when you move in between chunks. Edit: Would it be possible to create a 3 dimensional array list so that shifting of chunks within the array would not be neccessary?

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• Oracle OpenWorld / JavaOne Where I'll Be

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  It's that time of the year again when San Francisco get flooded with Oracle and Java geeks for the annual OpenWorld and JavaOne conferences. Here are some of the places where you'll be able to find me: Sunday has a bunch of great ADF content in the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group track - I'm not sure if I'll make it there but I'm sure those who will will get some serious knowledge transfer. I'm starting Monday at the Keynote for Developers (10:45 in Salon 8 at the Marriott) - that's a great place for ADF developers to start the official week with an overview of what's new and upcoming in the world of development with ADF. While I'm not presenting this session - Chris Tonas who leads the development tools org will -  a demo that I built will be shown. So I'll be sitting in the audience crossing my fingers praying for the demo gods (and the wifi connection to work). My presentation part of the week starts on Monday at 12:15 at Moscone South room 306 where I'll be presenting "CON3004 - Understanding Oracle ADF and Its Role in Oracle Fusion"  . A basic introduction to ADF, it's architecture, development experience and how it integrates and works with the rest of the Fusion Middleware components.  After the session between 2-4 I'll be at the JDeveloper demo booth in Moscone South to answer any questions people might have. Then at 6:15 together with Grant we'll host BOF4492 - How to Get Started with Oracle ADF where we'll try and explain some of the learning paths and resources that are available for people who want to start learning ADF. This is a birds-of-a-feather so we'll also love to hear ideas from the audience about what paths they took and what things work or need improvment. Tuesday is relatively a quite day for me with a shift at the Oracle ADF Essentials pod at JavaOne from 1:30-3:30. There are several very good ADF architecture and best practices sessions on that day - so I'll try and hit those. Wednesday starts with another shift at the JDeveloper booth at JavaOne. Then at 4:30, instead of doing what all the ADF developers should do and heading over to the ADF meetup at the OTN Lounge, I'll be heading over to JavaOne for my CON3770 - Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF: What’s New session. It's been a couple of years since the last time JDeveloper or ADF got any airtime at JavaOne - so it will be a great opportunity to show those in the Java community with open minds our approach to Java development. Now that ADF Essentials offers a free way to develop with ADF on GlassFish, I hope we'll be getting more people from the core Java camp interested in what we have to offer. Thursday is another relaxed day for me - who knows maybe I'll even be able to catch a session or two on that day. If you want to learn more about the ADF related sessions at OOW check out our full list here.

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• How to apply effects that occur (or change) over time to characters in a game?

  - by Joshua Harris

  So assume that I have a system that applies Effects to Characters like so: public class Character { private Collection<Effect> _effects; public void AddEffect (Effect e) { e.ApplyTo(this); _effects.Add(e); } public void RemoveEffect (Effect e) { e.RemoveFrom(this); _effects.Remove(e); } } public interface Effect { public void ApplyTo (Character character); public void RemoveFrom (Character character); } Example Effect: Armor Buff for 5 seconds. void someFunction() { // Do Stuff ... Timer armorTimer = new Timer(5 seconds); ArmorBuff armorbuff = new ArmorBuff(); character.AddEffect(armorBuff); armorTimer.Start(); // Do more stuff ... } // Some where else in code public void ArmorTimer_Complete() { character.RemoveEffect(armorBuff); } public class ArmorBuff implements Effect { public void applyTo(Character character) { character.changeArmor(20); } public void removeFrom(Character character) { character.changeArmor(-20); } } Ok, so this example would buff the Characters armor for 5 seconds. Easy to get working. But what about effects that change over the duration of the effect being applied. Two examples come to mind: Damage Over Time: 200 damage every second for 3 seconds. I could mimic this by applying an Effect that lasts for 1 second and has a counter set to 3, then when it is removed it could deal 200 damage, clone itself, decrement the counter of the clone, and apply the clone to the character. If it repeats this until the counter is 0, then you got a damage over time ability. I'm not a huge fan of this approach, but it does describe the behavior exactly. Degenerating Speed Boost: Gain a speed boost that degrades over 3 seconds until you return to your normal speed. This is a bit harder. I can basically do the same thing as above except having timers set to some portion of a second, such that they occur fast enough to give the appearance of degenerating smoothly over time (even though they are really just stepping down incrementally). I feel like you could get away with only 12 steps over a second (maybe less, I would have to test it and see), but this doesn't seem very elegant to me. The only other way to implement this effect would be to change the system so that the Character checks the _effects collection for effects that alter any of the properties any time that they are being used. I could handle this in functions like getCurrentSpeed() and getCurrentArmor(), but you can imagine how much of a hassle it would be to have that kind of overhead every time you want to do a calculation with movement speed (which would be every time you move your character). Is there a better way to deal with these kinds of effects or events?

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• Ask the Readers: Which Browser is a Must-Have for You on Linux?

  - by Asian Angel

  Linux systems all come with their own particular set of default browsers, but those browsers may not be the ones you want or need. This week we would like to know which browser (or browsers) are considered “must-have” on your Linux systems. As a general rule many Linux distributions have Firefox and/or Konqueror as one of the default installation browsers. During this past year the open source browser Chromium has also been gaining a lot of traction as a default install for systems. For most people these browsers are the ones that they like best or feel work well enough to not make any changes. But there are other people who want more than what is available with a default system install. They may favor a particular browser for its’ extensibility or speed…others prefer a particular browser for its’ features or minimalist UI. Whatever your preferences may be, there is a browser out there to fit your style. Some people may even prefer to run only bleeding edge nightly releases or add them in with their current browsers. The important part is that you have choices when it comes to your Linux system. What we would like to know this week is which browser or browsers you make sure are always installed on your Linux systems. Does the Linux system you use already have your favorite browser installed as part of the default set? Maybe you are content with using the default set of browsers that come with the system. Or perhaps you prefer to rework the entire browser setup on your system by removing the defaults and adding your favorites. Let us know which browsers you consider “must have” and why in the comments! Note: You can make up to two selections on today’s poll since most people will likely have more than one browser that they make certain is always installed. How-To Geek Polls require Javascript. Please Click Here to View the Poll. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC BotSync Enables Secure FTP File Synchronization on Android Devices Enjoy Beautiful City Views with the Cityscape Theme for Windows 7 Luigi Installs Any OS on Google’s Cr-48 Notebook DIY iPad Stylus Offers Pen-Based Interaction on the Cheap Serene Blue Ubuntu Wallpaper for Your Desktop Enjoy Old School Style Video Game Fun with Chicken Invaders

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• How should I structure my turn based engine to allow flexibility for players/AI and observation?

  - by Reefpirate

  I've just started making a Turn Based Strategy engine in GameMaker's GML language... And I was cruising along nicely until it came time to handle the turn cycle, and determining who is controlling what player, and also how to handle the camera and what is displayed on screen. Here's an outline of the main switch happening in my main game loop at the moment: switch (GameState) { case BEGIN_TURN: // Start of turn operations/routines break; case MID_TURN: switch (PControlledBy[Turn]) { case HUMAN: switch (MidTurnState) { case MT_SELECT: // No units selected, 'idle' UI state break; case MT_MOVE: // Unit selected and attempting to move break; case MT_ATTACK: break; } break; case COMPUTER: // AI ROUTINES GO HERE break; case OBSERVER: // OBSERVER ROUTINES GO HERE break; } break; case END_TURN: // End of turn routines/operations, and move Turn to next player break; } Now, I can see a couple of problems with this set-up already... But I don't have any idea how to go about making it 'right'. Turn is a global variable that stores which player's turn it is, and the BEGIN_TURN and END_TURN states make perfect sense to me... But the MID_TURN state is baffling me because of the things I want to happen here: If there are players controlled by humans, I want the AI to do it's thing on its turn here, but I want to be able to have the camera follow the AI as it makes moves in the human player's vision. If there are no human controlled player's, I'd like to be able to watch two or more AI's battle it out on the map with god-like 'observer' vision. So basically I'm wondering if there are any resources for how to structure a Turn Based Strategy engine? I've found lots of writing about pathfinding and AI, and those are all great... But when it comes to handling the turn structure and the game states I am having trouble finding any resources at all. How should the states be divided to allow flexibility between the players and the controllers (HUMAN, COMPUTER, OBSERVER)? Also, maybe if I'm on the right track I just need some reassurance before I lay down another few hundred lines of code...

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• From Co-op to fulltime help with salary negotation [closed]

  - by Peter

  Hey I'm a coop student that worked at a particular medium size printing company for 8 months. I had a good time it was lax, sometimes insufficiently challenging but none the less I learned a whole lot. I stuck with them for another 5 months (including this month) at the same rate I was paid then, doing testing work, tool development, taking care of emergencies when the lead developers were away, and other smaller projects and now bigger projects and problem handling (bad printer output etc.). I know their website inside out (ecommerce), and I know their printing software inside out and have made many changes to them both without a hitch. I have also done a lot of refactoring of the existing code base which as far as Im concerned, I believe am the only one to do those sorts of restructuring even though there is constant talk about it. I guess the unit testing paid off and lets me see the value in modularity if even a tad more. Never the less I have faith in my skill and the restructuring I did turned out better than I had imagined . Now the problem is that I finish school next month and so I asked for a full time spot the month after. They have been expanding and have hired a new guy a few months after my coop spot, and just now they hired a new guy to deal with the CRM application. The lead developer who wrote all of the software had left 5 months ago so it was up to all of us to learn what he had done over 4 years (including db, networking). So now I'm afraid that if I assert myself for a salary similar to the other guys, which I believe I am certainly on par with, that I would be seen as ingrateful. It's hard to flip a switch and say, hey double my pay, although when I'm working with their bread and butter (printers) and writing new features, refactoring the whole application for extensibility. I love it regardless of pay. I also feel maybe I'm replaceeble, although nobody knows the website better than myself and the lead web dev (not by a long shot), and nobody knows the printer software/drivers better than myself. I just thought they would have brought up a raise earlier on, and now it feels like they don't value my work. I'm also tired of worrying about it. I think my question is, well what do I do next?

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• Unable to find good parameters for behavior of a puck in Farseer

  - by Krumelur

  EDIT: I have tried all kinds of variations now. The last one was to adjust the linear velocity in each step: newVel = oldVel * 0.9f - all of this including your proposals kind of work, however in the end if the velocity is little enough, the puck sticks to the wall and slides either vertically or horizontally. I can't get rid of this behavior. I want it to bounce, no matter how slow it is. Retitution is 1 for all objects, Friction is 0 for all. There is no gravity. What am I possibly doing wrong? In my battle to learn and understand Farseer I'm trying to setup a simple Air Hockey like table with a puck on it. The table's border body is made up from: Vertices aBorders = new Vertices( 4 ); aBorders.Add( new Vector2( -fHalfWidth, fHalfHeight ) ); aBorders.Add( new Vector2( fHalfWidth, fHalfHeight ) ); aBorders.Add( new Vector2( fHalfWidth, -fHalfHeight ) ); aBorders.Add( new Vector2( -fHalfWidth, -fHalfHeight ) ); FixtureFactory.AttachLoopShape( aBorders, this ); this.CollisionCategories = Category.All; this.CollidesWith = Category.All; this.Position = Vector2.Zero; this.Restitution = 1f; this.Friction = 0f; The puck body is defined with: FixtureFactory.AttachCircle( DIAMETER_PHYSIC_UNITS / 2f, 0.5f, this ); this.Restitution = 0.1f; this.Friction = 0.5f; this.BodyType = FarseerPhysics.Dynamics.BodyType.Dynamic; this.LinearDamping = 0.5f; this.Mass = 0.2f; I'm applying a linear force to the puck: this.oPuck.ApplyLinearImpulse( new Vector2( 1f, 1f ) ); The problem is that the puck and the walls appear to be sticky. This means that the puck's velocity drops to zero to quickly below a certain velocity. The puck gets reflected by the walls a couple of times and then just sticks to the left wall and continues sliding downwards the left wall. This looks very unrealistic. What I'm really looking for is that a puck-wall-collision does slow down the puck only a tiny little bit. After tweaking all values left and right I was wondering if I'm doing something wrong. Maybe some expert can comment on the parameters?

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• Career advice: stay with PHP or start a new career in something else ( .Net?)

  - by Christian P

  I'm planning on moving to NY in 6-12 months tops, so I'm forced to find a new job. When I'm planing to start my life in another city it's also probably a good time to think about career changes. I've found a lot of different opinions about PHP vs .Net vs Java and this is not topic here. I don't want to start a new fight about which language is better. Knowing programming language is not the most important thing for being a software developer. To be a really good developer you need to know OOP, design patterns, testing... and language is just a tool to make things happen. So back to my question. I have mixed experience in IT - 1 year as an IT support guy (Windows administration and support), around 2 years of experience in embedded programming (VB.Net 2005) and for the last 2 years I'm working with PHP/MySQL. I have worked with Magento web shop, assisted in some projects in Symfony, modified few Drupal sites. My main concerns are following: Do I continue to improve my skills in PHP e.g. to start learning some major PHP framework like Zend, Symfony maybe get some PHP certification. Or do I start learning .NET or Java. I'm more familiar to .NET so I'll probably choose it if choice falls between .NET and Java ( or you could convince me to choose Java :). Career-wise, I don't know what is the best choice. Learning new framework and language is more time consuming then improving my existing skills in PHP. But with .NET you have a lot of possibilities (Windows 7 Phone development, Silverlight, WPF) and possibly bigger chances to find better jobs. PHP jobs are less payed then .NET, at least, according to my researches (correct me if I'm wrong). But if I start now with .NET I'm just a beginner and my salary will be low. I need at least 2+ years of experience in some language to even try to find some job that is paying higher than $50-60k in NY. My main goal in next 2-3 years is to try to find a job in a $60-80k category. Don't get me wrong, I'm not just chasing money, but money is an important factor when you're trying to start a family. I'm 27 years old and I feel that there isn't a lot of room for wrong decisions regarding my career, so any advice will be very welcome. Update Thank you all for spending time to help me with my problem. All of the answers and comments have been very helpful. I have decided to stick with PHP but also to learn C# and Silverlight 4. We'll see where the life will take me.

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• prism and multiple screens

  - by Avi

  OK - I am studying Prism a little because of a "free weekend" offer on Pluralsight. As this is proving too complex for me, I went to the Prism book and looked at the forward, and this is what it said: What comes after “Hello, World?” WPF and Silverlight developers are blessed with an abundance of excellent books... There’s no lack of tutorials on Model-View-ViewModel ... But they stop short of the guidance you need to deliver a non-trivial application in full. Your first screen goes well. You add a second screen and a third. Because you started your solution with the built-in “Navigation Application Template,” adding new screens feels like hanging shirts on a closet rod. You are on a roll. Until the harsh reality of real application requirements sets in. As it happens, your application has 30 screens not three. There’s no room on that closet rod for 30 screens. Some screens are modal pop-ups; you don’t navigate to a pop-up. Screens become interdependent such that user activity in one screen triggers changes that propagate throughout the UI. Some screens are optional; others are visible only to authorized users. Some screens are permanent, while other screens can be opened and closed at will. You discover that navigating back to a previously displayed screen creates a new instance. That’s not what you expected and, to your horror, the prior instance is gone along with the user’s unsaved changes. Now the issue is, I don't relate to this description. I've never been a UI programmer, but same as everyone else I'm using Windows apps such as MS-Office, and web sites such as Amazon, Facebook and StackExchange. And I look at these and I don't see many "so many screens" issues! Indeed, the only applications having many windows I can think of is Visual Studio. Maybe also Visio, a little. But take Word - You have a ribbon and a main window. Or take Facebook: You have those lists on the left (Favorites, Lists, Groups etc.), the status middle, the adds and then the Contacts sidebar. But it's only one page. Of course, I understand that in enterprise scenarios there are dashboad applications where multiple segments of the screen are updated from multiple non-related services. This I dig. But other scenarios? So - What am I missing? What is the "multiple screens" monster Pirsm is supposed to be the silver bullet solution for? Shoud I invest in studying Prism in addition to learning WPF or ASP.NET MVC?

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• MOSSLover Lives On&hellip;

  - by MOSSLover

  A while back, maybe 6 months, I got some bad news about 2010.  Microsoft was removing Office from the MOSS equivalent of 2010, so basically my alias would be obsolete the second 2010 caught on in the community.  I thought about it for some time.  I had some discussions with friends in the community.  I even noticed that the MOSSMan changed his twitter id.  I started my blog around a WSS 3.0 project when I worked for LRS in there St. Louis Office in February/March 2007.  So I think it’s fitting to keep the name, because my community involvement centers around 2007.  My first ever speaking ordeal was at the Kansas City Office Geeks meeting in November of 2007 on Disaster Recovery where about three people attended.  The first user group meeting I ever attended was around the month of June 2007 at the KC .Net User Group about two weeks after my braces were installed.  It’s definitely fitting to say that 2007 paved the way for everything that happened in the past 2/2 1/2 years.  If anyone asks what MOSSLover means I added a description on twitter and I also added my name.  I added my name for other reasons, because I’m sick of people thinking I am the guy in the photo.  Also, I’d like people to recognize me for who I am.  Everyone should expect less of the hat in the upcoming year and more of my hair.  I’ve taken a vow to wear the hat less and less this year.  I am sick of buying hats, plus I want to move forward to gain more self confidence.  The hat does not really help.  I will still wear a t-shirt and jeans in most of my presentations.  That is who I am and it will not change any time soon.  If you expect to see me in a skirt good luck with that as it won’t be happening unless I am forced at gun point.  I hope you guys have a good weekend.  Later all… Technorati Tags: MOSSLover,Cardinal's Hat,Becky Isserman

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• How do I know if I am using Scrum methodologies?

  - by Jake

  When I first started at my current job, my purpose was to rewrite a massive excel-VBA workbook-application to C# Winforms because it was thought that the new C# app will fix all existing problems and have all the new features for a perfect world. If it were a direct port, in theory it would be easy as i just need to go through all the formulas, conditional formatting, validations, VBA etc. to understand it. However, that was not the case. Many of the new features are tightly dependant on business logic which I am unfamiliar with. As a solo programmer, the first year was spent solely on deciphering the excel workbook and writing the C# app. In theory, I had the business people to "help" me specify requirements, how GUI looks and work, and testing of the app etc; but in practice it is like a contant tsunami of feature creep. At the beginning of the second year I managed to convince the management that this is not going anywhere. I made them start from scratch with the excel-VBA. I have this "issue log" saved on the network, each time they found something they didn't like about the excel-VBA app, they will write it in there. I check the log daily and consolidate issues (in my mind) mainly into 2 groups: (1) requires massive change. (2) can be fixed in current version. For massive change issues, I make a copy of the latest excel-VBA and give it a new version number, then work on it whenever I can. For current version fixes, I make the changes in a few days to a week, and then immediately release it. I also ensure I update the same change in any in-progress massive change future versions. This has gone on for about 4 months and I feel it works great. I made many releases and solved many real issues, also understood the business logic more and more. However, my boss (non-IT trained) thinks what I am doing are just adhoc changes and that i am not looking at the "bigger picture". I am struggling to convince my boss that this works. So I hope to formalise my approach and maybe borrow a buzzword to confuse him. Incidentally, I read about Agile and SCRUM, about backlog and sprints. But it's all very vague to me still. QUESTION (finally): I want to tell him that this is SCRUM! But I want to hold my breath first and ask whether my current approach is considered SCRUM or SCRUM-like? How can I make it more SCRUM-like? Note that I have only myself, there's no project leader or teams.

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• How can I be prepared to join a company?

  - by Aerovistae

  There's more to it than that, but this title was the best way I could think of to sum it up. I'm a senior in a good computer science program, and I'm graduating early. About to start interviews and all whatnot. I'm not a super-experienced programmer, not one of those people who started in middle school. I'm decent at this, but I'm not among the best, not nearly. I have to do an awful lot of googling. So today I'm meeting some fellow for lunch at a campus cafe to discuss some front-end details when this tall, good-looking guy begs pardon, says he's new to campus, says he's wondering if we know where he can go to sign up for recruiting developers. Quickly evolves into long conversation: he's the CEO of a seems-to-be-doing-well start-up. Hiring passionate interns and full-times. Sounds great! I take one look at his site on my own computer later, immediately spot a major bug. No idea how to fix it, but I see it. I go over to the page code, and good god. It's the standard amount of code you would expect from a full-scale web application, a couple dozen pages of HTML and scripts. I don't even know where to start reading it. I've built sites from scratch, but obviously never on that scale, nor have I ever worked on one of that scale. I have no idea which bit might generate the bug. But that sets me thinking: How could someone like me possibly settle into an environment like that? A start-up is a very high-pressure working environment. I don't know if I can work at that pace under those constraints-- I would hate to let people down. And with only 10 employees, it's not like anyone has much time to help you get your bearings. Somewhere in there is a question. Can you see it? I'm asking for general advice here. Maybe even anecdotal advice. Is joining a start-up right out of college a scary process? Am I overestimating what it would take to figure out the mass of code behind this site? What's the likelihood a decent but only moderately-experienced coder could earn his pay at such a place? For instance, I know nothing of server-side/back-end programming. Never touched it. That scares me.

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• Is OOP hard because it is not natural?

  - by zvrba

  One can often hear that OOP naturally corresponds to the way people think about the world. But I would strongly disagree with this statement: We (or at least I) conceptualize the world in terms of relationships between things we encounter, but the focus of OOP is designing individual classes and their hierarchies. Note that, in everyday life, relationships and actions exist mostly between objects that would have been instances of unrelated classes in OOP. Examples of such relationships are: "my screen is on top of the table"; "I (a human being) am sitting on a chair"; "a car is on the road"; "I am typing on the keyboard"; "the coffee machine boils water", "the text is shown in the terminal window." We think in terms of bivalent (sometimes trivalent, as, for example in, "I gave you flowers") verbs where the verb is the action (relation) that operates on two objects to produce some result/action. The focus is on action, and the two (or three) [grammatical] objects have equal importance. Contrast that with OOP where you first have to find one object (noun) and tell it to perform some action on another object. The way of thinking is shifted from actions/verbs operating on nouns to nouns operating on nouns -- it is as if everything is being said in passive or reflexive voice, e.g., "the text is being shown by the terminal window". Or maybe "the text draws itself on the terminal window". Not only is the focus shifted to nouns, but one of the nouns (let's call it grammatical subject) is given higher "importance" than the other (grammatical object). Thus one must decide whether one will say terminalWindow.show(someText) or someText.show(terminalWindow). But why burden people with such trivial decisions with no operational consequences when one really means show(terminalWindow, someText)? [Consequences are operationally insignificant -- in both cases the text is shown on the terminal window -- but can be very serious in the design of class hierarchies and a "wrong" choice can lead to convoluted and hard to maintain code.] I would therefore argue that the mainstream way of doing OOP (class-based, single-dispatch) is hard because it IS UNNATURAL and does not correspond to how humans think about the world. Generic methods from CLOS are closer to my way of thinking, but, alas, this is not widespread approach. Given these problems, how/why did it happen that the currently mainstream way of doing OOP became so popular? And what, if anything, can be done to dethrone it?

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• I didn't mean to become a database developer, but now I am. Should I stop or try to get better?

  - by pretlow majette

  20 years ago I couldn't afford even a cheap POS program when I opened my first surf shop in the Virgin Islands. I bought a copy of Paradox (remember that?) in 1990 and spent months in a back room scratching out a POS application. Over many iterations, including a switch to Access (2000)/SQL Server (2003), I built a POS and backoffice solution that runs four stores with multiple cash registers, a warehouse and office. Until recently, all my stores were connected to the same LAN (in a small shopping center) and performance wasn't an issue. Now that we've opened a location in the States that's changed. Connecting to my local server via the internet has slowed that locations application to a crawl. This is partly due to the slow and crappy dsl service we have in the Virgin Islands, and partly due to my less-than-professional code and sql. With other far-away stores in the works, I need a better solution. I like my application. My staff knows it well, and I'm not inclined to take on the expense of a proper commercial solution. So where does that leave me? I should probably host my sql online to sidestep the slow dsl here. I think I can handle cleaning up my SQL querries to speed that up a bit. What about Access? My version seems so old, but I don't like the newer versions with the 'ribbon'. There are so many options... Should I be learning Visual Studio with an eye on moving completely to the web? Will my VBA skills help me at all there? I don't have the luxury of a year at the keyboard to figure it out anymore. What about dotnetnuke, sharepoint, or lightswitch? They all seem like possibilities, but even understanding their capabilities is daunting. I'm pretty deep into it, but maybe I should bail and hire a consultant or programmer. That sounds expensive tho, and there's no guarantee there either... Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Or, if anybody is interested in buying a small chain of surf shops...

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• Defining a service layer: the text-based adventure

  - by Stacy Vicknair

  Applications these days have more options than ever for a user interface, and it’s only going to grow. A successful product might require native applications for mobile devices, a regular web implementation, or even a gaming console. These systems often will be centralized and data driven. The solution is one that’s fairly solitary, a service layer! Simply put, take what’s shared and put it behind a physical or abstract layer that defines the boundary between the specific user interface and the shared content.   I know, I know, none of this is complicated. But some times it can be difficult to discern what belongs on which side of the line. For instance, say we’re creating a service that will provide content for both an ASP.NET MVC application and a WP7 application. Although the content served to each application is the same, there are different paradigms and patterns for displaying that data in the different environments. In ASP.NET MVC, you may create a model specific to a page that combines necessary information. In the WP7 application you might require different sets of data that you will connect via MVVM with the view. The general rule of thumb is that any shared content, business rules, or data should exist separately. Any element that is specific to the current UI implementation should be included in a separate library or with the UI implementation itself. The WP7 application doesn’t need my MVC specific model classes. My MVC application doesn’t require those INotifyPropertyChanged viewmodels that the WP7 application depends on. In both cases, there should be additional processing done above the service layer to massage the data to the application’s specific needs.   Service-ocalypse: the text based adventure What helps me the most about deciding whether or not something belongs coupled to the UI implementation or in the shared implementation is thinking of the simplest implementation you could have: a console application. You might have played a game like Peasant’s Quest: The console app is the text based adventure game version of your application. If you’re service was consumed in its simplest form, you would simply have a console based API for it that issues requests. Maybe those requests aren’t SWIM TO BOAT, but they might be CREATE USER JOHN. If I issue a request, I expect that request to be issued to the service. If the service has any exceptions or issues with my input, that business logic should be encapsulated in that service, not implemented in the UI. The service layer should be your functional application in its entirety, and anything above that layer should only assist with the display of that information.

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• Ubuntu 13.XX unable to mount USB HDD. Tried everything. I/O error boot sector/file system

  - by XaviGG

  I know that there are many posts related but none of them helped me. I will jump to the last test because it is the one that should work, but it does not. An external HDD with single partition slow NTFS formatted in Windows, empty and clean. Checked for errors, it tells that not errors where found. Moving to Ubutnu 13.04... Gparted throws the first error when trying to read the disk: Input/output error It appears as unknown the content of the disk. Unable to create partition table or format it, getting the same error when trying. If I try to mount it in the terminal it tells me the same, specifying that also there is an I/O error reading the boot sector. I have this problem since I upgraded (always with fresh install) to 13.04. I thought it will be solved by the 13.10 but it has the same behavior. I tried with two different HDD (HD and SSHD) that work perfectly in Windows 7. In 13.04 at least I got a trying of mounting where the icon of the drive started showing and disappearing until finally it disappeared. But now it doesn't even try. Possible causes: -The HDD was my old main HDD, so it had WIN,RECOVERY,SYSTEM,UBU,SWAP partitions. Maybe the way or place where the partition table is defined is not the best for an external HDD but I don't know a lot in that topic. I would appreciate a lot if someone can give me a guideline to convert one of these HDD in a working external HDD. No files to recover, nothing to care about. Just format completely the disk and be able to use it for storing backups without having to move the files first to the windows partition, load windows and then copy them to the external HDD. Because I want to use a file comparator for the backups. Thanks a lot Edit 1: I found an option in Windows to convert it to a dynamic HDD that warns me that I wont be able to run O.S. after changing. I suppose that is what I need because in the current mode I cannot safely extract it. But it tells me an error that it couldn't change the mode.

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• fdisk shows overlapping partitions

  - by Campa

  At every boot to start Ubuntu, a partition gets re-mounted more than 1 times, sometimes causing very long boots. Example below: > dmesg ... [ 21.472020] EXT4-fs (sda5): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro ... [ 42.021537] EXT4-fs (sda5): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,commit=0 ... I suspect there is a problem of overlapping partitions here, regarding sda4 and sda5: > sudo fdisk -l Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 63 610469 305203+ de Dell Utility /dev/sda2 612352 32069631 15728640 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda3 * 32069632 238979788 103455078+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda4 238983166 625141759 193079297 5 Extended /dev/sda5 238983168 612630527 186823680 83 Linux /dev/sda6 612632576 625141759 6254592 82 Linux swap / Solaris Further details: > more /etc/fstab ... # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 # / was on /dev/sda6 during installation UUID=b33be99b-5c9e-449e-ad48-be608aeff001 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # swap was on /dev/sda7 during installation UUID=7c9071cc-b77b-40da-9f80-6b8a9a220cb1 none swap sw and > mount /dev/sda5 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw) none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620) tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755) none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880) none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/piero/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=piero) I am Running Ubuntu Oneiric + LXDE on Dell Studio XPS machine 64-bit, dual booting with Windows 7. A months ago, I resized the Ubuntu partition and maybe I messed up something by doing that. Do you have any idea, why this long booting is happening?

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• How to make sprint planning fun

  - by Jacob Spire

  Not only are our sprint planning meetings not fun, they're downright dreadful. The meetings are tedious, and boring, and take forever (a day, but it feels like a lot longer). The developers complain about it, and dread upcoming plannings. Our routine is pretty standard (user story inserted into sprint backlog by priority story is taken apart to tasks tasks are estimated in hours repeat), and I can't figure out what we're doing wrong. How can we make the meetings more enjoyable? ... Some more details, in response to requests for more information: Why are the backlog items not inserted and prioritized before sprint kickoff? User stories are indeed prioritized; we have no idea how long they'll take until we break them down into tasks! From the (excellent) answers here, I see that maybe we shouldn't estimate tasks at all, only the user stories. The reason we estimate tasks (and not stories) is because we've been getting story-estimates terribly wrong -- but I guess that's the subject for an altogether different question. Why are developers complaining? Meetings are long. Meetings are monotonous. Story after story, task after task, struggling (yes, struggling) to estimate how long it will take and what it involves. Estimating tasks makes user-story-estimation seem pointless. The longer the meeting, the less focus in the room. The less focused colleagues are, the longer the meeting takes. A recursive hate-spiral develops. We've considered splitting the meeting into two days in order to keep people focused, but the developers wouldn't hear of it. One day of planning is bad enough; now we'll have two?! Part of our problem is that we go into very small detail (in order to get more accurate estimations). But when we estimate roughly, we go way off the mark! To sum up the question: What are we doing wrong? What additional ways are there to make the meeting generally more enjoyable?

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• Inherit one instance variable from the global scope

  - by Julian

  I'm using Curses to create a command line GUI with Ruby. Everything's going well, but I have hit a slight snag. I don't think Curses knowledge (esoteric to be fair) is required to answer this question, just Ruby concepts such as objects and inheritance. I'm going to explain my problem now, but if I'm banging on, just look at the example below. Basically, every Window instance needs to have .close called on it in order to close it. Some Window instances have other Windows associated with it. When closing a Window instance, I want to be able to close all of the other Window instances associated with it at the same time. Because associated Windows are generated in a logical fashion, (I append the name with a number: instance_variable_set(self + integer, Window.new(10,10,10,10)) ), it's easy to target generated windows, because methods can anticipate what assosiated windows will be called, (I can recreate the instance variable name from scratch, and almost query it: instance_variable_get(self + integer). I have a delete method that handles this. If the delete method is just a normal, global method (called like this: delete_window(@win543) then everything works perfectly. However, if the delete method is an instance method, which it needs to be in-order to use the self keyword, it doesn't work for a very clear reason; it can 'query' the correct instance variable perfectly well (instance_variable_get(self + integer)), however, because it's an instance method, the global instances aren't scoped to it! Now, one way around this would obviously be to simply make a global method like this: delete_window(@win543). But I have attributes associated with my window instances, and it all works very elegantly. This is very simplified, but it literally translates the problem exactly: class Dog def speak woof end end def woof if @dog_generic == nil puts "@dog_generic isn't scoped when .woof is called from a class method!\n" else puts "@dog_generic is scoped when .woof is called from the global scope. See:\n" + @dog_generic end end @dog_generic = "Woof!" lassie = Dog.new lassie.speak #=> @dog_generic isn't scoped when .woof is called from an instance method!\n woof #=> @dog_generic is scoped when .woof is called from the global scope. See:\nWoof! TL/DR: I need lassie.speak to return this string: "@dog_generic is scoped when .woof is called from the global scope. See:\nWoof!" @dog_generic must remain as an insance variable. The use of Globals or Constants is not acceptable. Could woof inherit from the Global scope? Maybe some sort of keyword: def woof < global # This 'code' is just to conceptualise what I want to do, don't take offence! end Is there some way the .woof method could 'pull in' @dog_generic from the global scope? Will @dog_generic have to be passed in as a parameter?

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• Evolution laggy due to IMAP -profile or due to some odd Sync -issue?

  - by Izzy

  I'm fighting with Evolution. Basically it's working fine -- but it is very slow to react in certain situations. Helper questions Could it be that changing away from Bonobo has to do with slowing-down? There might be some trouble with the new engine and "asynchronous actions". What to do about it? Are there e.g. any configuration files? I want to get the previous "working mood" back. How can I speed this thing up? Different scenarios when sending a mail, the composer window hangs there inactive for a couple of seconds, everything grayed out. Though there is a green check mark saying it's sent, I'm not sure a) why it's still blocking everything and b) whether I could simply close it without "breaking"/"losing" anything. In earlier versions, the composer window was closing pretty fast, and one could see the message being stored into the local "outbox" until it was sent, and one could immediately continue with the next task. I prefer that behaviour over the current, where I cannot do anything in the application until the window closes. switching between modules. Coming from mail and switching to the address book takes a couple of seconds. Same for switching to the calendar. I read about different "possible causes" and tried a few things: I only have 3 local address books, so no networking should be involved here. To make sure, I switched to offline mode and then tried to access the address book. No noticeable difference. I use 3 Google Calendars. Switching to offline mode made a minor difference, but so minor that it also could be "imagination" since one might have expected this in this case according to some reports, disabling the tasks should help. Well, it didn't in my case, as I don't use them regularly (just two local items stored here) Maybe I should also mention that I'm using the KDE4 desktop (so no Unity or Gnome, though both is installed on the computer). And I did not have this issue before I updated to 12.04.

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• What does path finding in internet routing do and how is it different from A*?

  - by alan2here

  Note: If you don't understand this question then feel free to ask clarification in the comments instead of voting down, it might be that this question needs some more work at the moment. I've been directed here from the Stack Excange chat room Root Access because my question didn't fit on Super User. In many aspects path finding algorithms like A star are very similar to internet routing. For example: A node in an A* path finding system can search for a path though edges between other nodes. A router that's part of the internet can search for a route though cables between other routers. In the case of A*, open and closed lists are kept by the system as a whole, sepratly from any individual node as well as each node being able to temporarily store a state involving several numbers. Routers on the internet seem to have remarkable properties, as I understand it: They are very performant. New nodes can be added at any time that use a free address from a finite (not tree like) address space. It's real routing, like A*, there's never any doubling back for example. Similar IP addresses don't have to be geographically nearby. The network reacts quickly to changes to the networks shape, for example if a line is down. Routers share information and it takes time for new IP's to be registered everywhere, but presumably every router doesn't have to store a list of all the addresses each of it's directions leads most directly to. I'm looking for a basic, general, high level description of the algorithms workings from the point of view of an individual router. Does anyone have one? I presume public internet routers don't use A* as the overheads would be to large, and scale to poorly. I also presume there is a single method worldwide because it seems as if must involve a lot of transferring data to update and communicate a reasonable amount of state between neighboring routers. For example, perhaps the amount of data that needs to be stored in each router scales logarithmically with the number of routers that exist worldwide, the detail and reliability of the routing is reduced over increasing distances, there is increasing backtracking involved in parts of the network that are less geographically uniform or maybe each router really does perform an A* style search, temporarily maintaining open and closed lists when a packet arrives.

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• Nashorn in the Twitterverse

  - by jlaskey

  I have been following how often Nashorn has been showing up on the net.  Nashorn got a burst of tweets when we announced Project Nashorn and I was curious how Nashorn was trending per day, maybe graph the result.  Counting tweets manually seemed mindless, so why not write a program to do the same. This is where Nashorn + Java came shining through.  There is a very nice Java library out there called Twitter4J https://github.com/yusuke/twitter4j that handles all things Twitter.  After running bin/getAccessToken.sh to get a twitter4j.properties file with personal authorization, all I had to do to run my simple exploratory app was; nashorn -cp $TWITTER4J/twitter4j-core-3.0.1.jar GetHomeTimeline.js The content of GetHomeTimeline.js is as follows; var twitter4j      = Packages.twitter4j; var TwitterFactory = twitter4j.TwitterFactory; var Query          = twitter4j.Query; var twitter = new TwitterFactory().instance; var query   = new Query("nashorn OR nashornjs"); query.count = 100; do {     var result = twitter.search(query);     var tweets = result.tweets;     for each (tweet in tweets) {         print("@" + tweet.user.screenName + "\t" + tweet.text);     } } while (query = result.nextQuery()); How easy was that?  Now to hook it up to the JavaFX graphing library... 

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• Interaction of a GUI-based App and Windows Service

  - by psubsee2003

  I am working on personal project that will be designed to help manage my media library, specifically recordings created by Windows Media Center. So I am going to have the following parts to this application: A Windows Service that monitors the recording folder. Once a new recording is completed that meets specific criteria, it will call several 3rd party CLI Applications to remove the commercials and re-encode the video into a more hard-drive friendly format. A controller GUI to be able to modify settings of the service, specifically add new shows to watch for, and to modify parameters for the CLI Applications A standalone (GUI-based) desktop application that can perform many of the same functions as the windows service, expect manually on specific files instead of automatically based on specific criteria. (It should be mentioned that I have limited experience with an application of this complexity, and I have absolutely zero experience with Windows Services) Since the 1st and 3rd bullet share similar functionality, my design plan is to pull the common functionality into a separate library shared by both parts applications, but these 2 components do not need to interact otherwise. The 2nd and 3rd bullets seem to share some common functionality, both will have a GUI, both will have to help define similar parameters (one to send to the service and the other to send directly to the CLI applications), so I can see some advantage to combining them into the same application. On the other hand, the standalone application (bullet #3) really does not need to interact with the service at all, except for possibly sharing a few common default parameters that can easily be put into an XML in a common location, so it seems to make more sense to just keep everything separate. The controller GUI (2nd bullet) is where I am stuck at the moment. Do I just roll this functionality (allow for user interaction with the service to update settings and criteria) into the standalone application? Or would it be a better design decision to keep them separate? Specifically, I'm worried about adding the complexity of communicating with the Windows Service to the standalone application when it doesn't need it. Is WCF the right approach to allow the controller GUI to interact with the Windows Service? Or is there a better alternative? At the moment, I don't envision a need for a significant amount of interaction, maybe just adding a new task once in a while and occasionally tweaking a parameter, but when something is changed, I do expect the windows service to immediately use the new settings.

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