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• CyanogenMod Updates; Rolls out Android 2.3 to the Less Fortunate

  - by ETC

  If you’re one of the less fortunate (namely those forgotten by their carrier when it comes to phone OS upgrade time) you’ve got a friend in Cyanogen. They’ve rolled out a new Release Candidate update that includes Android 2.3 and a host of performance tweaks. First thing to note is that this is an RC and if you upgrade from CyanogenMod 6 to CyanogenMod 7 RC you’ll be trading a little bit of stability and a few features that haven’t made the jump from 6 to 7 in return for the newest features of Android 2.3. If you’re not comfortable with that wait for CyanogenMod 7 to update to a final release. For the intrepid, hit up the link below to read more and grab a copy. CyanogenMod-7 Release Candidates! [Cyanogen via Download Squad] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide CyanogenMod Updates; Rolls out Android 2.3 to the Less Fortunate MyPaint is an Open-Source Graphics App for Digital Painters Can the Birds and Pigs Really Be Friends in the End? [Angry Birds Video] Add the 2D Version of the New Unity Interface to Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 MightyMintyBoost Is a 3-in-1 Gadget Charger Watson Ties Against Human Jeopardy Opponents

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• How to manage long running background threads and report progress with DDD

  - by Mr Happy

  Title says most of it. I have found surprising little information about this. I have a long running operation of which the user wants to see the progress (as in, item x of y processed). I also need to be able to pause and stop the operation. (Stopping doesn't rollback the items already processed.) The thing is, it's not that each item takes a long time to get processed, it's that that there are usually a lot of items. And what I've read about so far is that it's somewhat of an anti-pattern to put something like a queue in the DB. I currently don't have any messaging system in place, and I've never worked with one either. Another thing I read somewhere is that progress reporting is something that belongs in the application layer, but it didn't go into the details. So having said all this, what I have in mind is the following. User request with list of items enters the application layer. Application layer gets some information from the domain needed to process the items. Application layer passes the items and the information off to some domain service (should the implementation of this service belong in the infrastructure layer?) This service spins up a worker thread with callbacks for both progress reporting and pausing/stopping it. This worker thread will process each item in it's own UoW. This means the domain information from earlier needs to be stored in some DTO. Since nothing is really persisted, the service should be singleton and thread safe Whenever a user requests a progress report or wants to pause/stop the operation, the application layer will ask the service. Would this be a correct solution? Or am I at least on the right track with this? Especially the singleton and thread safe part makes the whole thing feel icky.

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• UPDATE FOR BI PUBLISHER ENTERPRISE 10.1.3.4.2 NOVEMBER 2011

  - by Tim Dexter

  It's Friday, that means its patch release time. Why do we do this to ourselves, 'we'll release on Friday!' It might 11.59 on Friday but by golly we'll have released on Friday. I can remember a release of BIP years ago that for some reason we went for 12/31 as a release date ... were we mad? I seem to remember we made it but talk about ridiculous pressure! The latest 10g rollup is out in the wild and available from Oracle support. A bug fixing rollup but worth getting to and know that support will want you to get to it and re-test before going forward on an SR. One simple but very useful fix or enhancement:[Cause of the bug] @ ================== @ Customer reports that despite the clock being shown, end users are clicking @ on the View button repeatedly as the initial generation is taking some time.   @ If the button were to be grayed out then  this would prevent the users @ requesting the report more than  once.  Repeated requests are causing a @ system overload and as this is their Production  instance this is extremely @ important to the customer. @ . @ [The Fix] @ ========= @ Added the logic to disable the button after the user clicks on the "view" @ button and re-enable it when the report is loaded. I told a group of customers once that they have a headache and we have a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, alright, I actually said 'aspirin'. This little gem of a fix helps relieve another little headache that our aspirin was causing. The patch number for all this BIP pain killing is 13399232, enjoy!

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• What is the aim of this email? Is this a ping/sping? [closed]

  - by mplungjan

  Hi, I received this spam in my catch-all. As a webmaster of the domain it was sent to, I am really curious what the reason for this mail is. It was sent to a non-existent user "tania" on my domain - here I used mydomain.zzz - what do the sender want to achieve? Since many mail servers have stopped backscattering, not getting a bounce would not mean anything, would it? And if this is off topic, where inb the StackExchange WOULD it be on topic? Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: (qmail 8015 invoked from network); 27 Jan 2011 02:32:47 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO p3pismtp01-021.prod.phx3.secureserver.net) ([10.6.12.26]) (envelope-sender <[email protected]>) by smtp35.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net (qmail-1.03) with SMTP for <[email protected]>; 27 Jan 2011 02:32:47 -0000 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: At4FAAlnQE1GVjtCVGdsb2JhbACWXo4gCwEWCA0YJLwyhU8EhRc Received: from mx.dt3ls.com ([70.86.59.66]) by p3pismtp01-021.prod.phx3.secureserver.net with ESMTP; 26 Jan 2011 19:32:47 -0700 Received: from 70.86.59.66 by mx.dt3ls.com (Merak 8.9.1) with ASMTP id JXF39710 for <[email protected]>; Wed, 26 Jan 2011 17:31:10 -0500 Return-Path: [email protected] Status: Message-ID: <20110126173109.4d9d6c3f2b@1c3c> From: "Tech Support" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Subject: Information, as instructed. Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2011 17:31:09 -0500 X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: General-Mailer v.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Quote: I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field reveals to a man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools. William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury

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• Download the Anime Angels Theme for Windows 7

  - by Asian Angel

  Do you have a passion for all things anime? Then you will definitely want to have a look at the Anime Angels Theme for Windows 7. This cute theme will give your desktop that extra bit of fun and spunk to help bring a smile to your face. The theme comes with 21 Hi-Res wallpapers of the cutest Anime Angels from around the web, a wonderful set of anime icons, and great system sounds to round out the perfect anime theme. Anime Angels Theme For Windows (Anime Themes) [VikiTech] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The Legend of Zelda – 1980s High School Style [Video] Suspended Sentence is a Free Cross-Platform Point and Click Game Build a Batman-Style Hidden Bust Switch Make Your Clock Creates a Custom Clock for your Android Homescreen Download the Anime Angels Theme for Windows 7 CyanogenMod Updates; Rolls out Android 2.3 to the Less Fortunate

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• SnapBird Supercharges Your Twitter Searches

  - by ETC

  Twitter’s default search tool is a bit anemic. If you want to supercharge your Twitter search, fire up web-based search tool SnapBird and dig into your past tweets as well as those of friends and followers. Yesterday I was trying to find a tweet I’d sent some time last year regarding my search for an application that could count keystrokes for inclusion in my review of the app I finally found to fulfill the need, KeyCounter. Searching for it with Twitter’s search tool yielded nothing. One simple search at SnapBird and I nailed it. SnapBird requires no authentication to search public tweets (both your own and those of your friends and follows) but does require authentication in order to search through your sent and received direct messages. SnapBird is a free service. SnapBird Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines MyPaint is an Open-Source Graphics App for Digital Painters Can the Birds and Pigs Really Be Friends in the End? [Angry Birds Video] Add the 2D Version of the New Unity Interface to Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 MightyMintyBoost Is a 3-in-1 Gadget Charger Watson Ties Against Human Jeopardy Opponents Peaceful Tropical Cavern Wallpaper

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• How Security Products Are Made; An Interview with BitDefender

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Most of us use anti-virus and malware scanners, without giving the processes behind their construction and deployment much of a thought. Get an inside look at security product development with this BitDefender interview. Over at 7Tutorials they took a trip to the home offices of BitDefender for an interview with Catalin Co?oi–seen here–BitDefender’s Chief Security Researcher. While it’s notably BitDefender-centric, it’s also an interesting look at the methodology employed by a company specializing in virus/malware protection. Here’s an excerpt from the discussion about data gathering techniques: Honeypots are systems we distributed across our network, that act as victims. Their role is to look like vulnerable targets, which have valuable data on them. We monitor these honeypots continuously and collect all kinds of malware and information about black hat activities. Another thing we do, is broadcast fake e-mail addresses that are automatically collected by spammers from the Internet. Then, they use these addresses to distribute spam, malware or phishing e-mails. We collect all the messages we receive on these addresses, analyze them and extract the required data to update our products and keep our users secure and spam free. Hit up the link below for the full interview. How To Properly Scan a Photograph (And Get An Even Better Image) The HTG Guide to Hiding Your Data in a TrueCrypt Hidden Volume Make Your Own Windows 8 Start Button with Zero Memory Usage

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• Newbie tips, please [closed]

  - by eXeP

  So, I just got a new computer and I want to put Ubuntu on my old laptop. I just need few tips before installing it. 1.Programs, where to download, how to download, what is the "ending" (windows has .exe) 2. How much is command line involved? And where to get the most usual commands? 3.Few programs you recommend (graphics editing, IDE, video player, web browser) 4. Do I have to download drivers when installing new OS? I plan on getting fully rid of Windows. I have no idea of the name of my graphics card, so how do I can get to know what it is if I have to download drivers? (I don't know the name because it's not on the original box, or anywhere on the internet, believe me) 5. When installing new OS does it destroy everything else on the hard drive? 6. Anti-virus, do I need one? I'm not super paranoid, and I don't visit "shady" sites. Please note that I have never used linux, or any other OS than Windows and sorry for my bad english. If this is the wrong place to post this, then please remove this. Thank you.

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• You wouldn&rsquo;t drink 9 year old milk would you?

  - by Jim Duffy

  This is an absolutely brilliant campaign to urge users that its time to move on from IE 6. I like how it puts it terms that everyone can understand and has probably experienced at one time or another. How many times have you opened the milk, took a sniff, and experienced that visceral reaction that accompanies catching a whiff of milk that has turned to the dark side of the force? I call it Darth Vader milk. :-) Of course I’m assuming that you haven’t used IE 6 for a long time now. It is our responsibility as information technology workers to communicate to our friends and family how lame using IE 6 is. Shame them into upgrading if necessary. I don’t care how you get through to them but get through. Tell them that only losers use IE 6. Tell them you’ll cut them out of the your will. Tell them they’re banned from your annual BBQ blowout. Tell them that [insert their favorite celebrity’s name here] thinks people using IE6 are losers.  :-) Seriously, IE6 sucks and blows at the same time and has got to go for a number of reasons including the security leaks that come with using it. Confidentially, I urge them to upgrade for purely selfish reasons. Because I am the first level of computer support for waaaaaay to many of my family members I always advocate they use a current browser (IE 8 or Firefox) and anti-virus software (AVG). Call me selfish but I’d rather not waste my time dealing with a virus or malware that could potentially slip through with IE6. Yes, I’m selfish with my time that way. :-) Have a day. :-|

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• When does implementing MVVM not make sense

  - by Kelly Sommers

  I am a big fan of various patterns and enjoy learning new ones all the time however I think with all the evangelism around popular patterns and anti-patterns sometimes this causes blind adoption. I think most things have individual pros and cons and it's important to educate what the cons are and when it doesn't make sense to make a particular choice. The pros are constantly advocated. "It depends" I think applies most times but the industry does a poor job at communicating what it depends ON. Also many patterns surfaced from inheriting values from previous patterns or have derivatives, which each one brings another set of pros and cons to the table. The sooner we are more aware of the trade off's of decisions we make in software architecture the sooner we make better decisions. This is my first challenge to the community. Even if you are a big fan of said pattern, I challenge you to discover the cons and when you shouldn't use it. Define when MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) may not make sense in a particular piece of software and based on what reasons. MVVM has a set of pros and cons. Let's try to define them. GO! :)

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• Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) 2.0

  - by TATWORTH

  Secunia Personal Software Inspector is now available in a updated version that is free for personnal use. The home page says "The Secunia PSI is aFREE security tool designed to detectvulnerable andout-dated programs and plug-ins which expose your PC to attacks. Attacks exploiting vulnerable programs and plug-ins are rarely blocked by traditional anti-virus and are therefore increasingly "popular" among criminals. The only solution to block these kind of attacks is to apply security updates, commonly referred to as patches. Patches are offered free-of-charge by most software vendors, however, finding all these patches is a tedious and time consuming task. Secunia PSI automates this and alerts you when your programs and plug-ins require updating to stay secure. Download the Secunia PSI now and secure your PC today - free-of-charge." I have used this for some time on my home PC and have found it to be very useful in identifying required updates. I use Google Chrome but I found that whenever a new version is issued, the old version is not de-installed. Secunia PSI helps me to locate them and get rid of them.

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• How to make my simple round sprite look right in XNA

  - by Joshua Perina

  Ok, I'm very new to graphics programming (but not new to coding). I'm trying to load a simple image in XNA which I can do fine. It is a simple round circle which I made in photoshop. The problem is the edges show up rough when I draw it on the screen even with the exact size. The anti-aliasing is missing. I'm sure I'm missing something very simple: GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Black); // TODO: Add your drawing code here spriteBatch.Begin(); spriteBatch.Draw(circle, new Rectangle(10, 10, 10, 10), Color.White); spriteBatch.End(); Couldn't post picture because I'm a first time poster. But my smooth png circle has rough edges. So I found that if I added: spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.FrontToBack, BlendState.NonPremultiplied); I can get a smooth image when the image is the same size as the original png. But if I want to scale that image up or down then the rough edges return. How do I get XNA to smoothly resize my simple round image to a smaller size without getting the rough edges?

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• XNA 2D Spritesheet drawing rendering problem

  - by user24092

  I'm making a tile-based game, using one spritesheet containing all tile graphics. Each tile has a size of 32x32 pixels. The main problem is: when I draw the tile to the screen, if the tile position x and y are not rounded or if scale is activated in spriteBatch.Draw() method (scale != 1.0f), I get some lines of adjacent tiles on the spritesheet into the current tile drawed. I already tried setting SamplerState to PointClamp, removing AntiAlias, but still doesn't work. Here I'll show images of some tests that I made, with a test sprite sheet that I've created (I made a 9x9 spritesheet, with each sprite of size 32x32 containing a unique solid color). Tests: http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/5946/testsqj.png SpriteSheet used: http://imageshack.us/a/img821/1341/tilesm.png Already tried to remove anti-alias, set PointClamp as sampler state, but still getting this issue, XNA keeps drawing part of the adjacent pixels of the texture on the screen. What I want is to get the correct area of the tilesheet texture (as seen in the first test, that gets just the yellow pixels). My question is: Is there any way that I can fix this, WITHOUT adding tile spacing or any other modification involving the tilesheet? Maybe disabling a texture filtering that is done by XNA, or something like that.

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• Vector-based fonts vs. bitmap fonts in (2d) games?

  - by jmp97

  I know that many games are using bitmap fonts. Which are the advantages for vector-based font rendering / manipulation when compared to bitmap fonts and in which scenarios would they matter the most? Prefer a focus on 2d games when answering this question. If relevant, please include examples for games using either approach. Some factors you might consider: amount of text used in the game scaling of text overlaying glyphs and anti-aliasing general rendering quality font colors and styling user interface requirements localisation / unicode text wrapping and formatting cross-platform deployment 2d vs 3d Background: I am developing a simple falling blocks game in 2d, targeted for pc. I would like to add text labels for level, score, and menu buttons. I am using SFML which uses FreeType internally, so vector-based features are easily available for my project. In my view, font sizes in simple games often don't vary, and bitmap fonts should be easier for cross-platform concerns (font-formats and font rendering quality). But I am unsure if I am missing some important points here, especially since I want to polish the looks of the final game.

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• Triggering Data Changes in N-Tier

  - by Ryan Kinal

  I've been studying n-tier architectures as of late, particularly in VB.NET with Entity Framework and/or LINQ to SQL. I understand the basic concepts, but have been wondering about best practices in regard to triggering CRUD-type operations from user input/action. So, the arcitecture looks something like the following: [presentation layer] - [business layer] - [data layer] - (database) Getting information from the database into the presentation layer is simple and abstracted. It's just a matter of instantiating a new object from the business layer, which in turn uses the data layer to get at the correct information. However, saving (updating and inserting), and deleting seem to require particular APIs on the relevant business objects. I have to assume this is standard practice, unless a business object will save itself on various operations (which seems inefficient), or on disposal (which seems like it just wouldn't work, or may be unwieldy and unreliable). Should my "savable" business objects all implement a particular "ISavable" or "IDatabaseObject" interface? Is this a recognized (anti-)pattern? Are there other, better patterns I should be using that I'm just unaware of? The TLDR question, I suppose, is How does the presentation layer trigger database changes?

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• At the end of my rope

  - by hvgotcodes

  I am a contractor to a big company. Currently, there are three developers on the project, myself included. The problem is the other 2 developers don't really get it. By "it" i mean the following: They don't understand the best practices for the technology we are using. After 6 months of me and others giving them examples there are terrible anti-patterns being used. They are "copy and paste" programmers that produce primarily spaghetti code. They constantly break things, implementing changes but not doing a basic smoke test to see if all is good They refuse/rarely to ask for code-reviews. They refuse/rarely even do basic things like formatting code. No documentation on any classes (jsdocs) Afraid to delete code that doesn't do anything Leave commented code blocks everywhere even though we have version control. I find myself getting more and more frustrated as I format others code, fix bugs, discover functionality that is broken, and create abstractions to remove the spaghetti. I really don't know what to do. I try not to get to frustrated, but it's just a mess. I like these people as people, but I feel like the coding situation is so bad that I could move faster if they simply browsed the web all day. Would it be out of line to ask our manager to review the others svn commit access; commits can only be done after a review by someone who is knowledgeable in what we are doing? As a contractor, I'm not sure if that's the best move. Is there a subtle/not so subtle way of making it clear how many things I am fixing?

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• Need a good quality bitmap rotation algorithm for Android

  - by Lumis

  I am creating a kaleidoscopic effect on an android tablet. I am using the code below to rotate a slice of an image, but as you can see in the image when rotating a bitmap 60 degrees it distorts it quite a lot (red rectangles) – it is smudging the image! I have set dither and anti-alias flags but it does not help much. I think it is just not a very sophisticated bitmap rotation algorithm. canvas.save(); canvas.rotate(angle, screenW/2, screenH/2); canvas.drawBitmap(picSlice, screenW/2, screenH/2, pOutput); canvas.restore(); So I wonder if you can help me find a better way to rotate a bitmap. It does not have to be fast, because I intend to use a high quality rotation only when I want to save the screen to the SD card - I would redraw the screen in memory before saving. Do you know any comprehensible or replicable algorithm for bitmap rotation that I could programme or use as a library? Or any other suggestion? EDIT: The answers below made me think if Android OS had bilinear or bicubic interpolation option and after some search I found that it does have its own version of it called FilterBitmap. After applying it to my paint pOutput.setFilterBitmap(true); I get much better result

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• OpenGL render to texture causing edge artifacts

  - by mysticalOso

  This is my first post here so any help would be massively appreciated :) I'm using C++ with SDL and OpenGL 3.3 When rendering directly to screen I get the following result And when I render to texture I this happens Anti-aliasing is turned off for both. I'm guessing this has something to do with depth buffer accuracy but I've tried a lot of different methods to improve the result but, no success :( I'm currently using the following code to set up my FBO: GLuint frameBufferID; glGenFramebuffers(1, &frameBufferID); glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, frameBufferID); glGenTextures(1, &coloursTextureID); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, coloursTextureID); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D,0,GL_RGB,SCREEN_WIDTH,SCREEN_HEIGHT,0,GL_RGB,GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE,NULL); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER,GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER,GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); //Depth buffer setup GLuint depthrenderbuffer; glGenRenderbuffers(1, &depthrenderbuffer); glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, depthrenderbuffer); glRenderbufferStorage(GL_RENDERBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT24, SCREEN_WIDTH,SCREEN_HEIGHT); glFramebufferRenderbuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, GL_RENDERBUFFER, depthrenderbuffer); glFramebufferTexture(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, coloursTextureID, 0); GLenum DrawBuffers[1] = {GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0}; glDrawBuffers(1, DrawBuffers); // if(glCheckFramebufferStatus(GL_FRAMEBUFFER) != GL_FRAMEBUFFER_COMPLETE) return false; Thank you so much for any help :)

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• Depending on fixed version of a library and ignore its updates

  - by Moataz Elmasry

  I was talking to a technical boss yesterday. Its about a project in C++ that depends on opencv and he wanted to include a specific opencv version into the svn and keep using this version ignoring any updates which I disagreed with.We had a heated discussion about that. His arguments: Everything has to be delivered into one package and we can't ask the client to install external libraries. We depend on a fixed version so that new updates of opencv won't screw our code. We can't guarantee that within a version update, ex from 3.2.buildx to 3.2.buildy. Buildy the function signatures won't change. My arguments: True everything has to be delivered to the client as one package,but that's what build scripts are for. They download the external libraries and create a bundle. Within updates of the same version 3.2.buildx to 3.2.buildy its impossible that a signature change, unless it is a really crappy framework, which isn't the case with opencv. We deprive ourselves from new updates and features of that library. If there's a bug in the version we took, and even if there's a bug fix later, we won't be able to get that fix. Its simply ineffiecient and anti design to depend on a certain version/build of an external library as it makes our project difficult in the future to adopt to new changes. So I'd like to know what you guys think. Does it really make sense to include a specific version of external library in our svn and keep using it ignoring all updates?

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• What are the advantages to use vector-based fonts over bitmap fonts in (2d) games?

  - by jmp97

  I know that many games are using bitmap fonts. Which are the advantages for vector-based font rendering / manipulation when compared to bitmap fonts and in which scenarios would they matter the most? Prefer a focus on 2d games when answering this question. If relevant, please include examples for games using either approach. Some factors you might consider: amount of text used in the game scaling of text overlaying glyphs and anti-aliasing general rendering quality font colors and styling user interface requirements localisation / unicode text wrapping and formatting cross-platform deployment 2d vs 3d Background: I am developing a simple falling blocks game in 2d, targeted for pc. I would like to add text labels for level, score, and menu buttons. I am using SFML which uses FreeType internally, so vector-based features are easily available for my project. In my view, font sizes in simple games often don't vary, and bitmap fonts should be easier for cross-platform concerns (font-formats and font rendering quality). But I am unsure if I am missing some important points here, especially since I want to polish the looks of the final game.

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• How to avoid the GameManager god object?

  - by lorancou

  I just read an answer to a question about structuring game code. It made me wonder about the ubiquitous GameManager class, and how it often becomes an issue in a production environment. Let me describe this. First, there's prototyping. Nobody cares about writing great code, we just try to get something running to see if the gameplay adds up. Then there's a greenlight, and in an effort to clean things up, somebody writes a GameManager. Probably to hold a bunch of GameStates, maybe to store a few GameObjects, nothing big, really. A cute, little, manager. In the peaceful realm of pre-production, the game is shaping up nicely. Coders have proper nights of sleep and plenty of ideas to architecture the thing with Great Design Patterns. Then production starts and soon, of course, there is crunch time. Balanced diet is long gone, the bug tracker is cracking with issues, people are stressed and the game has to be released yesterday. At that point, usually, the GameManager is a real big mess (to stay polite). The reason for that is simple. After all, when writing a game, well... all the source code is actually here to manage the game. It's easy to just add this little extra feature or bugfix in the GameManager, where everything else is already stored anyway. When time becomes an issue, no way to write a separate class, or to split this giant manager into sub-managers. Of course this is a classical anti-pattern: the god object. It's a bad thing, a pain to merge, a pain to maintain, a pain to understand, a pain to transform. What would you suggest to prevent this from happening?

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• How do spambots work?

  - by rlb.usa

  I have a forum that's getting hit a lot by forum spambots, and of course the best way to defeat something is to know thy enemy. I'll worry about defeating those spambots later, but right now I'd like to know more about them. Reading around, I felt surprised about the lack of thorough information on the subject (or perhaps my ineptness to input the correct search terms for better google results). I'm interested in learning all about spambots. I've asked on other forums and gotten brush-off answers like "Spambots are always users registering on your site." How do forum spambots work? How do they find the 'new user registration' page? (I'm especially surprised because some forums don't have a dedicated URL for this eg, www.forum.com/register.html , but instead use query strings or even other methods invisible to the URL bar) How do they know what to enter into each 'new user registration' field? How do they determine what's a page they can spam / enter data into and what is not? Do they even 'view' this page at all? ..If not, then I'd assume they're communicating with the server directly - how is - this possible? How do they do it? Can forum spambots break CAPTCHAs? Can they solve logic questions (how?)? Math questions? Do they reverse-engineer client-side anti-bot validation scripts? Server-side scripts? What techniques are still valid to prevent them? Where do spambots come from? Is someone sitting behind the computer snickering as they watch their bot destroy site after site? Or are they snickering as they simply 'release' it onto the internet somehow? Are spambots 'run' by an infected computer somewhere? Do they replicate themselves? etc

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• Best setup/workflow for distributed team to integrated DSVC with fragmented huge .NET site?

  - by lazfish

  So we have a team with 2 developers one manager. The dev server sits in a home office and the live server sits in a rack somewhere handled by the larger part of my company. We have freedom to do as we please but I want to incorporate Kiln DSVC and FogBugz for us with some standard procedures to make sense of our decisions/designs/goals. Our main product is web-based training through our .NET site with many videos etc, and we also do mobile apps for multiple platforms. Our code-base is a 15 yr old fragmented mess. The approach has been rogue .asp/.aspx pages with some class management implemented in the last 6 years. We still mix our html/vb/js all on the same file when we add a feature/page to our site. We do not separate the business logic from the rest of the code. Wiring anything up in VS for Intelli-sense or testing or any other benefit is more frustrating than it is worth, because of having to manually rejigger everything back to one file. How do other teams approach this? I noticed when I did wire everything up for VS it wants to make a class for all functions. Do people normally compile DLLs for page-specific functions that won't be reusable? What approaches make sense for getting our practices under control while still being able to fix old anti-patterns and outdated code and still moving towards a logical structure for future devs to build on?

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• Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler: What Tables Aren’t In At Least One SubView?

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Organizing your data model makes the information easier to consume. One of the organizational tools provided by Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler is the ‘SubView.’ In a nutshell, a SubView is a subset of your model. The Challenge: I’ve just created a model which represents my entire ____________ application. We’ll call it ‘residential lending.’ Instead of having all 100+ tables in a single model diagram, I want to break out the tables by module, e.g. appraisals, credit reports, work histories, customers, etc. I’ve spent several hours breaking out the tables to one or more SubViews, but I think i may have missed a few. Is there an easy way to see what tables aren’t in at least ONE subview? The Answer Yes, mostly. The mostly comes about from the way I’m going to accomplish this task. It involves querying the SQL Developer Data Modeler Reporting Schema. So if you don’t have the Reporting Schema setup, you’ll need to do so. Got it? Good, let’s proceed. Before you start querying your Reporting Schema, you might need a data model for the actual reporting schema…meta-meta data! You could reverse engineer the data modeler reporting schema to a new data model, or you could just reference the PDFs in \datamodeler\reports\Reporting Schema diagrams directory. Here’s a hint, it’s THIS one The Query Well, it’s actually going to be at least 2 queries. We need to get a list of distinct designs stored in your repository. For giggles, I’m going to get a listing including each version of the model. So I can query based on design and version, or in this case, timestamp of when it was added to the repository. We’ll get that from the DMRS_DESIGNS table: SELECT DISTINCT design_name, design_ovid, date_published FROM DMRS_designs Then I’m going to feed the design_ovid, down to a subquery for my child report. select name, count(distinct diagram_id) from DMRS_DIAGRAM_ELEMENTS where design_ovid = :dESIGN_OVID and type = 'Table' group by name having count(distinct diagram_id) < 2 order by count(distinct diagram_id) desc Each diagram element has an entry in this table, so I need to filter on type=’Table.’ Each design has AT LEAST one diagram, the master diagram. So any relational table in this table, only having one listing means it’s not in any SubViews. If you have overloaded object names, which is VERY possible, you’ll want to do the report off of ‘OBJECT_ID’, but then you’ll need to correlate that to the NAME, as I doubt you’re so intimate with your designs that you recognize the GUIDs So I’m going to cheat and just stick with names, but I think you get the gist. My Model Of my almost 90 tables, how many of those have I not added to at least one SubView? Now let’s run my report! Voila! My ‘BEER2′ table isn’t in any SubView! It says ’1′ because the main model diagram counts as a view. So if the count came back as ’2′, that would mean the table was in the main model diagram and in 1 SubView diagram. And I know what you’re thinking, what kind of residential lending program would have a table called ‘BEER2?’ Let’s just say, that my business model has some kinks to work out!

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• asynchrony is viral

  - by Daniel Moth

  It is becoming hard to write code today without introducing some form of asynchrony and, if you are using .NET (e.g. for Windows Phone 8 or Windows Store apps), that means sooner or later you have to await something and mark your method as async. My most recent examples included introducing speech recognition in my Translator By Moth phone app where I had to await mySpeechRecognizerUI.RecognizeWithUIAsync() and when moving that code base to a Windows Store project just to show a MessageBox I had to await myMessageDialog.ShowAsync(). Any time you need to invoke an asynchronous method in your code, you have a choice to make: kick off the operation but don’t wait for it to complete (otherwise known as fire-and-forget), synchronously wait for it to complete (which will entail blocking, which can be bad, especially on a UI thread), or asynchronously wait for it to complete before continuing on with the rest of the method’s work. In most cases, you want the latter, and the await keyword makes that trivial to implement.  When you use the magical await keyword in front of an API call, then you typically have to make additional changes to your code: This await usage is within a method of course, and now you have to annotate that method with async. Furthermore, you have to change the return type of the method you just annotated so it returns a Task (if it previously returned void), or Task<myOldReturnType> (if it previously returned myOldReturnType). Note that if it returns void, in some cases you could cheat and stop there. Furthermore, any method that called this method you just annotated with async will now also be invoking an asynchronous operation, so you have to make that change in the body of the caller method to introduce the await keyword before the call to the method. …you guessed it, you now have to change this caller method to be annotated with async and have its return types tweaked... …and it goes on virally… At some point you reach the root of your user code, e.g. a GUI event handler, and whoever calls that void method can already deal with the fact that you marked it as async and the viral introduction of the keywords stops there… This is all wonderful progress and a very powerful mechanism, and I just wish someone had written a refactoring tool to take care of this… anyone? I mentioned earlier that you have a choice when invoking an asynchronous operation. If the first time you encounter this you wish to localize the impact of all these changes and essentially try to turn the asynchronous behavior into synchronous by blocking - don't! For reasons why you don't want to do that, read Toub's excellent blog post (and check out the rest of his blog with gems on async programming starting with the Async FAQ). Just embrace the pattern knowing that when you use one instance of an await, you'll propagate the change all the way to the root user code method, e.g. typically an event handler. Related aside: I just finished re-writing my MessageBox wrapper class for Phone projects, including making it work in Windows Store projects, and it does expect you to use it with an await :-). I'll share that in an upcoming post for those of you that have the same need… Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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