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• Antenna Aligner Part 7: Connecting the dots

  - by Chris George

  The app is basically ready, so I eagerly started to sort out creating the application entry in iTunes Connect. It's mostly intuitive actually, although I did have to create yet another icon for iTunes sized 512x512 pixels, damn lucky I did the original graphics as vector! It took me longer to write the application description than anything else, I'm so not a tech author! I didn't like the way you have to 'make up' an SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) number. I have to do some googling to find out that it really doesn't matter what it is! It should be more obvious what to do from the actual website itself. That aside, the rest of it was actually fairly straightforward. As well as the details of the application, iPhone and iPad screenshots were also required. This posed somewhat of a problem. The iPhone ones were easy (as I have one!), but I do not (yet) own an iPad . So I thought I'd leave the iPad screenshots out for now. Once the application details were sorted, I moved onto the rights and pricing. At the start of the project I had made the decision that I wouldn't charge any more than the lowest amount £0.59. I believe there is a market for this, but as my first foray into app development I didn't want to take the mick. I did realise, however, that I had built my app with a developer certificate and provisioning profile. This was fairly quickly corrected, and again Nomad made this very easy to switch over to the distribution certificate and provisioning profile. With a sense of excitement I cracked open iTunes connect and clicked the upload button ... ...slight snag... . when the Nomad project was started, Apple allowed uploads of these binaries via iTunes Connect. But this is no longer possible, the only upload path is via the Application Loader available from the Apple Developer program. This itself has one limitation, it only runs on a mac! D'OH!!!  Actually my language was somewhat more colourful when this fact came to light. After picking my laptop up off the floor and putting it back together... ok only joking, but I did nearly throw it out of frustration!... I started to consider the options; I briefly entertained the idea of buying a cheap mac from ebay... no, that defeats the whole object of what I'm doing, plus my wife wouldn't be impressed there are some guys out there in the interweb who will upload your app for a small fee...but I don't really like the idea of giving some faceless email address my apple developer login details, as well as my app binary! find some willing friend with a mac who would kindly let me use it... obviously this is the only sensible option. In the meantime, I informed the Nomad team about this slight 'issue' and they are currently investigating possible solutions...

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• Viewport / Camera Calculation in 2D Game

  - by Dave

  we have a 2D game with some sprites and tiles and some kind of camera/viewport, that "moves" around the scene. so far so good, if we wouldn't had some special behaviour for your camera/viewport translation. normally you could stick the camera to your player figure and center it, resulting in a very cheap, undergraduate, translation equation, like : vec_translation -/+= speed (depending in what keys are pressed. WASD as default.) buuuuuuuuuut, we want our player figure be able to actually reach the bounds, when the viewport/camera has reached a maximum translation. we came up with the following solution (only keys a and d are the shown here, the rest is just adaption of calculation or maybe YOUR super-cool and elegant solution :) ): if(keys[A]) { playerX -= speed; if(playerScreenX <= width / 2 && tx < 0) { playerScreenX = width / 2; tx += speed; } else if(playerScreenX <= width / 2 && (tx) >= 0) { playerScreenX -= speed; tx = 0; if(playerScreenX < 0) playerScreenX = 0; } else if(playerScreenX >= width / 2 && (tx) < 0) { playerScreenX -= speed; } } if(keys[D]) { playerX += speed; if(playerScreenX >= width / 2 && (-tx + width) < sceneWidth) { playerScreenX = width / 2; tx -= speed; } if(playerScreenX >= width / 2 && (-tx + width) >= sceneWidth) { playerScreenX += speed; tx = -(sceneWidth - width); if(playerScreenX >= width - player.width) playerScreenX = width - player.width; } if(playerScreenX <= width / 2 && (-tx + width) < sceneWidth) { playerScreenX += speed; } } i think the code is rather self explaining: keys is a flag container for currently active keys, playerX/-Y is the position of the player according to world origin, tx/ty are the translation components vital to background / npc / item offset calculation, playerOnScreenX/-Y is the actual position of the player figure (sprite) on screen and width/height are the dimensions of the camera/viewport. this all looks quite nice and works well, but there is a very small and nasty calculation error, which in turn sums up to some visible effect. let's consider following piece of code: if(playerScreenX <= width / 2 && tx < 0) { playerScreenX = width / 2; tx += speed; } it can be translated into plain english as : if the x position of your player figure on screen is less or equal the half of your display / camera / viewport size AND there is enough space left LEFT of your viewport/camera then set players x position on screen to width half, increase translation (because we subtract the translation from something we want to move). easy, right?! doing this will create a small delta between playerX and playerScreenX. after so much talking, my question appears now here at the bottom of this document: how do I stick the calculation of my player-on-screen to the actual position of the player AND having a viewport that is not always centered aroung the players figure? here is a small test-case in processing: http://pastebin.com/bFaTauaa thank you for reading until now and thank you in advance for probably answering my question.

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• Best triple head display setup

  - by dgel

  I'm currently running Ubuntu 12.04 with a darn good triple head display setup. I've got a VisionTek 900530 Radeon HD 5450 512MB DDR3 PCI Express video card that has two DVI outputs and one Mini DisplayPort that I have connected to a HDMI adapter. I'm running three identical Asus 1920x1080 monitors that each have a DVI, VGA, and HDMI input. I'm using the xorg-edgers ppa, so I'm using the open source radeon driver version 6.99.99. I tried using the ATI binary fglrx driver, but I wasn't able to get the three monitors working properly- the monitor connected via HDMI / DisplayPort wouldn't run at full resolution. The setup is almost perfect: Compiz runs fine and is quite snappy. I'm not able to use that great compiz feature where you can drag a window to the side of a display and it will half maximize. I occasionally experience display corruption weirdness with Unity and need to restart it. When I use a dropdown menu in LibreOffice it often pops the menu down in another window. For example, if I'm using the center monitor and click the Insert menu, the menu pulls down on the monitor to my right, forcing me to chase it. If I chase down the menu and choose Manual Break, the dialog appears over on my left monitor. This absurdity is mildly entertaining but has lost its novelty. I've decided to build a new system and have spared no expense- latest i7 processor, SSD, etc. I really like the performance of the Nvidia binary drivers, so I put two ZOTAC ZT-40707-10L GeForce GT 440 in the system, figuring I'd have four DVI outputs and an awesome triple (or even eventually quad) head setup. Unfortunately it appears that I didn't do sufficient research before my purchase. It seems that Nvidia TwinView only supports two monitors on one card (I guess that's why they call it TwinView...). I messed around with running two X servers, but I really don't want that- being able to drag windows to any monitor is critical. It doesn't sound like Xinerama is an option because from what I understand it simply doesn't support Compiz. I've seen a BaseMosaic option that can be used with the Nvidia drivers that appears to support an almost unlimited number of heads- unfortunately me cheap little cards don't support it. I'm also not sure whether you'll still have all nice maximizing and snapping that TwinView provides, or whether Ubuntu will only see it as one massive display. I put my old trusty ATI card into my new system and installed 12.10. I'm using the opensource radeon drivers again because even in 12.10 I can't get the fglrx binary drivers to do triple head. Unfortunately, even with an unbelievably powerful system the experience is extremely sluggish (much more so than my experience in 12.04). The menu scattering problem appears to be fixed, but I get a lot of nasty Unity display corruption. So finally, my question is this: What hardware / drivers should I use? I'm willing to buy (almost) any video card(s). I have two PCI-Express 3.0 slots on my motherboard (which has an integrated Intel HD card). I'm willing to use ATI or Nvidia cards and willing to run Ubuntu 12.04.1 or 12.10. I'm not a gamer, but do want beautiful and snappy Compiz effects. Does anyone out there have the perfect triple head setup in 12.04 or 12.10? What hardware / drivers are you using? I have those two Nvidia cards but will probably be returning them unless someone knows a way to use them together for a triple head setup. Since I'm having pretty good luck with a single ATI card providing three displays, should I just buy a beefier one with the hopes that it will fix the horrible sluggishness I'm experiencing in 12.10?

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• ConcurrentDictionary<TKey,TValue> used with Lazy<T>

  - by Reed

  In a recent thread on the MSDN forum for the TPL, Stephen Toub suggested mixing ConcurrentDictionary<T,U> with Lazy<T>.  This provides a fantastic model for creating a thread safe dictionary of values where the construction of the value type is expensive.  This is an incredibly useful pattern for many operations, such as value caches. The ConcurrentDictionary<TKey, TValue> class was added in .NET 4, and provides a thread-safe, lock free collection of key value pairs.  While this is a fantastic replacement for Dictionary<TKey, TValue>, it has a potential flaw when used with values where construction of the value class is expensive. The typical way this is used is to call a method such as GetOrAdd to fetch or add a value to the dictionary.  It handles all of the thread safety for you, but as a result, if two threads call this simultaneously, two instances of TValue can easily be constructed. If TValue is very expensive to construct, or worse, has side effects if constructed too often, this is less than desirable.  While you can easily work around this with locking, Stephen Toub provided a very clever alternative – using Lazy<TValue> as the value in the dictionary instead. This looks like the following.  Instead of calling: MyValue value = dictionary.GetOrAdd( key, () => new MyValue(key)); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } We would instead use a ConcurrentDictionary<TKey, Lazy<TValue>>, and write: MyValue value = dictionary.GetOrAdd( key, () => new Lazy<MyValue>( () => new MyValue(key))) .Value; This simple change dramatically changes how the operation works.  Now, if two threads call this simultaneously, instead of constructing two MyValue instances, we construct two Lazy<MyValue> instances. However, the Lazy<T> class is very cheap to construct.  Unlike “MyValue”, we can safely afford to construct this twice and “throw away” one of the instances. We then call Lazy<T>.Value at the end to fetch our “MyValue” instance.  At this point, GetOrAdd will always return the same instance of Lazy<MyValue>.  Since Lazy<T> doesn’t construct the MyValue instance until requested, the actual MyClass instance returned is only constructed once.

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• How to deal with overly aggressive "Link Take Down Demands"?

  - by Eoin

  I've been receiving a large number of emails recently requesting I clean from link spam from my forum. Initially the emails were very polite and professional, and I was happy to remove the links. Recently the email have gotten very abrasive, here is a particularly rude example: From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Hi, This is the second time we are reaching out to you regarding your link to our site hxxp://www.company-two.com from hxxp://www.my-forum.com/some-topic-id. We really do need to remove this link. We have to report to Google any link we were unable to remove, and I wouldn't want to have to include your site in the list. Could you please remove our link from this page and any other page on your site? Thank You, Name Changed Behind the superficial pleasantries I feel there is some very real maliciousness. Note the email address, DMCA Violations, I don't see how the DMCA is involved here, except as a word which tends to strike fear in many people. Also relating to the email address, it doesn't match the company being linked to at all. How am I to trust they are truely operating on behalf of company-two when they don't even use one of it's email addresses. My email is hidden by privacypost. While a service with legitimate uses, I feel it's highly unprofessional for communications between to companies. The claim "This is the second time..." Every email I've received has started like this, but a check of my spam filters has never revealed a 1st mail. Initially I gave them the benefit of the doubt, by now though it's clear this is a cheap ploy to start me off on the defensive. And finally worst of all- the threats of reporting me to Google if I don't do everything they ask. I sent a polite reply asking for more information. I have no idea if the email address was even valid but I never received any response. Much later I got this followup mail From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Hi, This is the final time we are reaching out to you regarding your link to our site hxxp://www.company-two.com from hxxp://www.my-forum.com/some-topic-id. We will soon be reporting to Google any link we were unable to remove, and currently your site will have to be on the list. Could you please remove our link from this page and any other page on your site? I appreciate your urgent attention to this matter. Thank You, Name Changed This time the from address was more personal, though still not obviously connected to the spammed company. Lets be honest, I don't for one second believe that the companies were the victim of a 3rd party spammer as they claim. The links in questions were generated well over a year ago, and I firmly believe the companies were directly responsible for the spam links in question, a type of spam that has plagued my forum. Now they have the audacity to demand I spend my time cleaning up their mess, using threats to ensure they get their way. Have recent changes in Googles algorithms meant all the cash they spent spamming the web has now turned into a liability? If so I can see why these companies are all of a sudden running scared. Frankly, cleaning up my forum is a good things, but the threats they are using sickens me. So my question here is specifically about the threats: Are they vaild, and would such reports to Google destroy my page rankings? Is there a way I can report this abusive behaviour to Google?

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• TechEd 2010 Important Events

  If youll be attending TechEd in New Orleans in a couple of weeks, make sure the following are all on your calendar:   Party with Palermo TechEd 2010 Edition Sunday 6 June 2010 7:30-930pm Central Time RSVP and see who else is coming here.  The party takes place from 730pm to 930pm Central (Local) Time,  and includes a full meal, free swag, and prizes.  The event is being held at Jimmy Buffetts Margaritaville located at 1104 Decatur Street.   Developer Practices Session: DPR304 FAIL: Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices Monday 7 June 2010 4:30pm-545pm Central Time Room 276 Come to my session and hear about what NOT to do on your software project.  Hear my own and others war stories and lessons learned.  Youll laugh, youll cry, youll realize youre a much better developer than a lot of folks out there.  Heres the official description: Everybody likes to talk about best practices, tips, and tricks, but often it is by analyzing failures that we learn from our own and others' mistakes. In this session, Steve describes various anti-patterns and worst practices in software development that he has encountered in his own experience or learned about from other experts in the field, along with advice on recognizing and avoiding them. View DPR304 in TechEd Session Catalog >> Exhibition Hall Reception Monday 7 June 2010 545pm-9pm Immediately following my session, come meet the shows exhibitors, win prizes, and enjoy plenty of food and drink.  Always a good time.   Party: Geekfest Tuesday 8 June 8pm-11pm Central Time, Pat OBriens Lets face it, going to a technical conference is good for your career but its not a whole lot of fun. You need an outlet. You need to have fun. Cheap beer and lousy pizza (with a New Orleans twist) We are bringing back GeekFest! Join us at Pat OBriens for a night of gumbo, beer and hurricanes. There are limited invitations available, so what are you waiting for? If you are attending the TechEd 2010 conference and you are a developer, you are invited. To register pick up your "duck" ticket (and wristband) in the TechEd Technical Learning Center (TLC) at the Developer Tools & Languages (DEV) information desk. You must have wristband to get in. Tuesday, June 8th from 8pm 11pm Pat OBriens New Orleans 624 Bourbon Street New Orleans, LA 70130 Closing Party at Mardi Gras World Thursday 10 June 730pm-10pm Central Time Join us for the Closing Party and enjoy great food, beverages, and the excitement of New Orleans at Mardi Gras World. The colors, the lights, the music, the joie de vivreits all here.  Learn more >> Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Free hosting solution for a very low-traffic website [duplicate]

  - by user966939

  This question already has an answer here: How to find web hosting that meets my requirements? 4 answers I run a very low-traffic website (about 40 users, basically all of which are daily active on the site). I don't see it changing anytime soon either, as there is no way to sign up on the site right now. Until now I have just been using a sub-directory on a friend's host (shared), to host the web site. But in only a few weeks from now, his subscription will end, and he has no plans on renewing it. So of course this means I'll have to move on to something else. But I don't think I'll find someone who'd be willing to share a... shared host with me again. And besides, the software used on that server is ancient (PHP 4.4.9 + MySQL 4.1.22). There's one obvious solution that comes to mind, I guess: choose a better host and pay for it myself. The problem here is that I have no real fixed income, as I'm only a student. So even if the pricing is dirt cheap, I just can't be certain I will be able to afford it, every single month, for... at least 2 years maybe? So I've looked at free hosting solutions instead. The least requirement I had was that it was completely free of ads. But no matter where I look, I always find something in a corner or two ("what can you expect from a free host?" - yeah I know, but I guess it was worth a shot). For example, on Byethost (one of the free hosts I tried), if you trigger a PHP error while error reporting is set to E_ALL, you will spawn some hidden ad... Besides Byethost, I've tried 000Webhost, x10Hosting, 2Freehosting/1Freehosting, Wink.ws, and they are only worse. Okay, I'm running low on ideas. But! What if I just hosted the site myself, on my own computer? That could work. I actually do have my computer on practically 24/7. But not really. Sometimes I need to reboot it, and sometimes we even have power outages. And what if the hardware needs an upgrade? It's not such a big deal for me if the site went down, because I know what's going on; but what about the users? If I do decide to host it myself, is there some way to show users an alternate page instead of them just seeing a generic "server not found" page in the browser when the site is not accessible? Or is there something I have been missing out on? Is there a different kind of "web hosting" solution out there that I haven't heard of? Here is what I'm really looking for: Free (as in, no costs) NO ads Bandwidth enough for a low-traffic forum with roughly 40 users (Semi-)Up-to-date PHP and MySQL (at least not older than a year) No standard (non-extension) PHP functions turned off - such as sleep() The mbstring extension is enabled Disk space: at least 5 MB At least one MySQL database Some bonus points would be: Max execution time of PHP scripts can be set Remote access to MySQL database What would be the best solution for me? Is there one?

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• TechEd 2010 Important Events

  If youll be attending TechEd in New Orleans in a couple of weeks, make sure the following are all on your calendar:   Party with Palermo TechEd 2010 Edition Sunday 6 June 2010 7:30-930pm Central Time RSVP and see who else is coming here.  The party takes place from 730pm to 930pm Central (Local) Time,  and includes a full meal, free swag, and prizes.  The event is being held at Jimmy Buffetts Margaritaville located at 1104 Decatur Street.   Developer Practices Session: DPR304 FAIL: Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices Monday 7 June 2010 4:30pm-545pm Central Time Room 276 Come to my session and hear about what NOT to do on your software project.  Hear my own and others war stories and lessons learned.  Youll laugh, youll cry, youll realize youre a much better developer than a lot of folks out there.  Heres the official description: Everybody likes to talk about best practices, tips, and tricks, but often it is by analyzing failures that we learn from our own and others' mistakes. In this session, Steve describes various anti-patterns and worst practices in software development that he has encountered in his own experience or learned about from other experts in the field, along with advice on recognizing and avoiding them. View DPR304 in TechEd Session Catalog >> Exhibition Hall Reception Monday 7 June 2010 545pm-9pm Immediately following my session, come meet the shows exhibitors, win prizes, and enjoy plenty of food and drink.  Always a good time.   Party: Geekfest Tuesday 8 June 8pm-11pm Central Time, Pat OBriens Lets face it, going to a technical conference is good for your career but its not a whole lot of fun. You need an outlet. You need to have fun. Cheap beer and lousy pizza (with a New Orleans twist) We are bringing back GeekFest! Join us at Pat OBriens for a night of gumbo, beer and hurricanes. There are limited invitations available, so what are you waiting for? If you are attending the TechEd 2010 conference and you are a developer, you are invited. To register pick up your "duck" ticket (and wristband) in the TechEd Technical Learning Center (TLC) at the Developer Tools & Languages (DEV) information desk. You must have wristband to get in. Tuesday, June 8th from 8pm 11pm Pat OBriens New Orleans 624 Bourbon Street New Orleans, LA 70130 Closing Party at Mardi Gras World Thursday 10 June 730pm-10pm Central Time Join us for the Closing Party and enjoy great food, beverages, and the excitement of New Orleans at Mardi Gras World. The colors, the lights, the music, the joie de vivreits all here.  Learn more >> Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Multitenancy in SQL Azure

  - by cibrax

  If you are building a SaaS application in Windows Azure that relies on SQL Azure, it’s probably that you will need to support multiple tenants at database level. This is short overview of the different approaches you can use for support that scenario, A different database per tenant A new database is created and assigned when a tenant is provisioned. Pros Complete isolation between tenants. All the data for a tenant lives in a database only he can access. Cons It’s not cost effective. SQL Azure databases are not cheap, and the minimum size for a database is 1GB.  You might be paying for storage that you don’t really use. A different connection pool is required per database. Updates must be replicated across all the databases You need multiple backup strategies across all the databases Multiple schemas in a database shared by all the tenants A single database is shared among all the tenants, but every tenant is assigned to a different schema and database user. Pros You only pay for a single database. Data is isolated at database level. If the credentials for one tenant is compromised, the rest of the data for the other tenants is not. Cons You need to replicate all the database objects in every schema, so the number of objects can increase indefinitely. Updates must be replicated across all the schemas. The connection pool for the database must maintain a different connection per tenant (or set of credentials) A different user is required per tenant, which is stored at server level. You have to backup that user independently. Centralizing the database access with store procedures in a database shared by all the tenants A single database is shared among all the tenants, but nobody can read the data directly from the tables. All the data operations are performed through store procedures that centralize the access to the tenant data. The store procedures contain some logic to map the database user to an specific tenant. Pros You only pay for a single database. You only have a set of objects to maintain and backup. Cons There is no real isolation. All the data for the different tenants is shared in the same tables. You can not use traditional ORM like EF code first for consuming the data. A different user is required per tenant, which is stored at server level. You have to backup that user independently. SQL Federations A single database is shared among all the tenants, but a different federation is used per tenant. A federation in few words, it’s a mechanism for horizontal scaling in SQL Azure, which basically uses the idea of logical partitions to distribute data based on certain criteria. Pros You only have a single database with multiple federations. You can use filtering in the connections to pick the right federation, so any ORM could be used to consume the data. Cons There is no real isolation at that database level. The isolation is enforced programmatically with federations.

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• A simple augmented reality application in C#

  - by Ian

  Hi All, I would like to start a personal project that will give me a lot of new concept to learn and understand. After some thought, I figured that an Augmented Reality related project will be the most beneficial for me because of the following reasons: I haven't tried interfacing a program with a live video/camera feed I haven't done any "image processing" project I haven't done any "graphics rendering" ever With that said, you can assume that I will totally suck at AR. So I'm here to ask for some advice regarding the best way to go through this. st milestone project that I am thinking of is to take a cheap webcam and read some Data Matrix using C#. nd milestone project will render some text-overlay on the feed when presented with a certain Data Matrix. rd milestone project will actually render some 3D shapes. I've searched all-around and found some nice yet advanced materials for AR: http://sites.google.com/site/augmentedrealitytestingsite/ http://soldeveloper.com/ http://www.mperfect.net/wpfAugReal/ So I came here to ask the following: Do you think my milestone is reasonable given my "deficiencies"? In order to start Milestone 1, can you give some materials that I can study? I prefer online materials. Thanks!

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• C# performance analysis- how to count CPU cycles?

  - by Lirik

  Is this a valid way to do performance analysis? I want to get nanosecond accuracy and determine the performance of typecasting: class PerformanceTest { static double last = 0.0; static List<object> numericGenericData = new List<object>(); static List<double> numericTypedData = new List<double>(); static void Main(string[] args) { double totalWithCasting = 0.0; double totalWithoutCasting = 0.0; for (double d = 0.0; d < 1000000.0; ++d) { numericGenericData.Add(d); numericTypedData.Add(d); } Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch(); for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) { stopwatch.Start(); testWithTypecasting(); stopwatch.Stop(); totalWithCasting += stopwatch.ElapsedTicks; stopwatch.Start(); testWithoutTypeCasting(); stopwatch.Stop(); totalWithoutCasting += stopwatch.ElapsedTicks; } Console.WriteLine("Avg with typecasting = {0}", (totalWithCasting/10)); Console.WriteLine("Avg without typecasting = {0}", (totalWithoutCasting/10)); Console.ReadKey(); } static void testWithTypecasting() { foreach (object o in numericGenericData) { last = ((double)o*(double)o)/200; } } static void testWithoutTypeCasting() { foreach (double d in numericTypedData) { last = (d * d)/200; } } } The output is: Avg with typecasting = 468872.3 Avg without typecasting = 501157.9 I'm a little suspicious... it looks like there is nearly no impact on the performance. Is casting really that cheap?

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• Subscription Management with Merchant Account via API

  - by Josh

  I'm researching gateways/vendors that provide the ability to create subscription based transitions for merchant accounts. In other words, I want to allow customers to signup for a subscription for a website service that charges once a month. Authorize.Net has an ARB (Automated Recurring Billing) Module. The cost is cheap, $10 a month for the service, with unlimited subscriptions, and they have an API that allows XML or SOAP access to create, update and cancel. The LARGE negative of the service is that it doesn't have elegant way to obtain the current status of a subscription. They can send a daily email with an attached CSV file, or someone can login into the site and review statuses – neither is an enterprise solution. The parent company "CyberSource" has a "Recurring Billing Service" which implies a more robust solution, including API access to subscription information. I’m currently waiting for a sales call back on costs related to the service. I also looked at PayPal's Recurring Billing Service, but that appears to require that users are redirected to the PayPal site to signup for the subscription -- again, not an an elegant solution. Does anyone know of any other vendors/gateways that offer subscription service, that meet the following criteria: Vendor/Gateway must host the credit card number and be PCI compliant Have an API that accessible via a Web Service, Post over HTTPS or SOAP Have an API that allows querying the status of subscriptions and/or the ability to query for activity since a certain date. Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

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• Are there any decent free JAVA data plotting libraries out there?

  - by Kurt W. Leucht

  On a recent JAVA project, we needed a free JAVA based real-time data plotting utility. After much searching, we found this tool called the Scientific Graphics Toolkit or SGT from NOAA. It seemed pretty robust, but we found out that it wasn't terribly configurable. Or at least not configurable enough to meet our needs. We ended up digging very deeply into the JAVA code and reverse engineering the code and changing it all around to make the plot tool look and act the way we wanted it to look and act. Of course, this killed any chance for future upgrades from NOAA. So what free or cheap JAVA based data plotting tools or libraries do you use? Followup: Thanks for the JFreeChart suggestions. I checked out their website and it looks like a very nice data charting and plotting utility. I should have made it clear in my original question that I was looking specifically to plot real-time data. I corrected my question above to make that point clear. It appears that JFreeChart support for live data is marginal at best, though. Any other suggestions out there?

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• latex list environment inside the tabular environment: extra line at top preventing alignment

  - by Usagi

  Hello good people of stackoverflow. I have a LaTeX question that is bugging me. I have been trying to get a list environment to appear correctly inside the tabular environment. So far I have gotten everything to my liking except one thing: the top of the list does not align with other entries in the table, in fact it looks like it adds one line above the list... I would like to have these lists at the top. This is what I have, a custom list environment: \newenvironment{flushemize}{ \begin{list}{$\bullet$} {\setlength{\itemsep}{1pt} \setlength{\parskip}{0pt} \setlength{\parsep}{0pt} \setlength{\partopsep}{0pt} \setlength{\topsep}{0pt} \setlength{\leftmargin}{12pt}}}{\end{list}} Renamed ragged right: \newcommand{\rr}{\raggedright} and here is my table: \begin{table}[H]\caption{Tank comparisons}\label{tab:tanks} \centering \rowcolors{2}{white}{tableShade} \begin{tabular}{p{1in}p{1.5in}p{1.5in}rr} \toprule {\bf Material} & {\bf Pros} & {\bf Cons} & {\bf Size} & {\bf Cost} \\ \midrule \rr Reinforced concrete &\rr \begin{flushemize}\item Strong \item Secure \end{flushemize}&\rr \begin{flushemize}\item Prone to leaks \item Relatively expensive to install \item Heavy \end{flushemize} & 100,000 gal & \$299,400 \\ \rr Steel & \begin{flushemize}\item Strong \item Secure \end{flushemize} & \begin{flushemize}\item Relatively expensive to install \item Heavy \item Require painting to prevent rusting \end{flushemize} & 100,000 gal & \$130,100 \\ \rr Polypropylene & \begin{flushemize}\item Easy to install \item Mobile \item Inexpensive \item Prefabricated \end{flushemize} & \begin{flushemize}\item Relatively insecure \item Max size available 10,000 gal \end{flushemize} & 10,000 gal & \$5,000 \\ \rr Wood & \begin{flushemize}\item Easy to install \item Mobile \item Cheap to install \end{flushemize} & \begin{flushemize}\item Prone to rot \item Must remain full once constructed \end{flushemize} & 100,000 gal & \$86,300\\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} \end{table} Thank you for any advice :)

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• Replace Temp with Query

  - by student

  The Replace Temp with Query refactoring method is recommended quite widely now but seems to be very inefficient for very little gain. The method from the Martin Fowler's site gives the following example: Extract the expression into a method. Replace all references to the temp with the expression. The new method can then be used in other methods. double basePrice = _quantity * _itemPrice; if (basePrice > 1000) return basePrice * 0.95; else return basePrice * 0.98; becomes if (basePrice() > 1000) return basePrice() * 0.95; else return basePrice() * 0.98; double basePrice() { return _quantity * _itemPrice; } Why is this a good idea? surely it means the calculation is needlessly repeated and you have the overhead of calling a function. I know CPU cycles are cheap but throwing them away like this seems careless? Am I missing something?

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• Source Control - XCode - Visual Studio 2005/2008 / 2010

  - by Mick Walker

  My apologies if this has been asked before, I wasnt quite sure if this question should be asked on a programming forum, as it more relates to programming environment than a particular technology, so please accept my (double) appologies if I am posting this in the wrong place, my logic in this case was if it effects the code I write, then this is the place for it. At home, I do a lot of my development on a Mac Pro, I do development for the Mac, iPhone and Windows on this machine (Xcode & Visual Studio - (multiple versions installed in bootcamp, but generally I run it via Parallels)). When visiting a client, I have a similar setup, but on my MacBook Pro. What I want is a source control solution to install on the Mac Pro, that will support both XCode and multiple versions of visual studio, so that when I visit a client, I can simply grab the latest copy from source control via the MacBook Pro. Whilst visiting the client, he / she may suggest changes, and minor ones I would tend to make on site, so I need the ability to merge any modified code back into the trunk of the project / solution when I return home. At the moment, I am using no source control at all, and rely on simply coping folders and overwriting them when I return from a client- thats my 'merge'!!! I was wondering if anyone had any ideas of a source provider I could use, which would support both Windows and Mac development environments, and is cheap (free would be better).

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• Majordomo/Mailman - Yahoo/Google Groups

  - by tom smith

  Hi. Not an app question, but thought that I might ask here anyway! The responses might help someone. I've got an app where we're going to be dealing with 5000-10000 people in a group/pool. Periodically, different subsets of people will break off in their own group. I'm looking for thoughts on how to manage/approach this situation. (For now, all of this is being managed on a few servers in the garage, with dynamic IP) I've looked into the Yahoo/google groups, and they seem to be reasonable. The primary issue that I see with this approach, is that I don't have a good way of quickly/easily alowing a subset of the group to form their own group for a given project. This kind of function is critical. The upside to this though, I wouldn't have to really set anything up. And the hosted groups could send emails to the user all day along, without running into cap/bandwidth limits The other approach is a managed list, like mailman/majordomo. This approach appears to be more flexible, and looks like ti could be modified to handle the quick creation of lists, allowing users to quickly be assigned to different lists on the fly.. The downside, I'd have to run my own Mailman/Majordomo instance, as well as the associated mail server. Or I could look at possibly using one of the hosted service.. But this is for a project on the cheap, so we're really trying to keep costs down. Thoughts/Comments/Pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance -tom

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• How to do fixed price quote for design sessions?

  - by Shaul

  Normally when I do a system for a customer, I do design sessions on an hourly rate and then come out with a fixed price quotation for the full system development. Now this customer has thrown me a curveball: he doesn't want an hourly rate for design, either - he wants me to quote a fixed price to do all the design, too! Not that he's trying to cheap out, but he doesn't want to be in a situation where the longer design stretches out, the more he has to pay - and I can understand that. For the business layer it was actually not too difficult to work with this, because from his original functional spec I got a good idea of what the core business objects were, and in our design agreement I defined several objects which would be covered by a fixed design price; if any new non-trivial objects were discovered, they would be considered variances, and those would be billed on an hourly rate. So far so good. But when it comes to the UI, things start getting a lot more woolly. How many screens will there be? Don't know yet. What's going to be on each screen? Don't know yet. All we know is that it's a "dashboard" type of system, and there will be a lot of visual reporting involved e.g. gauges, graphs, etc. So maybe make it fixed price per screen design? Not a great definition; he might say that everything is going to be on one screen. Maybe a price per "visual report" design, including ability to slice & dice? Again not so easy - it might be that the entire system is just one report, and all the intelligence is going to go into how to present that segmentation. Anyone have any ideas how to do a fixed price quotation for a UI design like this?

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• Anyone got a nifty credit expiry algorithm?

  - by garethkeenan

  Our website uses a credit system to allow users to purchase inexpensive digital goods (eg. photos). We use credits, rather than asking the user to pay for items individually, because the items are cheap and we are trying to keep our credit-card/PayPal overhead low. Because we aren't a bank, we have to expire credits after a certain amount of time. We expire deposit credits after a year, but other types of credits (bonuses, prizes, refunds) may have a different shelf-life. When a buyer buys an item, we spend the credit that is going to expire first. Our current system keeps track of every deposit by storing the original value and the remainder to be spent. We keep a list of all purchases as well, of course. I am currently moving to a system which is much more like a traditional double-entry accounting system. A deposit will create a ledger item, increasing the user's 'spending' account balance. Every purchase will also create a ledger item, decreasing the user's 'spending' account balance. The new system has running balances, while the old system does not, which greatly improves our ability to find problems and do reconciliations. We do not want to use the old system of keeping a 'remainder' value attached to each deposit record because it is inefficient to replay a user's activities to calculate what the remainder of each deposit is over time (for the user's statement). So, after all of this verbose introduction, my question is "Does anyone else out there have a similar system of expiring credits?" If you could describe how you calculate expired credits it would be a great help. If all expired credits had the exact same shelf life, we would be able to calculate the expired amount using: Total Deposits - Total Spending - Deposits Not Due To Expire = Amount to Expire However, because deposits can have different shelf lives, this formula does not work because more than one deposit can be partially spent at any given time.

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• Reporting System architecture for better performance

  - by pauloya

  Hi, We have a product that runs Sql Server Express 2005 and uses mainly ASP.NET. The database has around 200 tables, with a few (4 or 5) that can grow from 300 to 5000 rows per day and keep a history of 5 years, so they can grow to have 10 million rows. We have built a reporting platform, that allows customers to build reports based on templates, fields and filters. We face performance problems almost since the beginning, we try to keep reports display under 10 seconds but some of them go up to 25 seconds (specially on those customers with long history). We keep checking indexes and trying to improve the queries but we get the feeling that there's only so much we can do. Off course the fact that the queries are generated dynamically doesn't help with the optimization. We also added a few tables that keep redundant data, but then we have the added problem of maintaining this data up to date, and also Sql Express has a limit on the size of databases. We are now facing a point where we have to decide if we want to give up real time reports, or maybe cut the history to be able to have better performance. I would like to ask what is the recommended approach for this kind of systems. Also, should we start looking for third party tools/platforms? I know OLAP can be an option but can we make it work on Sql Server Express, or at least with a license that is cheap enough to distribute to thousands of deployments? Thanks

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• how to know location of return address on stack c/c++

  - by Dr Deo

  i have been reading about a function that can overwrite its return address. void foo(const char* input) { char buf[10]; //What? No extra arguments supplied to printf? //It's a cheap trick to view the stack 8-) //We'll see this trick again when we look at format strings. printf("My stack looks like:\n%p\n%p\n%p\n%p\n%p\n% p\n\n"); //%p ie expect pointers //Pass the user input straight to secure code public enemy #1. strcpy(buf, input); printf("%s\n", buf); printf("Now the stack looks like:\n%p\n%p\n%p\n%p\n%p\n%p\n\n"); } It was sugggested that this is how the stack would look like Address of foo = 00401000 My stack looks like: 00000000 00000000 7FFDF000 0012FF80 0040108A <-- We want to overwrite the return address for foo. 00410EDE Question: -. Why did the author arbitrarily choose the second last value as the return address of foo()? -. Are values added to the stack from the bottom or from the top? apart from the function return address, what are the other values i apparently see on the stack? ie why isn't it filled with zeros Thanks.

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• Cross-browser padding/margins

  - by Lucifer

  Hi All, I was wondering if you could give me some helpful hints on how to correct this issue? I have a main menu on my site, the code for it is as follows: li:hover { background-color: #222222; padding-top: 8px; padding-bottom: 9px; } And here's a demo of what it actually looks like: The problem is that when I hover over a menu option (li), the background appears, but it overflows to the outside of the menu's background, and makes it look really dodgy/crap/cheap/yuck! Note that (obviously) when I change the padding to make it display correctly in these browsers, it appears too small in height in IE! So I'm screwed either way. How can I make little imperfections like this look the same in all browsers? Update: HTML (The menu): <ul class="menu"> <li class="currentPage" href="index.php"><a>Home</a></li> <li><a href="services.php">Services</a></li> <li><a href="support.php">Support</a></li> <li><a href="contact.php">Contact Us</a></li> <li><a href="myaccount/" class="myaccount">My Account</a></li> </ul> The CSS: .menu { margin-top: 5px; margin-right: 5px; width: 345px; float: right; } li { font-size: 9pt; color: whitesmoke; padding-left: 6px; padding-right: 8px; display: inline; list-style: none; } li:hover { background-color: #222222; padding-top: 8px; padding-bottom: 9px; }

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• Can I use Ninject ConstructorArguments with strong naming?

  - by stiank81

  Well, I don't know if "strong naming" is the right term, but what I want to do is as follows. Currently I use ConstructorArgument like e.g. this: public class Ninja { private readonly IWeapon _weapon; private readonly string _name; public Ninja(string name, IWeapon weapon) { _weapon = weapon; _name = name; } // ..more code.. } public void SomeFunction() { var kernel = new StandardKernel(); kernel.Bind<IWeapon>().To<Sword>(); var ninja = ninject.Get<Ninja>(new ConstructorArgument("name", "Lee")); } Now, if I rename the parameter "name" (e.g. using ReSharper) the ConstructorArgument won't update, and I will get a runtime error when creating the Ninja. To fix this I need to manually find all places I specify this parameter through a ConstructorArgument and update it. No good, and I'm doomed to fail at some point even though I have good test coverage. Renaming should be a cheap operation. Is there any way I can make a reference to the parameter instead - such that it is updated when I rename the parameter?

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• DAL Layer : EF 4.0 or Normal Data access layer with Stored Procedure

  - by Harryboy

  Hello Experts, Application : I am working on one mid-large size application which will be used as a product, we need to decide on our DAL layer. Application UI is in Silverlight and DAL layer is going to be behind service layer. We are also moving ahead with domain model, so our DB tables and domain classes are not having same structure. So patterns like Data Mapper and Repository will definitely come into picture. I need to design DAL Layer considering below mentioned factors in priority manner Speed of Development with above average performance Maintenance Future support and stability of the technology Performance Limitation : 1) As we need to strictly go ahead with microsoft, we can not use NHibernate or any other ORM except EF 4.0 2) We can use any code generation tool (Should be Open source or very cheap) but it should only generate code in .Net, so there would not be any licensing issue on per copy basis. Questions I read so many articles about EF 4.0, on outset it looks like that it is still lacking in features from NHibernate but it is considerably better then EF 1.0 So, Do you people feel that we should go ahead with EF 4.0 or we should stick to ADO .Net and use any code geneartion tool like code smith or any other you feel best Also i need to answer questions like what time it will take to port application from EF 4.0 to ADO .Net if in future we stuck up with EF 4.0 for some features or we are having serious performance issue. In reverse case if we go ahead and choose ADO .Net then what time it will take to swith to EF 4.0 Lastly..as i was going through the article i found the code only approach (with POCO classes) seems to be best suited for our requirement as switching is really easy from one technology to other. Please share your thoughts on the same and please guide on the above questions

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• Any HTTP proxies with explicit, configurable support for request/response buffering and delayed conn

  - by Carlos Carrasco

  When dealing with mobile clients it is very common to have multisecond delays during the transmission of HTTP requests. If you are serving pages or services out of a prefork Apache the child processes will be tied up for seconds serving a single mobile client, even if your app server logic is done in 5ms. I am looking for a HTTP server, balancer or proxy server that supports the following: A request arrives to the proxy. The proxy starts buffering in RAM or in disk the request, including headers and POST/PUT bodies. The proxy DOES NOT open a connection to the backend server. This is probably the most important part. The proxy server stops buffering the request when: A size limit has been reached (say, 4KB), or The request has been received completely, headers and body Only now, with (part of) the request in memory, a connection is opened to the backend and the request is relayed. The backend sends back the response. Again the proxy server starts buffering it immediately (up to a more generous size, say 64KB.) Since the proxy has a big enough buffer the backend response is stored completely in the proxy server in a matter of miliseconds, and the backend process/thread is free to process more requests. The backend connection is immediately closed. The proxy sends back the response to the mobile client, as fast or as slow as it is capable of, without having a connection to the backend tying up resources. I am fairly sure you can do 4-6 with Squid, and nginx appears to support 1-3 (and looks like fairly unique in this respect). My question is: is there any proxy server that empathizes these buffering and not-opening-connections-until-ready capabilities? Maybe there is just a bit of Apache config-fu that makes this buffering behaviour trivial? Any of them that it is not a dinosaur like Squid and that supports a lean single-process, asynchronous, event-based execution model? (Siderant: I would be using nginx but it doesn't support chunked POST bodies, making it useless for serving stuff to mobile clients. Yes cheap 50$ handsets love chunked POSTs... sigh)

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