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• Step Away From That Computer! You’re Not Qualified to Use It!

  - by Michael Sorens

  Most things tend to come with warnings and careful instructions these days, but sadly not one of the most ubiquitous appliances of all, your computer. If a chainsaw is missing its instructions, you’re well advised not to use it, even though you probably know roughly how it’s supposed to work. I confess, there are days when I feel the same way about computers. Long ago, during the renaissance of the computer age, it was possible to know everything about computers. But today, it is challenging to be fully knowledgeable even in one small area, and most people aren’t as savvy as they like to think. And, if I may borrow from Edwin Abbott Abbott’s classic Flatland, that includes me. And you. Need an example of what I mean? Take a look at almost any recent month’s batch of Windows updates. Just two quick questions for you: Do you need all of those updates? Is it safe to install all of those updates? I do software design and development for a living on Windows and the .NET platform, but I will be quite candid: I often have little clue what the heck some of those updates are going to do or why they are needed. So, if you do not know why they are needed or what they do, how do you know if they are safe? Of course, one can sidestep both questions by accepting Microsoft’s recommended Windows Update setting of “install updates automatically”. That leads you to infer that you need all of them (which is not always the case) and, more significantly, that they are safe. Quite safe. Ah, lest reality intrude upon such a pretty picture! Sadly, there is no such thing as risk-free software installation, and payloads from Windows Update are no exception. Earlier this year, a Windows Secrets Patch Watch article touted this headline: Keep this troublesome kernel update on hold. It discusses KB 2862330, a security update originally published more than 4 months earlier, and yet the article still recommends not installing it! Most people simply do not have the time, resources, or interest, to go about figuring out which updates to install or postpone or skip for safety reasons. Windows Secrets Patch Watch is the best service I have encountered for getting advice, but it is still no panacea and using the service effectively requires a degree of computer literacy that I still think is beyond a good number of people. Which brings us full circle: Step Away From That Computer! You’re Not Qualified to Use It!

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• Advice Needed: Developers blocked by waiting on code to merge from another branch using GitFlow

  - by fogwolf

  Our team just made the switch from FogBugz & Kiln/Mercurial to Jira & Stash/Git. We are using the Git Flow model for branching, adding subtask branches off of feature branches (relating to Jira subtasks of Jira features). We are using Stash to assign a reviewer when we create a pull request to merge back into the parent branch (usually develop but for subtasks back into the feature branch). The problem we're finding is that even with the best planning and breakdown of feature cases, when multiple developers are working together on the same feature, say on the front-end and back-end, if they are working on interdependent code that is in separate branches one developer ends up blocking the other. We've tried pulling between each others' branches as we develop. We've also tried creating local integration branches each developer can pull from multiple branches to test the integration as they develop. Finally, and this seems to work possibly the best for us so far, though with a bit more overhead, we have tried creating an integration branch off of the feature branch right off the bat. When a subtask branch (off of the feature branch) is ready for a pull request and code review, we also manually merge those change sets into this feature integration branch. Then all interested developers are able to pull from that integration branch into other dependent subtask branches. This prevents anyone from waiting for any branch they are dependent upon to pass code review. I know this isn't necessarily a Git issue - it has to do with working on interdependent code in multiple branches, mixed with our own work process and culture. If we didn't have the strict code-review policy for develop (true integration branch) then developer 1 could merge to develop for developer 2 to pull from. Another complication is that we are also required to do some preliminary testing as part of the code review process before handing the feature off to QA.This means that even if front-end developer 1 is pulling directly from back-end developer 2's branch as they go, if back-end developer 2 finishes and his/her pull request is sitting in code review for a week, then front-end developer 2 technically can't create his pull request/code review because his/her code reviewer can't test because back-end developer 2's code hasn't been merged into develop yet. Bottom line is we're finding ourselves in a much more serial rather than parallel approach in these instance, depending on which route we go, and would like to find a process to use to avoid this. Last thing I'll mention is we realize by sharing code across branches that haven't been code reviewed and finalized yet we are in essence using the beta code of others. To a certain extent I don't think we can avoid that and are willing to accept that to a degree. Anyway, any ideas, input, etc... greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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• links for 2011-02-09

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Tech Cast Live - Java and Oracle, One Year Later - February 15th 10AM PST (Oracle Technology Network Blog (aka TechBlog)) (tags: ping.fm) The impact of IT decisions on organizational culture - O'Reilly Radar "While I believe we recognize the limiting qualities of IT decisions, I'd suggest we've insufficiently studied the degree to which those decisions in aggregate can have a large influence on organizational culture." - Jonathan Reichental, Ph.D. (tags: ITgovernance organizationalculture enterprisearchitecture) Women "computers" of World War II - Boing Boing "Before it came to mean laptops, PCs, or even room-sized machines, "computer" was what you called a person who did mathematical calculations for a living. That job was vitally important during World War II. And, like many vital jobs on the homefront, it was turned over to women..." (tags: computers history worldwar2) InfoQ: Book Excerpt and Interview: 100 SOA Questions Asked and Answered A new "100 SOA Questions Asked and Answered " book by Kerrie Holley and Ali Arsanjani provides a deep insight into SOA covering a wide spectrum of topics from SOA basics to its business and organizational impact, to SOA methods and architecture to SOA future. InfoQ spoke with Kerrie Holley and Ali Arsanjani about their book. (tags: ping.fm) @myfear: GlassFish City - Another view onto your favorite application server Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele runs GlassFish through CodeCity. (tags: oracle otn oracleace glassfish codecity) The Ron Batra Blog: Technology Whispers: Upcoming Presentations Oracle ACE Director Ron Batra shares details on upcoming presentations at OAUG events in the US and Dubai. (tags: oaug c11 oracle otn oracleace) Free ADF Training Event in the UK (Grant Ronald's Blog) Gobsmack survivor Grant Ronald with the details on an Oracle ADF training session he'll conduct on 11 May 2011 at the UK Oracle office in Reading. (tags: oracle otn adf) Java Spotlight Episode 16 - Richar Bair - The Java Spotlight Podcast The latest Java Spotlight podcast features an interview with Java Client Architect Richar Bair. (tags: oracle java podcast) Stewart Bryson: OBIEE 11g Migrations "[Rittman Mead's] Mark and Venkat have covered OBIEE migration methodologies in the past (see here, here and here), but I decided to throw my hat in the ring on the subject, as I had to develop a methodology for a client recently and wanted to share my experiences." - Stewart Bryson (tags: oracle otn obiee businessintelligence) Dr. Chris Harding: The golden thread of interoperability | Open Group Blog "There are so many things going on at every Conference by The Open Group that it is impossible to keep track of all of them, and this week’s Conference in San Diego, California, is no exception. The main themes are Cybersecurity, Enterprise Architecture, SOA and Cloud Computing." - Dr. Chris Harding (tags: entarch soa interoperability cloud) Marc Kelderman: OSB: Creating an Asynchronous / Fire-Forget WebService Call Creating a fire-and-forget call via OSB is simple, according to solution architect Marc Kelderman. "The trick is to send NO response back to the caller, only an HTTP response code, 200 or any other." (tags: oracle otn servicebus)

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• Au revoir, Python?

  - by GuySmiley

  I'm an ex-C++ programmer who's recently discovered (and fallen head-over-heels with) Python. I've taken some time to become reasonably fluent in Python, but I've encountered some troubling realities that may lead me to drop it as my language of choice, at least for the time being. I'm writing this in the hopes that someone out there can talk me out of it by convincing me that my concerns are easily circumvented within the bounds of the python universe. I picked up python while looking for a single flexible language that will allow me to build end-to-end working systems quickly on a variety of platforms. These include: - web services - mobile apps - cross-platform client apps for PC Development speed is more of a priority at the time-being than execution speed. However, in order to improve performance over time without requiring major re-writes or architectural changes I think it's imperative to be able to interface easily with Java. That way, I can use Java to optimize specific components as the application scales, without throwing away any code. As far as I can tell, my requirement for an enterprise-capable, platform-independent, fast language with a large developer base means it would have to be Java. .NET or C++ would not cut it due to their respective limitations. Also Java is clearly de rigeur for most mobile platforms. Unfortunately, tragically, there doesn't seem to be a good way to meet all these demands. Jython seems to be what I'm looking for in principle, except that it appears to be practically dead, with no one developing, supporting, or using it to any great degree. And also Jython seems too married to the Java libraries, as you can't use many of the CPython standard libraries with it, which has a major impact on the code you end up writing. The only other option that I can see is to use JPype wrapped in marshalling classes, which may work although it seems like a pain and I wonder if it would be worth it in the long run. On the other hand, everything I'm looking for seems to be readily available by using JRuby, which seems to be much better supported. As things stand, I think this is my best option. I'm sad about this because I absolutely love everything about Python, including the syntax. The perl-like constructs in Ruby just feel like such a step backwards to me in terms of readability, but at the end of the day most of the benefits of python are available in Ruby as well. So I ask you - am I missing something here? Much of what I've said is based on what I've read, so is this summary of the current landscape accurate, or is there some magical solution to the Python-Java divide that will snuff these concerns and allow me to comfortably stay in my happy Python place?

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• XNA 2D line-of-sight check

  - by bionicOnion

  I'm working on a top-down shooter in XNA, and I need to implement line-of-sight checking. I've come up with a solution that seems to work, but I get the nagging feeling that it won't be efficient enough to do every frame for multiple calls (the game already hiccups slightly at about 10 calls per frame). The code is below, but my general plan was to create a series of rectangles with a width and height of zero to act as points along the sight line, and then check to see if any of these rectangles intersects a ClutterObject (an interface I defined for things like walls or other obstacles) after first screening for any that can't possibly be in the line of sight (i.e. behind the viewer) or are too far away (a concession I made for efficiency). public static bool LOSCheck(Vector2 pos1, Vector2 pos2) { Vector2 currentPos = pos1; Vector2 perMove = (pos2 - pos1); perMove.Normalize(); HashSet<ClutterObject> clutter = new HashSet<ClutterObject>(); foreach (Room r in map.GetRooms()) { if (r != null) { foreach (ClutterObject c in r.GetClutter()) { if (c != null &&!(c.GetRectangle().X * perMove.X < 0) && !(c.GetRectangle().Y * perMove.Y < 0)) { Vector2 cVector = new Vector2(c.GetRectangle().X, c.GetRectangle().Y); if ((cVector - pos1).Length() < 1500) clutter.Add(c); } } } } while (currentPos != pos2 && ((currentPos - pos1).Length() < 1500)) { Rectangle position = new Rectangle((int)currentPos.X, (int)currentPos.Y, 0, 0); foreach (ClutterObject c in clutter) { if (position.Intersects(c.GetRectangle())) return false; } currentPos += perMove; } return true; } I'm sure that there's a better way to do this (or at least a way to make this method more efficient), but I'm not too used to XNA yet, so I figured it couldn't hurt to bring it here. At the very least, is there an efficient to determine which objects may be in front of the viewer with greater precision than the rather broad 90 degree window I've given myself?

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• A Quick HLSL Question (How to modify some HLSL code)

  - by electroflame

  Thanks for wanting to help! I'm trying to create a circular, repeating ring (that moves outward) on a texture. I've achieved this, to a degree, with the following code: float distance = length(inTex - in_ShipCenter); float time = in_Time; ///* Simple distance/time combination */ float2 colorIndex = float2(distance - time, .3); float4 shipColor = tex2D(BaseTexture, inTex); float4 ringColor = tex2D(ringTexture, colorIndex); float4 finalColor; finalColor.rgb = (shipColor.rgb) + (ringColor.rgb); finalColor.a = shipColor.a; // Use the base texture's alpha (transparency). return finalColor; This works, and works how I want it to. The ring moves outward from the center of the texture at a steady rate, and is constrained to the edges of the base texture (i.e. it won't continue past an edge). However, there are a few issues with it that I would like some help on, though. They are: By combining the color additively (when I set finalColor.rgb), it makes the resulting ring color much lighter than I want (which, is pretty much the definition of additive blending, but I don't really want additive blending in this case). I would really like to be able to pass in the color that I want the ring to be. Currently, I have to pass in a texture that contains the color of the ring, but I think that doing it that way is kind of wasteful and overly-cumbersome. I know that I'm probably being an idiot over this, so I greatly appreciate the help. Some other (possibly relevant) information: I'm using XNA. I'm applying this by providing it to a SpriteBatch (as an Effect). The SpriteBatch is using BlendState.NonPremultiplied. Thanks in advance! EDIT: Thanks for the answers thus far, as they've helped me get a better grasp of the color issue. However, I'm still unsure of how to pass a color in and not use a texture. i.e. Can I create a tex2D by using a float4 instead of a texture? Or can I make a texture from a float4 and pass the texture in to the tex2D? DOUBLE EDIT: Here's some example pictures: With the effect off: With the effect on: With the effect on, but with the color weighting set to full: As you can see, the color weighting makes the base texture completely black (The background is black, so it looks transparent). You can also see the red it's supposed to be, and then the white-ish it really is when blended additively.

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: College of American Pathologists

  - by me

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution Summary College of American Pathologists Goes Live with OracleWebCenter - Imaging, AP Invoice Automation, and EBS Managed Attachment with Support for Imaging ContentThe College of American Pathologists (CAP), the leading organization of board-certified pathologists serving more then 18,000 physician members, 7,000 laboratories are accredited by the CAP, and approximately 22,000 laboratories are enrolled in the College’s proficiency testing programs. The business objective was to content-enable their Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) enterprise application by combining the best of Imaging and Manage Attachment functionality providing a unique opportunity for the business to have unprecedented access to both structure and unstructured content from within their enterprise application. The solution improves customer services turnaround time, provides better compliance and improves maintenance and management of the technology infrastructure. Company OverviewThe College of American Pathologists (CAP), celebrating 50 years as the gold standard in laboratory accreditation, is a medical society serving more than 17,000 physician members and the global laboratory community. It is the world’s largest association composed exclusively of board certified pathologists and is the worldwide leader in laboratory quality assurance. The College advocates accountable, high-quality, and cost-effective patient care. The more than 17,000 pathologist members of the College of American Pathologists represent board-certified pathologists and pathologists in training worldwide. More than 7,000 laboratories are accredited by the CAP, and approximately 23,000 laboratories are enrolled in the College’s proficiency testing programs.  Business ChallengesThe CAP business objective was to content-enable their Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) enterprise application by combining the best of Imaging and Manage Attachment functionality providing a unique opportunity for the business to have unprecedented access to both structure and unstructured content from within their enterprise application.  Bring more flexibility to systems and programs in order to adapt quickly Get a 360 degree view of the customer Reduce cost of running the business Solution DeployedWith the help of Oracle Consulting, the customer implemented Oracle WebCenter Content as the centralized E-Business Suite Document Repository.  The solution enables to capture, present and manage all unstructured content (PDFs,word processing documents, scanned images, etc.) related to Oracle E-Business Suite transactions and exposing the related content using the familiar EBS User Interface. Business ResultsThe CAP achieved following benefits from the implemented solution: Managed Attachment Solution Align with strategic Oracle Fusion Middleware platform Integrate with the CAP existing data capture capabilities Single user interface provided by the Managed Attachment solution for all content Better compliance and improved collaboration  Account Payables Invoice Processing Imaging Solution Automated invoice management eliminating dependency on paper materials and improving compliance, collaboration and accuracy A single repository to house and secure scanned invoices and all supplemental documents Greater management visibility of invoice entry process Additional Information CAP OpenWorld Presentation Oracle WebCenter Content Oracle Webcenter Capture Oracle WebCenter Imaging Oracle  Consulting

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• Characteristics of a Web service that promote reusability and change

  Characteristics of a Web service that promote reusability and change:  Standardized Data Exchange Formats (XML, JSON) Standardized communication protocols (Soap, Rest) Promotes Loosely Coupled Systems  Standardized Data Exchange Formats (XML, JSON) XML W3.org defines Extensible Markup Language (XML) as a simplistic text format derived from SGML. XML was designed to solve challenges found in large-scale electronic publishing. In addition,  XML is playing an important role in the exchange of data primarily focusing on data exchange on the web. JSON JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a human-readable text-based standard designed for data interchange. This format is used for serializing and transmitting data over a network connection in a structured format. The primary use of JSON is to transmit data between a server and web application. JSON is an alternative to XML. Standardized communication protocols (Soap, Rest) Soap W3Scools.com defines SOAP as a simple XML-based protocol. This protocol lets applications exchange data over HTTP.  SOAP provides a way to communicate between applications running on different operating systems, with different technologies and programming languages. Rest In 2007, Stefan Tilkov defines Representational State Transfer (REST) as a set of principles that outlines how Web standards are supposed to be used.  Using REST in an application will ensure that it exploits the Web’s architecture to its benefit. Promotes Loosely Coupled Systems “Loose coupling as an approach to interconnecting the components in a system or network so that those components, also called elements, depend on each other to the least extent practicable. Coupling refers to the degree of direct knowledge that one element has of another.” (TechTarget.com, 2007) “Loosely coupled system can be easily broken down into definable elements. The extent of coupling in a system can be measured by mapping the maximum number of element changes that can occur without adverse effects. Examples of such changes include adding elements, removing elements, renaming elements, reconfiguring elements, modifying internal element characteristics and rearranging the way in which elements are interconnected.” (TechTarget.com, 2007) References: W3C. (2011). Extensible Markup Language (XML). Retrieved from W3.org: http://www.w3.org/XML/ W3Scools.com. (2011). SOAP Introduction. Retrieved from W3Scools.com: http://www.w3schools.com/soap/soap_intro.asp Tilkov, Stefan. (2007). A Brief Introduction to REST. Retrieved from Infoq.com: http://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-introduction TechTarget.com. (2011). loose coupling. Retrieved from TechTarget.com: http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/definition/loose-coupling

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Big Data

  - by Clint Edmonson

  As the name implies, what we’re talking about here is the explosion of electronic data that comes from huge volumes of transactions, devices, and sensors being captured by businesses today. This data often comes in unstructured formats and/or too fast for us to effectively process in real time. Collectively, we call these the 4 big data V’s: Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Variability. These qualities make this type of data best managed by NoSQL systems like Hadoop, rather than by conventional Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). We know that there are patterns hidden inside this data that might provide competitive insight into market trends.  The key is knowing when and how to leverage these “No SQL” tools combined with traditional business such as SQL-based relational databases and warehouses and other business intelligence tools. Drivers Petabyte scale data collection and storage Business intelligence and insight Solution The sketch below shows one of many big data solutions using Hadoop’s unique highly scalable storage and parallel processing capabilities combined with Microsoft Office’s Business Intelligence Components to access the data in the cluster. Ingredients Hadoop – this big data industry heavyweight provides both large scale data storage infrastructure and a highly parallelized map-reduce processing engine to crunch through the data efficiently. Here are the key pieces of the environment: Pig - a platform for analyzing large data sets that consists of a high-level language for expressing data analysis programs, coupled with infrastructure for evaluating these programs. Mahout - a machine learning library with algorithms for clustering, classification and batch based collaborative filtering that are implemented on top of Apache Hadoop using the map/reduce paradigm. Hive - data warehouse software built on top of Apache Hadoop that facilitates querying and managing large datasets residing in distributed storage. Directly accessible to Microsoft Office and other consumers via add-ins and the Hive ODBC data driver. Pegasus - a Peta-scale graph mining system that runs in parallel, distributed manner on top of Hadoop and that provides algorithms for important graph mining tasks such as Degree, PageRank, Random Walk with Restart (RWR), Radius, and Connected Components. Sqoop - a tool designed for efficiently transferring bulk data between Apache Hadoop and structured data stores such as relational databases. Flume - a distributed, reliable, and available service for efficiently collecting, aggregating, and moving large log data amounts to HDFS. Database – directly accessible to Hadoop via the Sqoop based Microsoft SQL Server Connector for Apache Hadoop, data can be efficiently transferred to traditional relational data stores for replication, reporting, or other needs. Reporting – provides easily consumable reporting when combined with a database being fed from the Hadoop environment. Training These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. Hadoop Learning Resources (20+ tutorials and labs) Huge collection of resources for learning about all aspects of Apache Hadoop-based development on Windows Azure and the Hadoop and Windows Azure Ecosystems SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• Career Advice: finding challenging work in software and web development

  - by dianovich

  Having left my physics degree early, I started out in the realm of web design / front end web development and was able to get work quite quickly. I moved on to spend a chunk of my time on servers and gained experience with frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal, then the likes of Codeigniter and CakePHP and became comfortable in Debian-based and RHEL/CentOS environments. I ventured in to iOS development and published a couple of native apps to the app store too! I have started to spend a good deal of my time writing Python and have invested a little time in Django. The problem is, I still spend a fair chunk of my time doing more front end web development (writing markup and CSS for site themes, design-lead JavaScript, small applications for which application architecture and software engineering are relatively unimportant or too time consuming to invest in) in my job. What I want to do is really exercise the systematic/logical portion of my brain and tackle challenging problems on a daily basis. I want to have to care about big-oh running times, modularity in software, DRY, performance tuning and development methodologies. I want to work for a firm whose clients say: "Yes, these things are important to us and we'll pay you to get them right." But it is difficult: I have no formal training and am potentially becoming a jack of all trades. Not that being a jack of many trades is necessarily a bad thing, but the scope of work I find myself involved in is far too broad. And, there are only so many hours in a day outside of work! My question is: where do I go from here? I am starting to work on a few open source projects and have started to publish content to my blog. But this isn't likely to make it past the recruitment consultants and HR departments of many-a-firm. And I do not, for example, work in a team that practices agile methodologies, so how do I get work in such a team to gain experience? While I have been responsible for implementing version control and some solid working practices into our current environment, there is only so far I can go in this context. What would convince you that i'm worth taking a risk? What would convince you that i'll have caught up the other guys in your employ in next to no time?

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• Producing a smooth mesh from density cloud and marching cubes

  - by Wardy

  Based on my results from this question I decided to build myself a 3D noise map containing float values in place of my existing boolean point values. The effect I'm trying to produce is something like this, rather than typical rolling hills; which should explain the "missing cubes" in the image below. If I render my density map in normal "minecraft mode" (1 block per point in the density map) varying the size of the cube based on the value in my density map (floats in the range 0 to 1) I get something like this: I'm now happy that I can produce a density map for the marching cubes algorithm (which will need a little tweaking) but for some reason when I run it through my implementation it's not producing what I expect. My problem is that I'm getting something like the first image in this answer to my previous question, when I want to achieve the effect in the second image. Upon further investigation I can't see how marching cubes does the "move vertex along the edge" type logic (i.e. the difference between the two images on my previous link). I see that it does do some interpolation, but I'm not convinced I have the correct understanding of what I think it should do, because the code in question appears to give the same result regardless of whether I use boolean or float values. I took the code from here which is a C# implementation of marching cubes, but instead of using the MarchingCubesPrimitive I modified it to accept an object of type IDrawable, containing lists for the various collections (vertices, normals, UVs, indices), the logic was otherwise untouched. My understanding is that given a very low isovalue the accuracy level of the surface being rendered should increase, so in short "less 45 degree slows more rolling hills" type mesh output. However this isn't what I'm seeing. Have I missed something or is the implementation flawed and need to be fixed? EDIT: A little more detail on what I am seeing when I "marching cube" the data. Ok so firstly, ignore the fact that the meshes created by the chunks don't "connect" (i'll probably raise another question about this later). Then look at the shaping of the island, it's too ... square, from the voxels rendered as boxes you get the impression there's a clean soft gradual hill and yet from the image there are sharp falling edges even in the most central areas where the gradient in the first image looks the most smooth. The data is "regenerated" each time I run this so no 2 islands come out the same, and it's purely random so not based on noise, but still, how can it look so smooth in 1 image and so not smooth in the other?

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• Finding work as a college student

  - by lightburst

  I'm a 3rd year CS student. I'm currently really, really, bored and tired of cheap school programming(I go to a fairly respectable(albeit not top) university in my country, but, really, it's not MIT) so I've been thinking about getting a part-time dev job for a long while now. I'm not some hotshot programmer or anything, but "Add/Delete XYZ class objects to list" or "Do this web feature/pattern in PHP" does get old after a few semesters. I also only learned(heard?) of programming when I entered college, so the duration of me being in contact with any code is short. I can't really apply as an intern as I have not accumulated the necessary credits yet to do that so I was thinking of selling myself as a part-time dev. I still need to go to school, and don't want to subject myself to living two lives. Plus, I think I'd have better chances considering my lack of things to write on the resume. The only language I know at heart is C (I've written several pointer-oriented stuff on my freshman year, which is apparently pretty leet(for some reason), or so Joel says. That sort of boosted my morale a bit) but I've worked with several other languages only for the sake of course work such as C#/Java/PHP/ASM. My only user-worthy project was a recursive quicksort simulator I wrote for class using GTK+ that used a textbox to output the progress. I also have not taken the compiler theory class yet, or my thesis. All that being said, I wonder if any legitimate software company(big or small) would hire somebody like me considering all that. If there are companies that do accept anybody like me, would I be doing programming or maybe just be a tester or something? Would anybody hire me as a dev at all? I know I don't have much(not even a degree) but what I lack in experience, I compensate with interest? I am less interested in websites and 'management' software(no offense or anything. also, most of the places here ONLY have those), and more into 'process driven'(I'm not sure how to call it) and system software. I have my eyes on a startup that sells basically an extension of Google Drive, but I feel like I'm too 'risky' for them. Oh, I'm also 19 if that means anything. We're not K-12 so kids go to college earlier than in the US.

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• Robust line of sight test on the inside of a polygon with tolerance

  - by David Gouveia

  Foreword This is a followup to this question and the main problem I'm trying to solve. My current solution is an hack which involves inflating the polygon, and doing most calculations on the inflated polygon instead. My goal is to remove this step completely, and correctly solve the problem with calculations only. Problem Given a concave polygon and treating all of its edges as if they were walls in a level, determine whether two points A and B are in line of sight of each other, while accounting for some degree of floating point errors. I'm currently basing my solution on a series of line-segment interection tests. In other words: If any of the end points are outside the polygon, they are not in line of sight. If both end points are inside the polygon, and the line segment from A to B crosses any of the edges from the polygon, then they are not in line of sight. If both end points are inside the polygon, and the line segment from A to B does not cross any of the edges from the polygon, then they are in line of sight. But the problem is dealing correctly with all the edge cases. In particular, it must be able to deal with all the situations depicted below, where red lines are examples that should be rejected, and green lines are examples that should be accepted. I probably missed a few other situations, such as when the line segment from A to B is colinear with an edge, but one of the end points is outside the polygon. One point of particular interest is the difference between 1 and 9. In both cases, both end points are vertices of the polygon, and there are no edges being intersected, but 1 should be rejected while 9 should be accepted. How to distinguish these two? I could check some middle point within the segment to see if it falls inside or not, but it's easy to come up with situations in which it would fail. Point 7 was also pretty tricky and I had to to treat it as a special case, which checks if two points are adjacent vertices of the polygon directly. But there are also other chances of line segments being col linear with the edges of the polygon, and I'm still not entirely sure how I should handle those cases. Is there any well known solution to this problem?

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• Do we need to adopt a black-box asset our project is inheriting from its predecessor?

  - by Tom Anderson

  Our client has an eCommerce site which was developed by an in-house team, and is now showing its age. I work for a firm brought in as external contractors to build a replacement. Part of the current site is a Flash viewer applet which displays media about the product - zoom-able images, 360-degree views, movies, and so on. We need to show the same media the current site does, so we are simply reusing the viewer. The viewer is embedded on a page in the usual way, and told what media to show by means of an XML file it loads from our server, which is pretty simple for us to generate. We've got this working; it was pretty straightforward. But what else do we need to do? The thing is, as far as we're concerned, the viewer is a binary blob which is served from the client's content-distribution network. We embed it, feed it some XML, and it does its job, but we have no power over its internals. It's completely opaque to us - a black box. We can use it to do what it does, but we can't change it, so if we ever need to do something different, we're stuffed. We're building this site for the client, and when we're done, we'll hand it over for them to maintain. We won't be doing the maintenance ourselves. There's a small team within the client who are working as part of our team, and who will be the ones doing the maintenance. That team only includes one person from the team that built the old site, and it's not someone who knows the image viewer. The people who do know the image viewer are not slated to join our team when our system replaces theirs - they'll be moved to other projects. The documentation on the viewer is extremely thin, and as far as i know doesn't cover the internals at all. My worry is that if someone doesn't take some positive action, all knowledge of the internal workings of the viewer - even down to where the source code for it is - will be lost. It's possible it already has been. Is this something to worry about? If so, whose job is it to worry about it? What should they do about it once they've got worried?

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• Express your personality and potential @ Oracle

  - by jessica.ebbelaar(at)oracle.com

  Ciao, my name is Michel and I am a 24 year old guy from Forlì, Italy, working as a Business Intelligence Business Development Consultant in Rome. After I completed the Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration at Bologna University, I took a Multiple Master of Science in International Management organized by three European Universities: Bologna University (IT), ICN Business School of Nancy (FR) and Uppsala University (SE).I therefore had the chance to travel a lot and, most important, to study and meet hundreds of people from all over the world. This experience enhanced the passion I foster for international environments, different cultures and countries; not to mention the learning of foreign languages. Working for such a structured multinational as Oracle totally reflects my desire to be surrounded by a multicultural and international atmosphere, having the opportunity to grow from the personal point of view and to endlessly boost my career path. Demand Generation My department is responsible for demand generation activities. That implies, for instance, the implementation of various strategies aimed to feed the pipeline for Business Intelligence products in the Italian market. Organization of marketing campaigns, events, providing ideas or contacts to the sales force is just a few examples of our work. I like to define the role of the business development as something that translates the marketing insights into tools to increase the sales, accounting the differences amongst countries, companies and industries. Furthermore, it is an important feature to collaborate with the EMEA team to share knowledge and best practices. My initial lack of an IT background has been constantly covered by the managers and my personal mentor. The thing I appreciated most is indeed the fact I always feel to be a growing potential, becoming essential day after day. I am surprised by the trust and confidence people have on me and how they proudly encourage my personal initiative and always spur me to contribute. Career Ambitions If your ambitions are to work within an international but extremely people focused environment, to contribute to the growth of one of the most successful companies in the world, to deal with a fast-paced industry and highly competitive market, to have the chance to fully express your personality and potential and to satisfy your career ambitions over the years, then Oracle is right for YOU. Looking forward to having YOU aboard! Do you want to find out more about the open roles within Oracle? Follow us on http://campus.oracle.com.

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• How can a solo programmer become a good team player?

  - by Nick

  I've been programming (obsessively) since I was 12. I am fairly knowledgeable across the spectrum of languages out there, from assembly, to C++, to Javascript, to Haskell, Lisp, and Qi. But all of my projects have been by myself. I got my degree in chemical engineering, not CS or computer engineering, but for the first time this fall I'll be working on a large programming project with other people, and I have no clue how to prepare. I've been using Windows all of my life, but this project is going to be very unix-y, so I purchased a Mac recently in the hopes of familiarizing myself with the environment. I was fortunate to participate in a hackathon with some friends this past year -- both CS majors -- and excitingly enough, we won. But I realized as I worked with them that their workflow was very different from mine. They used Git for version control. I had never used it at the time, but I've since learned all that I can about it. They also used a lot of frameworks and libraries. I had to learn what Rails was pretty much overnight for the hackathon (on the other hand, they didn't know what lexical scoping or closures were). All of our code worked well, but they didn't understand mine, and I didn't understand theirs. I hear references to things that real programmers do on a daily basis -- unit testing, code reviews, but I only have the vaguest sense of what these are. I normally don't have many bugs in my little projects, so I have never needed a bug tracking system or tests for them. And the last thing is that it takes me a long time to understand other people's code. Variable naming conventions (that vary with each new language) are difficult (__mzkwpSomRidicAbbrev), and I find the loose coupling difficult. That's not to say I don't loosely couple things -- I think I'm quite good at it for my own work, but when I download something like the Linux kernel or the Chromium source code to look at it, I spend hours trying to figure out how all of these oddly named directories and files connect. It's a programming sin to reinvent the wheel, but I often find it's just quicker to write up the functionality myself than to spend hours dissecting some library. Obviously, people who do this for a living don't have these problems, and I'll need to get to that point myself. Question: What are some steps that I can take to begin "integrating" with everyone else? Thanks!

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• Function Folding in #PowerQuery

  - by Darren Gosbell

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/darrengosbell/archive/2014/05/16/function-folding-in-powerquery.aspxLooking at a typical Power Query query you will noticed that it's made up of a number of small steps. As an example take a look at the query I did in my previous post about joining a fact table to a slowly changing dimension. It was roughly built up of the following steps: Get all records from the fact table Get all records from the dimension table do an outer join between these two tables on the business key (resulting in an increase in the row count as there are multiple records in the dimension table for each business key) Filter out the excess rows introduced in step 3 remove extra columns that are not required in the final result set. If Power Query was to execute a query like this literally, following the same steps in the same order it would not be overly efficient. Particularly if your two source tables were quite large. However Power Query has a feature called function folding where it can take a number of these small steps and push them down to the data source. The degree of function folding that can be performed depends on the data source, As you might expect, relational data sources like SQL Server, Oracle and Teradata support folding, but so do some of the other sources like OData, Exchange and Active Directory. To explore how this works I took the data from my previous post and loaded it into a SQL database. Then I converted my Power Query expression to source it's data from that database. Below is the resulting Power Query which I edited by hand so that the whole thing can be shown in a single expression: let     SqlSource = Sql.Database("localhost", "PowerQueryTest"),     BU = SqlSource{[Schema="dbo",Item="BU"]}[Data],     Fact = SqlSource{[Schema="dbo",Item="fact"]}[Data],     Source = Table.NestedJoin(Fact,{"BU_Code"},BU,{"BU_Code"},"NewColumn"),     LeftJoin = Table.ExpandTableColumn(Source, "NewColumn"                                   , {"BU_Key", "StartDate", "EndDate"}                                   , {"BU_Key", "StartDate", "EndDate"}),     BetweenFilter = Table.SelectRows(LeftJoin, each (([Date] >= [StartDate]) and ([Date] <= [EndDate])) ),     RemovedColumns = Table.RemoveColumns(BetweenFilter,{"StartDate", "EndDate"}) in     RemovedColumns If the above query was run step by step in a literal fashion you would expect it to run two queries against the SQL database doing "SELECT * …" from both tables. However a profiler trace shows just the following single SQL query: select [_].[BU_Code],     [_].[Date],     [_].[Amount],     [_].[BU_Key] from (     select [$Outer].[BU_Code],         [$Outer].[Date],         [$Outer].[Amount],         [$Inner].[BU_Key],         [$Inner].[StartDate],         [$Inner].[EndDate]     from [dbo].[fact] as [$Outer]     left outer join     (         select [_].[BU_Key] as [BU_Key],             [_].[BU_Code] as [BU_Code2],             [_].[BU_Name] as [BU_Name],             [_].[StartDate] as [StartDate],             [_].[EndDate] as [EndDate]         from [dbo].[BU] as [_]     ) as [$Inner] on ([$Outer].[BU_Code] = [$Inner].[BU_Code2] or [$Outer].[BU_Code] is null and [$Inner].[BU_Code2] is null) ) as [_] where [_].[Date] >= [_].[StartDate] and [_].[Date] <= [_].[EndDate] The resulting query is a little strange, you can probably tell that it was generated programmatically. But if you look closely you'll notice that every single part of the Power Query formula has been pushed down to SQL Server. Power Query itself ends up just constructing the query and passing the results back to Excel, it does not do any of the data transformation steps itself. So now you can feel a bit more comfortable showing Power Query to your less technical Colleagues knowing that the tool will do it's best fold all the  small steps in Power Query down the most efficient query that it can against the source systems.

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• Cloud service and IM protocol advice, for a backend to group chat mobile app

  - by Jonathan

  Overview I’m going to develop an app on Android and iOS. It will allow users to set up group ‘chat rooms’ and talk on chat rooms set up by other users. The service needs to be highly scalable, such that it could accommodate a massive increase in users overnight (we can only dream). Chat requirements The chat protocol used should be flexible: it should allow me to determine who can view/post on ‘chat rooms’ based on certain other factors, as determined by the first poster/creator of the particular ‘chat room’. It should also allow for users to simply install the app and begin using the service, after only providing a simple nickname (which could be changed later). Chat protocol plans Having looked around I think the XMPP protocol is the best candidate. In particular the Multi-user chat extension looks like what I’ll need. Would this be most suited to my requirements, or do you know another potential solution? Cloud service I have been deciding between Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine and Windows Azure. I’m coming to the conclusion that Azure will be best, as it is easier to manage than AWS (ease of scalability will be a key factor in the design), I think it may be less restricted than GAE, plus Azure will soon have toolkits to allow easy interfacing with both Android and iOS phones. Is this the decision you would have made, or would you recommend/look into other cloud services? General project philosophy I have only recently started looking into this project’s feasibility, and am no expert on any of its aspects. So wherever possible I will leave the actual implementations to experts, i.e. choosing a higher-level cloud service, using a well-documented plugin of a, proven reliable, group chat protocol etc. My background I have some programming knowledge from a computer science degree. Main languages I’ve used have been Java and Python, but I don’t want this to affect design decisions for the project. The most appropriate languages for the task should be used, i.e. I don’t mind learning a lot of new skills (my current programming levels are relatively basic anyway). Thank you Thanks for reading, and any advice you have about any aspect would be greatly appreciated :-)

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• How to export 3D models that consist of several parts (eg. turret on a tank)?

  - by Will

  What are the standard alternatives for the mechanics of attaching turrets and such to 3D models for use in-game? I don't mean the logic, but rather the graphics aspects. My naive approach is to extend the MD2-like format that I'm using (blender-exported using a script) to include a new set of properties for a mesh that: is anchored in another 'parent' mesh. The anchor is a point and normal in the parent mesh and a point and normal in the child mesh; these will always be colinear, giving the child rotation but not translation relative to the parent point. has a normal that is aligned with a 'target'. Classically this target is the enemy that is being engaged, but it might be some other vector e.g. 'the wind' (for sails and flags (and smoke, which is a particle system but the same principle applies)) or 'upwards' (e.g. so bodies of riders bend properly when riding a horse up an incline etc). that the anchor and target alignments have maximum and minimum and a speed coeff. there is game logic for multiple turrets and on a model and deciding which engages which enemy. 'primary' and 'secondary' or 'target0' ... 'targetN' or some such annotation will be there. So to illustrate, a classic tank would be made from three meshes; a main body mesh, a turret mesh that is anchored to the top of the main body so it can spin only horizontally and a barrel mesh that is anchored to the front of the turret and can only move vertically within some bounds. And there might be a forth flag mesh on top of the turret that is aligned with 'wind' where wind is a function the engine solves that merges environment's wind angle with angle the vehicle is travelling in an velocity, or something fancy. This gives each mesh one degree of freedom relative to its parent. Things with multiple degrees of freedom can be modelled by zero-vertex connecting meshes perhaps? This is where I think the approach I outlined begins to feel inelegant, yet perhaps its still a workable system? This is why I want to know how it is done in professional games ;) Are there better approaches? Are there formats that already include this information? Is this routine?

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• How to become a good team player?

  - by Nick

  I've been programming (obsessively) since I was 12. I am fairly knowledgeable across the spectrum of languages out there, from assembly, to C++, to Javascript, to Haskell, Lisp, and Qi. But all of my projects have been by myself. I got my degree in chemical engineering, not CS or computer engineering, but for the first time this fall I'll be working on a large programming project with other people, and I have no clue how to prepare. I've been using Windows all of my life, but this project is going to be very unix-y, so I purchased a Mac recently in the hopes of familiarizing myself with the environment. I was fortunate to participate in a hackathon with some friends this past year -- both CS majors -- and excitingly enough, we won. But I realized as I worked with them that their workflow was very different from mine. They used Git for version control. I had never used it at the time, but I've since learned all that I can about it. They also used a lot of frameworks and libraries. I had to learn what Rails was pretty much overnight for the hackathon (on the other hand, they didn't know what lexical scoping or closures were). All of our code worked well, but they didn't understand mine, and I didn't understand theirs. I hear references to things that real programmers do on a daily basis -- unit testing, code reviews, but I only have the vaguest sense of what these are. I normally don't have many bugs in my little projects, so I have never needed a bug tracking system or tests for them. And the last thing is that it takes me a long time to understand other people's code. Variable naming conventions (that vary with each new language) are difficult (__mzkwpSomRidicAbbrev), and I find the loose coupling difficult. That's not to say I don't loosely couple things -- I think I'm quite good at it for my own work, but when I download something like the Linux kernel or the Chromium source code to look at it, I spend hours trying to figure out how all of these oddly named directories and files connect. It's a programming sin to reinvent the wheel, but I often find it's just quicker to write up the functionality myself than to spend hours dissecting some library. Obviously, people who do this for a living don't have these problems, and I'll need to get to that point myself. Question: What are some steps that I can take to begin "integrating" with everyone else? Thanks!

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• Legality of similar games

  - by Jamie Taylor

  This is my first question on GD.SE, and I hope it's in the right place. A little background: I'm an amateur (read: not explicitly employed to develop games, but am employed as a software developer) game developer and took a ComSci with Games Development degree. My Question: What is the legal situation/standpoint of creating a copycat title? I know that there are only N number of ways of solving a problem, and N number of ways to design a piece of software. Say that an independent developer designed a copycat game (a Tetris clone in this example) for instance, and decided to use that game to generate income for themselves as well as interest for their other products. Say the developer adds a disclaimer into the software along the lines of "based on , originally released c. by ." Are there any legal problems/grey areas with the developer in this example releasing this game, commercially? Would they run into legal problems? Should the developer in this example expect cease and desist orders or law suit claims from original publishers? Have original publishers been known to, effectively, kill independent projects because they are a little too close to older titles? I know that there was, at least, one attempt by a group of independent developers to remake Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sega shut them down. I also know of Sega shutting down development of the independent Streets of Rage Remake. I know that "but it's an old game, your honour," isn't a great legal standpoint when it comes to defending yourself. But, could an independent developer have a law suit filed against them for re-implementing an older title in a new way? I know that there are a lot of copycat versions of the older titles like Tetris available on app stores (and similar services), and that it would be very difficult for a major publisher to shut them all down. Regardless of this, is making a Tetris (or other game) copycat/clone illegal? We were taught lots of different things at University, but we never covered copyright law. I'm presuming that their thought behind it was "IF these students get jobs in games development, they wont need to know anything about the legal side of it, because their employers will have legal departments... presumably" tl;dr Is it illegal to create a clone or copycat of an old title, and make money from it?

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• Randomly generate directed graph on a grid

  - by Talon876

  I am trying to randomly generate a directed graph for the purpose of making a puzzle game similar to the ice sliding puzzles from Pokemon. This is essentially what I want to be able to randomly generate: http://bulbanews.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Crunching_the_numbers:_Graph_theory. I need to be able to limit the size of the graph in an x and y dimension. In the example given in the link, it would be restricted to an 8x4 grid. The problem I am running into is not randomly generating the graph, but randomly generating a graph, which I can properly map out in a 2d space, since I need something (like a rock) on the opposite side of a node, to make it visually make sense when you stop sliding. The problem with this is that sometimes the rock ends up in the path between two other nodes or possibly on another node itself, which causes the entire graph to become broken. After discussing the problem with a few people I know, we came to a couple of conclusions that may lead to a solution. Including the obstacles in the grid as part of the graph when constructing it. Start out with a fully filled grid and just draw a random path and delete out blocks that will make that path work. The problem then becomes figuring out which ones to delete to avoid introducing an additional, shorter path. We were also thinking a dynamic programming algorithm may be beneficial, though none of us are too skilled with creating dynamic programming algorithms from nothing. Any ideas or references about what this problem is officially called (if it's an official graph problem) would be most helpful. Here are some examples of what I have accomplished so far by just randomly placing blocks and generating the navigation graph from the chosen start/finish. The idea (as described in the previous link) is you start at the green S and want to get to the green F. You do this by moving up/down/left/right and you continue moving in the direction chosen until you hit a wall. In these pictures, grey is a wall, white is the floor, and the purple line is the minimum length from start to finish, and the black lines and grey dots represented possible paths. Here are some bad examples of randomly generated graphs: http://i.stack.imgur.com/9uaM6.png Here are some good examples of randomly generated (or hand tweaked) graphs: i.stack.imgur.com/uUGeL.png (can't post another link, sorry) I've also seemed to notice the more challenging ones when actually playing this as a puzzle are ones which have lots of high degree nodes along the minimum path.

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• Writing or extending existing emacs packages: is it worth or should I move to Netbeans/Eclipse?

  - by Andrea

  I'm finishing my master degree course in CS and I've almost become addicted to Emacs. I've used it to write in C, Latex, Java, JSP,XML, CommonLisp, Ada and other languages no other editor supported, like AMPL. I'd like to improve the packages I've been using the most or create new ones, but, in practice, I find that the implementation of Emacs leaves a lot to be desired. There are a lot of poorly-featured/poorly-maintained packages with either overlapping functionalities or obscure incompatibilities, and Elisp just seems to foster the situation by lacking the common features modern lisps have. In contrast Eclipse and Netbeans are actively improved and it does seem they can be effective for non-mainstream languages. I tried Hibachi for Ada in Eclipse and it worked well, there's CUPS for Lisp in Eclipse and LambdaBeans built using NetBeans components. On the other hand those plugins seem to be less active than their Emacs' counterparts, for example Hibachi was archived last year. What's your opinion on this? Which editor should I write extension for? EDIT: To answer Larry Coleman (see comment below): I like Emacs as a user because it is efficient both for me and the computer I'm using. It's fast and the textual interface (i.e. minibuffer) allows for quick interaction. It's solid and packages are usually small and easy to manage. If I need to correct or remove something I usually just have to change a row in my .emacs or an elisp file, or delete a directory. Eclipse plugins rely on a more complicated process that screwed my Eclipse configuration a couple of times, forcing me to do a clean reinstall. Emacs works as long as I use the basic packages. If I need something more complicated the situation gets pretty hairy. As a "power user" I think that the best I can hope for is to write a severely crippled version of the extensions I'd actually like to have; in other words, that it's not worth the trouble. I'd like to write extensions for the things I'd like to have automated in Emacs, for example project support with automated tag-table update on file writing. There are a few projects on this that lack integration, documentation, extensibility and so forth. The best one is probably CEDET, for which I believe the Greenspun's 10th rule can be applied. EDIT: To comment Larry Coleman's answer I'm pretty sure I can pick elisp programming but the extensions I have in mind don't exist yet despite their relative simplicity and the effort more knowledgeable people poured into related projects.This makes me wonder whether it is so because of the way emacs is developed, i.e. people tend to write their own little extensions without coordination, or its implementation, its extension language not being able to keep up with the growing complexity.

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• Implementing a wheeled character controller

  - by Lazlo

  I'm trying to implement Boxycraft's character controller in XNA (with Farseer), as Bryan Dysmas did (minus the jumping part, yet). My current implementation seems to sometimes glitch in between two parallel planes, and fails to climb 45 degree slopes. (YouTube videos in links, plane glitch is subtle). How can I fix it? From the textual description, I seem to be doing it right. Here is my implementation (it seems like a huge wall of text, but it's easy to read. I wish I could simplify and isolate the problem more, but I can't): public Body TorsoBody { get; private set; } public PolygonShape TorsoShape { get; private set; } public Body LegsBody { get; private set; } public Shape LegsShape { get; private set; } public RevoluteJoint Hips { get; private set; } public FixedAngleJoint FixedAngleJoint { get; private set; } public AngleJoint AngleJoint { get; private set; } ... this.TorsoBody = BodyFactory.CreateRectangle(this.World, 1, 1.5f, 1); this.TorsoShape = new PolygonShape(1); this.TorsoShape.SetAsBox(0.5f, 0.75f); this.TorsoBody.CreateFixture(this.TorsoShape); this.TorsoBody.IsStatic = false; this.LegsBody = BodyFactory.CreateCircle(this.World, 0.5f, 1); this.LegsShape = new CircleShape(0.5f, 1); this.LegsBody.CreateFixture(this.LegsShape); this.LegsBody.Position -= 0.75f * Vector2.UnitY; this.LegsBody.IsStatic = false; this.Hips = JointFactory.CreateRevoluteJoint(this.TorsoBody, this.LegsBody, Vector2.Zero); this.Hips.MotorEnabled = true; this.AngleJoint = new AngleJoint(this.TorsoBody, this.LegsBody); this.FixedAngleJoint = new FixedAngleJoint(this.TorsoBody); this.Hips.MaxMotorTorque = float.PositiveInfinity; this.World.AddJoint(this.Hips); this.World.AddJoint(this.AngleJoint); this.World.AddJoint(this.FixedAngleJoint); ... public void Move(float m) // -1, 0, +1 { this.Hips.MotorSpeed = 0.5f * m; }

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• Microsoft Azure News: Capturing VM Images

  - by Herve Roggero

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/hroggero/archive/2014/05/21/microsoft-azure-news-capturing-vm-images.aspxIf you have a Virtual Machine (VM) in Microsoft Azure that has a specific configuration, it used to be difficult to clone that VM. You had to sysprep the VM, and clone the data disks. This was slow, prone to errors, and stopped you from being productive. No more! A new option, called Capture, allows you to easily select a VM, running or not. The capture will copy the OS disk and data disks and create a new image out of it automatically for you. This means you can now easily clone an entire VM without affecting productivity.  To capture a VM, simply browse to your Virtual Machines in the Microsoft Azure management website, select the VM you want to clone, and click on the Capture button at the bottom. A window will come up asking to name your image. It took less than 1 minute for me to build a clone of my server. And because it is stored as an image, I can easily create a new VM with it. So that’s what I did… And that took about 5 minutes total.  That’s amazing…  To create a new VM from your image, click on the NEW icon (bottom left), select Compute/Virtual Machine/From Gallery, and select My Images from the left menu when selecting an Image. You will find your newly created image. Because this is a clone, you will not be prompted for a new login; the user id/password is the same. About Herve Roggero Herve Roggero, Microsoft Azure MVP, @hroggero, is the founder of Blue Syntax Consulting (http://www.bluesyntaxconsulting.com). Herve's experience includes software development, architecture, database administration and senior management with both global corporations and startup companies. Herve holds multiple certifications, including an MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD. He also holds a Master's degree in Business Administration from Indiana University. Herve is the co-author of "PRO SQL Azure" and “PRO SQL Server 2012 Practices” from Apress, a PluralSight author, and runs the Azure Florida Association.

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