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  • Switched from DVI to HDMI, possible audio artifacts?

    - by I take Drukqs
    I'm using an ASUS VH236H monitor and an EVGA GeForce 570 GTX both of which are brand new. My monitor has an audio out port for speakers/headphones so I plugged in my headphones and made a random selection from my library when I noticed two things: There are static-like artifacts during "louder" parts of songs. There's what seems to be a volume cap in place. When I crank the volume past 100% in VLC the decibel level does not truly increase but the amount of static does. The cable is not new; I yanked it off of my PS3 when my DVI cable broke. It has been used a good amount on my HDTV and PS3 so I doubt it's a matter of burn-in. I like the way the setup works with an HDMI cable as opposed to DVI because my headphones barely reach my rig whereas I have plenty of slack when they're plugged into my monitor. Thanks in advance for any support. Note: I'm using a high quality HDMI cable from monoprice, AKG K702 headphones, and VLC media player.

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  • Building My First Computer And Suprise It Isn't Working

    - by BobbShots
    I've had many years of experience working on and around computers, but this was my first foray into building one completely from scratch. So far that foray has been a disaster. My rig is completely assembled, and on its maiden power-up plus many power cycles I noticed three things: There were a few beeps from the BIOS POST upon powering up the first time, but I wasn't paying attention completely to the sequence. However, every time after that there are 0 POST beeps, even after taking off all hardware except the CPU and MB. There was no video being sent to the monitor. I run a HDMI cable from my video card to the monitor. The video card was LOUD. My card is a Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 which is known for not only being a powerhouse, but being pretty quiet. A few times during my power cycles it ran a lot quieter, but most of the time it was just super loud. Can anyone provide help for any of these issues? My MB, CPU, and Video Card are: MB: ASUS P6X58D Premium LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard CPU: i7 920 Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 5870

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  • Getting a "CPU over temperature error", but temperatures seem to be normal

    - by Luis Parker
    I built a PC with the following parts: CPU: i5-2500 Motherboard: Asus P8H67-M EVO rev 3.0 RAM: G-Skill Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1333 Video: GTX 560-Ti 1GB I used a crappy (but functioning) old case and a 500W Powercooler supply. The rig also includes 3 HDs and a DVD-RW. Whenever I push the system mildly it resets right away (looks more like power off/power on) and gives me a "CPU over temperature error". However, BIOS always reports <65ºC for the CPU at the moment of the reset, same as Core Temp and RealTemp. This is RealTemp's log since launching BF3 until the reset (just over 1 minute, as you can see) Just to be sure I've checked the CPU cooler and re-applied the thermal paste twice, but nothing changed. I'm not overclocking at all. What am I missing here? Could it be that the old power supply is generating this error? Maybe the mobo isn't reporting temperatures correctly? I don't have a clue on how to troubleshoot this, help Thanks in advance!

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  • File Translator to Export Animated 3D Character from Autodesk Maya as Quake MD2

    - by Andy R
    I'm wondering if anyone knows of a way to export geometry/textures for a rigged, animated character as Quake MD2? I’m developing an app for mobile devices, and I’ve found that MD2 works great for lightweight OpenGL rendering. I have several animated characters, and I’d like to export them as MD2 from Maya. Here are some of the things I have tried: Exporting FBX to 3D Studio Max and using the QTip plugin -- this works, but only if I convert my animation to point cache (pc2) and bring that into Max. When I do that, QTip plugin doesn’t honor the point cache node, and all I get is the model, no animation Exporting OBJ Sequence to Blender, exporting MD2 from there -- I can’t seem to get blender to compile the imported obj sequence into a single animated object Exporting FBX to Milkshape -- the maya rig gets corrupted in the process Bake point cache for animation, export to FBX, import to Milkshape -- again, Milkshape doesn’t honor the geometry cache, so all that appears is a static character. I’m currently writing a plugin for Maya using the blender MD2 export script as reference (but re-writing using the C++ Maya API), but I’m just wondering if anyone has done this before or has any suggestions of how to do this. Also, if anyone has other suggestions for the best format to render a single animated character on an OpenGL ES (Android or iPhone) device, I would be very grateful! I’m open to trying anything to get these animations rendering on device Thanks!

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  • What components and IDE add-ins do you install with Delphi?

    - by Mick
    After a clean install of Delphi, what components and IDE add-ins do you make certain that you install? What's your Delphi "rig"? Here's what I install after a clean installation: Delphi 2007 JCL / JVCL - JEDI Code Library and JEDI Visual Code Library (600+ components) JWA / JWSCL - JEDI API Library & Security Code Library GExperts - GExperts is a free set of tools built to increase the productivity of Delphi and C++Builder programmers by adding several features to the IDE. TWM's experimental GExperts code formatter - adds code formatting capabilities to Delphi Virtual TreeView - Virtual Treeview is a treeview control built from ground up. More than 5 years of development made it one of the most flexible and advanced tree controls available today. MustangPeak Components (EasyList View, Virtual ShellTools, etc) - EasyListview is a control that has no dependance on the Microsoft Listview control but has all the features of the latest version from Microsoft. Also includes 'Explorer.exe' like shell components. Synapse lightweight networking components - contains simple low level non-visual objects for easy programming without problems. (no required multi-threaded synchronization, no need for windows message processing,…) Great for command line utilities, visual projects, NT services EurekaLog - EurekaLog is a complete bug resolution tool for Delphi and C++Builder developers that gives your application the power to catch every exception and memory leak, directly on the end user PC, generating a detailed log of the call stack (with file, class, method and line number), optionally sending you a copy of each log entry via email or to a web bug-tracker. DelphiSpeedUp - DelphiSpeedUp is an IDE plugin for Delphi and C++Builder. It improves the IDE’s startup speed and increases the general speed of the whole IDE. DDevExtensions - DDevExtensions extends the Delphi/C++Builder IDE by adding some new productivity features. IDE Fix Pack - The IDE Fix Pack installs is a DLL-Expert that fixes the following RAD Studio 2007 bugs at runtime. All changes are done in memory. No file on disk is modified. TPerlRegex - Regular Expression library for Delphi How about other Delphi developers?

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  • SHA1 hashing in Delphi XE

    - by Leonardo Herrera
    Hello, I'm in the process of implementing XML digital signatures. I'm starting with little steps, so right now I want to solve the problem of SHA-1 hashing. There are lots of questions about this in SO: Digitially Sign Key with Lockbox Encryption library for Delphi Convert this php digital signing to Delphi Delphi: is there a version of LockBox for Delphi-XE Delphi 2010 Cryptography libraries ...and probably more. However, I'm using Delphi XE. So far, I've tried LockBox 2 (both the Songbeamer and Sourceforge versions), Lock Box 3, DCPCrypto2 and some others (Hashes is an easy to use unit which uses Windows crypto functions) I prepared a small test rig that gives me the following: LockBox2 FAILED: 1 ('abc') Got: '9f04f41a848514162050e3d68c1a7abb441dc2b5' Expected: 'a9993e364706816aba3e25717850c26c9cd0d89d' FAILED: 2 ('abcdbcdecdefdefgefghfghighijhijkijkljklmklmnlmnomnopnopq') Got: '51d7d8769ac72c409c5b0e3f69c60adc9a039014' Expected: '84983e441c3bd26ebaae4aa1f95129e5e54670f1' LockBox3 FAILED: 1 ('abc') Got: '9f04f41a848514162050e3d68c1a7abb441dc2b5' Expected: 'a9993e364706816aba3e25717850c26c9cd0d89d' FAILED: 2 ('abcdbcdecdefdefgefghfghighijhijkijkljklmklmnlmnomnopnopq') Got: '51d7d8769ac72c409c5b0e3f69c60adc9a039014' Expected: '84983e441c3bd26ebaae4aa1f95129e5e54670f1' DCPCrypto2 FAILED: 1 ('abc') Got: '9f04f41a848514162050e3d68c1a7abb441dc2b5' Expected: 'a9993e364706816aba3e25717850c26c9cd0d89d' FAILED: 2 ('abcdbcdecdefdefgefghfghighijhijkijkljklmklmnlmnomnopnopq') Got: '51d7d8769ac72c409c5b0e3f69c60adc9a039014' Expected: '84983e441c3bd26ebaae4aa1f95129e5e54670f1' Hashes Test 1 passes Test 2 passes Have you succeeded in compile the mentioned libraries under Delphi XE and make them give the appropriate values? I'm particularly interested in DCPCrypt2 SelfTest procedure. Edit: I've added this answer with the fixed source code. Thank you all for your help, it is most appreciated.

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  • Get more debug info from AxHost?

    - by Presidenten
    Hello I'm trying to deploy an application which uses an library that embeds an ActiveX control with AxHost in C#. When I run the installed app on our test rig I catch and present the following exception: Unexpected exception. This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800736B1) at System.Windows.Forms.UnsafeNativeMethods.CoCreateInstance(Guid& clsid, Object punkOuter, Int32 context, Guid& iid) at System.Windows.Forms.AxHost.CreateWithoutLicense(Guid clsid) at System.Windows.Forms.AxHost.CreateWithLicense(String license, Guid clsid) at System.Windows.Forms.AxHost.CreateInstanceCore(Guid clsid) at System.Windows.Forms.AxHost.CreateInstance() at System.Windows.Forms.AxHost.GetOcxCreate() at System.Windows.Forms.AxHost.TransitionUpTo(Int32 state) at System.Windows.Forms.AxHost.CreateHandle() at System.Windows.Forms.Control.CreateControl(Boolean fIgnoreVisible) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.CreateControl(Boolean fIgnoreVisible) at System.Windows.Forms.AxHost.EndInit() at ....InitializeComponent() at ... I googled 0x800736B1, so I know that it means that a file could not be loaded. The big Q right now is how to find out which file it is that cant be loaded. Is there some sort of logging function I can turn on, or is there maybe som way I can get more info from the exception?

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  • How can I test this SQL Server performance Utility?

    - by Martin Smith
    As part of my MSc I need to do a three month project later this year. I have decided to do something which will likely be useful for me in the workplace and spend the time getting to understand SQL Server internals. The deliverable for this project will be a performance advisor looking at a variety of different rules. Some static such as finding redundant indexes, some more dynamic such as using XEvents to find outlying invocations of stored procedure execution times when certain parameters are passed. I am struggling to come up with a good way of testing this though. I can obviously design a "bad" database and a synthetic workload that my tool will pick up issues on but I also need to demonstrate that it has real world utility. Looking at the self tuning database literature it is common to use TPC benchmarks but I've had a look at the TPCC site and it looks very time consuming to implement and not that good a fit to my project's testing needs in any event (I would still be able to "rig" it by the decisions I made on indexing or physical architecture). Plan A would be to find willing beta tester(s) but in the event that isn't possible I will need a fallback plan. The best idea I have come up with so far is to use the various MS sample applications as examples of real world applications. e.g. http://msftdpprodsamples.codeplex.com/ http://www.asp.net/community/projects/ Does anyone have any better suggestions?

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  • Avoiding GC thrashing with WSE 3.0 MTOM service

    - by Leon Breedt
    For historical reasons, I have some WSE 3.0 web services that I cannot upgrade to WCF on the server side yet (it is also a substantial amount of work to do so). These web services are being used for file transfers from client to server, using MTOM encoding. This can also not be changed in the short term, for reasons of compatibility. Secondly, they are being called from both Java and .NET, and therefore need to be cross-platform, hence MTOM. How it works is that an "upload" WebMethod is called by the client, sending up a chunk of data at a time, since files being transferred could potentially be gigabytes in size. However, due to not being able to control parts of the stack before the WebMethod is invoked, I cannot control the memory usage patterns of the web service. The problem I am running into is for file sizes from 50MB or so onwards, performance is absolutely killed because of GC, since it appears that WSE 3.0 buffers each chunk received from the client in a new byte[] array, and by the time we've done 50MB we're spending 20-30% of time doing GC. I've played with various chunk sizes, from 16k to 2MB, with no real great difference in results. Smaller chunks are killed by the latency involved with round-tripping, and larger chunks just postpone the slowdown until GC kicks in. Any bright ideas on cutting down on the garbage created by WSE? Can I plug into the pipeline somehow and jury-rig something that has access to the client's request stream and streams it to the WebMethod? I'm aware that it is possible to "stream" responses to the client using WSE (albeit very ugly), but this problem is with requests from the client.

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  • Retrieve OpenId FullName from Google

    - by user294711
    I'm using DotNetOpenAuth lib to work with Google(only) OpenId. And I'm retrieving Email without any problem. But I can't get FullName, it is always null. request.AddExtension(new ClaimsRequest { Email = DemandLevel.Require, FullName = DemandLevel.Require }); ClaimsResponse claimsResponse = relyingPartyResponse.GetExtension<ClaimsResponse>(); if (claimsResponse != null) { var email = claimsResponse.Email; var fullName = claimsResponse.FullName; } I googled this problem and found that: Glad you got it working. Google will not give a full name or nickname for their users. They ONLY give email address, and (I think, but perhaps only on a white list) the timezone. It's not a matter of figuring out how to rig your RP so that it works. Google just won't do it yet. – Andrew Arnott Sep 8 at 14:22 stackoverflow.com/questions/1387438/retrieve-openid-user-information-claims-across-providers But it was in Sep 2009, maybe something was changed from that moment... I've found that in http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/OpenID.html: openid.ax.required -- (required) Specifies the attribute being requested. Valid values include: "country", "email", "firstname", "language", "lastname". To request multiple attributes, set this parameter to a comma-delimited list of attributes. So, my question is how can I get FullName (FirstName, LastName) from Google OpenId?

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  • A basic load test question

    - by user236131
    I have a very basic load test question. I am running a load test using VSTS 2008 and I have test rig with controller + 10 agents. This load test is against a SharePoint farm I have. My goal of the load test is to find out the resource utilization on web+app+db tiers of my farm for any given load scenario. An example of a load scenario is Usage profile: Average collaboration (as defined by SCCP) User Load: 500 (using step load pattern=a step of 50 every 2 mins and a warm up time of 2mins for every step) Think time: 0 Load duration: 8hrs Now, the question is: Is it fair to expect that metrics like Requests/sec, %processor time on web front end / App / DB, Test/sec, and etc become flat or enter a steady state at one point in time during the load test. Like I said, the goal is not to create a bottleneck but to only measure the utilization of resources by the above load profile. I am asking this question because I see something different. At one point in the load test, requests/sec becomes more or less flat. But processor utilization on the web/DB servers keeps increasing. After digging through the data a bit, I see that "tests running" counter also steadily increased over time. So, if I run the load test for more than 8hrs, %processor may go up further. This way, I don't know what to consider as the load excreted by the load profile. What does this "tests running" counter really signify? How is this different from tests/sec? Another question is: how can I find out why "tests running" counter shows an increase overtime? Thanks for your time

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  • Can a pc with a 1.2 ghz dual core run VS 2013? [on hold]

    - by moo2
    Edit: This question is about a tool used for programming, Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. I already read the minimum requirements for VS 2013 before I posted or I wouldn't have asked the question. I searched on the web for an answer for a few hours before posting. Why should I go out and spend $400 on a laptop if I can spend less than $100 and use it to learn how to program? In the context of the question it is clear I was not asking for advice on what laptop to buy and it was also clear I was not asking for someone to walk me through the system requirements of VS 2013. This is a vast community and I was wondering if someone in this vast community would have experience in dealing with my question. In other words has anyone ever tried anything like it? If I had an old computer sitting around I would have tested it. At the moment all I have is a friend's Chromebook I'm borrowing. End Edit. I know the requirements for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 state 1.6 ghz processor. I'm looking at getting a laptop for school and I found one that is old but cheap and would work for college. The Dell D430 I'm looking at getting has a 1.2ghz Core 2 Duo CPU, 80GB HD, 2GB RAM, and Windows 7 Home Premium. It's refurbished. I can get it for less than most phone's cost and from a Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher. I know it's not a skyrim rig but it's lightweight and can handle being a college laptop and doing word processing. Would Visual Studio 2013 run at all? If it is slower I'm not concerned. I just want to know if it would work and compile my assignments and run them? I'd be using this laptop for doing assignments and learning programming languages not for coding the next social media sensation.

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  • Computer randomly reboots during "intensive activity".

    - by Reznor
    My friend has been playing games on his new build for some time now. However, lately, his computer will randomly reboot out of nowhere, so far only happening in game, and presumably only to happen in game as it happens nowhere else. This can happen in game during play or even in the options. Note, it isn't a crash or blue screen. It's just a normal reboot. This started today, I believe, and has only occured in two games: Dead Space and Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. He has played a handful of games before these, for about a week or so, without this problem. We theorized on two possibilities: Maybe something is overheating? Maybe the power supply is inadequate? These two were quickly dismissed, as all his components were operating at normal temperatures when he got back to his desktop from the reboot, and we all know these parts don't exactly cool down quickly, especially if they get hot enough to trigger a reboot. Besides, I know at-least my motherboard reports processor overheating at start-up, and requests I press f1 to continue into boot. The PSU one was dismissed too. He has an 850w power supply on a rig that was estimated to take only 720 some watts, that's with some overcompensating to be safe. He opened up his case to make sure nothing was seated wrong or in the way. All was fine, but he did notice a sticker on his video card. It had a giant barcode on it and some numbers. Now, I'm used to seeing these stickers, they're the warranty stickers, right, and removal voids the warranty? Yeah, well, we find it odd because this sticker is slapped right over the circuits of the video card, not on a block or anything. Is this normal? Should he remove it? Right now, I am concerned with the memory. Could that be at fault? Here are his specs: Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-Bit Intel i7 950 EVGA GeForce 570 GTX 4 GB DDR3 PC10666 dual-channel Corsair RAM Corsair 850w PSU Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Western Digital 1 TB WD1001FALS

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  • How to Play PC Games on Your TV

    - by Chris Hoffman
    No need to wait for Valve’s Steam Machines — connect your Windows gaming PC to your TV and use powerful PC graphics in the living room today. It’s easy — you don’t need any unusual hardware or special software. This is ideal if you’re already a PC gamer who wants to play your games on a larger screen. It’s also convenient if you want to play multiplayer PC games with controllers in your living rom. HDMI Cables and Controllers You’ll need an HDMI cable to connect your PC to your television. This requires a TV with HDMI-in, a PC with HDMI-out, and an HDMI cable. Modern TVs and PCs have had HDMI built in for years, so you should already be good to go. If you don’t have a spare HDMI cable lying around, you may have to buy one or repurpose one of your existing HDMI cables. Just don’t buy the expensive HDMI cables — even a cheap HDMI cable will work just as well as a more expensive one. Plug one end of the HDMI cable into the HDMI-out port on your PC and one end into the HDMI-In port on your TV. Switch your TV’s input to the appropriate HDMI port and you’ll see your PC’s desktop appear on your TV.  Your TV becomes just another external monitor. If you have your TV and PC far away from each other in different rooms, this won’t work. If you have a reasonably powerful laptop, you can just plug that into your TV — or you can unplug your desktop PC and hook it up next to your TV. Now you’ll just need an input device. You probably don’t want to sit directly in front of your TV with a wired keyboard and mouse! A wireless keyboard and wireless mouse can be convenient and may be ideal for some games. However, you’ll probably want a game controller like console players use. Better yet, get multiple game controllers so you can play local-multiplayer PC games with other people. The Xbox 360 controller is the ideal controller for PC gaming. Windows supports these controllers natively, and many PC games are designed specifically for these controllers. Note that Xbox One controllers aren’t yet supported on Windows because Microsoft hasn’t released drivers for them. Yes, you could use a third-party controller or go through the process of pairing a PlayStation controller with your PC using unofficial tools, but it’s better to get an Xbox 360 controller. Just plug one or more Xbox controllers into your PC’s USB ports and they’ll work without any setup required. While many PC games to support controllers, bear in mind that some games require a keyboard and mouse. A TV-Optimized Interface Use Steam’s Big Picture interface to more easily browse and launch games. This interface was designed for using on a television with controllers and even has an integrated web browser you can use with your controller. It will be used on the Valve’s Steam Machine consoles as the default TV interface. You can use a mouse with it too, of course. There’s also nothing stopping you from just using your Windows desktop with a mouse and keyboard — aside from how inconvenient it will be. To launch Big Picture Mode, open Steam and click the Big Picture button at the top-right corner of your screen. You can also press the glowing Xbox logo button in the middle of an Xbox 360 Controller to launch the Big Picture interface if Steam is open. Another Option: In-Home Streaming If you want to leave your PC in one room of your home and play PC games on a TV in a different room, you can consider using local streaming to stream games over your home network from your gaming PC to your television. Bear in mind that the game won’t be as smooth and responsive as it would if you were sitting in front of your PC. You’ll also need a modern router with fast wireless network speeds to keep up with the game streaming. Steam’s built-in In-Home Streaming feature is now available to everyone. You could plug a laptop with less-powerful graphics hardware into your TV and use it to stream games from your powerful desktop gaming rig. You could also use an older desktop PC you have lying around. To stream a game, log into Steam on your gaming PC and log into Steam with the same account on another computer on your home network. You’ll be able to view the library of installed games on your other PC and start streaming them. NVIDIA also has their own GameStream solution that allows you to stream games from a PC with powerful NVIDIA graphics hardware. However, you’ll need an NVIDIA Shield handheld gaming console to do this. At the moment, NVIDIA’s game streaming solution can only stream to the NVIDIA Shield. However, the NVIDIA Shield device can be connected to your TV so you can play that streaming game on your TV. Valve’s Steam Machines are supposed to bring PC gaming to the living room and they’ll do it using HDMI cables, a custom Steam controller, the Big Picture interface, and in-home streaming for compatibility with Windows games. You can do all of this yourself today — you’ll just need an Xbox 360 controller instead of the not-yet-released Steam controller. Image Credit: Marco Arment on Flickr, William Hook on Flickr, Lewis Dowling on Flickr

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  • The Linux powered LAN Gaming House

    - by sachinghalot
    LAN parties offer the enjoyment of head to head gaming in a real-life social environment. In general, they are experiencing decline thanks to the convenience of Internet gaming, but Kenton Varda is a man who takes his LAN gaming very seriously. His LAN gaming house is a fascinating project, and best of all, Linux plays a part in making it all work.Varda has done his own write ups (short, long), so I'm only going to give an overview here. The setup is a large house with 12 gaming stations and a single server computer.The client computers themselves are rack mounted in a server room, and they are linked to the gaming stations on the floor above via extension cables (HDMI for video and audio and USB for mouse and keyboard). Each client computer, built into a 3U rack mount case, is a well specced gaming rig in its own right, sporting an Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 560 along with a 60GB SSD drive.Originally, the client computers ran Ubuntu Linux rather than Windows and the games executed under WINE, but Varda had to abandon this scheme. As he explains on his site:"Amazingly, a majority of games worked fine, although many had minor bugs (e.g. flickering mouse cursor, minor rendering artifacts, etc.). Some games, however, did not work, or had bad bugs that made them annoying to play."Subsequently, the gaming computers have been moved onto a more conventional gaming choice, Windows 7. It's a shame that WINE couldn't be made to work, but I can sympathize as it's rare to find modern games that work perfectly and at full native speed. Another problem with WINE is that it tends to suffer from regressions, which is hardly surprising when considering the difficulty of constantly improving the emulation of the Windows API. Varda points out that he preferred working with Linux clients as they were easier to modify and came with less licensing baggage.Linux still runs the server and all of the tools used are open source software. The hardware here is a Intel Xeon E3-1230 with 4GB of RAM. The storage hanging off this machine is a bit more complex than the clients. In addition to the 60GB SSD, it also has 2x1TB drives and a 240GB SDD.When the clients were running Linux, they booted over PXE using a toolchain that will be familiar to anyone who has setup Linux network booting. DHCP pointed the clients to the server which then supplied PXELINUX using TFTP. When booted, file access was accomplished through network block device (NBD). This is a very easy to use system that allows you to serve the contents of a file as a block device over the network. The client computer runs a user mode device driver and the device can be mounted within the file system using the mount command.One snag with offering file access via NBD is that it's difficult to impose any security restrictions on different areas of the file system as the server only sees a single file. The advantage is perfomance as the client operating system simply sees a block device, and besides, these security issues aren't relevant in this setup.Unfortunately, Windows 7 can't use NBD, so, Varda had to switch to iSCSI (which works in both server and client mode under Linux). His network cards are not compliant with this standard when doing a netboot, but fortunately, gPXE came to the rescue, and he boostraps it over PXE. gPXE is also available as an ISO image and is worth knowing about if you encounter an awkward machine that can't manage a network boot. It can also optionally boot from a HTTP server rather than the more traditional TFTP server.According to Varda, booting all 12 machines over the Gigabit Ethernet network is surprisingly fast, and once booted, the machines don't seem noticeably slower than if they were using local storage. Once loaded, most games attempt to load in as much data as possible, filling the RAM, and the the disk and network bandwidth required is small. It's worth noting that these are aspects of this project that might differ from some other thin client scenarios.At time of writing, it doesn't seem as though the local storage of the client machines is being utilized. Instead, the clients boot into Windows from an image on the server that contains the operating system and the games themselves. It uses the copy on write feature of LVM so that any writes from a client are added to a differencing image allocated to that client. As the administrator, Varda can log into the Linux server and authorize changes to the master image for updates etc.SummaryOverall, Varda estimates the total cost of the project at about $40,000, and of course, he needed a property that offered a large physical space in order to house the computers and the gaming workstations. Obviously, this project has stark differences to most thin client projects. The balance between storage, network usage, GPU power and security would not be typical of an office installation, for example. The only letdown is that WINE proved to be insufficiently compatible to run a wide variety of modern games, but that is, perhaps, asking too much of it, and hats off to Varda for trying to make it work.

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  • How do I organize a GUI application for passing around events and for setting up reads from a shared resource

    - by Savanni D'Gerinel
    My tools involved here are GTK and Haskell. My questions are probably pretty trivial for anyone who has done significant GUI work, but I've been off in the equivalent of CGI applications for my whole career. I'm building an application that displays tabular data, displays the same data in a graph form, and has an edit field for both entering new data and for editing existing data. After asking about sharing resources, I decided that all of the data involved will be stored in an MVar so that every component can just read the current state from the MVar. All of that works, but now it is time for me to rearrange the application so that it can be interactive. With that in mind, I have three widgets: a TextView (for editing), a TreeView (for displaying the data), and a DrawingArea (for displaying the data as a graph). I THINK I need to do two things, and the core of my question is, are these the right things, or is there a better way. Thing the first: All event handlers, those functions that will be called any time a redisplay is needed, need to be written at a high level and then passed into the function that actually constructs the widget to begin with. For instance: drawStatData :: DrawingArea -> MVar Core.ST -> (Core.ST -> SetRepWorkout.WorkoutStore) -> IO () createStatView :: (DrawingArea -> IO ()) -> IO VBox createUI :: MVar Core.ST -> (Core.ST -> SetRepWorkout.WorkoutStore) -> IO HBox createUI storeMVar field = do graphs <- createStatView (\area -> drawStatData area storeMVar field) hbox <- hBoxNew False 10 boxPackStart hbox graphs PackNatural 0 return hbox In this case, createStatView builds up a VBox that contains a DrawingArea to graph the data and potentially other widgets. It attaches drawStatData to the realize and exposeEvent events for the DrawingArea. I would do something similar for the TreeView, but I am not completely sure what since I have not yet done it and what I am thinking of would involve replacing the TreeModel every time the TreeView needs to be updated. My alternative to the above would be... drawStatData :: DrawingArea -> MVar Core.ST -> (Core.ST -> SetRepWorkout.WorkoutStore) -> IO () createStatView :: IO (VBox, DrawingArea) ... but in this case, I would arrange createUI like so: createUI :: MVar Core.ST -> (Core.ST -> SetRepWorkout.WorkoutStore) -> IO HBox createUI storeMVar field = do (graphbox, graph) <- createStatView (\area -> drawStatData area storeMVar field) hbox <- hBoxNew False 10 boxPackStart hbox graphs PackNatural 0 on graph realize (drawStatData graph storeMVar field) on graph exposeEvent (do liftIO $ drawStatData graph storeMVar field return ()) return hbox I'm not sure which is better, but that does lead me to... Thing the second: it will be necessary for me to rig up an event system so that various events can send signals all the way to my widgets. I'm going to need a mediator of some kind to pass events around and to translate application-semantic events to the actual events that my widgets respond to. Is it better for me to pass my addressable widgets up the call stack to the level where the mediator lives, or to pass the mediator down the call stack and have the widgets register directly with it? So, in summary, my two questions: 1) pass widgets up the call stack to a global mediator, or pass the global mediator down and have the widgets register themselves to it? 2) pass my redraw functions to the builders and have the builders attach the redraw functions to the constructed widgets, or pass the constructed widgets back and have a higher level attach the redraw functions (and potentially link some widgets together)? Okay, and... 3) Books or wikis about GUI application architecture, preferably coherent architectures where people aren't arguing about minute details? The application in its current form (displays data but does not write data or allow for much interaction) is available at https://bitbucket.org/savannidgerinel/fitness . You can run the application by going to the root directory and typing runhaskell -isrc src/Main.hs data/ or... cabal build dist/build/fitness/fitness data/ You may need to install libraries, but cabal should tell you which ones.

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  • IsNumeric() Broken? Only up to a point.

    - by Phil Factor
    In SQL Server, probably the best-known 'broken' function is poor ISNUMERIC() . The documentation says 'ISNUMERIC returns 1 when the input expression evaluates to a valid numeric data type; otherwise it returns 0. ISNUMERIC returns 1 for some characters that are not numbers, such as plus (+), minus (-), and valid currency symbols such as the dollar sign ($).'Although it will take numeric data types (No, I don't understand why either), its main use is supposed to be to test strings to make sure that you can convert them to whatever numeric datatype you are using (int, numeric, bigint, money, smallint, smallmoney, tinyint, float, decimal, or real). It wouldn't actually be of much use anyway, since each datatype has different rules. You actually need a RegEx to do a reasonably safe check. The other snag is that the IsNumeric() function  is a bit broken. SELECT ISNUMERIC(',')This cheerfully returns 1, since it believes that a comma is a currency symbol (not a thousands-separator) and you meant to say 0, in this strange currency.  However, SELECT ISNUMERIC(N'£')isn't recognized as currency.  '+' and  '-' is seen to be numeric, which is stretching it a bit. You'll see that what it allows isn't really broken except that it doesn't recognize Unicode currency symbols: It just tells you that one numeric type is likely to accept the string if you do an explicit conversion to it using the string. Both these work fine, so poor IsNumeric has to follow suit. SELECT  CAST('0E0' AS FLOAT)SELECT  CAST (',' AS MONEY) but it is harder to predict which data type will accept a '+' sign. SELECT  CAST ('+' AS money) --0.00SELECT  CAST ('+' AS INT)   --0SELECT  CAST ('+' AS numeric)/* Msg 8115, Level 16, State 6, Line 4 Arithmetic overflow error converting varchar to data type numeric.*/SELECT  CAST ('+' AS FLOAT)/*Msg 8114, Level 16, State 5, Line 5Error converting data type varchar to float.*/> So we can begin to say that the maybe IsNumeric isn't really broken, but is answering a silly question 'Is there some numeric datatype to which i can convert this string? Almost, but not quite. The bug is that it doesn't understand Unicode currency characters such as the euro or franc which are actually valid when used in the CAST function. (perhaps they're delaying fixing the euro bug just in case it isn't necessary).SELECT ISNUMERIC (N'?23.67') --0SELECT  CAST (N'?23.67' AS money) --23.67SELECT ISNUMERIC (N'£100.20') --1SELECT  CAST (N'£100.20' AS money) --100.20 Also the CAST function itself is quirky in that it cannot convert perfectly reasonable string-representations of integers into integersSELECT ISNUMERIC('200,000')       --1SELECT  CAST ('200,000' AS INT)   --0/*Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 2Conversion failed when converting the varchar value '200,000' to data type int.*/  A more sensible question is 'Is this an integer or decimal number'. This cuts out a lot of the apparent quirkiness. We do this by the '+E0' trick. If we want to include floats in the check, we'll need to make it a bit more complicated. Here is a small test-rig. SELECT  PossibleNumber,         ISNUMERIC(CAST(PossibleNumber AS NVARCHAR(20)) + 'E+00') AS Hack,        ISNUMERIC (PossibleNumber + CASE WHEN PossibleNumber LIKE '%E%'                                          THEN '' ELSE 'E+00' END) AS Hackier,        ISNUMERIC(PossibleNumber) AS RawIsNumericFROM    (SELECT CAST(',' AS NVARCHAR(10)) AS PossibleNumber          UNION SELECT '£' UNION SELECT '.'         UNION SELECT '56' UNION SELECT '456.67890'         UNION SELECT '0E0' UNION SELECT '-'         UNION SELECT '-' UNION SELECT '.'         UNION  SELECT N'?' UNION SELECT N'¢'        UNION  SELECT N'?' UNION SELECT N'?34.56'         UNION SELECT '-345' UNION SELECT '3.332228E+09') AS examples Which gives the result ... PossibleNumber Hack Hackier RawIsNumeric-------------- ----------- ----------- ------------? 0 0 0- 0 0 1, 0 0 1. 0 0 1¢ 0 0 1£ 0 0 1? 0 0 0?34.56 0 0 00E0 0 1 13.332228E+09 0 1 1-345 1 1 1456.67890 1 1 156 1 1 1 I suspect that this is as far as you'll get before you abandon IsNumeric in favour of a regex. You can only get part of the way with the LIKE wildcards, because you cannot specify quantifiers. You'll need full-blown Regex strings like these ..[-+]?\b[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?\b #INT or REAL[-+]?\b[0-9]{1,3}\b #TINYINT[-+]?\b[0-9]{1,5}\b #SMALLINT.. but you'll get even these to fail to catch numbers out of range.So is IsNumeric() an out and out rogue function? Not really, I'd say, but then it would need a damned good lawyer.

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  • SerialPort ReadLine() after Thread.Sleep() goes crazy

    - by Mat
    Hi everybody, I've been fighting with this issue for a day and I can't find answer for it. I am trying to read data from GPS device trough COM port in Compact Framework C#. I am using SerialPort class (actually my own ComPort class boxing SerialPort, but it adds only two fields I need, nothing special). Anyway.. I am running while loop in a separate thread which reads line from the port, analyze NMEA data, print them, catch all exceptions and then I Sleep(200) the thread, cause I need CPU for other threads... Without Sleep it works fine, but uses 100% CPU.. When I dont use Sleep after few minutes the output from COM port looks like this: GPGSA,A,3,09,12,22,17,15,27,,,,,,,2.6,1.6,2.1*3F GSA,A,3,09,12,22,17,15,27,,,,,,,2.6,1.6,2.1*3F A,A,3,09,12,22,17,15,27,,,,,,,2.6,1.6,2.1*3F ,18,12,271,24,24,05,020,24,14,04,326,25,11,03,023,*76 A,3,09,12,22,17,15,27,,,,,,,2.6,1.6,2.1*3F 3,09,12,22,17,15,27,,,,,,,2.6,1.6,2.1*3F 09,12,22,17,15,27,,,,,,,2.6,1.6,2.1*3F ,12,22,17,15,27,,,,,,,2.6,1.6,2.1*3F as you can see the same message is read few times but cut. I wonder what I'm doing wrong... My port configuration: port.ReadBufferSize = 4096; port.BaudRate = 4800; port.DataBits = 8; port.Parity = Parity.None; port.StopBits = StopBits.One; port.NewLine = "\r\n"; port.ReadTimeout = 1000; port.ReceivedBytesThreshold = 100000; And my reading function: private void processGps(){ while (!closing) { //reconnect if needed try { string sentence = port.ReadLine(); //here print the sentence //analyze the sentence (this takes some time 50-100ms) } catch (TimeoutException) { Thread.Sleep(0); } catch (IOException ioex) { //handling IO exception (some info on the screen) } Thread.Sleep(200); } } There is some more stuff in this function like reconnection if the device is lost etc.. but it is not called when the GPS is connected properly.. I was trying port.DiscardInBuffer(); after some blocks of code (in TimeoutException, after read..) Did anyone had similar problem? I really dont know what I'm doing wrong.. The only way to get rig of it is removing the last Sleep... Thanks in advance! Best Regards, Mat

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  • Initialization of ComboBox in datagrid, Silverlight 4.0

    - by Budda
    I have datagrid with list of MyPlayer objects linked to ItemsSource, there are ComboBoxes inside of grid that are linked to a list of inner object, and binding works correctly: when I select one of the item then its value is pushed to data model and appropriately updated in other places, where it is used. The only problem: initial selections are not displayed in my ComboBoxes. I don't know why..? Instance of the ViewModel is assigned to view DataContext. Here is grid with ComboBoxes (grid is binded to the SquadPlayers property of ViewModel): <data:DataGrid ="True" AutoGenerateColumns="False" ItemsSource="{Binding SquadPlayers}"> <data:DataGrid.Columns> <data:DataGridTemplateColumn Header="Rig." Width="50"> <data:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate> <DataTemplate> <ComboBox SelectedItem="{Binding Rigid, Mode=TwoWay}" ItemsSource="{Binding IntLevels, Mode=TwoWay}"/> </DataTemplate> </data:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate> </data:DataGridTemplateColumn> </data:DataGrid.Columns> </data:DataGrid> Here is ViewModel class ('_model_DataReceivedEvent' method is called asynchronously, when data are received from server): public class SquadViewModel : ViewModelBase<SquadModel> { public SquadViewModel() { SquadPlayers = new ObservableCollection<SquadPlayer>(); } private void _model_DataReceivedEvent(List<SostavPlayerData> allReadyPlayers) { TeamTask task = new TeamTask { Rigid = 1 }; foreach (SostavPlayerData spd in allReadyPlayers) { SquadPlayer sp = new SquadPlayer(spd, task); SquadPlayers.Add(sp); } RaisePropertyChanged("SquadPlayers"); } And here is SquadPlayer class (it's objects are binded to the grid rows): public class SquadPlayer : INotifyPropertyChanged { public SquadPlayer(SostavPlayerData spd) { _spd = spd; Rigid = 2; } public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; private int _rigid; public int Rigid { get { return _rigid; } set { _rigid = value; if (PropertyChanged != null) { PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("Rigid")); } } } private readonly ObservableCollection<int> _statIntLevels = new ObservableCollection<int> { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 }; public ObservableCollection<int> IntLevels { get { return _statIntLevels; } } It is expected to have all "Rigid" comboboxes set to "2" value, but they are not selected (items are in the drop-down list, and if any value is selected it is going to ViewModel). What is wrong with this example? Any help will be welcome. Thanks.

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  • The Math of a Jump in a 2D game.

    - by ONi
    I have been all around with this question and I can't find the correct answer! So, behold, the description of my question: I'm working in J2ME, I have my gameloop that do the following: public void run() { Graphics g = this.getGraphics(); while (running) { long diff = System.currentTimeMillis() - lastLoop; lastLoop = System.currentTimeMillis(); input(); this.level.doLogic(); render(g, diff); try { Thread.sleep(10); } catch (InterruptedException e) { stop(e); } } } so it's just a basic gameloop, the doLogic() function calls for all the logic functions of the characters in the scene and render(g, diff) calls the animateChar function of every character on scene, following this, the animChar function in the Character class sets up everything in the screen as this: protected void animChar(long diff) { this.checkGravity(); this.move((int) ((diff * this.dx) / 1000), (int) ((diff * this.dy) / 1000)); if (this.acumFrame > this.framerate) { this.nextFrame(); this.acumFrame = 0; } else { this.acumFrame += diff; } } This ensures me that everything must to move according to the time that the machine takes to go from cycle to cycle (remember it's a phone, not a gaming rig). I'm sure it's not the most efficient way to achieve this behavior so I'm totally open for criticism of my programming skills in the comments, but here my problem: When I make I character jump, what I do is that I put his dy to a negative value, say -200 and I set the boolean jumping to true, that makes the character go up, and then I have this function called checkGravity() that ensure that everything that goes up has to go down, checkGravity also checks for the character being over platforms so I will strip it down a little for the sake of your time: public void checkGravity() { if (this.jumping) { this.jumpSpeed += 10; if (this.jumpSpeed > 0) { this.jumping = false; this.falling = true; } this.dy = this.jumpSpeed; } if (this.falling) { this.jumpSpeed += 10; if (this.jumpSpeed > 200) this.jumpSpeed = 200; this.dy = this.jumpSpeed; if (this.collidesWithPlatform()) { this.falling = false; this.standing = true; this.jumping = false; this.jumpSpeed = 0; this.dy = this.jumpSpeed; } } } So, the problem is, that this function updates the dy regardless of the diff, making the characters fly like Superman in slow machines, and I have no idea how to implement the diff factor so that when a character is jumping, his speed decrement in a proportional way to the game speed. Can anyone help me fix this issue? or give me pointers on how to make a 2D Jump in J2ME the right way. Thank you very much for your time.

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  • jQuery tablesorter - loss of functionality after AJAX call

    - by Nick
    I have recently been experimenting with the tablesorter plugin for jQuery. I have successfully got it up and running in once instance, and am very impressed. However, I have tried to apply the tablesorter to a different table, only to encounter some difficulties... Basically the table causing a problem has a <ul> above it which acts as a set of tabs for the table. so if you click one of these tabs, an AJAX call is made and the table is repopulated with the rows relevant to the specific tab clicked. When the page initially loads (i.e. before a tab has been clicked) the tablesorter functionality works exactly as expected. But when a tab is clicked and the table repopulated, the functionality disappears, rendering it without the sortable feature. Even if you go back to the original tab, after clicking another, the functionality does not return - the only way to do so is a physical refresh of the page in the browser. I have seen a solution which seems similar to my problem on this site, and someone recommends using the jQuery plugin, livequery. I have tried this but to no avail :-( If someone has any suggestions I would be most appreciative. I can post code snippets if it would help (though I know the instantiation code for tablesorter is fine as it works on tables with no tabs - so it's definitely not that!) EDIT: As requested, here are some code snippets: The table being sorted is <table id="#sortableTable#">..</table>, the instantiation code for tablesorter I am using is: $(document).ready(function() { $("#sortableTable").tablesorter( { headers: //disable any headers not worthy of sorting! { 0: { sorter: false }, 5: { sorter: false } }, sortMultiSortKey: 'ctrlKey', debug:true, widgets: ['zebra'] }); }); And I tried to rig up livequery as follows: $("#sortableTable").livequery(function(){ $(this).tablesorter(); }); This has not helped though... I am not sure whether I should use the id of the table with livequery as it is the click on the <ul> I should be responding to, which is of course not part of the table itself. I have tried a number of variations in the hope that one of them will help, but to no avail :-(

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  • Visual studio 2010 colourizers, intellisense and the rest. Where to start!!

    - by Owen
    Ok, before I begin I realize that there is a lot of documentation on this subject but I have thus far failed to get even basic colourization working for VS2010. My goal is to simply get to a point where I can open a document and everything is coloured red, from here I can implement the relevant parsing logic. Here's what I have tried/found: 1) Downloaded all the relevent SDK's and such- Found the ook sample (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ookLanguage) - didn't build, didn't work. 2) Knowing almost nothing about MEF read through "Implementing a Language Service By Using the Managed Package Framework" - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb166533(v=VS.100).aspx This was pretty much a copy and paste of all the basic stuff here, and also updating some references which were out of date with the sample see: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsx/thread/a310fe67-afd2-4592-b295-3fc86fec7996 Now, I have got to a point where when running the package MEF appears to have hooked up correctly (I know this because with the debugger open I can see that the packages initialize and FDoIdle methods are being hit). When I open a file of the extension I have registered with the ProvideLanguageExtensionAttribute everything dies as if in an endless loop, yet no debug symbols hit (though they are loaded). Looking at the ook sample and the MEF examples they seem to be totally different approaches to the same problem. In the ook sample there are notions of Clasifications and Completion controllers which aren't mentioned in the MEF example. Also, they don't seem to create a Package or Language service, so I have no idea how it should work? With the MEF example, my assumption is that I need to hook into the "IScanner.ScanTokenAndProvideInfoAboutIt" to provide syntax highlighting? Which would be fine if I could ever hit this method. So my first question I guess is which approach should I be taking here? Or do they both somehow tie together? My second questions is, where can I find a basic fully working project that implements bog standard basic syntax highlighting and intellisense or VS2010? Thirdly, in the MEF example when I created a Package there were a bunch of test projects created for me. I appears that the integration tests launch the VS2010 test rig somehow, but the test fails. It would be good to write my service with tests but I have no idea what/how I can test each interaction so any references to testing Language services would be helpful. Finally, please throw any resource/book links my way that I may find useful. Cheers, Chris. N.B. Sorry I realize this is part question part rant, but I have never been so confused.

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  • How to diagnose computer lockups and freezes?

    - by Scott Mitchell
    I built a desktop computer a couple years back with the following specs: CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz 6 MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor BX80580Q9300 Motherboard: EVGA 122-CK-NF68-T1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard Video Card: Two EVGA 256-P2-N758-TR GeForce 8600GT SCC 256 MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported Video Card PSU: SeaSonic S12 Energy Plus SS-550HT 550W ATX12V V2.3 / EPS12V V2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply Memory: Two G.SKILL 4 GB (2 x 2 GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ Since its inception, the machine has periodically locked up, the regularity having varied over the years from once a day to once a month. Typically, lockups happen once every few days. By "lockup" I mean my computer just freezes. The screen locks up, I can't move the mouse. Hitting keys on my keyboard that normally turn LEDs on or off on the keyboard (such as Caps Lock) no longer turn the LEDs on or off. If there was music playing at the time of the lockup, noise keeps coming out of the speakers, but it's just the current frequency/note that plays indefinitely. There is no BSOD. When such a lockup occurs I have to do a hard reboot by either turning off the computer or hitting the reset button. I have the most recent version of the NVIDIA hardware drivers, and update them semi-regularly, but that hasn't seemed to help. I am currently using Windows 7 x64, but was previously using Windows Server 2003 x64 and having the same lockup issues. My guess is that it's somehow video driver or motherboard related, but I don't know how to go about diagnosing this problem to narrow down which of the two is the culprit. Additional information re: cooling Regarding cooling... I've not installed any after-market cooling systems aside from two regular fans I scavenged from an older computer. The fan atop the CPU is the one that shipped with it. One of the two scavenged fans I added it located at the bottom tower of the corner, in an attempt to create some airflow from front to back. The second fan is pointed directly at the two video cards. SpeedFan installation and readings Per studiohack's suggestion, I installed SpeedFan, which provided the following temperature readings: GPU: 63C GPU: 65C System: 76C CPU: 64C AUX: 36C Core 0: 78C Core 1: 76C Core 2: 79C Core 3: 79C Update #3: Another Lockup :-( Well, I had another lockup last night. :-( SpeedFan reported the CPU temp at 38 C when it happened, and there was no spike in temperature leading up to the freeze. One thing I notice is that the freeze seems more likely to happen if I am watching a video. In fact, of the last 5 freezes over the past month, 4 of them have been while watching a video on Flickr. Not necessarily the same video, but a video nevertheless. I don't know if this is just coincidence or if it means anything. (As an aside, each night before bedtime my 2 year old daughter sits on my lap and watches some home videos on Flickr and, in the last month, has learned the phrase, "Uh oh, computer broke.") Update #4: MemTest86 and 3DMark06 Test Results: Per suggestions in the comments, I ran the MemTest86 overnight and it cycled through the 8 GB of memory 5 times without error. I also ran the 3DMark06 test without a problem (see my scores at http://3dmark.com/3dm06/15163549). So... what now? :-) Any further suggestions on what to check? Is there some way to get a stack trace or something when the computer locks like that? Resolution I have never did figure out the particular problems, but based on the suggestions here and elsewhere, I'm presuming it was a motherboard issue. In any event, I recently upgraded my system, buying a new motherbeard, PSU, CPU, and RAM, and that new rig has been working splendidly the past several weeks. I am using the same graphic cards as in the old setup, so I think it's safe to reason that they weren't the cause of the problem.

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  • DBCC CHECKDB on VVLDB and latches (Or: My Pain is Your Gain)

    - by Argenis
      Does your CHECKDB hurt, Argenis? There is a classic blog series by Paul Randal [blog|twitter] called “CHECKDB From Every Angle” which is pretty much mandatory reading for anybody who’s even remotely considering going for the MCM certification, or its replacement (the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master: Data Platform – makes my fingers hurt just from typing it). Of particular interest is the post “Consistency Options for a VLDB” – on it, Paul provides solid, timeless advice (I use the word “timeless” because it was written in 2007, and it all applies today!) on how to perform checks on very large databases. Well, here I was trying to figure out how to make CHECKDB run faster on a restored copy of one of our databases, which happens to exceed 7TB in size. The whole thing was taking several days on multiple systems, regardless of the storage used – SAS, SATA or even SSD…and I actually didn’t pay much attention to how long it was taking, or even bothered to look at the reasons why - as long as it was finishing okay and found no consistency errors. Yes – I know. That was a huge mistake, as corruption found in a database several days after taking place could only allow for further spread of the corruption – and potentially large data loss. In the last two weeks I increased my attention towards this problem, as we noticed that CHECKDB was taking EVEN LONGER on brand new all-flash storage in the SAN! I couldn’t really explain it, and were almost ready to blame the storage vendor. The vendor told us that they could initially see the server driving decent I/O – around 450Mb/sec, and then it would settle at a very slow rate of 10Mb/sec or so. “Hum”, I thought – “CHECKDB is just not pushing the I/O subsystem hard enough”. Perfmon confirmed the vendor’s observations. Dreaded @BlobEater What was CHECKDB doing all the time while doing so little I/O? Eating Blobs. It turns out that CHECKDB was taking an extremely long time on one of our frankentables, which happens to be have 35 billion rows (yup, with a b) and sucks up several terabytes of space in the database. We do have a project ongoing to purge/split/partition this table, so it’s just a matter of time before we deal with it. But the reality today is that CHECKDB is coming to a screeching halt in performance when dealing with this particular table. Checking sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks and sys.dm_os_latch_stats showed that LATCH_EX (DBCC_OBJECT_METADATA) was by far the top wait type. I remembered hearing recently about that wait from another post that Paul Randal made, but that was related to computed-column indexes, and in fact, Paul himself reminded me of his article via twitter. But alas, our pathologic table had no non-clustered indexes on computed columns. I knew that latches are used by the database engine to do internal synchronization – but how could I help speed this up? After all, this is stuff that doesn’t have a lot of knobs to tweak. (There’s a fantastic level 500 talk by Bob Ward from Microsoft CSS [blog|twitter] called “Inside SQL Server Latches” given at PASS 2010 – and you can check it out here. DISCLAIMER: I assume no responsibility for any brain melting that might ensue from watching Bob’s talk!) Failed Hypotheses Earlier on this week I flew down to Palo Alto, CA, to visit our Headquarters – and after having a great time with my Monkey peers, I was relaxing on the plane back to Seattle watching a great talk by SQL Server MVP and fellow MCM Maciej Pilecki [twitter] called “Masterclass: A Day in the Life of a Database Transaction” where he discusses many different topics related to transaction management inside SQL Server. Very good stuff, and when I got home it was a little late – that slow DBCC CHECKDB that I had been dealing with was way in the back of my head. As I was looking at the problem at hand earlier on this week, I thought “How about I set the database to read-only?” I remembered one of the things Maciej had (jokingly) said in his talk: “if you don’t want locking and blocking, set the database to read-only” (or something to that effect, pardon my loose memory). I immediately killed the CHECKDB which had been running painfully for days, and set the database to read-only mode. Then I ran DBCC CHECKDB against it. It started going really fast (even a bit faster than before), and then throttled down again to around 10Mb/sec. All sorts of expletives went through my head at the time. Sure enough, the same latching scenario was present. Oh well. I even spent some time trying to figure out if NUMA was hurting performance. Folks on Twitter made suggestions in this regard (thanks, Lonny! [twitter]) …Eureka? This past Friday I was still scratching my head about the whole thing; I was ready to start profiling with XPERF to see if I could figure out which part of the engine was to blame and then get Microsoft to look at the evidence. After getting a bunch of good news I’ll blog about separately, I sat down for a figurative smack down with CHECKDB before the weekend. And then the light bulb went on. A sparse column. I thought that I couldn’t possibly be experiencing the same scenario that Paul blogged about back in March showing extreme latching with non-clustered indexes on computed columns. Did I even have a non-clustered index on my sparse column? As it turns out, I did. I had one filtered non-clustered index – with the sparse column as the index key (and only column). To prove that this was the problem, I went and setup a test. Yup, that'll do it The repro is very simple for this issue: I tested it on the latest public builds of SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 (CU6) and SQL Server 2012 SP1 (CU4). First, create a test database and a test table, which only needs to contain a sparse column: CREATE DATABASE SparseColTest; GO USE SparseColTest; GO CREATE TABLE testTable (testCol smalldatetime SPARSE NULL); GO INSERT INTO testTable (testCol) VALUES (NULL); GO 1000000 That’s 1 million rows, and even though you’re inserting NULLs, that’s going to take a while. In my laptop, it took 3 minutes and 31 seconds. Next, we run DBCC CHECKDB against the database: DBCC CHECKDB('SparseColTest') WITH NO_INFOMSGS, ALL_ERRORMSGS; This runs extremely fast, as least on my test rig – 198 milliseconds. Now let’s create a filtered non-clustered index on the sparse column: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [badBadIndex] ON testTable (testCol) WHERE testCol IS NOT NULL; With the index in place now, let’s run DBCC CHECKDB one more time: DBCC CHECKDB('SparseColTest') WITH NO_INFOMSGS, ALL_ERRORMSGS; In my test system this statement completed in 11433 milliseconds. 11.43 full seconds. Quite the jump from 198 milliseconds. I went ahead and dropped the filtered non-clustered indexes on the restored copy of our production database, and ran CHECKDB against that. We went down from 7+ days to 19 hours and 20 minutes. Cue the “Argenis is not impressed” meme, please, Mr. LaRock. My pain is your gain, folks. Go check to see if you have any of such indexes – they’re likely causing your consistency checks to run very, very slow. Happy CHECKDBing, -Argenis ps: I plan to file a Connect item for this issue – I consider it a pretty serious bug in the engine. After all, filtered indexes were invented BECAUSE of the sparse column feature – and it makes a lot of sense to use them together. Watch this space and my twitter timeline for a link.

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  • HTG Explains: Should You Build Your Own PC?

    - by Chris Hoffman
    There was a time when every geek seemed to build their own PC. While the masses bought eMachines and Compaqs, geeks built their own more powerful and reliable desktop machines for cheaper. But does this still make sense? Building your own PC still offers as much flexibility in component choice as it ever did, but prebuilt computers are available at extremely competitive prices. Building your own PC will no longer save you money in most cases. The Rise of Laptops It’s impossible to look at the decline of geeks building their own PCs without considering the rise of laptops. There was a time when everyone seemed to use desktops — laptops were more expensive and significantly slower in day-to-day tasks. With the diminishing importance of computing power — nearly every modern computer has more than enough power to surf the web and use typical programs like Microsoft Office without any trouble — and the rise of laptop availability at nearly every price point, most people are buying laptops instead of desktops. And, if you’re buying a laptop, you can’t really build your own. You can’t just buy a laptop case and start plugging components into it — even if you could, you would end up with an extremely bulky device. Ultimately, to consider building your own desktop PC, you have to actually want a desktop PC. Most people are better served by laptops. Benefits to PC Building The two main reasons to build your own PC have been component choice and saving money. Building your own PC allows you to choose all the specific components you want rather than have them chosen for you. You get to choose everything, including the PC’s case and cooling system. Want a huge case with room for a fancy water-cooling system? You probably want to build your own PC. In the past, this often allowed you to save money — you could get better deals by buying the components yourself and combining them, avoiding the PC manufacturer markup. You’d often even end up with better components — you could pick up a more powerful CPU that was easier to overclock and choose more reliable components so you wouldn’t have to put up with an unstable eMachine that crashed every day. PCs you build yourself are also likely more upgradable — a prebuilt PC may have a sealed case and be constructed in such a way to discourage you from tampering with the insides, while swapping components in and out is generally easier with a computer you’ve built on your own. If you want to upgrade your CPU or replace your graphics card, it’s a definite benefit. Downsides to Building Your Own PC It’s important to remember there are downsides to building your own PC, too. For one thing, it’s just more work — sure, if you know what you’re doing, building your own PC isn’t that hard. Even for a geek, researching the best components, price-matching, waiting for them all to arrive, and building the PC just takes longer. Warranty is a more pernicious problem. If you buy a prebuilt PC and it starts malfunctioning, you can contact the computer’s manufacturer and have them deal with it. You don’t need to worry about what’s wrong. If you build your own PC and it starts malfunctioning, you have to diagnose the problem yourself. What’s malfunctioning, the motherboard, CPU, RAM, graphics card, or power supply? Each component has a separate warranty through its manufacturer, so you’ll have to determine which component is malfunctioning before you can send it off for replacement. Should You Still Build Your Own PC? Let’s say you do want a desktop and are willing to consider building your own PC. First, bear in mind that PC manufacturers are buying in bulk and getting a better deal on each component. They also have to pay much less for a Windows license than the $120 or so it would cost you to to buy your own Windows license. This is all going to wipe out the cost savings you’ll see — with everything all told, you’ll probably spend more money building your own average desktop PC than you would picking one up from Amazon or the local electronics store. If you’re an average PC user that uses your desktop for the typical things, there’s no money to be saved from building your own PC. But maybe you’re looking for something higher end. Perhaps you want a high-end gaming PC with the fastest graphics card and CPU available. Perhaps you want to pick out each individual component and choose the exact components for your gaming rig. In this case, building your own PC may be a good option. As you start to look at more expensive, high-end PCs, you may start to see a price gap — but you may not. Let’s say you wanted to blow thousands of dollars on a gaming PC. If you’re looking at spending this kind of money, it would be worth comparing the cost of individual components versus a prebuilt gaming system. Still, the actual prices may surprise you. For example, if you wanted to upgrade Dell’s $2293 Alienware Aurora to include a second NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 graphics card, you’d pay an additional $600 on Alienware’s website. The same graphics card costs $650 on Amazon or Newegg, so you’d be spending more money building the system yourself. Why? Dell’s Alienware gets bulk discounts you can’t get — and this is Alienware, which was once regarded as selling ridiculously overpriced gaming PCs to people who wouldn’t build their own. Building your own PC still allows you to get the most freedom when choosing and combining components, but this is only valuable to a small niche of gamers and professional users — most people, even average gamers, would be fine going with a prebuilt system. If you’re an average person or even an average gamer, you’ll likely find that it’s cheaper to purchase a prebuilt PC rather than assemble your own. Even at the very high end, components may be more expensive separately than they are in a prebuilt PC. Enthusiasts who want to choose all the individual components for their dream gaming PC and want maximum flexibility may want to build their own PCs. Even then, building your own PC these days is more about flexibility and component choice than it is about saving money. In summary, you probably shouldn’t build your own PC. If you’re an enthusiast, you may want to — but only a small minority of people would actually benefit from building their own systems. Feel free to compare prices, but you may be surprised which is cheaper. Image Credit: Richard Jones on Flickr, elPadawan on Flickr, Richard Jones on Flickr     

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