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• Open Forms In Normal State

  - by baran

  Hi, I have a Mdi form. when I open a form in it in maximize state, after that every form will open in maximize state, and it's not OK for me. actually the second one must open in normal state what can I do?

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• Scrolling content in a kindle book

  - by Dave

  I'm wondering if anyone is aware of a way to scroll content in a kindle book. I thought I had the problem solved by using calibre but I quickly discovered that since the content is DRMed, I'm not allowed to read the book with this reader. lame The specific book I'm reading has code examples in it, but it is difficult to follow them without being able to specifically scroll through the examples. This doesn't even touch on the fact that the code content is also poorly formatted.

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• Can maintain session state when using Server.Transfer() ?

  - by nvn

  Can maintain session state when using Server.Transfer() ?

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• Best JSF framework/library for "conversation state"

  - by stacked

  What do people think is the best JSF framework or library for a saving state longer than request scope (but w/o using session scope) that is backbutton/new window safe -- i.e. you have a "wizard"/multi-page form. For example, MyFaces has the 'SaveState' tag (http://bit.ly/8QHmX5) that allows you to maintain state across pages by saving state in the view's component tree. Any comments on SaveState (pros/cons) or suggestions for any better framework or library for this capability?

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• ASP.NET Custom Control - Template Allowing Literal Content

  - by Bob Fincheimer

  I want my User Control to be able to have Literal Content inside of it. For Example: <fc:Text runat="server">Please enter your login information:</fc:Text> Currently the code for my user control is: <ParseChildren(True, "Content")> _ Partial Public Class ctrFormText Inherits FormControl Private _content As ArrayList <PersistenceMode(PersistenceMode.InnerDefaultProperty), _ DesignerSerializationVisibility(DesignerSerializationVisibility.Content), _ TemplateInstance(TemplateInstance.Single)> _ Public Property Content() As ArrayList Get If _content Is Nothing Then Return New ArrayList End If Return _content End Get Set(ByVal value As ArrayList) _content = value End Set End Property Protected Overrides Sub CreateChildControls() If _content IsNot Nothing Then ctrChildren.Controls.Clear() For Each i As Control In _content ctrChildren.Controls.Add(i) Next End If MyBase.CreateChildControls() End Sub End Class And when I put text inside this control (like above) i get this error: Parser Error Message: Literal content ('Please enter your login information to access CKMS:') is not allowed within a 'System.Collections.ArrayList'. This control could have other content than just the text, so making the Content property an attribute will not solve my problem. I found in some places that I need to implement a ControlBuilder Class, along with another class that implements IParserAccessor. Anyway I just want my default "Content" property to have all types of controls allowed in it, both literal and actual controls.

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• Equalizing Agent and Master Nagios on state change alone

  - by punith

  We have a setup where there are distributed Nagios running on multiple sites and are equalizing their data to the main Nagios server. The problem is it sends back the data to main Nagios server no matter if there is a state change in host or service. Is it possible to configure the slave Nagios to check the service/Host every 5 sec but send back the data only if there is a state change. Currently it is implemented by Obsess Over Hosts/Service which always runs the command which will equalize. Nagios version is 3 I am no administrator but a developer so I don't know the exact jargon so please bare with me.

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• <a> with an inner <span> not triggering :active state in IE 8

  - by Adam Singer

  I want to style the :active state of a button that is represented by an <a> tag. The <a> tag has an inner <span> (beacuse I want to add an icon to this button). I notice the :active state is triggered properly in everything but Internet Explorer 8. In IE 8, it appears that the area around the <span> (the <a>’s padding) triggers the :active state, but when clicking directly on the text within the <span>, the :active state is not triggered. Is there a way to fix this without resorting to Javascript? HTML <a class="button" href="#"> <span>Add a link</span> </a> CSS a.button { some styles } a.button:active { some other styles }

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• Component not listening to MainApp's state change

  - by tag

  I don't know if this is too difficult or too easy. My custom component is trying to listen to the main application's state changes using StateChangeEvent.CURRENT_STATE_CHANGE private function init(){ addEventListener(StateChangeEvent.CURRENT_STATE_CHANGE, function():void{ Alert.show("parent state changed"); }); } but as expected, it's reporting its own state changes not the main application's. I have 2 options: figure a way to tell it that I really mean the main application's state change not its own or configure the main application to dispatch a specific custom event that the component would listen for Any idea how I could do the first? or do I need the second option in this case?

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• Best way to manage the persistence of a form state, to and from a database

  - by Laurent.B

  In a JSP/Servlet webapp, I have to implement a functionality that allows a user to save or restore a form state, that latter containing for instance some search criteria. In other words, the user must be able to save or restore field values of a form, at any time. On the same page that contains that form, there's also another little form that allows him to name his form state before saving it. Then, later he'll be able to recall that state, via a combobox, and refill dynamically the form with the state he selected. I know how to implement that by hand but I would prefer not to reinvent the wheel then I'd like to know if there are some frameworks managing that kind of functionality ? A mix between JSP taglib, filter class, jQuery or other JavaScript frameworks... My research has not give anything yet. Thank you in advance.

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• AI agents with FSM: a question regarding this

  - by Prog

  Finite State Machines implemented with the State design pattern are a common way to design AI agents. I am familiar with the State design pattern and know how to implement it. However I have a question regarding how this is used in games to design AI agents. Please consider a class Monster that represents an AI agent. Simplified it looks like this: class Monster{ State state; // other fields omitted public void update(){ // called every game-loop cycle state.execute(this); } public void setState(State state){ this.state = state; } // irrelevant stuff omitted } There are several State subclasses that implement execute() differently. So far classic State pattern. Here's my question: AI agents are subject to environmental effects and other objects communicating with them. For example an AI agent might tell another AI agent to attack (i.e. agent.attack()). Or a fireball might tell an AI agent to fall down. This means that the agent must have methods such as attack() and fallDown(), or commonly some message receiving mechanism to understand such messages. My question is divided to two parts: 1- Please say if this is correct: With an FSM, the current State of the agent should be the one taking care of such method calls - i.e. the agent delegates to the current state upon every event. Correct? Or wrong? 2- If correct, than how is this done? Are all states obligated by their superclass) to implement methods such as attack(), fallDown() etc., so the agent can always delegate to them on almost every event? Or is it done in some other way?

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• Get your content off Blogger.com

  - by Daniel Moth

  Due to blogger.com deprecating FTP users I've decided to move my blog. When I think of the content of a blog, 4 items come to mind: blog posts, comments, binary files that the blog posts linked to (e.g. images, ZIP files) and the CSS+structure of the blog. 1. Binaries The binary files you used in your blog posts are sitting on your own web space, so really blogger.com is not involved with that. Nothing for you to do at this stage, I'll come back to these in another post. 2. CSS and structure In the best case this exists as a separate CSS file on your web space (so no action for now) or in a worst case, like me, your CSS is embedded with the HTML. In the latter case, simply navigate from you dashboard to "Template" then "Edit HTML" and copy paste the contents of the box. Save that locally in a txt file and we'll come back to that in another post. 3. Blog posts and Comments The blog posts and comments exist in all the HTML files on your own web space. Parsing HTML files to extract that can be painful, so it is easier to download the XML files from blogger's servers that contain all your blog posts and comments. 3.1 Single XML file, but incomplete The obvious thing to do is go into your dashboard "Settings" and under the "Basic" tab look at the top next to "Blog Tools". There is a link there to "Export blog" which downloads an XML file with both comments and posts. The problem with that is that it only contains 200 comments - if you have more than that, you will lose the surplus. Also, this XML file has a lot of noise, compared to the better solution described next. (note that a tool I will refer to in a future post deals with either kind of XML file) 3.2 Multiple XML files First you need to find your blog ID. In case you don't know what that is, navigate to the "Template" as described in section 2 above. You will find references to the blog id in the HTML there, but you can also see it as part of the URL in your browser: blogger.com/template-edit.g?blogID=YOUR_NUMERIC_ID. Mine is 7 digits. You can now navigate to these URLs to download the XML for your posts and comments respectively: blogger.com/feeds/YOUR_NUMERIC_ID/posts/default?max-results=500&start-index=1 blogger.com/feeds/YOUR_NUMERIC_ID/comments/default?max-results=200&start-index=1 Note that you can only get 500 posts at a time and only 200 comments at a time. To get more than that you have to change the URL and download the next batch. To get you started, to get the XML for the next 500 posts and next 200 comments respectively you’d have to use these URLs: blogger.com/feeds/YOUR_NUMERIC_ID/posts/default?max-results=500&start-index=501 blogger.com/feeds/YOUR_NUMERIC_ID/comments/default?max-results=200&start-index=201 ...and so on and so forth. Keep all the XML files in the same folder on your local machine (with nothing else in there). 4. Validating the XML aka editing older blog posts The XML files you just downloaded really contain HTML fragments inside for all your blog posts. If you are like me, your blog posts did not conform to XHTML so passing them to an XML parser (which is what we will want to do) will result in the XML parser choking. So the next step is to fix that. This can be no work at all for you, or a huge time sink or just a couple hours of pain (which was my case). The process I followed was to attempt to load the XML files using XmlDocument.Load and wait for the exception to be thrown from my code. The exception would point to the exact offending line and column which would help me fix the issue. Rather than fix it in the XML itself, I would go back and edit the offending blog post and fix it there - recommended! Then I'd repeat the cycle until the XML could be loaded in the XmlDocument. To give you an idea, some of the issues I encountered are: extra or missing quotes in img and href elements, direct usage of chevrons instead of encoding them as &lt;, missing closing tags, mismatched nested pairs of elements and capitalization of html elements. For a full list of things that may go wrong see this. 5. Opportunity for other changes I also found a few posts that did not have a category assigned so I fixed those too. I took the further opportunity to create new categories and tag some of my blog posts with that. Note that I did not remove/change categories of existing posts, but only added.   In an another post we'll see how to use the XML files you stored in the local folder… Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• WebCenter Content (WCC) Trace Sections

  - by Kevin Smith

  Kyle has a good post on how to modify the size and number of WebCenter Content (WCC) trace files. His post reminded me I have been meaning to write a post on WCC trace sections for a while. searchcache - Tells you if you query was found in the WCC search cache. searchquery - Shows the processing of the query as it is converted form what the user submitted to the end query that will be sent to the database. Shows conversion from the universal query syntax to the syntax specific to the search solution WCC is configured to use. services (verbose) - Lists the filters that are called for each service. This will let you know what filters are available for each service and will also tell you what filters are used by WCC add-on components and any custom components you have installed. The How To Component Sample has a list of filters, but it has not been updated since 7.5, so it is a little outdated now. With each new release WCC adds more filters. If you have a filter that has no code attached to it you will see output like this: services/6    09.25 06:40:26.270    IdcServer-423    Called filter event computeDocName with no filter plugins registered When a WCC add-on or custom component uses a filter you will see trace output like this: services/6    09.25 06:40:26.275    IdcServer-423    Calling filter event postValidateCheckinData on class collections.CollectionValidateCheckinData with parameter postValidateCheckinDataservices/6    09.25 06:40:26.275    IdcServer-423    Calling filter event postValidateCheckinData on class collections.CollectionFilters with parameter postValidateCheckinData As you can see from this sample output it is possible to have multiple code points using the same filter. systemdatabase - Dumps the database call AFTER it executes. This can be somewhat troublesome if you are trying to track down some weird database problems. We had a problem where WCC was getting into a deadlock situation. We turned on the systemdatabase trace section and thought we had the problem database call, but it turned out since it printed out the database call after it was executed we were looking at the database call BEFORE the one causing the deadlock. We ended up having to turn on tracing at the database level to see the database call WCC was making that was causing the deadlock. socketrequests (verbose) - dumps the actual messages received and sent over the socket connection by WCC for a service. If you have gzip enabled you will see junk on the response coming back from WCC. For debugging disable the gzip of the WCC response.Here is an example of the dump of the request for a GET_SEARCH_RESULTS service call. socketrequests/6 09.25 06:46:02.501 IdcServer-6 request: REMOTE_USER=sysadmin.USER-AGENT=Java;.Stel socketrequests/6 09.25 06:46:02.501 IdcServer-6 request: lent.CIS.11g.CONTENT_TYPE=text/html.HEADER socketrequests/6 09.25 06:46:02.501 IdcServer-6 request: _ENCODING=UTF-8.REQUEST_METHOD=POST.CONTEN socketrequests/6 09.25 06:46:02.501 IdcServer-6 request: T_LENGTH=270.HTTP_HOST=CIS.$$$$.NoHttpHead socketrequests/6 09.25 06:46:02.501 IdcServer-6 request: ers=0.IsJava=1.IdcService=GET_SEARCH_RESUL socketrequests/6 09.25 06:46:02.501 IdcServer-6 request: [email protected] socketrequests/6 09.25 06:46:02.501 IdcServer-6 request: calData.SortField=dDocName.ClientEncoding= socketrequests/6 09.25 06:46:02.501 IdcServer-6 request: UTF-8.IdcService=GET_SEARCH_RESULTS.UserTi socketrequests/6 09.25 06:46:02.501 IdcServer-6 request: meZone=UTC.UserDateFormat=iso8601.SortDesc socketrequests/6 09.25 06:46:02.501 IdcServer-6 request: =ASC.QueryText=dDocType..matches..`Documen socketrequests/6 09.25 06:46:02.501 IdcServer-6 request: t`.@end. userstorage, jps - Provides trace details for user authentication and authorization. Includes information on the determination of what roles and accounts a user has access to. In 11g a new trace section, jps, was added with the addition of the JpsUserProvider to communicate with WebLogic Server. The WCC developers decide when to use the verbose option for their trace output, so sometime you need to try verbose to see what different information you get. One of the things I would always have liked to see if the ability to turn on verbose output selectively for individual trace sections. When you turn on verbose output you get it for all trace sections you have enabled. This can quickly fill up your trace files with a lot of information if you have the socket trace section turned on.

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• Java OO design confusion: how to handle actions modified by states modified by actions...

  - by Arvanem

  Hi folks, Given an entity, whose action is potentially modified by states (of the entity and other entities) in turn potentially modified by other actions (of the entity and other entities) , what is the best way to code or design to handle the potential existence of the modifiers? Speaking metaphorically, I am coding a Java application representing a piano. As you know a piano has keys (which, when pressed, emit sound) and pedals (which, when pressed, modify the keys' sounds). My base class structure is as follows: Entity (for keys and pedals) State (this holds each entity's states, e.g. name such as "soft pedal", and boolean "Pressed"), Action (this holds each entity's actions, e.g. play sound when pressed, or modify others sounds). By composition, the Entity class has a copy of each of State and Action inside it. e.g.: public class Entity { State entityState = new State(); Action entityAction = new Action(); Thus I have coded a "C-Sharp" key Entity. When I "press" that entity (set its "Pressed" state to true), its action plays a "C-Sharp" sound and then sets its "Pressed" state to false. At the same time, if the "C-Sharp" key entity is not "tuned", its sound deviates from "C-Sharp". Meanwhile I have coded a "soft pedal" Entity. When that entity is "pressed", no sound plays but its action is to make softer the sound of the "C-Sharp" and other key entities. I have also coded a "sustain pedal" Entity. When that entity is "pressed", no sound plays but its action is to enable reverberation of the sound of the "C-Sharp" and other key entities. Both the "soft" and "sustain pedals" can be pressed at the same time with the result that keys entities become both softened and reverberating. In short, I do not understand how to make this simultaneous series of states and actions modify each other in a sensible OO way. I am wary of coding a massive series of "if" statements or "switches". Thanks in advance for any help or links you can offer.

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• Workshops, online content show how Oracle infuses simplicity, mobility, extensibility into user experience

  - by mvaughan

  By Kathy Miedema & Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle has made a huge investment into the user experience of its many different software product families, and recent releases showcase big changes and features that aim to promote end user engagement and efficiency by streamlining navigation and simplifying the user interface. But making Oracle’s enterprise software great-looking and usable doesn’t stop when Oracle products go out the door. The Applications User Experience (UX) team recognizes that our customers may need to customize software to fit their work processes. And that’s why we provide tools such as user experience design patterns to help you maintain the Oracle user experience as you tailor your application to fit your business needs. Often, however, customers may need some context around user experience. How has the Oracle user experience been designed and constructed? Why is a good user experience important for users? How does understanding what goes into the user experience benefit the people who purchase the software for users? There’s a short answer to these questions, and you can read about it on Usable Apps. But truly understanding Oracle’s investment and seeing how it applies across product families occasionally requires a deeper dive into the Oracle user experience, especially if you’re an influencer or decision-maker about Oracle products. To help frame these decisions, the Communications & Outreach team has developed several targeted workshops that explore what Oracle means when it talks about user experience, and provides a roadmap into where the Oracle user experience is going. These workshops require non-disclosure agreements, and have been delivered to Oracle sales folks, Oracle partners, Oracle ACE Directors and ACEs, and a few customers. Some of these audience members have been developers or have a technical background; just as many did not. Here’s a breakdown of the kind of training you can get around the Oracle user experience from the OAUX Communications & Outreach team.For Partners: George Papazzian, Principal, Naviscent with Joyce Ohgi, Oracle Oracle Fusion Applications HCM Pre-Sales Seminar:  In concert with Worldwide Alliances  and  Channels under Applications Partner Enablement Director Jonathan Vinoskey’s guidance, the Applications User Experience team delivers a two-day workshop.  Day one focuses on Oracle Fusion Applications HCM and pre-sales strategy, and Day two focuses on positioning and leveraging Oracle’s investment in the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience.  The next workshops will occur on the following dates: December 4-5, 2013 @ Manchester, UK January 29-30, 2014 @ Reston, Virginia February 2014 @ Guadalajara, Mexico (email: Shannon Whiteman) March 11-12, 2014 @ Dubai, United Arab Emirates April 1-2, 2014 @ Chicago, Illinois Partner Advisory Board: A two-day board meeting in the U.S. and U.K. to discuss four main user experience areas for Oracle Fusion Applications: simplicity, visualization & analytics, mobility, & futures. This event is limited to Oracle Diamond Partners, UX bloggers, and key UX influencers and requires legal documentation.  We will be talking about the Oracle applications UX strategy and roadmap. Partner Implementation Training on User Interface: How to Build Great-Looking, Usable Apps:  In this two-day, hands-on workshop built around Oracle’s Application Development Framework, learn how to build desktop and mobile user interfaces and mobile user interfaces based on Oracle’s experience with Fusion Applications. This workshop is for partners with a technology background who are looking for ways to tailor Fusion Applications using ADF, or have built their own custom solutions using ADF. It includes an introduction to UX design patterns and provides tools to build usability-tested UX designs. Nov 5-6, 2013 @ Redwood Shores, CA, USA January 28-29th, 2014 @ Reston, Virginia, USA February 25-26, 2014 @ Guadalajara, Mexico March 9-10, 2014 @ Dubai, United Arab Emirates To register, contact [email protected] Simplified UI Customization & Extensibility:  Pilot workshop:  We will be reviewing the proposed content for communicating the user experience tool kit available with the next release of Oracle Fusion Applications.  Our core focus will be on what toolkit components our system implementors and independent software vendors will need to respond to customer demand, whether they are extending Fusion Applications, or building custom applications, that will need to leverage the simplified UI. Dec 11th, 2013 @ Reading, UK For information: contact [email protected] Private lab tour and demos: Interested in seeing what’s going on in the Apps UX Labs?  If you are headed to the San Francisco Bay Area, let us know. We can arrange a spin through our usability labs at headquarters. OAUX Expo: This open-house forum gives partners a look at what the UX team is working on, and showcases the next-generation user experiences in a demo environment where attendees can see and touch the applications. UX Direct: Use the same methods that Oracle uses to develop its own user experiences. We help you define your users and their needs, and then provide direction on how to tailor the best user experience you can for them. For CustomersAngela Johnston, Gozel Aamoth, Teena Singh, and Yen Chan, Oracle Lab tours: See demos of soon-to-be-released products, and take a spin on usability research equipment such as our eye-tracker. Watch this video to get an idea of what you’ll see. Get our newsletter: Learn about newly released products and see where you can meet us at user group conferences. Participate in a feedback session: Join a focus group or customer feedback session to get an early look at user experience designs for the next generation of software, and provide your thoughts on how well it will work. Join the OUAB: The Oracle Usability Advisory Board meets several times a year to discuss trends in the workforce and provide direction on user experience designs. UX Direct: Use the same methods that Oracle uses to develop its own user experiences. We help you define your users and their needs, and then provide direction on how to tailor the best user experience you can for them. For Developers (customers, partners, and consultants): Plinio Arbizu, SP Solutions, Richard Bingham, Oracle, Balaji Kamepalli, EiSTechnoogies, Praveen Pillalamarri, EiSTechnologies How to Build Great-Looking, Usable Apps: This workshop is for attendees with a strong technology background who are looking for ways to tailor customer software using ADF. It includes an introduction to UX design patterns and provides tools to build usability-tested UX designs.  See above for dates and times. UX design patterns web site: Cut the length of your project down by months. Use these patterns to build out the task flow you need to develop for your users. The patterns have already been usability-tested and represent the best practices that the Oracle UX research team has found in its studies. UX Direct: Use the same methods that Oracle uses to develop its own user experiences. We help you define your users and their needs, and then provide direction on how to tailor the best user experience you can for them. For Oracle Sales Mike Klein, Jeremy Ashley, Brent White, Oracle Contact your local sales person for more information about the Oracle user experience and the training available from the Applications User Experience Communications & Outreach team. See customer-friendly user experience collateral ranging from the new simplified UI in Oracle Fusion Applications Release 7, to E-Business Suite user experience highlights, to Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards user experience highlights.   Receive access to the same pre-sales and implementation training we provide to partners. For Oracle Sales only: Oracle-only training on the Oracle Fusion Applications UX Innovation Sales Kit.

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• How to Best Optimize up Model Transforms, Import 3DS Animations Into XNA 4.0?

  - by Jason R. Mick

  Relative beginner to XNA, but trying to build a multi-purpose (3D) game frameworking in XNA 4. Been using the Reed (O'Reilly) and Cawood/McGee (McGraw Hill) guides. My question is multi-faceted and involves how to most efficiently handle models. I'm using 3DS Max 2010 with kw-Xport to ship out my models as .X files. Solved an early problem by using my depth stencil state. My models are now loading properly (yay!) and I have basic bounding working, I just want to optimize transforming models and get animations working as a next step. My questions on models are: 1. Do you have any suggestions for good resources on exporting 3DS animations to XNA? I've seen some resources on how to handle animations in XNA, but most skimp on basic topics of how to convert multi-animation 3DS files. For example how do I take one big long string of keyframed animations (say running, frame 5-20, climbing frames 25-45, etc.) and turned them into named XNA animations. To my understanding every XNA animation has to have a name, but I haven't seen any tutorials on creating a new named animation from a subset of frames. 2. Is it faster to load a model once and animate/transform that base model on the fly @ draw time, or to load multiple models? My game will have multiple enemies, and I've already seen some lagginess in XNA, so II want to make my code efficient... 3. I've heard people on app hub talking about making custom content processors for models-- what is the benefit of this? Does it speed up transforming or animating the models? If so, can you point me towards any good (model-centric) tutorials? (I've built a custom height map content processor to generate terrain, following Cawood's examples, I'm just a bit confused as to how a model content processor would be implemented.)

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• Sprite sheets, Clamp or Wrap?

  - by David

  I'm using a combination of sprite sheets for well, sprites and individual textures for infinite tiling. For the tiling textures I'm obviously using Wrap to draw the entire surface in one call but up until now I've been making a seperate batch using Clamp for drawing sprites from the sprite sheets. The sprite sheets include a border (repeating the edge pixels of each sprite) and my code uses the correct source coordinates for sprites. But since I'm never giving coordinates outside of the texture when drawing sprites (and indeed the border exists to prevent bleed over when filtering) it's struck me that I'd be better off just using Wrap so that I can combine everything into one batch. I just want to be sure that I haven't overlooked something obvious. Is there any reason that Wrap would be harmful when used with a sprite sheet?

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• Who writes the words? A rant with graphs.

  - by Roger Hart

  If you read my rant, you'll know that I'm getting a bit of a bee in my bonnet about user interface text. But rather than just yelling about the way the world should be (short version: no UI text would suck), it seemed prudent to actually gather some data. Rachel Potts has made an excellent first foray, by conducting a series of interviews across organizations about how they write user interface text. You can read Rachel's write up here. She presents the facts as she found them, and doesn't editorialise. The result is insightful, but impartial isn't really my style. So here's a rant with graphs. My method, and how it sucked I sent out a short survey. Survey design is one of my hobby-horses, and since some smartarse in the comments will mention it if I don't, I'll step up and confess: I did not design this one well. It was potentially ambiguous, implicitly excluded people, and since I only really advertised it on Twitter and a couple of mailing lists the sample will be chock full of biases. Regardless, these were the questions: What do you do? Select the option that best describes your role What kind of software does your organization make? (optional) In your organization, who writes the text on your software user interfaces? (for example: button names, static text, tooltips, and so on) Tick all that apply. In your organization who is responsible for user interface text? Who "owns" it? The most glaring issue (apart from question 3 being a bit broken) was that I didn't make it clear that I was asking about applications. Desktop, mobile, or web, I wouldn't have minded. In fact, it might have been interesting to categorize and compare. But a few respondents commented on the seeming lack of relevance, since they didn't really make software. There were some other issues too. It wasn't the best survey. So, you know, pinch of salt time with what follows. Despite this, there were 100 or so respondents. This post covers the overview, and you can look at the raw data in this spreadsheet What did people do? Boring graph number one: I wasn't expecting that. Given I pimped the survey on twitter and a couple of Tech Comms discussion lists, I was more banking on and even Content Strategy/Tech Comms split. What the "Others" specified: Three people chipped in with Technical Writer. Author, apparently, doesn't cut it. There's a "nobody reads the instructions" joke in there somewhere, I'm sure. There were a couple of hybrid roles, including Tech Comms and Testing, which sounds gruelling and thankless. There was also, an Intranet Manager, a Creative Director, a Consultant, a CTO, an Information Architect, and a Translator. That's a pretty healthy slice through the industry. Who wrote UI text? Boring graph number two: Annoyingly, I made this a "tick all that apply" question, so I can't make crude and inflammatory generalizations about percentages. This is more about who gets involved in user interface wording. So don't panic about the number of developers writing UI text. First off, it just means they're involved. Second, they might be good at it. What? It could happen. Ours are involved - they write a placeholder and flag it to me for changes. Sometimes I don't make any. It's also not surprising that there's so much UX in the mix. Some of that will be people taking care, and crafting an understandable interface. Some of it will be whatever text goes on the wireframe making it into production. I'm going to assume that's what happened at eBay, when their iPhone app purportedly shipped with the placeholder text "Some crappy content goes here". Ahem. Listing all 17 "other" responses would make this post lengthy indeed, but you can read them in the raw data spreadsheet. The award for the approach that sounds the most like a good idea yet carries the highest risk of ending badly goes to whoever offered up "External agencies using focus groups". If you're reading this, and that actually works, leave a comment. I'm fascinated. Who owned UI text Stop. Bar chart time: Wow. Let's cut to the chase, and by "chase", I mean those inflammatory generalizations I was talking about: In around 60% of cases the person responsible for user interface text probably lacks the relevant expertise. Even in the categories I count as being likely to have relevant skills (Marketing Copywriters, Content Strategists, Technical Authors, and User Experience Designers) there's a case for each role being unsuited, as you'll see in Rachel's blog post So it's not as simple as my headline. Does that mean that you personally, Mr Developer reading this, write bad button names? Of course not. I know nothing about you. It rather implies that as a category, the majority of people looking after UI text have neither communication nor user experience as their primary skill set, and as such will probably only be good at this by happy accident. I don't have a way of measuring those frequency of those accidents. What the Others specified: I don't know who owns it. I assume the project manager is responsible. "copywriters" when they wish to annoy me. the client's web maintenance person, often PR or MarComm That last one chills me to the bone. Still, at least nobody said "the work experience kid". You can see the rest in the spreadsheet. My overwhelming impression here is of user interface text as an unloved afterthought. There were fewer "nobody" responses than I expected, and a much broader split. But the relative predominance of developers owning and writing UI text suggests to me that organizations don't see it as something worth dedicating attention to. If true, that's bothersome. Because the words on the screen, particularly the names of things, are fundamental to the ability to understand an use software. It's also fascinating that Technical Authors and Content Strategists are neck and neck. For such a nascent discipline, Content Strategy appears to have made a mark on software development. Or my sample is skewed. But it feels like a bit of validation for my rant: Content Strategy is eating Tech Comms' lunch. That's not a bad thing. Well, not if the UI text is getting done well. And that's the caveat to this whole post. I couldn't care less who writes UI text, provided they consider the user and don't suck at it. I care that it may be falling by default to people poorly disposed to doing it right. And I care about that because so much user interface text sucks. The most interesting question Was one I forgot to ask. It's this: Does your organization have technical authors/writers? Like a lot of survey data, that doesn't tell you much on its own. But once we get a bit dimensional, it become more interesting. So taken with the other questions, this would have let me find out what I really want to know: What proportion of organizations have Tech Comms professionals but don't use them for UI text? Who writes UI text in their place? Why this happens? It's possible (feasible is another matter) that hundreds of companies have tech authors who don't work on user interfaces because they've empirically discovered that someone else, say the Marketing Copywriter, is better at it. And once we've all finished laughing, I'll point out that I've met plenty of tech authors who just aren't used to thinking about users at the point of need in the way UI text and embedded user assistance require. If you've got what I regard, perhaps unfairly, as the bad kind of tech author - the old-school kind with the thousand-page pdf and the grammar obsession - if you've got one of those then you probably are better off getting the UX folk or the copywriters to do your UI text. At the very least, they'll derive terminology from user research.

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• Side effect-free interface on top of a stateful library

  - by beta

  In an interview with John Hughes where he talks about Erlang and Haskell, he has the following to say about using stateful libraries in Erlang: If I want to use a stateful library, I usually build a side effect-free interface on top of it so that I can the use it safely in the rest of my code. What does he mean by this? I am trying to think of an example of how this would look, but my imagination and/or knowledge is failing me.

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• Why does F. Wagner consider "NOT (AI_LARGER_THAN_8.1)" to be ambiguous?

  - by oosterwal

  In his article on Virtual Environments (a part of his VFSM specification method) Ferdinand Wagner describes some new ways of thinking about Boolean Algebra as a software design tool. On page 4 of this PDF article, when describing operators in his system he says this: Control statements need Boolean values. Hence, the names must be used to produce Boolean results. To achieve this we want to combine them together using Boolean operators. There is nothing wrong with usage of AND and OR operators with their Boolean meaning. For instance, we may write: DI_ON OR AI_LARGER_THAN_8.1 AND TIMER_OVER to express the control situation: digital input is on or analog input is larger than 8.1 and timer is over. We cannot use the NOT operator, because the result of the Boolean negation makes sense only for true Boolean values. The result of, for instance, NOT (AI_LARGER_THAN_8.1) would be ambiguous. If "AI_LARGER_THAN_8.1" is acceptable, why would he consider "NOT (AI_LARGER_THAN_8.1)" to be ambiguous?

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• Letting search engines know that different links to identical pages stress different parts of the page

  - by balpha

  When you follow a permalink to a chat message in the Stack Exchange chat, you get a view of the transcript page for the day that contains the particular message. This message is highlighted in yellow, and the page is scrolled to its position. Sometimes – admittedly rarely, but it happens – a web search will result in such a transcript link. Here's a (constructed, obviously) example: A Google search for strange behavior of the \bibliography command site:chat.stackexchange.com gives me a link to this chat message. This message is obiously unrelated to my query, but the transcript page does indeed contain my search terms – just in a totally different spot. Both the above links lead to the same content, and Google knows this, since both pages have <link rel="canonical" href="/transcript/41/2012/4/9/0-24" /> in their <head>. The only difference between the two links is Which message has the highlight css class?. Is there a way to let Google know that while all three links have the same content, they put an emphasis on a different part of the content? Note that the permalinks on the transcript page already have a #12345 hash to "point" to the relavant chat message, but Google appears to drop it.

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• How to test issues in a local development environment that can only be introduced by clustering in production?

  - by Brian Reindel

  We recently clustered an application, and it came to light that because of how we're doing SSL offloading via the load balancer in production it didn't work right. I had to mimic this functionality on my local machine by SSL offloading Apache with a proxy, but it still isn't a 1-to-1 comparison. Similar issues can arise when dealing with stateful applications and sticky sessions. What would be the industry standard for testing this kind of production "black box" scenario in a local environment, especially as it relates to clustering?

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• Saving an interface instance into a Bundle

  - by user22241

  All I've have an interface that allows me to switch between different scenes in my Android game. When the home key is pressed, I am saving all of my states (score, sprite positions etc) into a Bundle. When re-launching, I am restoring all my states and all is OK - however, I can't figure out how to save my 'Scene', thus when I return, it always starts at the default screen which is the 'Main Menu'. How would I go about saving my 'Scene' (into a Bundle)? Code import android.view.MotionEvent; public interface Scene{ void render(); void updateLogic(); boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event); } I assume the interface is the relevant piece of code which is why I've posted that snippet. I set my scene like so: ('options' is an object of my Options class which extends MainMenu (Another custom class) which, in turn implements the interface 'Scene') SceneManager.getInstance().setCurrentScene(options); //Current scene is optionscreen

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• Why does a proportional controller have a steady state error?

  - by Qantas 94 Heavy

  I've read about feedback loops, how much this steady state error is for a given gain and what to do to remove this steady state error (add integral and/or derivative gains to the controller), but I don't understand at all why this steady state error occurs in the first place. If I understand how a proportional control works correctly, the output is equal to the current output plus the error, multiplied by the proportional gain (Kp). However, wouldn't the error slowly diminish over time as it is added (reaching 0 at infinite time), not have a steady state error? From my confusion, it seems I'm completely misunderstanding how it works - a proper explanation of how this steady state error eventuates would be fantastic.

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• How to write a blog for SEO purpose

  - by Mathieu Imbert

  I have a photo sharing website, which provides very little textual content. Users can add tags to photos and a description, but it creates a lot of duplicate content, because most of the descriptions will be 'wow', 'lol', ... I don't think I should rely on users to build my SEO. I think it would be a great idea to write a blog, and use it to describe the best photos, start contests, explain themes, in short: create original content that search engines will love. Our website's main URL is like www.domain.com, and our new blog is hosted on blog.domain.com. From a SEO perspective, is it a good idea to keep the blog separate from the main site? This has the advantage to leave the original site unchanged, but will it add any page rank to the www.domain.com? If the blog ranks well it will obviously pass some page rank to the original through links. What do you think is the best option from a SEO perspective? Include the blog in www.domain.com? Or leave it in blog.domain.com?

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• HLSL: An array of textures and sampler states

  - by nate142

  The shader must switch between multiple textures depending on the Alpha value of the original texture for each pixel. Now this would word fine if I didn't have to worry about SamplerStates. I have created my array of textures and can select a texture based on the Alpha value of the pixel. But how do I create an Array of SamplerStates and link it to my array of textures? I attempted to treat the SamplerState as a function by adding the (int i) but that didn't work. Also I can't use Texture.Sample since this is shader model 2.0. //shader model 2.0 (DX9) texture subTextures[255]; SamplerState MeshTextureSampler(int i) { Texture = (subTextures[i]); }; float4 SampleCompoundTexture(float2 texCoord, float4 diffuse) { float4 SelectedColor = SAMPLE_TEXTURE(Texture, texCoord); int i = SelectedColor.a; texture SelectedTx = subTextures[i]; return tex2D(MeshTextureSampler(i), texCoord) * diffuse; }

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