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  • Drawing multiple Textures as tilemap

    - by DocJones
    I am trying to draw a 2d game map and the objects on the map in a single pass. Here is my OpenGL initialization code // Turn off unnecessary operations glDisable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glDisable(GL_LIGHTING); glDisable(GL_CULL_FACE); glDisable(GL_STENCIL_TEST); glDisable(GL_DITHER); glEnable(GL_BLEND); glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); // activate pointer to vertex & texture array glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); My drawing code is being called by a NSTimer every 1/60 s. Here is the drawing code of my world object: - (void) draw:(NSRect)rect withTimedDelta:(double)d { GLint *t; glActiveTexture(GL_TEXTURE0); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, [_textureManager textureByName:@"blocks"]); glTexEnvi(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL_REPLACE); for (int x=0; x<[_map getWidth] ; x++) { for (int y=0; y<[_map getHeight] ; y++) { GLint v[] = { 16*x ,16*y, 16*x+16,16*y, 16*x+16,16*y+16, 16*x ,16*y+16 }; t=[_textureManager getBlockWithNumber:[_map getBlockAtX:x andY:y]]; glVertexPointer(2, GL_INT, 0, v); glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_INT, 0, t); glDrawArrays(GL_QUADS, 0, 4); } } } (_textureManager is a Singelton only loading a texture once!) The object drawing codes is identical (except the nested loops) in terms of OpenGL calls: - (void) drawWithTimedDelta:(double)d { GLint *t; GLint v[] = { 16*xpos ,16*ypos, 16*xpos+16,16*ypos, 16*xpos+16,16*ypos+16, 16*xpos ,16*ypos+16 }; glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, [_textureManager textureByName:_textureName]); t=[_textureManager getBlockWithNumber:12]; glVertexPointer(2, GL_INT, 0, v); glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_INT, 0, t); glDrawArrays(GL_QUADS, 0, 4); } As soon as my central drawing routine calls the two drawing methods the second call overlays the first one. i would expect the call to world.draw to draw the map and "stamp" the objects upon it. Debugging shows me, that the first call is performed correctly (world is being drawn), but the following call to all objects ONLY draws the objects, the rest of the scene is getting black. I think i need to blend the drawn textures, but i cant seem to figure out how. Any help is appreciated. Thanks PS: Here is the github link to the project. It may not be in sync of my post here, but for some more in-depth analysis it may help.

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  • XNA Notes 001

    - by George Clingerman
    Just a quick recap of things I noticed going on in or around the XNA community this past week. I’m sure there’s a lot I missed (it’s a pretty big community with lots of different parts to it) but these where the things I caught that I thought were pretty cool. The XNA Team Michael Klucher gave a list of books every gamer should read. http://twitter.com/#!/mklucher/status/22313041135673344 Shawn Hargreaves posted Nelxon Studio posting about a cheatsheet for converting 3.1 to 4.0 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/01/04/xna-3-1-to-4-0-cheat-sheet.aspx?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter XNA Game Studio won the Frontline award for Programming Tool by GameDev magazine! Congrats to the XNA team! http://www.gdmag.com/homepage.htm XNA MVPs In January several MVPs were up for re-election, Jim Perry, Andy ‘The ZMan’ Dunn, Glenn Wilson and myself were all re-award a Microsoft MVP award for their contributions to the XNA/DirectX communities. https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/communities/mvp.aspx?product=1&competency=XNA%2fDirectX A movement to get Michael McLaughlin an MVP award has started and you can join in too! http://twitter.com/#!/theBigDaddio/status/22744458621620224 http://www.xnadevelopment.com/MVP/MichaelMcLaughlinMVP.txt Don’t forget you can nominate ANYONE for a MVP award, that’s how they work. https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/gp/mvpbecoming  XNA Developers James Silva of Ska Studios hit 9,200 sales of ZP2KX and recommends you listen to Infected Mushroom. http://twitter.com/#!/Jamezila/status/22538865357094912 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infected_Mushroom Noogy creator of the upcoming XBLA title Dust an Elysian tail posts some details into his art creation. http://noogy.com/image/statue/statue.html Xbox LIVE Indie Game News Microsoft posts acknowledging there was an issue with the sales data that has been addressed and apologized for not posting about it sooner. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71347/436154.aspx#436154 Winter Uprising sales still chugging along and being updated by Xalterax (by those developers willing to actually share sales numbers. Thanks for sharing guys, much appreciated!) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/70147.aspx Don’t forget about Dream Build Play coming up in February! http://www.dreambuildplay.com/Main/Home.aspx The Best Xbox LIVE Indie Games December Edition comes out on NeoGaf http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=414485 The Greatest XBox LIVE Indie Games of 2010 on DealSpwn – Congrats to DrMistry and MStarGames for his #1 spot with his massive XBLIG Space Pirates From Tomorrow! http://www.dealspwn.com/xbligoty-2010/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Dealspwn+%28Dealspwn%29 XNA Game Development The future of XACT and WP7 has finally been confirmed and we finally know what our options are for looping audio seamlessly on WP7. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/61826/436639.aspx#436639  Super Mario 3 Design Notes is an interesting read for XBLIG developers, giving some insight to the training that natural occurs for players as they start playing the game. Good things for XBLIG developers to think about. http://www.significant-bits.com/super-mario-bros-3-level-design-lessons

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  • links for 2011-01-04

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Webcasts (tags: ping.fm) Five Key Trends in Enterprise 2.0 for 2011 (Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Blog) Kellsey Ruppel shares insight from Oracle's Andy MacMillan. (tags: oracle otn enterprise2.0) Victor Bax: Lost in Service Oriented Architecture? "SOA is a concept, no more, no less. SOA is not a technology, or a piece of software. It is an architecture, a model." - Victor Bax (tags: oracle soa) Jan-Leendert: Oracle 11g SOA Suite read multi record data from csv file with the file adapter (master-detail) "The file adapter is a very powerlful tool to read files with structured data. Most of the time you will read simple csv files with one record per row. But what if your csv file contains multiple records with different types?" - Jan-Leendert (tags: oracle soa soasuite) @myfear: Five ways to know how your data looked in the past. Entity Auditing. "Whatever requirements you have. I can promise you, that it will never be a simple solution. In general it's best to evaluate your purpose for auditing in detail." - Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele (tags: oracle otn oracleace java) @fteter: Buffing Up The Crystal Ball "While I'm already tired of seeing these types of posts (I'm writing on New Year's Day), I'm also feeling guilty about not making my own set of predictions." - Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter (tags: oracle otn oracleace ec2 cloud fusionmiddleware) @bex: ECM New Year's Resolutions "Happy new year! Most people use the first post of the year to go over their own blog statistics of popular posts... but since my blog's fiscal year ends in April, I decided to do new years resolutions instead." - Oracle ACE Director Bex Huff (tags: oracle otn oracleace ecm enterprise2.0) Izaak de Hullu: Embedded Java in a 11g BPEL process "In an earlier blog my colleague Peter Ebell explained how you can create an extension of com.collaxa.cube.engine.ext.BPELXExecLet to do your coding in a regular Java environment so you have code completion and validation..." - Izaak de Hullu (tags: oracle otn bpel java soa) @gschmutz: Cannot access EM console after installing SOA Suite 11g PS2 Oracle ACE Director Guido Schmutz encounters a problem and shares the solution. (tags: oracle otn oracleace soa soasuite)

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  • Play a Webpage Display Prank in Google Chrome

    - by Asian Angel
    Are you looking for a fun but innocent prank to play on someone who loves using Google Chrome? If so then you may want to have a closer look at the Upside Down extension for Chrome. Before Here is our example webpage before starting the prank…looking all “normal like”. Upside Down in Action As soon as the extension has been installed you are ready to go. If you had a webpage open before installing the extension you will only need to refresh the page. As soon as the page has been refreshed or a new one is opened everything is going to look messed up very quickly. With the default setting there are five different “looks” available. To cycle through the five “looks” use the “Windows Key + Semicolon” or “Command + Semicolon” to toggle through them. On the sixth toggle the webpage will revert to normal (toggling afterwards starts the whole process again). Here are the five “looks” available…         Options There are options available for the extension where you can focus on just a specific effect or a group of effects. You can also enable a “Grayscale Effect” and even set a delay timer (a definite “evil touch”)! Think of the fun and surprised looks that await… Conclusion If you have been looking for a fun and unexpected prank for your favorite Google Chrome fan then this just might be what you have been looking for. Get ready to sit back and watch the fun. Links Download the Upside Down extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Take Screenshots of Any Webpage in Google ChromeHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserSubscribe to RSS Feeds in Chrome with a Single ClickActivate the Redesigned New-Tab Interface in Google ChromeFriday Fun: Play MineSweeper in Google Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 If Web Browsers Were Modes of Transportation Google Translate (for animals) Out of 100 Tweeters Roadkill’s Scan Port scans for open ports Out of band Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 Cool Looking Screensavers for Windows

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-06-14

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Duke's Choice Award Nominations Close Friday! | The Java Source The Duke's Choice Awards celebrate extreme innovation in the world of Java technology. Nominate an individual, a group or company who show the best in Java innovation. Nominate at Java.net/dukeschoice. Nominations are open until this Friday, June 15. Whole Lotta Virtualization Goin' On | Rick Ramsey The OTN Garage's Rick Ramsey shares a list of recent Virtualization articles available on OTN, along with a link to a video by The Killer, Mr Jerry Lee Lewis. A Pragmatic Path to Navigating your Infrastructure to the Cloud | The WebLogic Server Blog Ruma Sanyal offers an overview of a recent Oracle webcast featuring Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Andy Butler and Vice President and Gartner Fellow Massimo Pezzini. Migrating C/C++ embedded SQL code | Tom Laszewski Cloud migration expert Tom Laszewski explains the how-to in 5 easy steps. Aetna Dumps Its Siloed Enterprise Architecture for SOA | CIO.com CIO writer Stephanie Overby tells the story of how one major health insurance provider put the "Enterprise" back in Enterprise Architecture. (H/T to Joe McKendrick for this story.) Downloading specific video renditions in WebCenter Content | Kyle Hatlestad How-to from Oracle WebCenter & ADF A-Team blogger Kyle Hatlestad. Eclipse DemoCamp - June 2012 - Redwood Shores, CA Location: Oracle HQ - 10 Twin Dolphin Drive, Redwood Shores, CA (Map) Date and Time: Wednesday, June 13, 2012. From 6pm - 9pm Agenda: The evolution of Java persistence, Doug Clarke, EclipseLink Project Lead, Oracle Integrating BIRT into Applications, Ashwini Verma, Actuate Corporation Leveraging OSGi In The Enterprise, Kamal Muralidharan, Lead Engineer, eBay Developing Rich ADF Applications with Java EE, Greg Stachnick, Oracle NVIDIA® NsightTM Eclipse Edition, Goodwin (Tech lead - Visual tools), Eugene Ostroukhov (Senior engineer – Visual tools) 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards - Win a FREE Pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2012 in San Francisco Share your use of Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions and how they help your organization drive business innovation. You just might win a free pass to Oracle Openworld 2012 in San Francisco. Deadline for submissions in July 17, 2012. BI Architecture Master Class for Partners – Oracle Architecture Unplugged Date: June 21, 2012 No slides, no fluff. This workshop will be highly interactive and is aimed at Oracle OPN member partners who are IT Architects and BI+W specialists. The focus will be on architectural issues and considerations. DevOps: Evolving to Handle Disruption | JP Morgenthal The subject of DevOps came up this week during an OTN ArchBeat podcast interview with Ron Batra and James Baty on the role of the cloud architect (that program will be available in a few weeks). Morgenthal's article for InfoQ offers a good overview of what DevOps is and how it works. Thought for the Day "Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure." — Edsger Dijkstra Source: softwarequotes.com

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  • Data Structures usage and motivational aspects

    - by Aubergine
    For long student life I was always wondering why there are so many of them yet there seems to be lack of usage at all in many of them. The opinion didn't really change when I got a job. We have brilliant books on what they are and their complexities, but I never encounter resources which would actually give a good hint of practical usage. I perfectly understand that I have to look at problem , analyse required operations, look for data structure that does them efficiently. However in practice I never do that, not because of human laziness syndrome, but because when it comes to work I acknowledge time priority over self-development. Over time I thought that when I would be better developer I will automatically use more of them - that didn't happen at all or maybe I just didn't. Then I found that the colleagues usually in the same plate as me - knowing more or less some three of data structures and being totally happy about it and refusing to discuss this matter further with me, coming back to conversations about 'cool new languages' 'libraries that do jobs for you' and the joy to work under scrumban etc. I am stuck with ArrayLists, Arrays and SortedMap , which no matter what I do always suffice or either I tweak them to be capable of fulfilling my task. Yes, it might be inefficient but do we really have to care if Intel increases performance over years no matter if we improve our skills? Does new Xeon or IBM machines really care what we use? What if I like build things, but I am not particularly excited whether it is n log(n) or just n? Over twenty years the processing power increased enormously, which gives us freedom of not being critical about which one to use? On top of that new more optimized languages appear which support multiple cores more efficiently. To be more specific: I would like to find motivational material on complex real areas/cases of possible effective usages of data structures. I would be really grateful if you would provide relevant resources. There is similar question ,but in the end the links again mostly describe or do dumb example(vehicles, students or holy grail quest - yes, very relevant) them and people keep referring to the "scenario decides the data structure to use". I want to know these complex scenarios to be able to identify similarities to my scenario and then use them. The complex scenarios where it really matters and not necessarily of quantitive nature. It seems that data structures only concern is efficiency and nothing else? There seems to be no particular convenience for developer in use one over another. (only when I found scientific resources on why exactly simple carbohydrates are evil I stopped eating sugar and candies completely replacing it with less harmful fruits - I hope you can see the analogy)

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  • One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

    - by Bob Rhubart
    One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

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  • One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

    - by Bob Rhubart
    One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

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  • Is there a pedagogical game engine?

    - by K.G.
    I'm looking for a book, website, or other resource that gives modern 3D game engines the same treatment as Operating Systems: Design and Implementation gave operating systems. I have read Jason Gregory's Game Engine Architecture, which I enjoyed. However, by intent the author treated components of the architecture as atomic units, whereas what I'm interested in is the plumbing between those units that makes a coherent whole out of ideally loosely coupled parts. In books such as these, one usually reads that "that's academic," but that's the point! I have also read Julian Gold's Object-oriented Game Development, which likewise was good, but I feel is beginning to show its age. Since even mobile platforms these days are multicore and have fast video memory, those kinds of things (concurrency, display item buffering) would ideally be covered. There are other resources, such as the Doom 3 source code, which is highly instructive for its being a shipped product. The problem with those is as follows: float Q_rsqrt( float number ) { long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the f***? y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 1st iteration // y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 2nd iteration, this can be removed return y; } To wit, while brilliant, this kind of source requires more enlightenment than I can usually muster upon first read. In summary, here's my white whale: For an adult reader with experience in programming. I wish I could save all the trees killed by every. Single. Game Programming book ever devoting the first two chapters to "Now just what is a variable anyway?" In C or C++, very preferably C++. Languages that are more concise are fantastic for teaching, except for when what you want to learn is how to cope with a verbose language. There is also the benefit of the guardrails that C++ doesn't provide, such as garbage collection. Platform agnostic. I'm sincerely afraid that this book is out there and it's Visual C++/DirectX oriented. I'm a Linux guy, and I'd do what it takes, but I would very much like to be able to use OpenGL. Thanks for everything! Before anyone gets on my case about it, Fast inverse square root was from Quake III Arena, not Doom 3!

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  • Dark Sun Dispatch 001.5 (a review of City Under The Sand)

    - by Chris Williams
    City Under The Sand - a review I'm moderately familiar with the Dark Sun setting. I've read the other Dark Sun novels, ages ago and I recently started running a D&D 4.0 campaign in the Dark Sun world, so I picked up this book to help re-familiarize myself with the setting. Overall, it did accomplish that, in a limited way. The book takes place in Nibenay and a neighboring expanse of desert that includes a formerly buried city, a small town and a bandit outpost. The book does a more interesting job of describing Nibenese politics and the court of the ruling Sorcerer King, his templars and the expected jockeying for position that occurs between the Templar Wives. There is a fair amount of combat, which was interesting and fairly well detailed. The ensemble cast is introduced and eventually brought together over the first few chapters. Not a lot of backstory on most of the characters, but you get a feel for them fairly quickly. The storyline was somewhat predictable after the first third of the book. Some of the reviews on Amazon complain about the 2-dimensional characterizations, and yes there were some... but it's easy to ignore because there is a lot going on in the book... several interwoven plotlines that all eventually converge. Where the book falls short... First, it appears to have been edited by a 4th grader who knows how to use spellcheck but lacks the attention to detail to notice the frequent occurence of incorrect words that often don't make sense or change the context of the entire sentence. It happened just enough to be distracting, and honestly I expect better from WOTC. Second, there is a lot of buildup to the end of the story... the big fight, the confrontation between good and evil, etc... which is handled in just a few pages and then the story basically just ends. Kind of a letdown, honestly. There wasn't a big finish, and it wasn't a cliffhanger, it just wraps up neatly and ends. It felt pretty rushed. Overall, aside from the very end, I enjoyed it. I really liked the insight into that region of Athas and it gave me some good ideas for fleshing out my own campaign. In that sense, the book served its purpose for me. If you're looking for a light read (got a 5-6 hour flight somewhere?) or you want to learn more about the Dark Sun setting, then I'd recommend this book.

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  • Independent Research on 1500 Companies Reveals Challenges in Performance Visibility – Part 1

    - by ndwyouell
    At the end of May I was joined by Professor Andy Neely of Cambridge University on a webinar, with an audience of over 700, to discuss the results of this extensive study which covered 13 countries and nearly every commercial and industrial sector.  What stunned both of us was not so much the number listening but the 100 questions they asked in just 1 hour.  This certainly represents a record in my experience and for those that organized the webinar. So what was all the fuss about?  Well, to begin with this was a pretty big sample and it represented organizations with over $100m sales across the USA, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. It also delivered some pretty interesting results across a wide range of EPM subjects such as profitability, planning and reporting.  Let’s look at some of those findings. We kicked off with profitability, one of the key factors in driving performance, or that is what you would think, but in fact 82% of our respondents said they did not have complete visibility into the profitability of their organization. 91% of these went further to say that, not surprisingly, this lack of knowledge into the profitability has implications with over half citing 3 or more implications.  Implications cited included misallocated resources, revenue opportunities not maximized, erroneous decisions made and impaired financial performance.  Quite a list of implications, especially given the difficult economic circumstances many organizations are operating in at this time. So why is this?  Well other results in the study point to some of the potential reasons.  Firstly 59% of respondents that use spreadsheets use them for monitoring profitability and 93% of all managers responding to the study use spreadsheets to gather and analyze information.  This is an enormous proportion given the problems with using spreadsheets based performance management systems that have been widely talked about for many years.  For profitability analysis this is particularly important when you consider the typical requirement will be to allocate cost and revenue across 6+ dimensions based on many different allocation methods.  Not something that can be done easily in spreadsheets plus it gets to be a nightmare once you want to change allocations, run different scenarios and then change the basis of your planning and budgeting! It is no wonder so many organizations have challenges in performance visibility. My next blog will look at the fragmented nature of many organizations’ planning.  In the meantime if you want to read the complete report on the research go to: http://www.oracle.com/webapps/dialogue/ns/dlgwelcome.jsp?p_ext=Y&p_dlg_id=10077790&src=7038701&Act=29

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  • Why does ping flooding a domain name freezes and not a direct ip address

    - by CYREX
    I am wondering why, when ping flooding a domain, the ping flood freezes after a couple of seconds then continues and this freeze, unfreeze continues until i stop the ping flood. When i do the same using the ip it does not freeze. NEVER. i did for example sudo ping -f IP (It does not freeze) then i did sudo ping -f DomainName (It freezes after a couple of seconds) Why does ping flooding an IP not freezes and ping flooding the same place using the domain name does freeze. EDIT - What i mean about freezing is that the behavior of the ping flood should send a ping and create a dot (.) for each ping but also remove each dot (.) after receiving the echo request. Looks something like this: .......... <-- This means you just send 10 ping requests. If the requests are answer, for each request answer a dot is removed. The freeze happens when this is sending or receiving. The dots will stay there frozen, like is not receiving or sending any packets. For the PING FLOOD. I do not mean in the evil way of flooding a place, i mean in the testing way. To test the performance/speed of the request send and answered of the ping requests. If you send a ping flood to google's IP for about 10 seconds you would have send about 1000 packets.but if you do it to google's domain name (google.com) it will create the freeze am talking about. IMPORTANT - Do not confuse with flooding a site with ping of death attacks.

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  • Windows Server 2008 Services won't start after patch

    - by Antitribu
    After installing the run of the mill patches today on a Windows Server 2008 (Running as an AD controller and Exchange 2007 Server) the machine came back up with "configuring updates stage 3 of 3 0% complete". The machine had been kept reasonably up to date so this likely was caused by a very recent patch. At the leaste the following patches were installed: KB973037 KB969947 KB973565 Restarting the server into safe mode and then subsequently rebooting (with no changes made) allowed the computer to restart and I can now log in normally. However none of the critical services start; including but not limited to Exchange, DNS and Terminal Services (Obviously if DNS doesn't start other things will break). I am unable to run Internet Explorer but Chrome will work. There are no meaningful errors in the event logs as to why services won't start. Under KDC I have The Key Distribution Center (KDC) cannot find a suitable certificate to use for smart card logons, or the KDC certificate could not be verified. Smart card logon may not function correctly if this problem is not resolved. To correct this problem, either verify the existing KDC certificate using certutil.exe or enroll for a new KDC certificate. This is going to be an evil one to debug and I'm kinda hoping someone has encountered it and knows the answer off hand. Thanks all.

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  • MAC addresses on dual-NIC mainboards

    - by Tom O'Connor
    Here's a weird problem. We've got a number of devices with dual-NIC mainboards. Some are Realtek NICs, which suck. Some are Intel e1000s, which don't. I've just noticed on 2 machines, one is an Intel NIC, one is a Realtek, that when I put the MAC address of one machine into the dhcpd.conf file on our DHCP server to get it to PXE boot the machine into a rebuild environment, initially everything is fine. The server gets a DHCP allocation, and PXE boots into the Ubuntu preseed enviroment. On one or two machines, it gets as far as Ubuntu's DHCP network configuration, and fails. If i pull up a busybox shell (on tty2 on the installing machine), and run ip link, I can see that the UP flag is set on the other NIC. Here's some stuff. host xeon16-ghz240-gb48-node1 { hardware ethernet BC:AE:C5:07:1F:18; filename "pxelinux.0"; next-server 192.168.123.80; } That's what's in dhcpd.conf This is what ip link on the evil machine looks like. Only one NIC is actually connected (deliberately). As you can see, the NIC that's in the dhcpd config, is not marked as UP, and the link that is UP, isn't the one in DHCP. So far I've seen this on two brands of dual-NIC configuration. Does anyone know 1) what's causing it, and b) What we can do about it?

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  • DisableCrossAccountCopy not working on some Outlook installs, working on others, both going against Exchange

    - by MikeBaz
    As part of a mail migration project from one Exchange organization to another, we need to be able to prevent users from moving/copying messages between their accounts in each organization. (Yes, users will think this is evil; no, it's not my decision; yes, users will hate us.) Luckily, we thought, Outlook 2010 provides the DisableCrossAccountCopy registry value/policy (cf. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff800883.aspx). (Because you can't do multiple Exchange organizations in a single profile before Outlook 2010, this only matters on Outlook 2010. Yes, I'm ignoring for the sake of this question copy/move to/from the filesystem.) In our test lab, in a test forest with a test Exchange organization, with a second Exchange account added to the profile in either of the "real" Exchange organizations, with the value set to "*", everything works as expected. On a workstation in one of the production domains, however, the setting does not seem to work. We have tried it under HKCU, HKLM, HKCU\Software\Policies, and HKLM\Software\Policies. It simply seems to be ignored. The value was set in the OCT on a test machine, but the OCT (and the ADM/ADMX file) have the wrong type for the value. We have located the value in the registry and removed it everywhere it is found, we think, and put it back in HKCU, but it still isn't taking. At the moment, a clean Outlook install is not an option - even if it was, we at this point would need to know what to do to fix the pushed copy (I didn't push the copy out to thousands of machines, I've just been asked to help clean up the current mess). Thoughts?

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  • Vista WHS Client stopped resolving local names

    - by andrewcr
    I’m running Windows Home Server PP2 in my home, with 3 client computers: two XP and one Vista. I have a router that provides my local DHCP and the server has a static IP address. The other day the Vista machine hung, and on reboot stopped resolving local names. It will show the green home server client icon in the system tray, but if I attempt to log in to the console, I get a “This computer cannot connect to your home server” message. If I ping the server name from the command line, it does not resolve, and gives a “could not find host” message. Oddly enough, if I browse the network, I can see the server, but double clicking on it fails. The other machines on the local network have no problems seeing the server, and the Vista machine has no problems resolving names from the internet, it just can’t see any local machines. I’m aware that I can work around this by adding entries to my HOSTS file (it does work), but I’d like this to work the way it’s “supposed” to. I’m an experienced computer user and developer, but not a networking whiz. Can anyone tell me how local name resolution is supposed to work in my environment and/or suggest ways to troubleshoot this? Thanks, Andy

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  • IPSec for LAN traffic: Basic considerations?

    - by chris_l
    This is a follow-up to my Encrypting absolutely everything... question. Important: This is not about the more usual IPSec setup, where you want to encrypt traffic between two LANs. My basic goal is to encrypt all traffic within a small company's LAN. One solution could be IPSec. I have just started to learn about IPSec, and before I decide on using it and dive in more deeply, I'd like to get an overview of how this could look like. Is there good cross-platform support? It must work on Linux, MacOS X and Windows clients, Linux servers, and it shouldn't require expensive network hardware. Can I enable IPSec for an entire machine (so there can be no other traffic incoming/outgoing), or for a network interface, or is it determined by firewall settings for individual ports/...? Can I easily ban non-IPSec IP packets? And also "Mallory's evil" IPSec traffic that is signed by some key, but not ours? My ideal conception is to make it impossible to have any such IP traffic on the LAN. For LAN-internal traffic: I would choose "ESP with authentication (no AH)", AES-256, in "Transport mode". Is this a reasonable decision? For LAN-Internet traffic: How would it work with the internet gateway? Would I use "Tunnel mode" to create an IPSec tunnel from each machine to the gateway? Or could I also use "Transport mode" to the gateway? The reason I ask is, that the gateway would have to be able to decrypt packages coming from the LAN, so it will need the keys to do that. Is that possible, if the destination address isn't the gateway's address? Or would I have to use a proxy in this case? Is there anything else I should consider? I really just need a quick overview of these things, not very detailed instructions.

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  • cannot resolve DNS server's own domain name

    - by sims
    I have a DNS server (mega.dude - 123.123.123.123) running bind 9.4. When I: dig mega.dude I get no answer section. I have nameserver 123.123.123.123 in /etc/resolv.conf Here is my zone file: $TTL 1W @ IN SOA mega.dude. names.mega.dude. ( 2009081502 ; serial 3H ; refresh 15M ; retry 1W ; expiry 1D ) ; minimum NS ns1 NS ns2 MX 10 mail.mega.dude. A 123.123.123.123 @ A 123.123.123.123 ns1 A 123.123.123.123 ns2 A 123.123.123.123 www CNAME @ mail A 123.123.123.123 It didn't used to look like this. I read that it's evil to have an mx record pointing to a CNAME. So I changed that. Then I thought maybe that was also the case for NS. So I changed those too. Still no good. The ports are open. I can't figure it out. Oh by the way, all the other zones return fine. But not the servers own domain. So I know I'm doing something stupid. Thanks for your help all!

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  • vyatta Server Reboots by itself

    - by Fernando
    I have an issue regarding some hardware, maybe you can help me. First, I set up a Supermicro Superserver SYS-5016I-NTF with a Intel Xeon X3470 and 4 GB of Ram with a Hotlava Card Tambora 64G4 with Intel Chipset 82599EB and 4x10G SPF+ ports. Installed Vyatta community edition 6.3. I used it as router making BGP connections with 2 operators. No load at all, temp ranges normal. But the issue is that it reboots by itself in a ramdom way. Not very often, once every few days. But it is unacceptable for production purposes. So I try to test on different hardware, and installed Vyatta community edition 6.3 on a Dell PowerEdge 2950, with Xeon(R) E5345 @ 2.33GHz and 4 GB of Ram. Same Vyatta configuration as Supermicro Server. With same hotlava Card model ( I bought two of them ) Well I have reboots with this equipment as well. Same frecuency as above. I have checked syslog no strange logs until boot process starts to be logged. So it seems server reboot suddenly. I have installed latest driver for the chipset of the Hotlava card. Servers are placed in a datacenter with UPS So finally two things in common in both servers: Hotlava Card. Someone with issues with this card, or the chipset?? Could be it this card?? Vyatta 6.3 community edition. I don't thing is the problem. Is a regular Debian with packages to glue together different services. Or maybe is something I am missing. Andy ideas, suggestions?? Thank you very much... Fernando

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  • Xinerama creates a panning viewport

    - by iblue
    EDIT: I've created a bug report: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48458 My Setup I have 4 monitors, 1920x1080, which are in portrait mode (rotated left). They are connected to two radeon graphic cards. As usual, a picture says more than a thousand words. The problem Everything works fine, when Xinerama is disabled. But when I enable Xinerama, things get weird. When I move the mouse of the screen and return, the screen contents begin to move with the mouse, only on this monitor. It seems like the virtual display size does not match the real screen size, which activates a panning viewport. Any idea how to stop this? The video I created a video to demonstrate the issue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq_XHji1P24 xorg.conf This is my xorg.conf: Section "ServerLayout" ##################[ Evilness begins here ]############# Option "Xinerama" "on" # <--- Makes it go b0rked! ##################[ End of all evil ]############# Identifier "BOFH Console of Doom" Screen 0 "Screen-0" 0 0 Screen 1 "Screen-1" RightOf "Screen-0" Screen 2 "Screen-2" RightOf "Screen-1" Screen 3 "Screen-3" RightOf "Screen-2" EndSection Section "ServerFlags" Option "RandR" "false" EndSection Section "Module" Load "dbe" Load "dri" Load "extmod" Load "dri2" Load "record" Load "glx" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor-0" Option "Rotate" "left" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor-1" Option "Rotate" "left" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor-2" Option "Rotate" "left" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor-3" Option "Rotate" "left" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Radeon-0-0" Driver "radeon" BusID "PCI:9:0:0" Option "ZaphodHeads" "DVI-0" Screen 0 EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Radeon-0-1" Driver "radeon" BusID "PCI:9:0:0" Option "ZaphodHeads" "DVI-1" Screen 1 EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Radeon-1-0" Driver "radeon" BusID "PCI:4:0:0" Option "ZaphodHeads" "DVI-2" Screen 0 EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Radeon-1-1" Driver "radeon" BusID "PCI:4:0:0" Option "ZaphodHeads" "DVI-3" Screen 1 EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen-0" Device "Radeon-0-0" Monitor "Monitor-0" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen-1" Device "Radeon-0-1" Monitor "Monitor-1" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen-2" Device "Radeon-1-0" Monitor "Monitor-2" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen-3" Device "Radeon-1-1" Monitor "Monitor-3" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection

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  • Computer Won't Boot Properly, unless in safe mode?

    - by Mr_CryptoPrime
    I bought a computer today and booted it up, but when I did I only got a blank screen. I checked to make sure it wasn't the monitor by connecting it to my old computer...it worked. I then tried connecting my monitor to both DVI ports and found that the bottom one did work. However, now it just boots up and says "loading windows" and then when the login screen is suppose to come up the screen just goes blank and monitor says "no input, check cord" (or something like that). I tried reinstalling windows and then I was able to log on normally. I used the CD's and reinstalled all the drivers, then rebooted...now I am stuck right back where I started. I tried taking out the RAM and inserting into different slots, that didn't fix anything. I was able to boot up into windows using safe-mode. I suspected that my ATI Radeon 6950 was the issue and downloaded the drivers, but I can't install them on safe-mode. Someone said to install C++ distr. and I tried doing that to fix driver installation problem of "failed to load detection driver" but it wouldn't let me do that either. Please someone help me, I don't want to have to deal with the evil redtape of sending it back to get a replacement! My computer: -Content--text-_-"http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229236&nm_mc=TEMC-RMA-Approvel&cm_mmc=TEMC-RMA-Approvel--Content--text-_- Driver detection problem: http://www.hardwareheaven.com/hardwareheaven-tools-discussion/174912-failed-load-detection-driver-installation-error.html Driver download page: http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/radeon_win7-64.aspx#1 I am using windows 7. Thanks again.

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  • Recommended drive encryption solution

    - by Chris Driver
    Hello, I will soon be purchasing a number of laptops running Windows 7 for our mobile staff. Due to the nature of our business I will need drive encryption. Windows BitLocker seems the obvious choice, but it looks like I need to purchase either Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate editions to get it. Can anyone offer suggestions on the best course of action: a) Use BitLocker, bite the bullet and pay to upgrade to Enterprise/Ultimate b) Pay for another 3rd party drive encryption product that is cheaper (suggestions appreciated) c) Use a free drive encryption product such as TrueCrypt Ideally I am also interested in 'real world' experience from people who are using drive encryption software and any pitfalls to look out for. Many thanks in advance... UPDATE Decided to go with TrueCrypt for the following reasons: a) The product has a good track record b) I am not managing a large quantity of laptops so integration with Active Directory, Management consoles etc is not a huge benefit c) Although eks did make a good point about Evil Maid (EM) attacks, our data is not that desirable to consider it a major factor d) The cost (free) is a big plus but not the primary motivator The next problem I face is imaging (Acronis/Ghost/..) encrypted drives will not work unless I perform sector-by-sector imaging. That means an 80Gb encrypted partition creates an 80Gb image file :(

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  • What's the best way to get a stored POP3 password out of Outlook 2007?

    - by Tom Morris
    If you have a password for a POP3 account in Outlook 2007 (Windows 7 Home Premium) and you then forget the password, how do you retrieve it? I tried copy-and-paste. No go. I downloaded Mail PassView, but upon installing it, AVG said it was malware, so I removed it. I eventually found the account details by opening up RegEdit, and found it in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook\ (...) but it was encoded in REG_BINARY. I Googled around and found various Visual Basic routines for decoding it but being a Unix dork I had absolutely no idea what to do with said scripts. By this point, I gave up and managed to get hold of the password by another means (it was written down on a piece of paper in the briefcase of the owner of the account - I know, it makes the inner sysadmin rage). I also attempted to write a simple POP3 server in Python and then get Outlook to log on to it, but that didn't really work out (it was about 4am at that point). For future reference, is there an easy and sensible way of doing this? Is Mail PassView actually evil spyware or was AVG just giving me a false positive? (Any chance of Windows 8 having something like OS X's Keychain?)

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  • Ping with explicit next-hop selection (aka Monitoring multiple default gateways)

    - by Michuelnik
    I have a linux (debian) router with two internet connections (A) and (B). (A) is preferred, (B) is fallback. I want to monitor the internet connection (and not only the availability of the gateways!) and change the default route appropriately. If (A) is not providing internet, switch to (B) If (A) is providing internet again, switch back to (A). Only problem I have is in case (2). My routing table points towards a working internet so I cannot easily detect whether internet is working over link (A) again. I am search for a ping or traceroute (or other diagnosis-tool) which can select the next-hop explicitly. ping -r looks promising, but can only ping a host on the lan. (It only has to write another destination address in the packet, damnit!) traceroute -g gateway looks even more promising and nearly does what I want - but sets source routing options which my next-hops deny. (Not within my administrative boundary...) I just want a $ping, that can: select a source interface (and address) select a next-hop on that interface ping any arbitrary ip address I could do evil trickery with policy-based routing but that would have production impact for all users. I would like to see a side-effect-free solution....

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  • SFTP access without hassle

    - by enobayram
    I'm trying to provide access to a local folder for someone over the internet. After googling around a bit, I've come to the conclusion that SFTP is the safest thing to expose through the firewall to the chaotic and evil world of the Internet. I'm planning to use the openssh-server to this end. Even though I trust that openssh will stop a random attacker, I'm not so sure about the security of my computer once someone is connected through ssh. In particular, even if I don't give that person's user account any privileges whatsoever, he might just be able to "su" to, say, "nobody". And since I was never worried about such things before, I might have given some moderate privileges to nobody at some point (not sudo rights surely!). I would of course value your comments about giving privileges to nobody in the first place, but that's not the point, really. My aim is to give SFTP access to someone in such a sandboxed state that I shouldn't need to worry about such things (at least not more so than I should have done before). Is this really possible? Am I speaking nonsense or worried in vain?

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