Search Results

Search found 11995 results on 480 pages for 'clement game'.

Page 463/480 | < Previous Page | 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470  | Next Page >

  • Puppet: Making Windows Awesome Since 2011

    - by Robz / Fervent Coder
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-making-windows-awesome-since-2011.aspxPuppet was one of the first configuration management (CM) tools to support Windows, way back in 2011. It has the heaviest investment on Windows infrastructure with 1/3 of the platform client development staff being Windows folks.  It appears that Microsoft believed an end state configuration tool like Puppet was the way forward, so much so that they cloned Puppet’s DSL (domain-specific language) in many ways and are calling it PowerShell DSC. Puppet Labs is pushing the envelope on Windows. Here are several things to note: Puppet x64 Ruby support for Windows coming in v3.7.0. An awesome ACL module (with order, SIDs and very granular control of permissions it is best of any CM). A wealth of modules that work with Windows on the Forge (and more on GitHub). Documentation solely for Windows folks - https://docs.puppetlabs.com/windows. Some of the common learning points with Puppet on Windows user are noted in this recent blog post. Microsoft OpenTech supports Puppet. Azure has the ability to deploy a Puppet Master (http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/microsoft). At Microsoft //Build 2014 in the Day 2 Keynote Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies co-presented with Mark Russonivich (http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY02  fast forward to 19:30)! Puppet has a Visual Studio Plugin! It can be overwhelming learning a new tool like Puppet at first, but Puppet Labs has some resources to help you on that path. Take a look at the Learning VM, which has a quest-based learning tool. For real-time questions, feel free to drop onto #puppet on freenode.net (yes, some folks still use IRC) with questions, and #puppet-dev with thoughts/feedback on the language itself. You can subscribe to puppet-users / puppet-dev mailing lists. There is also ask.puppetlabs.com for questions and Server Fault if you want to go to a Stack Exchange site. There are books written on learning Puppet. There are even Puppet User Groups (PUGs) and other community resources! Puppet does take some time to learn, but with anything you need to learn, you need to weigh the benefits versus the ramp up time. I learned NHibernate once, it had a very high ramp time back then but was the only game on the street. Puppet’s ramp up time is considerably less than that. The advantage is that you are learning a DSL, and it can apply to multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.) with the same Puppet resource constructs. As you learn Puppet you may wonder why it has a DSL instead of just leveraging the language of Ruby (or maybe this is one of those things that keeps you up wondering at night). I like the DSL over a small layer on top of Ruby. It allows the Puppet language to be portable and go more places. It makes you think about the end state of what you want to achieve in a declarative sense instead of in an imperative sense. You may also find that right now Puppet doesn’t run manifests (scripts) in order of the way resources are specified. This is the number one learning point for most folks. As a long time consternation of some folks about Puppet, manifest ordering was not possible in the past. In fact it might be why some other CMs exist! As of 3.3.0, Puppet can do manifest ordering, and it will be the default in Puppet 4. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources You may have caught earlier that I mentioned PowerShell DSC. But what about DSC? Shouldn’t that be what Windows users want to choose? Other CMs are integrating with DSC, will Puppet follow suit and integrate with DSC? The biggest concern that I have with DSC is it’s lack of visibility in fine-grained reporting of changes (which Puppet has). The other is that it is a very young Microsoft product (pre version 3, you know what they say :) ). I tried getting it working in December and ran into some issues. I’m hoping that newer releases are there that actually work, it does have some promising capabilities, it just doesn’t quite come up to the standard of something that should be used in production. In contrast Puppet is almost a ten year old language with an active community! It’s very stable, and when trusting your business to configuration management, you want something that has been around awhile and has been proven. Give DSC another couple of releases and you might see more folks integrating with it. That said there may be a future with DSC integration. Portability and fine-grained reporting of configuration changes are reasons to take a closer look at Puppet on Windows. Yes, Puppet on Windows is here to stay and it’s continually getting better folks.

    Read the article

  • Reflections on GiveCamp

    - by Reed
    I participated in the Seattle GiveCamp over the weekend, and am entirely impressed.  GiveCamp is a great event – I especially like how rewarding it is for everybody involved.  I strongly encourage any and all developers to watch for future GiveCamp events, and consider participating, for many reasons… GiveCamp provides real value to organizations that truly need help.  The Seattle event alone succeeded in helping sixteen non-profit organizations in many different ways.  The projects involved varied dramatically, including website redesigns, SEO, reworking data management workflows, and even game development.  Many non-profits have a strong need for good, quality technical help.  However, nearly every non-profit organization has an incredibly limited budget.  GiveCamp is a way to really give back, and provide incredibly valuable help to organizations that truly benefit. My experience has shown many developers to be incredibly generous – this is a chance to dedicate your energy to helping others in a way that really takes advantage of your expertise.  Your time as a developer is incredibly valuable, and this puts something of incredible value directly into the hands of places its needed. First, and foremost, GiveCamp is about providing technical help to non-profit organizations in need. GiveCamp can make you a better developer.  This is a fantastic opportunity for us, as developers, to work with new people, in a new setting.  The incredibly short time frame (one weekend for a deliverable project) and intense motivation to succeed provides a huge opportunity for learning from peers.  I’d personally like to thank off the developers with whom I worked – I learned something from each and every one of you.  I hope to see and work with all of you again someday. GiveCamp provides an opportunity for you to work outside of your comfort zone. While it’s always nice to be an expert, it’s also valuable to work on a project where you have little or no direct experience.  My team focused on a complete reworking of our organizations message and a complete new website redesign and deployment using WordPress.  While I’d used WordPress for my blog, and had some experience, this is completely unrelated to my professional work.  In fact, nobody on our team normally worked directly with the technologies involved – yet together we managed to succeed in delivering our goals.  As developers, it’s easy to want to stay abreast of new technology surrounding our expertise, but its rare that we get a chance to sit down and work on something practical that is completely outside of our normal realm of work.  I’m a desktop developer by trade, and spent much of the weekend working with CSS and Photoshop.  Many of the projects organizations need don’t match perfectly with the skill set in the room – yet all of the software professionals rose to the occasion and delivered practical, usable applications. GiveCamp is a short term, known commitment. While this seems obvious, I think it’s an important aspect to remember.  This is a huge part of what makes it successful – you can work, completely focused, on a project, then walk away completely when you’re done.  There is no expectation of continued involvement.  While many of the professionals I’ve talked to are willing to contribute some amount of their time beyond the camp, this is not expected. The freedom this provides is immense.  In addition, the motivation this brings is incredibly valuable.  Every developer in the room was very focused on delivering in time – you have one shot to get it as good as possible, and leave it with the organization in a way that can be maintained by them.  This is a rare experience – and excellent practice at time management for everyone involved. GiveCamp provides a great way to meet and network with your peers. Not only do you get to network with other software professionals in your area – you get to network with amazing people.  Every single person in the room is there to try to help people.  The balance of altruism, intelligence, and expertise in the room is something I’ve never before experienced. During the presentations of what was accomplished, I felt blessed to participate.  I know many people in the room were incredibly touched by the level of dedication and accomplishment over the weekend. GiveCamp is fun. At the end of the experience, I would have signed up again, even if it was a painful, tedious weekend – merely due to the amazing accomplishments achieved throughout the event.  However, the event is fun.  Everybody I talked to, the entire weekend, was having a good time.  While there were many faces focused into a near grimace at times (including mine, I’ll admit), this was always in response to a particularly challenging problem or task.  The challenges just added to the overall enjoyment of the weekend – part of why I became a developer in the first place is my love for challenge and puzzles, and a short deadline using unfamiliar technology provided plenty of opportunity for puzzles.  As soon as people would stand up, it was another smile.   If you’re a developer, I’d recommend looking at GiveCamp more closely.  Watch for an event in your area.  If there isn’t one, consider building a team and organizing an event.  The experience is worth the commitment. 

    Read the article

  • Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge: Bezzotech

    - by Kellsey Ruppel
    Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. I’ve covered all the entries we had for the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge, the winners, Dimitri and Martin, HarQen, TEAM Informatics and John Sim from Fishbowl Solutions, and today, I’m giving you bonus coverage. Friend of the ‘Lab, Bex Huff (@bex) from Bezzotech (@bezzotech), had an interesting OpenWorld. He rebounded from an allergic reaction to finish his entry, Honey Badger, only to have his other OpenWorld commitments make him unable to present his work. Still, he did a bunch of work, and I want to make sure everyone knows about the Honey Badger. If you’re wondering about the name, it’s a meme; “honey badger don’t care.” Bex tackled a common problem with social tools by adding game mechanics to create an incentive for people to keep their profiles updated. He used a Hot-or-Not style comparison app that poses expertise questions and awards a badge to the winner. Questions are based on whatever attributes the business wants to emphasize. The goal is to find the mavens in an organization, give them praise and recognition, ideally creating incentive for everyone to raise their games. In his own words: There is a real information quality problem in social networks. In last year’s keynote, Larry Elison demonstrated how to use the social network to track down resources that have the skill sets needed for specific projects. But how well would that work in real life? People usually update that information with the basic profile information, but they rarely update their profiles with latest news items, projects, customers, or skills. It’s a pain. Or, put another way, when was the last time you updated your LinkedIn profile? Enter the Honey Badger! This is a example of a comparator app that gamifies the way people keep their profiles updated, which ensures higher quality data in the social network. An administrator comes up with a series of important questions: Who is a better communicator? Who is a better Java programmer? Who is a better team player? And people would have a space in their profile to give a justification as to why they have these skills. The second part of the app is the comparator. It randomly shows two people, their names, and their justification for why they have these skills. You will click on one of them to “vote” for them, then on the next page you will see the results from the previous match, and get 2 new people to vote on. Anybody with a winning score wins a “Honey Badge” to be displayed on their profile page, which proudly states that their peers agree that this person has those skills. Once a badge is won, it will be jealously guarded. The longer your go without updating your profile, the more likely it is that you will lose your badge. This “loss aversion” is well known in psychology, and is a strong incentive for people to keep their profiles up to date. If a user sees their rank drop from 90% to 60%, they will find the time to update their justification! Unfortunately, during the hackathon we were not allowed to modify the schema to allow for additional fields such as “justification.” So this hack is limited to just the one basic question: who is the bigger Honey Badger? Here are some shots of the Honey Badger application: #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } Thanks to Bex and everyone for participating in our challenge. Despite very little time to promote this event, we had a great turnout and creative and useful entries. The amount of work required to put together these final entries was significant, especially during a conference, and the judges and all of us involved were impressed at how much work everyone was able to do. Congrats to everyone, pat yourselves on the back. Stay tuned if you’re interested in challenges like these. We’ll likely be running similar events in the not-so-distant future.

    Read the article

  • Mixed Emotions: Humans React to Natural Language Computer

    - by Applications User Experience
    There was a big event in Silicon Valley on Tuesday, November 15. Watson, the natural language computer developed at IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and its inventor and principal research investigator, David Ferrucci, were guests at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for another round of the television game Jeopardy. You may have read about or watched on YouTube how Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two top Jeopardy competitors, last February. This time, Watson swept the floor with two Silicon Valley high-achievers, one a venture capitalist with a background  in math, computer engineering, and physics, and the other a technology and finance writer well-versed in all aspects of culture and humanities. Watson is the product of the DeepQA research project, which attempts to create an artificially intelligent computing system through advances in natural language processing (NLP), among other technologies. NLP is a computing strategy that seeks to provide answers by processing large amounts of unstructured data contained in multiple large domains of human knowledge. There are several ways to perform NLP, but one way to start is by recognizing key words, then processing  contextual  cues associated with the keyword concepts so that you get many more “smart” (that is, human-like) deductions,  rather than a series of “dumb” matches.  Jeopardy questions often require more than key word matching to get the correct answer; typically several pieces of information put together, often from vastly different categories, to come up with a satisfactory word string solution that can be rephrased as a question.  Smarter than your average search engine, but is it as smart as a human? Watson was especially fast at descrambling mixed-up state capital names, and recalling and pairing movie titles where one started and the other ended in the same word (e.g., Billion Dollar Baby Boom, where both titles used the word Baby). David said they had basically removed the variable of how fast Watson hit the buzzer compared to human contestants, but frustration frequently appeared on the faces of the contestants beaten to the punch by Watson. David explained that top Jeopardy winners like Jennings achieved their success with a similar strategy, timing their buzz to the end of the reading of the clue,  and “running the board”, being first to respond on about 60% of the clues.  Similar results for Watson. It made sense that Watson would be good at the technical and scientific stuff, so I figured the venture capitalist was toast. But I thought for sure Watson would lose to the writer in categories such as pop culture, wines and foods, and other humanities. Surprisingly, it held its own. I was amazed it could recognize a word definition of a syllogism in the category of philosophy. So what was the audience reaction to all of this? We started out expecting our formidable human contestants to easily run some of their categories; however, they started off on the wrong foot with the state capitals which Watson could unscramble so efficiently. By the end of the first round, contestants and the audience were feeling a little bit, well, …. deflated. Watson was winning by about $13,000, and the humans had gone into negative dollars. The IBM host said he was going to “slow Watson down a bit,” and the humans came back with respectable scores in Double Jeopardy. This was partially thanks to a very sympathetic audience (and host, also a human) providing “group-think” on many questions, especially baseball ‘s most valuable players, which by the way, couldn’t have been hard because even I knew them.  Yes, that’s right, the humans cheated. Since Watson could speak but not hear us (it didn’t have speech recognition capability), it was probably unaware of this. In Final Jeopardy, the single question had to do with law. I was sure Watson would blow this one, but all contestants were able to answer correctly about a copyright law. In a career devoted to making computers more helpful to people, I think I may have seen how a computer can do too much. I’m not sure I’d want to work side-by-side with a Watson doing my job. Certainly listening and empathy are important traits we humans still have over Watson.  While there was great enthusiasm in the packed room of computer scientists and their friends for this standing-room-only show, I think it made several of us uneasy (especially the poor human contestants whose egos were soundly bashed in the first round). This computer system, by the way , only took 4 years to program. David Ferrucci mentioned several practical uses for Watson, including medical diagnoses and legal strategies. Are you “the expert” in your job? Imagine NLP computing on an Oracle database.   This may be the user interface of the future to enable users to better process big data. How do you think you’d like it? Postscript: There were three little boys sitting in front of me in the very first row. They looked, how shall I say it, … unimpressed!

    Read the article

  • Video games, content strategy, and failure - oh my.

    - by Roger Hart
    Last night was the CS London group's event Content Strategy, Manhattan Style. Yes, it's a terrible title, feeling like a self-conscious grasp for chic, sadly commensurate with the venue. Fortunately, this was not commensurate with the event itself, which was lively, relevant, and engaging. Although mostly if you're a consultant. This is a strong strain in current content strategy discourse, and I think we're going to see it remedied quite soon. Not least in Paris on Friday. A lot of the bloggers, speakers, and commentators in the sphere are consultants, or part of agencies and other consulting organisations. A lot of the talk is about how you sell content strategy to your clients. This is completely acceptable. Of course it is. And it's actually useful if that's something you regularly have to do. To an extent, it's even portable to those of us who have to sell content strategy within an organisation. We're still competing for credibility and resource. What we're doing less is living in the beginning of a project. This was touched on by Jeffrey MacIntyre (albeit in a your-clients kind of a way) who described "the day two problem". Companies, he suggested, build websites for launch day, and forget about the need for them to be ongoing entities. Consultants, agencies, or even internal folks on short projects will live through Day Two quite often: the trainwreck moment where somebody realises that even if the content is right (which it often isn't), and on time (which it often isn't), it'll be redundant, outdated, or inaccurate by the end of the week/month/fickle social media attention cycle. The thing about living through a lot of Day Two is that you see a lot of failure. Nothing succeeds like failure? Failure is good. When it's structured right, it's an awesome tool for learning - that's kind of how video games work. I'm chewing over a whole blog post about this, but basically in game-like learning, you try, fail, go round the loop again. Success eventually yields joy. It's a relatively well-known phenomenon. It works best when that failing step is acutely felt, but extremely inexpensive. Dying in Portal is highly frustrating and surprisingly characterful, but the save-points are well designed and the reload unintrusive. The barrier to re-entry into the loop is very low, as is the cost of your failure out in meatspace. So it's easy (and fun) to learn. Yeah, spot the difference with business failure. As an external content strategist, you get to rock up with a big old folder full of other companies' Day Two (and ongoing day two hundred) failures. You can't send the client round the learning loop - although you may well be there because they've been round it once - but you can show other people's round trip. It's not as compelling, but it's not bad. What about internal content strategists? We can still point to things that are wrong, and there are some very compelling tools at our disposal - content inventories, user testing, and analytics, for instance. But if we're picking up big organically sprawling legacy content, Day Two may well be a distant memory, and the felt experience of web content failure is unlikely to be immediate to many people in the organisation. What to do? My hunch here is that the first task is to create something immediate and felt, but that it probably needs to be a success. Something quickly doable and visible - a content problem solved with a measurable business result. Now, that's a tall order; but scrape of the "quickly" and it's the whole reason we're here. At Red Gate, I've started with the text book fear and passion introduction to content strategy. In fact, I just typo'd that as "contempt strategy", and it isn't a bad description. Yelling "look at this, our website is rubbish!" gets you the initial attention, but it doesn't make you many friends. And if you don't produce something pretty sharp-ish, it's easy to lose the momentum you built up for change. The first thing I've done - after the visual content inventory - is to delete a bunch of stuff. About 70% of the SQL Compare web content has gone, in fact. This is a really, really cheap operation. It's visible, and it's powerful. It's cheap because you don't have to create any new content. It's not free, however, because you do have to validate your deletions. This means analytics, actually reading that content, and talking to people whose business purposes that content has to serve. If nobody outside the company uses it, and nobody inside the company thinks they ought to, that's a no-brainer for the delete list. The payoff here is twofold. There's the nebulous hard-to-illustrate "bad content does user experience and brand damage" argument; and there's the "nobody has to spend time (money) maintaining this now" argument. One or both are easily felt, and the second at least should be measurable. But that's just one approach, and I'd be interested to hear from any other internal content strategy folks about how they get buy-in, maintain momentum, and generally get things done.

    Read the article

  • LIMBO fails on startup with Internal errors - invalid parameters received

    - by user61262
    I installed LIMBO from the Humble Bundle V and as far as I am aware, this has wine packaged with it (I also installed the latest from the repo's in case is was because of that). However the game doesn't even start and fails with the message: Wine Program Error Internal errors - invalid parameters received. Is there a way to log the error or does anyone know why this happens? This question was asked previously but it seems to have disappeared. My Graphics cards is a Geforece GT 250 Cheers ice. [edit: Wine outputs the following error: wine /opt/limbo/support/limbo/drive_c/Program\ Files/limbo/limbo.exe fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 59 (SPI_SETSTICKYKEYS) fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 53 (SPI_SETTOGGLEKEYS) fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 51 (SPI_SETFILTERKEYS) fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x32f580,0x00000000), stub! err:x11settings:X11DRV_ChangeDisplaySettingsEx No matching mode found 1920x1080x32 @60! (XRandR) err:xrandr:X11DRV_XRandR_SetCurrentMode Resolution change not successful -- perhaps display has changed? wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00000000 at address 0x48213e (thread 0009), starting debugger... The debugger has the following output: Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x00000000 in 32-bit code (0x0048213e). Register dump: CS:0073 SS:007b DS:007b ES:007b FS:0033 GS:003b EIP:0048213e ESP:0032f9f4 EBP:0037cdd0 EFLAGS:00010202( R- -- I - - - ) EAX:00000000 EBX:00000000 ECX:00000000 EDX:0037cf4c ESI:0037cda8 EDI:0037cdcc Stack dump: 0x0032f9f4: 0037cda8 0034c708 7bc35120 00000000 0x0032fa04: 0037cda8 0032fa38 0079fc58 00000000 0x0032fa14: 0048b7d4 00000001 0037cdcc 00000001 0x0032fa24: 00000780 00000438 0034c620 00000000 0x0032fa34: 0034c708 0032fa78 007a04e2 00000002 0x0032fa44: 0048c4bc 00000780 00000438 0037cda8 Backtrace: =>0 0x0048213e in limbo (+0x8213e) (0x0037cdd0) 0x0048213e: movl 0x0(%eax),%edx Modules: Module Address Debug info Name (103 modules) PE 400000- 926000 Export limbo PE 10000000-101ff000 Deferred d3dx9_43 ELF 79bb3000-7b800000 Deferred libnvidia-glcore.so.295.53 ELF 7b800000-7ba15000 Deferred kernel32<elf> \-PE 7b810000-7ba15000 \ kernel32 ELF 7bc00000-7bcc3000 Deferred ntdll<elf> \-PE 7bc10000-7bcc3000 \ ntdll ELF 7bf00000-7bf04000 Deferred <wine-loader> ELF 7d7e0000-7d7e4000 Deferred libnvidia-tls.so.295.53 ELF 7d7e4000-7d8bc000 Deferred libgl.so.1 ELF 7d9d0000-7d9d9000 Deferred librt.so.1 ELF 7d9d9000-7d9de000 Deferred libgpg-error.so.0 ELF 7d9de000-7d9f6000 Deferred libresolv.so.2 ELF 7d9f6000-7d9fa000 Deferred libkeyutils.so.1 ELF 7d9fa000-7da43000 Deferred libdbus-1.so.3 ELF 7da43000-7da55000 Deferred libp11-kit.so.0 ELF 7da55000-7dada000 Deferred libgcrypt.so.11 ELF 7dada000-7daec000 Deferred libtasn1.so.3 ELF 7daec000-7daf5000 Deferred libkrb5support.so.0 ELF 7daf5000-7dafa000 Deferred libcom_err.so.2 ELF 7dafa000-7db22000 Deferred libk5crypto.so.3 ELF 7db22000-7dbf1000 Deferred libkrb5.so.3 ELF 7dbf1000-7dc03000 Deferred libavahi-client.so.3 ELF 7dc03000-7dc11000 Deferred libavahi-common.so.3 ELF 7dc11000-7dcd5000 Deferred libgnutls.so.26 ELF 7dcd5000-7dd13000 Deferred libgssapi_krb5.so.2 ELF 7dd13000-7dd66000 Deferred libcups.so.2 ELF 7dd94000-7ddc8000 Deferred uxtheme<elf> \-PE 7dda0000-7ddc8000 \ uxtheme ELF 7ddc8000-7ddd3000 Deferred libxcursor.so.1 ELF 7ddd4000-7dde7000 Deferred gnome-keyring-pkcs11.so ELF 7de47000-7de4d000 Deferred libxfixes.so.3 ELF 7deac000-7ded6000 Deferred libexpat.so.1 ELF 7ded6000-7df0a000 Deferred libfontconfig.so.1 ELF 7df0a000-7df1a000 Deferred libxi.so.6 ELF 7df1a000-7df1e000 Deferred libxcomposite.so.1 ELF 7df1e000-7df27000 Deferred libxrandr.so.2 ELF 7df27000-7df31000 Deferred libxrender.so.1 ELF 7df31000-7df37000 Deferred libxxf86vm.so.1 ELF 7df37000-7df3b000 Deferred libxinerama.so.1 ELF 7df3b000-7df5d000 Deferred imm32<elf> \-PE 7df40000-7df5d000 \ imm32 ELF 7df5d000-7df64000 Deferred libxdmcp.so.6 ELF 7df64000-7df85000 Deferred libxcb.so.1 ELF 7df85000-7df9f000 Deferred libice.so.6 ELF 7df9f000-7e0d3000 Deferred libx11.so.6 ELF 7e0d3000-7e0e5000 Deferred libxext.so.6 ELF 7e0e5000-7e178000 Deferred winex11<elf> \-PE 7e0f0000-7e178000 \ winex11 ELF 7e178000-7e18e000 Deferred libz.so.1 ELF 7e18e000-7e228000 Deferred libfreetype.so.6 ELF 7e228000-7e247000 Deferred libtinfo.so.5 ELF 7e247000-7e269000 Deferred libncurses.so.5 ELF 7e27d000-7e292000 Deferred xinput1_3<elf> \-PE 7e280000-7e292000 \ xinput1_3 ELF 7e292000-7e2a6000 Deferred psapi<elf> \-PE 7e2a0000-7e2a6000 \ psapi ELF 7e2a6000-7e304000 Deferred dbghelp<elf> \-PE 7e2b0000-7e304000 \ dbghelp ELF 7e304000-7e391000 Deferred msvcrt<elf> \-PE 7e320000-7e391000 \ msvcrt ELF 7e391000-7e4c5000 Deferred wined3d<elf> \-PE 7e3a0000-7e4c5000 \ wined3d ELF 7e4c5000-7e4fe000 Deferred d3d9<elf> \-PE 7e4d0000-7e4fe000 \ d3d9 ELF 7e4fe000-7e573000 Deferred rpcrt4<elf> \-PE 7e510000-7e573000 \ rpcrt4 ELF 7e573000-7e67b000 Deferred ole32<elf> \-PE 7e590000-7e67b000 \ ole32 ELF 7e67b000-7e697000 Deferred dinput8<elf> \-PE 7e680000-7e697000 \ dinput8 ELF 7e697000-7e6d1000 Deferred winspool<elf> \-PE 7e6a0000-7e6d1000 \ winspool ELF 7e6d1000-7e7c9000 Deferred comctl32<elf> \-PE 7e6e0000-7e7c9000 \ comctl32 ELF 7e7c9000-7e833000 Deferred shlwapi<elf> \-PE 7e7e0000-7e833000 \ shlwapi ELF 7e833000-7ea44000 Deferred shell32<elf> \-PE 7e840000-7ea44000 \ shell32 ELF 7ea44000-7eb23000 Deferred comdlg32<elf> \-PE 7ea50000-7eb23000 \ comdlg32 ELF 7eb23000-7eb3c000 Deferred version<elf> \-PE 7eb30000-7eb3c000 \ version ELF 7eb3c000-7eb9c000 Deferred advapi32<elf> \-PE 7eb50000-7eb9c000 \ advapi32 ELF 7eb9c000-7ec59000 Deferred gdi32<elf> \-PE 7ebb0000-7ec59000 \ gdi32 ELF 7ec59000-7ed99000 Deferred user32<elf> \-PE 7ec70000-7ed99000 \ user32 ELF 7ef99000-7efa6000 Deferred libnss_files.so.2 ELF 7efa6000-7efc0000 Deferred libnsl.so.1 ELF 7efc0000-7efec000 Deferred libm.so.6 ELF 7efee000-7eff4000 Deferred libuuid.so.1 ELF 7eff4000-7f000000 Deferred libnss_nis.so.2 ELF b7411000-b7415000 Deferred libxau.so.6 ELF b7415000-b741e000 Deferred libnss_compat.so.2 ELF b741f000-b7424000 Deferred libdl.so.2 ELF b7424000-b75ca000 Deferred libc.so.6 ELF b75cb000-b75e6000 Deferred libpthread.so.0 ELF b75e9000-b75f2000 Deferred libsm.so.6 ELF b75fa000-b773c000 Dwarf libwine.so.1 ELF b773e000-b7760000 Deferred ld-linux.so.2 ELF b7760000-b7761000 Deferred [vdso].so Threads: process tid prio (all id:s are in hex) 00000008 (D) Z:\opt\limbo\support\limbo\drive_c\Program Files\limbo\limbo.exe 00000009 0 <== 0000000e services.exe 00000020 0 0000001f 0 00000019 0 00000018 0 00000017 0 00000015 0 00000010 0 0000000f 0 00000012 winedevice.exe 0000001d 0 0000001a 0 00000014 0 00000013 0 0000001b plugplay.exe 00000021 0 0000001e 0 0000001c 0 00000022 explorer.exe 00000023 0 System information: Wine build: wine-1.4 Platform: i386 Host system: Linux Host version: 3.2.0-24-generic-pae

    Read the article

  • Using a Predicate as a key to a Dictionary

    - by Tom Hines
    I really love Linq and Lambda Expressions in C#.  I also love certain community forums and programming websites like DaniWeb. A user on DaniWeb posted a question about comparing the results of a game that is like poker (5-card stud), but is played with dice. The question stemmed around determining what was the winning hand.  I looked at the question and issued some comments and suggestions toward a potential answer, but I thought it was a neat homework exercise. [A little explanation] I eventually realized not only could I compare the results of the hands (by name) with a certain construct – I could also compare the values of the individual dice with the same construct. That piece of code eventually became a Dictionary with the KEY as a Predicate<int> and the Value a Func<T> that returns a string from the another structure that contains the mapping of an ENUM to a string.  In one instance, that string is the name of the hand and in another instance, it is a string (CSV) representation of of the digits in the hand. An added benefit is that the digits re returned in the order they would be for a proper poker hand.  For instance the hand 1,2,5,3,1 would be returned as ONE_PAIR (1,1,5,3,2). [Getting to the point] 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3:   4: namespace DicePoker 5: { 6: using KVP_E2S = KeyValuePair<CDicePoker.E_DICE_POKER_HAND_VAL, string>; 7: public partial class CDicePoker 8: { 9: /// <summary> 10: /// Magical construction to determine the winner of given hand Key/Value. 11: /// </summary> 12: private static Dictionary<Predicate<int>, Func<List<KVP_E2S>, string>> 13: map_prd2fn = new Dictionary<Predicate<int>, Func<List<KVP_E2S>, string>> 14: { 15: {new Predicate<int>(i => i.Equals(0)), PlayerTie},//first tie 16:   17: {new Predicate<int>(i => i > 0), 18: (m => string.Format("Player One wins\n1={0}({1})\n2={2}({3})", 19: m[0].Key, m[0].Value, m[1].Key, m[1].Value))}, 20:   21: {new Predicate<int>(i => i < 0), 22: (m => string.Format("Player Two wins\n2={2}({3})\n1={0}({1})", 23: m[0].Key, m[0].Value, m[1].Key, m[1].Value))}, 24:   25: {new Predicate<int>(i => i.Equals(0)), 26: (m => string.Format("Tie({0}) \n1={1}\n2={2}", 27: m[0].Key, m[0].Value, m[1].Value))} 28: }; 29: } 30: } When this is called, the code calls the Invoke method of the predicate to return a bool.  The first on matching true will have its value invoked. 1: private static Func<DICE_HAND, E_DICE_POKER_HAND_VAL> GetHandEval = dh => 2: map_dph2fn[map_dph2fn.Keys.Where(enm2fn => enm2fn(dh)).First()]; After coming up with this process, I realized (with a little modification) it could be called to evaluate the individual values in the dice hand in the event of a tie. 1: private static Func<List<KVP_E2S>, string> PlayerTie = lst_kvp => 2: map_prd2fn.Skip(1) 3: .Where(x => x.Key.Invoke(RenderDigits(dhPlayerOne).CompareTo(RenderDigits(dhPlayerTwo)))) 4: .Select(s => s.Value) 5: .First().Invoke(lst_kvp); After that, I realized I could now create a program completely without “if” statements or “for” loops! 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: Dictionary<Predicate<int>, Action<Action<string>>> main = new Dictionary<Predicate<int>, Action<Action<string>>> 4: { 5: {(i => i.Equals(0)), PlayGame}, 6: {(i => true), Usage} 7: }; 8:   9: main[main.Keys.Where(m => m.Invoke(args.Length)).First()].Invoke(Display); 10: } …and there you have it. :) ZIPPED Project

    Read the article

  • How to Customize Fonts and Colors for Gnome Panels in Ubuntu Linux

    - by The Geek
    Earlier this week we showed you how to make the Gnome Panels totally transparent, but you really need some customized fonts and colors to make the effect work better. Here’s how to do it. This article is the first part of a multi-part series on how to customize the Ubuntu desktop, written by How-To Geek reader and ubergeek, Omar Hafiz. Changing the Gnome Colors the Easy Way You’ll first need to install Gnome Color Chooser which is available in the default repositories (the package name is gnome-color-chooser). Then go to System > Preferences > Gnome Color Chooser to launch the program. When you see all these tabs you immediately know that Gnome Color Chooser does not only change the font color of the panel, but also the color of the fonts all over Ubuntu, desktop icons, and many other things as well. Now switch to the panel tab, here you can control every thing about your panels. You can change font, font color, background and background color of the panels and start menus. Tick the “Normal” option and choose the color you want for the panel font. If you want you can change the hover color of the buttons on the panel by too. A little below the color option is the font options, this includes the font, font size, and the X and Y positioning of the font. The first two options are pretty straight forward, they change the typeface and the size. The X-Padding and Y-Padding may confuse you but they are interesting, they may give a nice look for your panels by increasing the space between items on your panel like this: X-Padding:   Y-Padding:   The bottom half of the window controls the look of your start menus which is the Applications, Places, and Systems menus. You can customize them just the way you did with the panel.   Alright, this was the easy way to change the font of your panels. Changing the Gnome Theme Colors the Command-Line Way The other hard (not so hard really) way will be changing the configuration files that tell your panel how it should look like. In your Home Folder, press Ctrl+H to show the hidden files, now find the file “.gtkrc-2.0”, open it and insert this line in it. If there are any other lines in the file leave them intact. include “/home/<username>/.gnome2/panel-fontrc” Don’t forget to replace the <user_name> with you user account name. When done close and save the file. Now navigate the folder “.gnome2” from your Home Folder and create a new file and name it “panel-fontrc”. Open the file you just created with a text editor and paste the following in it: style “my_color”{fg[NORMAL] = “#FF0000”}widget “*PanelWidget*” style “my_color”widget “*PanelApplet*” style “my_color” This text will make the font red. If you want other colors you’ll need to replace the Hex value/HTML Notation (in this case #FF0000) with the value of the color you want. To get the hex value you can use GIMP, Gcolor2 witch is available in the default repositories or you can right-click on your panel > Properties > Background tab then click to choose the color you want and copy the Hex value. Don’t change any other thing in the text. When done, save and close. Now press Alt+F2 and enter “killall gnome-panel” to force it to restart or you can log out and login again. Most of you will prefer the first way of changing the font and color for it’s ease of applying and because it gives you much more options but, some may not have the ability/will to download and install a new program on their machine or have reasons of their own for not to using it, that’s why we provided the two way. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware The Splendiferous Array of Culinary Tools [Infographic] Add a Real-Time Earth Wallpaper App to Ubuntu with xplanetFX The Citroen GT – An Awesome Video Game Car Brought to Life [Video] Final Man vs. Machine Round of Jeopardy Unfolds; Watson Dominates Give Chromium-Based Browser Desktop Notifications a Native System Look in Ubuntu Chrome Time Track Is a Simple Task Time Tracker

    Read the article

  • Must-see sessions at TCUK11

    - by Roger Hart
    Technical Communication UK is probably the best professional conference I've been to. Last year, I spoke there on content strategy, and this year I'll be co-hosting a workshop on embedded user assistance. Obviously, I'd love people to come along to that; but there are some other sessions I'd like to flag up for anybody thinking of attending. Tuesday 20th Sept - workshops This will be my first year at the pre-conference workshop day, and I'm massively glad that our workshop hasn't been scheduled along-side the one I'm really interested in. My picks: It looks like you're embedding user assistance. Would you like help? My colleague Dom and I are presenting this one. It's our paen to Clippy, to the brilliant idea he represented, and the crashing failure he was. Less precociously, we'll be teaching embedded user assistance, Red Gate style. Statistics without maths: acquiring, visualising and interpreting your data This doesn't need to do anything apart from what it says on the tin in order to be gold dust. But given the speakers, I suspect it will. A data-informed approach is a great asset to technical communications, so I'd recommend this session to anybody event faintly interested. The speakers here have a great track record of giving practical, accessible introductions to big topics. Go along. Wednesday 21st Sept - day one There's no real need to recommend the keynote for a conference, but I will just point out that this year it's Google's Patrick Hofmann. That's cool. You know what else is cool: Focus on the user, the rest follows An intro to modelling customer experience. This is a really exciting area for tech comms, and potentially touches on one of my personal hobby-horses: the convergence of technical communication and marketing. It's all part of delivering customer experience, and knowing what your users need lets you help them, sell to them, and delight them. Content strategy year 1: a tale from the trenches It's often been observed that content strategy is great at banging its own drum, but not so hot on compelling case studies. Here you go, folks. This is the presentation I'm most excited about so far. On a mission to communicate! Skype help their users communicate, but how do they communicate with them? I guess we'll find out. Then there's the stuff that I'm not too excited by, but you might just be. The standards geeks and agile freaks can get together in a presentation on the forthcoming ISO standards for agile authoring. Plus, there's a session on VBA for tech comms. I do have one gripe about day 1. The other big UK tech comms conference, UA Europe, have - I think - netted the more interesting presentation from Ellis Pratt. While I have no doubt that his TCUK case study on producing risk assessments will be useful, I'd far rather go to his talk on game theory for tech comms. Hopefully UA Europe will record it. Thursday 22nd Sept - day two Day two has a couple of slots yet to be confirmed. The rumour is that one of them will be the brilliant "Questions and rants" session from last year. I hope so. It's not ranting, but I'll be going to: RTFMobile: beyond stating the obvious Ultan O'Broin is an engaging speaker with a lot to say, and mobile is one of the most interesting and challenging new areas for tech comms. Even if this weren't a research-based presentation from a company with buckets of technology experience, I'd be going. It is, and you should too. Pattern recognition for technical communicators One of the best things about TCUK is the tendency to include sessions that tackle the theoretical and bring them towards the practical. Kai and Chris delivered cracking and well-received talks last year, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they've got for us on some of the conceptual underpinning of technical communication. Developing an interactive non-text learning programme Annoyingly, this clashes with Pattern Recognition, so I hope at least one of the streams is recorded again this year. The idea of communicating complex information without words us fascinating and this sounds like a great example of this year's third stream: "anything but text". For the localization and DITA crowds, there's rich pickings on day two, though I'm not sure how many of those sessions I'm interested in. In the 13:00 - 13:40 slot, there's an interesting clash between Linda Urban on re-use and training content, and a piece on minimalism I'm sorely tempted by. That's my pick of #TCUK11. I'll be doing a round-up blog after the event, and probably talking a bit more about it beforehand. I'm also reliably assured that there are still plenty of tickets.

    Read the article

  • How to Tell If Your Computer is Overheating and What to Do About It

    - by Chris Hoffman
    Heat is a computer’s enemy. Computers are designed with heat dispersion and ventilation in mind so they don’t overheat. If too much heat builds up, your computer may become unstable or suddenly shut down. The CPU and graphics card produce much more heat when running demanding applications. If there’s a problem with your computer’s cooling system, an excess of heat could even physically damage its components. Is Your Computer Overheating? When using a typical computer in a typical way, you shouldn’t have to worry about overheating at all. However, if you’re encountering system instability issues like abrupt shut downs, blue screens, and freezes — especially while doing something demanding like playing PC games or encoding video — your computer may be overheating. This can happen for several reasons. Your computer’s case may be full of dust, a fan may have failed, something may be blocking your computer’s vents, or you may have a compact laptop that was never designed to run at maximum performance for hours on end. Monitoring Your Computer’s Temperature First, bear in mind that different CPUs and GPUs (graphics cards) have different optimal temperature ranges. Before getting too worried about a temperature, be sure to check your computer’s documentation — or its CPU or graphics card specifications — and ensure you know the temperature ranges your hardware can handle. You can monitor your computer’s temperatures in a variety of different ways. First, you may have a way to monitor temperature that is already built into your system. You can often view temperature values in your computer’s BIOS or UEFI settings screen. This allows you to quickly see your computer’s temperature if Windows freezes or blue screens on you — just boot the computer, enter the BIOS or UEFI screen, and check the temperatures displayed there. Note that not all BIOSes or UEFI screens will display this information, but it is very common. There are also programs that will display your computer’s temperature. Such programs just read the sensors inside your computer and show you the temperature value they report, so there are a wide variety of tools you can use for this, from the simple Speccy system information utility to an advanced tool like SpeedFan. HWMonitor also offer this feature, displaying a wide variety of sensor information. Be sure to look at your CPU and graphics card temperatures. You can also find other temperatures, such as the temperature of your hard drive, but these components will generally only overheat if it becomes extremely hot in the computer’s case. They shouldn’t generate too much heat on their own. If you think your computer may be overheating, don’t just glance as these sensors once and ignore them. Do something demanding with your computer, such as running a CPU burn-in test with Prime 95, playing a PC game, or running a graphical benchmark. Monitor the computer’s temperature while you do this, even checking a few hours later — does any component overheat after you push it hard for a while? Preventing Your Computer From Overheating If your computer is overheating, here are some things you can do about it: Dust Out Your Computer’s Case: Dust accumulates in desktop PC cases and even laptops over time, clogging fans and blocking air flow. This dust can cause ventilation problems, trapping heat and preventing your PC from cooling itself properly. Be sure to clean your computer’s case occasionally to prevent dust build-up. Unfortunately, it’s often more difficult to dust out overheating laptops. Ensure Proper Ventilation: Put the computer in a location where it can properly ventilate itself. If it’s a desktop, don’t push the case up against a wall so that the computer’s vents become blocked or leave it near a radiator or heating vent. If it’s a laptop, be careful to not block its air vents, particularly when doing something demanding. For example, putting a laptop down on a mattress, allowing it to sink in, and leaving it there can lead to overheating — especially if the laptop is doing something demanding and generating heat it can’t get rid of. Check if Fans Are Running: If you’re not sure why your computer started overheating, open its case and check that all the fans are running. It’s possible that a CPU, graphics card, or case fan failed or became unplugged, reducing air flow. Tune Up Heat Sinks: If your CPU is overheating, its heat sink may not be seated correctly or its thermal paste may be old. You may need to remove the heat sink and re-apply new thermal paste before reseating the heat sink properly. This tip applies more to tweakers, overclockers, and people who build their own PCs, especially if they may have made a mistake when originally applying the thermal paste. This is often much more difficult when it comes to laptops, which generally aren’t designed to be user-serviceable. That can lead to trouble if the laptop becomes filled with dust and needs to be cleaned out, especially if the laptop was never designed to be opened by users at all. Consult our guide to diagnosing and fixing an overheating laptop for help with cooling down a hot laptop. Overheating is a definite danger when overclocking your CPU or graphics card. Overclocking will cause your components to run hotter, and the additional heat will cause problems unless you can properly cool your components. If you’ve overclocked your hardware and it has started to overheat — well, throttle back the overclock! Image Credit: Vinni Malek on Flickr     

    Read the article

  • Drawing on a webpage – HTML5 - IE9

    - by nmarun
    So I upgraded to IE9 and continued exploring HTML5. Now there’s this ‘thing’ called Canvas in HTML5 with which you can do some cool stuff. Alright what IS this Canvas thing anyways? The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group says this: “The canvas element provides scripts with a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly.” The Canvas element has two only attributes – width and height and when not specified they take up the default values of 300 and 150 respectively. Below is what my HTML file looks like: 1: <!DOCTYPE html> 2: <html lang="en-US"> 3: <head> 4: <script type="text/javascript" src="CustomScript.js"></script> 5: <script src="jquery-1.4.4.js" type="text/javascript"></script 6:  7: <title>Draw on a webpage</title> 8: </head> 9: <body> 10: <canvas id="canvas" width="500" height="500"></canvas> 11: <br /> 12: <input type="submit" id="submit" value="Clear" /> 13: <h4 id="currentPosition"> 14: 0, 0 15: </h4> 16: <div id="mousedownCoords"></div> 17: </body> 18: </html> In case you’re wondering, this is not a MVC or any kind of web application. This is plain ol’ HTML even though I’m writing all this in VS 2010. You see this is a very simple, ‘gimmicks-free’ html page. I have declared a Canvas element on line 10 and a button on line 11 to clear the drawing board. I’m using jQuery / JavaScript show the current position of the mouse on the screen. This will get updated in the ‘currentPosition’ <h4> tag and I’m using the ‘mousedownCoords’ to write all the places where the mouse was clicked. This is what my page renders as: The rectangle with a background is our canvas. The coloring is due to some javascript (which we’ll see in a moment). Now let’s get to our CustomScript.js file. 1: jQuery(document).ready(function () { 2: var isFirstClick = true; 3: var canvas = document.getElementById("canvas"); 4: // getContext: Returns an object that exposes an API for drawing on the canvas 5: var canvasContext = canvas.getContext("2d"); 6: fillBackground(); 7:  8: $("#submit").click(function () { 9: clearCanvas(); 10: fillBackground(); 11: }); 12:  13: $(document).mousemove(function (e) { 14: $('#currentPosition').html(e.pageX + ', ' + e.pageY); 15: }); 16: $(document).mouseup(function (e) { 17: // on the first click 18: // set the moveTo 19: if (isFirstClick == true) { 20: canvasContext.beginPath(); 21: canvasContext.moveTo(e.pageX - 7, e.pageY - 7); 22: isFirstClick = false; 23: } 24: else { 25: // on subsequent clicks, draw a line 26: canvasContext.lineTo(e.pageX - 7, e.pageY - 7); 27: canvasContext.stroke(); 28: } 29:  30: $('#mousedownCoords').text($('#mousedownCoords').text() + '(' + e.pageX + ',' + e.pageY + ')'); 31: }); 32:  33: function fillBackground() { 34: canvasContext.fillStyle = '#a1b1c3'; 35: canvasContext.fillRect(0, 0, 500, 500); 36: canvasContext.fill(); 37: } 38:  39: function clearCanvas() { 40: // wipe-out the canvas 41: canvas.width = canvas.width; 42: // set the isFirstClick to true 43: // so the next shape can begin 44: isFirstClick = true; 45: // clear the text 46: $('#mousedownCoords').text(''); 47: } 48: })   The script only looks long and complicated, but is not. I’ll go over the main steps. Get a ‘hold’ of your canvas object and retrieve the ‘2d’ context out of it. On mousemove event, write the current x and y coordinates to the ‘currentPosition’ element. On mouseup event, check if this is the first time the user has clicked on the canvas. The coloring of the canvas is done in the fillBackground() function. We first need to start a new path. This is done by calling the beginPath() function on our context. The moveTo() function sets the starting point of our path. The lineTo() function sets the end point of the line to be drawn. The stroke() function is the one that actually draws the line on our canvas. So if you want to play with the demo, here’s how you do it. First click on the canvas (nothing visible happens on the canvas). The second click draws a line from the first click to the current coordinates and so on and so forth. Click on the ‘Clear’ button, to reset the canvas and to give your creativity a clean slate. Here’s a sample output: Happy drawing! Verdict: HTML5 and IE9 – I think we’re on to something big and great here!

    Read the article

  • Can Kind People Finish First?

    - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies
    by Jim Lein, Oracle Midsize Programs In an earlier post, I expressed my undying love for KIND Snacks' products. This month's Oracle Profit magazine features an interview with KIND Healthy Snacks Founder and CEO Daniel Lubetzky entitled "Better Business". Lubetzky expresses his vision for making KIND a "not for profit only" company.  All great companies start with a good idea. In this case, that one great idea was to offer a healthy snack with ingredients you can "see and pronounce". That's one of things I really like about this company--that coupled with the fact that their snacks taste great. They compete in an over crowded playing field but I've found that it's rare to find an energy snack that both tastes good and is good for you.  A couple of interesting facts I learned from reading this article: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} 9 out of 10 consumers who try a KIND bar will purchase a KIND product again and recommend it to others KIND has the highest Net Promoter Score among the top 10 brands in the nutritional bar category (I confess I've never heard about this rating before but now that I have it's pretty cool) KIND's coporate mantra, "Do the Kind Thing" both encourages people to do random acts of kindness and provides easy mechanisms for doing so. Not coincidentally, I think, KIND is indeed a story about how nice guys can finish first. KIND has doubled in size every year for the last ten  years and now employees over 300 people, with sales exceeding $120M annually. Growth Applies Pressures One thing I know for certain from interacting our with fast growing customers over the last fifteen years is that growth applies myriad pressures across the organization--resources, processes, technology systems, and leadership agility. And it's easy to forget that Oracle was once an entrepreneurial startup and experienced all those same pressures that other growing companies are experiencing today. When asked by Profit Editor in Chief Aaron Lazenby, " What sort of pressure does KIND"s growth and success place on operations?", Lubetzky responded, "We have a demand planning process right now that is manual to a significant extent, and it just takes so much management time. It takes us days and sometimes weeks to produce information that is critical to our business—and by the time we get the results, we need revised data. Our sales leadership could go out selling, but instead they’re talking to our team about forecasts." Hitching Your Wagon to Oracle Lubetzky and his team selected Oracle for what I believe is our company's greatest strength: hitch your wagon to Oracle and you can trust that we will be there for the long run with the solutions you need and financial staying power. In Lubetzky's words, "The KIND philosophy requires you to have a long-term view of things; taking shortcuts may be the fastest way to get things done, but in the long term that can come back and bite you. Oracle is the type of company—and has the kind of platform—that is here for the long term. It’s not going to go away tomorrow. And Oracle is going to invest all the necessary resources into staying ahead of the game and improving." o next time you're in the supermarket or an REI (my favorite store in the world) or any of the other 80,000 locations that carry KIND, give one a try. Maybe some day you'll want to become a KIND Brand Ambassador.   Looking for more news and information about Oracle Solutions for Midsize Companies? Read the latest Oracle for Midsize Companies Newsletter Sign-up to receive the latest communications from Oracle’s industry leaders and experts Jim Lein I evangelize Oracle's enterprise solutions for growing midsize companies. I recently celebrated 15 years with Oracle, having joined JD Edwards in 1999. I'm based in Evergreen, Colorado and love relating stories about creativity and innovation whether they be about software, live music, or the mountains. The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of Oracle.

    Read the article

  • Disaster Recovery Discovery

    - by Rodney Landrum
    Last weekend I joined several of my IT staff on a mission to perform a DR test in our remote CoLo center in a large South East city of the US. Can I be more obtuse? The goal was simple for me as the sole DBA in a throng of Windows, Storage, Network and SAN admins – restore the databases and make them work. There were 4 applications that back ended to 7 SQL Server databases on 4 different SQL Server instances. We would maintain the original server names, but beyond that it was fair game. We had time to prepare so I was able to script out or otherwise automate the recovery process. I used sp_help_revlogin for three of the servers, a bit of a cheat actually because restoring the Master database on the target DR servers was the specified course of action according to the DR procedures ( the caveat “IF REQUIRED” left it open to interpretation. I really wanted to avoid the step of restoring Master for a number of reasons but mainly because I did not want to deal with issues starting SQL Services afterward. Having to account for the location of TempDB and the version conflicts of the resource DBs were just two of the battles I chose not to fight. Not to mention other system database location problems that might arise and prevent SQL from starting.  I was going to have to restore all of the user databases anyway, so I would not really gain any benefit, outside of logins, for taking the time to restore the source Master database over the newly installed one on the fresh server. What I wanted was the ability to restore the Master database as a user database, call it Master_Mine, from a backup on the source system and then use that restored database to script the SQL Logins and passwords on the DR systems. While I did not attempt this on the trip, the thought stuck in my mind and this past week I succeeded at scripting user accounts and passwords using only a restored copy of the Master database. Granted there were several challenges to overcome.  Also, as is usual for any work like this the usual disclaimers apply:  This is not something that I would imagine Microsoft would condone or support and this was really only an experiment for me to learn if it was even possible. While I have tested the process with success, I do not know that I would use this technique in a documented procedure because future updates for SQL Server will render this technique non-functional. I thought at first, incorrectly of course, that I could use sp_help_revlogin on a restored copy of the master database I named Master_Mine.   Since sp_help_revlogin uses system schema objects, sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals, this was not going to work because all results would come from the main Master database. To test this I added a SQL login via SSMS, backed up Master, restored  it as Master_Mine, and then deleted the login.  Even though the test account I created should presumably still be in the Master_Mine database, I should be able to get to it and script out its creation with its password hash so that I would not need to know the password, but any applications that stored that password would not have to be altered in the DR scenario. They would just work as expected. Once I realized that would not work I began looking deeper.  Knowing that sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals are system views, their underlying code should be available with sp_helptext, right? They were. And this led me to discover the two tables sys.sysxlgns and sys.sysprivs, where the data I needed was stored. These tables existed in both the real Master and the restored copy, Master_Mine.  I used this information to tweak the sp_help_revlogin stored procedure to use these tables instead to create the logins cursor used in sp_help_revlogin. For the password hash,  sp_help_revlogin uses the function LoginProperty() which takes a user name and option ‘passwordhash’ to return the hash for the user. Unfortunately, it requires the login to exist in the Master database. This would not work. So another slight modification I had to make was to pull the password hash itself (pwdhash from sys.sysxlgns) into the logins cursor and comment out the section of sp_help_revlogin that uses LoginProperty. Instead, I pass the pwdhash value as the variable @PWD_varbinary to the sp_hexadecimal stored procedure which is also created by and used within the code provided by Microsoft in the link above for sp_help_revlogin. The final challenge: sys.sysxlgns and sys.server_principals are visible only within a Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC) query window in SSMS or within SQLCDMD.  To open a DAC connection you have to be logged in on the SQL Server itself, via RDP in my case,  and you preface the server name in the query connection with ADMIN:, so that the server connection looks like ADMIN:ServerName. From there you can create the modified stored procedure in the restored copy of a Master database from a source system as whatever name you like, and then run the modified stored procedure. I named my new stored procedure usp_help_revlogin_MyMaster. Upon execution I was happy to see the logins and password hashes that I needed to apply from the source Master database without having to restore over the new Master system database and without the need to access the original server (assuming it was down due to whatever disaster put it in that state). You will note that I am not providing full code samples here of the modifications. I will say that it was a slight bit of work and anyone who needed to do this for whatever reason, could fairly easily roll their own solution with the information provided herein.  My goal, as I said was to prove that this could be done and provide another option if required to ease the burden of getting SQL Servers up and available in an emergency situation where alternatives may be more challenging or otherwise unavailable.  

    Read the article

  • Microsoft BUILD 2013 Day 1&ndash;Keynote

    - by Tim Murphy
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/27/microsoft-build-2013-day-1ndashkeynote.aspx This one is going to be a little long because the keynote was jam-packed so bare with me. The keynote for the first day of BUILD 2013 was kicked off by Steve Balmer.  He made it very clear that Microsoft’s focus is on accelerating its time to market with products and product updates.  His quote was that “Rapid release” is the new norm.  He continued by showing off several new Lumias that have been buzzing around the internet for a while and announce that Sprint will now be carrying the HTC 8XT and Samsung ATIV. Balmer is known for repeating words or phrase for affect.  This time it was “Rapid release, rapid release” and “Touch, touch, touch, touch, touch, …”.  This was fun, but even more fun was when he announce that all attendees would receive an Acer Iconia 8” tablet. SCORE! The next subject Balmer focused on is new apps.  The three new ones were Flipboard, Facebook and NFL Fantasy Football.  I liked the first two because these are ones that people coming from other platforms are missing.  The NFL app is great just because it targets a demographic that can be fanatical.  If these types of apps keep coming than the missing app argument goes away. While many Negative Nancy’s are describing Windows 8.1 as Windows 180 Steve Balmer chose to call it a “refined blend” as in a coffee that has been improved with a new mix.  This includes more multi-tasking options and leveraging Bing straight throughout the entire ecosystem. He ended this first section by explaining that this will also bring more Bing development opportunities to the community. Steve Balmer was followed by Julie Larson-Green who spent her time on stage selling us on Windows 8 all over again from my point of view.  Something that I would not have thought was needed until I had listened to some other attendees who had a number of concerns and complaints.  She showed a number of new gestures that will come with Windows 8.1, and while they were cool I was left wondering if they really improved the experience.  I guess only time will tell. I did like the fact that it the UI implementation to bring up “All Apps” now mirrors that of Windows Phone.  The consistency is a big step forward that I hope to see continue.  The cool factor went up from there as she swiped content from a desktop (mega-tablet) to the XBox One.  This seamless experience I believe is what is really needed for any future platform to be relevant. I was much more enthused by the presentation of Antoine Leblond who humbled us by letting us know that there are 5k new API.  How that can be or how anyone would ever use all of them is another question.  His announcement was that the Visual Studio 2013 preview would be available today along with the Windows 8.1 bits.  One of the features of VS2013 that he demonstrated is the power consumption profiler.  With battery life being a key factor with consumer consumption devices this is a welcome addition. He didn’t limit his presentation to VS2013 features though.  He showed how the Store has been redesigned to enable better search and discoverability of apps and how Win 8.1 can perform multiple screen scales depending on the resolution of the device automatically.  The last feature he demoed was the real time video streaming API which he made sure we understood by attaching a Surface to a little robot.  Oh, but there was one more thing.  Antoine and Julie announce that all attendees would also be getting Surface Pros.  BONUS! How much more could there be?  Gurdeep Singh Pall was about to pile on.  He introduced us to Bing as a platform (BaaP?).  He said if they (Microsoft) could do something with and API that is good 3rd party developers can do something that is dynamite and showed us some of the tools they had produced.  These included natural user interface improvements such as voice commands that looked to put Siri to shame.  Add to that 3D, OCR and translation capabilities and the future looks to be full of opportunities. Balmer then came out to show us one last thing.  Project Spark is a game design environment that will be available for Windows 8.1, XBox 360 and XBox One.  All I can say is that if my kids get their hands on this they are going to be able to learn some of what dad does in a much more enjoyable way. At the end of it all I was both exhausted and energized by what I saw.  What could they have possibly left for the day 2 keynote?  I hear it will feature Scott Hanselman.  If that is right we are in for a treat.  See you there. del.icio.us Tags: BUILD 2013,Windows 8.1,Winodws Phone,XAML,Keynote,Bing,Visual Studio 2013,Project Spark

    Read the article

  • Gamification = -10#/3mo

    - by erikanollwebb
    One of the purposes of gamification of anything is to see if you can modify the behavior of the user. In the enterprise, that might mean getting sales people to enter more information into a CRM system, encouraging employees to update their HR records, motivating people to participate in forums and discussions, or process invoices more quickly.  Wikipedia defines behavior modification as "the traditional term for the use of empirically demonstrated behavior change techniques to increase or decrease the frequency of behaviors, such as altering an individual's behaviors and reactions to stimuli through positive and negative reinforcement of adaptive behavior and/or the reduction of behavior through its extinction, punishment and/or satiation."  Gamification is just a way to modify someone's behavior using game mechanics. And the magic question is always whether it works. So I thought I would present my own little experiment from the last few months.  This spring, I upgraded to a Samsung Galaxy 4.  It's a pretty sweet phone in many ways, but one of the little extras I discovered was a built in app called S Health. S Health is an app that you can use to track calories, weight, exercise and it has a built in pedometer. I looked at it when I got the phone, but assumed you had to turn it on to use it so I didn't look at it much.  But sometime in July, I realized that in fact, it just ran in the background and was quietly tracking my steps, with a goal of 10,000 per day.  10,000 steps per day is this magic number recommended by the Surgeon General and the American Heart Association.  Dr. Oz pushes it as the goal for daily exercise.  It's about 5 miles of walking. I'm generally not the kind of person who always has my phone with me.  I leave it in my purse and pull it out when I need it.  But then I realized that meant I wasn't getting a good measure of my steps.  I decided to do a little experiment, and carry it with me as much as possible for a week.  That's when I discovered the gamification that changed my life over the last 3 months.  When I hit 10,000 steps, the app jingled out a little "success!" tune and I got a badge.  I was hooked.  I started carrying my phone.  I started making sure I had shoes I could walk in with me.  I started walking at lunch time, because I realized how often I sat at my desk for 8-10 hours every day without moving.  I started pestering my husband to walk with me after work because I hadn't hit my 10,000 yet, leading him at one point to say "I'm not as much a slave to that badge as you are!"  I started looking at parking lots differently.  Can't get a space up close?  No worries, just that many steps toward my 10,000.  I even tried to see if there was a second power user level at 15,000 or 20,000 (*sadly, no).  If I was close at the end of the day, I have done laps around my house until I got my badge.  I have walked around the block one more time to get my badge.  I have mentally chastised myself when I forgot to put my phone in my pocket because I don't know how many steps I got.  The badge below I got when my boss and I were in New York City and we walked around the block of our hotel just to watch the badge pop up. There are a bunch of tools out on the market now that have similar ideas for helping you to track your exercise, make it social.  There are apps (my favorite is still Zombies, Run!).  You could buy a FitBit or UP by Jawbone.   Interactive fitness makes the Expresso stationary bike with built in video games.  All designed to help you be more aware of your activity and keep you engaged and motivated.  And the idea is to help you change your behavior. I know someone who would spend extra time and work hard on the Expresso because he had built up strategies for how to kill the most dragons while he was riding to get more points.  When the machine broke down, he didn't ride a different bike because it just wasn't that interesting. But for me, just the simple jingle and badge have been all I needed.  I admit, I still giggle gleefully when I hear the tune sing out from my pocket. After a few weeks, I noticed I had dropped a few pounds.  Not a lot, just 2-3.  But then I was really hooked.  I started making a point both to eat a little less and hit 10,000 steps as much as I could.  I bemoaned that during the floods in Boulder, I wasn't hitting my 10,000 steps.  And now, a few months later, I'm almost 10 lbs lighter. All for 1 badge a day. So yes, simple gamification can increase motivation and engagement.  And that can lead to changes in behavior.  Now the job is to apply that to the enterprise space in a meaningful and engaging way. 

    Read the article

  • BYOD-The Tablet Difference

    - by Samantha.Y. Ma
    By Allison Kutz, Lindsay Richardson, and Jennifer Rossbach, Sales Consultants Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-TW X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Less than three years ago, Apple introduced a new concept to the world: The Tablet. It’s hard to believe that in only 32 months, the iPad induced an entire new way to do business. Because of their mobility and ease-of-use, tablets have grown in popularity to keep up with the increasing “on the go” lifestyle, and their popularity isn’t expected to decrease any time soon. In fact, global tablet sales are expected to increase drastically within the next five years, from 56 million tablets to 375 million by 2016. Tablets have been utilized for every function imaginable in today’s world. With over 730,000 active applications available for the iPad, these tablets are educational devices, portable book collections, gateways into social media, entertainment for children when Mom and Dad need a minute on their own, and so much more. It’s no wonder that 74% of those who own a tablet use it daily, 60% use it several times a day, and an average of 13.9 hours per week are spent tapping away. Tablets have become a critical part of a user’s personal life; but why stop there? Businesses today are taking major strides in implementing these devices, with the hopes of benefiting from efficiency and productivity gains. Limo and taxi drivers use tablets as payment devices instead of traditional cash transactions. Retail outlets use tablets to find the exact merchandise customers are looking for. Professors use tablets to teach their classes, and business professionals demonstrate solutions and review reports from tablets. Since an overwhelming majority of tablet users have started to use their personal iPads, PlayBooks, Galaxys, etc. in the workforce, organizations have had to make a change. In many cases, companies are willing to make that change. In fact, 79% of companies are making new investments in mobility this year. Gartner reported that 90% of organizations are expected to support corporate applications on personal devices by 2014. It’s not just companies that are changing. Business professionals have become accustomed to tablets making their personal lives easier, and want that same effect in the workplace. Professionals no longer want to waste time manually entering data in their computer, or worse yet in a notebook, especially when the data has to be later transcribed to an online system. The response: the Bring Your Own Device phenomenon. According to Gartner, BOYD is “an alternative strategy allowing employees, business partners and other users to utilize a personally selected and purchased client device to execute enterprise applications and access data.” Employees whose companies embrace this trend are more efficient because they get to use devices they are already accustomed to. Tablets change the game when it comes to how sales professionals perform their jobs. Sales reps can easily store and access customer information and analytics using tablet applications, such as Oracle Fusion Tap. This method is much more enticing for sales reps than spending time logging interactions on their (what seem to be outdated) computers. Forrester & IDC reported that on average sales reps spend 65% of their time on activities other than selling, so having a tablet application to use on the go is extremely powerful. In February, Information Week released a list of “9 Powerful Business Uses for Tablet Computers,” ranging from “enhancing the customer experience” to “improving data accuracy” to “eco-friendly motivations”. Tablets compliment the lifestyle of professionals who strive to be effective and efficient, both in the office and on the road. Three Things Businesses Need to do to Embrace BYOD Make customer-facing websites tablet-friendly for consistent user experiences Develop tablet applications to continue to enhance the customer experience Embrace and use the technology that comes with tablets Almost 55 million people in the U.S. own tablets because they are convenient, easy, and powerful. These are qualities that companies strive to achieve with any piece of technology. The inherent power of the devices coupled with the growing number of business applications ensures that tablets will transform the way that companies and employees perform.

    Read the article

  • What Counts for a DBA: Humility

    - by drsql
    In football (the American sort, naturally,) there are a select group of players who really hope to never have their names called during the game. They are members of the offensive line, and their job is to protect other players so they can deliver the ball to the goal to score points. When you do hear their name called, it is usually because they made a mistake and the player that they were supposed to protect ended up flat on his back admiring the clouds in the sky instead of advancing towards the goal to scoring point. Even on the rare occasion their name is called for a good reason, it is usually because they were making up for a teammate who had made a mistake and they covered up for them. The role of offensive lineman is a very good analogy for the role of the admin DBA. As a DBA, you are called on to be barely visible and rarely heard, protecting the company data assets tenaciously, even though the enemies to our craft surround us on all sides:. Developers: Cries of ‘foul!’ often ensue when the DBA says that they want data integrity to be stringently enforced and that documentation is needed so they can support systems, mostly because every error occurrence in the enterprise will be initially blamed on the database and fall to the DBA to troubleshoot. Insisting too loudly may bring those cries of ‘foul’ that somewhat remind you of when your 2 year old daughter didn't want to go to bed. The result of this petulance is that the next "enemy" gets involved. Managers: The concerns that motivate DBAs to argue will not excite the kind of manager who gets his technical knowledge from a glossy magazine filled with buzzwords, charts, and pretty pictures. However, the other programmers in the organization will tickle the buzzword void with a stream of new-sounding ideas and technologies constantly, along with warnings that if we did care about data integrity and document things, the budget would explode! In contrast, the arguments for integrity of data and supportability tend to be about as exciting as watching grass grow, and far too many manager types seem to prefer to smoke it than watch it. Packaged Applications: The DBA is rarely given a chance to review a new application that is being demonstrated for the enterprise, and rarer still is the DBA that gets a veto of an application because the database it uses has clearly been created by an architect that won't read a data modeling book because he is already married. More often than not this leads to hours of work for the DBA trying to performance-tune a database with a menagerie of rules that must be followed to stay within the  application support agreement, such as no changing indexes on a third party schema even though there are 10 billion rows instead of the 10 thousand when the system was last optimized. Hardware Failures: Physical disks, networking devices, memory, and backup devices all come with a measure known as ‘mean time before failure’ and it is never listed in centuries or eons. More like years, and the term ‘mean’ indicates that half of the devices are expected to fail before that, which by my calendar means any hour of any day that it wants to fail it will. But the DBA sucks it up and does the task at hand with a humility that makes them nearly invisible to all but the most observant person in the organization. The best DBAs I know are so proactive in their relentless pursuit of perfection that they detect many of the bugs (which they seldom caused) in the system well before they become a problem. In the end the DBA gets noticed for one of same two reasons as the offensive lineman. You make a mistake, like dropping a critical production database that had never been backed up; or when a system crashes for any reason whatsoever and they are on the spot with troubleshooting and system restoration plans that have been well thought out, tested, and tested again. Not because there is any glory in it, but because it is what they do.   Note: The characteristics of the professions referred to in this blog are meant to be overstated stereotypes for humorous effect, and even some DBAs aren't quite this perfect. If you are reading this far and haven’t hand written a 10 page flaming comment about how you are a _______ and you aren’t like this, that is awesome. Not every situation applies to everyone, but if you have never worked with a bad packaged app, a magazine trained manager, programmers that aren’t team players, or hardware that occasionally failed, relax and go have a unicorn sandwich before you wake up.

    Read the article

  • Windows Phone 8 Announcement

    - by Tim Murphy
    As if the Surface announcement on Monday wasn’t exciting enough, today Microsoft announce that Windows Phone 8 will be coming this fall.  That itself is great news, but the features coming were like confetti flying in all different directions.  Given this speed I couldn’t capture every feature they covered.  A summary of what I did capture is listed below starting with their eight main features. Common Core The first thing that they covered is that Windows Phone 8 will share a core OS with Windows 8.  It will also run natively on multiple cores.  They mentioned that they have run it on up to 64 cores to this point.  The phones as you might expect will at least start as dual core.  If you remember there were metrics saying that Windows Phone 7 performed operations faster on a single core than other platforms did with dual cores.  The metrics they showed here indicate that Windows Phone 8 runs faster on comparable dual core hardware than other platforms. New Screen Resolutions Screen resolution has never been an issue for me, but it has been a criticism of Windows Phone 7 in the media.  Windows Phone 8 will supports three screen resolutions: WVGA 800 x 480, WXGA 1280 x 768, and 720 1280x720.  Hopefully this makes pixel counters a little happier. MicroSD Support This was one of my pet peeves when I got my Samsung Focus. With Windows Phone 8 the operating system will support adding MicroSD cards after initial setup.  Of course this is dependent on the hardware company on implementing it, but I think we have seen that even feature phone manufacturers have not had a problem supporting this in the past. NFC NFC has been an anticipated feature for some time.  What Microsoft showed today included the fact that they didn’t just want it to be for the phone.  There is cross platform NFC functionality between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.  The demos , while possibly a bit fanciful, showed would could be achieved even in a retail environment.  We are getting closer and closer to a Minority Report world with these technologies. Wallet Windows Phone 8 isn’t the first platform to have a wallet concept.  What they have done to differentiate themselves is to make it sot that it is not dependent on a SIM type chip like other platforms.  They have also expanded the concept beyond just banks to other types of credits such as airline miles. Nokia Mapping People have been envious of the Lumia phones having the Nokia mapping software.  Now all Windows Phone 8 devices will use NavTeq data and will have the capability to run in an offline fashion.  This is a major step forward from the Bing “touch for the next turn” maps. IT Administration The lack of features for enterprise administration and deployment was a complaint even before the Windows Phone 7 was released.  With the Windows Phone 8 release such features as Bitlocker and Secure boot will be baked into the OS. We will also have the ability to privately sign and distribute applications. Changing Start Screen Joe Belfiore made a big deal about this aspect of the new release.  Users will have more color themes available to them and the live tiles will be highly customizable. You will have the ability to resize and organize the tiles in a more dynamic way.  This allows for less important tiles or ones with less information to be made smaller.  And There Is More So what other tidbits came out of the presentation?  Later this summer the API for WP8 will be available.  There will be developer events coming to a city near you.  Another announcement of interest to developers is the ability to write applications at a native code level.  This is a boon for game developers and those who need highly efficient applications. As a topper on the cake there was mention of in app payment. On the consumer side we also found out that all updates will be available over the air.  Along with this came the fact that Microsoft will support all devices with updates for at least 18 month and you will be able to subscribe for early updates.  Update coming for Windows Phone 7.5 customers to WP7.8.  The main enhancement will be the new live tile features.  The big bonus is that the update will bypass the carriers.  I would assume though that you will be brought up to date with all previous patches that your carrier may not have released. There is so much more, but that is enough for one post.  Needless to say, EXCITING! del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone 8,WP8,Windows Phone 7,WP7,Announcements,Microsoft

    Read the article

  • javaf, problem...plz help someone...urgent [closed]

    - by innovative_aj
    i have made a word guessing game, when i click myButton to check if the guessed word is right or wrong, ball1 is moved into the "container" if its right, i want that when i click the button again and if the typed word is right, the 2nd ball should move into the container too... means one ball per correct answer...plz help me someone and provide me with the code that i can implement, its quite urgent... controller class coding /* * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates * and open the template in the editor. */ package project3; import java.net.URL; import java.util.ResourceBundle; import javafx.event.ActionEvent; import javafx.event.EventHandler; import javafx.fxml.FXML; import javafx.fxml.Initializable; import javafx.scene.control.Button; import javafx.scene.control.Label; import javafx.scene.control.TextField; import javafx.scene.layout.StackPane; import javafx.scene.shape.Circle; /** * FXML Controller class * * @xxx */ public class MyFxmlController implements Initializable { @FXML // fx:id="ball1" private Circle ball1; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="ball2" private Circle ball2; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="ball3" private Circle ball3; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="ball4" private Circle ball4; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="container" private Circle container; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="myButton" private Button myButton; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="myLabel1" private Label myLabel1; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="myLabel2" private Label myLabel2; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="pane" private StackPane pane; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @FXML // fx:id="txt" private TextField txt; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @Override // This method is called by the FXMLLoader when initialization is complete public void initialize(URL fxmlFileLocation, ResourceBundle resources) { assert ball1 != null : "fx:id=\"ball1\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert ball2 != null : "fx:id=\"ball2\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert ball3 != null : "fx:id=\"ball3\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert ball4 != null : "fx:id=\"ball4\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert container != null : "fx:id=\"container\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert myButton != null : "fx:id=\"myButton\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert myLabel1 != null : "fx:id=\"myLabel1\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert myLabel2 != null : "fx:id=\"myLabel2\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert pane != null : "fx:id=\"pane\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; assert txt != null : "fx:id=\"txt\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'MyFxml.fxml'."; // initialize your logic here: all @FXML variables will have been injected myButton.setOnAction(new EventHandler<ActionEvent>(){ @Override public void handle(ActionEvent event) { int count = 0; String guessed=txt.getText(); boolean result; result=MyCode.check(guessed); if(result) { ball1.setTranslateX(600); ball1.setTranslateY(250-container.getRadius()); //ball2.setTranslateX(600); // ball2.setTranslateY(250-container.getRadius()); } else System.out.println("wrong"); } }); } } word guessing logic public class MyCode { static String x="Netbeans"; static String y[]={"net","beans","neat","beat","bet"}; //static int counter; // public MyCode() { // counter++; //} static boolean check(String guessed) { int count=0; boolean result=false; //counter++; //System.out.println("turns"+counter); for(count=0;count<5;count++) { if(guessed.equals(y[count])) { result=true; break; } } if(result) System.out.println("Right"); else System.out.println("Wrong"); return result; } }

    Read the article

  • State of the (Commerce) Union: What the healthcare.gov hiccups teach us about the commerce customer experience

    - by Katrina Gosek
    Guest Post by Brenna Johnson, Oracle Commerce Product A lot has been said about the healthcare.gov debacle in the last week. Regardless of your feelings about the Affordable Care Act, there’s a hidden issue in this story that most of the American people don’t understand: delivering a great commerce customer experience (CX) is hard. It shouldn’t be, but it is. The reality of the government’s issues getting the healthcare site up and running smooth is something we in the online commerce community know too well.  If there’s one thing the botched launch of the site has taught us, it’s that regardless of the size of your budget or the power of an executive with a high-profile project, some of the biggest initiatives with the most attention (and the most at stake) don’t go as planned. It may even give you a moment of solace – we have the same issues! But why?  Organizations engage too many separate vendors with different technologies, running sections or pieces of a site to get live. When things go wrong, it takes time to identify the problem – and who or what is at the center of it. Unfortunately, this is a brittle way of setting up a site, making it susceptible to breaks, bugs, and scaling issues. But, it’s the reality of running a site with legacy technology constraints in today’s demanding, customer-centric market. This approach also means there’s also a lot of cooks in lots of different kitchens. You’ve got development and IT, the business and the marketing team, an external Systems Integrator to bring it all together, a digital agency or consultant, QA, product experts, 3rd party suppliers, and the list goes on. To complicate things, different business units are held responsible for different pieces of the site and managing different technologies. And again – due to legacy organizational structure and processes, this is all accepted as the normal State of the Union. Digital commerce has been commonplace for 15 years. Yet, getting a site live, maintained and performing requires orchestrating a cast of thousands (or at least, dozens), big dollars, and some finger-crossing. But it shouldn’t. The great thing about the advent of mobile commerce and the continued maturity of online commerce is that it’s forced organizations to think from the outside, in. Consumers – whether they’re shopping for shoes or a new healthcare plan – don’t care about what technology issues or processes you have behind the scenes. They just want it to work.  They want their experience to be easy, fast, and tailored to them and their needs – whatever they are. This doesn’t sound like a tall order to the American consumer – especially since they interact with sites that do work smoothly.  But the reality is that it takes scores of people, teams, check-ins, late nights, testing, and some good luck to get sites to run, and even more so at Black Friday (or October 1st) traffic levels.  The last thing on a customer’s mind is making excuses for why they can’t buy a product – just get it to work. So what is the government doing? My guess is working day and night to get the site performing  - and having to throw big money at the problem. In the meantime they’re sending frustrated online users to the call center, or even a location where a trained “navigator” can help them in-person to complete their selection. Sounds a lot like multichannel commerce (where broken communication between siloed touchpoints will only frustrate the consumer more). One thing we’ve learned is that consumers spend their time and money with brands they know and trust. When sites are easy to use and adapt to their needs, they tend to spend more, come back, and even become long-time loyalists. Achieving this may require moving internal mountains, but there’s too much at stake to ignore the sea change in how organizations are thinking about their customer. If the thought of re-thinking your internal teams, technologies, and processes sounds like a headache, think about the pain associated with losing valuable customers – and dollars. Regardless if you’re in B2B or B2C, it’s guaranteed that your competitors are making CX a priority. Those early to the game who have made CX a priority have already begun to outpace their competition. So as you’re planning for 2014, look to the news this week. Make sure the customer experience is a focus at your organization. Expectations are at record highs. Map your customer’s journey, and think from the outside, in. How easy is it for your customers to do business with you? If they interact with many touchpoints across your organization, are the call center, website, mobile environment, or brick and mortar location in sync? Do you have the technology in place to achieve this? It’s time to give the people what they want!

    Read the article

  • YouTube SEO: Video Optimization

    - by Mike Stiles
    SEO optimization is still regarded as one of the primary tools in the digital marketing kit. However and wherever a potential customer is conducting a search, brands want their content to surface in the top results. Makes sense. But without a regular flow of good, relevant content, your SEO opportunities run shallow. We know from several studies video is one of the most engaging forms of content, so why not make sure that in addition to being cool, your videos are helping you win the SEO game? Keywords:-Decide what search phrases make the most sense for your video. Don’t dare use phrases that have nothing to do with the content. You’ll make people mad.-Research those keywords to see how competitive they are. Adjust them so there are still lots of people searching for it, but there are not as many links showing up for it.-Search your potential keywords and phrases to see what comes up. It’s amazing how many people forget to do that. Video Title: -Try to start and/or end with your keyword.-When you search on YouTube, visual action words tend to come up as suggested searches. So try to use action words. Video Description: -Lead with a link to your site (include http://). -Don’t stuff this with your keyword. It leads to bad writing and it won’t work anyway. This is where you convince people to watch, so write for humans. Use some showmanship. -At the end, do a call to action (subscribe, see the whole playlist, visit our social channels, etc.) Video Tags:-Don’t over-tag. 5-10 tags per video is plenty. -If you’re compelled to have more than 10, that means you should probably make more videos specifically targeting all those keywords. Find Linking Pals:-45% of videos are discovered on video sites. But 44% are found through links on blogs and sites.-Write a blog about your video’s content, then link to the video in it. -A good site for finding places to guest blog is myblogguest.com-Once you find good linking partners, they’ll link to your future videos (as long as they’re good and you’re returning the favor). Tap the Power of Similar Videos:-Use Video Reply to associate your video with other topic-related videos. That’s when you make a video responding to or referencing a video made by someone else. Content:-Again, build up a portfolio of videos, not just one that goes after 30 keywords.-Create shorter, sequential videos that pull them deeper into the content and closer to a desired final action.-Organize your video topics separately using Playlists. Playlists show up as a whole in search results like individual videos, so optimize playlists the same as you would for a video. Meta Data:-Too much importance is placed on it. It accounts for only 15% of search success.-YouTube reads Captions or Transcripts to determine what a video is about. If you’re not using them, you’re missing out.-You get the SEO benefit of captions and transcripts whether the viewers has them toggled on or not. Promotion:-This accounts for 25% of search success.-Promote the daylights out of your videos using your social channels and digital assets. Don’t assume it’s going to magically get discovered. -You can pay to promote your video. This could surface it on the YouTube home page, YouTube search results, YouTube related videos, and across the Google content network. Community:-Accounts for 10% of search success.-Make sure your YouTube home page is a fun place to spend time. Carefully pick your featured video, and make sure your Playlists are featured. -Participate in discussions so users will see you’re present. The volume of ratings/comments is as important as the number of views when it comes to where you surface on search. Video Sitemaps:-As with a web site, a video sitemap helps Google quickly index your video.-Google wants to know title, description, play page URL, the URL of the thumbnail image you want, and raw video file location.-Sitemaps are xml files you host or dynamically generate on your site. Once you’ve made your sitemap, sign in and submit it using Google webmaster tools. Just as with the broadcast and cable TV channels, putting a video out there is only step one. You also have to make sure everybody knows it’s there so the largest audience possible can see it. Here’s hoping you get great ratings. @mikestiles

    Read the article

  • fatal error C1014: too many include files : depth = 1024

    - by numerical25
    I have no idea what this means. But here is the code that it supposely is happening in. //======================================================================================= // d3dApp.cpp by Frank Luna (C) 2008 All Rights Reserved. //======================================================================================= #include "d3dApp.h" #include <stream> LRESULT CALLBACK MainWndProc(HWND hwnd, UINT msg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam) { static D3DApp* app = 0; switch( msg ) { case WM_CREATE: { // Get the 'this' pointer we passed to CreateWindow via the lpParam parameter. CREATESTRUCT* cs = (CREATESTRUCT*)lParam; app = (D3DApp*)cs->lpCreateParams; return 0; } } // Don't start processing messages until after WM_CREATE. if( app ) return app->msgProc(msg, wParam, lParam); else return DefWindowProc(hwnd, msg, wParam, lParam); } D3DApp::D3DApp(HINSTANCE hInstance) { mhAppInst = hInstance; mhMainWnd = 0; mAppPaused = false; mMinimized = false; mMaximized = false; mResizing = false; mFrameStats = L""; md3dDevice = 0; mSwapChain = 0; mDepthStencilBuffer = 0; mRenderTargetView = 0; mDepthStencilView = 0; mFont = 0; mMainWndCaption = L"D3D10 Application"; md3dDriverType = D3D10_DRIVER_TYPE_HARDWARE; mClearColor = D3DXCOLOR(0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); mClientWidth = 800; mClientHeight = 600; } D3DApp::~D3DApp() { ReleaseCOM(mRenderTargetView); ReleaseCOM(mDepthStencilView); ReleaseCOM(mSwapChain); ReleaseCOM(mDepthStencilBuffer); ReleaseCOM(md3dDevice); ReleaseCOM(mFont); } HINSTANCE D3DApp::getAppInst() { return mhAppInst; } HWND D3DApp::getMainWnd() { return mhMainWnd; } int D3DApp::run() { MSG msg = {0}; mTimer.reset(); while(msg.message != WM_QUIT) { // If there are Window messages then process them. if(PeekMessage( &msg, 0, 0, 0, PM_REMOVE )) { TranslateMessage( &msg ); DispatchMessage( &msg ); } // Otherwise, do animation/game stuff. else { mTimer.tick(); if( !mAppPaused ) updateScene(mTimer.getDeltaTime()); else Sleep(50); drawScene(); } } return (int)msg.wParam; } void D3DApp::initApp() { initMainWindow(); initDirect3D(); D3DX10_FONT_DESC fontDesc; fontDesc.Height = 24; fontDesc.Width = 0; fontDesc.Weight = 0; fontDesc.MipLevels = 1; fontDesc.Italic = false; fontDesc.CharSet = DEFAULT_CHARSET; fontDesc.OutputPrecision = OUT_DEFAULT_PRECIS; fontDesc.Quality = DEFAULT_QUALITY; fontDesc.PitchAndFamily = DEFAULT_PITCH | FF_DONTCARE; wcscpy(fontDesc.FaceName, L"Times New Roman"); D3DX10CreateFontIndirect(md3dDevice, &fontDesc, &mFont); } void D3DApp::onResize() { // Release the old views, as they hold references to the buffers we // will be destroying. Also release the old depth/stencil buffer. ReleaseCOM(mRenderTargetView); ReleaseCOM(mDepthStencilView); ReleaseCOM(mDepthStencilBuffer); // Resize the swap chain and recreate the render target view. HR(mSwapChain->ResizeBuffers(1, mClientWidth, mClientHeight, DXGI_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM, 0)); ID3D10Texture2D* backBuffer; HR(mSwapChain->GetBuffer(0, __uuidof(ID3D10Texture2D), reinterpret_cast<void**>(&backBuffer))); HR(md3dDevice->CreateRenderTargetView(backBuffer, 0, &mRenderTargetView)); ReleaseCOM(backBuffer); // Create the depth/stencil buffer and view. D3D10_TEXTURE2D_DESC depthStencilDesc; depthStencilDesc.Width = mClientWidth; depthStencilDesc.Height = mClientHeight; depthStencilDesc.MipLevels = 1; depthStencilDesc.ArraySize = 1; depthStencilDesc.Format = DXGI_FORMAT_D24_UNORM_S8_UINT; depthStencilDesc.SampleDesc.Count = 1; // multisampling must match depthStencilDesc.SampleDesc.Quality = 0; // swap chain values. depthStencilDesc.Usage = D3D10_USAGE_DEFAULT; depthStencilDesc.BindFlags = D3D10_BIND_DEPTH_STENCIL; depthStencilDesc.CPUAccessFlags = 0; depthStencilDesc.MiscFlags = 0; HR(md3dDevice->CreateTexture2D(&depthStencilDesc, 0, &mDepthStencilBuffer)); HR(md3dDevice->CreateDepthStencilView(mDepthStencilBuffer, 0, &mDepthStencilView)); // Bind the render target view and depth/stencil view to the pipeline. md3dDevice->OMSetRenderTargets(1, &mRenderTargetView, mDepthStencilView); // Set the viewport transform. D3D10_VIEWPORT vp; vp.TopLeftX = 0; vp.TopLeftY = 0; vp.Width = mClientWidth; vp.Height = mClientHeight; vp.MinDepth = 0.0f; vp.MaxDepth = 1.0f; md3dDevice->RSSetViewports(1, &vp); } void D3DApp::updateScene(float dt) { // Code computes the average frames per second, and also the // average time it takes to render one frame. static int frameCnt = 0; static float t_base = 0.0f; frameCnt++; // Compute averages over one second period. if( (mTimer.getGameTime() - t_base) >= 1.0f ) { float fps = (float)frameCnt; // fps = frameCnt / 1 float mspf = 1000.0f / fps; std::wostringstream outs; outs.precision(6); outs << L"FPS: " << fps << L"\n" << "Milliseconds: Per Frame: " << mspf; mFrameStats = outs.str(); // Reset for next average. frameCnt = 0; t_base += 1.0f; } } void D3DApp::drawScene() { md3dDevice->ClearRenderTargetView(mRenderTargetView, mClearColor); md3dDevice->ClearDepthStencilView(mDepthStencilView, D3D10_CLEAR_DEPTH|D3D10_CLEAR_STENCIL, 1.0f, 0); } LRESULT D3DApp::msgProc(UINT msg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam) { switch( msg ) { // WM_ACTIVATE is sent when the window is activated or deactivated. // We pause the game when the window is deactivated and unpause it // when it becomes active. case WM_ACTIVATE: if( LOWORD(wParam) == WA_INACTIVE ) { mAppPaused = true; mTimer.stop(); } else { mAppPaused = false; mTimer.start(); } return 0; // WM_SIZE is sent when the user resizes the window. case WM_SIZE: // Save the new client area dimensions. mClientWidth = LOWORD(lParam); mClientHeight = HIWORD(lParam); if( md3dDevice ) { if( wParam == SIZE_MINIMIZED ) { mAppPaused = true; mMinimized = true; mMaximized = false; } else if( wParam == SIZE_MAXIMIZED ) { mAppPaused = false; mMinimized = false; mMaximized = true; onResize(); } else if( wParam == SIZE_RESTORED ) { // Restoring from minimized state? if( mMinimized ) { mAppPaused = false; mMinimized = false; onResize(); } // Restoring from maximized state? else if( mMaximized ) { mAppPaused = false; mMaximized = false; onResize(); } else if( mResizing ) { // If user is dragging the resize bars, we do not resize // the buffers here because as the user continuously // drags the resize bars, a stream of WM_SIZE messages are // sent to the window, and it would be pointless (and slow) // to resize for each WM_SIZE message received from dragging // the resize bars. So instead, we reset after the user is // done resizing the window and releases the resize bars, which // sends a WM_EXITSIZEMOVE message. } else // API call such as SetWindowPos or mSwapChain->SetFullscreenState. { onResize(); } } } return 0; // WM_EXITSIZEMOVE is sent when the user grabs the resize bars. case WM_ENTERSIZEMOVE: mAppPaused = true; mResizing = true; mTimer.stop(); return 0; // WM_EXITSIZEMOVE is sent when the user releases the resize bars. // Here we reset everything based on the new window dimensions. case WM_EXITSIZEMOVE: mAppPaused = false; mResizing = false; mTimer.start(); onResize(); return 0; // WM_DESTROY is sent when the window is being destroyed. case WM_DESTROY: PostQuitMessage(0); return 0; // The WM_MENUCHAR message is sent when a menu is active and the user presses // a key that does not correspond to any mnemonic or accelerator key. case WM_MENUCHAR: // Don't beep when we alt-enter. return MAKELRESULT(0, MNC_CLOSE); // Catch this message so to prevent the window from becoming too small. case WM_GETMINMAXINFO: ((MINMAXINFO*)lParam)->ptMinTrackSize.x = 200; ((MINMAXINFO*)lParam)->ptMinTrackSize.y = 200; return 0; } return DefWindowProc(mhMainWnd, msg, wParam, lParam); } void D3DApp::initMainWindow() { WNDCLASS wc; wc.style = CS_HREDRAW | CS_VREDRAW; wc.lpfnWndProc = MainWndProc; wc.cbClsExtra = 0; wc.cbWndExtra = 0; wc.hInstance = mhAppInst; wc.hIcon = LoadIcon(0, IDI_APPLICATION); wc.hCursor = LoadCursor(0, IDC_ARROW); wc.hbrBackground = (HBRUSH)GetStockObject(NULL_BRUSH); wc.lpszMenuName = 0; wc.lpszClassName = L"D3DWndClassName"; if( !RegisterClass(&wc) ) { MessageBox(0, L"RegisterClass FAILED", 0, 0); PostQuitMessage(0); } // Compute window rectangle dimensions based on requested client area dimensions. RECT R = { 0, 0, mClientWidth, mClientHeight }; AdjustWindowRect(&R, WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW, false); int width = R.right - R.left; int height = R.bottom - R.top; mhMainWnd = CreateWindow(L"D3DWndClassName", mMainWndCaption.c_str(), WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW, CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT, width, height, 0, 0, mhAppInst, this); if( !mhMainWnd ) { MessageBox(0, L"CreateWindow FAILED", 0, 0); PostQuitMessage(0); } ShowWindow(mhMainWnd, SW_SHOW); UpdateWindow(mhMainWnd); } void D3DApp::initDirect3D() { // Fill out a DXGI_SWAP_CHAIN_DESC to describe our swap chain. DXGI_SWAP_CHAIN_DESC sd; sd.BufferDesc.Width = mClientWidth; sd.BufferDesc.Height = mClientHeight; sd.BufferDesc.RefreshRate.Numerator = 60; sd.BufferDesc.RefreshRate.Denominator = 1; sd.BufferDesc.Format = DXGI_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM; sd.BufferDesc.ScanlineOrdering = DXGI_MODE_SCANLINE_ORDER_UNSPECIFIED; sd.BufferDesc.Scaling = DXGI_MODE_SCALING_UNSPECIFIED; // No multisampling. sd.SampleDesc.Count = 1; sd.SampleDesc.Quality = 0; sd.BufferUsage = DXGI_USAGE_RENDER_TARGET_OUTPUT; sd.BufferCount = 1; sd.OutputWindow = mhMainWnd; sd.Windowed = true; sd.SwapEffect = DXGI_SWAP_EFFECT_DISCARD; sd.Flags = 0; // Create the device. UINT createDeviceFlags = 0; #if defined(DEBUG) || defined(_DEBUG) createDeviceFlags |= D3D10_CREATE_DEVICE_DEBUG; #endif HR( D3D10CreateDeviceAndSwapChain( 0, //default adapter md3dDriverType, 0, // no software device createDeviceFlags, D3D10_SDK_VERSION, &sd, &mSwapChain, &md3dDevice) ); // The remaining steps that need to be carried out for d3d creation // also need to be executed every time the window is resized. So // just call the onResize method here to avoid code duplication. onResize(); }

    Read the article

  • How to use onSensorChanged sensor data in combination with OpenGL

    - by Sponge
    I have written a TestSuite to find out how to calculate the rotation angles from the data you get in SensorEventListener.onSensorChanged(). I really hope you can complete my solution to help people who will have the same problems like me. Here is the code, i think you will understand it after reading it. Feel free to change it, the main idea was to implement several methods to send the orientation angles to the opengl view or any other target which would need it. method 1 to 4 are working, they are directly sending the rotationMatrix to the OpenGl view. all other methods are not working or buggy and i hope someone knows to get them working. i think the best method would be method 5 if it would work, because it would be the easiest to understand but i'm not sure how efficient it is. the complete code isn't optimized so i recommend to not use it as it is in your project. here it is: import java.nio.ByteBuffer; import java.nio.ByteOrder; import java.nio.FloatBuffer; import javax.microedition.khronos.egl.EGL10; import javax.microedition.khronos.egl.EGLConfig; import javax.microedition.khronos.opengles.GL10; import static javax.microedition.khronos.opengles.GL10.*; import android.app.Activity; import android.content.Context; import android.content.pm.ActivityInfo; import android.hardware.Sensor; import android.hardware.SensorEvent; import android.hardware.SensorEventListener; import android.hardware.SensorManager; import android.opengl.GLSurfaceView; import android.opengl.GLSurfaceView.Renderer; import android.os.Bundle; import android.util.Log; import android.view.WindowManager; /** * This class provides a basic demonstration of how to use the * {@link android.hardware.SensorManager SensorManager} API to draw a 3D * compass. */ public class SensorToOpenGlTests extends Activity implements Renderer, SensorEventListener { private static final boolean TRY_TRANSPOSED_VERSION = false; /* * MODUS overview: * * 1 - unbufferd data directly transfaired from the rotation matrix to the * modelview matrix * * 2 - buffered version of 1 where both acceleration and magnetometer are * buffered * * 3 - buffered version of 1 where only magnetometer is buffered * * 4 - buffered version of 1 where only acceleration is buffered * * 5 - uses the orientation sensor and sets the angles how to rotate the * camera with glrotate() * * 6 - uses the rotation matrix to calculate the angles * * 7 to 12 - every possibility how the rotationMatrix could be constructed * in SensorManager.getRotationMatrix (see * http://www.songho.ca/opengl/gl_anglestoaxes.html#anglestoaxes for all * possibilities) */ private static int MODUS = 2; private GLSurfaceView openglView; private FloatBuffer vertexBuffer; private ByteBuffer indexBuffer; private FloatBuffer colorBuffer; private SensorManager mSensorManager; private float[] rotationMatrix = new float[16]; private float[] accelGData = new float[3]; private float[] bufferedAccelGData = new float[3]; private float[] magnetData = new float[3]; private float[] bufferedMagnetData = new float[3]; private float[] orientationData = new float[3]; // private float[] mI = new float[16]; private float[] resultingAngles = new float[3]; private int mCount; final static float rad2deg = (float) (180.0f / Math.PI); private boolean mirrorOnBlueAxis = false; private boolean landscape; public SensorToOpenGlTests() { } /** Called with the activity is first created. */ @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); mSensorManager = (SensorManager) getSystemService(Context.SENSOR_SERVICE); openglView = new GLSurfaceView(this); openglView.setRenderer(this); setContentView(openglView); } @Override protected void onResume() { // Ideally a game should implement onResume() and onPause() // to take appropriate action when the activity looses focus super.onResume(); openglView.onResume(); if (((WindowManager) getSystemService(WINDOW_SERVICE)) .getDefaultDisplay().getOrientation() == 1) { landscape = true; } else { landscape = false; } mSensorManager.registerListener(this, mSensorManager .getDefaultSensor(Sensor.TYPE_ACCELEROMETER), SensorManager.SENSOR_DELAY_GAME); mSensorManager.registerListener(this, mSensorManager .getDefaultSensor(Sensor.TYPE_MAGNETIC_FIELD), SensorManager.SENSOR_DELAY_GAME); mSensorManager.registerListener(this, mSensorManager .getDefaultSensor(Sensor.TYPE_ORIENTATION), SensorManager.SENSOR_DELAY_GAME); } @Override protected void onPause() { // Ideally a game should implement onResume() and onPause() // to take appropriate action when the activity looses focus super.onPause(); openglView.onPause(); mSensorManager.unregisterListener(this); } public int[] getConfigSpec() { // We want a depth buffer, don't care about the // details of the color buffer. int[] configSpec = { EGL10.EGL_DEPTH_SIZE, 16, EGL10.EGL_NONE }; return configSpec; } public void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) { // clear screen and color buffer: gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL10.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); // set target matrix to modelview matrix: gl.glMatrixMode(GL10.GL_MODELVIEW); // init modelview matrix: gl.glLoadIdentity(); // move camera away a little bit: if ((MODUS == 1) || (MODUS == 2) || (MODUS == 3) || (MODUS == 4)) { if (landscape) { // in landscape mode first remap the rotationMatrix before using // it with glMultMatrixf: float[] result = new float[16]; SensorManager.remapCoordinateSystem(rotationMatrix, SensorManager.AXIS_Y, SensorManager.AXIS_MINUS_X, result); gl.glMultMatrixf(result, 0); } else { gl.glMultMatrixf(rotationMatrix, 0); } } else { //in all other modes do the rotation by hand: gl.glRotatef(resultingAngles[1], 1, 0, 0); gl.glRotatef(resultingAngles[2], 0, 1, 0); gl.glRotatef(resultingAngles[0], 0, 0, 1); if (mirrorOnBlueAxis) { //this is needed for mode 6 to work gl.glScalef(1, 1, -1); } } //move the axis to simulate augmented behaviour: gl.glTranslatef(0, 2, 0); // draw the 3 axis on the screen: gl.glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, vertexBuffer); gl.glColorPointer(4, GL_FLOAT, 0, colorBuffer); gl.glDrawElements(GL_LINES, 6, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, indexBuffer); } public void onSurfaceChanged(GL10 gl, int width, int height) { gl.glViewport(0, 0, width, height); float r = (float) width / height; gl.glMatrixMode(GL10.GL_PROJECTION); gl.glLoadIdentity(); gl.glFrustumf(-r, r, -1, 1, 1, 10); } public void onSurfaceCreated(GL10 gl, EGLConfig config) { gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_DITHER); gl.glClearColor(1, 1, 1, 1); gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_CULL_FACE); gl.glShadeModel(GL10.GL_SMOOTH); gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_DEPTH_TEST); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_COLOR_ARRAY); // load the 3 axis and there colors: float vertices[] = { 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1 }; float colors[] = { 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1 }; byte indices[] = { 0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 3 }; ByteBuffer vbb; vbb = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(vertices.length * 4); vbb.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); vertexBuffer = vbb.asFloatBuffer(); vertexBuffer.put(vertices); vertexBuffer.position(0); vbb = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(colors.length * 4); vbb.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); colorBuffer = vbb.asFloatBuffer(); colorBuffer.put(colors); colorBuffer.position(0); indexBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(indices.length); indexBuffer.put(indices); indexBuffer.position(0); } public void onAccuracyChanged(Sensor sensor, int accuracy) { } public void onSensorChanged(SensorEvent event) { // load the new values: loadNewSensorData(event); if (MODUS == 1) { SensorManager.getRotationMatrix(rotationMatrix, null, accelGData, magnetData); } if (MODUS == 2) { rootMeanSquareBuffer(bufferedAccelGData, accelGData); rootMeanSquareBuffer(bufferedMagnetData, magnetData); SensorManager.getRotationMatrix(rotationMatrix, null, bufferedAccelGData, bufferedMagnetData); } if (MODUS == 3) { rootMeanSquareBuffer(bufferedMagnetData, magnetData); SensorManager.getRotationMatrix(rotationMatrix, null, accelGData, bufferedMagnetData); } if (MODUS == 4) { rootMeanSquareBuffer(bufferedAccelGData, accelGData); SensorManager.getRotationMatrix(rotationMatrix, null, bufferedAccelGData, magnetData); } if (MODUS == 5) { // this mode uses the sensor data recieved from the orientation // sensor resultingAngles = orientationData.clone(); if ((-90 > resultingAngles[1]) || (resultingAngles[1] > 90)) { resultingAngles[1] = orientationData[0]; resultingAngles[2] = orientationData[1]; resultingAngles[0] = orientationData[2]; } } if (MODUS == 6) { SensorManager.getRotationMatrix(rotationMatrix, null, accelGData, magnetData); final float[] anglesInRadians = new float[3]; SensorManager.getOrientation(rotationMatrix, anglesInRadians); if ((-90 < anglesInRadians[2] * rad2deg) && (anglesInRadians[2] * rad2deg < 90)) { // device camera is looking on the floor // this hemisphere is working fine mirrorOnBlueAxis = false; resultingAngles[0] = anglesInRadians[0] * rad2deg; resultingAngles[1] = anglesInRadians[1] * rad2deg; resultingAngles[2] = anglesInRadians[2] * -rad2deg; } else { mirrorOnBlueAxis = true; // device camera is looking in the sky // this hemisphere is mirrored at the blue axis resultingAngles[0] = (anglesInRadians[0] * rad2deg); resultingAngles[1] = (anglesInRadians[1] * rad2deg); resultingAngles[2] = (anglesInRadians[2] * rad2deg); } } if (MODUS == 7) { SensorManager.getRotationMatrix(rotationMatrix, null, accelGData, magnetData); rotationMatrix = transpose(rotationMatrix); /* * this assumes that the rotation matrices are multiplied in x y z * order Rx*Ry*Rz */ resultingAngles[2] = (float) (Math.asin(rotationMatrix[2])); final float cosB = (float) Math.cos(resultingAngles[2]); resultingAngles[2] = resultingAngles[2] * rad2deg; resultingAngles[0] = -(float) (Math.acos(rotationMatrix[0] / cosB)) * rad2deg; resultingAngles[1] = (float) (Math.acos(rotationMatrix[10] / cosB)) * rad2deg; } if (MODUS == 8) { SensorManager.getRotationMatrix(rotationMatrix, null, accelGData, magnetData); rotationMatrix = transpose(rotationMatrix); /* * this assumes that the rotation matrices are multiplied in z y x */ resultingAngles[2] = (float) (Math.asin(-rotationMatrix[8])); final float cosB = (float) Math.cos(resultingAngles[2]); resultingAngles[2] = resultingAngles[2] * rad2deg; resultingAngles[1] = (float) (Math.acos(rotationMatrix[9] / cosB)) * rad2deg; resultingAngles[0] = (float) (Math.asin(rotationMatrix[4] / cosB)) * rad2deg; } if (MODUS == 9) { SensorManager.getRotationMatrix(rotationMatrix, null, accelGData, magnetData); rotationMatrix = transpose(rotationMatrix); /* * this assumes that the rotation matrices are multiplied in z x y * * note z axis looks good at this one */ resultingAngles[1] = (float) (Math.asin(rotationMatrix[9])); final float minusCosA = -(float) Math.cos(resultingAngles[1]); resultingAngles[1] = resultingAngles[1] * rad2deg; resultingAngles[2] = (float) (Math.asin(rotationMatrix[8] / minusCosA)) * rad2deg; resultingAngles[0] = (float) (Math.asin(rotationMatrix[1] / minusCosA)) * rad2deg; } if (MODUS == 10) { SensorManager.getRotationMatrix(rotationMatrix, null, accelGData, magnetData); rotationMatrix = transpose(rotationMatrix); /* * this assumes that the rotation matrices are multiplied in y x z */ resultingAngles[1] = (float) (Math.asin(-rotationMatrix[6])); final float cosA = (float) Math.cos(resultingAngles[1]); resultingAngles[1] = resultingAngles[1] * rad2deg; resultingAngles[2] = (float) (Math.asin(rotationMatrix[2] / cosA)) * rad2deg; resultingAngles[0] = (float) (Math.acos(rotationMatrix[5] / cosA)) * rad2deg; } if (MODUS == 11) { SensorManager.getRotationMatrix(rotationMatrix, null, accelGData, magnetData); rotationMatrix = transpose(rotationMatrix); /* * this assumes that the rotation matrices are multiplied in y z x */ resultingAngles[0] = (float) (Math.asin(rotationMatrix[4])); final float cosC = (float) Math.cos(resultingAngles[0]); resultingAngles[0] = resultingAngles[0] * rad2deg; resultingAngles[2] = (float) (Math.acos(rotationMatrix[0] / cosC)) * rad2deg; resultingAngles[1] = (float) (Math.acos(rotationMatrix[5] / cosC)) * rad2deg; } if (MODUS == 12) { SensorManager.getRotationMatrix(rotationMatrix, null, accelGData, magnetData); rotationMatrix = transpose(rotationMatrix); /* * this assumes that the rotation matrices are multiplied in x z y */ resultingAngles[0] = (float) (Math.asin(-rotationMatrix[1])); final float cosC = (float) Math.cos(resultingAngles[0]); resultingAngles[0] = resultingAngles[0] * rad2deg; resultingAngles[2] = (float) (Math.acos(rotationMatrix[0] / cosC)) * rad2deg; resultingAngles[1] = (float) (Math.acos(rotationMatrix[5] / cosC)) * rad2deg; } logOutput(); } /** * transposes the matrix because it was transposted (inverted, but here its * the same, because its a rotation matrix) to be used for opengl * * @param source * @return */ private float[] transpose(float[] source) { final float[] result = source.clone(); if (TRY_TRANSPOSED_VERSION) { result[1] = source[4]; result[2] = source[8]; result[4] = source[1]; result[6] = source[9]; result[8] = source[2]; result[9] = source[6]; } // the other values in the matrix are not relevant for rotations return result; } private void rootMeanSquareBuffer(float[] target, float[] values) { final float amplification = 200.0f; float buffer = 20.0f; target[0] += amplification; target[1] += amplification; target[2] += amplification; values[0] += amplification; values[1] += amplification; values[2] += amplification; target[0] = (float) (Math .sqrt((target[0] * target[0] * buffer + values[0] * values[0]) / (1 + buffer))); target[1] = (float) (Math .sqrt((target[1] * target[1] * buffer + values[1] * values[1]) / (1 + buffer))); target[2] = (float) (Math .sqrt((target[2] * target[2] * buffer + values[2] * values[2]) / (1 + buffer))); target[0] -= amplification; target[1] -= amplification; target[2] -= amplification; values[0] -= amplification; values[1] -= amplification; values[2] -= amplification; } private void loadNewSensorData(SensorEvent event) { final int type = event.sensor.getType(); if (type == Sensor.TYPE_ACCELEROMETER) { accelGData = event.values.clone(); } if (type == Sensor.TYPE_MAGNETIC_FIELD) { magnetData = event.values.clone(); } if (type == Sensor.TYPE_ORIENTATION) { orientationData = event.values.clone(); } } private void logOutput() { if (mCount++ > 30) { mCount = 0; Log.d("Compass", "yaw0: " + (int) (resultingAngles[0]) + " pitch1: " + (int) (resultingAngles[1]) + " roll2: " + (int) (resultingAngles[2])); } } }

    Read the article

  • Null reading in stream images? Unable to start activity ComponentInfo

    - by lasmith
    I have reviewed a lot of similar questions regarding not being able to launch an activity but they don't seem to quite match my problem. I am working on a simple black jack game but its force quitting. I suspect there is a problem with loading up the card png images I have. Stepping through the debugger it crashes right while in the resetGame() function. I'm sure I am doing something dumb. My Logcat: 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): FATAL EXCEPTION: main 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to start activity ComponentInfo{com.smith.blackjack/com.smith.blackjack.Main}: java.lang.NullPointerException 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2059) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2084) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at android.app.ActivityThread.access$600(ActivityThread.java:130) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:1195) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:137) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4745) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:511) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:786) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:553) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at com.smith.blackjack.DeckOfCards.<init>(DeckOfCards.java:17) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at com.smith.blackjack.Main.resetGame(Main.java:98) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at com.smith.blackjack.Main.onCreate(Main.java:67) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at android.app.Activity.performCreate(Activity.java:5008) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1079) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2023) 10-15 20:21:43.309: E/AndroidRuntime(2863): ... 11 more My androidmanifest: <manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" package="com.smith.blackjack" android:versionCode="1" android:versionName="1.0" > <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="11" android:targetSdkVersion="15" /> <application android:icon="@drawable/ic_launcher" android:label="@string/app_name" android:theme="@style/AppTheme" > <activity android:name=".Main" android:label="@string/title_activity_main" > <intent-filter> <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" /> <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" /> </intent-filter> </activity> </application> Here is my Main.java package com.smith.blackjack; import android.os.Bundle; import android.app.Activity; import android.content.res.AssetManager; import android.graphics.drawable.Drawable; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.InputStream; import android.util.Log; import android.view.View; import android.view.View.OnClickListener; import android.widget.Button; import android.widget.ImageView; public class Main extends Activity { private ImageView dealerCard0; private ImageView dealerCard1; private ImageView dealerCard2; private ImageView dealerCard3; private ImageView playerCard0; private ImageView playerCard1; private ImageView playerCard2; private ImageView playerCard3; private ImageView imgResult; private Button btnDeal; private Button btnDraw; private Button btnHold; private DeckOfCards deckOfCards; private int[] dealerValues; private int dealerSum; private int dealerCardNumber; private int[] playerValues; private int playerSum; private int playerCardNumber; private InputStream dealerHiddenCard; private Card dealerCard; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); dealerCard0 = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.dealerCard0); dealerCard1 = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.dealerCard1); dealerCard2 = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.dealerCard2); dealerCard3 = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.dealerCard3); playerCard0 = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.playerCard0); playerCard1 = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.playerCard1); playerCard2 = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.playerCard2); playerCard3 = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.playerCard3); imgResult = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.imgResult); btnDeal = (Button) findViewById(R.id.deal); btnDraw = (Button) findViewById(R.id.draw); btnHold = (Button) findViewById(R.id.hold); btnDeal.setOnClickListener(btnDealListener); btnDraw.setOnClickListener(btnDrawListener); btnHold.setOnClickListener(btnHoldListener); resetGame(); } private void resetGame(){ AssetManager assets = getAssets(); dealerValues = new int[4]; playerValues = new int[4]; dealerSum = 0; playerSum = 0; dealerCardNumber = 0; playerCardNumber = 0; for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++) { dealerValues[i] = 0; playerValues[i] = 0; } try { InputStream stream = assets.open("cardback.png"); // stream = assets.open("cardback.png"); Drawable cardImage = Drawable.createFromStream(stream, null); dealerCard0.setImageDrawable(cardImage); dealerCard1.setImageDrawable(cardImage); dealerCard2.setImageDrawable(cardImage); dealerCard3.setImageDrawable(cardImage); playerCard0.setImageDrawable(cardImage); playerCard1.setImageDrawable(cardImage); playerCard2.setImageDrawable(cardImage); playerCard3.setImageDrawable(cardImage); imgResult.setImageDrawable(cardImage); deckOfCards = new DeckOfCards(); deckOfCards.shuffle(); assets.close(); } catch (IOException e){ Log.e("Reset Game", "Error Loading", e); } } public OnClickListener btnDealListener = new OnClickListener() { // @Override public void onClick(View v) { try { AssetManager assets = getAssets(); InputStream stream; // first player card Card newCard; newCard = deckOfCards.dealCard(); playerValues[playerCardNumber] = newCard.faceValue; playerCardNumber++; stream = assets.open(newCard.File); Drawable cardImage = Drawable.createFromStream(stream, newCard.File); playerCard0.setImageDrawable(cardImage); assets.close(); // second player card newCard = deckOfCards.dealCard(); playerValues[playerCardNumber] = newCard.faceValue; playerCardNumber++; stream = assets.open(newCard.File); cardImage = Drawable.createFromStream(stream, newCard.File); playerCard1.setImageDrawable(cardImage); assets.close(); // first dealer card hidden newCard = deckOfCards.dealCard(); dealerCard = newCard; dealerValues[dealerCardNumber] = newCard.faceValue; dealerCardNumber++; dealerHiddenCard = assets.open(newCard.File); stream = assets.open("cardback.png"); cardImage = Drawable.createFromStream(stream, "cardback"); dealerCard0.setImageDrawable(cardImage); assets.close(); // second dealer card open newCard = deckOfCards.dealCard(); dealerValues[dealerCardNumber] = newCard.faceValue; dealerCardNumber++; stream = assets.open(newCard.File); cardImage = Drawable.createFromStream(stream, newCard.File); dealerCard1.setImageDrawable(cardImage); assets.close(); } catch (IOException e){ Log.e("Deal", "Error Loading", e); } }; }; public OnClickListener btnDrawListener = new OnClickListener() { // @Override public void onClick(View v) { try { AssetManager assets = getAssets(); InputStream stream; // get next player card Card newCard; newCard = deckOfCards.dealCard(); playerValues[playerCardNumber] = newCard.faceValue; playerCardNumber++; stream = assets.open(newCard.File); Drawable cardImage = Drawable.createFromStream(stream, newCard.File); switch (playerCardNumber){ case 3: playerCard2.setImageDrawable(cardImage); case 4: playerCard3.setImageDrawable(cardImage); } assets.close(); } catch (IOException e){ Log.e("Draw", "Error Loading", e); } }; }; public OnClickListener btnHoldListener = new OnClickListener() { // @Override public void onClick(View v) { Drawable cardImage; // evaluate player hand playerSum = evaluate(playerValues); if (playerSum > 21){ // player losses } // flip over the dealer hidden card cardImage = Drawable.createFromStream(dealerHiddenCard, dealerCard.File); Card newCard; InputStream stream; AssetManager assets = getAssets(); for (int i=2; i<4; i++){ dealerSum = evaluate(dealerValues); if (dealerSum < 16 ) { newCard = deckOfCards.dealCard(); dealerValues[dealerCardNumber] = newCard.faceValue; dealerCardNumber++; try { stream = assets.open(newCard.File); cardImage = Drawable.createFromStream(stream, newCard.File); switch (dealerCardNumber){ case 3: dealerCard2.setImageDrawable(cardImage); case 4: dealerCard3.setImageDrawable(cardImage); } assets.close(); } catch (IOException e){ Log.e("Draw", "Error Loading", e); } if (dealerSum < playerSum) { // player wins } if (dealerSum > playerSum){ // dealer wins } if (dealerSum == playerSum){ // it is a draw } } } }; }; public int evaluate (int[]values) { int sumCards = 0; for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++){ sumCards += values[i]; } if (sumCards > 21) { for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++){ if (values[i] == 11) { values[i] = 1; sumCards -= 10; continue; } } } return sumCards; } } My DeckOfCards class: package com.smith.blackjack; import java.util.Random; public class DeckOfCards { private Card [] deck; private int currentCard; private static final int NUMBER_OF_CARDS = 52; private static final Random randomNumbers = new Random(); public DeckOfCards () { deck = new Card[NUMBER_OF_CARDS]; currentCard = 0 ; for(int count = 0; count < deck.length; count++) { deck[count].faceValue = count + 1; } } public void shuffle () { currentCard = 0; for (int first = 0; first < deck.length; first ++){ int second = randomNumbers.nextInt(NUMBER_OF_CARDS); int temp = deck[first].faceValue; deck[first].faceValue=deck[second].faceValue; deck[second].faceValue = temp; } } public Card dealCard(){ Card temp = new Card(); temp.faceValue = 0; temp.File = ""; if(currentCard < deck.length) { temp.faceValue = deck[currentCard].faceValue / 4; int suit = deck[currentCard].faceValue % 4; String suitString = ""; switch (suit){ case 0: suitString = "c"; case 1: suitString = "d"; case 2: suitString = "h"; case 3: suitString = "s"; } Integer face = temp.faceValue / 4 ; String faceString = face.toString(); temp.File = faceString + suitString + ".png"; switch (temp.faceValue){ case 11: temp.faceValue = 10; case 12: temp.faceValue = 10; case 13: temp.faceValue = 10; } return temp; } else return temp; } }

    Read the article

  • Using Optical Flow in EmguCV

    - by Meko
    HI. I am trying to create simple touch game using EmguCV.Should I use optical flow to determine for interaction between images on screen and with my hand ,if changes of points somewhere on screen more than 100 where the image, it means my hand is over image? But how can I track this new points? I can draw on screen here the previous points and new points but It shows on my head more points then my hand and I can not track my hands movements. void Optical_Flow_Worker(object sender, EventArgs e) { { Input_Capture.SetCaptureProperty(Emgu.CV.CvEnum.CAP_PROP.CV_CAP_PROP_POS_FRAMES, ActualFrameNumber); ActualFrame = Input_Capture.QueryFrame(); ActualGrayFrame = ActualFrame.Convert<Gray, Byte>(); NextFrame = Input_Capture.QueryFrame(); NextGrayFrame = NextFrame.Convert<Gray, Byte>(); ActualFeature = ActualGrayFrame.GoodFeaturesToTrack(500, 0.01d, 0.01, 5); ActualGrayFrame.FindCornerSubPix(ActualFeature, new System.Drawing.Size(10, 10), new System.Drawing.Size(-1, -1), new MCvTermCriteria(20, 0.3d)); OpticalFlow.PyrLK(ActualGrayFrame, NextGrayFrame, ActualFeature[0], new System.Drawing.Size(10, 10), 3, new MCvTermCriteria(20, 0.03d), out NextFeature, out Status, out TrackError); OpticalFlowFrame = new Image<Bgr, Byte>(ActualFrame.Width, ActualFrame.Height); OpticalFlowFrame = NextFrame.Copy(); for (int i = 0; i < ActualFeature[0].Length; i++) DrawFlowVectors(i); ActualFrameNumber++; pictureBox1.Image = ActualFrame.Resize(320, 400).ToBitmap() ; pictureBox3.Image = OpticalFlowFrame.Resize(320, 400).ToBitmap(); } } private void DrawFlowVectors(int i) { System.Drawing.Point p = new Point(); System.Drawing.Point q = new Point(); p.X = (int)ActualFeature[0][i].X; p.Y = (int)ActualFeature[0][i].Y; q.X = (int)NextFeature[i].X; q.Y = (int)NextFeature[i].Y; p.X = (int)(q.X + 6 * Math.Cos(angle + Math.PI / 4)); p.Y = (int)(q.Y + 6 * Math.Sin(angle + Math.PI / 4)); p.X = (int)(q.X + 6 * Math.Cos(angle - Math.PI / 4)); p.Y = (int)(q.Y + 6 * Math.Sin(angle - Math.PI / 4)); OpticalFlowFrame.Draw(new Rectangle(q.X,q.Y,1,1), new Bgr(Color.Red), 1); OpticalFlowFrame.Draw(new Rectangle(p.X, p.Y, 1, 1), new Bgr(Color.Blue), 1); }

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470  | Next Page >